Christmas is over, time to redeem your itunes gift card and find that song you heard!

Hi ya, Yes I am actually alive. Had an awesome Christmas hanging out with the family. Many stories and hilarious antics - as usual if you knew my family! So getting back to the usual grind again, cleaning up the house and disposing of christmas decorations yet dealing with 70 degree weather! This is utter insanity in the Boston area! I'm gleefully wearing flip-flops today. Is the weather aware that it's January 6th???? It's utterly unbelievable and I'm horridly un-anticipating our first major dig-out... It's got to be coming to sock us really good one of these days.

So anyhow... I was tinkering on itunes redeeming my christmas gift cards and figured the three people who will stumble by this may not know about my favorite itunes feature. You can actually browse local radio station playlists in your area. I utterly love this thing! I can't even explain how much and how smart I think this feature is. You see... even though I have a kickin' little radio system in my robin's spiled car that displays the title and artist of the song playing on the radio... a) not all stations do this yet, uh... duh, which just drives me bonkers, and b) I never cease to annoy myself by not remembering when I said (to myself, assuredly out loud, all alone) "Oh, I really need to remember that one so I can ipod it." So this wonderful little feature saves me from remembering one more useless "to do" for the day. (no, saving my life is drastic, I exaggerate, but it gives me amazingly great pleasure)

So what you do is... Go to the quick links over to the upper right side of the itunes store home. Here you will see "Browse." Now, once it switches to the browse screen, to the top left is your categories: Charts, Radio Charts, Audiobooks etc. Charts gives you the billboard charts (ohh, chills thinking about listening to Casey Kasem (check out his real name) and the top 40 - hee hee.
So... the cool feature, tada! Radio Charts. Select this one and move to the next box to choose your city. You then see all the radio stations in your area that you can look at. WOOOHOOO! And so solves the mystery of what was that stupid song you heard on the way to work that you wanted to remember but can only hum a little bit of. Lata'!

The Helpful Braille Snack Machine

The duh design award of the day goes to whomever designed this one! I should really come up with some sort of logo/certificate to hand out. Anyway... A woman I work with comes over to my desk hardly able to contain her giggling. Of course she comes to me knowing I raise the stupid flag in laughter a lot and I am going to get what she's about to tell me immediately. See, we've just moved in to a newly outfitted floor in our building complex and they put in a brand new snack machine for us in the kitchen. Nice! Well... this wonderful new snack machine has braille on the buttons of the number pad. Now, one of the guys, upon hearing our conversation of "Oh My God Robin, come look, there's braille on the snack machine!" smartly says "well yea, blind people need snacks too!" (Smart butt's about to get kicked.) My friend and I respond to his logical thought of the day with laughing even harder at him! So we take him over to the machine to take a little look-see.

Yes, so very nice of them to put braille on the snack machine for the 3 o'clock hungry blind person, who, um, can't see by the way. We ask him... Ok, How would a blind person know what's IN THE MACHINE? How would they pick their snack? Oh logical snack machine creators, do tell us your thoughts on this one! Our friend stares at us. Thinking logically, he goes "OH! I bet if you punch in a number it will tell you what's in that slot." Good thinking! That would solve knowing what's in there and since it changes frequently, that makes sense. He tries to punch in some numbers. For instance, 111 is the first slot. Ding #2, oh logical snack designer who did not use letters and numbers like A1. No dice, the machine doesn't talk and there's no way 111 makes any sense as the first slot number to try. It does however helpfully display .60 on the extremely contrasted little LED display. (That will help them see it!) Seriously?!? What were they thinking on this one?

So the moral of the story is... a)We laugh a lot at work! and b)If you're at work and you're blind and snack hungry, you can't eat actually eat anything unless someone else is with you, pretty much at least once a week, but... we're oh so thankful they were kind enough to let you play the slots with a number pad.

So my thought for the day is... blind people HAVE to be or learn to be smarter than the sighted! P.S. Check out something that makes me laugh every time I see it. Next time you pull up to a drive through ATM machine, look down at the braille on the key pad.
Lata'