Yep this is being sent from my Treo. I am passing the time while Ali works out.
I saw something funny today. There was an SUV that had a Yankees tow hitch cover. Not very funny. What was funny was the full size, straw bristled, broom tied below it. I could only assume it was to be symbolic of the Yankees sweep of the Red Sox in Fenway. Wow that is hardcore, in your face, smack.
Well as usual, the forecasters swung and missed on Ernesto. They said it was supposed to be free and clear of out area by 1pm yesterday, instead it stalled as it came over Florida and dumped 4 and a half inches of rain at our house. When we got home practically all areas of our property other than the mound the house is build on was underwater. A big soggy mess. At one point last night we got over and inch of rain in an hour. All clear now, hopefully things start to dry out, some of our landscaped stuff is underwater. Most trees/plants don’t take kindly to having their roots underwater for extended periods of time.
I spent a lot of time getting stuff on my Treo last night. I pulled across all the numbers I had in my Nokia phone. I installed a few games and apps. My coolest experience was remote controlling a server from my Treo using RDP. It is just too cool.
Well even though Ernesto was forecast to not be very severe, last night I went around outside in a light rain and picked stuff up. Yesterday at this time we were assuming the office would be closed today. Then yesterday afternoon the word was we would open at 1pm, then after work yesterday I got a call that we would be open at 8 like normal. I was pissed last night as I looked at the forecast and at 8 am the storm was basically going to be on top of us. I thought it was pretty stupid to force the employees to be on the road at that time of day.
Well I woke up this morning and the first thing I noticed was we had power, a good thing. I took Nicki out and there was no rain, but some gusty wind, nothing more than we see with our daily summer thunderstorms. They closed all the schools so the drive in was pretty empty. We drove through some steady rain but again nothing bad. The radar image looks like the major precipitation is right below us so we should be getting dumped on shortly.
It was funny watching the weather forecasters last night talking about the storm in almost a disappointed manner that it didn’t strengthen into something more news worthy. Oh well I’m glad it didn’t turn into something worse.
So yesterday I started looking into how I could enlist my brother-in-laws discarded Treo into service as my cell phone. Originally I had wild ideas about transferring it to Verizon (from Sprint) since they both use CDMA networks. I read about hacks to make it work although it seemed like a major hassle. Since the phone is on the Sprint network that already put a shadow of doubt in my mind about my ability to get it online for me. Well just for the hell of it I decided to call up Sprint and see if it was possible to transfer the phone from my brother-in-law to me. Well I’ll be damned, it can be done, I just need to get him to start the process. We were worried about him having to pay an early termination fee on the phone but doing a transfer eliminates that issue.
So we had a 3 way conversation going with me, my brother-in-law and the Sprint rep on the line. It took awhile but eventually we got the phone switched to me AND 
my current cell number transferred to it. Within an hour the change had taken effect! I was really amazed. I mean this was Sprint after all, they had to f it up. Plus I am getting a really sweet deal on the package, for voice and data access it only comes to 46 bucks a month which is what I paid for straight voice service on my boring Nokia phone. It is about 50 bucks a month less than what we pay for Ali’s Treo on Verizon! The only downside is I have to pay an early termination fee to Cingular but it isn’t all that much. It almost seems too good to be true. Of course the first thing I did was fire up the web browser and load my blog.
I have to give credit where credit is due, this may be the first time I ever had a positive customer service experience with Sprint. I will be tricking the Treo out over the next few weeks. Oh yea it has a camera as well so I will be able to snap pics of things that before I could only describe from memory.
The Eagles pulled a great trade yesterday getting Dante Stallworth for Mark Simoneau and a 4th round pick. Stallworth is a speedster that had 70 catches last year for the shitty Saints. I am excited about having some speed on the team. Simoneau has heart but he was just too small, I saw him get run over and away from way too many times. I’m excited for the season to begin.
Yep we are going to have some impact from Ernesto, probably a lot of rain and some strong but not devastating winds. The track of it has been inching westward towards us all day. I can hardy wait.
When I was driving home on Friday I saw a full size Ford pickup truck that had 5 mexicans in the cab and another 9 jammed into the bed of the truck. I shit you not, I counted. That can’t be very safe.
On the way home I had two stops, Sam’s club and the grocery store. Sam’s club is the only place I have found Zone bars in bulk so while I am there I grab other bulk items to save a few bucks. I even found a 3 pack of the Izod boxers I like so I grabbed them as well. Then I hit Publix for the rest of the list. On the way out to the car I saw a bumper sticker that would have been funny if it didn’t have a degree of stinging truth. It said “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam”
One of the things I got at the store was 2 six packs of my favorite alcoholic beverage, Zima XXX. Over the years I have taken some heat for liking Zima as much as I do. I really don’t care. It tastes decent and has more alcohol content than beer, a win/win in my book. I put it to good use Friday night.
Usually when Ali goes out of town I have one get drunk and play games online night. Friday night was the night. I put down one of the six packs of Zima. The drunkeness on Zima is much better than what I experience with things like Goldschlager, Vodka or rum. Zima is a smooth and steady ride into the land of inebriation as opposed to the others that come up all of a sudden and smack you in the face, often with disasterous results.
Ali gave me the green light to finally replace my computer and I decided for the first time in 6 or 7 years I was going to buy components and put it together myself. Buying the canned boxes is easy but they throw so much extra shit on there that you don’t need. So as I am getting drunk I am speccing my new system. I talk to Ali from PA and get her blessing and when I am fully toasted and at the end of a marathon game playing session at 1:30 in the morning I submit the order for my pc. It should show up this week. It has some nice specs, Pentium 3.2 Dual Core CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 600+ gigs of hdd space, Nvidia SLI 6800 video card all wrapped up in an aluminum case with transparent side window. I can’t wait to get it up and running.
The plan is to migrate my current system and then wipe it and set it up as a new pc for Ali and the box Ali is using will just be a dedicated server. Having her try to use that box as a workstation has been a pain in the ass, it’s too slow.
Playing WoW drunk always is fun. It is one of the only times I get on our team’s Ventrilo server to communicate with the other players via voice. When I am drunk I have much more to say than sober, it’s much more entertaining.
On Saturday after I shook of the cobwebs, I had a game plan all laid out in my head, I wanted to knock out the chores quickly so I could relax. I didn’t lay out an overly ambitious list because I just didn’t feel like busting my ass all that hard. Mowing the grass didn’t take very long because there is a ton of standing water again so I mowed around it. I had everything tied up by noon. Not having Ali around means many things take longer because of one less set of hands. I had planned to go for a long walk with Nicki on Saturday afternoon but just as I was getting ready to do so, the skies opened up yet again and washed those plans away.
I spent a lot of time watching movies and shows that Ali cares not to see. I watched a few Contender episodes (boxing reality show) and then checked out two movies that have been sitting on my hard drive for months and months, Doom and Dukes of Hazard. I liked Doom. Doom is based on the video game of the same name which was one of the early pioneers in FPS(first person shooter) games. The Rock was the lead character in the flick. It had lots of suspense, blood and gore, just like the game. I thought it was awesome towards the end where they shot a scene that mimicked the game visual, where all you see is the weapon out in front of you as you blast everything into chunky red bits. It was better than I expected, it gets a B.
Dukes of Hazard was pretty lame. I was a fan of the tv show but even so I knew making the show into a movie was going to be an uphill battle. I cringed as I saw scene after scene where they wreck another Dodge Challenger, they were sweet cars. The action was decent with the car chases, jumps and wrecks. Jessica Simpson was hard to miss as Daisy Duke, outstanding. Burt Reynolds is just far too disturbing to look at anymore. The combination of surgery, botox and wigs have transformed this guy that was cool as cool could be in Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run into a freaky looking old man. I mean I can relate with not wanting to age, not wanting to succumb to the years but when it makes you look like another species you have gone too far. Well anyway, the movie was solidly average for me so it gets a C.
I was all pumped up to watch Transporter 2, I had that on my HDD as well. I was majorly bummed when I discovered I had downloaded the spanish version…. The final movie I watched during the weekend was The Sixth Sense. Yea I saw it before but I wanted to see it again. Ali didn’t really want to see it again because of the scary elements in it. This was a Tivo’d version that was taped off of the ABC family channel so they cut a bunch of shit out which was too bad. It’s a powerful movie and really hits me on several levels including divorce, death, relationships and dealing with loss. I’m glad I watched it alone.
On Sunday Nicki and I got to do our makeup walk. We hit the streets early, out the door by 8am. Nicki needs more exercise. We did a great little route that probably covered close to 3 miles. She was tired at the end but she was having fun exploring new areas. It was interesting for me to see the houses around us at walking pace. They span the gambit from luxurious homes with gated entries and immaculate landscaping to foot high weed filled lawns with homes that still have their christmas decorations up. Nicki basically crashed for the rest of the day, she was wore out.
Ali told me her brother no longer wants his Treo and asked if I wanted it, I said hell yes! I don’t think I would turn on full blown data access because the plans are too expensive but I will trick it out all the same.
I have pretty much turned the bills over to Ali during the last year or so, the times when she is away and I do the bills it makes me feel like I should go back to doing them. Not because she is doing a bad job but because I feel out of the loop on just how much money is going out. Ali doesn’t get bent out of shape about money, I do. I paid out around 15k in bills (including the pool cage bill) My head was spinning trying to get a handle on how many directions our money goes, it is staggering. Then on top of it I got the property tax bills for the 2 pieces of land we own in Lee County. I almost shit my pants when I saw them.
When we bought the land both were assessed at around 4k and had been right around that level for 10 years. Well last year they raised the assessed value 400% to around 16,000, increasing the taxes 400% as well. Well this year they raised the assessed value ANOTHER 300% to a staggering 42,000. Between the two lots we will be dropping about 1400 bucks in taxes. I went off and sent the Lee County Appraiser a nasty email asking them how they can explain that the costs of the government tending to my VACANT lots has gone up 700% in two years? I mean it is beyond ludicrous how local government thinks it is no big deal to exponentially raise people’s taxes year to year. I mean it is just beyond words how disgusted I am with the financial aspect of living in our area right now. How am I with my 4% raise a year supposed to keep up with living expenses that increase at a rate 10 times that?
I remember when I was a kid my dad bitching about taxes, how unjust they were how pissed off it made him. I remember thinking dad was just being a malcontent, everyone has to pay taxes, what is the big deal? Well I now know what the big deal is. I can only imagine how Dad would have reacted if he lived here and got bills like this. He may have been on his way to the government complex with a bag of horseshit to throw across the desk of the appraiser’s office. I am so pissed but so frustrated because what can I really do about it….
Ali comes back this evening. It will be good to have her home. I really will be pushing for us to do fun but inexpensive things to entertain ourselves. The walk with Nicki was a perfect example of a great way to spend some time.
I am kind of bummed that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. I am not quite sure why this bothers me. Maybe it’s just because that was taught to me as fact when I was in school. Maybe the kids that were taught the world is flat felt the same way.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline in the news this morning that Ernesto is now projected to plow into south Florida. Last thing I had heard was it will hit the gulf and land up north somewhere. Yea people are starting to freak. For some reason I am not thinking about it much and am counting on them being wrong. However if tomorrow the track still holds, we will be going through the fire drill of putting all outside loose items into either the shed or garage. The last thing we need right now is more hurricane damage.
I was exhausted this morning. I didn’t get home from my fantasy football draft until after 11 and then by the time I tended to the animals and took a shower I didn’t actually fall asleep until early this morning. So needless to say I wasn’t in a bright and fuzzy mood this morning when I crawled out of bed. As I stumble out to the kitchen I flipped on the light, opened the utility room door and am greeted to vomit on the tile and on the rug we have by the door, hooray!
Well just like a treasure map I knew these 2 piles of vomit were only the beginning of my adventure. I scan the kitchen, number 3! Right outside the kitchen was stain number 4, by the guest bathroom was stain number 5! Wow how exciting! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better I spot pile number 6 behind the couch and then the grand finale was pile number 7 which was literally 8 inches from the creator of this wonderful mess, Buttons. She looked up at me and once she saw the rage in my face and the ominous tone that I uttered her name she bolted from the room. The fleeing cat was an instaneous sign for Nicki and our neighbor’s dog to pounce which I welcomed. They chased the cat under some furniture. I encouraged them to eat the cat but I knew I would not be so lucky.
So I spent the first 15 minutes of my morning going from spot to spot of glorious cat vomit cleaning it up. As I did it I annoyingly asked the cat why she feels the need to walk around the house and voimt. Why could she not be intelligent enough to vomit on the tile where it would be easily addressed. For some reason even though I have told the cat this countless times over the years she never takes it to heart which makes me more angry. Stupid cat.
Well anyway, last night was my fantasy football draft. Our league is run by a friend of ours. The rest of the team owners are basically co-workers or friends of his so I am kind of an outsider looking in. Last year I took considerable ribbing on my first round pick, Julius Jones. I had a feeling that he was going to have a break out year so I jumped up and grabbed him. Well he turned out to be hurt for most of the year and didn’t do shit for me.
This year I was much more conventional with my picks. My number one was Edgerrin James. I think I have a pre
tty well rounded team but as always, it’s all about injuries, your team needs to stay healthy. I didn’t even look at the bye weeks for my players which is dumb but I was lucky that there shouldn’t be any major conflicts. Here is my complete roster, I am heavy on running backs but I am hoping to use them as trade bait if needed later. I made a couple sentimental picks later, grabbing the Eagles defense and my last pick was Ryan Moats. I am suspect of Westbrook’s foot injury and am
banking on him going down sooner rather than later which would move Moats into the starter role. My team name is “Green Machine”. The name works on multiple levels. The Green Machine was my favorite riding toy in my childhood, it is a nick name associated with the Eagles and it could be interpreted as my enviromental position as well.
Palmer, Carson
Droughns, Reuben
James, Edgerrin
Johnson, Andre
Wayne, Reggie
Crumpler, Alge
Graham, Shayne
Eagles, DST
Favre, Brett
Barber, Marion
Green, Ahman
Lewis, Jamal
Moats, Ryan
Mason, Derrick
Moulds, Eric
I forgot I wanted to mention another reason to get a Tivo, (if you are a techno geek) You can pull any show that is sitting on your Tivo onto your pc and with the help of a little 3rd party utility convert it into a regular mpeg that you can watch on your pc, your laptop or even your smart phone. Of course this assumes you have your Tivo connected to your home lan. I just ripped a half hour show on Wednesday and it worked like a charm.
Ali left for PA yesterday. In addition our neighbors are gone for a couple days so it is me and 2 dogs right now. Our neighbor’s dog and Nicki get along well. Nicki gets very excited to see her and wants to do nothing but play with her. Unfortunately Zoe gets tired of the horseplay sooner than Nicki does. Also when Zoe is over it makes me feel like a celebrity. The reason is because she does nothing but follow me around and stare. Of course she isn’t staring because she admires me, she stares because she is constantly waiting for me to throw her some edible object. The dog is always looking for a treat, it’s funny.
I don’t have any wild parties planned for my bachelor weekend. I want to knock out the chores I have on my mental list first and then just enjoy myself. I may get drunk and play WoW, watch some movies I downloaded that Ali would not want to watch with me, maybe fly my planes if the water recedes and whatever else comes to mind. I really don’t mind being by myself, at least for a few days.
I forgot to mention another gym story from Monday. I saw a woman I am friendly with that came over to Powerhouse from JFZ just like me. We normally say Hi and make small talk. She even got Ali and I into the wellness center for free that one time because she works there. Well she hadn’t seen me in a couple weeks so as a result had not seen my buzzcut. She commented that it looked good and I thanked her. As she was heading towards whatever machine she was going to, I noticed how sweaty she was from working hard. (she is hard core) and I blurted out “You look sweaty…” with the intention of following up with “you must be working hard” I’m not sure if she heard correctly because she was maybe 15-20 feet away but she gave me the sort of look when you don’t understand what someone said but you shake your head and half smile.
Well I was worried that she misheard me or heard me and thought “What an asshole, I complement his haircut and he calls me sweaty?” So later she was going back towards the locker room and I tried making little dumb small talk and got a short answer and the vibe that she was annoyed. Great. I don’t even know how to address an issue like that. I am hoping the next time I see her I can just be extra cordial and it can be swept under the rug. I hate speaking.
When our offices were being redone we had a chance to go through our crap and clean up. My buddy next door asked me if I wanted a platter out of an ancient hard drive. It was huge, at least 18 inches in diameter. At first I said he could chuck it but then I reconsidered and told him I would keep it. I wasn’t quite sure what I 
would do with it but I knew it fit right in with my lamp that my uncle made for us as a wedding gift. He made the lamp out of parts of an old answering machine and the feet are the favors we had at the reception. His thing is making unique objects out of old discarded things and he is very good at it.
Well anyway at first I just hung the hard drive platter on the wall. It looked ok but I yearned for more. Well then I remembered I had an old clock hanging next to my desk at home that had a cracked face and really had no use to me. So last night I took it apart, removed the stuff I didn’t need and brought it in here. A little bit of packing tape and viola, I now have a unique, techie, geeky clock hanging on my wall in the office. My uncle would be proud.
I have had a challenging time getting Vista up and running. At first my plan was to run it on a Dell GX270. After going through the hour plus install I discovered that Vista did not support the onboard video on that system and would only boot in safe mode. If I tried to boot normally the screen would just be black.
So my next attempt was on a brand new Dell Optiplex GX620. The install went fine but I noticed I didn’t have the cool Aero window effect that is the “OOOHHH…” factor in Windows Vista. After some digging I found that again the video driver was not allowing my to run Aero, plus with only a half gig of ram, Vista was struggling. A half gig of ram and the OS is choking, unbelievable. I remember all too clearly when 4 megs of ram was living large, dos 5.0 and Windows 3.1 hummed on it.
Well anyway I doubled up the memory to a gig and then I allowed the box to phone home and grab the latest updates, one of which must have fixed the video issue. After the reboot I had Aero windows. SWEET!
I am all about the visual side of things and Windows Vista is eye candy. I love the transparency effects. When you mouse over window controls they glow, as windows open and close they grow and shrink accordingly, it all just looks great.
Vista includes “sidebar” which reminds me of a souped up version of something OS/2 offered 12 years ago. It is basically an area with little “gadgets” that again are more eye candy than anything. You can see some gadgets in the screenshot below, namely the clock and the performance monitor. Vista seems very careful in what it lets you do. If you want to run almost anything it will ask you first if you are sure you want to do this before actually doing it. I’ve only skimmed the surface so far so I will give more info later but I can say for sure, it looks damn good. (oh and it has a sweet 3d chess game included)
After seeing it in John J’s blog, I added a weather widget here as well that shows the current conditions in Naples. It’s cool.
I got a copy of Beta 2 of Microsoft’s next operating system, Vista which I am installing right now. It’s important for me to try to stay up to date with the latest and greatest although I don’t do as good of a job at it as I would like. I will give my report after I play with it for a bit.
For several years I have had a morning coffee routine. We are fortunate enough to have a Subway/Dunkin Donuts in the government complex that is a few feet outside our door. Every morning I would stop in and get a refill in my big ass coffee mug. I like Dunkin Donuts coffee. Well a few weeks ago they changed the Dunkin Donuts part to a “Subway Cafe” They removed the Dunkin donuts and replaced them with Krispy Kremes, which I didn’t care about because I didn’t eat the donuts anyway. Much more concerning was they no longer served the Dunkin Donuts coffee and instead replaced it with some other brand that didn’t taste nearly as good. To top it off they raised the prices!
Well yesterday I finally had enough after paying more for yet another cup of bad coffee. I decided to just make my own. I got a 4 cup coffee maker and brewed my first pot this morning. I think I made it a little strong, I feel more wired than normal. I used Chock Ful of Nuts brand. I was spending 7 or 8 bucks each week on coffee, this new arrangement will cut the expense by 75% at least.
I blog about the pool cage place not billing me and who do I get a call from at work, the pool cage place. The lady asks if I could cut them a check for the bill and I said I never got a bill and to send me one. She asked if they could fax it to me and then come pick up the check and I said no, I did not have my check book with, mail me a bill. For some reason she seemed quite uptight about this like all of a sudden it is crucial that they get the check TODAY. I asked her why they neglected to send a bill. She said Gerald (the owner) planned to drop one off but has been too busy to do so. Oh well, that’s not my problem spend 39 cents on a stamp and send it. It’s so weird that they called me today……