I recently tried a little surprise from Austin, Texas, sold at Trader Joe's supermarket in northern California: Tito's Handmade Vodka. It's the cleanest-tasting vodka I've ever had, and I highly recommend it for those who mix their martinis with vodka rather than gin (I admit to doing both on occasion.)
Like many, I keep a pocketchange bank on my desk, where I throw my end-of-the-day coin shrapnel. Until recently, I'd taken the 8.9% hit on Coinstar exchanges at a local supermarket, since I value my time highly enough not to spend it counting out 6 pounds of coin. A few days ago, I noticed that one of the options on the Coinstar machine allowed for a conversion of my coins to stored value on an anonymous Starbuck's card... with 0% commission. Since I regularly drink Starbuck's coffee - when a Peet's is not convenient - I found this a rather good deal.
I needed to my online investment bank's customer service center, which was given on its website in the form of "800-555-CALL", one of those supposedly helpful mnemonic phone numbers with letters corresponding to digits. Well, my Treo 650 smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard with a digit keypad superimposed on the left side of the board, no 3-letter-to-single-digit DTMF tonepad overlay. I had to dig an old phone out of my "sell on eBay" box to puzzle out my bank's phone number, since they didn't provide a digits-only version of that number.
Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey will be speaking next week at Stanford University, on "Why the prospect of dramatic life extension matters now." Talk will occur Wednesday evening 7:00-8:30 PM, 8 June 2005, at the Clark Center Auditorium. Thanks to Tyler Emerson for forwarding this to me; I do plan to attend.
