I had to get up and getting moving this morning because I had a doctor’s appointment out in Batavia relatively early this morning. Nothing to worry about, just the regular annual or semi-annual checkup. I needed to get my acid reflux prescription refilled but nothing exciting there. The evil scale monster reported that I had put on ten pounds, however, since the last time that I had been in about a year ago. And, to add insult to injury, it also appears that we have always been incorrect about my height and I am actually just UNDER 5’9″ instead of being just under 5’10” like we had always assumed that I was. So not only did I gain some weight but apparently I have less frame to squeeze that weight into now.
So, in order to combat my weight issues, my doctor wants me to start using Weight Watchers to watch points and all of that. He said doing it online would be fine. However, the big business supports over at Weight Watchers actually actively block anyone attempting from using the site through the use of the Firefox free web browser and only accept customers who have paid their respective dues to either Microsoft or Apple to have one of their commercial browsers available (that is, Internet Explorer or Safari.) What kind of crappy business practice is that? Is it really possible that Microsoft and Apple are providing such significant kick-backs to Weight Watchers that they are willing to alienate a part of their audience? Or do they simply dislike the open source community so much that they are willing to risk financial losses in order to make a point. And what is the point? It hasn’t been made very well. Is there one renegade web designer inside that decides to block the second most popular browser because he or she hates having to support multiple browsers and not a single executive of Weight Watchers has ever tried to access even the home page of the company (yes, even the main index page is blocked to us Firefox users.) And it is important to note that the site is blocked. Not even cunningly made to work poorly for those of us without IE or Safari but they actually redirect us to a page where they act like there is an error. Of course, this could all be fixed simply by removing the redirect capability and the site would work fine. In fact, the error page even says that the site will probably work fine – except we are not allowed to go to the site to find out whether or not that is true. I am very disappointed in Weight Watcher’s position on this. I can’t believe that they either have such a tremendous level of disgust for serious computer users or such a low quality threshold for their web developers and don’t even bother to check up on their work. In either case, I am extremely unimpressed. I did discover that, at least it appears to be so superficially, that if you go to a legal notice page that there is a link available for on the error page – that from there you can work your way back to the actual home page and the site appears to function just fine from there. But Dominica was competely confused and at a loss for how she would use the site and it took me five minutes of playing with it to get it to work. I tried Firefox on both the Windows and Mac platforms and it reacted identically. What a pain. Min came down after a little bit and said that she had figured out how to bypass the error page as well. But most people would not put this kind of effort into getting their web site to work. I did send them a note about Firefox being blocked. Once I got into the site I also noticed that they are running on Microsoft’s ASP.NET which takes care of all of the browser detection issues and would not have had a technical issue with Firefox in the least so the issue has to be on Weight Watcher’s end. Once we got into the site we found out how much it costs. It is terribly expensive. And every little thing costs more and more money.
After my doctor’s appointment this morning I drove up to the hospital and picked up Eric and we went down to Jay’s Diner for some lunch. Since I am supposed to be eating healthier, I just got a fish sandwich and some potato chips. I guess that that is healthy. Healthier than what I normally get, I guess. We hung out for a while and had some coffee. On the way back to the hospital we decided to stop off at a Chevy dealer because Eric wanted to show me how ugly the new cars and trucks were. He and Amanda have been looking into getting her a new vehicle and they want to get a truck so that they don’t have to always borrow one. We ended up test driving a Chevy Colorado Extreme Edition – or something like that. The Colorado replaces the Chevy S10. It was okay, not too bad. But nothing special either. It did have a lot of interior room which really set it apart from other vehicles that we ended up looking at.
After leaving the Chevy dealer we stopped by Borders so that I could look at some books that I was interested in. That only took a few minutes, though. Then we swung by a Ford dealer on the way back and Eric test drove a used F150. Ford really didn’t have any trucks available that would suit his needs. Not even if he ordered one. They don’t make a truck with the specs that he is looking for which surprises me because what he is looking for is really practical. I guess that truck buying has really become the domain of soccer moms and trucks smaller than the F250 are just considered toys. You can see this in the awful designs and colours that they now come in. The trucks have really become just extremely impractical versions of mini-vans. While we were waiting for the salesman at the Ford dealer, I spotted some stray Chicklets lying on a platter. So I had some. I don’t think that I have had Chicklets in twenty years. Really, twenty years is a real possibility. I was a little kid last time that I had them. Boy did they bring back memories. I used to get them all of the time when my mom used to take me down to the little corner grocery store in Pavilion. They were my favorite thing when I was really, really young. It has been so long…
While we were out we swung my Target and I swapped Raise Your Voice hopefully getting a copy that will work this time. While I was there, I noticed that they had Sex and the City: Season VI Part 2 on sale. It is the last set that Min needs to have the entire collection. So I got it for her. She will be very happy.
We ended up being out truck shopping all afternoon and we had to rush home at the end of the day. I got home around 5:30 and woke Min up. She decided to cook salmon for dinner tonight but she didn’t have everything that she needed so we had to run out to the grocery store to pick some stuff up.
Tony and Jeremy got some blogging in this afternoon. Whoo-oo. Someday my blogging peeps and I will take over the world. There will be a new world order and it will be good. Mu ha ha ha.
I introduced Min to the insane world of Andy the Intern today and she was laughing hysterically reading his site. He has got some really serious insite there that shouldn’t be overlooked. Andy is so popular that he, apparently, gets many regular proposals of marriage and at least one offering him lots of popsicles. No, I am not kidding.
Min made teriyaki and apricot glazed salmon for dinner tonight – it was really good. It was late by the time that we ate and after dinner we only had enough time to squeeze in a single episode of Are You Being Served? before she had to run off to go to work.
It has been brought to me attention that a large contingency of loyal SGL readers is forming at York Central, my old high school. In fact, Art, Danielle, Josh, Phil and my old high school. That is freakin’ sweet guys! Yo to all my peeps. I don’t even know what that means but it is pretty cool. But don’t think that just because you guys get vacation starting Wednesday that that excuses you from regular readings of SGL. Not at all. In fact, while on vacation you will be expected to be reading SGL regulary as well as checking into SGL2 and the other way cool sites that are linked from over there. And you can hear the audio when it is fresh! There hasn’t been any audio for the last few days but I will do what I can over vacation to keep things interesting.
I have heard that my audio blogs are not able to be played at YCS because the firewall is filtering out everything from audioblogger.com. So I am posting links to the audio clips directly from here. I am still new to audio blogging so there are only ten posts right now and the first several of them are just me testing the audio posting service. The clip that everyone at YCS will be looking for is Not Another Poop Out of You.
Here is a quick, and temporary, link to all of the audio posts from SGL2 over the weekend. Not much in there but the last four or so are decently interesting. The first five or six are just test posts. Soon I will have an audio post page, maybe, here on SGL so that we can host all of the audio ourselves since it seems to be in high demand. If you are reading SGL from a regular Internet connection and are not blocked by a firewall you should go over to SGL2 and get your audio posts from over there as they have more bandwidth than we do. St. Patrick’s Day Greeting, Having Issues with Audioblogger, Still Working on Getting Audio to Post, Audio Meant for ScottAlanMiller.blogspot.com, Is Anyone Out There Alive at Audioblogger?, One Last Audio Post Today, Welcoming Blogging Eric with a Poem, East Avon Ham Party and Troubles Posting so Signing Off from Bed. Okay, enjoy.
I am really tired tonight so I am signing off early. I will post more tomorrow.