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Recently, we purchased a digital camera from Circuit City. They offered a good price on-line, so we ordered the camera from their website, and picked up the camera from one of their local stores. All in all, that should be the end of the story right?Wrong.

Ever since that day, I get at least one call a day from 804-747-6434. When I answer the telephone, the person on the other end of the line never speaks and when I don’t answer the telephone they never leave a message.

So, I called the telephone number in question the other day and who should it be but the Circuit City Extended Warranty department.

Apparently, since I opted not to be voluntarily ripped off at the time of purchase, Circuit City has employed a building full of trained weasels to telephone me once a day. Now, it’s not clear to me what purpose that serves since the monkeys never speak or make any other noises on the other end of the line. If they were trying to sell me an extended warranty, it might help if they spoke or otherwise attempted to communicate in some method that I could understand.

Really, what’s it gonna take to make Circuit City die the death it so richly deserves? The company has been on the brink of bankruptcy for years and yet every year it just barely hangs on and lives to torture us all with shady business practices that are just this side of outright fraud.

If they’re going to employ hard-sell and shady sales tactics, at least they could have the courtesy to be a successful company. Instead, they let their competitors like Best Buy (who is being sued by the state of Wisconsin for underhanded and illegal business practices, by the way) gobble up their business.

The moral of the story is that if you purchase something from Circuit City, you should expect them to start harrassing you at all hours if you decline the Extended Warranty. After all, someone has to keep that building full of weasels busy.

After our extended swing to the East Coast and back, Sarah and I are back in Madison. Whenever we leave town for an extended period of time, we always stop our mail to keep it from piling up outside the house. Since we were gone for twelve days, we got quite a delivery of mail from our friendly neighborhood postal worker today.The amazing thing about the mail is how little mail you seem to get if you just get one or two pieces of mail each day. If one or both of those pieces are junk mail, the perception that you don’t get any mail quickly implants itself in your psyche.

When I started sorting through twelve days of mail, it quickly became obvious to me just how much utter crap is sent through the mail. For instance, the breakdown of mail sent just to me is as follows:

• 3 magazines
• 2 newsletters
• 4 bills
• 1 2004 tax form (?!?!?!)
• 1 check
• 3 pleas for money from non-profits
• 1 offer for a credit card imprinted with the logo of a non-profit organization
• 2 flyers for an election we missed
• 1 unsolicited hospital newsletter
• 8 offers to monkey with my telephone or high-speed data services
• 1 magazine subscription offer
• 1 book club offer
• 8 credit card offers
• 1 review copy of a technical book
• 2 catalogs from mail-order companies

Sarah’s pile is at least as tall as mine and seems to contain many of the same envelopes, suggesting that perhaps she got many of the same entreaties to acquire new plastic and donate funds to non-profits far and wide.

It’s hard to believe that the Postal Service is hurting when you take the time to look at the sheer volume of paper shoveled into our mailbox each and every day.

Sarah, Dalla, and I are currently on an extended tour of the nation East of Madison. At the moment, we’re visiting her parents. However, we have been as far East as DC, and have visited numerous national parks, monuments, and like on our trip. I don’t currently have the time to post many of the pictures we have taken, but I did post a small set of pictures to give you an idea of what we’ve been doing with ourselves.

Tuesday night, Sarah and I attended a show by the touring production of the Broadway show, “The Producers“.The show was given at Madison’s new, and generally revered, Overture Center. The Overture Center is a new arts center in the heart of Downtown that was 100% funded by private donations, all from one local couple.

The building itself has clean lines, plenty of glass, airy spaces, and is a generally nice facility. Certainly it is a vast improvement on what it replaced.

We saw “The Producers” in Overture Hall, which is the centerpiece of the Overture Center. The hall seats just over 2200 people and is really an impressive facility for a city the size of Madison.

The show itself was really quite a contrast. The first act, and the first half of the second act, are frenetic, riotous, and funny. It is really Mel Brooks at his best. The staging and scenery are superb. The actors and acrtresses seemed well rehearsed, and enthusiastic.

Where the show really drags is in the second half of the second act. Both Sarah and I felt that it was as if Mel Brooks simply ran out steam, and spent a good half-hour writing a dull and untidy end to the show. In fact, the ending is so awful, that it really casts quite a shadow across the first three quarters of the play. It made me wonder just how awful many of the other plays on Broadway were that this show won as many awards as it did.

In addition to a clunker of an ending, the seats in Overture Hall are just as painful. The geometry on the (sparkling new) seats is just enough out of whack as to make sitting in them for the better part of three hours an endurance event.

There is absolutely no way to sit comfortably in those seats. I’m not the tallest person I know, but I am taller than average, so I’m used to sitting in confined areas while taking in cultural events. It’s just the price I pay for being able to reach items on the top shelf. And, it isn’t as though I’m too wide for the seats. In fact, there were several inches of seat on either side of me that I wasn’t using.

At intermission, the gentleman seated next to me (who I didn’t know), started a conversation with me about how uncomfortable the seats were and how his knees were aching. I expressed similar sentiments as I had spent all of the first act trying to find a comfortable position in which to sit. Sarah, who isn’t as tall as myself or the gentleman next to me, expressed the same frustration.

So, there were the three of us, having paid a non-trivial amount of money to see a show, sitting in a brand-new building, with sparkling new seats, complaining how the seats were actually less comfortable than many aluminum bleachers we’ve used over time at various sporting events. Clearly, there is something wrong with the seating at Overture Hall.

…that we bought a digital camera last night. Now we can upload all sorts of photos to this site and bore all of our friends and family.We took plenty of bad, meaningless photos already. However, there are three we wanted to share with everyone.

The first photo is a picture of a rain barrel that Sarah built two weeks ago. Some folks had expressed to us a desire to see exactly what a rain barrel looks like.

The second photo is a picture of our tulip garden in bloom. So many people have seen pictures of the house, or have seen the house itself, but very few have seen our house in the Spring when all of our tulips are in bloom.

The third photo is just an interesting photo of Dalla looking out the window.

Sarah did some extensive research, and the camera we purchased is the Olympus C-765 Ultra Zoom. It is neither the top of the line, nor the bottom of the barrel. The only thing we don’t like about it is that it doesn’t run on AA batteries like some of the others we looked at did. So, if we go to a country like Greece or Brazil or the like, we’ll have to make sure that we bring along an appropriate power adapter for the battery recharger.

On the plus side, the camera has a variety of manual options to override most of the automatic settings. In addition, it as a 10x optical zoom. One of our biggest complaints with our last few cameras is that we just couldn’t seem to get “close” enough to distant subjects using the zoom lens. This camera shouldn’t have that problem.