mindsquirt

For those of you that have been to Germany, this will be old news. To the rest of you, you are in for a delcious factoid of monumental proportions!

Gauss, the famous mathematican who is revered for the famous Gaussian distribution (bell-shaped curve) , is evidently German.

In fact, his equation and a plot is seen on a dutch mark (marc?):
















Cool huh?


On the front is a picture of Gauss.

I really like this. While our founding fathers more than deserve being on our money, but why can't science and math get some cred? like on a anniversy coin or something. America has an excellent history of scientific discovery. I think we are 1st in Nobels Prizes (but not per cap), why not celebrate it?

With recognition like this, no wonder Germany excells at engineering; manufacturing; and fat, bearded women.

When buying stuff from online stores, I usually make up phoney companies for my own amusement. Lately, I have been calling my company Robots n' Such. You know, a store that sells cutting-edge interactive intelligent robots, and ... other stuff like nuts and chewing gum.

I went to a place today to order a SATA cable for my new hard drive, and decided to get a bit wacky with not only the company name, but also the comment field:



Sadly, the next page I visited included the shipping cost, which was about double the cost of the cable, so I ended not buying this and didn't submit this comment. too bad. The guys working there might have gotten a kick out of it.

have a happy easter!

Watch out for this guy:

# posted by fooiemcgoo : 7:12 AM  2 comments

Upon entering college, I noticed right away that people called "coke", "pop". I went to IU in Bloomington, and I figured out that it was mostly people from the central and north (and out of state) that said this. I was overpowered, and eventually assimilated. It was a good choice. I think it is more descriptive of soft drinks. I was also shocked to see the lack of Big Red soda anywhere in central Indiana.

I of course new from this experience that this was just in the vernacular of north/central Indiana, and didn’t put much more thought into, although I often wondered what part of the country said what. So I was very happy when I stumbled on this website that shows the distribution of people that call soft drinks: pop, soda, coke, and other.

Enjoy!

what do you say, and where are you located?

This will be my second blog about the same subject. I wrote a good one last night, and it is now lost forever due to blogspot's bumbling.

It went a little something like this:

I went to Meijer's late last night to get a cold-air humidifier for my little satchel-of-joy. I had an interesting conversation with the cashier there:

Upon entering the check-out area:

Me: Howdie-doo!
Her: Oh, fine. How ar yoo?
Me: Super-doop!

I like to be efficient when I talk. There was a certain rhythm to this conversation that made it almost poetic. actually when i look at it, it is a haiku. (3-5-3 or 5-7-5 right?)

I also saw some vomit splattered on the ground in the parking lot. It always is odd to see vomit in a public place. What happened to the poor guy who had to vomit at meijer’s? Was it that urgent that he had to let it fly right there? I know personally, when I have to puke, I have a at least 30 minutes warning.

I think the summer of 2004 I puked 2 weekends in a row as a result of copious drinking.

What a good summer!

I had another conversation the day before with someone at Best-Buy. I wanted to tell the cashier that I had a good experience with the salesman there.

Me: I know you aren’t a manager, but I thought I would tell you that John was very nice and helpful….
Her: I will tell him.
Me: … and handsome.
Her: … I will make sure to tell him.

I don’t know if she could tell I was kidding. She didn’t give me any indication that she did.

Wife and I had a delightful lunch with Goostermon and his wife. Good times were had by all. He loves Cooper. Who doesn’t?

I recently decided to play an april fool's joke on myself. I decided that I was not going to cuss during the month of April. I have thought that I cuss too much for some time now, and then I read an article on msn.com that said that cussing is up something like 300% since the 60s. So, I thought I would do my part and try to be decent.

besides, I have always said that cussing gives people a reason to not listen to you, and I figured I should start living by it.

As for an update on the keyboard situation, the unreasonable jackfanny that I sent this to put in a grivence of some sort and they ruled in his favor. so now they are sending the keyboard back and i will give them their money back. I think I had a pretty good case as I explained it to Paypal, so now paypal has made my "horsemarm list".

I think I am going to stop buying things. Below is a list of companies I am going to boycott because they made me mad due to poor customer service or because they have bad products. I urge you to boycott them as well. In fact, avoid them like the plague.

• Garden Treasures (expensive patio furnature is falling apart in less than 1 year )
• dell (customer service is disorganized, incompentent, and outsourced (however they are very polite))
• gateway (sets a new standard in bad customer service, way worse then dell)
• paypal (see above reasons)
• that verizon store on charlestown rd. (priced high and bad customer service)
• Cingular (terrible reception, terrible customer service)
• Motorola(cellular phones are made of cheerioes and rubber cement)
• Comcast ($50 high-speed internet, waaaa?)
• Hitachi (i bought a DVD camcorder that lost precious memories of my baby being born)

Here is a list of brands/stores that have managed not to honk me off yet:

• sony ( all electronics have been excellent except for a DVD/VCR player i just bought)
• lowes (good everything)
• Best-buy (prices are awesome, good selection, good help, nice-smelling bathrooms)*
• Tiger-direct (good customer service and VERY cheap, good selection and promos too!)
• Ford trucks (so far, so good)
• Nissan (nicely styled, reasonably priced, good features)
• GE (I don't know if I have ever had issues with anything of theirs, even the cheap stuff)
• Sears (craftsman tools are fantastic! (and cheap))
• Von-Maur (customer service awesome, but prices terrible)
• Gap (cheap clothes that are not too-trendy. 70% of my clothes are bought here, no fuss, no muss)
• Amazon.com (set standard for easy online shopping)
• Bosch tools (dependable and handsome!)

At some point, I may make a side bar to display good and bad companies. We can all contribute to them. That way, we can be informed buyers! Lets all start right now. Leave a comment if you want to cheer or jeer a company!