As we were driving home from an event at Amy’s school and approaching home Amy suddenly yelled “Dog!”. There was a dog darting around on the street near the local grocery store. We hadn’t seen it yet, only Amy had. But we stopped and Amy jumped out of the car. A few minutes later she had caught the loose dog (who was quite friendly). It had a tag. It was named “Nicky”. The tag had phone numbers. But all of our cell phones were dead. (Yeah, we need to be better at plugging them in to charge.) So Brandy called from a cell phone, but only got voice mail.

So Nicky came home for a little bit. Roscoe stayed down stairs and was not happy about this development at all. Almost as soon as we got the phones plugged in, the owner called us. A few minutes later they met us at the corner near our house and took Nicky back. Appearantly Nicky had wandered a little further from home than usual, but they often just let Nicky out to just wander around the neighborhood on his own. I’m not sure that is all that wise ever, let alone for a black dog at night who apperantly doesn’t mind running back and forth across streets with a decent amount of traffic.

But in any case, at least this time Nicky is home safe.

And we only had an extra dog for a few minutes.

Don’t you hate it when you spill coffee on your keyboard and a bunch of the keys get all sticky and hard to push?

Don’t you hate it more when you do that to two separate keyboards within the space of a week?

Yeah, that sucks.

For those of you who may be wondering, this week’s podcast was indeed recorded on Sunday. It hasn’t been released yet due to some technical difficulties preventing me from uploading it to the webserver where I keep my site (including the podcasts).

Related problems actually had the whole site down for about 14 hours earlier today, but it is obviously back up now. The podcast will follow as soon as my ability to move files around is restored.

Sometimes, things take a lot longer than you wish, and other times you have a lot less time than you wish. Most of the time both are true. And that kinda sucks.

Just had a call on my cell. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voice mail. I have transcribed the full text of the message. The first word starts in the middle, so it is obvious the automated system had already said a sentence or two while my recorded “Please leave a message” thing was playing, so I missed the beginning.

From 877-778-2578 at 00:09 UTC on 2007 Sep 25:

… As you are on the DirecTV do not call list we are not able to contact you for these exciting offers. The reason I’m calling you today is to give you an opportunity to change your selections. If you allow us to remove you from the DirecTV do not call list please be assured that we will not share your information with anyone else. Please call 1-877-778-2578 to remove your account from the DirecTV do not call list. You will then be eligible to receive exciting offers in the future. If you prefer to remain on DirecTV’s do not call list we completely respect your decision and your privacy and no action is required. Thank you for being a loyal DirecTV customer.

Excuse me??? I’m on your do not call list, so you are calling me to ask me to please take you off your do not call list? So you can call me about crap I don’t want? Excuse me? EXCUSE ME? I already told you not to call me. Assholes.

We were already planning to switch away from DirecTV as soon as either of our two DirecTivos die since they are no longer manufactured and you can only get them on the secondary market for way over what was the market price when they were still being made… all since DirecTV decided they wanted to push their own second rate DVRs instead of real Tivos.

Anyway, this call just makes me not have any regrets on that planned move. It may even end up accelerating it. (Although I don’t see us switching until early next year unless our existing hardware does die.)

What a crock.

More Internet comments on unwanted calls from this phone number here including at least a couple comments suggesting that it might not really be DirecTV. Dunno. Very annoyed regardless.