Archive for July, 2006

Sometime yesterday morning, some poor fisherman got stuck offshore of Muskegon County. He made several distress calls (on the wrong marine channel) saying that his boat was taking on water.

The Coast Guard was about to start a search, but then delayed it until the storm blew over. By the time they got to the right area all they found was some debris (fishing gear, etc…). They are continuing to search for whomever was on the boat, and the boat itself.

Presuming that this was a real distress call (it was not made on the correct channel), it is somewhat unfortunate that the Coast Guard had to let him get washed away. On the other hand, anyone with half a mind should have known enough to check the weather before heading out on the Lake, I mean it is not like this squall was being hidden from anyone.

You can read an article about it in the Muskegon Chronicle, or if you lazier, and want a less informative view, you can watch this video from WZZM.

This is basically going to be a two part posts, since it was meant to be two different posts, but I am just going to bundle them together, because I can.

I am presently sitting at the Grand Haven State Park. It is pretty rare that you can find a place with two competing wireless service providers fighting for your dollar. Well, maybe not exactly fighting for it. As you can see AT&T has a hotspot here in the building. But, I am pretty sure they would like to charge you two arms and a leg to use there service, and I believe that they charge an hourly rate.

Luck for me, Azulstar is also in the area. Azulstar is the company that came along and bought out Ottawa Wireless (the company that put up wireless towers all over town to make us the first wireless city in the United States). They have a package that you can sign up for that will give you free 256k wireless anywhere in the city for 60 minutes day. Sound like crap? Well, yeah it kind of is, but the important thing is that the package is free. But, if you are “loaded” and spending the day in Grand Haven, you can get a day pass for $5.95. Not horrible if you ask me.

Now, let’s take a quick second to discuss the new state park passes. Look at that piece of junk just cluttering up my wind shield. The pass on the bottom is the ’05 park pass, and it pretty much what most of them have looked like through out the years. They are classy, and mostly translucent so you can still see through them (an important attribute for your wind shield). Unfortunately, the new ones are not so great.

As you can see, it is opaque, and has some awful gaudy design on it. It is pretty clear that someone in the parks department CLEARLY dropped the ball on this one.

I would like to know what everyone else thinks about the new park passes. It is just me? Or, are they really that bad?

How can you vote for someone that blatantly disregards your wishes?

Do you like that nice yard sign? I know that I do not. My brother and I were quite disappointed to see the thing sticking up in the corner of our lawn Saturday afternoon.

Earlier in the week, the Hewitt campaign called out house asking if they could stick one of their lame ass signs in our yard. Considering how ugly the things are, we told him that we would have to check out their website and make sure we were cool with his platform before we would agree to it.

Then, a couple of days later there it is, just sitting there mocking us. Of course they did this on a Saturday, when there is no one in the office to chew out for their misconduct.

Needless to say, the sign now sits out in the backyard next to the trash cans awaiting our imminent call to campaign headquarters to see what they were thinking.

Politicians, can’t like with them, can’t put them out of your misery.