Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts

18 March 2007

Sticking it to The Mann Theaters.

Or maybe The Mann Theaters stuck it to me. You be the judge.

Drew and I decided to go see a matinée today and he picked Terabithia over Mimzy. There was a 4:30 show over at the Mann 4 in Glendale.

We go over and buy the tickets. It was $17.50 for one adult and one child. Yikes !

So far so good, but then Drew is thirsty and the snack bar has nothing but soda. I am told if I want juice, there are plenty of places outside that sell it.

Fine. We go back out and locate a place that has some apple juice and head back into the theater. That is when the trouble starts.

The boy/girl team taking tickets (apparently this is a two person task), inform me that "you can't come in here with that soda". I point out it is juice, which the snack bar people told me to go buy outside the theater.

Too bad. Policy is policy they say. Actually it was more like a grunt. I ask them why them have to be such jerks and tell Drew to finish his juice up.

The guy informs me that he is doing us a big favor by even allowing Drew to drink his unauthorized juice in the lobby, that he should really ask me to leave, and that if I call anyone a jerk again he will.

At this point my urge is to kick him in the nuts. Instead I throw my tickets on the ground and we leave.

Drew helpfully points out the absurdity of the situation and demands we go ask for a refund. I told him I would rather be out $17.50 than lose my temper and kick some poor Mann minion in the nuts. This causes a bit of juice to come out his nose for laughing.

I don't go out to the movies much these days and sometimes I forget why. You would think theater chains would be striving to retain their declining business. I guess not.

If anyone knows someone at Mann Theater I can mail a complaint letter to, that would be great. All I can find is a generic email address (Talk2Mann@manntheatres.com).

01 March 2007

PC Hell


The world of the PC is crashing down around my head.


  1. When I came back from a trip and turned off my Outlook out-of-office, I stopped getting meeting reminders.

  2. The IT guy couldn't fix so, so he put my XP virtual machine (I am running XP under Parallel's on an iMac) on the domain. Outlook worked fine. For a few hours.

  3. After lunch the new Outlook would not let me reply or forward messages. Instead it would crash. Whoopee. Plus my Outlook and Blackberry calendars were no longer syncing.

  4. Did I also mention that we are in some kind of calendar hell with all the daylight savings patches going on for servers, desktops, Blackberries, Exchange, BES, etc. ? They seriously told us to print out our calendars for the next month. Joy.

  5. I had some kind of power surge at home that blew out all the lights in the kitchen and killed the power supply in my PC. Joy again.
Instead of mucking with my old junky PC, I decided to look to see what a new PC would cost. Dell and the like cost way too much and give very limited control of your configuration. So I ordered this from Polywell for just over $2100 + tax -


  • Motherboard:Poly i680SLi ATX MB,3PCIe,2gLAN,7.1A,6SATA-R5

  • Processor:Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6400 2.13GHz 2M 1066FSB 65W

  • Memory: 2x DDR2 667MHz 1G PC5300 Memory Unbuffered

  • Case:TS514 10-Bay Black Tower with 250mm Side Fan (the image above is the case)

  • PowerSupply:700W Quiet PFC SLI P/S, 85% High Efficiency

  • HardDrive1:Seagate 750GB SATA-II 7200RPM HD 16M Cache

  • Floppy:Black Floppy+Media Reader 7-in-1 Internal Drive

  • Disk Controller:On-board SATA RAID-0,1,0+1,5 Controller

  • I/O Device:On-board 1394 Firewire Ports

  • Keyboard:Logitech Cordless Internet Pro USB KB+Mouse BLK

  • Audio Sound:On-board 7.1 3D Audio Sound

  • DVD-RW:Lite-On 20X LightScribe DVD+/-RW IDE Drive Black

  • Graphics:Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 640M PCI-E Graphics Card

  • Networking:On-Board Gigabit/100/1000T Ethernet

  • O/S:Windows XP Professional CD+License

  • Optional Support:3yr Parts Replacement in Advanced


Not bad a bad price at all. Any comments on the configuration ?

    14 December 2006

    Newspaper stock quotes == irrelevant

    I was reading the newspaper the other day and there was another self-interest article on cut backs at the LATimes. I mostly glossed over it since I have become resigned to the LATimes sucking even more than it does now. Mike over at Cruftbox has a good rant on the recent cosmetic changes.

    But when I got to the Business section, the article got me thinking.

    "Why don't they save a few bucks and stop printing stock quotes ?"

    I mean seriously, who the heck reads the newspaper for stock prices these days ? This has got to be some of the most useless information printed these days. Worse than the PennySaver or junk mail.

    If physical newspapers want to exist, they need to concentrate on some fundamental aspects that set them apart for the online world. In depth analysis, investigative reporting, great local news, crossword puzzles, comics, coupons and ads. But time sensitive news and data is not for them anymore. Give it up guys.