So I recently switched over to Cingular for a more affordable data plan and access to their 3G network in Utah County. Plus, I had a friend that bought the Blackjack and I thought it was pretty sweet. So far, I’ve had 2 dropped calls within a week on the network that boasts the least dropped calls. Plus, my friend who originally had the Blackjack had a really nasty experience with a local Orem Cingular store. It’s making me worry a little about my investment. Let’s hope things don’t get any worse. And if they do, let’s hope they do soon so I can get out of the contract without too much fuss.

What could be worse than trying to find the perfect home with a very limited time budget? Carpeting that home once you found it. Everyone’s got an opinion on where to go for pricing, service, etc.

Plus, there’s the added element of trying to pick a design that will go with your home design. This may be a difficult task on a good day. But, when you don’t know how you’ll paint it, what all your furniture will look like, or even remember exactly what the layout of the home is without being able to see it (and the previous occupant is still there), it’s a headache. Like, a migraine headache. Not a single-Tylenol headache. It’s like a call-your-doctor-to-see-if-he-can-get-you-some-type-of-prescription headache.

Luckily, this is something my wife mostly worries about. She’s great like that. Her net headache-giving ratio is way in the red.

Along the lines of summer day, we have all kinds of good times here at Sewell. For example, as made famous by NBC’s The Office, my cell phone is currently being called repeatedly and playing my awesome ring tone while stuck in our office ceiling.

Ah, good times. I’m not expecting any calls and I’m feeling a little too lazy to find something to stand on. So. I guess it’ll stay there for a while.

Normally, as any SEO guru could tell you, Google’s algorithm punishes scraper sites. These are sites that don’t add any new content to the Internet, but just have programs that find new material on a variety of other sites, then effectively copy and paste them into their own site. The creation of duplicate content or slightly modified duplicate content, is therefore discounted by Google to punish sites that don’t come up with original material.

That is, of course, except for news.google.com. It is a directory for various news feeds, and a site I use quite often. It also does not generate any content and is, in that sense, a sort of scraper site. It’s also got a PR (Pagerank - Google’s official ranking of how important a page is, from 0 to 10) of 9. That’s really, really good for a site that isn’t responsible for adding any content to the ‘net. I guess you could be a site for my dog fluffy with midi files embedded and animated GIFs everywhere and still be a PR 9 if you had fluffy.google.com. I wonder if they’d give me that…

In the LDS (or Mormon) Church, we don’t have a paid clergy. Doctrinally, we believe that people shouldn’t get paid for their service in the church. Moreover, it provides an opportunity for the school teacher and business executive alike to prepare talks and speak in church.

Another advantage occurred to me just today. That is, having a variety of individuals speak every week balances out the accuracy of the doctrine that’s taught. For example, today we had an individual speak on a topic and say some things that were blatantly not in line with the church’s official doctrine. If this man were our weekly minister or pastor, and had such a bias, I guarantee there would be individuals who would reconsider their participation in our congregation or potentially even in the church. However, because of the rotating system of lay speakers, the situation can be written off as human error, which happens to everyone and, overall, the doctrine in any single congregation stays clean.

It turns out buying a home is expensive. I’m not just referring to the mortgage payments I’ll soon have, but closing costs and stuff to buy to put in the home and appraisal fees and so forth. Wow. I’ll chalk this up under another one of life’s little lessons.

But, in the end, it’s worth it. House hunting may not be fun or glamorous, but it actually did wind up being easier than we had dreaded. And, like Michael Scott said… I don’t remember exactly what he said, but something about how homeowning is so important. And I think that being like Michael Scott is important. So. Yeah.

… and I am that big man. Well, I’m more of a medium man. I was only partially wrong about my Truck Art Bashing. Snopes has informed me that the art was indeed photoshopped, but for a legitimate truck design competition. In the email, it is certainly implied that they are actual trucks, which is what threw me off. So, I was right, I was wrong, whatever.

While it may not be as cool as a cruise to Mexico, we are having our second Summer Day at Sewell Direct. Basically, we turn the heat way up and encourage all employees to wear shorts, flip-flops, and t-shirts. We have a BBQ for lunch with ice cream for dessert. This is an especially welcome event here since we had a particularly cold January. It’s just one of those perks about working for a fun small company.

OK, I don’t know if I’m stupid (if I were, would I know it?) so we’ll just say I am. Regardless, I just received an email with an xlsx attachment created with MS Excel 2007. I’m unable to open it with Excel 2003. I simply get an error stating that “This file is not in a recognizable format.”

Please tell me Microsoft isn’t going to make everyone upgrade to Office ‘07 to view files from their more Office-ly advanced brothers. Those jerks. Of course, you don’t get to their monopolistic status without pushing the little guys around.

You may notice an increase in posts at the goont as a natural result of putting a shortcut to BlogDesk in my Startup menu. That’s some good advice for any of you who may be looking for a way to write more frequently on your own blog.