Live from Austin!

Got a phone call a while back from a company claiming I had won a contest with a prize of an SUV or a cruise. Since that’s not the kind of thing I’d want to win, I was immediately suspicious. The fact that they had fake caller ID info didn’t help. I told them I was pretty certain I hadn’t entered any such contest, and if they thought otherwise they could send me some info in the mail.

They called back a few minutes later, and someone claiming to be the manager of the previous caller tried to engage me in conversation again. I repeated, more firmly, that I wasn’t going to talk to a company with fake caller ID information trying to interest me in collecting the prize from a contest I hadn’t entered. I also pointed out that we’re on the do not call list (both the national one and the Texas one), so they were calling illegally.

They called back a third time after I hung up. I recognized the fake caller ID and ignored it.

Today I got a "letter" designed to look like a couple of boarding passes plus a prize notification about my SUV and/or cruise. It claims to be from "AVC Travel". A little Google research shows that AVC Travel = Awards Verification Center = a timeshare company. Google Awards Verification Center and you’ll find plenty of information. They have hundreds of BBB complaints lodged about them, and the BBB’s articles about the company warn against doing business with them.

Their addresses include 2400 W Pioneer Pkwy in Arlington TX, and 1221 River Bend in Dallas TX. They’ve also operated offices out of San Antonio in the past. They’ve been running the same business for years. They used to send dubious looking postcards, but these new mailings are much slicker and more convincing. It surprises me that they can get away with outright lying that the reader has won a prize worth "a minimum of $1,295", simply by adding the weasel words "Certain restrictions apply" in small print at the bottom of the letter.

While I don’t normally write up every scam attempt that hits my mailbox–who has the time?–these guys are so sleazy and so aggressive on the phone that I think their antics deserve some more Google visibility.

Note that there is another company called America’s Vacation Center, who also go by the initials AVC. I imagine they’re not too pleased that crooks are now using their name.

Just so you can plan appropriately :

An elusive group just outside of Abilene, Texas is claiming the end of the world is coming in less than a week.

The House of Yahweh recently gave ABC reporter Brian Ross access to their west Texas compound. Yahweh leader Yisrayl Hawkins says a nuclear holocaust will come June 12th and only members of his group will be saved.

And in case you were thinking they were harmless:

Local authorities claim the group is dangerous and practices polygamy.

Oh my god! Polygamy! Quick, send in the ATF flamethrowers!

…the local CVS drugstore has jars of mole sauce.

(No prescription required.)

Eeyore’s Birthday Party

Yeah, I’ve edited last year’s just in time for this year’s. I had a sudden outbreak of weddings to deal with.

Yesterday I found out what tamales are. I am another step on the way to being a Texan. (Hey, if George Bush can do it, so can I.)

Today I started packing for Minnesota. I am somewhat concerned about whether I will be able to pack sufficient warm clothing.

I was in a post-apocalyptic Texas. My mission was to broker piece between my village and a gang of nomadic gay vampires. It wasn’t just my blood they wanted to suck. My main concern was that I didn’t want to become Vampire+. I decided I preferred them to the cannibal UFO worshipers.

Secret messages were being exchanged by using steganography to hide them in photographs of puppies. Details and algorithms were found in Bruce Schneier’s book “Look! Puppies! (2nd Edition)“.

The temperature has suddenly dropped over the last couple of days. Yesterday evening it was 23 celsius as we sat on the restaurant patio.

A woman walked by, wearing a scarf.

I didn’t drive until 2004. I relied on public transit to get everywhere. This meant that I thought nothing of walking for half an hour to get where I wanted to be, and then walking back afterwards. Especially if the bus didn’t turn up.

In Massachusetts, I would start to gain weight as winter set in; all my body wanted me to do was eat and stay in bed. But in spring and summer, I’d walk it all off again.

And then I learned to drive, and we got a car and moved to Texas. Now in summertime I find myself glad to get back into the air conditioning after a brief stroll across the parking lot. I started getting heavier in summer, rather than in winter.

Oh, it can be beautiful in fall, winter and spring, especially evenings. But even after concerted effort, I wasn’t getting anything like as much exercise as I used to, and I was gradually getting fatter. Clearly I had to do something.

The traditional solution most Americans favor is to join a gym and not go to it. This gives you the feeling that you’re doing something positive, while still leaving you with all your valuable couch time. However, gym memberships are expensive, and school experiences have left me with an indelible view of locker rooms and gyms as places of ritual torture and humiliation.

Another popular solution is to buy an exercise machine. This has distinct advantages over a gym membership. For starters, it’s a one time expense, which is better than a gym membership if you know you’re just throwing money away. In addition, the machine can be used as a place to hang shirts, ties, and other apparel you’re too lazy to put in the closet where it belongs. And if you need the space, you can do what our last landlord did, and put the exercise machine out in the yard to act as a kind of rust sculpture and casual birdfeeder.

I did some research, and elliptical machines seemed to be the best option. They are low-impact exercise for the cardiovascular system, provide some exercise for the upper body, the machines are quiet, and some of the newer ones are quite small. I found that a local store had a good deal on one, and bribed some friends to help transport it home as the box wouldn’t fit in the car.

Some assembly was required. In fact, putting the device together was a good dose of exercise to start with. Everything seemed to work, including the electronic control panel and the servos that adjust the magnetic resistance, and the next day I tried it out for real.

And much to my surprise, I’ve been exercising pretty much every day since then. It has been one month with the machine, and have skipped exercise on only a couple of days when work and social engagements made it impossible to find a solid block of time. Exercise has become a habit, which I gather is one of the secrets to actually doing it. I now separate work from a relaxed evening by burning off around 2500 kJ. I can listen to radio shows, and I don’t have to interact with strangers in the shower. I’ve dropped 2kg so far.

When I moved in with rothko, we bought a vacuum cleaner. At the time we were living in a fully carpeted apartment in Malden, MA. Money was tight, so I did some research via Consumer Reports and bought a Sharp vacuum cleaner.

Unfortunately, I overlooked one detail. While excellent on carpets, the vacuum cleaner was entirely unsuitable for hard wood floors. After a couple of years we moved into an apartment with wood floors, and the Sharp took up residency in the basement. But I was loathe to part with it, because it was a perfectly good vacuum cleaner, and vacuum cleaners are expensive.

Then we moved to Texas. The faithful vacuum came with us. It’s still in fine working order, and we now have carpet again, which it does a good job of cleaning. But the problem is, we also have stairs. The trusty Sharp is about as suited to vacuuming stairs as a Dalek. And downstairs is wood floors again.

So for a while now, I’ve had plans to get a vacuum that actually does a good job of hard floors, stairs, and carpet.

Obviously the Dyson range appealed as soon as I saw it. But I heard that the early Dysons were heavy and awkward, and often unreliable. So I waited.

After a couple more years, the Dyson ball was launched, which was more maneuverable. Then this year, the Slim was launched in the USA. It has a smaller version of the ball mechanism in a vacuum that’s light enough to pick up and carry up and down stairs without my back hurting. It also seems as though the reliability issues have been dealt with.

Searching on Google, I saw ads for a company offering “Worst prices on Dyson”, asking “Don’t pick on us”. I wondered whether it was a mistake or a joke, clicked through, and discovered it was an independent retailer in Austin called ABC Vacuum Warehouse. It’s a store I must have driven past dozens of times without ever realizing it was there, partly because it’s in a nondescript shack-like building in front of a warehouse, and partly because the windows are all covered up with blinds so it looks like it has been abandoned. Inside is a small store filled with nothing but vacuum cleaners, accessories for vacuum cleaners, and spares for vacuum cleaners.

At the store’s suggestion we took a look at a Sebo vacuum cleaner as well as the Dyson range. Fine German engineering, but there were a few things I didn’t like. First up, it uses bags and filters. Secondly, the main upright piece detaches from the brush head for cleaning stairs, which sounds good, but I could see it would be annoying and require a lot of bending over to detach and re-attach it. I prefer the Dyson wand, which doesn’t require any bending over at all.

So, DC-18. I took it for a thorough trip around the house this afternoon. It does indeed do a good job on all floors; it’s great on the hard wood floor, will remove the gifts of the pube fairy from the tiled bathrooms, and does at least as good a job as the Sharp on carpet. Time will tell how reliable it is, but so far I’m satisfied: I ended up with a full cylinder of hairy filth.

I just went to weigh myself, and a tiny gecko shot out from under the scales and crawled part way up the wall. I’ve managed to catch him and reunite him with his lizard friends on the back porch. I’d love to know how he made it upstairs.

The squirrels have been leaving us alone since we came back from England. I wondered if they were sulking, but then I saw that the trees were all suddenly bearing black walnuts and live oak acorns. The squirrels have such abundant food right now that they simply don’t need to visit us.

We had a landscape gardener come to look at the front yard. We’re definitely going to get some cactus worked into the plans. The back yard is now entirely horse herb for ground coverage, which is working very nicely.