This post may only be relevant to my fellow Catholics, but if you’ve been watching the Papal visit coverage anywhere on television, you likely have seen the rock star-like response that Benedict has received everywhere that he’s visited so far. I just watched him enter St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and not only did the people outside of the cathedral go bonkers when he stepped out of his car, but the priests, nuns, and bishops on the inside of the cathedral gave the man a prolonged standing ovation!

And true to Catholic form, the applause lasted until Benedict began to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament - then it was like someone hit the “off” button because it was suddenly quiet.

Seeing the mania around Pope Benedict’s visit makes me wish that I had planned to go and see him in New York. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to make a trip to the Vatican for one of his masses there! Anyway, the response that Pope Benedict has received will hopefully accomplish two goals. First, I hope that it puts America further up the list for future visits by the Pope and second, I hope it helps to reignite Catholicism in America. Frankly, I think both goals have been accomplished!

Is there anything as exciting as getting a new electronic gadget to play with? Alright, so there are hundreds of things that are more exciting (winning the lottery, for example). However, at the moment that you have that new piece of technology in your hand, it’s like Christmas morning. Unless, of course, that piece of equipment busts…which brings me to our stories for today.

Many of you will remember all of the problems that I had with the Treo 700p in late 2006 and through the winter/summer of 2007. These problems are so widespread in the Treo 700p owner-base that many disgruntled owners have taken to posting their problems on the official Palm blog.

My last experience with Palm was sending in my busted 700p for the third time for a third weird technical failure (the touchscreen stopped working and the phone stalled on the welcome screen). That was last summer. For their part, Verizon Wireless (another bunch of crooks) sent me another replacement Treo 700p and it sat in my desk drawer, untouched, until about 2 weeks ago. It was at that time that I decided that I could no longer let this $250 - $500 piece of equipment just sit there and collect dust.

So I switched back to the Treo 700p. Stupid move.

The phone had a bunch of technical problems to start with in terms of incoming calls. With the help of an online forum, though, I was able to fix that problem (why should the end-user be fixing technical glitches). As you can tell, I wanted this thing to work so I went the extra mile. And then let me give the devil his due - the phone worked fine for about 10 days. Then, out of the blue, the headset connector stopped working. In other words, I would plug my earpiece into the phone and while I could hear the person on the other end, they couldn’t hear me. For a guy who drives at least 2 hours per each day as a part of his commute, that is prime communication time for me to catch up on a bunch of my personal relationships. If I’m silenced for those 2 hours, forget about it!

And once again here I am…I’ve have another broken Treo 700p and I don’t know what to do with it. Sure, I could go through the motions with Verizon Wireless again and receive a replacement phone in the mail, but the truth is that I want nothing to do with another 700p. I could go through the motions with Palm again and have them tell me that the problem is on the service provider’s end and not theirs and that there is nothing they can do. Quite frankly, I’m not interested in playing that game. I’m not interested in playing any of these games, really. I want my money back or I want a free upgrade, period. Verizon Wireless refuses to give any refund (even a discounted one) on faulty equipment - even if you’re going in for your 4th replacement phone. Palm won’t even listen to the argument. Could I bitch and moan and argue for an upgrade? Sure, but that does not guarantee that I’ll be getting an upgrade so I’m not willing to put in the effort.

Any advice out there on what to do with this faulty piece of garbage? I tried to sell it on eBay for half of what it’s worth and even THAT didn’t work!

As for my other technical problems, I don’t know if any of you heard about this, but Activision released Guitar Hero III for the Nintendo Wii with no surround sound support. Dopes. I have my GH3 disc in to Activision and I am awaiting a replacement. Not that it matters if I receive the replacement disc right away…my Nintendo Wii is back in the shop! Some of you may recall that my Wii had a faulty graphics chip. Well, I sent it in to be fixed in December and instead of fixing it, they sent me what had to be a refurbished Wii - complete with a broken door on the top of the machine and scratches on the side (and a new serial number). I procrastinated calling them to complain until about 3 weeks ago. When I did call, however, they were extremely friendly and helpful on the phone. They sent out a shipping slip right away and I sent them the refurbished Wii for repairs. The repaired product should be coming back to me this week sometime.

When I have kids, I think I’m just going to give them wooden blocks to play with! No worries about lead paint, no worries about something breaking, and hey - they may even learn something!

Another e-mail from my Mom. This one contains random bits of wisdom for a variety of topics ranging from the best way to peel a banana to how not to burn your house down via your clothes dryer. Enjoy!

Peel a banana from the bottom and you won’t have to pick the little “stringy things” off of it. That’s how the primates do it.

Take your bananas apart when you get home from the store. If you leave them connected at the stem, they ripen faster.

Store your opened chunks of cheese in aluminum foil. It will stay fresh much longer and not mold!

Peppers with 3 bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating. Peppers with 4 bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.

Add a teaspoon of water when frying ground beef. It will help pull the grease away from the meat while cooking.

To really make scrambled eggs or omelets rich add a couple of spoonfuls of sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream in and then beat them up.

For a cool brownie treat, make brownies as directed. Melt Andes mints in double broiler and pour over warm brownies. Let set for a wonderful minty frosting.

Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste of garlic and at the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of garlic.

Leftover snickers bars from Halloween make a delicious dessert. Simple chop them up with the food chopper. Peel, core and slice a few apples. Place them in a baking dish and sprinkle the chopped candy bars over the apples. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes!!! Serve alone or with vanilla ice cream. Yum

1. Reheat Pizza
Heat up leftover pizza in a nonstick skillet on top of the stove, set heat to med-low and heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy micro pizza. I saw this on the cooking channel and it really works.

2. Easy Deviled Eggs
Put cooked egg yolks in a zip lock bag. Seal, mash till they are all broken up. Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly, cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg. Just throw bag away when done easy clean up.

3. Expanding Frosting
When you buy a container of cake frosting from the st ore, whip i t with your mixer for a few minutes. You can double it in size. You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also eat less sugar and calories per serving.

4. Reheating refrigerated bread
To warm biscuits, pancakes, or muffins that were refrigerated, place them in a microwave with a cup of water. The increased moisture will keep the food moist and help it reheat faster.

5. Newspaper weeds away
Start putting in your plants, work the nutrients in your soil. Wet newspapers, put layers around the plants overlapping as you go cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic they will not get through wet newspapers.

6. Broken Glass
Use a wet cotton ball or Q-tip to pick up the small shards of glass you can’t see easily.

7. No More Mosquitoes
Place a dryer sheet in your pocket. It will keep the mosquitoes away.

8. Squirrel Away!
To keep squirrels from eating your plants sprinkle your plants with cayenne pepper. The cayenne pepper doesn’t hurt the plant and the squirrels won’t come near it.

9. Flexible vacuum
To get something out of a heat register or under the fridge add an empty paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll to your vacuum. It can be bent or flattened to get in narrow openings.

10. Reducing Static Cling
Pin a small safety pin to the seam of your slip and you will not have a clingy skirt or dress. Same thing works with slacks that cling when wearing panty hose. Place pin in seam of slacks and — ta da! — static is gone.

11. Measuring Cups
Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water. Dump out the hot water, but don’t dry cup. Next, add your ingredient, such as peanut butter, and watch how easily it comes right out.

12. Foggy Windshield?
Hate foggy windshields? Buy a chalkboard eraser and keep it in the glove box of your car . Wh en the windows fog, rub with the eraser! Works better than a cloth!

13. Reopening envelope
If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to include something inside, just place your sealed envelope in the freezer for an hour or two. Viola! It unseals easily.

14. Conditioner
Use your hair conditioner to shave your legs. It’s cheaper than shaving cream and leaves your legs really smooth. It’s also a great way to use up the conditioner you bought but didn’t like when you tried it in your hair…

15. Goodbye Fruit Flies
To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass fill it 1/2″ with Apple Cider Vinegar and 2 drops of dish washing liquid, mix well. You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever!

16. Get Rid of Ants
Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it, take it
“home,” can’t digest it so it kills them. It may take a week or so, especially if it rains, but it works & you don’t have the worry about pets or small children being harmed!

17. INFO ABOUT CLOTHES DRYERS
The heating unit went out on my dryer! The gentleman that fixes things around the house for us told us that he wanted to show us something and he went over to the dryer and pulled out the lint filter. It was clean. (I always clean the lint from the filter after every load clothes.)
He told us that he wanted to show us something; he took the filter over to the sink, ran hot water over it. The lint filter is made of a mesh material - I’m sure you know what your dryer’s lint filter looks like.
Well,…the hot water just sat on top of the mesh! It didn’t go through it at all! He told us that dryer sheets cause a film ov er that m esh that’s what burns out the heating unit. You can’t SEE the film, but it’s
there. It’s what is in the dryer sheets to make your clothes soft and static free — that nice fragrance too, you know how they can feel waxy when you take them out of the box, well this stuff builds up on your clothes and on your lint screen. This is also what causes dryer units to catch fire & potentially burn your house down with it! He said the best
way to keep your dryer working for a very long time (& to keep your electric bill lower) is to take that filter out & wash it with hot soapy water & an old toothbrush (or other brush) at least every six months. He said that makes the life of the dryer at least twice as long! How about that!?! Learn something new everyday! I certainly didn’t know dryer sheets would do that. So, I thought I’d share!

Note: I went to my dryer & tested my screen by running water on it. The
water ran through a little bit but mostly collected all the water in
the mesh screen. I washed it with warm soapy water & a nylon brush & I had it done in 30 seconds. Then when I rinsed it — the water ran right thru the screen! There wasn’t any pudding at all! That repairman knew what he was talking about!

For my fellow Catholics out there, you may be wondering why Easter is so incredibly early this year. The folks over at FOXNews.com had a great article about this topic posted today. What it comes down to is…the moon!

Pretty weird, huh? From the article:

Easter always comes on the Sunday after the first, or Paschal, full moon following the first day of spring.

Spring arrives on Thursday and the moon will be full on Friday, the earliest Paschal moon since 1913. And that means Easter, the Christian holiday marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is this Sunday. It won’t come this early again for another 220 or so years.

This is a mundane bit of news to some, but to others this can be a fascinating look at the history of the Catholic Church. As many theologians will tell you, there are little pieces of other religions that were integrated into Roman Catholicism at the Council of Nicaea. One of the common traditions of many religions at the time was to use the lunar cycle to provide dates for their feast days (for example, the stars were used to date some Jewish and Pagan feast days at the time). It would appear that the Council took some of this mindset and applied it to setting the date for Easter.

Pretty interesting stuff. Maybe we can all discuss it again in 2228 - the next time Easter will be this early in the year!

A few weeks ago I came across this story and I got a good laugh out of it. In short, this woman was passed out in a coma after giving childbirth and after a while they decided to pull the plug. A few days before they’re getting ready to pull the plug, her husband got a little pissed off at her and started yelling at her to stop this crap already and wake up!

Believe it or not, the husband yelling at the wife actually rocked her out of a coma! Ha! How great is that? The husband gets mad because the wife is essentially going to die and he yells at her (knowing that she always hated when he yelled at her) and it wakes her up. Awesome!

Hopefully I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand the craze around Sesame Street’s Elmo character over the last couple of years. What’s the big deal?! It’s a furry little red thing. That’s it! With all of that said, I had to post this story…

It turns out that a freak oddity has occurred with an Elmo doll down in the Tampa Bay area. These parents bought the doll for their son, James, and after a few days they realized that their furry little buddy had an odd saying…

“Kill James.”

That’s right. Elmo suggested killing James. KILLING THE SON!

If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, then I don’t know what scary means! This is like Chucky gone real. Freaky. Anyway, let’s use this as an opportunity to calm down the mania around the Elmo dolls. Who wants a doll that has a glitch that can possibly say it wants to kill your child? Definitely not what I’m trying to give to my kids whenever I have them!

About a week ago I celebrated my 18 month anniversary being employed by my company. If you read the post on Joe’s Journal, then you know that I wound up celebrating in rare form. And while that journal entry is more a display of a minor annoyance, there are other things going on that warrant an employee’s attention.

Sometime in January our Chief Operating Officer decided to move on to another job. She found a good job that is closer to home and - more importantly - closer to her family. As a working Mom, she needs to be close to home base. While we were all sad to see her go, it was a logical decision and she will be missed. Her last day was two weeks ago.

During her last week at the office, our Executive Director/President also announced his resignation citing that he was extremely proud of the organization and that it was time for him to move on to a new endeavor. No one is sure if he has a concrete job locked down somewhere else (he’s been at the company for the better part of the last decade). I know that he’s smart enough to make a ton of money with a financial consulting firm, if he decides to open one. We’re not entirely sure when he’s going to move on, but we know that each day that goes by we are closer to having no leadership in the office.

It is times like these that make employees reevaluate where they are in life and where they are in terms of their occupational situation. For me, the truth is that I began this reevaluation process in earnest sometime last spring. Then for family reasons, I stopped evaluating my employment for the summer and most of the fall. When I had to close a very big deal for our company in November, that pulled me back into the grind and ever since then, I’ve been thinking about this job and my future. The loss of the top leadership at my organization has sort of put this whole thing into hyper-drive.

The truth is that I really hate my commute. I drive an hour to work and an hour back each day (unless I’m working from home). The 100-mile daily commute is really a pain in the ass and for those of you that make this commute or longer, I’m not at a point where I can continue to blow $400 per month on gas so it’s a double whammy. I can’t take mass transit without adding another two hours onto the daily commute (ain’t happening). A few months ago I was really thinking about moving closer to my job, but I don’t really like Trenton area and there isn’t anything exciting going on anywhere between where I live and the office. In terms of getting to and from work, I hate it.

As for the physical place where I work, I really don’t like the building at all. We’re in a building that has got to be over 100 years old. One of our former COO’s tasks was to have the building upgraded. Well, now that she’s gone I’m confident that the building is not changing. Personally, I hate the all-white walls and the almost unmanageable parking situation in our extremely small lot. The crappy carpet and painted-over-panel walls in the offices don’t help either. Let’s just say it’s not a place that I’m comfortable bringing my clients. In terms of the physical space, it’s not a nice looking place to work.

Then there is the staff. The truth is that even though my post about the secretary showed how completely outlandish one member of the staff can be, I really like everyone (including the secretary). The staff at this place is among the best out there, period. They are good people with good hearts and that is important in the grand scheme of things. In terms of the staff, I couldn’t be in a better place!

Of course, one must consider advancement opportunities. Here is where it gets interesting. Is there a great deal of “upward mobility” in my job? No. In an organization with about 10 people, no one is more than one step removed from the top of the heap. It’s weird. The advancement opportunities at my job are more industry-wide advancement opportunities. In other words, an employee is likely never going to be “the boss” at this office, but he may find a new way to finance a particularly complex project that is duplicated by the competitors (which, in this industry, is a good thing). In terms of advancement I have to rate this position as 50/50.

One of the final things I’ve been considering is my remuneration. I get paid a decent salary, but it’s high time that it increased. I’ve only had one automatic “standard of living” raise over the last 18 months and believe me, the cost of living has gone up more than my raise! The problem is that with the top brass at the office leaving, I do not know who to ask for a raise. I was just getting ready to talk to the COO about this, but now she’s gone. Considering that it will take the new Executive Director a few months to really get the feel of the office, I may be out of a raise for a long-time to come and I’m not happy about that at all. In terms of remuneration…18 months ago I would have said that I’m very happy. Today? I’m not and it appears that there is no person to talk to about it. Not good.

All in all, my assessment tells me that I am not in the right employment situation right now. However - after all of the criticism above - I’m awkwardly content at my job. I will probably begin to look for a new place to work in the next few months, but not rigorously. If my company does actually move out of Trenton and into New Brunswick like the rumor has been for months, then I would probably move to that area of the state (or further north) and stick with it. However, I feel like something is missing at my current job and unless I can figure out what it is, then it might be time to move on.

When last month’s energy bill passed, there was a provision that called for traditional light bulbs to be phased out over the next 4 to 12 years so that new, compact fluorescent light bulbs can take over the market. As reported in USA Today:

Under the measure, all light bulbs must use 25% to 30% less energy than today’s products by 2012 to 2014. The phase-in will start with 100-watt bulbs in January 2012 and end with 40-watt bulbs in January 2014. By 2020, bulbs must be 70% more efficient.

Compact fluorescent bulbs already meet the 70% efficiency standard. A compact fluorescent costs about $2, vs. about 50 cents for an incandescent.

While an incandescent lasts about seven months, a fluorescent burns six times longer. It also saves about $5 a year in electricity costs, paying for itself in as little as four months, says Steve Nadel, head of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

This looks like a win-win situation for everyone involved. We have a compact fluorescent bulb over our stove in the apartment and it’s been there for a few years. My Mother recently switched over to mostly compact bulbs and they’re working fine at the house and saving a few bucks each month in electricity. It looks like government may have figured something out the right way for once!

While I was at the Opportunity Finance Network’s conference last month, I picked up a free sample of the Tanka Bite. As their website states, “The 70-calorie Tanka Bar delivers a slow, powerful protein punch by mixing two primary ingredients: low-fat, high-energy American buffalo meat and tasty cranberries.” This little piece of beef jerky was delicious!

I’m looking into the possibility of buying a 96-case of these little bites and keeping them as a part of my daily lunch at the office. These things are so good that I’m willing to spend the $100 or so it will cost to purchase them (it’s about $1 per bite, which is a reasonable price).

There is an added positive to this product. It is made by a Native American tribe out in the Midwest. This is what you would call a socially responsible purchase since the profits are used to benefit the tribe (the Lakota tribe). It’s a great bar, check it - you’ll love it!

And when you’re done chomping on the Tanka Bar, check out New Jersey Carpet Cleaning for the best carpet cleaning in the Garden State!

The Daily Record ran a story this morning about the Headquarters Plaza Fitness Club abruptly shutting down in Morristown. This echoes the same out-of-the-blue closing of the Ocean Fitness Company - both gyms were owned by The Fitness Company, a group out of Holmdel.

There is something up with The Fitness Company organization. They aren’t returning phone calls and they aren’t refunding membership fees even if you joined an expensive plan the day before they closed up shop. It would appear that a bunch of greedy punks are running the show over there - or at least a bunch of greedy punks took over the company and are now running it into the ground. This is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which is the community aspect of health clubs. The Ocean Fitness Company was more of a place-based company than it was a branch of the The Fitness Company. In fact, two years ago it changed its name from “The Fitness Company” to “Ocean Fitness” to reflect that fact.

The same is true of all gyms and health clubs. The people who go to these places form friendships and expand their personal networks. To see such innate community building torn apart because of some person’s greed is a shame, yet par for the course in New Jersey.

Here’s hoping that someone investigates the sudden closing of these clubs and that those who have been screwed out of a great deal of money join together and sue those who took that money.