Since my father was sixteen, he worked at Smalligan’s Bike Shop on Getty street in Muskegon, Michigan.  Several years ago, the shop closed and my father was left without work.  Luckily, Tom Anderson of the Bicycle Rack stepped in and not only hired my father, but also gave him a chance to become part owner and eventually take over.

After all my father has gone through with muscular dystrophy, this was truly a blessing.  Tom decided to further invest in my father by paying for his health insurance.  It was unreal; it was almost too good to be true.  Well, it wasn’t all that dreamy, my father would no longer be working on, or selling his beloved Schwinns, as the Bicycle Rack did not carry that brand. Though, later my father got a hold of his old rep. and quickly solved that problem.

Unfortunately, last year my father had a stroke.  It was a pretty scary time for us all.  When the smoke cleared, he was left with only minor damage in his speech center.  While he was recovering and going to therapy my aunts, uncles and cousins all chipped in and took shifts at the Bicycle Rack to help Tom and my father.  A month or so later, my father, though on disability, returned to the bike shop.  He gets frustrated and embarrassed when he struggles with his words, which makes him a bit self-conscious waiting on customers, however, he is still sharp and able to repair any bike you put in front of him.

Today, February 28, 2008, Tom Anderson fired my father from the Bicycle Rack.  On March 1, 2008, my father would have been a fully vested partner in the business.  Though I speak through obvious bias, I find this to be the unscrupulous behavior.  This is the type of things that large corporations do, not small, local businesses.  I realize that with the Walmarts in the world, small businesses struggle more and more each day.  Yet, I will not sit silently by and watch my father be treated this way in our community.  Is this a sample of things to come?  Is this how small business competes with the corporations?

I would like to ask you to take your business elsewhere.  Please do not patronize the Bicycle Rack.  Breakaway Bicycles is out on Harvey St, if you have bicycle needs.  Better yet, someone has started a shop in Whitehall that you might try.  In fact, when the owner in Whitehall was getting off his feet, my father gave him contacts and reps. to get his business off the ground.  By the way, in my opinion, that is a good example of how local business should be behaving, cooperating, not competing.  Let me know if you’d like more info. about this shop or if you need some repairs on your bike.  I would be happy to fix them myself, or my father is now available and would be eager to help you with any bicycle needs.

At 200000 this thing is going to explode, i think. How exciting.  Truthfully, I imagine it will go down like in the Blues Brothers.  Check the end of the clip, if you have never seen it, or watch it again for fun(until it gets pulled).

My del.icio.us bookmarks in the sidebar became problematic yesterday. Something buggy in the system, and when I went to the site to see what was going on, there was no info. I haven’t changed anything on my end, but I thought I’d look and see if they changed the code. I went to this page where they give you the javascript code to put on your site to display your links. They have it set up so that you can customize it and a preview to show you what it will look like. The preview is not working. Well, it appears to be on their end.

I feel a bit better, however, what about all the dedicated sikkdays fans who want to see where I have been? I decided to send them a support request. I wrote out my issue in the usual long-winded style I am so fond of and I hit send. “Error 999″ from Yahoo, owners of del.icio.us. This is a catch-all error Yahoo throws out to folks who are hammering their services with requests, in other words, people who are attacking them and trying to overload their servers to the point of shutdown. I don’t remember being that angry, however, when the preview function of their code wasn’t working, that page sat their churning and churning away, trying to render a preview of a broken service. So, now I am a super-villain hacker because of their own page contacting them over and over. Cool.

After an hour or so, I try again, I get through, send my email and walk away. Later in the afternoon, I decide to mess with it some more. I can’t seem to get the sidebar to show any of my del.icio.us bookmarks now. So, I switch gears, stop using the link roll script they provide and try some JSON, Javascript Object Notation. What is it? Well, it reads similar to javascript and Actionscript, so I can read it. Of course, I can read both of those other languages too, but I am not too great at writing it. Lucky for me del.icio.us provides help with that code also. Without much pain, I got the JSON to work and we are back baby, woo!

Now, I just got an email from my service request:

Hello, 
Thank you for writing to del.icio.us customer support.


Unfortunately, the linkroll feature on del.icio.us is currently not

available, but our engineers are working to restore this feature. We

estimate it to be working again in a few days to a week. I apologize

 for

the inconvenience. 


Thank you again for writing to del.icio.us customer support.


Regards,


Sky


del.icio.us Customer Support

Thank you, Sky. Despite the trouble with my fancy display, I still recommend you jump on the del.icio.us train. I love it. Click this, scroll down, & watch the vid.

I am going to work on reviving the quotes next, I swear. Check the forum, I have a few options to throw out at you loyal folks who loved the crazy quotes. I also want to change the layout here, and in the forum. When my class is over next week, maybe I’ll find some time.

So, last month you couldn’t go to any movie without seeing the trailer for Step Up 2: The Streets. They pimped that trailer in front of every movie they could think of, even if it wasn’t the same genre. The obvious joke to me was, Step Up 3: The Country. Some tough inner city kids move to the south and are bored, causing trouble, until they find an outlet for their energy, spicing up line dancing. As sad as that sounds, you know there’s about 5000 Hollywood producers making that pitch as you read this.

So, I am going to move on, let them fight over the idea and right for Step Up 3. I am working on Step Up 4. Here’s a couple of screen tests. Of course, I am shooting it overseas to keep costs down.

Pretext

So, my truck has been running very badly when it gets humid and wet. Long story short, it is one of those things that won’t show up when I take it to the garage, and they can’t find anything wrong with it.

Sunday

It is supposed to rain and freeze and just be a really bad day.  Instead, it warms up, rains and turns out to be a rather nice day.  Sure, it is raining, but I can’t help but feel good about the snow melting away and I have this overwhelming feeling of happiness because it feels like spring.  I drive around all day running errands without a care in the world.

Now, the cynic in me starts to itch in the afternoon.  The day is coming to an end and, “What do I have to be so happy about, huh?”  The cynical side of me says, adding, “Maybe this is just the quiet before the storm.  Some sort of shit storm is headed your way.”  That little bit of doubt brought me to my senses.  Wait a second, why is my truck running so well in all this wetness?  Why isn’t it acting up?

Hmm.  That is puzzling, maybe when I get home I should take a before picture of the truck, in case a tree falls on it or something.  This is the quiet before the storm.  Of course, a few minutes later the quiet was interrupted.  The snow, ice and plows have destroyed the roads and I hit a small patch of pot holes that revealed today’s car problem.  A terrible clanking noise was coming from my front end.  Every bump on the way home was a cry for help.  I get out of the vehicle and I find that the driver’s side is still leaning a bit, as if my fat ass was still in it.  

The passenger side looks good, the driver side, not so much.  The $500 truck is quickly wearing out its welcome.  Ball joints, fuel pump, and now this in the last 2 months are a bad sign of things to come.  You should probably drive if we go somewhere together.  The purpose of the truck was to simply get me through school, which it did.  Now, we are on borrowed time.

I was hoping to post a glorious picture of the odometer at 200,000 in the next month, but after all the repairs, the feat is hardly that impressive.  The mechanic, out of generosity, kindness, or alien control actually gave me a pretty good deal.  $40 to fix this little mishap, which isn’t even close to what he charges an hour for labor.  I got lucky this time.  However, I am as sick of cars as I am of snow.  I am going to get a Segway, and a helmet to look really bitchin’. 

Glaciers are melting, cruise ships are taking people out to watch the ice melt away, Al Gore is practicing animal husbandry with polar bears, trying to save the species and yet, it is snowing like a beeyotch in Michigan.

I am so sick of the snow, it killed my inner child. If the glaciers are so warm, I am moving there. Hell, these guys are living it up, like they were in Hawaii or something.

Which beer sounds better?  I haven’t posted a generator link in a while.  Here’s the Random Beer Name Generator.  Enjoy!