Yeah, it feels good to be a gangsta…

Silicone Dreamz…

“Dude, if she’d told me she had fake boobs I wouldn’t have squeezed so hard.”

Time To Boycott FOX 96.9FM

Ugh, some people just don’t have any sense. Recently 96.9 stopped carrying Bob & Brian. I’m a bit miffed. I thoroughly enjoy their show, and now can’t get it over-the-air for a third of my morning commute, when I can start picking up their home station 102.9 The Hog. During that blacked-out portion of my commute this morning, I went to 96.9’s website and lodged my complaint, “Bring Bob & Brian Back!”

In response, I received this email:

Thanks for your comments. I, too, was a huge fan of Bob & Brian, and listened to their show every morning.

However, we have been getting feedback from many people that wanted music in the morning, and ultimately we made the decision to go that route.

I hope you will continue to listen to New Rock 96 9 The Fox.

Regards,

Guy Dark

Operations Manager

Cumulus Broadcasting - Appleton/Oshkosh

WVBO / WOSH / WNAM / WWWX / WPKR

491 South Washburn Street

Suite 400

Oshkosh, WI 54904

Phone: 920 - 426 - 3239

Fax: 920 - 231 - 0145

To which I replied:

Nope, I’ll be streaming 102.9.
I’ve always had plenty of choices of music in the morning, and you don’t play anything I can’t get somewhere else. Plus it’s just more of the same music over and over. Dull and repetitive is every station’s comfort zone.
I only had one OTA choice for good, funny talk, thankfully I live in an age where I can stream the product I prefer into any radio with my phone. Choice is today’s wind of change, I guess.
To that, I received no response.  Static, you could say.

I Wish I Could Quit You!!!

This presented itself to me as I was shutting down tonight.

An Open Letter To Paul Davis Restoration Of Appleton, WI

The first thing I would like to do, to prevent you from further degrading our relationship, is to introduce you to the customer service concept of ‘One Customer’. This is the philosophy where you treat each customer like they are your only customer. No matter how busy you are, no matter how many customers you have, give them the focus, attention and dedication as if they were your ‘one customer’. This philosophy has to be top-down. It does no good to have the ‘mouths’ of your company saying “you are our only customer” if the ‘hands’ of your company are saying “we don’t care about any of our customers”. Your actions speak louder than your words.

Here’s another concept you are apparently unaware of: Matt and Renee Everett may be the owners of Paul Davis Restoration Of Appleton, WI, Jim Foytik may be the Senior Vice President, Dan Egan may be the Estimator, Matt Snell may be Project Supervisor LCS, and Steve never-new-his-last-name may be Project Supervisor and Jamie Miller may be Mitigation and Contents Supervisor, but so long as you’re working on my house and my belongings my girlfriend and I are the Chief Executives In Charge. It is my expectation that we are treated as such. We have not been.

And now a discussion about commitments. I had a conversation about this with Matt Everett and Jim Foytik some time ago. I had a problem with representatives of your company saying they were going to work at the house on certain days, meet with us on certain days, and they were not. During that conversation I was assured by Matt Everett that your company would be mindful of their commitments. We were told we would be back in our house by October 1st. We could easily have been, but your company wasted a month doing nothing, so we were told November 1st. Now we’ve been told we may be in by Thanksgiving, again because your company spent 3 weeks doing nothing. What is our compensation for this complete and total inconvenience? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The project completion date is back to November 1st, beyond that and we will need to negotiate compensation.

While we’re on the subject, except when the trusses for my roof were placed you’ve never had more than 2 or 3 people working on our house at any given time-don’t you think this may be a case of too many bosses, not enough workers? Perhaps we could be in our house on time if a few more people were swinging hammers.

And then there’s the handling of the personal property. From the missing and unaccounted for items (2 Nintendo DS game systems and games, 3 tents, 3 pudgie pie makers, 3 cast iron frypans, a 20gig Apple Ipod and many, many other items) to the deliberately destroyed items that were supposed to be saved (we even marked them with a tag saying ‘SAVE ME’) to the computer that was stolen by Paul Davis Restoration of Appleton, WI employee and Project Supervisor Brian Wood, this has been absolutely atrocious. In a meeting at our house Monday, September 15th, Jamie Miller had the audacity to tell us that we would have to pursue recovery of our property, stolen by your employee, ourselves. On our own. Unbelievable. An email sent to Jamie concerning this matter on Wednesday, 9/17 went unanswered. We have also been trying to get Jamie Miller to email the personal property lists to us for 3+ months which she still has not done. Items we personally pointed out to Jamie during a walkthrough did not make it on the list. We also had your company do the unsalvageables pack-out at extra expense, though much of that doesn’t appear on the hardcopy list we were given, so we now have to try to remember all of these things in order to account for them. Not exactly money well spent. Words cannot adequately describe how we feel about this situation.

Then there’s the budget. Dan Egan had said he would break down the budget into what had to be done (rebuild structure, plumbing, electrical, insulate, seal, etc.), and the rest, so we could decide where we wanted to spend money and where we would skimp or put off as future projects. This has not been done, and the budget has been a big secret. In fact, we were sent to the plumber’s supplier with no budget. We sat down with the salesman with no clue what we could or could not get. No clue how much money we would have to supply if we chose one faucet over another. I attempted to call Dan Egan on his cellphone with no result, and the salesman tried the plumber. Finally the plumber was able to supply the bid. We know we had massive amounts of copper (most of the supply and drain in the house was copper) that was supposed to be recycled and put in the budget, but we have not been told what that added to the budget.

There is much that needs to be corrected, my girlfriend, her children and I await your response.

The More You Know…

Average number of people killed by sharks per year: 5

Average number of people killed by coconuts per year: 150

Why Did I Bother To Buy A Natural Gas Car?

I’m no longer keeping close track of my commuting costs, but I’ll throw a few figures at you…

This week I’ll cross the 20,000 mile mark since I bought my CNG 2001 Chevy Cavalier in mid-March. If I was using gasoline, and figuring with today’s gas price in my town of $3.69 at 30mpg, that would be $2460. CNG is $1.75 where I stop every day right now, so that comes to $1167. Just by those figures, I saved $1293 by today’s prices.

These figures are admittedly imprecise. Between March and now, gasoline spiked up to over four dollars. The highest I saw it here was $4.32, 63 cents over what it is now. At the CNG station I most frequently use during the week the good stuff was $1.75, which spiked up to $1.98 when gas was at it’s highest, and is back down to what it was in March, a drop of 23 cents. When CNG does spike, it doesn’t go up anywhere near as much as gasoline. Another factor is that CNG is $1.15 in Appleton, where I fill up almost every weekend which drives my cost down even further. Yeah, $1.15 which it has been for at least a year. I NEED a transfer to Appleton (for reasons other than to bug my buddy Matt every day).

Something I’ve noticed since I moved to natural gas, the smell of gasoline is really nasty. I have to run a tank of gasoline through my car every 60 days and I find that having to fill the gas tank is a repulsive experience. I can literally taste it. It’s amazing what removing yourself from exposure to toxic chemicals and their vapors will do for you.

I’d say I made the right decision.  I’ve saved almost half the cost of a Fuelmaker Phill.  Speaking of which, that’ll be my next CNG purchase.

More Siding Removed

We got more siding removed this weekend, click the here to go to the Siding Removal picture gallery

Updates

I have more pics in the demo section of my house pics, which you can find here.

I also have the first pics of the rebuild, the replacement of the storage room, from joists to roof, see it here.

The More You Know…

If I Were A Geneticist

What? I’m not interested in genetically enhanced sheep. I need a project I can stay focused on…
Continue Reading »

The More You Know…

Now, fresh, sliced–supremo.

May 19, 2008

On Monday May 19th, 2008 we had a house fire.  Lost in the fire, aside from the relatively insignificant things we call possessions, we lost our Basenji boy, Jax, and Chihuahua Mix, Porshe.  Emily, Abby, Kayleigh, Christian, Doris, Erik and our Basenji boy Max are all ok.

I added my ‘House Picture Gallery’ in the sidebar because I’m way behind, but as we recover and rebuild I will be updating here.

Hello world!

I had to move my site to a larger host, this’ll serve as my bookmark.

Global Warming - Not Such A Bad Thing?

For a split second, I had the urge to buy a Hummer, a Trans-Am, or an AMC Matador… you know, pump up the smog for  a good cause!

The CNG Experience

I’ve spent a week commuting with my CNG Cavalier and have gathered some interesting data. I’ve traveled 809 miles solely on natural gas, averaged 29.013 mpg, and spent an average $1.609 per gallon on fuel. The full week’s commuting cost me $44.86.

By comparison, with an average mpg of 30.714, and an average gasoline price of $3.299, the Fiero would have cost $86.90. With an average mpg of 13.84, the Ram would have cost $192.84.

Driving my NGV cost 52% of the Fiero cost, and 23% of the Ram cost. A-freakin’-mazing!

Want to be more amazed? I thought so. My Harley gets 48 miles to the gallon, however it takes premium gasoline. At today’s prices, and if I was dumb enough to ride in the snow and ice, it would cost me $57.62 to commute with it. That’s right, the Cavalier costs me 78% of what my Hog would cost.