At 7:20 AM on August the 16th, Logan Robert Dunn came into this world via C-Section. Both mother and baby are doing well. He’s 20 inches long, weighs 7 pounds 9 ounces, and was born at the Calgary Foothills hospital. The staff here are great – special thanks to Dr. Paul Martyn for the great job he did on the surgery. This is a wonderful blessing, and I’m humbled and awed that God would give us such a beautiful baby to care for and raise.
That wedding I was at last weekend for my sister-in-law (and now brother-in-law). Their photographer has finished processing some of the photos, and has posted them to her blog. Here are three sample images:
Are those some great photos or what? My one and only regret from my wedding to Ashley back in 2001 was that I didn’t find the right kind of wedding photographer…meaning I was focused on not spending too much money, and not focused enough on getting real value for my dollar – and value in this case is having great photos that you’ll appreciate for years to come. I don’t have many regrets in my life, but this is one of them. So if you’re planning on getting married someday, take my advice: don’t skimp on the photographer. Spend the money to get someone good, someone who will take pictures of you all day/night long and really capture the wedding event. In ten years no one is going to remember how fancy the chair coverings were, or what your wedding cake looked like, but photos of you and your husband or wife are going to last forever.
There are a lot of things I don’t like about Google, but I’ve got to hand it to them: they do search really well. Not even five hours after I did my blog post, it’s already the 6th search result in Google for the terms Stony Trail Mazda. Gotta’ love that!
I don’t know much about cars. I’m one of those guys that, if something goes wrong with my car, I’ll call the AMA and let someone smarter than me figure it out. The most complicated thing I’ve done on my own cars is replace a headlight. So there’s the context for this story.
On Friday I took my 2003 Mazda Protege 5 to Stoney Trail Mazda in Calgary for an oil change, and after 30 minutes a woman came back to tell me that they were suggesting the following procedures for my car beyond the oil change:
I was expecting to walk out spending under $50, and they were suggesting I spend more than 10 times that much! I felt a bit overwhelmed at first, but I started asking questions because it seemed curious that so much needed to happen at once. The broken fog light, she said, wasn’t just a simple blown bulb – the entire assembly needed to be replaced. The car has 61K KM on it, and had never had any of the fluids replaced/flushed beyond the oil and wind shield wiper fluid, but did that mean that both the power steering and injector systems needed to be flushed? I ended up saying yes to the air filter and power steering flush, but said I’d decide later on the injetor flush and fog light.
After she walked away I started searching online for articles related to the topic, and found a good one on injector flushing. I also found a bunch of forum threads where people were discussing the same topic, and the general consensus I found was that unless there’s a suspected problem with the injectors, there’s no need to flush them. It seems that telling customers that their vehicle’s injectors need flushing is an easy money-maker for the auto shop. I’m glad I said no to that. As for the power steering flush, that seems to be more of a mixed bag – some people say it’s good to have it changed every five years or so – which means my car is due – but in general unless you’re having problems with your power steering, the fluids don’t need to be touched. As someone who does computer consulting, it looks like most fluid flushing is right up there with me telling someone the SATA ports on their computer need defragmenting, or their WiFi signal needs cleaning because it’s dirty.
Here’s what ticks me off about this: I took my Mazda back to a Mazda dealership rather than taking it to Mr. Lube or another quick-change shop because I wanted, and expected, by-the-book Mazda maintenance. Meaning that unless Mazda themselves recommended a certain procedure in the owners manual, the Mazda dealership wouldn’t recommend anything different. When I went up to pay for the procedures, I told the woman at the desk I wasn’t sure I’d ever come back to this dealership again for servicing. I wasn’t rude or angry when I said it. She asked me why, and I explained that after some research I didn’t believe that they were giving me sound advice about what really needed to be done on my car. She replied that merely relays what the technicians tell her.
The kicker? When I drove home and pulled into the garage I turned all my lights off and on, including the fog lights, and they all work just fine. I find it hard to believe that Stoney Trail Mazda would be so bold as to tell a customer a light isn’t working if it is, but on the other hand I’m baffled as to why they thought it wasn’t working.
So, any car experts out there care to weigh in on this?
I was in British Columbia last week, more specifically in Tofino, Comox, and Nanimo. We flew into Comox to travel to Tofino for the wedding of Ashely’s sister Chelsea. We had rented a car to drive from the Comox airport to Tofino, a drive of about four hours or so – and I’d heard the last led of the journey had some pretty twisty roads. We’d had a Ford Taurus lined up for rental, but when the Budget representative asked me if I wanted to upgrade to a 2010 Mustang convertible for $25 a day, it was hard to say no. Back in my early 20’s the Mustang was my “dream car” and I’d made a goal for myself of buying one by the time I was 25. That didn’t quite work out, so renting one for this trip seemed like the next-best thing. What a fun car to drive! Oodles of power, and it handled really nicely on the roads. Definitely a car I’d rent again!
“Imagine for a second that you set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we’ve come to know about consumer behavior to separate people from their money in as efficient a way as possible. What would you do? Well, you’d probably try to lure buyers with bargain prices. You’d pit them against one another in an auction. You’d ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they’re spending. On top of that, you’d ask them for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build up to hundreds of dollars. Still trying to figure out how you’d put all that together? You can relax. Someone’s already beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo. It’s an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them into what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.”
That’s a quote from an article on MSN Money, and it’s the best article I’ve seen yet on Swoopo. Despite my earlier success with Swoopo, and a successful cheap acquisition of a 16 GB SD card, like any gambler I rolled the dice and lost: I was bidding on a set of pots and pans, and after using 18 bids I didn’t win, so like a degenerate gambler I bought another bid pack for $27 and blew ALL of them and still lost. The most idiotic part? I kept one bid, decided to bid on something else, and when I checked the pots and pans auction, it had ended – exactly one bid after the person who outbid me. So if I had used that last bid, I might have one – or it might have gone on for another hour. Swoopo is just too problematic – avoid it.
When I first looked at that sign, I thought it said “Ecoli”, which is of course a horrible name for a store. I find that this happens to be fairly often – I’ll glance at a sign and before my eyes can finish reading the letters, my brain flashes an interpretation into existence…and it’s often wrong, with comical results. Does this happen to anyone else?
This is what the case for the Watchmen movie looks like if you get the special edition from Best Buy. Sweet eh?
Watchmen comes out on DVD today, so to celebrate the release of this amazing movie, I thought I’d embed this very hilarious spoof video that someone created. If you haven’t seen Watchmen yet, don’t worry, it’s nothing like this cartoon. 😉