I was going through some old estrip backup files and found so much stuff. Here are some of the banners I had made for the old site back from 2003-2007.

Walking home from lunch today we saw Zooey and Vanessa driving by. Then I got home and was going through out old backup hardrives to move the data to SSD and I found these cute pics. She was so little.

Dear Reader,
You will never believe this situation. As I outlined in (e:paul,59727) I have been pretty down with my eragem.com sapphire wedding ring being broken. With my birthday coming up, I kept harassing (e:terry) and (e:joe) about getting me a replacement ring. Of course the one I found was too expensive to be reasonable but to try and make me happy, they decided to call and see if they could bargain a bit.

(e:joe) told Michael from eragem.com about the story and he felt awful about the situation. I would have thought maybe we would bargain down on the ring price, but he went ahead offered to send the ring as a free replacement. He also said he would help look for a new sapphire for me . I really couldn't believe it when the doorbell rang and the ring was here this morning as he overnighted it!

Here was the email from Michael at Eragem.


And this was my response.


Here is the ring on my finger





Here was the text of the emails so that they are searchable

Hello Joe and or Paul,

I was sad when I read in the post that my reply to the email that was sent about the stone cracking was not received. I know that emails/replies from my @eragem.com address are sometimes caught in spam filters so I hope you will check back in your email to find my original reply. (I included a forwarded copy of our original reply below)

I am very glad that you came back to our company even after your experience to find something else that was of interest to you and even offered a very fair price for it, not taking into account all that happened previous.

You coming back gave me the opportunity to send you the diamond ring free of charge and hopefully leave you with a better feeling about my company. I will also continue to look for a replacement stone for the original ring.

Sapphires are one of the more durable gemstones. Star sapphires are normally kept as stars because they are more heavily included and often things like natural fractures and larger internal inclusions aren't fully removed from the stone, especially from the underside, all which can make them somewhat more fragile. They should still be very durable but even diamonds can break. When any gemstone is set in a heavy ring it greatly increases its likelihood of being damaged because of the force inertia behind the weight of the ring all gets transferred into the stone and focused on the precise point the stone makes contact with a hard surface.

I hope the new ring will be worn with good feeling until we can find a good sapphire replacement, which I hope happens soon. I wear a star sapphire as well so I know how nice they are to have on hand.

Michael,
The ring is so amazing. I seriously cannot thank you enough for this. You have gone above and beyond my wildest expectations as a shop owner and I will continue to do business with you for other jewelry as well as tell everyone I know how satisfied with your shop I am.

When I got home from work tonight I will post a update to my blog describing the very satisfactory update to the situation along with pictures of the ring.

I look forward to hearing from you if you can find a similar sapphire for the other ring.

Thank you again for you help.

I love android and all my google products. I even wear a watch but for some incredibly unbelieve reason they have omitted the ability to starta hangout from the google voice command.

Why can't I say, "Ok Google, send a message to John Doe" and have it auto choose hangouts instead of SMS. It seems like hangouts should just be the default. At least give me the option to say, "OK Google start a hangout with John Doe"

Its so crazy because you can in fact reply to a hangout, just not start one. Its almost more work to write all these disclaimers about how it doesn't work than to just fix it.

Some things you can’t do with Hangouts on Android Wear

Keep in mind that you can't do certain things with Hangouts on your watch that you could do on your phone.

Start a new Hangouts conversation. You can only reply to a Hangouts message you received.
Start a group Hangout or add a person to a conversation
Start a video call
Share your mood
Send a multimedia message
Sign out of Hangouts

How are they missing out on this? You would think google programmers could fix this in like 30 seconds but it hasn't been available since the watches came out. UGH.

This is in response to (e:uchina,59740).

Imagine if you could text message chopsticks based on the history of what she had written and a computer program to approximate her responses. Would it satisfy you more than the medium?

I never really thought about being able to be recreated at the level portrayed in a recent Black Mirror episode but now I think about it all the time.

I know its long but just watch it, you will appreciate it.



I feel so jealous when I think about the kids a generation or two from now that will have most of their lives available in HD VR format during the same time that most of my earlier memories will just vanish into senility. I guess they can't embellish the way i will be able to when I am elderly.

I wish so bad that I could have digitally recorded my Nonna talking to me in VR before she died. Something that you could share with other people and revisit.

I have just about no images from all my crazy adventures as a high school and undergrad college student. Its kills me that I spent a long while in Africa in fall of 1997 and traveled to my families ancestral farm in italy and have no pictures of any of it. If I didn't have some clothing I bought there I would start to doubt I even went.

Many of the images I do have from earlier periods are just images of some landscape. It funny how those things seemed so important when I took the photos, to show to people who I thought could never see those things - but now just about any landscape can be found on google now whereas pictures of the people you care about, frozen in time can not be.

Now I wish I took more pictures of the people I was with and more video.
(e:Terry) hates being in photo and video. Its a miracle I managed this video of us on our trip around America in the summer of 2000. It seems like lifetimes ago.



At the same time at some point it become an issue of quantity. If you 1 to 1 ratio recorded everything that happens in your life, it would take 1 entire lifetime to review it.

Sadly, I censor a huge part of my life now for no good reasons. I basically have turned my journal into a shell of food and dancing reviews. I figure I can pick back up in a post-retirement expose style.