…you have peach juice running down your chin.

…some idiot asks “When do we evacuate Katy?”

When are you getting married? I don’t know.

You mean you haven’t set a date? Yes.

Time’s a-wastin’! Why haven’t you set a date yet? We’ve only been engaged a couple of weeks. Do we have to do everything at once? Besides, we need to get Laura’s house on the market, and there’s only so many stressful things one can deal with at once.

So, when are you going to set a date? When we’re ready.

Why don’t you just go to Vegas? I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with that, because a) I’ve been married before so I’ve already had a big wedding and b) I’m a guy. However, Laura hasn’t been married before and she deserves the opportunity to have the wedding of her dreams.

Is this going to be a huge wedding? Probably somewhere in the middle. It’s going to be a nice gathering of family and friends, but it’s not going to be over the top. You know us – I’m fairly laid back and Laura is anything but a diva – so it’s going to fit our personalities.

It's that time of year again.

With Hurricane Alex hungry for some Tex-Mex, it’s time for the 2010 Hurricane Drinking Game. All you need is cable TV, a bottle or two, and a day off of work. Preferably you’ll need several days off of work, because if there’s one thing that TV news is good at during hurricane coverage, it’s bad clichés. 

I take no responsibility for your hangover. 

Here we go! 

• If you see someone putting up plywood: drink
• If the plywood has a spraypainted “go home” message to the storm: drink again
• If there’s at least one misspelled word: chug.
• If someone is surfing in advance of the storm: drink
• If you’re told to “hunker down”: drink
• If the reporter mentions “contraflow”: drink
• If Gov. Goodhair (Perry) tries to blame Obama for something: chug
• If the anchor admonishes the stand-up reporter to be safe: drink

I need to come up with something for Jim Cantore. Ideas?

UPDATE 7/1/2010: After watching Cantore last night, here’s the winners for the 2010 season. Drink when you hear:

• “Dodged a Bullet”
• “(Tropical Storm) Allison”

Chug if Allsion is mis-identified as a Hurricane.

Bringing up Allison is a hack play to try to scare the public. Every time a storm fizzles below the media’s expectations, they’ll start to speculate that the system will come back and stall over the area and flood, even when the forecast doesn’t call for it. Cantore was so intent on comparing Alex to Allison last night that he mistakenly called Allison a hurricane and then claimed that Allison was the second to last major storm to hit Texas. Perhaps he’s forgotten about 2005′s Rita hitting Beaumont, or 2008′s Dolly which hit the city he was reporting from last night… and that little storm called Ike. Wanker.

Please weather guys, if you’re going to try to scare the pants off of the public, could you please wait until it’s warranted? If you keep crying wolf, we’ll ignore you when we need you later.

Now that Clear/Sprint has started rolling out WiMAX here in Houston, Clear is aiming at the DSL/Cable Modem market as well as phone service.

Is it worth cutting the cord and going wireless? I’m not sold yet.

Some background: I refer to Clearwire as Clear/Sprint because Sprint owns a 51% stake in the company and the two companies essentially share networks. Sprint 4G customers are using Clear’s WiMAX network and Clear customers who purchase the 3G option for fallback service are using Sprint’s 3G network.

Clear’s mobile WiMAX service at $40 is cheaper than buying 4G from Sprint ($59.99), but (and this is a huge BUT) that doesn’t give you access to the Sprint 3G network. That really limits your ability to go online, as the WiMAX network as built right now in Houston is pretty weak. If you’re lucky enough to live or work somewhere close to a tower, you’ll get online as long as you don’t go too far from the window. The folks I know in Dallas with the service don’t sound too impressed either, and if I could get a WiMAX signal at all in Las Vegas it would drop before I could download my e-mail. With the exception of the office where we’re seemingly right under a tower, I find myself in 3G territory more than 4G. [There's absolutely no 4G service that I can find in Missouri City, but that's not stopping the cell phone store down the road from trying to sell Clear anyway.] The price to add the 3G service to Clear’s mobile service is an additional $15, making the price difference between Sprint & Clear $4.99.

Clear sells home service for $30, which is a desktop modem that can also do VoIP. At least you can stick that on a windowsill permanently. Having seen the performance hit that VoIP can cause on a wired connection, I’m not sure if I really want to run VoIP on a service where the maximum upload speed is half a meg.

And that’s why I’m not that bullish on Clear. For home internet, cable and DSL speeds are roughly double that of Clear. For mobile internet, the HSDPA 3G networks of AT&T and T-Mobile exceed the download speeds of Clear’s WiMAX network. Of course, as with Clear, the chances that you’ll actually obtain the “up to” speeds is a crapshoot. (If you think that AT&T’s 3G rollout has been slow, try being a T-Mobile customer…)

Clear has potential, but in my opinion it’s just not ready for prime time.

The only thing missing from the next song was someone in San Diego answering the phone “Hi Star, now give me my money” over the intro. Remember when 100.7 didn’t suck?

This one brings me back to the long departed Y-100 in Philly:

And I remember playing this one on the Zone in Phoenix back in the day:

Thanks to Phil Steiner for sending me the parody spot and Paul Talbot for writing it.

I’m not kidding about ginormous. In an age of 60″ LCD screens that hang on your wall, a 34″ TV set doesn’t sound that big, but this is a big sucker:

The Before Picture

You see, a CRT has a *lot* of glass, and it’s all on the front of the box. That makes this difficult to lift without dropping. Which is exactly what we did the day we brought it home from the store. After that, we always used three people to lift it, and it still wasn’t fun. (When it was dropped, it cracked the front bezel along the bottom edge of the screen, and it broke the coffee table it landed upon.) Despite all of that the TV, which had been one of the first HDTV’s on the market, gave me several years of flawless service, just not the 20+ that I expected out of a Sony CRT.

So why have I joined the rest of civilization? Happy birthday to me.

I have a feeling that part of what pushed this along was my parents were staying for a few days and my mother was going through HGTV withdrawals. They arrived on Thursday night, and by Friday evening she was suggesting that we shop for a TV the next day. Who am I to argue?

Since Best Buy has a program that will recycle old CRT’s, we decided to shop there and ended up with a very nice 1080p 37″ LCD. Great picture, it fits the furniture, and it’s the right size for the room.

But let’s talk about that electronics recycling program. Is it me, or has Best Buy gotten progressively sleazier over the years? When I looked a couple of months ago, you could get free delivery and haul away on a set of $999 and above, and if you spent less they’d haul away for $99. A small price to pay for two people to take your 350-pound problem off of your hands. Now, if you spend less than $999 they’ll charge $99 for delivery plus another $130 for haul away. $99 for someone to deliver what I can put in the backseat myself and drive away with? Sheesh, for $230 I could buy another LCD for the guest room. No thanks. This ranks up there with Best Buy having their “Geek Squad” open up laptops and pre-load crap onto them before they’re placed on sale so they can mark up the price. I think I’m done with Best Buy.

Solution: 1-800-Got-Junk. I went online on Saturday afternoon and booked a pickup for first thing Monday morning (they let you schedule in 2-hour blocks so you’re not having to deal with waiting for a truck between 9 and 5 or something like that). They called ahead to confirm Monday morning, showed up on time, and hauled it away for their minimum charge of $118 plus tax. All I had to do was hold the storm door open for them while they carried it out. Perfect.

But back to mom’s HGTV addiction. Saturday I signed up with DirecTV. For $50/month for a year I have programming, 1 HD DVR for the living room, 1 HD receiver for the master bedroom, and multi-room DVR networking so I can watch in the bedroom what’s recorded in the living room. Saturday they also started matching Dish’s free HD for life promotion. Monday morning, while the old TV was being hauled away, the new dish was being put on the roof, and by 11:30 we had a working TV in the living room again. It was no surprise that mom opted to stay home and watch while dad and I went shopping. (It’s not that mom is a couch potato, it’s more that she’s walking with a cane these days and isn’t as mobile as she used to be. So she’s earned her right to sit on the couch.)

So, while I’m no longer saving $100/month over what I was paying AT&T, I’m still saving $50/month over AT&T for similar service (right down to multi-room DVR). Works for me.

Now, when it comes to installation, AT&T wins for professionalism. Branded trucks, uniformed techs who wear booties over their shoes while in your house, and techs who won’t leave until they’ve fully tested everything they’ve installed.

DirecTV contracts out installation to another firm who contracts it out to other people. You get someone rolling up to your house in a beat-up mini-van who does wear an ID badge but looks like they picked them up at a day laborer place or yesterday was painting houses. Because they’re subcontractors, they get paid per job so they want to get out of your house as quickly as possible and don’t want to spend time fully testing their work or showing you how it works. I was told “it looks like you should be able to figure out how this all works” and he was out the door. It wasn’t until I went to bed and tried to pull up the Anthony Bourdain episode recorded earlier in the day that I realized that the multi-room DVR wasn’t set up properly. A call to tech support concluded that the installer failed to install an extra part. A new installer is due at the house today; I don’t have high expectations because so far everyone I’ve dealt with at Multiband Houston has failed to follow directions.

So far, I like DirecTV but I hate the company that does their installations.

Lots of songs on this particular chart have staying power (Billie Jean & Beat It, anyone?) and very few clunkers even in the upper 30′s.

I forgot how much I liked Bob Seger back in the day. Ripped that CD into iTunes last night before I went to bed!

Gotta love the kids done up as rock stars with big hair. Hope to get Rush on the music log today.

Life is a game of Frogger.

It’s been awhile since we had a good rain in these parts, so the downpours we’ve had the last couple of days were welcome. Afterwards, the frogs in the neighborhood come out of hiding.

Some of them don’t make it trying to cross the roads. This morning’s body count, as observed giving the pups their morning walk: 9. That’s a lot of squished frogs!

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