The weather in NY has been amazing. It was over 70 today.

Everyone was out in short sleeves, getting ready for the warm weather ahead.

Winter? What's that? ">

These kooky musicians were playing real good for free in Washington Square Park yesterday.

 3/19/2010; 5:06:01 PM.   .

I placed two electronics orders this week, one with Crutchfield and one with Amazon.

The Crutchfield order was fraught with difficulty. They asked for some info that Amazon never asked for, and the credit card company gave them trouble. It looked like the order, a TV and soundbar-with-woofer, would be delayed. I said so on Twitter. Even though the TV was a very interesting and totally new product from Sony, and very reasonably priced. Further, Amazon was only taking pre-orders, Crutchfield had it in stock.

At the same time the order I placed on Amazon went through with out a hitch. I praised them on Twitter, and said Crutchfield should try to be more like Amazon.

Heh.

The Crutchfield order, which was far more complex (a 46-inch TV) but not much more expensive than the Amazon one, is complete. And unusually, the Amazon order is lost in UPS hell. It's been "out for delivery" for almost 48 hours. After I paid for 1-day turnaround the best they can offer is they'll refund the $3.99 I paid (how generous of them, he said sarcastically) and say I should wait until the 22nd. Geez if I wanted it that slow I wouldn't have bought it from Amazon.

Sometimes I wonder if they look at their records to see how much I spend with them. It's guys like me that keep them flying First Class instead of coach. Couldn't they arrange a Saturday delivery? Couldn't they call UPS and find out what they did with my delivery?

BTW, I ordered the Fujitsu scanner I wrote up here. It was a total impulse buy. A product I'm paying to review. Nothing more aggravating than an impulse buy that turns into a support issue.

 3/19/2010; 4:44:49 PM.   .

This evening I saw a father and a small boy stopped on stairs leading down to the Chambers Street station in lower Manhattan. The boy was saying he didn't want to go down the stairs. The father was conceding. The boy was scared. Something about going down the stairs freaked him out.

I've seen it before, people frozen as they're about to get on an escalator going down. It's perfectly safe. I do it without thinking. I have no fear. I've even stopped to listen, and offered that there was an elevator to take. Once told of the opportunity, they always go that route.

Something like this happens to me when I have to climb down a ladder from some height. I don't have any trouble going up, it's going down that spooks me. It happened at a rooftop New Years Eve party in San Francisco, the big one on December 31, 1999. After the celebration was over, everyone went down, climbed down the ladder we had gone up, but I just couldn't do it. I stayed up there for an hour, made a bunch of approaches. People below said it's no big deal. I wished they would just go away, and let me do this myself. Finally when they gave up, I slowly put myself over the edge and climbed down, uneventfully. What choice did I have? Believe me, if I had had one, I would have taken it.

No moral of the story. You can't explain irrational fears to people who don't have them, and you can't reason with them either. If you have no choice, eventually you take the leap. If only there was an elevator...

 3/19/2010; 4:25:43 PM.   .