A decade
3650 days (plus leap year days)
1/10 of a century
1/3 of my life

Has it been 10 years already? Wow. It’s almost hard to believe that 10 years ago today, my wife and I became “my wife and I.” Those 10 years have included a lot, too. Several moves, a few jobs, 2 kids, 4 cats (and the untimely death of 2 of them), car accidents, 5 cars, a few medical nightmares. And a house. Yes, let’s not forget about the 30 years of debt (now just 26 years…).

A lot has happened these 10 years, but one thing hasn’t: my wife hasn’t killed me. So yay. Happy Anniversary to us.

We didn’t do a whole lot to celebrate. We got a friend to watch the kids, and we went out to one of my favorite restaurants (Henry’s in downtown Acworth…it’s awesome Cajun food). Maria had never been there before, so she enjoyed having something new. Then we went to Wal-Mart and bought some flower pots.

And people say romance is dead.

You may remember me blogging about my first flat tire back in December. I mentioned very briefly that I had a bad incident with Kauffman Tire in Hiram, Georgia; and I promised to blog about that later. This is later.

I’m going to post the brief recap of what happened so this doesn’t get too long. I wasted 3 1/2 hours of my life in that store. The Kauffman Tire employees showed a complete disregard for my time, they tried to “bait & switch” me with a huge up-sell after they didn’t have the tires I had asked for, and then they lied to me.

Yes, they lied. Twice.

The first lie was that I needed new brakes. I had bought the car a month earlier and had new brakes put on it then. These brakes had less than a month’s wear on them. I questioned the salesman’s recommendation, and he backed off.

Then they told me that unless I paid nearly $300 for work on the front driver’s side axle my alignment would be off, and there’s nothing they could do to prevent that. I told them no (because after 3 1/2 hours I was fighting hard to hold my fury inside), and paid for the tires and left. (By the way, the alignment is perfect on the car.)

About a month later, I got a call from Kauffman Tire. They wanted me to let them do those recommended repairs. I thanked the guy for calling, and explained that I wasn’t interested in doing business with them. He seemed concerned about the issue and passed it on to the store manager. I spoke with the store manager twice before he stopped returning my calls.

There are enough people selling tires around here that I don’t need to put up with that kind of treatment. If you live near me, I suggest you bypass the Kauffman experience as well.

So fast-forward to today. My overly-worn Mountaineer tires finally gave up. One of them sprung a leak. Shane told me that Discount Tire had been good to him, and so I gave them a try. The guy at Discount Tire was really helpful. Not only did he explain a great deal about the quality of the tires I was considering (read: “knowledgeable sales staff”), but he went out of his way to make the price more affordable.

I’m not sure how long I’ll hang on to the Mountaineer (probably about a year), so I didn’t want to spend a fortune on tires. I was looking at the cheaper tires, and the sales guy gave me what he called a “new customer credit” to make the better tires cheaper than the low end tires.

They didn’t try to up-sell me on anything. They didn’t hassle me at all. I dropped it off, let them do the work, and then I came back to pick it up later. And the best part of all - they didn’t lie to me.

So if you need tires, you might check out Discount Tires. I went to the one on Highway 41 in Acworth, Georgia. I bet they’ll take good care of you as well.

But no matter what you do, don’t let those liars at Kauffman Tire (specifically the Hiram store) get your money.

I’m watching the South Carolina debate on TV tonight, and Mike Huckabee just made a comment that congress was “spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.”

That line (best of the night so far) reminded me of this video clip of Edwards making himself feel pretty.

I had an issue tonight with a Wordpress site I’ve been working on.  It’s a new domain, and it currently only exists within my basement.  The problem was that every page view within Wordpress was taking about 20 seconds to load.  Not cool.

I did ping tests and looked for errors in packets, but it all looked normal.  I tested network connectivity with other software, and the system behaved as expected.  I thought my problem might be Apache, but some of my own code worked just fine.  (This didn’t make sense because there’s no way my code is worthy of comparison to Wordpress’ code.)

Finally (more hours than I care to count later), I added an entry for the new domain in the hosts file.  That fixed it.  Apparently, Wordpress uses that hostname for something, and if it’s not resolvable by the server, you’ll see some pretty substantial delays.

This was with Wordpress 2.1.3.  I found this documented somewhere in the Wordpress support forums, but I can’t find the link right now.

When I was a kid, I followed the career of Dale Murphy religiously. I collected his baseball cards, posters, autographs, etc. Anything that had to do with Murphy had me in the middle of it.

Murphy’s been out of baseball for some time now, but he’s in the news a little more recently. My dad forwarded me this article about Murphy and iwontcheat.com. Dale is looking to make a change in professional sports by impacting children of today.

Says Murphy (as quoted by that article):

“I believe in zero tolerance when it comes to using performance-enhancing drugs. The rule on using steroids should be the same as gambling — if you are caught you are out of the game. Period.”

Amen, Murph.

Murphy also says that players who use steroids should not be eligible for the Hall of Fame. I’d second that motion.

There’s just one question I have: can somebody tell me why we have arguments about whether or not Barry Bonds should be eligible for the Hall of Fame and a man like Dale Murphy (with HOF-caliber career stats) sits humbly outside of Cooperstown?

1-800-984-3672

This site has been in desperate need of a fresh look.  That dark red theme (though I still like it) needs a break.  I decided a while back that I’d just design my own Wordpress theme.  Well, that went like you’d expect…I never got around to it and then ended up finding something that was better than I could have done anyway.

Today I tripped across styleshout.com and really liked the Envision design.  It wasn’t a Wordpress theme though, so I couldn’t (easily) put it to use.  After about 3 minutes of searching (thanks, Google), I found this site that had the Envision design in a Wordpress theme.

I’ve got a few tweaks to do, but I wanted to give credit where it’s due.  Thanks to those guys (and, really, to the Wordpress folks as well) for such awesome free stuff.