24 Hour Fitness membership services suck!

I called 24 Hour Fitness (Parkmoor, San Jose) to inquire about a new membership. The phone conversation went something like this...

Me: Hi, do you guys have membership discounts for IBM employees?

Him: Yes we do. You need to come in and give us your badge number before I can give you a quote based on the agreement we have

Me: OK, I'll give you my badge number now.

Him: You mean like over the phone?

Me: Yeah... (yes, genius, "now" means "here and now, over the phone"... geez)

Him: No I can't do this over the phone. You need to come in.

Me: Why can't you do it over the phone? My badge number is going to be the same whether I tell you over the phone or in person you know.

Him: Cos once I give you a quote, you'll have no incentive to come in.

Me: Alright, forget it then.

Him: *click*

First, this totally stinks of pressure sales. Think car dealerships. Second, he hung up on me. That's just flat out rude. Guess what? I'm not joining 24 Hour Fitness...

Bruce on Spiderman

Bruce Campbell, better known as Ash from the Evil Dead series, said about his role on Spiderman 2:
"I played the 'Snooty Usher,' another pivotal role where I deny Tobey Maguire access to see Kirsten Dunst in her first big play. Where the Green Goblin failed, Snooty Usher prevailed! That's right, my character defeated Spider-Man."
This quote is shamelessly ripped from bruce-campbell.com

And by the way, this dude is so cool in Army of Darkness!

I <heart> GMail!

I've been using gmail for almost 8 months now, and I LOVE IT! It's fast. It's slick. I'm not so sure about the whole labelling thing. I've got my labels working like folders, sort of, but I wish I could have nested folders so I could do something like /Family/Sis and /Family/Dad etc instead of creating labels like FAM_Sis and FAM_Dad. And I wish the search function could find root words or substrings so that I could do a search for "dog" and get "doggie" and "dogs" and "dogma" etc.

Saber

Saber is the only cat to have added me on friendster. I'm sure that deserves some kind of honorable mention.

Saber currently lives with Clara. I'm not sure, but I think Clara claims Saber as a dependent. Or maybe she's just thought about it. Either way, Saber lives a sheltered life under Clara's roof. I think he's a little lonely. I think Clara doesn't spend enough time with him. Poor dude.

Rich Dad Poor Dad... or is it?

I'm in a little of a quandry. When I sat down at my keyboard earlier this evening, I had only intended to write about a Robert Kiyosaki seminar that was happening next month in San Jose, which I wanted to attend. I wanted to put a link up to Kiyosaki's website, so I did a quick google search and came up with this rather interesting piece. I encourage you to read through it. It's long, but it is well backed up by research and definitely worth the time.

So anyway, now I'm lost.

On one hand, after reading Kiyosaki's books, I've found myself paying more attention to where I invest money, and how I think about investment. For that matter, my invest profits skyrocketed once I began becoming more attentive to my investments. On the other hand, the webpage pointed out so many loopholes in Kiyosaki's book that I'm beginning to wonder how much of his advice I can trust.

Right now, I believe that the main strength of Kiyosaki's seminar will be inspiration and ideas and all sorts of intagible little goodies rather than hard solid money earning techniques. As such I'm probably still going to attend the seminar, but only trusting what I feel to be true. You know, use my own common sense and knowledge as my guide. Oh, and research. Lots of it.