Category: Weblog

Red Envelope, California Style

In the chinese tradition, it is common to give red envelopes with money inside as gifts. This is especially big on the New Year. Being part of a Chinese family, these envelopes are well known to us.


My father decided to get into the action this year. He came to our house yesterday and told me to come outside with him. In the trunk of his car was a large red bag. He told me to carry it in. It was very heavy and I asked him what was inside. “You’ll see.” is all he would say.

He told the girls that this was his version of a New Year’s red envelope for them. They opened the lid to find it full of quarters. Thousands of quarters…

For years my father has kept the quarters from his daily change. He had drawers with quarters kept neatly in 35mm film canisters. As you may remember, he also collects Victorinox Swiss Army Classic Knives. He now uses the metal boxes from the knives to hold film canister quarters. It’s all very tidy and organized in my father’s world.

He wants the quarters to go to the girls, so I’ll cash them and deposit them into a savings account for the girls. The girls will take a few canisters to the video arcade, but most are going into their college funds.
I don’t know how I’m going to cash them, but I’ll figure something out.
I wanted to know how much all the quarters added up to, so I did a few quick calculations. I weighed the quarters and they are roughly 68 pounds. 5 quarters weigh 1 oz.
68 pounds * 16 oz/pound = 1,088 oz of quarters
1,088 oz of quarters * 5 quarters/oz = 5,440 quarters
1,088 oz of quarters * $1.25/oz of quarters = $1,360
Holy crap. One thousand, three hundred and sixty dollars in quarters. That’s a lot of saving.
Once I get the quarters counted for real, I’ll update you all with the actual count.

Corporate Gifts

As some of you may know, I work in a large corporation and get to make some of the decisions. People that sell things to us, know this and try to curry favor. Typically, this is done with gifts.
In some businesses and in politics, this gift giving is taken to extremes. As you might expect, this gift giving does affect how people make decisions. People that say that it doesn’t effect their decision making are lying.
My company limits gifts to $75 and no more. Personally, I think this a great idea. I get to make decisions that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and sometimes millions. Being a normal person, if someone gave me a big gift like a laptop or other expensive item, I would feel indebted in some way.
In the entertainment field this gift giving gets a little crazy at places where there are no company limites. I’ve heard of watches, iPods, and other costly items being doled out like candy to even minor players in Hollywood. The vendors that deal with us know the limits and try to stay within it. If it goes above $75, I have to turn it in to the company.
Each year I get a number of gifts at Christmas. Here’s this years list:
Two bottles of red wine (split with my assistant)
Zagat 2006 Guide (gave to Michele)
Basket of Muffins (put out for co-workers to eat)
Box of Godiva Chocolates (eaten by guests watching football)
Frosted cookies (put out for co-workers to eat)
Ms. Beasley teacakes (fed to family at Christmas – my personal favorite)
Pair for good earbud headphones (gave to Michele)
If vendors really wanted to curry favor with execs, they would focus more on the assistants and second-in-commands with gifts as well. These people protect and control access to decision makers. They are often not given the respect they deserve. Without these support people modern business would grind to halt and no deals would get done.

LED bulb swap

I was out shopping yesterday at REI. (Yes, I got off my ass and bought something not online for once.) At REI, I saw an LED replacement kit for mini-Maglites. I had read about these before, where you swap out the halogen bulb in a Maglite flashlight and install an LED bulb into it.
The kit was $8 so I decided to give it a try. I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as the new trend of seriously hardcore flashlights, but it could be neat anyways. I had already burned out one halogen bulb and was on the spare. Replacement halogen bulbs are $3-4 per pair.


This version consisted of 3 LEDs to replace the single halogen bulb. It took longer to hack through the plastic packaging than it did to do the actual bulb swap. I really hate the trend toward this fortress-like packaging these days.

Here you can see the old bulb and reflector about the flashight before I put it all back together.
Pros:
The light color is more white and not yellowish at all.
Longer battery life
All the cool kids are doing it
Cons:
You lose the focusing control of the Maglite.
Not noticeably brighter
My wife thinks it’s ‘another stupid blog thing, right?’
Tonight I’ll take it outside and look for possums with the dog…

Frosty Sno-Balls

On a recent trip to my beloved 7-Eleven store, I spied yet another version of the classic Sno-Balls confectionary. Thsi time the Sno-Balls were actually snow colored – white! Of course, I snatched up a package for further investigation. Previously I have examined the green Lucky Puffs and orange Glo-Balls versions.


I think Hostess is catching onto my investigations and they have made very few claims on the packaging for me to investigate.
After staring at the package for a bit I came to the conclusion that Hostess is actually pursuing a crypto-Catholic agenda. I mean it’s obvious once you look at it.
As you can see, Frosty the Snowman on the package represents the Christmas holiday. The Sno-Balls are clearly meant to represent portions of his own body. You are expected to celebrate the Christmas holiday by eating the body of Frosty! Sound anything like the a familiar religious ritual?
Christmas = Christ’s Mass. What happens at Mass? For you non-Catholics out there, at Mass, wine and bread wafers are consecrated for communion and by transubstantiation converted to the actual blood and body of Jesus Christ.
So, I think we can clearly see that Hostess is trying to get unsuspecting Sno-Balls lovers to join the Catholic faith!

Back to the actual Sno-Balls themselves, they appear to be frighteningly dull. I mean would it have been so much trouble to have red or green filling on the inside of the Sno-Balls as a treat? Perhaps they felt with a red filling their secret Catholic agenda would be revealed.
On a related Sno-Balls note, do take the time to check out the pictures of a highly mobile package of pink Sno-Balls.

Paid in advance

I don’t like dealing with bills, so where ever possible I set up automatic payments through my bank to pay my bills. As an example I roughly know how much my phone bills will be monthly, so I set up payments that pay the roughly correct amount and I adjust as needed every couple of months. Usually I end up with a little credit on accounts after a while but that’s OK since I get the warm and cozy feeling that the bills are all paid.
One of the newspapers we get every morning is the Pasadena Star News. When we subscribed, I estimated the monthly amount and set up a monthly automatic payment and didn’t worry about the bill any more. Since we are paid up, I don’t get a bill from the newspaper, so I don’t check the balance.
Yesterday I received a message from Jackie at the Pasadena Star News. I called back today and conversation went something like this:
Jackie: Mr. Pusateri, do you use a bill pay system?
Me: Yes, have the payments not been arriving.
Jackie: No, to the contrary, you are a very regular payer. The opposite of most of the problems we have.
Me: And so…
Jackie: And so since you have been paying us so regularly, you are paid up until well into 2009.
Me: … um … wow …
Jackie: Yes, so Mr. Pusateri you need to stop paying us for four years, you are maxing out our billing systems.
Me: OK, I’ll cancel the payment. So when I use up my credit, you’ll send me a bill?
Jackie: Yes, your next bill will be in four years.
Me: Right. Talk to you in four years.
I’m not sure what happened, whether they lowered their prices or I calculated wrong, but I am Paid in Advance!

More Animal Drama

Last night Piper the dog goes outside to wander around the backyard a bit. I refer to this as patrolling. This time was a bit special though. On her patrol, Piper starts barking up a storm, which is normal, and running around in circles, which is normal. Then she did her low growl, which is not normal.
I walked outside to see what the matter was and it was a large possum that Piper had cornered. Piper wasn’t sure what to do next.


Of course, since I am always thinking of you, the Loyal Cruft Reader, I ran inside to get a flashlight and a camera. I snapped this nice photo of the dog confronting the intruder.
The possum just sat there hissing no matter how much I loudly explained that it should be on it’s way. At Michele’s suggestion, I sprayed the possum with the hose and it ran up a tree.
I wonder what smoked possum tastes like?