Mishmash Musings

I haven’t done the “Five Things” meme in, like, forever, so I thought this would be a good time to bust out with a quick list! Here are five books that I’m currently reading and/or listening to on my iPod now. I normally don’t like to get involved with this many different stories at once, but I’ve been feeling far too restless to stick with just one title for very long.

1. The Innocent Man by John Grisham
2. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
3. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. There is a Tide… by Agatha Christie
5. Saturday by Ian McEwan

I’m closest to finishing Never Let Me Go (creeeepy!) and The Innocent Man, (boring) but am most intrigued by The Thirteenth Tale. Let’s see which one I finish first!

I read an interesting story yesterday about a salon in the DC area that has been using “garra rufa” carp, commonly called “doctor fish”, in order to give people pedicures. The fish nibble away at dead, flaking skin, and, according to salon owner John Ho, are more effective than using a razor for the procedure.

Ho charges customers $35 for 15 minutes or $50 for 30 minutes to soak their feet in a warm bath littered with the dead flesh-eating carp. Thus far, about 5,000 customers have tried the fish pedicure, and most apparently rave about the results.

At first, I thought the whole idea of a fish pedicure seemed a bit gross, but after reading more about it, I’d definitely be willing to try it if it were ever offered in my area. I have terribly rough feet, and would certainly benefit from a pedicure of any sort at this point! The fish pedicure looks interesting, and if it works, then all the better. If not, I’d still come away with a great conversation piece for my time and money!

(AP Photo)

41-year-old actor Gary Dourdan, who plays Warrick Brown on the long-running CBS television series CSI, was arrested in Palm Beach yesterday for drug possession. Although details are still scarce at this time, several preliminary reports indicate that he was asleep in his car (which was parked on the wrong side of the street) at around 5am, which aroused the suspicion of police officers. When the officers went to investigate, they found an array of drugs in Dourdan’s possession, including cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy, prescription drugs, and assorted paraphernalia.

This arrest comes two weeks after Michael Ausiello of TVGuide.com reported that Dourdan would not be renewing his contract with CSI after it expires in May. Originally, it was thought that Dourdan was leaving to pursue other options, but a few days before this arrest, Ausiello followed up with a report that Dourdan may in fact have been fired for “personal problems”.

I did some more digging because I usually don’t follow this type of celebrity gossip (I just take in the major headline stuff like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Brangelina, etc.) and learned that it has long been suspected that Dourdan would benefit from drug and/or alcohol rehab. In fact, after reading various gossip columns, I’m surprised that the actor wasn’t busted or fired long before this.

Wow, I never would have guessed that Dourdan would be in this situation. Let’s hope this arrest serves as a wakeup call and that he gets the help he needs.

I like Coldplay, so I was pretty excited when I heard that they would be offering a free download of their new single Violet Hill over on their website (www.coldplay.com). But I’ve been trying all day and haven’t been able to get the download to work!

When you get to the site, you click on a link called “Song” and then you have to submit your email address, zip code, and country in order to get download instructions sent to you. I’ve tried that at least 10 times, but have not yet received download instructions! I’ve tried with a Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo account, and I’ve put the @coldplay.com address on my white list for all three accounts, but had no luck. How absolutely frustrating!

Have any of you been able to get the free song? Let me know how you did it!

I’m just about to give up on my computer, as it’s frustrating me to no end. This thing is several years old and was a generic model to begin with, so I suppose I shouldn’t realistically expect too much performance out of it. Still, I thought I had solved its chronic slowness and lagging when I added more ram a couple months ago. Things did get better for a while, but in the past few days, I’ve gone back to the annoyingly slow performance again.

For instance, I was just trying to get some more info on Mr. Irrelevant of 2008 (the last player picked in the NFL Draft), David Vobora of Idaho, but every site I went to took forever to load. I know it’s my computer, not my Internet connection or the sites themselves because I tested the same sites on my laptop, where they loaded very quickly.

So now I’m back to thinking that I have to get a new computer — which is the LAST thing I want to do because of all the issues people are having with Windows Vista. This is not a good way to start the week….

Oh, BTW, this year’s Mr. Irrelevant was picked by the St. Louis Rams, who used the No. 2 overall pick on Chris Long — certainly not an irrelevant or unknown prospect at all!

The AP is calling Sen. Hillary Clinton as the winner in the Pennsylvania primary. She has reportedly received 53 percent of the votes in this important state, while opponent Barack Obama received 47 percent of the votes. According to the article I read, 9 percent of precincts have reported.

Hmm, I didn’t know a race could be called after just 9 percent of the votes were tallied, but whatever.

With this win, Clinton will be able to remain in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, despite trailing Obama in most of the popularity/approval polls that I’ve seen.

The loss, while disappointing after a long six weeks of campaigning, can’t come as too much of a surprise to the Obama camp. His message doesn’t exactly resonate with blue-collar workers, and his recent comments about them being “bitter” and having to “cling to guns and religion”. Of course, he tried to downplay those remarks, as Clinton immediately jumped on them as proof that Obama is out of touch with the people.

Anyway, I’m glad the Pa primary results are in early. Now I can go watch baseball and forget about politics for a while!

Wow, it seems like there’s an endless supply of crazy in this country. The biggest news story of the morning concerns an 18-year-old South Carolina kid named Ryan Schallenberger who was apparently planning to bomb his Chesterfield school in an act that he called a “Columbine followup”.

The plan was thwarted when Schallenberger’s parents phoned police after 10 pounds of ammonium nitrate was delivered to their door (yay for online shopping). A subsequent search yielded a journal in which Schallenberger laid out the details of his plans. He wanted to plant bombs around the school and then leave an audio recording of some rant or other after he killed himself and who knows how many others.

According to the CNN article I read, no guns or other weapons were found in or near the Schallenberger home.

To make this whole South Carolina school bomb plot even more of a head-scratcher, it seems that Ryan Schalleberger wasn’t an outsider or loner like the Columbine killers. He is described as “handsome” and “social”, which certainly doesn’t fit the typical bullied nerd profile of other kids who have taken this path.

I’m glad the parents did the right thing and called the cops here. Now I’m interested in finding out what the kid’s deal is. Why was Ryan Schallenberger plotting to bomb his school? Obviously something wasn’t right with him, but what???

I read an interesting article on the Boston Herald website about the perceived sexist media coverage of Hillary Clinton during her entire campaign thus far.

Basically, columnist Margery Eagan says that there’s unfair treatment of Hillary in the media because news outlets often publish unflattering photos of Clinton “that make her look crazy”, while these same outlets publish good photos of opponent Barack Obama looking “cool and reflective.”

I have to say that I totally agree with Eagan’s assessment. I have Yahoo! set as my homepage, and I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times that a crazy-looking Hillary photo has been among the most e-mailed items of the day. I’ve never, ever seen an unflattering news photo of Obama. Perhaps they exist; I don’t really know or care. The point is that I never have to go hunting for Crazy Hillary pictures.

I don’t even support Hillary, but I still think this kind of coverage is unfair.

As you can see, I have chosen another new wordpress theme for this blog. I don’t know why, but I’m having a lot of trouble finding something I like for this particular site. I run several other blogs, and I don’t change the themes for those nearly as much as I do for this one, so I’m not sure what the problem is.

I liked the color scheme of the last blog, which was like a pale green or something, and I liked the way everything looked — except for images. I couldn’t figure out how to add padding to my images so the text didn’t squish right up against the border of the picture. I read up on the problem and tried adding margins both in the post itself and in the stylesheet, but that didn’t work. I don’t know enough about css stuff to go beyond the tiny bit of tinkering I did, so I finally gave up and found a new theme.

But this one isn’t perfect either and I already know that I’m going to change it again as soon as I have a couple of free hours to browse through some more wordpress themes. I like the color on this theme and most the layout. Plus, I can align images and make them look pretty good here. But there are other minor annoyances that I can’t fix because of my own lack of knowledge.

For example, I don’t like the blockquote style in this theme. It’s so plain and ugly, but I don’t know how to change it. Here’s a post that has a blockquote in it — check it out.

I also would prefer having borders around the three columns — especially the main body — but again, I don’t know how to tweak the theme to accomplish this. So… it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Hopefully I can choose something this weekend!

I think I’ve mentioned a couple times before about how poorly my home is furnished. Neither my husband nor I really care too much about having nice furniture, so we usually just buy what we can afford — which means the cheap stuff.

But I think that trend might finally be starting to change. We bought a new couch last month to replace our old fake leather one that had duct tape holding it together. The new couch is actually pretty nice and easily qualifies as the most expensive piece of furniture we have. The next step for us now is to get a dining room set so we don’t have to eat our meals huddled around the coffee table in the living room.

I was browsing through some online stores today and saw some very nice dining room sets in the Century furniture Casa collection. I would love to get one of those, so hopefully I can talk my husband into shelling out some more money to improve our home!

I went out to lunch with my husband last week, and before we left, I took a quick walk through his office to say hi to some of his co-workers that I’m friends with. My husband has been working at the same company for 11 years, and I don’t think they’ve purchased a new piece of furniture for the offices in that entire time! Things are looking pretty shabby in there, which certainly isn’t the impression they should be giving to prospective clients. I think an upgrade is definitely in order over there.

For example, the desks that they’re using are ancient! The surfaces are scratched and scarred from years of wear and tear, and the desks in the room don’t even match each other. It looks like such a ragtag operation in there! They really need to look into getting some nice modern desks that will spruce the place up a bit.

I don’t know… I just can’t stand it when businesses don’t seem to care what kind of impression they make on customers. That should be one of their main concerns, especially when a good part of their bottom line revolves around sales!

A friend of ours runs a successful business that involves packaging and selling produce to area restaurants. He recently opened a brand new packaging plant after operating out of rented warehouse space for many years, which means that now his main offices and the plant are separated by a couple of miles. The distance is negligible in terms of travel time, but it’s very inconvenient in terms of communication.

So right now our friend is looking into intranet software to solve the bulk of his communication problems. An intranet setup is not just for large organizations anymore, so I think our friend is on the right track. After all, a company intranet would give his employees email, scheduling, and messaging capabilities while improving overall productivity.

I did some quick searching online and learned that Epazz.com is offering a 30-day free trial on their intranet software. This would be a great way for our friend to see how much of a difference a company intranet would make, and he’ll be able to make a more informed purchasing decision. He’ll know exactly what to expect from the software, which means there won’t be any surprises later.

If you find yourself in the same situation and think that intranet software could be the solution to your organization’s communication problems, contact Epazz to get started with a free trial.