… The house smelled great. How the food could have come out so bland, I don’t know. Even this morning the place smelled like an excellent Indian restaurant.

What a let down

And I’m only posting now to try out this offline blog post editor.

It’s a rainy weekend here which is bad news because when visiting a city I tend to want to walk around a lot. We’re mostly hanging around the Shadyside-Bloomfield-Lawenceville areas. They seem to be relatively poorer areas of Pittsburgh.

Much of the housing is row-housing and many of the shops are closed. Walking around the streets at night it looked like many of the houses were empty too. Many, maybe most of the houses had no lights on. Although the neighborhoods were very walkable, and it was a nice night, we saw very few other people walking around.

We went to a delicious Indian restaurant last night called “Taste of India”. Doesn’t every city have an Indian restaurant called that? Then we went to a brew pub built in an old church. Although it was impressive to see. It was large and fairly full, but I didn’t think the beer was all that good. We got a sampler and couldn’t get really excited about any of the beers.

Today we’re planning on seeing the strip district. I’m hoping to try one of those Primanti Brothers sandwiches. And tonight we’re going to see something known as OUTrageous bingo which is some kind of bingo/dragshow hybrid.

I save for retirement, I invest and I take a pretty active role in my savings.  However I’ve never seen a good method for determining what I will need.  I recently received an ad from Fidelity, which holds the vast majority of my retirement savings, about a retirement calculator that is supposed to tell you if your on track for a comfy retirement.

I couldn’t answer all the questions but look at this, can I be this far off?

They say I will need almost 6 million to retire?  And that I have to increase my savings by 10 to 12K per month – well over my take-home?  I didn’t even specify what I thought I’d need to live on, I let them estimate it for me.

I see this morning that lake Erie has finally developed a little ice on it. I’ll be surprised if it freezes over this year though.

I know there are worse things happening in the world (the Iraq war for one) but these kinds of stories just make me feel so sorry for people.

This 78 year old woman saved for 10 years to go on an Alaskan cruise through Princes Cruise Lines. She let Princess book the air flights and ended up with this tortuous route through three different flights.

Well, something went wrong and she ended up missing the cruise. It’s Princess Cruise Lines policy to keep all the money. Apparently that’s an industry standard. The airline refunded the money but since PCL booked the flights, they’re keeping that too.

What PCL did might be legal but I don’t know how a corporation, which after all is made up of people, can be so heartless. I can’t imagine the disappointment of saving $250 a year, over 10 years for something that gets snatched away from you, along with the money.

How do corporations become so sociopathic?

Story vie the Consumerist

…. at least temporarily.

Brenda and I went to Tremont to get pizza from Edison’s only to find out the at the deli is closed for renovation. The bar is still open but…. no food.

I don’t know that I got the complete story but there’s been some upset in ownership at the deli. Someone involved in the deli is opening a new place nearby, but I don’t remember where and someone else will be re-opening the deli.

The unanswered question is…. which location will be making that pizza?

I mentioned sometime ago that I was working on a music podcast/blog. It’s almost ready to go. I’ve shown a few people for feedback but I’ve not widely announced it yet.

However, about a week ago, I started to receive comment spam, about one a day, all drug related. I have it set up so that comments are moderated unless it’s a commenter who’s been previously approved so no comment spam has actually appeared but they still come.

Spam is so cheap to send that I don’t suppose their lack of success in getting their ad on my site will ever deter them. Once they find a blog to spam it’s far cheaper to just keep spamming than it would be to check to see which sites are accepting the spam. So I imagine I’m stuck with it forever.

Still I feel a little freaked to have been “discovered”. The spammer community LOVES my music!

I wonder if there’s a way to change the comment link so that it’s easy for a person to see and access but spam bots would be confused?

… if it’s the last thing we ever doooooo!

Post sunset to the west

Post sunset to the east