Moo! The Musings of a Plaid Cow

If you really want to “Stare into the subliminal (for as long as you can)” try listening to the song backwards!

So if you are in a position where you are trying to decide whether to buy Trail of Memories: The Randy Travis Anthology or The Very Best of Randy Travis , this post may help. The latter is a single CD which duplicates works found on the two disc Anthology and adds only one new song–Three Wooden Crosses.

Here is the track list from the anthology with tracks that also appear on the very best marked with an [*].

Disc 1

1. Diggin’ Up Bones [*]
2. On The Other Hand [*]
3. Reasons I Cheat
4. 1982
5. Send My Body
6. No Place Like Home
7. Anything
8. Forever And Ever, Amen [*]
9. I Won’t Need You Anymore (Always And Forever) [*]
10. Too Gone Too Long [*]
11. I Told You So (Single Remix) [*]
12. What’ll You Do About Me
13. Honky Tonk Moon [*]
14. Deeper Than The Holler [*]
15. Is It Still Over? [*]
16. It’s Just A Matter Of Time (Country Single Mix) [*]
17. Hard Rock Bottom Of Your Heart (Single Remix) [*]
18. He Walked On Water [*]
19. Card Carryin’ Fool
20. A Few Ole Country Boys (w/ George Jones)
21. Waiting On The Light To Change (w/ B.B. King)
22. We’re Strangers Again (w/ Tammy Wynette)
23. All Night Long (w/ Merle Haggard)

Disc: 2

1. Heroes And Friends (Long Single Edit) [*]
2. Allergic To The Blues
3. Point Of Light
4. Forever Together [*]
5. I’m Gonna Have A Little Talk [*]
6. Better Class Of Losers [*]
7. Look Heart, No Hands [*]
8. If I Didn’t Have You [*]
9. Memories Of Old Santa Fe
10. Cowboy Boogie
11. Before You Kill Us All
12. Whisper My Name [*]
13. Gonna Walk That Line
14. This Is Me

This is an approximation of the conversation between Peter (who sits across the 8 ft wall from me) and a coworker. Peter is taking the afternoon off to mow the grass since it supposed to rain tomorrow:

C: You’re taking the afternoon off to mow your yard??
P: But what else could I do?
C: You could hire it out
P: That’s what my wife said, but I don’t want to lose my exercise
C: Don’t you have a riding lawnmower?
P: Yeah, but…

If your looking for a job from ClearedJobs.Net, make sure to your password in a safe place. If you do forget your password, be sure to check their FAQ:

Q. I forgot my user ID and password. It indicates that it does not exist. Could you please provide my user ID along with the password?

A. We do not have a record of your account information in our database. Go ahead and re-register. Double-check the web site address. It is www.ClearedJobs.Net.

Real good customer service.

Julie is one of my coworkers. As Foghorn Leghorn would say, “Nice girl, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice.” (Actual Julie is very intelligent and a lot of fun to hang around. Most of the time.)

So she poured a cup of coffee this afternoon (the coffee pool is own by the office next door, but the pot actually sits in my office) and then went to heat it up since the pot had been off for a little while. After returning from the microwave she was lamenting the fact that the handle on her aluminum travel mug was hot and coming detached from the body.

Apparently she needed the coffee before going on the mission to heat it up.

I got a survey in the mail from RTN Federal Credit Union, where I used to have an account. So I found their website to let them know how they could get better results on their survey of former customers:

If Audit Services wold like to get a better response to the survey that they are sending out for former customers, enclosing a SASE would go a long way to getting better results.

I’m not going to spend for a stamp to tell them why I left.

I’m wondering how many people will actually respond.

After all of the problems that we have had getting Comcast service setup in the first place (as alluded to in my previous post, we weren’t surprised when we returned home after a long holiday weekend to find out that our cable had been out since 6:05 Friday evening. So I called the local number and went through the automated system which told me there was an outage in my area. I then held for an operator to find out when service would be restored (since it had been out over three days).

On talking to this operator I found out that the automated system is broken–there wasn’t actually an outage showing in my area. This did not bode well. She saud that she would send an email to the team that did service calls and they would see what they could work in. After a few more instructions, she wished me good night. And I thought, “Yeah, Right”, I’ve been here before. But this time it was different.

• A representative called the correct phone number the next morning to let my wife know that they would be coming out sometime that day. (Both of the numbers are on the account, but explicit instructions every other time have left me with a voice mail at the end of the day, and her with nary a call.)
• They called her before they came out. And she said to find her in the backyard.
• They actually came out that day. And found her in the backyard.
• And, they fixed the problem. All before I came home from work.
• And, the biggest shock of all: it wasn’t their fault.

It seems that our new neighbors decided that they wanted cable, but didn’t want to pay for it. So they went out to the pole, spliced into our cable and ran lines into their windows. Three of them. (Our cable had been fuzzy the previous week, apparently from a low signal.) The reason that our cable we out was that they had done a piss poor job trying to reconnect an F-type jack on the cable and the line running to our house had just fallen apart. A smarter/better criminal likely would not have been caught.

So he cut the splitter out of the line. (This brought out the “house sitter” next door who claimed that the house didn’t even have cable, but that they might be interested and wanted to know who they should call to get service installed.) And then repaired the line (even putting a sheathing around the bottom to make further tampering more difficult). So went then end of his visit. But he may be back. As I was standing outside tonight, I could see the neighbors outside looking at the pole and commenting “do you think we can work around this”?

This whole experience has taught me a couple of things (which may be of some use to somebody, somewhere, for some reason):

• Comcast will not pursue charges the first time that you are caught stealing cable. But they will put a note on the address that it has happened, which may make it more difficult to get service in the future.
• Comcast uses bright orange coax for all of the work that they do. So if you look out at your pole and see some black wires snaking out of it, something may be amiss. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Someday I may actually recount the reason I have made in excess of 40 calls to customer service, but again, that is for another day.

Since both me and my wife use Quicken, I’ve put the data file out on a network drive so that we both can access it. I’ve had decent luck (though it is dog slow) accessing the file using CIFS (SMB), but cannot access it on the same server using AFP (Apple Filing Protocol, or AppleShare). I contacted Intuit about this issue.

The first response I got back suggested that I copy the file to the Desktop before trying to open it, which just misses the point of having it on the shared drive to begin with. So I tried again, and got this response:

When a file is transferred over a network, it is broken into small packets at the transmitting end and reassembled at the receiving end. This usually causes damage to the Quicken data file as well.

To protect the integrity of your data, we do not recommend or support this procedure.

Apparently transferring a file over a network can cause irreparable damage. Who knew?