I wrote about Pray At The Pump about a month ago, and now they’re claiming victory. They believe their prayers have actually caused the price of gas to drop:

“We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying,” Mr Twyman said. “Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri.”

This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing “We shall overcome,” they changed the words of the well-known hymn to “We’ll have lower gas prices”.

I can’t wait to see what they’re going to pray for next.

I am still waiting for it to be a good day. Not that I have much faith in a Monday morning at work, but ya gotta try. I felt exhausted all day yesterday and nothing seemed able to give me a boost towards getting into the day, not even pure laziness and sloth.

I went to Tonic for breakfast and I think my usual/favorite server must have gotten a new job or be on vacation. My last two times there, I was served by very “cute” girl servers that were kinda… bad. Yesterday was the worse of my two experiences though as I was seated, order taken, cups filled once and from them on, I didn’t see my server again. No refills on coffee or water, no “how is everything?”, nada. I sat for a good 20 minutes after I was finished with the meal before she came over and said “can I get you anything else?” I admit that I did not tip well, and considering the amount of attention she paid to me, she probably thinks I’m an asshole for doing so. But this is one reason that I hate eating alone: you often get horrible service. Tables of 4 and 6 that were seated after me were getting more service and attention–and actual coffee refills. I wasn’t hungover or anything, but still you don’t nurse 8 ounces of coffee for an entire meal, sheesh.

After breakfast I headed home to find out that our building is now completely elevator-less. We normally have 2 working, if slightly glitchy, elevators so when one goes down it’s not the end of the world. But one had been down for at least a week with no acknowledgment from the condo board and the remaining working elevator was the more glitchy of the two. The doors hold open longer than normal, sometimes refusing to close at all on some floors. If you didn’t have experience with the car, you’d have thought it was broken. Well… now it is. When I tried to leave for breakfast, the car was just traveling to the called floor and then returning to the lobby without opening the doors. When I got back from breakfast, it wasn’t moving at all, and as I walked up the 7 flights of stairs to my apartment, I noticed that every single floor’s elevator call buttons were lit up. This morning, they were still lit up and the one on my floor was fairly hot to the touch. And still we’ve had no e-mails or posted notice from the condo board. I won’t go so far as to say they suck but… right now their level of response does.

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I don’t want to rock the boat too much because I’d love for this type of weather in August to become the norm. It was too nice to stay indoors today so Kyle and I headed out and about. Our main goals were museums, but the way it felt outside, anywhere and everywhere was fair game. Got quite a bit of walking in, and made appropriate stops for food and iced drinks.

I have been way too guilty of staying in on the weekends citing “it’s too hot” as the reason for staying in, but it was nice to get out and see stuff. Especially in areas of the city I haven’t been to in a while. The building at 1110 Vermont Avenue is friggin’ amazing with singing poles. And walking past nclud’s building makes me think I need a new job. They had board games and a Wii in there!

There’s going to be drinking later on, but for now I’m happy to have a little break from all the walking and perhaps a little nap before beginning the evening.

I don’t watch “Root of All Evil” and have no plans to start, but I might have to keep catching the good snippets online. In general I’m noticing that a lot of the “bigger” blogs are starting to have more and more crackdowns on their comment areas, but the “biggest” ones are still subject to a complete lack of moderation. Especially when they think that a self-moderated community is a working concept. A recent xkcd strip suggests a solution that, while it wouldn’t fix anything, it might make it easier to deal with.

Thankfully, I have a good filter for spam on this site even though it can be a little aggressive from time to time. But I am so glad that I’ve never had a First! comment (don’t you dare) or had someone calling something totally gay, though that latter would actually fit in just fine here.

With the slow evolution of net/lol-speak into the accepted vernacular, I have to wonder how long it will take before the intra-office e-mails start to show signs of it. That would be scary… and hilarious!

[video seen at Adventures in Troubleshooting]

I should have listened sooner, really. A few years back, when Tom still worked in my office, he suggested a pair of Shure headphones to go with my iPod. Advising that they were expensive, but worth it. I think I was both cheap and lazy at the time and I never bothered making the upgrade. Plus Apple came out with the radio upgrade for the phones and then I upgraded my iPod in timely enough fashion that I always had a good new set on hand. Then came the iPhone… the device is still amazing, but the headphones are for utter crap. After a third set started to fail on me, I sought help from Fredo for a replacement. The Shure name came up again and I went for it.

I got the SE110 model and these things are amazing. I read the words “sound isolating” on the box, but I wasn’t really thinking about it:

Comfortable sound isolating sleeves block over 90 percent of ambient noise. Combined with the compact design and a modular cable, interruptions from the outside world are minimized, enabling you to focus on your music.

I didn’t get them “properly” fitting for a while because they come with 2 styles of ear inserts in three sizes and it took me a while to realize which were the best fit and comfort for me, but they are not kidding about that 90%. It was just me and my music and the outside world no longer seemed relevant and blissfully so. They still scare me a little bit, and these are not the kind of things that one should wear when walking through DC after dark because you really don’t hear anything outside of your player. Also when riding metro, I turn my music off from time to time so I don’t end up not knowing that the Green Line train I’m on isn’t stopping at Columbia Heights… again*.

Combined with the Music Phone Adapter, I love ‘em though navigating the longer cord plus no longer having my mic/button closer to my mouth is a bit weird. That doesn’t much matter since I’m kinda old-fashioned and still like taking calls on the phone like it’s a phone, holding it up to my ear and all. Besides, in this day and age, who actually uses their phone to make phone calls anymore?

* It’s happened like 4 times now Metro, get your sh☆t together.