Bat-Man Comes to the Inn

February 8th, 2009

Well, I thought I had seen just about everything…until Bat-Man checked in!

He was probably in his 70s and un-married, a retired engineer he said. He walked up to the desk to check in, and when I looked up I almost lost it. He had these clear plastic bat-wings sticking out of the sides of his head.

Earglasses made of clear plastic

Earglasses made of clear plastic

We aren’t always too polite and discrete at the Naugas Inn, so it wasn’t long before somebody asked him what the heck those things were. He said they are Earglasses, a non-electronic hearing aid. He said they work just like if you cup your hand behind your ear, in order to hear a faint sound. He said they only cost $10 a pair, and don’t make strange sounds or need batteries like normal hearing aids.

He said he likes them, but knows that they make him look more than a little odd. He has regular electronic hearing aids for more formal situations, and uses his Earglasses mostly in private.

Bat-Man was a perfectly well behaved guest, and we wished him well when he checked out two days later.

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Carbonite Not Backing Up Videos

January 31st, 2009

We had a guest from the MidWest last night, a guy who sells computer hardware. He wondered how we backup our operating data here at the Inn. I told him that our needs are pretty modest…we use an external hard drive, and also use Carbonite online backups.

He asked if we knew that Carbonite does not back up videos. I said I didn’t know that, and wasn’t sure I believed it.

So, he said “Go to your computer and double click the “Carbonite Backup Drive” icon on the desktop. Open the “Backed Up Files” folder and look for one of your videos. I went to a DVD folder that contains an old converted home video. Inside were two folders, VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS. The TS folder was very small, less than 1 MB.

He said, “Did you tell Carbonite to backup all your videos?” “Yes,” I replied, “months ago I selected the My Videos folder on my computer and selected the Backup option in Carbonite.”

“Now, look at that same VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive.” I did, and it was 4 GB! Carbonite had backed up the folder, but very little of what was inside it!

This was a big surprise, a very big surprise! I thought everything was safely stored offsite, but it wasn’t.

He said he thinks it’s possible to get Carbonite to back up videos, but that it takes a lot of manual configuring. Neither quick nor intuitive.

I’m not sure where we go from here, I guess I need to send those DVDs to my aunt in New Jersey for safekeeping.

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The HoLAP Prostate Cure that Our Guest Wants

January 20th, 2009

We are accustomed to complaints from guests. The room is too hot, the neighbors are too noisy, I saw a little bitty insect in the room night before last, etc. Most guests never complain, because we run a good inn, but some others just worry us almost to death.

Yesterday we had a new complaint, one never before heard. An older male guest complained about the urinals in the lobby restroom. He said that they are always full of water, so you could hear him urinate. “So?,” I asked.

He said that he has benign prostate hyperplasia, or BPH, which causes his urine stream to be “thin.” He said that the sound of this thin stream hitting the water was embarrassing whenever there was another man in the restroom. He wants us to replace the urinals with the type with no pool of water in the bottom, so there will be no audio when he pees.

Of course, we can’t do this…at least not in the few remaining days while he is here as a guest. I apologized to our guest, and he replied that it would not be a problem long. He said he is going to have the HoLAP prostate laser treatment soon for his enlarged prostate, and that will cure the problem.

He said that HoLAP BPH is the newest and greatest treatment option for BPH enlarged prostrate. He said it uses a holnium laser to blast away tissue inside the prostate gland, so the urethra (pee tube) opens up and he can urinate normally.

This was almost more than I wanted to know, and I told him to let me know how the HoLAP prostate cure works out.

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The Time Capsule Guy

December 18th, 2008

Things have been kind of slow lately, with the economy seeming to reduce the number of guests at the Naugas. We did have one unusual character last week, a guy who researches time capsules.

He said that there are two major problems with time capsules…people lose track of them, and the things they contain are not that interesting.

For example, he said he knows of a time capsule buried in a concrete tunnel wall at the University of Texas. He said it is just outside their Blanton Museum of Art, way deep underground. He said you can find photos of its location on the web at http://www.swopnet.com/time_capsule.html, but he does not know if that is recorded anywhere else.

When he said that the time capsule isn’t to be opened until 2103, I kind of lost interest. If we are lucky, the economy will have picked up by then.

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The Reverse-Talk Visitor…rotisiV klaT-esreveR ehT

December 10th, 2008

We had an unusual guest, that we nicknamed The Reverse Talk Guy. He actually wasn’t that unusual, but he had an unusual idea. That idea was that everything we say has meaning if it’s heard in reverse. In other words, if I were to say a few sentences to you and you recorded them, then played them back in reverse, you would be able to determine what was really on my mind from words (mainly single-syllable words) that you would hear.

He said he learned about this phenomenon at Reverse Speech International. He said they have lots of samples of reverse speech on their website, everything from an 1877 photograph recording through the Apollo 11 moon landing audio.

Al gave him a pretty hard time, they thought he was crazy. Me, I was just happy that he didn’t sign his name backwards on the credit-card slip.

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Our Motivated Guest

December 4th, 2008

We had a guest at the Naugas who was all excited about a motivational seminar he had attended a few days earlier. He said it was very…motivational.

He said that the speakers included Suzy Orman, Gen. Colin Powell, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar.

He mentioned that General Powell is a comedian (who would have known!) and that Ziglar is now ailing due to a fall at his home.

The thing that surprised this guest was that so many people bought the ‘how and when to use covered calls to beat the stock market’ package that was for sale by Phil Towne. All the experts say that you can’t time the market, but he said that (literally) thousands of people lined up to pay $100 each for the covered-calls course (plus $600/year subscription to a necessary additional service, plus potential upsells).

He said that there was also a presentation about how to protect your assets against lawsuits, but that he already knew all that stuff from the Asset-Protection-Trust.us website.

Anyway, our guest paid less than $10 to go to the motivational seminar and said it was well worth it.

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Two More Unique Websites

November 22nd, 2008

Here are a couple more unusual websites that I found.

The first is BoomerHotties.com. It is like HotOrNot.com, except for photos of hot baby boomers. Mainly women, but I guess they could have photos of boomer guys, too. In this case, Boomer means Baby Boomer and Hotties means…hot. Some of them look pretty hot, some definitely not.

The other site is AspartameLawsuit.org, which is for folks who have used aspartame artificial sweetener and plan to join an aspartame class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer. They believe, perhaps justifiably, that aspartame causes disease and they need to have a class-action lawsuit to receive compensation or some other benefit.

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Strange Little Online Stores

November 22nd, 2008

I was surfing the web and came across a curious collection of little stores…the ecrater stores.

One of them was yearbooks.ecrater.com. Boy, talk about a specialized bookstore! All they sell is high school and college yearbooks, alumni directories, football programs and the like.

Another was MakeMoneyOnline.ecrater.com. They have a book on how to sell on eBay and Amazon, as well as how to set up your own online store and sell direct to buyers.

The last was downloads.ecrater.com. The site says they have Music, Video, Movies, Games, Software to download, but I couldn’t actually find much worth downloading. Maybe they are new.

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Avandia Patient Stays at the Inn

November 19th, 2008

I had a dream that went something like this:

We had a guest a few days ago who made an impression on us. Her name was Helen, and she was from New York. Probably about 50 years old. She was warm, funny and smart…everybody liked her. The sad thing about Helen was that she could hardly get around. She said she had congestive heart failure, and she believed that a diabetes medicine named Avandia had contributed to it. She could only walk about 30 seconds, then she had to sit down and rest.

Helen said that she had started taking Avandia about a year ago, and at the time her heart was fine. But within a few weeks she noticed herself getting winded, and her doctor diagnosed congestive heart failure. She immediately quit taking Avandia in order to prevent the heart disease from getting worse. She said there was so much fluid overload and edema, she had to sit up while sleeping. She said her doctor diagnosed hypertension (high blood pressure) in the blood vessels of the lungs.

She said that Avandia has been implicated in heart problems (congestive heart failure, heart attacks) in other people, and she is hoping to get in a class action lawsuit against Glaxo, the manufacturer.

She told us that a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine had found that Avandia increased the risk of heart attack by over 40 per cent.

She believes the Food and Drug Administration, under the Bush administration, has leaned too far toward helping the drug companies and not enough toward safety.

Of course, she may win the class action lawsuit, but is it worth it if she loses her life due to heart attack?

Then I woke up, and realized it had all been a dream.

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The Battle for American Auto Makers

November 17th, 2008

We had an interesting debate at the bar last night, over whether or not the government should bail out the American automobile manufacturers. One guy said “heck no” (or something like that), the companies and the UAW have foolishly locked themselves into making giant, fuel-gulping cars that nobody wants. Survival of the fittest, let them sink.

The other guy said that the first guy had it all wrong. He said that the Big 3 lose money making small cars but (normally) make a big profit on big SUVs, so they are doing exactly what any smart corporation should do…maximize profits.

I noticed that they both arrived in imported cars.

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