Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Basic human courtesy - sadly - is not one of the things I expect to encounter very often in the revitalization zone that is East Atlanta.

My interaction with hoodies more typically involves things like incessantly barking dogs (the house behind me) left outside all night to howl; a 1978 Buick barreling down Van Vleck at 70 miles per hour or the door- hood- and trunk-less Caprice Classic plopped down in front of the house that already has two non-functioning Caprices in the driveway.

There have been, of course, exceptions to this experience.

There was the time when I put my ratty old sofas on the curb to be claimed by the first brother with a pick-up truck to come by. A couple of hours later I get a knock on the door, and a very courteous fella asked if the sofas were free for the taking and if he could have them.

The 90-year-old man who lives next door is as friendly as my grandfather, and Charlie who lives across the street almost wouldn”t take the extra $5 I gave him for cutting the jungle that had once been my backyard yesterday.

But when fetching the mail after work tonight, I found something so amazing I had to blog it.

Among the mail was a simple photocopied note. It was from Katrina and Tiffani, who live one street over on Braeburn. It read:

Dear Neighbors,

We will be having a birthday party that will include all outdoor festivities July 12, 2003.

Our party will begin around 9 or 9:30 and will disperse around 1 a.m.

We have a lot of musicians that will be performing live and a few in a drum circle until 11:30.

If in the event that our party becomes excessive in noise levels, we can be reached at 404.993.2375 for Katrina or 404.702.4527 for Tiffani.

Thanks in Advance
Katrina and Tiffani
1568 Braeburn Drive

Wow. Questionable grammar aside, I though that was pretty damn cool of them. Of course, I didn”t check mail on Saturday, or I might have wandered over to see the “drum circle” and whatnot.

I owe a payoff for the fearful blog about my PVR.

Turns out everything was ok. Maybe the way to fix the thing is to leave it alone. In any case, no hard drive reformatting, customer service call or anything like that. Ashley Judd is safely burned to a DVD; and the world is fine.

And, for the record (Will), I do love the PVR and would not want to be without one, ever again.

I think it”s really odd that it can be so hard to explain the benefits of having a PVR/TiVo to people. It”s a really simple concept - you record shows to a hard drive so you never miss a show and can watch it whenever you want, and skip the commercials. But for whatever reason, a lot of people can”t grasp the power of that concept. But use it for a day and you will never watch regular TV again.

PVR people get spoiled. When we”re traveling, it”s like water torture to have to watch commercial-filled TV. When I hear something said on the radio that I didn”t quite catch, I find myself looking for a remote to back it up 10 seconds. And, with the two-tuner thingy now, I get very easily frustrated when I try to set a timer to record the third show at 9 p.m. on Sunday.

One day I”ll be the old man in the La-Z-Boy telling my grandchildren “you know, when I was young, we couldn”t stop the TV whenever we wanted …”;”2 0

This is a blog of anxiousness and fear.

I fear that when I get home tonight I”m going to have to reformat my DishPVR (DishNetwork”s TiVo thingy) and lose all of the TV shows I have saved on it. I know this from experience based on the box”s behavior. If I do lose everything on the disk, it”ll be the fourth time it”s happened in the past eight months.

It”s not called the “bleeding edge” for nothing.

I have the new DishPVR 721, which has two tuners in it and can store 90 hours of TV. The 721 is more juiced than any TiVo you can buy. I bought it off the Internet from some dealer in Indiana for $550.

But the thing is buggy. In fact, the 721 sitting in my bedroom is the second one I”ve had. Dish sent me a replacement unit about two months ago, after my harddrive reformatted itself for the second time. Two weeks ago the new 721 freaked out - as the wife and I call its behavior - and we lost all of our saved programs once again.

And now I”m facing yet another loss of the Ashley Judd Style Star (the last time I lost that very, very, very good program, I swore I”d burn it out to DVD the instant I had it recorded again — I didn”t).

Apart from the major crashes and data loss, the 721 freaks out probably every other day. It typically only takes a reboot to fix things, but it does become annoying.

Thus, the “bleeding edge”.

When I get pissed off at the 721, I try to remember that what I have sitting on my TV is actually a Linux PC hastily developed by the fine folks at DishNetwork to give themselves a competitive advantage over DirecTV, which offers a version of TiVo for its subscribers.

And they”ve done a pretty good job. It delivers picture-in-picture, allows you to watch TV while you search for programs (not offered on the 501) and has a sharp-looking program guide. It”s just buggy. They”ll fix that.

My prediction for my evening — get home, 721 is still freaking out. I give it the reboot, and get the error message: “Receiver is in stand-by … booting”. Screen goes blank, it reboots itself and starts the cycle over again. Call customer service, remind them that last time I called they said they”re send me another replacement at no charge if the disk failed again. Give them my information, turn off the 721, hook the 501 back up and try to find Style Star again.

I”ll let y”all know if it plays out like that.

Does LSU football coach Nick Saban know something we don”t?

In my continuing preparation for Fightin” Tiger football season (54 days and counting), I visited www.nicksaban.net this evening to see what”s new on the coach”s site. One of the things I wanted to check out was the new crop of Recruiting Whores he”d lined up to show prospects around campus this fall.

A school”s whores are key members of the recruiting team. It”s all fine and good to show off the weight room, academic center and packed football stadium when a kid visits, but not offering up some quality tail to a hot recruit is like not wearing a tie to a job interview.

Ever wonder how Arizona State is competitive in football? Check out the Sun Devil Recruiters. Hell, even Georgia Tech can scare up a few good looking girls among the student body for the Solid Gold when football is on the line.

So the lineup of Recruiting Whores is a good leading indicator for recruiting. Thankfull, LSU posts individual pictures of their whores - officially known as “Tiger Pride” - for those of us who follow recruiting closely.

For 2003-04 we”ve got:

Jennifer Russell

Kimmy Dao

Megan Irby

Mallory Lafargue

… and many other fine whores as well.

I”m thinking things are looking pretty good for the Class of 2004.

Then I notice something.

New members of Tiger Pride include:

Dustin Davis

and Daniel Nunes

To say the least, these are not your typical recruiting whores!

It could be that Dustin is just a mop-headed freak, but that Nunes kid is absolutely gay. So does this mean there”s a couple of homosexual fellas among our potential recruits this year? Saban is nothing if not a top-notch recruiter, so there has to be something behind the addition of Dustin and Daniel to the lineup of whores.

Don”t think it”s some kind of PC change prompted by pressure to stop having whores escort recruits around. This is Louisiana, after all. All LSU has to offer kids is booze and sex.

So I”ll keep an eye out on the recruiting list this fall. If we end up signing a high-profile placekicker or punter, I”ll know why.

I”m a fanatic about money management. I”m one of those people who keeps track of every penny the wife and I spend, and I manage it all in Microsoft Money (I use NetBank and credit cards that download automatically into Money, so the work is more about analysis than typing in receipt details). Also, I run everything I can through a credit card, so I have a lot of records about where we spend our money.

So with 2003 halfway done, I took a look this weekend at where our money has been going this year. Take out the regular bills and taxes, and here”s the dozen places who get the most money from us:

1. Kroger - Before getting completely fed up with the Ghetto Kroger, it was our regular grocery store. Look for Ghetto K to slip down the ranking for the rest of the year.

2. Home Depot - Yeah, typical. Between the work done around our house and re-painting our rental condo (twice) this year, there”s been a lot of trips to Big Orange on Ponce.

3. Amazon.com - What kind of modern, Internet-working couple would we be if we didn”t shop at BezosMart? The bulk of the expense here so far in 2003 was the super-fly DVD recorder the wife got me for my birthday. Come Christmas time, Amazon.com will creep back up the Q4 list.

4. Chez Danielle - The wife”s beauty salon. Hey, she”s hot. How do you figure she stays that way?

5. Publix - Our new preferred neighborhood grocery is No. 5 with a bullet, having won our business away from Ghetto K. Publix is shooting for No. 1 by the end of the year.

6. PeopleFirst.com - Although it sounds like a radical socialist movement, it”s actually the loan for the new SUV. If we”d have bought a Nissan Murano instead of a Hyundai SantaFe, PF.com would be up the list.

7. QuikTrip - Since starting my new job in suburbia, I”m again filling up - with gas and 44-ounce fountain drinks - at my favorite convenience store. I”ve been a fan of QuikTrip since moving up to Atlanta (the only one I knew of at the time was on Chamblee-Tucker Road near where the ex and later my boy Tom were working), and I always seek them out when I need a fillup in the “burbs. And now the Maxima drinks QT gas almost exclusively.

8. Shell Oil - The wife favors the Shell station on Moreland at McPherson. She says the Indian fellas who run the place are nice to her. One weekend we were there filling her car up. She was sitting in the passenger seat; I was pumping the gas. I see one of the little Indian guys come outside, and he gives a big smile and wave to the wife. I stopped letting her leave the house alone after that.

9. Walgreens - I tend to hit the CVS in Grant Park if I make a drugstore run from home, but I also hit a Walgreens by the office, and the wife is partial to the WGreen on North at Piedmont. Those tubes of toothpaste and bars of soap really add up.

10. JCrew - First sign of Yuppiedom to appear on the list (it gets worse at No. 12). Mostly clothes for the wife (they put more women”s stuff on sale, especially online), but also plenty of stuff for myself.

11. PetsMart - Our big dog, Ruffin, eats about five pounds of food a day. The little dog, Dobie, is an absolute jackass unless you shut him up with rawhides. Thus, many, many trips to PetsMart.

12. Starbucks - Maybe I should feel guilty about this. And if the wife and I were drinking regular-old hot coffee at The Evil Empire instead of at Joe”s or Aurora or something, I probably would. But our Starbucks addiction is all about Iced Chai and Iced Quad Lattes. Ordering iced coffee beverages at a small coffeeshop is like ordering country-fried steak at Ruth”s Chris. Sure, they can make it, but it”s not what they do well. The Iced Quad Latte at Starbucks is always going to be good, whether you buy it in Atlanta, New York, Charleston, Nashville, Savannah, New Orleans, Houston, Las Vegas or the Ft. Lauderdale airport (yes, I”ve had them in all those places).

And there”s the Dirty Dozen. Pretty damn corporate, isn”t it? Local places start to show up more in the second dozen. There”s our former dog sitter Brian - an EAtl resident - at 14; Oxford Cleaners in L5P - not coincidentally located next to the Starbucks - at 16; The Flatiron at 21 and Six Feet Under at 24.

If I had a better system of cash accounting, Yard Guy would probably rank somewhere in the top 20. But he doesn”t take Visa.