Not A Fan

This is perhaps more of a set of posts in one (that's value creation), but here are some things that are on notice that I've never explained here that I will explain now.

Bill Walton

I'm not quite sure why I dislike him as much as I do. I know some of it is because he's a meatball. He might have been a great college center, and he might have even been a good NBA center. Nevertheless, he's not a great commentator and his voice just bugs me to death. He has his biases that completely cloud his judgment. I remember several games during the 1998 playoffs between the Utah Jazz and Portland Trail Blazers where he would talk about how bad the Jazz were or how poorly Karl Malone was playing, even though he was doing good. I wish that examples were on YouTube, and here's at least a sample of his announcing. I loved it when Steve "Snapper" Jones would totally bring the hammer down on him and Walton would just stammer and then list off his "5 Greatest Players who did X." The list would inevitably be the following:
1. Shaq
2. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
3. Bill Russell
4. Oscar Robinson
5. and Me (i.e. old Bill Walton himself)
Those lists were always the same guys and they always involved how darn great Shaq was. He could have put the same group in the "5 Greatest Free Throw Shooters of All Time" and it wouldn't have changed things despite Shaq's penchant for shooting south of 50% at the line.

Orem City Traffic Lights

If I was elected to any position in Orem City, this would be my first thing I would do. Seriously, the guys in their traffic management office are the worst in the world. When I start from a red light I always hit every single light unless I'm blazing along at 65-70 MPH. This ensures that we have maximum gridlock, minimum MPG, and maximum pollution. Call me crazy, but I think that what would be better for the whole city would be to let the traffic flow. Granted, if they were sensor lights, I could see things being that way due to the other streets. The issue is that they are on timers and they still can't get them timed right. Maybe those traffic engineers should drive along the streets themselves and see what they have caused?

IT Pet Peeve O' The Day

I've gotten this enough that it's now an official pet peeve: people think I'm their password manager. I've gotten this from three or four people over the past two weeks on our color copier. We've set up password protection on color copies because of the penchant for abuse inherent in a color copying machine. Because of the numerical keypad, it's a number based system and so people's user names are things like 10, 11, etc. The password is always some variant on what an idiot would have on their luggage, but the user name is something I would expect people to remember. I certainly haven't. Nevertheless, they don't remember their user name and they expect me to. I then have to set them up with a new user name and the same idiot password. Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed by this, but is it really too much to ask someone to know their own user names and passwords?

Quick Hits

Some quick thoughts from the past couple of weeks that don't merit their own post, just because I really don't have much to say about them:

• Shirley's Bakery (from the Dead to Me list) continues to justify my putting them on there. When asked if there was any way to avoid waiting in line to get some rolls, they told my mother-in-law "come earlier." Honestly, who does this? Can you come up with a system, say actually baking the rolls ahead of time, to improve your customer service?

• I was behind a guy at Costco Gasoline today who went through all the motions of actually pumping the gas - swiping his card, putting the nozzle in his gas tank, squeezing the handle, etc - without actually pumping gas. The guy sat there for a few minutes as though it was working. He got out of his car to put the nozzle back and collect his reciept only to find out that he was the dumbest person alive. That's right, he hadn't pumped one ounce of gas. It's times like these that make me think that maybe Oregon (California's Canada, and one of two states that won't let you pump your own gas) might actually be on to something.

• Is Hugo Chavez insane, or does he really think that he wants to turn Venezuela into a paradise a la Cuba? Since when did being insanely poor and destitute despite a wealth of natural resources become something to aspire to?

• The bank that my company banks at (AmBank) hasn't had internet banking for the past 3 weeks. The main reason is because they must want to lose all their customers. I haven't seen anything like it since Al Gore invented the Internet.

Weee....Just [Looked Like We] Went Out of Business

There are a few businesses that just bug me, and one of them is Pa Pa's Southern Smoked BBQ. Right from the get-go this business annoyed me. They spelled Papa's Pa Pa. They have a little ugly pig on their sign. They have their little saying, which can only be said in the Cheeth's Little Kid From The South voice. Finally, and most importantly, they're not The Smokehouse. This is a shortcoming of pretty much every barbeque place west of Texas though, so it's tough to fault them for that. Unfortunately, as a connoisseur of barbeque, just existing isn't enough. I had tasted the sweet sweet taste of good barbeque on trips to Florida and Texas and some random place with bush league sauce just wasn't going to cut it. I have the same beef with Goodwood. Sure, the name is classic, but their sauce sucks. On top of that, they price their meals like they're gold plated. Anyway, I thought I saw some big crowds in Pa Pa's, which was unfortunate. Nevertheless, I drove past one night and it was quite dark with the only vehicle in the parking lot being a semi trailer. That's what happens when you're a start-up no-name barbeque place going into a former Tony Roma's (which also sucks, but that's beside the point) - too big a location, IMO.

EDIT - 3/6/08: a while back they moved across the street, so it was just a temporary relocation.