The Raging Tech

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Tags: Blog, comment love, Pro Writing, SocialSpark

Staggering U.S. Waste and Excess as Art

My friend over at The Fate of Tyrlon (and other dubious things) pointed me to an interesting site he stumbled upon with the Stumble Upon toolbar. It’s on Portfolio.com, a web site by Conde’ Nast, and it’s about how Chris Jordan uses staggering facts and figures about waste and excess in the United States and visually represents them with the objects in question.

It took me a minute to figure out what was actually going on, but if you will zoom in, you’ll see that each of these photos is made up of thousands or millions of items.

[This site requires Flash, so make sure you have that installed first. You probably do, but if nothing shows up, that's what's up.]

Tags: Chris Jordan, excess, photo essay, USA, waste

Got a Case of the Mondays? Tell Me About It!

Monday mornings are never fun. I can’t remember once waking up at my usual 6:42 a.m., rolling over and instead of hitting the snooze button saying “I’m so excited it’s Monday!” (at least on a work day, anyway). I know I’m excited on Mondays that fall on holidays or vacation days.

What is it about Monday mornings that seem to drag the life out of you? The rest of the week isn’t so bad, at least to me - some of you may have different tales to tell. I find it’s especially bad if I’ve had a great weekend with friends, or have something to look forward to at the end of the week that just began.

Tell me what gets you through your Monday morning blues, whether it’s coffee or your favorite radio station or reading my blog (*wink wink say no more*) that gets you through, in the comments below.

Tags: blogs, coffee, holiday, monday morning, mondays, office space, radio

Miscellaneous Henchman Guards Need Pants, Too

So if you’re planning on building up your own small army of miscellaneous henchmen guards to protect your fortress that houses your secret headquarters, you’ll need to give them pants.

Wimpy jeans or khakis just aren’t going to do the trick. These henchmen may be called into a fierce battle at any moment. Maybe your fortress is a mile underground and surrounded by thick forest. There could be crawling around in the dirt or repelling down a mountainside, or intense hand-to-hand combat. You don’t want your minions to rip their pants and have to replace them every couple of days, do you?

That’s why LAPoliceGear.com has some seriously hard-core BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) pants. Check it out, for all your henchmen tactical gear needs, especially really tough pants. My favorite item on the site was their cool 5.11 tactical gear glasses, to protect your eyes from things like empty bullet casings.

Tags: bdu, henchmen, pants, tactical gear, tough

Insurance Checks at Grocery Stores

This Friday, I received a check in the mail from my insurance company that I had been expecting. This weekend, that money would have been particularly useful. But you see, I get my mail after 5pm nearly every day. All the banks around here either close at 4:30pm, 5:00pm, or 5:30pm, so I had no time to get to a bank by the time I got my mail.

I started to call around and I learned something interesting: most grocery stores will cash payroll checks from anywhere, even if you don’t shop with them. What they won’t do is cash a hand-written check, or a non-payroll computer-generated check. Specifically though, they would say things like “Sorry, we don’t do insurance checks.”

Are insurance companies going around and dropping bad checks? Or more likely, are people going around ripping off stores with fake checks from insurance companies?

I’d like to give special mention to GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), because I didn’t have to get out of bed to call the stores to see if they would cash the check. I just called, said my city and state, and then the name of the business I wanted, and asked to be connected. Plus, it didn’t cost a dime. Put that number in your cell phone, it’s powered by Google and is pretty useful. So far, they only have business names and not personal addresses.

It’s not a big deal, tomorrow (Monday) I’ll just go to my bank and cash the check. Pay day is Wednesday, and that will be a nice day. I’ve got a date planned for me and Kylara to go out of town and eat at the Olive Garden, maybe go to a movie or something.

Tags: check, date, free stuff, Goog 411, Google, insurance, money, services