Day 498

I had to renew my storage warehouse space for another year today and once again they raised the rate on my room. When I asked why they had to raise the rate every single year, the manager laughed and said I was getting off easy. "Your rate didn't go up nearly as much as some people's did this year," she said. I must have looked puzzled, so she explained "We price these units now by how much demand there is for particular units. If you have a popular size space, or are in a desirable part of the building, you're rate will go up faster than other spaces. "So, storage units are kind of like copper, or coffee, or gasoline," I said. "That's right," said the manager. "We haven't priced by the square foot for quite a while." "But you're lucky," she added. "You don't happen to have a very popular unit.

What's this world coming to? I read the other day that McDonalds doesn't have fixed prices anymore either. Prices for your Big Mac and Happy Meal go up or down on a daily basis now, based on prices in the commodities market. If the price of beef futures goes up, your burger will instantly reflect the increase. It appears that everything we buy is starting to be priced just like gasoline.

The external mic I'm going to be using with my little blogging camera at the trade show arrived today. I plugged it in and instantly noticed a big problem. Even though the sales guy promised it would work perfectly, the microphone sends out a mic level signal and the camera was expecting a much stronger line level signal. Now, I'm going to have to go out and buy a little battery powered mixer to boost the mic signal. Also, I discovered that my camera records sound at 48 khz, while all my music samples are recorded at 44.1 khz. Not a huge problem, but it means one additional step in getting the files ready to upload. Sometimes technology just drives me crazy.

At least there's nothing high-tech about dog training class. It's just a leash and a dog. Sometimes those two simple elements can be just as perplexing as the most sophisticated digital camera though. Tonight all Dash wanted to do was play with the small dogs. All I wanted to do was get back inside, because my allergies were killing me. As a result, we could hardly walk in a straight line. Throughout the evening, the other class members kept giving me tips on how to improve our performance. Jeez, couldn't they see we just needed to be left alone. Luckily, class only lasts an hour.

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