Each afternoon I walk to the bus stop at 1st and Wall Street in order to catch the 15 or 18 bus down to King Street Station where I take the Sounder Train to Auburn. Parking is scarce in the Belltown district of Seattle so any sliver of street parking is most sought after. Within a block and a half of where I took these pictures are a couple of coffee houses as well as a dry cleaners where customers rely on convenient parking to patronize these business.

None of this would be interesting except for this one area disguised as a parking spot that’s actually not a parking spot. At least twice a week, while waiting for the bus, I can count on someone pulling their car into this space and running off to the cleaners or to grab coffee only to return to a $22 ticket. I’ve seen a number of drivers return to their car while parking enforcement was in the process of printing the ticket. Each time the driver points out the white markers while the enforcer just shrugs. Ticket quota in about an hour.

Take this first picture. The precise white markers on the street would make most people believe this is an available parking spot. But look closely off to the far right and you’ll see a very small yellow sign, only a couple of feet off the ground.

Here is a close up of the sign. The sign doesn’t say “No Parking” only that your car will be towed. I’ve never once seen a car towed but I’ve seen dozens of cars ticketed for parking here.

I took this picture just seconds after snapping the picture of the sign. The owner of this Range Rover even walked over the parking meter machine and paid $3 thinking this must be a parking space. He then ran off to the dry cleaners only to return to a ticket on the windshield. I believe the parking enforcement crew hang out around the corner just waiting for easy prey. As soon as the driver is out of sight they will appear from around the corner and print out a ticket. What a nice racket for the City of Seattle.

It’s been nearly two months now since I stopped eating sugar. I’ll save the ‘why’ for another post but here are a few things I’ve noticed since going sugar free:

• I sleep better
• Sugar is in a lot more foods than I thought
• My body was addicted to it
• Water actually tastes better than Coke or Mt. Dew
• Going from 3-4 Cokes a day to zero wasn’t fun on Day 2
• My sweet cravings are gone
• Most teriyaki sauce is loaded with sugar (crap!)
• I’m more active which leads to more exercise
• I still miss Peanut M&Ms!
• I’ve dropped nearly 35 lbs since giving up sugar
• And the best thing about giving up sugar: I have more energy to keep up and spend time with my wife and three kids.

Normally when a team starts the season with two win the fans don’t complain much. But not in Seattle, a year after the Seahawks went to the Superbowl. Listening to the hosts and callers on KRJ this morning I wondered if these people had mistaken a 2-0 start for an 0-2 start. Expectations have been raised and it’s no longer ok to play well enough to win. The fans want a well oiled machine right from the start.

I still believe that a win is a win is win. The Detriot Pistons have won a few NBA titles by playing ugly ball. Even the Steelers last didn’t play the most entertaining brand of football on their way to a Championship last year. I don’t mind that the ‘Hawks two wins weren’t very pretty. Just keep winning! Maybe it says something about the team that they can win ugly games even when they are not clicking on all cylinders.

This is a sign at King Street Station where I arrive and depart from the Sounder Train each morning. I took this picture with my camera phone as I looked out from top deck of the train. You’d think that a train station would have very clear and concise signs in order to get travelers to the right area of departure. If I were in a hurry to catch my train and ran out to this track I’d be confused. The number designates the track and the letter designates the position of the train.

I’ve never taken an Amtrak train before but I assume by telling a person the track and the position it would be easier to locate the coach or first class sections of the train. But it could very well confuse those that are in a race to catch their train and were unfamilar with the station.

A couple of weeks ago I visited EB Games located in the Auburn SuperMall. I had my two year daughter and three year old son with me. We entered the store around 8:30 pm knowing the store closed in a half hour. I quickly located two games I’d been looking for and was about to bring them to the counter to purchase, when one of the employees approached me and said, “We have some big important people coming from corporate tomorrow and would like to try to keep the games organized”. I noticed that my daughter had picked up a game from the shelf. The employee stared at my daughter and then back at me. I got the message.

I no longer had any desire to purchase the two games I had in hand so I just put the on the shelf, grabbed my kids and left the store. I guess EB Games employees are more concerned with having an organized shelf full of games than actually selling them to customers. I wonder what the “big important people from corporate” would say had they been able to see how this employee acted. There were two other employees in the store at the time that stood close to this idiot and neither said a word.

So I went to Fred Meyer, found the same two games and bought them, saving $15 in the process. Next time I’m a the mall I think I’ll go mess up a few shelves full of games.

There are many different ways companies deal with problems. I’ve experienced two ways this past week. Taking the train into Seattle each morning and afternoon is a very reliable mode of transportation. Few problems arise. But when they do, Sound Transit keeps everyone informed of what is going on and the estimated time the problem will be resolved. If the train is running 20 minutes behind like it was this morning (or even just 5 minutes), large electrical signs let everyone who is waiting in line know that. And when the train does show up and everyone is on board I can count on the conductor apologizing for the delay and providing a brief description of why the delay occurred. They keep their customers in the loop.

Contrast that behavior with that of Qwest DSL service. Over the past week my DSL service has gone down on three separate occasions. Each time I’ve dialed into Qwest customer service to find out if only my connection is down or if it’s a wider spread outage. Each time I made the call I was taken down an automated phone adventure to hell. They make it sound like you’ll be able to speak with a CSR but, in reality; all I received was a recording that mentioned they were aware of the outage and were working to correct it. I wonder how it would be if Qwest were more proactive in their approach to letting customers know they are aware of a problem. They obviously took the time to update their phone system when the outage occurred. What if they made a quick, even computer driven phone call to each person affected by the outage? That way customers wouldn’t worry they are the only ones with a problem and would relax knowing Qwest was working to fix the problem.

I purchased a fridge a couple months back from the Home Depot. At the time they were giving out a $75/gift card to offset the delivery fee. I figured that wasn’t a bad deal. A few weeks after the purchase the gift card arrived. This afternoon I decided to head down to the Home Depot to purchase $34 worth of stuff. I went to the self-checkout, passed all items over that goofy scanner and all was going smoothly at this point. When it came time to pay I select “Pay by Gift Card” on the screen and swiped my never been used before gift card. Crap. It didn’t work and, in big letter, the screen told me I need to talk with the service person manning the self-help area. After waiting about five minutes the service lady took my card, scanned it into her special computer and told me there was nothing left on the gift card. Hmmm….. I told her I’d never used the card and had recently received it in the mail. She was stumped. She called her supervisor who arrived about five minutes later. I explained myself again to the supervisor who took my card and disappeared for at least fifteen minutes. Had I known she was going to be gone that long I would have paid with another card in my wallet that’s “valid”.

When the supervisor returned she said that my card had been activated on June 7th and deactivated on the 14th. This makes absolutely not sense because I wouldn’t have received the card until well into July. She said it appears Home Depot sent me an invalid card. Ya think??

So now I’ve waited about 20+ minutes and am told there’s nothing the supervisor can do about it today since it’s a holiday and she has to call someone at the home office to solve the problem. So I scan my Amex to pay for my purchases and leave the store 30 minutes later.

Home Depot made a mistake by sending me an invalid gift card. Problems happen and I’m not bitter about that. But I am mad that I was made to wait 30 minutes and still be told there’s nothing they can do about it until tomorrow.

To make matters worse the supervisor asked me as I was leaving, “After I get this figured out should I call your or do you want to call me?” Hey, I’ve already wasted part of my holiday so why wouldn’t I want to call you tomorrow, be put on hold and wait for you to again?

Sept 5 Update: Home Depot called this morning and a friendly woman said they had a glitch in their system which cancelled a batch of gift cards. That’s why mine refused to work yesterday. For my troubles they were adding an extra $10 to the card. Although I wish this could have been taken care of at the store I applaud Home Depot for calling me to say they made a mistake. The only strange part of the call was hearing that they couldn’t just issue me a new card and call it a day. They had to wait 30 days because of policy before issuing a new card, so I’m supposed to call back, ask for the “computer room” and explain my story yet again if I don’t receive my card in 30 days. I wonder if they’d send me a $10 gas card instead? 🙂

I purchased the domain, nordquist.org, back in 1999. At the time I asked around for suggestions for a good hosting company. One of my friends suggested a company with a weird name: NoMonthlyFees. As the name says, this hosting company charged a one time $250 fee but, from then on, you didn’t pay a monthly hosting fee. It seemed like a good deal at the time, and continued to be so because their service was stellar. If I had a problem I’d fill out a form and within minutes I’d receive a response saying when the problem would be fixed. But over the past few years I’ve seen a lot more problems with their SMTP/POP servers and my website experienced a lot more downtime.

After another week of SMTP problems I decided to look around. A friend suggested a hosting company called BlueHost so I checked out their website. It was nearly 1 am in Seattle and I was surprised to see a “Chat Live” link on their front page. I figured there was no way someone would be up this late to field questions. But I clicked anyway, and in less than 30 seconds, I was connected to a friendly rep who answered all my questions. At this point, I probably would have made the switch had he left it at that. But he did something fantastic. I’d told him earlier that I needed to transfer my domain, so while we were chatting, he checked out my website and noticed that I was hosting my own WordPress blog. He said, “Did you know we have one-click WordPress setup?” This may not seem like a big deal to many as moving a very simple website and setting up email on another host is usually quite trivial. But moving my blog and its databases, templates, themes and plug-ins could take a while to get right.

So what I thought would take days to get completed took less than a couple of hours. Most of that time was spent FTP’ing my entire site and MySQL backups to my local machine, sorting through it all, and then uploading to Bluehost. I would have never guessed the entire process would go as smoothly as it did.

My email is back to normal and my blog is running must quicker than before. I’m very impressed with Bluehost so far.

I’ve written about the fantastic sounding Grado SR80 cans before. I’ve had them for over two years now, but they never cease to amaze me. I normally plug a set of Sennheiser PX100 into my iPod video during the two hour/day commute into Seattle. The train is quiet enough that I bypassed the noise-cancelling models and the PX100’s sound quite good. They sound substantially better than the stock buds that come with the iPod. The stock buds are just downright terrible. I tossed mine in the trash.

But tonight I decided to hook up my iPod with the Grados and listen to some Clash. Dang! As much as I like the PX100’s the Grados are in an entirely different league. The harmonica in “Train in Vain” is so clear, and the music sounds so immediate and clear that I couldn’t take them off till I’d gone through my entire playlist.

I tell all my friends they need to test drive a set of Grados. It doesn’t make sense to me to spend $300-$400 on a sweet iPod and then settle for stock earbuds.

David Brent is in mid-season form in these two Microsoft UK videos. Brings back great memories of the series….like Free Love. Or Keith’s review.

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Link to full versions on Google Video.