Archives 2006

Isn’t it ironic that as we approach the November elections that gas prices have magically started to come down?   Hmmm I’m sure the two events are not related right?  There is no reason to think that W’s administration is not calling in favors to their buddies to cut into their multi-billion dollar profit margins for a couple months to help the pubby’s in their re-election efforts?  It’s all so corrupt and dirty.

I had a bad morning.  I had a dream that somehow involved me taking a racehorse style piss.  Well you can guess where this goes.  Yea I wet my pants.  I was laying on my back and I came to quick enough before things got out of control. I’m sure when Ali wakes up this morning she will be wondering why there is a load of laundry in the washing machine.  I can’t tell you the last time that happened.  I think I vaguely recall it happening since I became an “adult” but it’s been ages.  Happy Friday.

In a continuing effort to reduce expenses where possible, before my orthodontist appointment yesterday, I stopped at the auto store and got the stuff to change the oil in our vehicles.  When I was younger I always changed my own oil.  Then as I got into my mid to late 20’s it became convenient to pay a few dollars more to pay a quick lube place to do it.  However since I have moved down here I have had bad experience after bad experience at these lube places.  So for the cost of one Quick lube I can do both vehicles myself.  At least I know it will be done right.  The only pain in the ass part is having to drop off the used oil to recycle but I will deal with the inconvenience. It’s good to get dirty under a car once in awhile anyway, makes you feel like a MAN!

This weekend is our cleaning project weekend.  The project for this month is the office.  The office is filled with so much stuff.  It is going to be a big job but it’s long overdue.  

This week is bad fashion week at the gym apparently.  Today I witnessed another first, some guy wearing his Oakley mirrorized sunglasses/mp3 player the entire workout.  Yep, this guy has those dumb combo mp3 player- glasses deal that Oakley makes.  Nothing says you are willing to overpay for stupid gadgets like these do. ($300)  The glasses also flipped up in the front like the clip ons that 80 year olds wear.  He wore these proudly as he went around the gym.  I noticed that I was not alone in spotting this odd spectacle.  He obviously thought he looked damn cool.  he spent as much time inspecting himself in the mirror as he did pushing weight. Funny. 

Finally after almost exactly 3 years, almost exactly double the amount of time I was told it would take, I am finished with my braces.  I have one nasty looking before pic of my teeth.  I don’t want to show the after shot until I get them zoom bleached.  They look pretty dingy right now, especially where the braces were mounted. You can tell from the before pic why I was never one who wanted to open his mouth with a toothy grin.  Looks like I have Billy Bob teeth.  Wait for the after shot. It is going to be weird to not have to go to the ortho office every month.

Randall dug out this pic he snapped of me and Ali after a volleyball tournament in Fort Lauderdale.  I think it was last year and he says it was after we won BB.  I don’t quite recall. Anyway it was when I was in my ultra-hairy state.  I was letting my hair get long.  What I found was when my hair was long the only time I liked it was when I had a hat or visor on, it looked cool spilling out of it.  I generally have the same feeling about long hair on women.  I think long hair on women looks the best when it is pulled up.  I also am sporting ample facial hair in the pic.  It’s as grungy as I get.

For those of you that read this for fitness tips (same people that read it for my reality tv reviews) I tried a new exercise yesterday that I saw a guy I talk to at the gym do before.  You grab a 12 pound medicine ball, the type that is flat and does not bounce.  You grab it with two hands and swing it over your head and slam it down to the ground on the side as hard as you can.  Then you pick it up immediately and reverse the movement and slam it to the other side.  It is sort of the movement you would make chopping wood.  Make sure you keep your core taut.  I did sets of 20.  It makes quite a racket as you slam the ball to the floor.  I wouldn’t have been able to do this at JFZ, far too noisy.  I guess workin out in a shithole has it’s advantages.  The move is also a great stress reliever.  Imagine the ball is whatever/whomever is annoying the piss out of you and enjoy slamming it to the floor again and again.

This morning as we were getting ready I heard a loud noise like something heavy had fallen against a wall.  It shook the house.  I went from room to room looking for something but found nothing.  The noise scared Nicki off the bed and Ali heard it in the shower.  It turns out what we heard was the sonic boom the space shuttle makes when it reenters that atmosphere over Florida. Wild stuff.

Yesterday we had a birthday lunch at work.  The food was from Olive Garden.  My entree was big enough that I didn’t need to eat the salad as well so I took the big plastic container with the salad in it and kept it in the fridge the rest of the day.  After work I took the salad and put it up front on the floor of the car.  I put the AC on bi-level and coooold to try to keep the salad as cool as possible.  The long ride home was quite cold but I put up with it in order to keep my Olive Garden salad fresh.  Finally we get home, I pull into the garage , open the door, and go to get out, totally forgetting about the salad.  My foot crashes into it, cracking the plastic and spilling almost half of the precious salad on the floor of the car.  I was not happy.  Well I wasn’t going to have it be a total loss so I pushed the salad that didn’t touch the floor back in the cracked container and then picked the big chunks off the floor with my hands and sucked up the little bits with the shop-vac.  The salad that we had left was good.

I bought a 2 gig SD card for my Treo off Ebay 3 weeks ago.  It just showed up yesterday.  The auction lister didn’t specify that delivery would take 3 weeks from SINGAPORE.  Well anyway, I slapped the card into the Treo and copied Napoleon Dynamite to it.  There is a freeware media player for various PDA platforms called TCPMP.  It is fantastic!  In the past if you wanted to play videos on your Palm you had to run it through an encoder that cut down the frame rate and pixels.  What you got out of it was barely viewable.  With TCPMP you can dump the same DIVX file you would watch on your pc onto your SD card and watch it on your portable device.  The sound and video for the movie was GREAT.  Who needs a portable DVD player for long trips.  Now I can just dump a couple movies onto my SD card and watch them on my Treo!

Last night I remote controlled my office cam from home.  Man it was cool.  There is something about remote controlling something from a distance that is just neat.  I had several of my buddies from up north in there screwing with it as well.  The picture quality with this camera is leaps and bounds above what I had in place before.  Look for yourself.

The cam image at work has been stalled for awhile, the camera I had at work was just lame with bad lighting and terrible picture quality.  I dropped some paypal bucks on an Orbit Cam which has much better picture quality as well as being ROBOTIC.  Yea it is one of those motorized cams.  I am going to be investigating setting it up so remote viewers can control the camera, I think it would be a geeky cool thing. Anyways you can check it out here.

**You can remote control it from the web, follow instructions on cam page to do so**

Well today was chest day and my shoulders were frickin killing me.  Sometime during the workout I decided I am gonna stop once again with the supplementation.  During my 2 month phase I put on some muscle mass but nothing that is extremely noticeable.  Trying to do set after heavy set of exercises is just breaking me down instead of building me up.  I think I was more satisfied when I weighed between 185 and 190 and could run AND play volleyball without severe physical repercussions.  Now I am 195 to 200 and things hurt all the time.  My knees are both coming around.  I am hoping that if I drop a few pounds it may facilitate my getting back into running and/or volleyball.  We’ll see.  I plan on packing my running shoes all week with the hope of doing a one mile test run at the gym after work one day this week.

Today there was a woman at the gym that wore an outfit that was hard to not stop and stare at and not in a good way.  She is an older woman, if I were to guess, in her 50’s.  She wasn’t a big fatty but she was pretty soft all over.  She was wearing full length leotard pants with a matching sports bra top with her belly spilling out all over in between.  The outfit was white with a hideous floral print.  I was trying to think of what to compare it to but failed to be able to do so.  It just looked like hell.  Oh yea she had a headband on as well.   I guess it may have been in style when Jane Fonda exercise videos were all the rage? Hey if you need to shave some pounds, good for you for going to the gym and working towards it.  But until you get there, keep it covered.

Normally I go in more or less chronological order when I describe my weekend events.  Well not this time.  Let’s talk about the f’in Eagles game.  Week 1’s game against the Texans made the Eagles look good, real good and I even mentioned that it had to be measured appropriately since the Texans were the worst team in the league last year.  So I really had no idea what to expect when the Giants came to the Vet.

Well for 3 + quarters, it was awesome.  The Eagles dominated the Giants, their defense didn’t give Manning time to breath, sacking him 8 times.  They stuffed the run and other than the Giants opening drive for a TD the Birds D shut them down.  On the flip side, the offense was clicking as well, mixing in run and pass in almost a perfect balance.  They also ran a lot of hurry up offense that kept the Giants defense off balance and tired.  What a great game plan, what great execution, what a great way to perform in the home opener!  Maybe the Eagles actually are for real this year?? Then the 4th quarter happened.

They entered the quarter up 24 to 7 a huge, three score lead.  Even if the Eagles didn’t score again, all they had to do was make a few first downs, come up with a defensive stop or two and the game is wrapped up.  Well then it all started to unravel.  The Giants got a cheap TD when a fumble by them which should have been recovered by Michael Overrated Lewis, instead wound up getting booted around until it wound up being fallen on in the end zone by the Giants.  Even now I don’t quite get it, I thought you couldn’t advance a fumble?  Well evidently I don’t know the rules because the TD stood. 

Ok well still, the quarter was about halfway gone, the Eagles just need to take control and drive the ball with their offense like they did all game.   Well instead they adopt a new offensive strategy, run the ball into the huge pile and gain nothing.  On one of the runs, Westbrook, whose priority should have been to protect the ball first and foremost, decides to launch himself into a pile of Giants and has the ball knocked out.  A stupid, stupid play that puts the Giants deep in Eagles territory.  All of a sudden it is the Giants that can’t be stopped.  Eli Manning looks like Johnny Unitas as he completes pass after pass in front of an Eagles defense that all of a sudden decides to play soft instead of agressive.  And of course the Giants score another TD in short order.

The Eagles get the ball only up 3 but still, all they have to do is put a drive together to kill the clock.  Instead another weak 3 and out and punt.  The Giants immediately start driving again but then the Birds make a play and Trotter intercepts the ball and puts the Eagles in great field position at midfield!  Whew that was a close one, now all they have to do is make a couple first downs and the game is done.  Instead after making a first down and then executing some poorly thought out plays, they once again punt, giving the Giants the ball back with less than a minute to go. Ok it’s time for the D to stand up.

They fall down.  The continue to play soft, keep everything in front of you defense, allowing the Giants to drive into borderline field goal range in a matter of seconds. Then Trent Cole makes it easy for the Giants by drawing a 15 yard personal foul for KICKING another player.  What a f’in dumb ass, I mean come on….     They drive into comfortable field goal range and tie the game with 5 seconds to go.  I was besides myself with disbelief, screaming at the TV on several occasions.

 Overtime comes and after both teams have to punt, the Giants get the ball back and drive down the field and once again they are in long field goal range.  On a 3rd and long the Eagles went for broke and blitzed hard.  Manning throws a fluttering rainbow towards the endzone.  Once again Burress is matched up one on one with a CB a half foot shorter than him.  He shrugs him off like he is a child and snags the ball for the game winning TD.  My disgust was beyond words.

I have had a lot of hard Eagle losses over the years, losing all those Championship games and then the Super Bowl was tough for sure, but there is something about blowing a big lead that stings in a different, very lasting way.  Even today I am still bent out of shape about it.  It was an enbarrassment for the team and the fans.  The Eagles folded like a lawn chair when the pressure was on and there just is nothing worse in an Eagles fan book.  They took the win for granted and got soft.  I am so pissed off.  I would fill the Eagles message board with venom if it wasn’t so bogged down already with others already venting, it was soooooooooo bad.  All I can hope is they use this as a wake up call, as a reminider that when they have a lead, they need to pour it on, they need to grind the opponents face into the dirt until the game is over. They did exactly that against the Texans.  It was just a pathetic, embarrassing, unexcusable collapse.

Ok rewind to Friday.  Friday I was weak.  Normally I am pretty disciplined and motivated in most areas of my personality.  Friday I just felt wishy washy.  It first surfaced when I went to the gym on Friday.  I felt very unmotivated to be there.  I did my exercises but my intensity was absent.  I felt like I was going through the motions.  My gains in strength since beginning supplementation again have slid to a stop.  It feels like I am up against the limits of what my body wants to do.  My shoulders seem to be permanently sore and each time I throw heavy weight on the bench they get a little worse. 

After work I had several errands to run.  The first stop was WalMart to get parts for my prototype.  All the way over I was f’ing with the satellite radio, the shitty antenna connector was once again giving me fits, refusing to lock in place properly, frustrating the hell out of me.  I slammed it into the cradle time and again but kept getting the “No Antenna Detected” message on the display.  My last effort to jam it in bitched up the antenna connector and I had enough.  Even though I knew we didn’t need to spend the money, I grabbed a new receiver in Wal-Mart as well, an Exact Replay unit.  It took me a long time to get out of there, longer than expected.  I came back out to my truck and activated and hooked up the new unit on the spot.

I also had to stop at Sam’s and the grocery store on the way home.  I didn’t pull into the driveway until after 7:30.  I reluctantly told Ali of my satellite radio purchase.  It was only 70 bucks but still, zero bucks would have been better than 70.  I was just frustrated and sick of screwing with it.  The new radio has no piece of shit connectors to screw with.

First thing Saturday morning I dug deep into Half Life 2, I could tell I was getting close to the end so I wanted to push through.  The game has been great althogh not more than a little stressful.  The graphics are so good you really feel like you could reach through the monitor and touch things.  I heard the ending was lame, which it was, but getting to it was fun.  Towards the end your gravity gun gets mutated from a weapon that can pick up inanimate objects only into something that can pick up ANYTHING, including enemy bad guys.  It was quite fun snagging guys and then launching them into other bad guys, knocking them out.   Even when guys were dead, I would pick up their corpses and throw them around some more, just because it was fun. Like I said the ending was bad, it gave you no satisfaction.  You don’t get the girl, you don’t get accolades from the masses for saving mankind, you just get set up for the next release.  They really did f that up. It’s still a great game though.

I put together my prototype Saturday.  The secrecy is a mute point since it didn’t work well and there are other similar things out there.  My idea is a temporary block for a pool drain.  Pool vacuum cleaners have an annoying habit of getting stuck on the pool drain, staying there until you come out and pull it off.  It is a pain in the ass to be constantly monitoring the pool cleaner to see if it is stuck again.  My invention consists of a microwave plate cover with a 5 pound plate weight glued to the top.  I envisioned this contraption with big eyeloops attached that would allow the device to be placed and removed as needed on top of the pool drain.  The unit was supposed to block the pool cleaner from getting stuck on the drain.

I wanted to drill a few holes into the top of the plate cover to allow air to escape.  When I took the wood boring bit to the top, instead of drilling cleanly, it ripped a hole in the top and cracked it badly. The top was intact but looked like shit.  Oh well it is only a prototype, it doesn’t have to be pretty. So I took it into the hobby room and slapped some super glue on the 5 pound weight and let it set up.  On Sunday I went to test it.

I hopped in the end of the pool and grabbed my mutation.  The second it hit the water, the glue let loose and it came apart.  Hmm design flaw, well no problem I just want to test the functionality.  So I slap on some goggles and dive down and place the plate cover over the drain and dive a second time to place the 5 pound weight on top of it.  It took awhile for the vacuum to encounter the now covered drain but when it did the results were not good.  The vaccum still tried to go over the cover and wound up getting stranded at an angle stuck on it. Ugh.  Between the assembly problems, the fact that things are out there that do the same function and my failed test results, it’s put a serious damper on my enthusiasm.  However I do realize that with some design changes, namely a higher microwave plate cover, it would work.  The 5 pound weight was adequate to keep the vacuum from pushing the cover around.  I am not sure what my next move will be with it.  The more I look into the invention creation, patent obtaining processes it seems like a large pain in the ass.  An ideal situation would be me selling the concept to someone that could turn my prototype into reality and run with it.  Then they just give me a lot of money.  It’s not that simple. 🙁

Well anyway, Saturday continued with us knocking out the grass mowing and then we went to Home Depot.  I had been building a list of things I needed from Home Depot for a few weeks.  Ali just snagged a 50 dollar gift card for HD from doing mypoints.com surfing so it was a good time to go get it.  I snagged a bunch of little things to address several needs around the house.  When we got home, while Ali caught some zzz’s, I went whirlwind style around the house and performed most of the maintenance that the items required.  The only thing that was left for Sunday was caulking the pool cage.

The pool cage guys did a decent job of installing the cage but for some reason the did not caulk the part of the frame in contact with the cement pad.  There were several spots where the gap was as big as a quarter inch which was allowing all sorts of bugs and small frogs/toads to enter into the lanai area.  So on Sunday morning,armed with 2 tubes of caulk, I gooped up pretty much the entire outside perimeter of the cage, hopefully it will dramatically reduce the amount of critters we are seeing inside the cage.

On Saturday night we watched RV, sort of a 2006 version of National Lampoon Vacation.  Man it was funny.  I laughed as hard as I have at a movie in a looooong time.  I had no idea it would be that good.  Robin Williams did a great job.  It is a definite must rent/buy flick. (of course I did neither) It gets an A, loved it.

Ok well that’s it, damn what a long entry, sorry.

Last night as I followed Ali around on my bike, I had my Treo with and snapped quite a few pics along the way, just for the hell of it.  Ali’s route takes her all over the place.  The picture quality is less than spectacular, but good enough to get the point across. Take a look at the pics here. Ali had to stop the run short because her knee was hurting.  I’m worried that she is starting to go down the same knee trouble filled road I have been travelling for the last 8 or 9 years.  She iced it up for quite awhile last night.

I did some more digging around yesterday in regards to the invention I have in my head.  I was somewhat disappointed to find 3 devices out there (on ebay of all places) that perform the same function my idea does.  However the difference is the devices I saw were designed to be installed and left installed permanently, where as my device would be put in place as needed and then easily removedso it doesn’t permanently alter anything and there is no installation.  Plus the things I saw cost 60 to 70 bucks,  I envision my thing being a 20 dollar item.  I dunno, seeing those items took some of the wind out of my sails but I am going to still build my prototype.

The weekend is low key.

I keep forgetting to mention this guy I see biking around several times a week.  He rides a cruiser style bike with high handlebars so he sits very upright.  I’m guessing he is in his 30’s.  He has very short hair and as a result you can see the area on top is starting to thin already.  I see him tooling around here and there, over lunch, after work, at various places near the government center.  He is always wearing similar outfits, long khaki style shorts and a large, oversized, button down shirt that hangs out that normally has a loud print.  He’s a skinny guy so it sort of hangs off him.  The funny part, to me at least is whenever I see him, without fail, he has a cancer stick either in his mouth or in his hand.  It just looks funny seeing a guy biking with a cigarette in his mouth.  Maybe it is the irony of it, doing a psuedo healthy thing like riding a bike while partaking in one of the unhealthiest activities you can do, smoking.  I often wonder what his vocation is. 

Yesterday I had something happen to me that rarely happens in SW Florida, a positive experience with a service company!!  I left work early as I was told a tech would be at my house between 2 and 4.  Over the last 6 years here I have had been told someone would be out between time X and Y and much more often than not they arrived well after that window, if they arrived at all.  Well the house was a toasty 87 degrees when I got home so I hoped this time would be different.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a call at 3 o’clock from their main office saying a tech was on their way.  Oh my God, a call to say they were going to arrive on time??? This is unheard of!!  The guy pulled up to the driveway about 3:30.  His name was Chris and I could immediately tell he was not typical of the service industry I have been exposed to so far in Florida. He was polite and english was his first language.  Instead of acting bothered by my explanation of the problem, he actually listened and used the info to start the troubleshooting.

From my description of the problem he was pretty sure that my coils were frozen over, which they were, solid.  So while he let the ice melt, he did some maintenance by attaching his shop vac to the drip outlet for the unit outside.    I told him that I occasionally put some bleach into the system by the air handler as I was told to do.  However once he had the unit apart I realized that what I was doing did absolutely nothing.  Through some shoddy installation, the air handler unit had a slight backwards tilt, away from the drain in the front, so any bleach I was sticking in was just sitting there.  I need to add the bleach to the outside drip pipe.

So to assist in the ice melting I turned on the fan blower to suck more of the warm outside air in.  The tech got out his blow torch and melted the rest, it probably took a half hour to get it all out. Now he had to figure out why it froze up.  He said that the main reasons for a unit to freeze up was either low freon or a dirty, clogged air filter.  I told him that we changed the air filter religiously every 3 months so I doubted that would be the issue.  He check the freon levels and they were fine, hmmm.

He inspected our air filter and said it didn’t look clogged.  He put the cover back on and we fired it up.  I went inside and felt the vents and told him it was still blowing very weakly and I still heard the chugging noise.  The tech was baffled.  He said we obviously have an air obstruction somewhere.  So he hopped up into the attic and inspected the duct from the air return to see if it was collapsed in any way, nope looks fine.  Then he decided to open the unit back up and take a look underneath.  At first glance he saw nothing, however when he hit it with a flashlight he saw the problem, the portion of the duct that comes down the wall and then turns up and under the air handler was FILLED with water.  He hypothesized that poor drainage had caused water to slowly drip into the duct down below, filling it over time to the point where it now choked off air flow.  He used his shop vac to pull out 35 to 40 gallons of water!  He put it all back together, I fired it up and viola, back to normal!

I was relieved that no parts had to be replaced and he said that our unit apears to be in good shape otherwise.  He did spend 2 and a half hours there which set us back a couple hundred bucks, but that is much less than I was fearing it would cost.  I really appreciated his good natured, professional demeanor during the call and writing the check didn’t bother me at all.  It makes such a difference when someone actually makes the effort to treat a customer as they would want to be treated.  

Since I observed the entire process, I learned a lot about my AC system and there was nothing that he did, short of measuring the freon pressure, that I couldn’t have done myself.  So if I run into issues in the future at least I have a game plan to diagnose it a bit.  I need to make sure I keep that drain as clear as possible.

Our one neighbor sent me a link to this clip of a commentary Keith Olbermann gave on the 9/11 five year anniversary and how an event that unified the country in a way that hadn’t been seen in decades has mutated into something that now polarizes and breaks down our country.  He RIPS the Bush administration in a way so powerful, so well thought out and so well communicated it is just compelling to view.  If you have a spare nine minutes, take it and watch this. I have no idea how anyone can still be supporting Bush, unless they are greedy bastards that are concerned with nothing more than what is inside their white picket fence.