1,000,000 Candlepower Light

Saturday, October 1st, 2005: On the subject of annoying Freecyclers, this girl arranges to come and get my couch today. It’s all done and arranged by email but I add my phone number on there in case she gets lost on the drive over. Even though I’ve given her very detailed driving directions in the email. She calls and and rehashes everything we talked about in the email. Then an hour later, some guy calls me (boyfriend? father?) to rehash everything that me and the girl talked about. He sits there and goes over the directions with me, step by step, while I confirm that yes, those are certainly the right directions. I’m really not as grouchy as I make this all sound and I am friendly with these phone calls and these people that show up unannounced. I love the concept of Freecycling and I like that people are coming to take stuff off my hands. It’s just annoying when people make it all difficult. Most of my Freecycling experiences really are positive.

Today I was at Lowes and, inspired by an article on Fark, decided to see if they had any handheld 10,000,000 candlepower flashlights. They didn’t and neither did Target. But They had 3,000,000 candlepower and under. I just wanted to buy one, see what trouble I could cause with it, and then return it. Then I saw a 1,000,000 candlepowere for just $9.99 so I just purchased that to keep. Might come in handy someday! I spent about 15 minutes, shining it in the neighbor’s window across the street. It was driving their dogs crazy. Finally he came out to see what was going on. I told him that from now on, I’m going to use the spotlight to get his attention instead of phone calls. That made the $9.99 worth it. This thing is super bright, too. The thought of increasing the power by 10 or 15 seems insane. And fun.

I really love Launchcast now. I’ve listened it off and on for the past year or so but never too heavily. I just didn’t think it was anything special. Then Jammie introduces me to a few of the basic features on it and now I’m hooked. I had no idea that it could do so much. Launchcast blows XM & Sirius away. And Winamp, Windows Media, FM, AM and mp3s. Screw everything else! There’s absolutely nothing that can do what Launchcast can do. The rating system is brilliant and I love that it can randomly play songs from other peoples’ Launchcast favorites. Yeah yeah, I know this is all obvious stuff to vetran Launchcast listeners. I’m just excited by both the new music I’m suddenly being exposed to as well as the old stuff that I haven’t heard in years, all in my own personal mix of genres. I signed up for a year of Launchcast yesterday, which I think was just $2.99 per month. Beats the $60 per month I was paying the cable company to mostly just listen to their digital music channels. Jammie kept making fun of me for that. Anyway, everyone go listen to Launchcast immediately. It’s great even if you’re not a subscriber.

Oh yeah, I took my cable box back to the cable company yesterday and canceled service. I’m now paying a mere $25/month for my cable internet, instead of the $85 I was paying before. Which I guess hardly matters since I’ll probably be leaving this place in a month anyway. I’ll miss the movie channels a little, but I can still download the good stuff from Bittorrent. The line in the cable office was terrible. There were 3 people helping customers, but one line. I stood there for about 15 minutes before it finally being my turn. About 7 people come in and get behind me while I’m in line. Then while I’m at the counter getting the service shut off, this lady comes in and tries to cut in front of all of these people by saying that there are 3 lines. Everyone protests, even the employees. She argues a bunch and eventually loses. But it was a fun battle to watch. It looked like she was defeated at one point and she went to the back of the line, then she came back up and exclaims, “There are 3 people at the counter! There must be 3 lines here!” A little more arguing and then she gave up again. Not sure if she went for round 3 after I left or not.

The other semi-amusing thing happening at the cable company was this guy there, trying to downgrade his cable package to save money. But at the same time he was wanting to trade in his current cable box for a cable box that had built-in DVR, which would cost him an extra $9.99 per month. I mean, if you’re trying to save a little money on your monthly bill, wouldn’t it make sense to just learn how to program your VCR to record your shows? VHS tapes are cheap! I should just hang out at the cable office all day. It seems fun there. It was like watching one of those wacky reality TV shows!