Archives January 2004

Check this out if you enjoy flash games, a TON of them here.

It’s been awhile since I fired off a letter to the editor but last night I was motivated to do so. We are big and popular now so f u.

“As a resident of the northeast estates, my wife and I always look forward to the county fair. One of the benefits of living right next to the fairgrounds has been the fair organizers offering free tickets to the residents that live next door. They did this as a courtesy for the increased traffic and noise that is generated by the fair during the 10 days it is running. I stopped by the fair office last night to pick up my tickets for this year.

I explained to the woman I was there to pick up two tickets. She said that the fair was no longer offering free tickets. She said that the event has become very ?popular? and ?big?. Puzzled, I tried to understand why the fair being popular or big had a correlation with extending this courtesy to the residents that border the property. Disappointed, I left and gave my wife the news.

It?s a shame that the fair officials have decided that the event has become popular enough that they no longer need to be good neighbors. We used to visit the fair two or three times during the 10 days. Although our tickets were free, we spend plenty on food, drink and entertainment. Now we will go no more than once. This apparent greed motivated action, may in reality hurt the fair?s bottom line as the residents that have frequented the fair with greatest regularity now stay away. “

Usually in the evenings I have a have a pushup/situp routine I will do. If Nicki is around when I do these she usually sees it as an invitation to rough house and roll around on the floor. Ali took some pictures of her doing just that the other night. Funny stuff.

I’ve been asked before what I am in charge of down here. Basically 120 workstations, 2 unix servers and around 10 Windows 2000 servers. Here are a couple pictures of our computer room.

I have mentioned many times how my house is “wired” Here is a rough layout of my home network and all devices that are connected to it, at last count I have 8 devices on the network which all talk out on the internet. Here is a diagram.

Recently I did some maintenance for a work associate of my wife. He has issues with the computers on his home network, specifically his kids computers being infested with spyware. I used Spybot to kill most of it. Some I had to remove manually. The 11 or 12 year old daughter’s PC had over 400 items classified as spyware. Some of it was the sort that popped up porn in browser windows, really, really bad stuff. All of these kids have aol buddy lists numbering at 100+ members. These kids have no idea of what they are doing when they install stuff like comet cursor, weatherbug or any of the other junk that comes up when you use many of the popular file sharing programs. It’s easy money for me to come in every month or so and clean up the junk but it’s disturbing to see adult material popping up on a little girl’s computer. If I have a kid I would think twice about allowing them to have their own computer in their bedroom.

After a long hiatus, my tivo(s) have been working overtime snagging the reality tv stuff I am currently watching. For whatever reason, once my mom moved out I got hooked into a bunch all at once. When my mom was here, I spent most of my spare time in the evenings doing stuff on my computer. (is that any better?) Currently I have season passes for My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, Average Joe Hawaii, Celebrity Mole, The Apprentice, & American Idol. Survivor All-Stars premieres after the Super Bowl so add that to the list. Having these programs on the tivo allows us to watch them in third less amount of time of watching it live so that is a small consolation. I am not sure how I exactly got pulled back into it so heavy. However I do have to laugh at people that scoff at reality tv that when asked what they watch, come back with Friends, ER, Queer Eye etc… To me, TV is TV regardless if you are watching sports, soaps, sitcoms, movies or documentaries. It’s entertainment, plain and simple. Now if you tell me instead of watching tv you are reading a book, going to the gym, studying or doing a hobby you have one up on me. If you are simply on a different channel, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on. Do most of us need to watch less TV? Sure. It’s a big part of the overall problem our society has with health & fitness. We eat the wrong stuff and way too much of it and then pile into the couch while we rest our full bellies and stare at the tv for hours each night. Not a prescription for health. This could lead into all sorts of other thoughts I have on the subject but suffice it to say we are in trouble , as we reap what we sow, the problem will snowball into all areas of society. So anyway, once these shows are over, I will again vow to cut back my viewing to minimums, honest, I will, I hope….. My name is shawn and I am a TV addict.

Last night I made my return to the sport of volleyball after a 5 month hiatus. Evidently they start earlier than they did before so when I got to the gym, they were just about ready to start so I jumped right into the game without getting a chance to warm up at all. It was ugly. The first 2 or 3 games were really , really ugly. Attempted passes caromed of my forearms like foul balls, attempted hits were into the net or mistimed and hit weakly. We were playing a team entirely made up of mexicans. The tallest one may have been 5’9″ or 5’10” but they were fast, wicked fast. If the ball was in the air they got it. I took a dive on the court that made me literally see stars and took a short serve I didn’t get in the family jewels which froze me for a few secs. We played 5 or 6 games, we lost every one but the last one. By the end I was actually performing the basic skills ok and had more good plays than bad. It was a lot of fun. I am sore today as my body is not used to volleyball movements anymore so I’ll have to work through that. I have 2 matching bruises on my forearms as well.

Last night, Nicki had bad gas. Paint stripping gas. I took her out multiple times but she did not want to do a number 2. Ok, I figure if she had to go, she would so we put her to bed. At 2:15am I hear her crying loudly. I fear the worst and my fears are confirmed as the smell of dog shit hits me as I open the bedroom door. She has shit her crate again. Not as terrible as episode one but plenty nasty. I pull her dog pillow out and lug it outside carefully, trying to not get excrement anywhere else. As I am outside hosing off the pillow case, Alison comes out asking what was up. I didn’t even have to speak, she just had to look at my disgusted face. I hosed it off best I could and we took it inside to throw it in the laundry. As I am coming out of the laundry room Nicki squats in the living room and pisses on the floor! I freak out. WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!! I scream at her as she scurries away and cowers in fear. So now Alison works on the urine as I take Nicki outside so she can finish up. By the time we are done with the clean up it’s 3 am. Back to bed and attempt to fall back asleep. I may have gotten an hour of sleep the rest of the night.

To top off the sleepless night, the commute to work was horrific. The god damn dump trucks clogged the road as far as I could see. The commute took a shade under under an hour and a half. Every intersection was clogged, there was no way around it. I was a half hour late to work. It can only get better from here, hopefully.

Evidently Tatoo had multiple talents. See?

One of my projects at work is to update Double Take, a disaster recovery software we run, to the latest version. We currently are running 4.2.something, the upgrade will take us to 4.3.something. On the support site it said to call before you upgraded if you were running certain versions, all the versions listed were newer than ours. So I thought it would be wise to call. Got Joe Shmoe tech support guy, told him I was calling because I wanted to put the latest and greatest on our systems. He confirmed my version. After a brief delay, he came back with “With a version as old as yours we recommend you uninstall the app and reinstall it with the new version” I said to him “Hmmm, I can’t simply upgrade it????” Thinking to myself, WHAT THE F? It is only 4.2 to 4.3 it requires an uninstall??!! He replies “Yes that is what we recommend because of all the changes” Fine, I hang up and thank him even though I don’t know why. I proceed to take screen shots of all my settings so I can rebuild the structure and run the uninstall. I need to reboot so that has to wait till this evening and then tomorrow I have to reinstall it from scratch. Later I was having an internal conversation and wondered why I didn’t simply try to run the upgrade anyway? I mean what was the worst that could have happened, I would have had to reinstall from scratch which is what I am doing anyway! Stupid….

I have been known to post unflattering pictures of people from time to time. So to be fair here is a silly one of me from Green Bay. I look really drunk but in reality I think I am more sleepy than drunk.

I saw an incredible new invention on the way back from the gym today! A full size remote control car! Well not really, but that is exactly what it looked like following this vehicle. It was late model Mercury Sable driven by an old lady who was so tiny that you could see absolutely none of her from behind, not even a tuft of purple hair, just 2 headrests. It looked like the car was driving itself, slowly, down the road. Funny as hell.

This weekend was the definition of nice. Before I forget, let me get the negative rant out of the way. This morning I am behind a woman putting on her makeup in the car. Not just while she was stopped, AS SHE WAS DRIVING. She had her rear view mirror turned so she could use it as her beauty mirror (ironic cause she was an overweight middle aged woman that looked liked Julia Childs) She was styling her hair and applying facial makeup as she drove in the passing lane of the road. Needless to say I was infuriated. As soon as I got a chance I passed this idiot. Unfortunately she wasn’t looking at me as I mouthed DONT DO YOUR MAKEUP IN THE F’IN CAR when I passed her. I mean come on, get a clue.

On Saturday I got up without an alarm at 5:30 am so I could get into work to do some stuff I had been putting off for awhile. It went well and I was done in less than 3 hours. So I was home before 10 am and ripped right into the cleaning duties. We knocked that out quickly.

Since we moved into the house we have had an idea of how we wanted our house to be utilized. We wanted to use one spare bedroom as a nice guest room, the other for hobbies, crafts and as a secondary guest room. It’s been about 2 and a half years and we still hadn’t gotten things under control to where we could do this. Finally this weekend we got it all setup. In order to do this required us getting the outside shed to store junk, my mom moving out to clear up that room, and then on Saturday we went and got a decent but inexpensive computer desk for myself at Wal-mart that allowed us to setup both of our old ones in the craft/hobby room. Our day didn’t end till close to midnight by the time we got done moving all the crap around and assembling the new desk. The new layout is great! Hopefully we can keep things in order. We are gathering stuff for a flea market and our new motto is if we buy something new, we get rid of something old.

We also found time to watch Finding Nemo saturday evening. It was a good flick but I don’t know that it was good enough to me to understand why it did HUGE box office numbers. Enjoyable but nothing outstanding for me.

Sunday was my first football-less day in 4 months. Luckily Sunday was near perfect weather, mid 70’s, blue skies and low humidity. Just going out on the lanai, sitting in the sun and realizing that it is the end of January can make you forget even something as dramatic as the impending end to football season. I finally conquered my Tivo project on Sunday. I am now able to run my second Tivo independently using tv listings that are downloaded off the internet. If Tivo used good sense and offered customers with multple DVR’s a discount on their service for multiple household dvr’s I would have never investigated this option. However there was no way I could justify paying close to 30 bucks a month just to have two Tivo’s download the same tv guide data. It is one of the most involved and complicated hacks I have tackled, it’s good to have it behind me.

Sunday afternoon I came up with the idea to take Nicki to the dog park. We have talked about doing this for months but never got around to it. Nicki needs socialization. Whenever she meets someone or some new dog she cowers in fear and immediately retreats. The dog park is a beautiful large fenced in area with benches, water stations and tennis balls lying around everywhere. When we first got there she was terrified as normal. It was comical, when dogs would approach, Nicki would retreat to a bench and hop onto it, almost like what you imagine with women and rats. It was quite entertaining. We stayed almost an hour and a half. By the end she still wasn’t participating in the dog games but at least she would let the other mutts come up and sniff her without jumping on the bench. We will just have to keep taking her to these sort of places till she relaxes.

Got in my first rc plane flight in weeks. It was a high speed acrobatic fest in relatively high winds. I zigged when I should have zagged and put it into a tree at high speed but it came out unscathed. I was able to reattach the battery and chuck it right back into the sky.

Tonight I am planning to head to the community center to kick off my 2004 volleyball campaign. 5-6 years ago volleyball was such an integral part of my life. Back then I could not imagine not playing for 6 months at a time. But that is exactly what I have done and not even thought twice about it. I’m hoping to stay more consistent with it again. It’s good exercise, quenches my competitive thirst and is a good way to meet people. I get to break in one of my 3 new volleyballs too. 🙂

Naples, FL 59…77 F
Reading, PA* 11…20 F

There are certain things in life that you think “Why in the F did they do that?” One such thing struck me today after passing a Saturn Ion. Apparently Saturn has adopted the center instrument gauge cluster idea. What is the point of this? I believe Toyoyta started this a couple years ago on one of their “Speck” cars. Is it just to be different? Do up and comers think it is cool to have the passengers be able to read the speedometer? I mean why would you put the instrument cluster anywhere except IN FRONT of the person driving the vehicle???? Some of the stupidest engineering I have seen in recent automotive history. Of course auto engineers also thought the Pacer was a futuristic vehicle.