McNelis.biz

Occasionally a company will do something unexpected that will put a smile on your face.  These instances seem to be rare these days, but still, every now and then the fates will smile upon you.  I’ve had two such experiences in the last couple of weeks, and feel I need to give some Kudos to a couple of companies.

First, you may all remember that Chris and I went to Nashville a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately on our way there we had some bad weather and despite the attendants and pilots best efforts a pretty shit flight where we were sitting on the tarmac for over three hours.  On the flight Southwest pretty much gave us open bar as a bit of a “hey, sorry” gesture.  It was really appreciated, especially since they literally had no control over the circumstances.

Then last week we get a welcome surprise, Southwest sent both Chris and I an apology letter, which is nice.  But what got us was that they included a $150 travel voucher for another Southwest flight.  Given the prices of their flights, this is fantastic and was totally an un-needed but much appreciated gesture.  I can’t say I really LIKE flying Southwest, but they have certainly made me much more likely to use them in the  future.

The second great customer service moment was last week for me.  I’ve had a set of Bose Tri-port earphones for about a year and a half.  I love these headphones.  They have a fantastic sonic clarity that allows me to listen to my music at a lower volume but still hear all the nuances of the music.  They also have several ear-bud sizes you can swap out to get just the right fit.  The Tri-ports were not without their design flaws though.  The ear bud itself had problems staying attached and the plug had an awkward box on the end that ultimately would fray.

That was the problem I faced the most, I wore out that joint after about 6 months and Bose replaced it, no questions asked.  It worked for me up until the Nashville trip where the wear and tear was causing the sound to cut out.  I took them into the store (an actual Bose store), and despite no longer being under warranty they Sales person replaced my headphones.

The kicker?  All the design flaws I mentioned are gone.  So now I’ve got a brand new set of headphones that I love that are better designed than they were previously.  If Chris wants a set of earbuds, I’d definitely get her the Tri-ports.  I’m also more inclined to buy from that store now even if it is marginally more expensive.

I’m still in the middle of reading Countdown, so you get a reprieve from the boring-ass book posts.  Instead, I’ve got a couple of cool things to share with you.

First, you may recall a while back I was plugging for my brother since he and his fiancé were finalists for a free wedding from Bloomington, Indiana’s B97 radio station.  I’m excited to tell you that I got a call yesterday morning from my mom and they won!  The WON A FREE WEDDING HOLY SHIT OMG PONIES!!!!!  Can’t tell you how happy I am for them, they are incredibly fortunate.  Anyone that sent an email in, thank you.

The second cool thing isn’t free, unfortunately, but is just as cool to Chris and I.  We had already been signed up for a CSA produce share for a couple of months that starts in June and will run into September I believe.  Don’t know what a CSA share is?  Check this out.  Ours is by the kind folks at Home Grown Wisconsin.  What we really were looking for and hadn’t found was a meat share program.  We’ve been wanting to get away from the corn-finished beef and pork and to use free range, hormone and antibiotic free chickens.  But that can get way too expensive real real quick.

Enter Grass Is Greener Gardens, near New Glarus, Wisconsin.  Their sign-up period was over at the beginning of May, but the had some spots still open when we called last week and we totally signed up.  We got what they call the “medium” share, 3 dozen eggs and one pound of honey a month.  For the full size months, starting a week from tomorrow, is $691.  Yes, a lot of money to pay out at once, but our meat needs will be largely satisfied for the next 6 months by it!

Curious what that gets us?  We don’t know exactly what we are getting next week, but a typical share that starts in May might get something like 2 whole chickens, 4 lamb chops, 1 pound ground lamb, 2  package pork chops, 1 pound bacon, 2 pounds ground beef (bulk or in patties), 1 pound stew meat and a 2.5 to 3 pound roast.  Then it varies a little bit month to month, but still includes poultry, lamb, pork, and beef.  Sooo excited.  Now we just need to make room in our freezer!

Last thing for this post, I went golfing for the first time this season yesterday at Chick Evans, which is one of the Forest Preserve courses and I played better than I have in 5 years, stroking an honest 92.  I even managed to par 5 holes.  Had I not had some problems off the Tee early I might have been in the mid-80s.  Needless to say, very excited and really looking forward to playing again in Indy next weekend.

Earlier this week I finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  I’m still digesting it.  This book was really interesting, but at the same time very difficult to read for me.  Without spoiling anything, a father and son are traveling along ‘the road’ in a post-nuclear apocalypse earth.

When it comes to human nature, I don’t think I’ve read anyone who portrays it as McCarthy does, and I think I hate him for it.  On the one hand, he’s very dark, and its disgusting the way that some of the people in his world (and not just this book, but the same could be said for No Country For Old Men) behave and those characters very nature.  What I hate is that the way these characters behave is completely believable.  I don’t want to believe that humans can kill other humans without a shred of remorse, and devour their flesh without a thought.

But really, in the world this book is set in, our world, after a nuclear war, is completely and scarily believable.  And I hate it.  But I also don’t feel like there is much I could do to stop it, outside of being “one of the good guys.”  Though that’s not enough, it would have to do.  I’m still struggling with some of the stuff in this book, and part of me wishes I never laid eyes on it.  Another part of me is glad that now I’m considering and thinking about things in a new light.  But I don’t think I like that new light.  When I put the book down for the final time I wanted to cut myself.  Something to feel human, because I was left feeling so cold after reading the book.

Of course I didn’t do that.  But it made me consider if I would really want to be a survivor if there was a nuclear war or other event that literally scorched every living thing from the earth.  Would anyone want to live in that world?  Probably not, but we’d probably all at least try to go on living, until it was too much for us to bear, then we’d just hope for a quick death.

Now that you all also want to kill yourselves, I’ll move on to the next book.  I was recommended <em>count down - the race for beautiful solutions at the International Mathematical Olympiad</em> by Steve Olson.  Chris had to read this book for her masters class and so far it has been up and down for me.  Yesterday I got bored with it at lunch, but then on my way home from work, missed my train stop because I was nose down in it and paying no attention to my surroundings.

Anyway, thats all for now, I’m halfway there, and its not even June.

25 down, 25 to go.

I’ve read TWO books, and completely forgot to talk about one when I finished it.  In my defense, we were heading out to Nashville when I read it.  So what to talk about first?  I suppose you’re probably more interested in the Nashville trip than the books I’ve been reading so I’ll start there.

First, I hate rain and lightning.  Ok, generally I like it, but last Friday morning our flight was supposed to leave Chicago at 7:40 in the morning and we pushed away from the gate on time.  Then?  The weather shut down the airport because of rain.  So we sat on the tarmac.  For two hours.  Then, they decide to take us back to the gate when it starts to lightning, do you know what that means?  They can’t push us back to the gate.  We sat there for three hours before taking off on the bumpiest flight I’ve ever had.  Thank God it was only an hour long flight.

We got down there and picked up our rental car and drove out east of the city to Lebanon and drove through a state park out there before eating some great barbeque in Lebanon at a Nashville BBQ chain called Witts.  It was great, I had ribs, Chris had pulled pork, a good kick off on our journey.  Then, exhausted, we checked into the hotel and took a lonnnngggggg nap.  When we woke up we checked for food recommendations at the hotel’s front desk.  By the way, if you don’t know this already, most hotels have a list of non-chain food places and directions from the hotel handy to give out.  We’ve found this to be really useful in our last couple of trips to check out some local fare.  We ended up at a southern / soul food place called Monell’s where they sit you family style with other people.  We met a group of interesting and nice folks there and enjoyed some AWESOME fried chicken, corn pudding, collard greens, corn bread, mashed potatoes….it could go on and on.

The next day we drove west of the city through White Bluff to the Montgomery Bell state park and hiked around and saw some really beautiful areas.  We also had breakfast at a little dive called Hog Heaven, which was pretty good.  In general we found that we really liked the area west of the city a whole lot, and if we decide that its Nashville for us, then thats the general area we’d like to be in.

We also checked out the Vanderbilt area that night and the next day and took in an arts and crafts fair at Centennial Park, which was a fun and relaxing way to end our trip before heading back.

All in all, I think we both really really liked Nashville and the people we met were awesome, even if we don’t necessarily agree with all their world-views.  As we’ve been talking, Chris has been saying that the more she thinks about it, the more she likes it.  So now we’ve got to plan our Portland / Portland-Seattle trip to help us make our final decision since we could, today for example, buy 20 acres in White Bluff that is wooded with a creek along the back of the property for under 80k.

Now really quick I’ll cover the two books.  Number 23 was called The Haven and was loaned to me by one of my co-workers, Q.  It was a sci-fi / fantasy novel where dogs were the most feared creature on the planet and pretty much all the animals can talk.  It was a little strange, but right up my alley.

Number 24 was also loaned to me by a co-worker and was Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s Kafka By The Shore, an intense metaphysical coming of age store with some fantasy elements thrown in to help with the overall pace and meaning of the book.  This one is going to take quite a while to digest, the book is filled with riddles that aren’t ever really completed, but that is part of the joy of this book.  It allows the reader to complete the puzzle and get a different meaning out it each time its read.

I started Number 25 this morning, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, also the author of No Country For Old Men, which I read late last year.  Once I finish that one up I’ll have some more stuff to add.  I also need to start blogging more regularly in general, a once-a-week book post just isn’t cutting it.

24 down, 26 to go.

I finished number 22 late last night, a book called The Eight.  The Eight centered around a fictional chess service given to Charlemagne and subsequently bequeathed to a soldier that defeated Charlemagne in the first match played on the board.  The Montglane Service as it is called is a mystical item that many people seek in “The Game.”

I won’t get into the details, but it had some Da Vinci Code kind of elements to it, though I would not put it in the same playing field.  Not because one is better than the other, but its not a fair comparison, the stories are too different, even though they resolve around, to some extent, solving puzzles to survive.  There was also a lot more mystical / magical happenings in The Eight than there was in ‘the Code.’

Today I started a book loaned to me by a co-worker, called The Haven by Graham Diamond.

22 down, 28 to go.

First thing is first, my youngest brother, Scott, is getting married. He and his fiancé are up for a free wedding, and you can help.  Its easy, just send an email to <a href=”emailto:keraandscott@wbwb.com“>keraandscott@wbwb.com</a>!  Here is what Scott had to say in the email he sent out.

Hello everybody.  I’m sorry to bother you all with this email, but I do have a favor to ask you.  My fiancée Kera and I are finalists in a radio station contest to win a free wedding.  The voting just started.  All you have to do to help us is to send one email (they only allow one email per email address) to keraandscott@wbwb.com under every email address you use.  If you could forward this email to anyone you know and ask them to help us as well, Kera and I would very much appreciate any support you can offer.  Ask them to email keraandscott@wbwb.com under every email address they use as well.  We’re going to need every vote we can get to win this wedding that Kera and I may not be able to afford otherwise.

If you’d like to see the website for the essay that Kera wrote to enter the contest and some engagement photos of Kera and I, you can visit it at
http://www.wbwb.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=561&Itemid=2 .

Thanks for doing this everybody.  I can’t tell you how awesome this is.  Any votes you can cast will make a huge difference.  Anyone else you can send this to would help also.

Thanks everybody, and at the least, please pray for Kera and I as we continue to prepare for the sacrament of marriage.

So please, please send some emails and help them get this done.  Scott is a youth minister, Kera is about to enter medical school, and because they are all old-school don’t want to live together before they get married, but are both moving away from “home” to be together in Ohio in the fall.  Maybe not the best financial decision, but if they get this wedding, they’ll be married by then and it will be a moot point.

I finished the 21st book of the year today over my lunch hour. Midnight in the Garden of Good Evil had long been a favorite movie of mine, and I had just never gotten around to reading the book. It was quite enjoyable, though the story took a lot longer than I was expecting to get into Jim Williams and the murder of his lover. Still, it was a fun read and filled in a lot of information that just wasn’t part of the movie, nor did it need to be.

I’m not sure what the next book on my agenda is, though the library may be in order for me soon, though I think there are still a couple of books on the shelf at home that I’m interested in reading. Tomorrow I’ll have another book that I’m working on. Then I’ll hopefully post some pictures by the weekend of the two tables I’ve made this spring. One has been done and in the living room for a while, the other one I’m in the process of finishing.

After two weeks, or somewhere thereabouts, I finally finished The Great Chicago Fire. Can you guess what it was about? Actually, your guess would have been only marginally accurate. I was expecting a rundown of all the various causes of the fire and how Chicago ended up in the situation it ultimately faced. Instead I got a refresher course in turn of the century architecture in Chicago.

Not that I don’t find that thoroughly interesting on the whole…Devil In The White City is one of my favorite recent reads (from last fall), so I had a pretty good primer on the subject, especially as it pertained to Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Olmsted, The Rookery, and of course the World’s Columbian Expedition. This book seemed to cover that part of culture in grave detail. It also formed a bit of literary criticism on popular fiction coming out of Chicago at the time and told the story of those fictional characters. The book itself was non-fiction, and I would have prefered to hear the story of some of the people that actually went through it, not a sensationalized piece about non-existent people.

In the end I’m glad to have read the book, but it was a long and difficult read that I just was not able to get in to at all, and never got emotionally invested in it. It wasn’t one of those books that I was inspired to find time to read. Now I’m on to my third John Scalzi book on the year, The Androids Dream. That one definitely starts out…differently than one might expect a novel to begin. But I’ll get there a couple of days hopefully.

Until then, 20 down, 32 to go.

Hey folks,

I’m in the process of changing my ISP for my sites, with this one being the first to move. Hopefully it will go smoothly, but there will be some down time as it gets going.

*Update* All the posts and mcnelis.biz has been migrated to the new hosting. I learned a bit on this, like my 600 or some odd posts are too many for a single wordpress import. Breaking it into 2 chunks made it happy though.

Courtesy of Tor and their bitchin’ email list, I just finished my 2nd eBook yesterday for free, courtesy of them. I must say, this is a great way for them to get people to read a book they otherwise might not. Case in point is Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell, the first in what to this point is a 3 book sci fi arc. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, but now, being the serial story kind of guy I am, will probably buy the next two books in the series soon.

So yes, Tor, good plan on that marketing. Same thing also happened with me for John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, though admittedly I’d been planning to read that series for some time.

The nice thing about the Tor program is that you can download the book as a PDF, HTML, or in a mobile format, so I can toss it on my phone to read during my commute, or any time really, when I have a few minutes and am a little bit bored. They also don’t put any DRM stuff on them, which means that if I really wanted to I could forward it to a friend, Scalzi even suggested people do that with his Old Man’s War…just asking not to put it up on a torrent site, which I think is completely fair.

So yes, Crystal Rain got off to a rocky start for me, the diction of worlds main characters drove me kind of batty at first, and I still don’t care much for it, but with the entire book, the context of the diction / accent makes sense now.

This was my 19th book to finish on the year…technically the 20th started, but it was a much quicker read than The Great Chicago Fire, which because I wanted something non-fiction, jumped in front of Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream.

Chris and I are headed down to Indianapolis tonight to spend some time with my family. We’ve not been down there since Christmas time, so it will be nice to see everyone. My youngest brother is going to be pretty excited, I think, since I can snag 3 Orioles v. Cubs tickets for May 26th. The Orioles are Scott’s favorite team and the three of us, my other brother Ryan, and Scott, were talking about going to that game already.

So now its Friday, I ain’t got a job, I ain’t got shit to do. Ok, so I do. So I will. Until next time.

19 down, 31 to go.