Customer of the Year

I just bought $97 worth of CDs. The customer service from CDBaby.com is excellent if there is any truth to this email I just received. I'll let you know in a future post if the CDs themselves are any good. I have high hopes.

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Thursday, July 31st.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...

--
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little store with the best new independent music

Linux Addiction

Hee hee. Use Linux with caution. It's a slippery slope to the command line and doing everything in text files.

From xkcd. Another funny one that no one will get unless they have spent some time at the command line.

scharfes S und umlauts

While studying German on LiveMocha.com, I have been stymied by my inability to type German characters like umlauts and the scharfes S. No longer! I can now type ä, ï, ö, ë and even ß!! It doesn't end there. Typing Spanish? You'll need é, ñ, ¡, and ¿. I can even type symbols like ©, ®, and €.

The secret is the "compose key." On my computer, I have designated the right control key as the compose key. Now I hit R-CTRL then a two-letter combination to get my desired character. It is fairly intuitive: n + ~ = ñ
"compose" + s + s = ß
"compose" + u + " = ü
"compose" + e + ' = é
(Don't actually type "+") A much longer list is available on Wikipedia: "Compose Key".

This is much easier than Alt + Unicode code, which is impossible to remember and doesn't seem to work in Linux anyway. As for designating a compose key on your computer, Windows users are on their own. In Linux/Gnome, select System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layout Options/Compose key position.

I'm very excited.

Or 100...

My goal of working up to 50 pushups stalled recently. I can do about 25 at one time. Then I came across a mention of hundredpushups.com on Lifehacker. This program promises to take us from zero to one hundred pushups in 6 weeks. Sounds ambitious, but if it is only half-true, I’ll reach my goal. So today I started Week One. Week One looks fairly easy, so I am doing the third column, the hardest. If anyone else cares to give it a try, let me know how it goes.

See more progress on: do 50 pushups

A Happy Birthday Indeed

Sunday was my 35th birthday. It was much like any Sunday--wake up, shower, prepare a sermon, go to church. After church I stopped at the book store, then at the library to check my email since I was without phone or internet service. (It's back today. Apparently some jack was unplugged at the phone company. I went without phone service for five days because someone unplugged the wrong thingy?!) By the time I got home I was tired, and since I had only slept about four hours the night before, I went to bed.

I woke up from a short nap and I was lying in bed contemplating my next move. "Put on pants" was definitely one of the top contenders in the Next Action field, but I still didn't have a reason to Get Out of Bed: Put on Pants. I heard a knocking at the apartment door and some people moving around, the fridge door opening and closing, all of which I attributed to my roommate Mitchell. Then there was a soft knock at my bedroom door.

"MMmmmf!" I said, which translates to "I hear and acknowledge your presence, but don't open the door because I am in my underwear. Speak."
"Are you asleep?" It was Craig, the leader of our Service Adventure Unit and not-infrequent visitor to our pad.
"No. I was. Now I'm just lying here. What's up?"
"Oh, nothing. I'm just going to look at some books here."
"OK."

Roll over. Did he come over here just to rifle through my library? Is he waiting for me? Investigate. Commence Operation Get Out of Bed: Put on Pants. I came out into the living room and the Service Adventurers were waiting in the kitchen with a cake and ice cream. We sang the song, ate the cake (very moist cake, Craig) and hung out for a while.

Later that evening, Mitchell and Craig, some friends of theirs and I went to the Moose's Tooth for pizza. We had a long wait for a table but while we were standing around in the parking lot, I ran into Ryan, who is a Mennonite pastor from Indiana who is taking a sabbatical in Alaska. He was there with his sister Christine, who occasionally comes to church. I knew he was coming, but I didn't expect to run into him at a restaurant. Ryan also started pastoring in his twenties and he told me that turning 35 was a good thing because that was when other pastors started taking him seriously. So I have that to look forward to.

It was a good birthday. I honestly hadn't expected anything, so it was a nice surprise. I welcome good food and good company any day of the year. It's especially nice to get both on your birthday. Stay tuned for my sabbatical plans as they are rapidly taking shape.