House of Jorob

Feeding four cats on less than a dollar a day

In a word, PetSmart.

The price of cat food, like everything else except gasoline this year, has risen steadily through the last twelve months. It's been a bit steep, too. Roughly 30% over last year's prices.

Come to think of it, it would be nice if the price crashed like gasoline has.

But I'm off-topic.

We were paying roughly .37 per can this time last year. Now, .47 per can.

Peeling the act of shopping for the cats out of the weekly household grocery shopping was the first clever thing we did.

Next was shopping around for a bit, to see who would give us the best price on cans of Friskies. We hit up BJ's, PetSmart, Acme, Giant, and K-Mart.

Settled on PetSmart.

They have a discount program that netted us the highest discount--roughly six cents per can on a .37 can, or 20%.

BJ's had the best bulk discount going.

But they carried a variety pack of three flavors in twelve cans. Worked out to be roughly .25 per can.....and the cats just won't eat reliably off of that. Not enough flavors to spread over four kitties.

The discount program has remained pretty solid at PetSmart, too. We're now saving seven cents per can off the current price of 47 cents each.

The other half of the cat diet is a goodly amount of dry food.

We use Meow Mix. Not a bad ash count, and the cats will eat it. Most of them, anyway. Gabe has to be the finicky one, so we keep a side bag of Nutro's Max Cat dry food around for him. At one time we fed them all Max Cat dry, but the costs just got out of hand, there. Gabe's the sole holdout from those days. He seems to flip between the Meow Mix and the Max Cat on a daily basis.

Anyway, here's how it all breaks down, with the PetSmart discount in play:

• Thirty cans of Friskies, spread across 10 flavors: .47 less .07 = $12.00
• One 21.6 pound bag of Meow Mix, 12.79 less 2.00 = 10.79
• Total for the month: 22.79.
• Divide across 30 days = .76

And that's how it works out. If we have to buy another bag of Nutro, it'll be a small one, and it'll boost the daily cost to roughly .80 day.

Either way, four cats for less than a buck.

Little Big Planet: My Contribution to the User Guides

Wheeeee!

I got LittleBigPlanet for Christmas!

So, after playing the thing until my eyes bled for the past couple days, I tried to distill everything I learned about the start of the game into one pithy, helpful sentence.

It is this:

The Star Sticker that you need on level two, "Get A Grip," is found at the end of level three,"Skate to Victory;" you're going to have to go through "Get A Grip" a second time--after you finish "Skate to Victory"--in order to attain 100% completeness.

Okay, what the hell does that mean?

If you're new to playing the game, those words mean the difference between a smooth tutorial experience and repeating the second level ad infinitum.

LittleBigPlanet is a platformer.

Like any good game, there is a tutorial built in to the front end.

In LBP, this is The Gardens, a LBP tutorial that takes up the first three complete levels of the game.

It's a very good tutorial: plenty of intuitive situations allowing you to figure out what works, what doesn't, and gives the player beaucoup rewards along the way.

There are tons of voiceover and video helps built in, too.

There are even total-tallies for each level, so you can see if you've uncovered all the hidden and not-so-hidden items for a level. "21/53 Items Found, 44%" and such.

So, after you complete a level, if that stat isn't 100%, you know you've got to rerun the level and search harder.

In LBP, there are trigger stickers which, when you paste them onto their blanks, will cause item bubbles to drop nearby. All kinds of fun things are in those bubbles. The more you find, the closer you get to 100% completion.

And the trigger stickers are not always found on the same level as where you need to paste them.

The earliest example of this is in The Gardens.

Almost half the of the goodies on level two, "Get A Grip,"are unlocked with the Star Sticker.

The Star Sticker that is found at the end of level three, "Skate to Victory."

StV doesn't open up until you complete GaG, so while you're running through it the first time, staring at all these blank star-shaped forms just screaming for a star-shaped sticker, you have no idea you will never, ever, find it on the level you are currently in.

There is nothing in the tutorial to tell the beginner that. Nothing in the instruction guidelet, nothing in the voice-overs, nothing in the vids.

I'm all for letting the player learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics by trial and error. But if your mind isn't open enough to consider the possibility of the keys you might need to one level are hidden on another, you are very likely to be rerunning the second level for a very, very long time before you give up and go on to the third...and feeling a bit discouraged for screwing up so early in the tutorial.

Imho it would not have hurt the experience to drop a little hint at the end of "Get a Grip."

Domino Toppling

No, not her.

The world record for domino-toppling was set last month in the Netherlands.

Students used 4,079,381 tiles.

The effort took two months to set up.

The event--Domino Day--was televised on BBC.

Head over to the Domino Day fansite.

One caveat: the site's in Dutch.

As an alternative, an English-speaking site, Domino Games.com, is loaded with tons of domino-ey stuff--but as of Dec 21 the site needed to be updated to reflect the new record.

LOL Phone bill

I keep a honeypot in the house.

It's my old land line. My dialtone service from Verizon.

Costs me all of $7.40 a month.

It'll go up soon.

In March, 2009.

To $7.87 a month.

I have a generous local calling allowance on the line.

0.25.

Total.

At 0.05 per minute, that's five minutes in local calls before I have to pay anything beyond my $7.40.

I had to fight like hell to get Verizon to give me this rate.

The first-line sales rep had never heard of it.

Her manager had, however.

It has nothing on it.

• No call waiting.
• No calling plan.
• No caller ID.
• No long distance.
• No toll calling.

It exists in my house for one purpose: Every bank, car dealer, political party, charity, and window replacement company in the country uses it to call me.

And I call 800 numbers on it.

Here's the part that galls me:

The telephone service costs me $7.40.

The taxes and fees are $8.42.

My monthly phone bill is $15.82, and over half of it is made up of taxes and fees.

• 0.41    Federal Excise Tax
• 0.35    PA Gross Receipts Surcharge
• 0.08    PA Relay Surcharge
• 1.00    E911
• 0.67    Federal Universal Service Fee
• 5.91    Federal Subscriber Line Charge

There was a time when a lot of this stuff didn't exist, or when it existed, it was absorbed by the telephone companies.

It was called overhead.

Now, it's a pass-through.

According to my phone bill:

• The 5.91 "Federal Subscriber Line Charge funds part of the cost of providing long distance companies access to local telephone networks." Otherwise......what? The long distance companies would have to pay more for access to the local telephone networks?
• The 0.67 "Federal Universal Service Fee helps keep telephone service affordable for high cost areas, rural health care providers, and library internet access." It costs less to wire libraries and farms with telephone service than it does to let long-distance companies connect to local telephone networks?
• The 1.00 "E911 charge funds my community's 911 system." According to my phone bill, this fee is sent to my state/county treasury.
• The massive .08 "PA Relay Surcharge funds telecommunications service for people with disabilities."
• The 0.41 Federal Excise Tax and the 0.35 PA Gross Receipts Surcharge just plain suck.

There's a shiny pony in all this horse manure, if I could just figure out how to play it: There's enough altruism in some of these fees, I should be allowed to deduct it under charitable contributions on my income tax.

TEST post from email

Writing a quick test post from an email client. There's more coming later on this week. Promise.

Bookshelf: Virtual Light

Virtual Light
William Gibson
c 1993

I skipped Gibson's Virtual Light when it first came out.

No idea why.

I just didn't read it.

Picked it up at the library the other week.

Man.

I already raved like a candy-jacked child over Gibson's work back in May, 2008.

So, I'll keep this simple.

The premise behind Gibson's writing is that it is of the near-future.

But unlike other fiction created 15 years ago concerning the near-future, his work still holds. The illusion of near-future is still working.

Part of the trick likes in his structure: He doesn't stick dates on the narrative, but he will stick dates in as history. So, for instance, we read about something happening in 1996. The book, being written in 1993, has lost its predictive power over whatever was tied to the '96 date. But because nowhere in the narrative is there any glimpse of the date supporting the "present" through which the narrative flows, 15 years later the '96 date stands in the context of the novel as backstory, as history.

Just don't waste time reading the book jacket. It says we're reading about 2005. Nowhere in the text is that actually established....you need to do some math adding and subtracting dated reference points from the narrative with a fixed date from one of the character's backstories to reach that conclusion.

Even so, nothing creaks.

Except for one thing. 

Dialing into the 'net.

Sure, the connective power of always-on cable and DSL connections wasn't close to being affordable in '93.

But they were jacking in to the net in Neuromancer. It's not like the concept couldn't be explained to a generation growing up on modem-squawks without bogging down the text.

Maybe it was the visual end of things.

Like the Wachowski brothers found themselves stuck without a dynamic visual for that ride through the real world onto the Matrix, without a telephone.

Ever tried playing World of Warcraft on a dialup connection? The freakin lag would have killed Neo long before any cranky virus application could have hurt him.

Larry Stroup continues his encouragement. What a guy.

Just checked the spam filter.

Yep.

Still coming in.

I still don't know how he found me.

World Clock, Spiritual Awakening, and Where's the Joy?

This is the World Clock.

A neat idea.

On the surface.

But the damn thing is soooooooo subtley negative. Right there, under the coolness of it all.

Negative.

Which is really ironic.

Considering Peter Russell is a spiritual kind of guy. And a bit of a pioneer. He's had a website going since 1996.

That's the stone age, as far as the Internet is concerned.

Back then, you coded by hand.

In Notepad.

And uploaded on a 56K modem on your house telephone line.

The hell with everyone else in the house wanting to use the phone at the time.

But to return to the point.....

I don't think the negativity is intentional.

But the choice of what's being tracked is what's doing it.

Births. Deaths. Population growth.

Deforestation.

Communicable/noncommunicable diseases.

Species Extinct.

Abortions.

Hot-button items, all of them.

Each stat is rising, of course, because the figures on the clock are approximations based on past stats and estimates, and then aggregated since the thing started counting, whenever that was.

And when you're done being impressed with the stats, the negativity kicks in.

The world sucks. People suck. We're killing ourselves.

<sigh>

Where are the counters for:

• successful organ transplants
• dollars donated by individuals for disaster relief
• babies and older children adopted
• spayed and neutered puppies and kittens
• teenagers getting their driver's licenses
• weddings
• barrels of single-malt whiskey
• pounds of aluminum, glass, and paper recycled

I mean, if you're going to seek spiritual enlightenment--using these clocks--why not leave a little joy around for others to find?

SUVs will kill NFL Football

How automakers' pigging out on SUV sales for the last decade could cause the end of professional football as we know it:

After a summer of $4.50 a gallon gasoline wiped out roughly $100 a month in disposable income from every single American who owned a car, the fall months witness unprecedented numbers of new-car buyers staying home.

GM, Chrysler, and Ford collapse.

Bankruptcy or complete wipe-out. For this scenario it doesn' t matter.

All three are heavy, heavy advertisers on NFL football broadcasts.
That money is now gone, leaving huge holes to fill.
The holes don't get filled.
The broadcasting networks, standing on an already shakey pillar of revenue now shot full of holes during their last 8 weeks of the football season, have lost a large chunk of money that is supposed to pay for their NFL broadcasting rights. They can't fulfill their contracts.
The teams share of NFL broadcasting dollars is wiped out, cutting into team money that's supposed to pay player salaries, stadium operating costs, and expenses.

The lower third of the NFL franchises, now starving for money that can not be replaced by 40% increases in ticket prices since at least 30% of their ticket-buying base either worked directly for one of the now defunct automakers or for one of their suppliers and remain out of work, nor by  selling stadium advertising to non-existent auto manufacturers, go up for sale.

Unable to find buyers for a third of their franchises, the NFL is forced to contract for the first time in a bazillion years.

Wizards in Winter Light Show

This is Carson Williams's 2004 light show.

The original. 

Visitors to the neighborhood heard the sound track by tuning their car radios to the FM channel he was broadcasting his music over--he posted a sign out front with the frequency.

The tune is Wizards in Winter.

The holiday house display spawned a whole bunch of imitators, and got glommed by a beer company.

Williams has gone on to bigger things--read about them here.

Wizards in Winter belongs to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Who might actually have a new album out before too long.

<sigh>.

Perfectionists.

What can you do?