Stunslinger.com Blog

A friend of mine is moving to Utah in a month and we’re trying to help him get a good rental house.  My friend has a few needs, primary among these is a secure place to park his motorcycle.  Unfortunately, garages are not the most common part of houses around here.  Back in Oregon, it’s extremely common, but not here in Salt Lake.  Perhaps it’s because the weather is so rainy back home, and so consistently nice here, or maybe not.

For whatever reason, it is less common to find a place with enclosed parking here than in Oregon.  So we’ve been looking on craigslist and asking the people we know for recommendations.  My friend found a place that advertised 100 square feet of extra storage, which seemed perfect for motorcycle parking.

He contacted the guy renting it, and asked if he could look at the place when he visits SLC tomorrow.  Now, he’s flying out here to look for housing from another state.  But the guy emailed him back, saying they’re in a mighty hurry to get the place rented and couldn’t he come look at it sooner?  Sure, he’ll just pay a few hundred extra dollars to change his plane tickets because you want to get the place rented sooner.  The guy prattled on about having so many applications and really needing to have it rented ASAP.

So we agreed to go look at it for my friend.  I emailed the landlord Monday evening to set up a viewing time.  I said I had to work 13 hours on Tuesday, so would have to come see it Wednesday after work.  The guy emailed back talking about “sooner the better” and all the applications they have.  I said I needed to spend a minute or two with my wife before falling into bed, so it’d have to wait.  He said “well, if it’s important, I can still meet you Tuesday.”  Of course it’s important, enough with the guilt trip!  At this point, if it were up to me I would’ve just blown the guy off.  I just don’t respond well to this high pressure sales tactic.  If you have so many applications, you don’t need to rush me in, because you have all of these other options!

Needless to say we ended up viewing the place on Wednesday evening.  Again he kept reiterating the “stack” of applications, and they were going to make the decision Wednesday night, so if my friend wanted the place he should contact them immediately.  Now, I should mention this is no gem of an apartment.  It’s very much a basement apartment, in the bad sense.  I had to stoop to get through doorways, there were random holes in the wall where outlets were and the whole thing was dark and poorly laid out.  I’m sure he would’ve preferred to have my friend sign a contract without seeing the place.

So my friend decided to pass on it, after hearing from me and seeing the pictures.  Good choice.  Then today the guy emailed us saying, “Just wanted to know if you’re still interested.  There’s still a chance.”  Right, because everyone in that stack of applications didn’t live up to the information you don’t have about us?  I’m beginning to think this “stack” of applications meant a stack of blank applications.  Technically not lying, he didn’t actually say they were completed applications!

Freaking salespeople… I seem to live in a state full of them!

Yesterday the wife and I went to rent a movie at the local movie rental store, which we’ll call Hollywood.  Now, the past several times I’ve tried to rent a movie, it’s been difficult.  When I get to the counter they ask for my phone number to pull up the account.  It’s always difficult.  I have a cell phone, a home phone, and my wife has a cell phone.  I’m certain it’s one of these three numbers, but I can never remember which one.  Furthermore, after trying all of these and having problems, they just look it up by my last name.  So the same thing happens now, and the guy looks up my account by “Stunslinger” and it turns out the person who entered my phone number into the computer switched two numbers around.  So it really wasn’t my fault all along!  Phew.  The guy changed it to the correct number (why in the world didn’t someone do this the last four times!?!).  Problem solved.

So we rented the movies (Music & Lyrics and The Good Shepherd) and went to leave.  Being a gentleman I let my wife into her side and walked around to mine.  I stuck the key into the door lock and noticed a woman and man walking to the car next to me.  The timing was off, so she would either need to wait while I opened the door or do something else.  She chose to do something else.  She said, “excuse me” and walked forward.  I interpreted this to mean, “I’m going to slip past you and wait behind you while you open your door and get in.”  I was wrong.  What she meant was, “I’m going to just walk up to my door, open it and get into my car.”  What!?!  Seriously, it was the dumbest move I’ve seen in a while.  After I got into the car my wife just looked at me and we burst out laughing.
To follow up with the whole thing, the guy driving the car waited forever to back out of his spot.  Now, as I mentioned already, they were in their car first and their engine was on.  In my world, this means you go first.  Since I’m wary of backing out and having them back out at the same time causing an accident, I waited an awkward amount of time for him to finally back out and take off.  Some people.

I have to hope they weren’t trying to be a pain, but rather they were just oblivious.  This is a trend I am noticing here, and I’ll write more about it in the future I’m sure.  I even have a term for it, and it’s specific to this state.  I’ll share it later, I promise.  I think it deserves its own post.

Yep, it’s Memorial Day.  After working with veterans for the past 9 months, this holiday means a lot more to me.  It’s a shame that it took that experience for me to truly appreciate the sacrifice given for me, but it has.

Every day I work with veterans who have born the battle, given up their freedom in order to serve their country.  Many of the ones I see have seen horrible traumas and have been permanently changed because of what they experienced.  Most of them did not sign up for the military because of some political idea, and once they were in they did what was asked of them because that was their job.  Unfortunately, many soldiers pay the ultimate price for their service.

The least we can do is remember those who lost their lives at least one day a year.  So on this day, I want to say a hearty thank you to those who can no longer receive it.  My thoughts and prayers are with current soldiers, that there may be no more suffering.  A man can dream, anyway.

Best wishes, protection, and appreciation for all those who serve, or have served.

In case you noticed my post frequency has dropped a bit, it’s for two reasons: 1) I’ve been a bit under the weather and haven’t had the energy to work and come up with blog posts and 2) I’ve been reading more recently.  I used to read a ton, but when I went to graduate school my interest in reading for fun kind of dropped off.

Recently I’ve been more into it, and that takes time away from writing blog posts.  But, surprisingly, my reading has inspired a blog post.  I’m reading a book that was written in the early 80’s and set in the early 70’s.  One thing that is hard is adjusting money values.  When I read about someone feeling cheated because they’re losing $75 in a sale, it seems a little less critical than if I thought about it as 70 times minimum wage (estimated).  Of course, once I started to put myself in the correct mindset, things made more sense.  But it got me thinking.

What if books were written with a relative value unit (RVU) that could be replaced every so often with the correct value in current day dollars.  So I could write, “He was mad.  His boss was cheating him out of 70RVU and he wouldn’t stand for it.”  When it was printed, it would say “…out of $490 and he…”, but in 20 years it could say “…out of $3400 and he…” because inflation has been out of control forever.

Of course then libraries would have to replace their books every 10 years or so, but it seems like a small price to pay.  Plus, it would keep the publishers in business, because they’d have to continuously be publishing old books.

I have a problem that costs me money.  I check books out of the library, and then keep them past their due dates.  I often don’t notice this until a week or two after, and then I feel horrible.  This sort of defeats the purpose of using the library, as it is supposed to save me money.  Granted, it’s not the same price as buying a book…but still, the idea that I have been lazy enough to incur fines (and, usually, not even finish the book) bothers me.

So this morning it hit me (and this is not an amazing revelation, the only thing amazing about it is that it took me this long to think of it): why not put the due dates into iCal, so I have some reminder of when they’re due.  I can even assign a specific color to a library book calendar, and have no excuse for missing a due date.  I guess I could miss it by not turning on my computer (yeah right, that happens) or by not opening iCal.  Maybe I need to have iCal start on load.

Technology will save me!

There are still three and a half months or so until we move back to Oregon, but I’m already anxious about finding a place to live.  The worst part about it is there’s not really a ton I can do.  It’s way too early to be searching Craigslist, but I sort of do.  I have been looking at apartment complexes, but we’d prefer to find a duplex, small house, or whatever via craigslist.  Our experience has taught us that we can get a better deal on craigslist than going through apartment complexes.

The thing that’s really stressing me is the location issue.  Used to be we didn’t mind a 30-45 minute commute, it was normal.  We lived in a town beyond the suburbs of Portland, and were just used to it.  But now we’ve lived in Salt Lake, where I’m only 3.3 miles from work, and everything in town is within 15 minutes.  We realized we enjoy being close, having a short commute.  But in Portland, this makes the prices of rentals go up (obviously).

In Portland it’s much more difficult to find a reasonably priced rental close enough to my future work site.  It’s frustrating, and I shouldn’t be worrying about it already.  I should just be enjoying my time here, and trusting that I will have somewhere to live next year.  Sigh.

I know, weird topic to blog about, right?  The other day my supervisor and another intern and I were talking about the state of our field, specifically in relation to fears of lawsuits.  First we lamented the state of our society, that lawsuits are so commonplace now.  Now, I believe there are absolutely valid reasons for someone to sue.  I also think there are numerous abuses of the system as well.

Anyway, as seems to happen whenever people talk about lawsuits, the topic of the McDonalds coffee-too-hot lawsuit, and others with gigantic payoffs came up.  On the one hand I understand why the payoff has to be so big: a $10,000 penalty isn’t anything to a gigantic corporation like McDonalds.  On the other hand, simply because of a company’s revenue size, this individual gets a ridiculously huge payout?  Shouldn’t payouts be based on the extent of the damage?

And that’s when it hit me: Assess two money amounts.  First, the court determines a suitable penalty related to the company’s financial status.  Second, the court decides how much pain and suffering the individual should be compensated for, and award them that money.  Then, the difference gets donated to social services of some sort.  For instance, I could be awarded $10,000 to compensate for my damages, and the company could be penalized $250,000 to teach them a lesson.  The $240,000 then goes into some fund, such as helping subsidize health care for the uninsured or housing programs for the homeless.

Seems like a good idea from where I’m sitting.

For some reason I’m still up.  I’m tired, worked hard today and it’s 12:25am.  I’ve been messing around browsing through random pics on Flickr and Comedy Central is showing some boring movie.  In this state of heightened cognitive functioning I had a profound realization.  The quality of the show on TV can be judged by the type of commercials playing.

For instance, this crummy movie has advertisements for male enhancement pills, porno movies, and “flirty” text messaging.  These are the markers of quality television.  Now, if this were crappy TV programming, we’d see advertisements for banks, fast food and big budget movies.  Oh wait, maybe I have that backwards…

Today I gave my final formal presentation to the psychology staff.  Before, since I didn’t have a laptop, I had to make my presentation at home and take it to the old work computer on a thumb drive.  Then I had to hope the old laptop wouldn’t take 10 minutes to load up Powerpoint.  This time, I decided to use my MacBook Pro, and what better time than now to try out Keynote for the presentation?

First impressions: I love it.  I’m thinking about purchasing iWork because of it (I haven’t really found a use for Pages).  It was pretty easy to figure out, not that Powerpoint is hard, but things just seemed to work right.  The real magic happened during my presentation.  I set up the 3d cube transition between slides, and as soon as I changed the first slide everyone went “ooh.”  I actually had to stop the presentation for a second when several people asked how I did that.  They were also wowed by the 3d graph I created (which was extremely easy).

So, basically I was able to put together a great looking presentation simply, and it set me apart from all the other Powerpoint templates everyone else uses.  Kinda cool.  And I love using the remote without worrying about whether it will work right or whatever when you use a remote that is from the projector.

I also realized (too late) that it actually works the way a presentation program should.  In Powerpoint, you set up the slides and the projector shows them.  Everything the computer screen shows, the projector shows.  When I hooked up the projector to my MacBook Pro, I noticed things were not the same.  It showed the nice Mac background, but none of my icons or files or anything.  Then I fired up Keynote, and saw that I could send the slides to the projector, and have notes, the timer, and other options on my computer screen.  So cool!  I always wanted to have the opportunity to keep my notes in Powerpoint, but not have them projected on the big screen.  Keynote and my MacBook Pro let me do that.  So cool.

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I got the formula right.  You see, I really like to read magazines.  I’m not sure exactly why, but I actually am happy when I open the mailbox and see a new magazine waiting for me.

I subscribe to several different magazines, and they’re all different.  Currently, I think I have four subscriptions (AP, Men’s Health, Wired, and GQ) and apparently this is the perfect medley for me.  Every time I finish my last magazine for the month, I think, “Now what am I going to read?”  And then, magically, it happens: The new cycle of magazines shows up.

The first month it happened I thought it was a lucky fluke.  Now it’s happened several months in a row, and I realized it’s no fluke.  It’s just weird, and I’m appreciative.  Don’t know why I thought I’d share, but I did.