Dealing with the airline cellphone industry

So a week or so ago Verizon Wireless sent me a postcard to tell me that if I renewed my contract with them, they'd give me a month's free service. I was already aware that my VZW contract was up, and with all the iPhone hype, I'd already been feeling a little nerdish technoenvy and looking at new phones for a possible upgrade. I wasn't contemplating shelling out $600 for an iPhone and certainly not contemplating switching to AT&T, but my old LG VX-8100, which seemed so fancy in 2005, was feeling thick and old (plus I'd lost the back cover), so when I read the magic phrase "This will not affect your eligibility to upgrade phones" on the renewal postcard, I thought, sweet! let's go get a new phone.

Verizon takes a customer they already had in the bag (me, someone who was going to upgrade phones anyway) and makes him even happier (by giving me a month free). Good deal, right?

So I take myself out to Verizon's Beavercreek store. When I get there, I'm greeted by a friendly associate who asks me to register on one of their fancy kiosks. This system is supposedly an improvement on their old system, where there were separate lines for sales, customer service and technical support. With the new system, tech support associates, off on one end of the store, can help sales customers if there aren't any people waiting for tech support. Nonetheless, with it being the day after a holiday, there were tons of people in the store, and I had to wait, almost 30 minutes.

Still, not the end of the world, as it gives me a chance to take a look at the various phones that are available. I was already pretty sure which phone I wanted, but I did take another look at various Windows Mobile phones (my friend Jim has a Palm Treo) to confirm that they're much bigger (too wide) than I want to carry around. The LG VX-8500's are cute, especially in white or cherry chocolate, but I really prefer a flip phone to a slider, and I had my eye on a newer phone that has a 2-megapixel camera with autofocus, namely the MOTORAZR maxx Ve.

Now I'm either a tech sales person's dream customer or nightmare. Perhaps I'm a nightmare because I know what I want and thus he has little chance of selling me a bunch of extras. But I like to think I'm a dream because I know what I want and thus am an easy sale. Last year when I came to this same store to buy a Kyocera KPC650 broadband wireless card, I was in and out of the store in less than 20 minutes. So this time when my name is finally called, I figured, cool, this won't take long now.

I walk up to the counter, and an associate named Jon greets me and asks how he can help me. I tell him I want to renew my contract and upgrade to a new phone, and I hand him the promotional postcard VZW sent me. He looks at it for a minute and then tells me, sorry, I can't do both in the same billing cycle. If I upgrade my phone now and renew my contract now, I won't get the free month. I can renew my contract and come back next month to upgrade phones.

Not good! Why on earth should I have to drive out to Beavercreek and wait in line two times? I pointed out to Jon the phrasing on the card that said that renewing my contract would not affect my ability to upgrade phones and asked him where it said I couldn't do both at the same time. He admitted that it didn't say that but said that's how it was. I said if the card had said that I would have simply called to renew my contract and then come in the next month to upgrade, but it didn't say that and I was already there. Poor Jon acted utterly helpless as if there was not a thing he could do to help me, so I asked to see his manager.

Of course this entailed waiting for another 10-15 minutes, which gave me plenty of time to notice a big poster on the wall behind Jon's counter. That poster lists all the reasons why Verizon Wireless is better than its competition, and one of the reasons is that "If you ever have a problem, it becomes our problem the first time you call." Jon apparently has never seen that poster. I had a problem, and Jon didn't make it his problem. If he'd has his way, it would still have been my problem. Fuck you very much, Jon, but it is in fact your problem, and if you don't want it to be your problem, get a job in another field.

Jon finally did come back and was pleased to report that his supervisor thought that I could in fact renew my contract, getting the month's free service, and at the same time upgrade to a new phone. Jon explained that if, for some reason, I did not receive the credit, I could call his supervisor next month, and he'd fix it. Jon worked on his computer for a while, trying to achieve the impossible, and after another 5 minutes or so had to excuse himself to confer with his superior again. After yet another 10-15 minutes, Jon came back and was able to work the miracle. He gave me my new phone, thanked me for my business and was ready to send me on my merry way. Not so fast, Jon! What's your supervisor's name and number? Oh, yeah, he said as he wrote the info down to hand to me.

Perhaps poor Jon realized I'd be writing a letter to corporate about my experience (which I did) or even posting about this on my blog. I don't doubt that Jon's a decent person and normally does a good job, and this really isn't about him so much as it is about Verizon overall. Don't tell me I'm the only person who got that postcard who wanted both to upgrade phones and to get a free month for renewing. They knew there'd be people like that because they took the time to assure us that renewing wouldn't impact our ability to upgrade. What they didn't do was to fix their systems or train their associates to handle that. In other words they took an opportunity to make their customers happier and more loyal and turned into one to make their customers unhappy and less loyal, leaving them worse off than if they'd done nothing. Great job, Verizon!

One last whine before I close. Verizon and its colleagues in the cellphone industry remind me of another industry, the airlines. The cellphone companies and the airlines give a lot of lip service to wanting to make customers happy, but really they want to make life difficult for us. Here, have some frequent flier miles you can't ever use. Here, have a sweet new phone that does Mobile Web 2.0, but its features are crippled and you've got to pay an extra fee for web and for every application you want to use. Both cellphone companies and airlines know they've got captive audiences. If you want to use a cellphone, you've got your choice of corporate behemoths that don't care about your needs, and if you want to travel by air, you've got your choice of corporate behemoths that don't care about your needs. Yay, capitalism!


Update—7/9/2007: I did get a follow-up call from Jon's manager who apologized for the screw-up and said that they'd do better. He explained that normally the stores get a bit of notice about these promotions so they can prepare on how to deal with them but that this time Marketing sent out the promotion without any warning. Well I can understand that this wasn't Jon's manager's fault, but it certainly wasn't my fault either. I hope Jon's manager has some luck in dealing with his corporation's bureaucracy.

Having just read Allen Drury's book, Advise and Consent, featuring a senator who kills himself after being blackmailed over his homosexual past, I checked out Otto Preminger's 1962 film version, and, for the most part, I like the movie better than the book. Although the film clocks in at 2 hours 20 minutes, it's faster paced than the book, and the film gives a glimpse into pre-Stonewall gay life that the book does not.

In the book Senator Brigham Anderson's WWII lover is given no name and makes only two brief appearances, once calling the Senator to apologize for having sold the blackmailers material and a second time atoning for his sins by jumping off a bridge unnoticed. We get no details about what Anderson's lover has given his blackmailers, and though we hear a lot about the photograph that first set off Anderson's enemies gaydar, we get only a vague description that it's "innocent-appearing" but bears a suspect inscription.

The movie, while it cuts out all of the subplot of how Senator Anderson's keepsake photo got into the wrong hands (and cuts out entirely the Supreme Court Justice who in the book found the pic), lets us see the photo for ourselves, and, showing two soldiers wearing leis but fully dressed in uniform, posed together but not even touching, it does seem rather innocent, were it not for the "Forever, Brig" written across the bottom. (The photo in the book, being one Brig had kept, surely would have had "Forever, Ray" instead.)

Another change the movie makes from the book is that we actually get to see some of the material the Senator's lover has sold off, specifically a letter the Senator has written his ex-lover asking him to stop contacting him. Brig's not really gay, you see, and the butt-fucking wouldn't have happened were it not "for the war and the exhaustion and the loneliness." I guess there weren't any women at all in Hawaii who wanted to sleep with lonely soldiers. Brig has "a good, normal life" now and "want[s] to forget there was ever anything else," though he knows "it won't be easy." Our Mormon Senator from Utah was bound and determined to be an ex-gay, and it seems he did a pretty good job of it.

The most interesting difference between the book and the movie is that in the movie Anderson decides to confront in person the only man who could have the goods on him. Hopping on a flight (the ease with which people jumped on and off planes back then is amazing) to NYC, Brig tracks Ray down, going first to what he discovers is a campy kind of cat-filled male brothel where he actually pays the proprieter, he thinks for information but for use of Ray and the room thinks the proprieter ("You can come back here with Ray — I mean you've paid").

Poor Brig, obviously not thinking clearly, heads on to Club 602, the outside of which is rather bleak but inside which is filled to the brim with all kinds of queers (this 1962 NYC gay bar is even racially integrated). The setup of the club isn't conducive to closeted married politicians wanting to sneak in for a hookup. No, instead patrons must first get past a trio of judgmental fairies and then find themselves under a spot light atop a flight of stairs in full view of everyone already in the club. Although the friendly bartender welcomes him, Brig loses his nerve, turns tail and runs.

But not before his ex-lover Ray (looking doable but aging quicky for a hustler) notices him. Seeing the look on Ray's face, you might think Ray still loves Brig and hopes to be reunited with him. Ray goes after Brig, which doesn't please Ray's current boyfriend (trick, whatever) — Ray, you're with me — but Ray wants to explain to Brig, and that explanation (I needed money and you wouldn't give me any) doesn't go over well. Brig escapes in a cab, pushing Ray to the curb and leaving him like the gutter tramp he is. There was one part of the book I admired which didn't really make it into the movie version. In the book the Senator's colleagues are aware that he's being blackmailed and also pretty much aware of exactly how before he's driven to suicide, and they offer him some support. Brig kills himself during the day, while some of his colleagues are also working, and one feels particularly guilty afterwards for having let Brig talk him out of coming down to talk, feeling, perhaps rightly so, that he could have done something. In the movie, the Senator's colleagues don't know what's up until, after his suicide, they go to talk to his wife, who, in the film, has been given copies of the goods on her husband.

And another aspect of the film I really didn't care for was the casting of Henry Fonda as Secretary of State nominee Robert Leffingwell or the addition (not in the book at all) of his wide-eyed Opie-esque son. Casting Fonda made Leffingwell much more sympathetic than Drury meant him to be, as did having Fonda explain things to OpieJohnny. The film also changes slightly the fate of Leffingwell's confirmation, although I'll grant in a fun way that makes the Vice President look good and that ends the film neatly and quickly.

All in all, a film worth watching, much easier to digest than the book.

Today's award for poor website design goes to none other than the Dayton City Paper, which underwent a major redesign (for the worse, in my opinion) in the past year. I've never been a frequent visitor to the site, although I do manage to pick up a hardcopy of the paper every week. Their previous online incarnation was at least usable, pretty much text only, but with a newspaper, the text of the articles is probably the most important part, right? Wrong, at least according to the Dayton City Paper, which has decided not to publish any text at all on its online site, only pictures.

So long as you don't use screen reader software (just one of many reasons websites should be mainly in text), you can read every page of the Dayton City Paper, provided that you don't find the font size too small. If you do find the text too small to read, tough shit, because it's not really text at all but a JPG of the page, and thus increasing the font size in your browser does zilch. You could try something like the Image Zoom extension for Firefox, but a bit-mapped image of text zoomed to 200% is only marginally easier to read.

Perhaps the most important reason websites are text-based is that text is easy to search. Not on the Dayton City Paper's website though. They realize visitors to their website will want to search, and they mock us by putting a picture of a search field at the top of their site. Yes, literally a picture of a search field, not even a real field that does nothing. How insane is that?

That the folks at Dayton City Paper even bother to save their calendar pages as images and upload them to their website is beyond my comprehension. Do they think that having those calendar pages online in that form is useful to anyone? Can you read the example calendar item to the left?

Now posting their pages as images does make life easier on the Dayton City Paper staff and might also make their advertisers happy (every ad is shown online exactly as it appears in the print edition), and they needn't worry about people plagiarizing one of their articles by cutting and pasting. I guess if the City Paper staff is happy, who cares whether the site's useful to readers?

One last whine about the Dayton City Paper before I move on, and that is that I find it incredibly annoying that they list contactus@daytoncitypaper.com as the e-mail address alongside the info about any of the authors of their articles, even if an author doesn't work for them. For example, last July they published an article by Dan Frosch (and misspelled his last name in the byline). Googling for the syndicated article, I found Dan Frosch's real e-mail address (and the real spelling of his name).

Now given that I sometimes like to make fun of the Dayton City Paper's larger rival, the Dayton Daily News, it's only fair that I point out that in comparison to daytoncitypaper.com, daytondailynews.com is a real pleasure. Actually Cox has really improved daytondailynews.com over the past year or so, by doing the following things:

• No longer using Flash to display photos
• No longer charging for access to the text of articles in their online archives
• Publishing contact information (phone and e-mail) for the reporters who write DDN articles (and these reporters are willing to answer questions posed by e-mail—very helpful)
• Making Dayton Daily News content available via RSS
• Having content not available in the print editions available online (blogs such as Scott Elliott's on local education are a good local news source)

Now I realize the Dayton City Paper can't hope to compete with the resources the Dayton Daily News has (just as the DDN can't compete with the truly nice newspaper website the New York Times has), but that doesn't mean it has to shoot itself in the foot with a lame-ass image-only website. (An independent weekly that has a site I admire is Seattle's the Stranger, home of "Savage Love", a sex advice column by the paper's editor, Dan Savage, who once told me I was an idiot.)

At a small meeting of some community volunteers I went to yesterday evening, one attendee was excited to tell us about a man who's coming to his church in September, showing us a video about the man's program and passing around a book the man wrote. Some of the people attending were really excited by what they saw, but I was a bit skeptical.

It's not that I begrudge Aman a living, but if he's got this great secret that will really solve all the world's problems, why can't he just tell us what it is? Instead of having a bunch of websites (amanmotwane.com, powerofwisdom.com, spreadchange.com, yesyoucanchangetheworld.com) that are basically sales pitches to buy stuff, why couldn't he just share the earth-shattering secret for free? Why is it that people who can't afford the $191 kit or the $345 workshop are left out? If it is such a great secret with the power to change the world for the better, I'm sure Aman could let everyone in on the secret and still sell plenty of books and make enough money going around talking about his discovery to have a nice living.

However, I think I may have discovered Aman's secret without giving him any money at all. Perhaps the secret is that after you do give him money, you start to earn money by becoming an affiliate of his, and then you can get a commission on the books and CDs and workshop tickets you sell to all your family and friends, setting you up on the path to prosperity. (If you sign up as an affiliate, be sure to tell Aman the "size of e-mail data base" you have.)

Something fun about the apartment building I live in is that they have movie nights and games nights (ever play Pokeno?). Tonight was a movie night, featuring, as you can see from the flyer to the right, "2" movies, Bridge to Terebithia and Daddy's Little Girls. All the announcements at Park Layne are in this style, with creative uses of quotation marks and punctuation.

I don't usually participate in these group activities, but I did want to see Bridge to Terebithia, since I'd become familiar with the book when I took Adolescent Literature a few years ago. The movie's not typical Disney, staying fairly true to the book including a tragic event that was the point of the book's being written. A great story for helping kids learn that tragedy's part of life and that they can deal with it. Also a great story for teaching about foreshadowing. Disney even leaves in (somewhat shortened) a little lesson about Jesus and Biblical literalism, which I think would make this a great film for a youth group to watch and discuss.

I can't tell you whether "2" movies were actually screened (or if that "2" meant something else) because I didn't stay for the second one. Sorry.

While I'm on the subject of fun things about Park Layne, here's another, namely that the basement garages flood whenever there's any rain outside. Usually I just see the aftermath, but yesterday there was a downpour outside as I was leaving, and so I got to see that my garage floods not just because of seepage from the walls but even more so because of a big leak in the ceiling. You can't see the leak so well in these photos, but you can see the effect of the drips hitting the pond below the leak:

A rose by any other name?

Tony Glassman just sent out his weekly announcement that the new Gay People's Chronicle is out, and his lead item is that Club Cleveland is their feature advertiser this week:
Now I had occasion once to recommend one of Club Cleveland's sister facilities, namely Club Columbus, but it wasn't because of the club's many amenities but because it was a better place for men to have anonymous sex than a park shelter is. I mean, come on, sure you can work out at The Clubs, but they're not competing with other fitness clubs. "A private mens' club" may be what the Chronicle calls Club Cleveland, but in plain English Club Cleveland is a bathhouse.

Look at Club Cleveland's pricing page. "Gym Membership Pricing" is in smaller print underneath what they're really promoting, which are private "dressing" rooms. After all, as the Club's FAQ says, "You cannot walk into a locker and lie down whereas you can with a dressing room." If being able to lie down is what gyms are all about, NeoLimits better get with the program.

A Frequently Asked Question I found particularly interesting was, "Will The Club be busy on the day I plan to visit?" Having been a member of a gym, I know that is in fact a question prospective gym members do ask. However, that's usually because people want to know if they'll have to wait around to use the equipment. Somehow, I don't think that's what potential visitors to Club Cleveland are concerned about.

Now don't get me wrong—I don't think bathhouses are a bad thing. Earlier this week someone I know was in gay.com's Dayton 1 chat room complaining about how promiscuous gay men give us all a bad image and set back our quest for equal rights. I bet he disapproves of bathhouses. But he's not realistic, not in thinking that if all gay men were in monogamous relationships that the Christianists would be embracing same sex marriage nor in thinking that men are by nature monogamous creatures. So if men are going to have casual sex, why not have places that are out of the way of people who don't want to see men having casual sex and that at least take a stab at promoting safer sex practices (how many gyms have links to Safe Sex Guides on their front page?).

And I know Tony Glassman and the Chronicle as well as The Clubs are running businesses. Complete and utter honesty isn't necessarily a best business practice, even if that is a tad ironic for a newspaper if not a gymbathhouse.

An old punch bowl and 1969 television
Yesterday evening was the annual Dayton Gay Men's Chorus progressive dinner, of which I hosted the first course, hors d'oeuvres, which gave me an occasion to use my grandmother's 18-piece Williamsport Crystal Punch Service of polished Prescut crystal by HazelWare®, which came to me in its original box. As near as I can tell, the punch bowl and its accessories are worth $10 or $20 on eBay, but this one is of course more valuable than that to me because it was my grandmother's.

Unless you're a collector of HazelWare or Prescut crystal, the punch bowl may not be of much interest to you, but you might be interested what was used to cushion it inside its box, namely a couple sections of the Dayton Journal Herald newspaper of Tuesday, April 1, 1969. That date is less than a week after the birth of my sister, so I wonder what use my grandmother put the punch bowl to that week after which she'd have carefully packed it back up. She used a couple different sections of the paper as cushioning, but rather than share the whole trove with you at once, I'll follow my grandfather's tradition and save it for multiple blog entries (no, he didn't have a blog, but he could cut up a single Bun Bar and make it last for a week or longer).

What I saw when I lifted the punch bowl out of its box was the top half of page 35, the TV listings for April 1, 1969. This pre-dates my own TV viewing memories but only barely. These were the days when every city had only a handful of stations and when every house had an aerial on its roof. Our house (and probably many others) had an antenna that could be rotated by means of a control kept atop the TV console because different stations (particularly the distant Cincinnati ones) came in better with the antenna in different positions. The Dayton newspapers listed both Dayton and Cincinnati stations, although during prime time the choices on Dayton and Cincinnati affiliates of the same networks were duplicates.

So what were your prime time viewing choices in Dayton, Ohio, on April 1, 1969? Basically you had three choices although sometimes Dayton and Cincinnati affiliates pre-empted or varied from network offerings, though you did get an extra half hour of prime time. No PBS (though it would be founded later that year) and of course no Fox or WB or UPN.

In addition, the newspaper also lists channel 16 WKTR-TV as having "movies" (but doesn't name them!), channel 26 WSWO as having Canadian hockey and channel 19 WXIX as carrying the Joan Rivers Show (I loved Joan Rivers when her Late Show helped launch the Fox network but had no idea she had an earlier show). All three of these channels were independent stations launched in 1968 and 1969. WKTR and WSWO I don't remember, and Wikipedia reports they were both off the air by 1970 (perhaps because all they showed were these untitled "movies"), but WXIX is what my sister and I tuned in after school to watch snowy repeats of shows like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie.

The idea of television being in color was still a novelty since the Jerry Lewis Show is noted in one of the previews as being "in color." It seems the Journal Herald didn't employ its own television writer, relying instead on the syndicated services of Richard K. Shull, an Indianapolis-based writer who died just this year. One obituary notes that Shull was noted for his acerbic wit, a wit that's apparent in his preview of the April 1, 1969 episode of the Doris Day Show; he says, "this episode isn't all that bad. Miss Day has some good, light comedy moments." Not quite what you'd call high praise, but I checked out the first season of Doris Day's show once from the library and I think Shull's analysis is accurate.

Ugh. Politics makes me tired, and here are two examples from yesterday as to how.

The first came after hearing Barack Obama respond on the CNN YouTube debates to a question about the difference between banning interracial marriage and banning gay marriage. Senator Obama say that he wants "to make sure everyone is equal under the law" and then proceeded to say that he thinks giving one set of people civil unions and another set marriage will accomplish that. Great, Obama's officially come out in favor of separate but equal.

So I took the time to look up Obama's campaign website and to send his campaign an e-mail in which I said that he'd never have accepted separate but equal in place of interracial marriages, so how can he think that's right for same sex couples?
And to Obama's campaign's credit, I got a response to my e-mail within 24 hours, but here's what makes me tired. Either their incredibly sophisticated e-mail response computer program or their incredibly stupid unpaid human campaign volunteer read my e-mail, saw "civil unions" and sent me back a lame response explaining all the rights for gay people that Obama supports (and explaining how great Obama is on AIDS issues — why is AIDS (including in Kenya?!) still just a gay issue?), completely ignoring my point that what Obama supports is separate but equal. I already knew Obama supports civil unions and did not need them to send me an automated e-mail telling me so. I might as well not have wasted my time.
The second political thing yesterday that made me tired was attending the Western Ohio regional meeting of Equaliy Ohio. One of the few political activities recently that did energize me somewhat was participating in Equality Ohio's Lobby Day earlier this year, not that it actually accomplished anything such as repeal of Issue 1 or passage of a state-level non-discrimination act, but it was a step. So when I saw that Equality Ohio was having a meeting, I figured I would go.

And what I saw when I got to the meeting, not counting the 2 Equality Ohio organizers who'd driven down from Columbus, was 14 people I already knew from Dayton-area LGBT groups and 1 new person I didn't already know. And what I heard, despite the Equality Ohio guy's asking us how many of us were already on Equality Ohio's mailing lists (all of us but the one new guy) and how many of us had participated in Lobby Day (almost all of us), was a repeat spiel of the history of Issue 1 and the formation of Equality Ohio and how Lobby Day works and how precinct analysis and voter identification helped us in the 2006 election (and how, in a state whose population is 11,353,140 and thus whose LGBT population is at least 113,531 [1%] and more like 1,135,314 [10%] we managed to get 6,500 [0.06%] postcards signed in support of ENDA). Brilliant. Way to reinvigorate the choir.

Finally after that spiel and another fairly brief spiel on the types of activities we could do (outreach, activism, education and visibility), we broke up into smaller groups to talk about specifics. Despite the loss of energy during these spiels, I did have a small energy boost at the idea of doing some local lobbying, similar to what we did on a state level in Columbus, so I headed over to the activism corner, to be joined by two friends from church and PFLAG and by the new guy. Most people, it seems, were more interested in the education-type activities, including, as it turned out, the new guy, who, when asked about what he wanted to do, kept talking about stuff like letting the public know about our issues. Goodbye, small energy boost.

We get back into the larger group, and to wrap things up the Equality Ohio guy wants to know what day next month would be good for us all to meet again. Wait, I said. Why do we need to schedule yet another monthly meeting for all of the same people (Diversity Dayton, Greater Dayton LGBT Center, Dayton PFLAG, Cross Creek Justice and Witness Committee) to come to? So we all came to our senses and did not schedule another Equality Ohio regional meeting, deciding instead that our working groups could stay in touch via phone and e-mail and meet separately if necessary.

If I can drum up some more energy, I might run the idea of a local lobbying effort past some of my friends and acquaintances and maybe something will come of it. Or maybe not.

There's this gay artist, Andy Darrling, from Richmond, Indiana, who hangs out online in the Dayton 1 room on gay.com, and he sent me an invitation to his art show which was to be held in the lobby of the Murray Theatre aka the Richmond Civic Theatre last weekend and this weekend, coinciding with a fabulously gay production of Grease. I couldn't go last weekend (what with Harry Potter book release parties and Dayton Gay Mens Chorus progressive dinners), so I called (I had to call — their stupid online ordering wasn't working) and got myself a ticket for this Saturday, figuring if I was going to drive all the way out to Richmond, I might as well have double the fun.

Alas, it was not to be. Last weekend Andy reported to the room that he was asked to remove his art from the Richmond Civic Theatre because they felt it wasn't appropriate for a family environment (unlike musicals involving pre-marital sex and pregnancy scares). Now I don't have anything against Grease, but it's not on the top of my list of things to see and I certainly would not have chosen to drive to Richmond only for it, so Monday I called the RCT's box office (765-962-1816) in the hopes of getting a refund.

The box office is supposed to be open until 5pm, but they must have had things to do Monday afternoon because it was a nice woman from their answering service who took a message from me. I didn't hear a thing from anyone on Tuesday, so I called again yesterday afternoon, only to get the answering service woman again, who, recognizing me, forwarded me on to RCT's voicemail, where I left a message myself. I still had not heard from anyone by this afternoon, so I called again and again got the friendly answering service lady, who this time managed to get someone from RCT's office on the line for me.

This woman wasn't so nice. They don't refund tickets, but she could offer me a ticket to another one of RCT's productions if I wanted. No, I didn't want. I don't live in Richmond and don't have occasion to go out there. I only bought a ticket to Grease because of the Andy Darrling show. She pointed out that I could have gone to that for free, and I said, yes, I was well aware of that but knowing I was going to drive out there I figured why not see the play too and it wasn't my fault they canceled his show. She said she'd have to talk to the board to get their permission to refund my ticket money. Yes, do that, I told her. She sounded thrilled to do so.

I don't have much hope of getting my $15 back, the loss of which same amount, coincidentally, was the subject of another post a couple months ago. This one's not all RCT's fault — I should never have purchased a ticket to see one of their Midwestern productions in the first place — but they do get a share of the blame for being idiotic about booking art shows (they should never have agreed to let an artist use their space without being clear beforehand about what kind of art they wanted shown).

The Dayton City Paper has done it again. They've run an interesting article ("We Have It Made") by an interesting author (Kelsey Timmerman) and said that he can be reached at contactus@daytoncitypaper.com. Well, yes, Timmerman probably will eventually get any message you send via that address, but you'll probably get a faster response if you e-mail him at kelsey@travelin-light.com. So why couldn't the City Paper have just said that and, while they were at it, pointed out his fun blog, whereamiwearing.com?

So why did I want to know more about Kelsey Timmerman than the City Paper was telling me? Well, it's because he mentions in his article that he was a "crazy shirtless gringo" who'd just given the Honduran-made T-shirt off his back to a factory worker in San Pedor Sula, and so I wanted to know what this crazy shirtless gringo looked like. Thanks to Google and no thanks to the City Paper, I found the actual shirt-giving event documented via YouTube and got to see the crazy shirtless gringo for myself (note to Kelsey, work on your tan before taking off your shirt).
Oh, and despite my griping, I do think that Dayton's lucky to have an alternative weekly newspaper.

Today was my church's annual summer picnic, and you can see lots of pictures in the galleries, but I wanted to point out one photo in particular, namely that of the delicious Watermelon Bowl O'Fruit, a creation of our pastor's wifepartner, Dan Carl. Doesn't it look just fabulous?

If you want to learn how to make this yourself, look for the Cross Creek 10th Anniversary Decade of Daring Cookbook, to be published this fall!

You may know, because I've written about it before, that I have a Kyocera KPC650 card which I use on Verizon's EVDO network. Today I was reminded about something I don't like about it, so I figured I'd mention again the workaround I normally use.

At the office, of course, I don't have to bring my own Internet access, but I put my KPC650 in my computer bag whenever I leave the house just in case, and this morning, with the cable modem out at work, is such a case. I pop in my KPC650, start my dialup networking connection, and I have Internet when the rest of the office doesn't. I go to Microsoft Outlook to check e-mail, and then my computer freezes, for several minutes.

In the couple of months since I've been using my DIR-450 router, I'd forgotten this annoying and repeatable problem — random freeze-ups with Microsoft Office and Windows (Firefox works fine even when Office and the start menu are frozen solid) whenever I have my KPC650 plugged directly into my notebook. If I use the KPC650 in my DIR-450 router, I don't have these freeze-ups. So the workaround is, if you've had freeze-up problems with the KPC650 and you don't have a WiFi EVDO-capable router, get one.

Now if I were nice, I'd not only drop my KPC650 in my bag each morning, but I'd also pack my DIR-450 and share my Internet with the entire office, but it's not worth that much trouble given how infrequently Time Warner is out. I did bring the DIR-450 a month or so ago to New Orleans, where it was useful in avoiding excessive hotel Internet charges.