Archives 2008

I have about 20 hours worth of movies I can watch this weekend.  Ali is heading out of town for a conference so I will be solo for three or four days.  Out of the 10 movies there are two that Ali indicated she would have any interest in seeing.  That’s fine, more brainless entertainment for me!

 We actually have some substantial standing water on the property from our four or five days of steady rain.  It’s the first time in at least two years.  Yea having standing water is a pain in the ass with the mosquitoes it breeds, the deafening frogs at night and mowing obstacles it creates but after it being so dry for so long, I’ll deal with it.

Not feeling chatty.  Full moon and stuff ya know.

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Behold, the prototypical american youth.

Many of their parents probably look like this.

It has been extremely wet here the last few days.  As a result I have been treated to seeing countless people trying to desperately stay dry.  I always find it amusing how people hate getting wet.  Ali is a prime example.  You would think she was being rained on by battery acid, she HATES getting rained on.  I don’t mind getting wet in the least.  I avoid using an umbrella at all costs.  The only time I try to track down an umbrella is during some of the water deluges we get in Florida where it looks like you are walking through a waterfall.  Other than that I don’t mind getting wet at all.  Sure I get a lot of looks of disbelief as I calmly walk through the parking lot while steady rain soaks me while others are madly sprinting for cover.  What can I say, it’s just water.

Last night when I got home I played WoW for a short period of time before I decided I didn’t feel like playing it.  Then I moved out to the great room and fired up the Wii and played some Mario Kart, working on getting my gold medals in mirror mode.  After I blurted out “MF’r!!!” for the fourth or fifth time I realized that playing the game was majorly stressing me out.  So I turn off the Wii, go in the fitness room and run two miles on the treadmill to burn off the stress.  I emerged from the room sweaty but more at ease.  I took my shower and fell asleep watching very little of the All Star game.

Mom sent me this list of ridiculous lawsuits that were actually decided for the idiotic plaintiff’s.  It just makes me shake my head in shame.  Stupidity really does rules the roost in the USA anymore.  Just look at these examples.

Stella Awards

It’s time again for the annual Stella Awards! For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck, who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald’s in New Mexico  where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?

That’s right, these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head.  So keep your head scratcher handy.

Here are the Stella’s for the past year:

7TH PLACE:

Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.

6TH PLACE:

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles, California, won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord.  Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he Was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps.

5TH PLACE:

Terrence Dickson, of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just  burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. Forced to sit for eight, count ’em, EIGHT, days on a case of Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog ood, he sued the homeowner’s insurance company claiming undue mental   anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish. Keep scratching.  There are more.

4TH PLACE:

Jerry Williams, of Little Rock, Arkansas, garnered 4th Place in the Stella’s when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical  expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor’s  beagle – even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner’s fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.

3RD PLACE:

A jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster ,  Pennsylvania $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on  the floor:  Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.  Whatever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?

2ND PLACE

Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, sued the owner of a nightclub in a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth.  Even though Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies’ room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the nightclub had to pay her $12,000, oh, yeah, plus dental expenses.

1ST PLACE:   (May we have a fanfare played on 50 kazoos, please.)

This year’s runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City , Oklahoma , who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, from a    football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich.  Not surprisingly, the motor home left the free way, crashed and overturned.  Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner’s manual that she couldn’t actually leave the driver’s seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down- $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

Are we, as a society, getting more stupid?  Or is it just the juries that the lawyers select? 

I just saw the new property value for our place for the 08 tax year.  The value of it dropped approximately 60k in the last year.  That’s a quite a hit.  Luckily we aren’t looking to sell anytime soon.

The world itself is in such disarray.  One needs to go no further than to read today’s headlines:

 Bernanke: Financial markets under heavy stress

GM to cut jobs, raise liquidity by $15 billion

Retail sales weak, producer prices strong

Iran to powers: No more ‘condescending’ atom talks

Multiple bombings kill 40 in northern Iraq

The move Bush pulled yesterday removing the ban on offshore oil drilling was such blatant political posturing bullshit it makes me sick.  In a nutshell it is his way of side stepping any responsibility for the quagmire we are in and pointing the finger at a democratic controlled congress. “Look it’s not me, it’s them!!!”  McCain followed along like a good lap dog, reversing his anti-off shore drilling in the span of less than three weeks?  GASP, a flip flopper!

As usual, moves like this are targeted at the uninformed, the intellectual midgets or the brainless lemmings.  The truth is any offshore drilling would take a prolonged period of time until the additional oil would be brought to market.  Secondly, the amount of oil this would provide would be next to negligible in being of any use to bring down oil prices.  We consume way too much.  We already have thousands of intentionally capped off wells to manipulate supply.  Big oil also refuses to build additional refineries as to keep a continuous strain on the supply chain.  Of course the biggest problem is the US population in general.  We make up 4% of the world population but manage to consume 25% of the world energy supply.  Bush doesn’t want to address the real issues.  His contribution to solving the problems is simply signing a piece of paper that says “It ain’t my fault….”  Stupid ass hat.

Here is a shot of the new expanded garden.  You can see the in progress pictures I took along the way here.

I talked to Ali during the day yesterday and reminded her to take a look outside at all the worms covering the house.  I couldn’t believe it when she said she looked and they were all gone!  Where did they all go?  Did they all retreat back into the grass?  Did they slither into the house through the roof?  I don’t know, it’s just bizarre. 

We actually got enough rain yesterday to develop some standing water in the ditches in the front of the property.  I was happy to see the grading we had done at the rear of the house seems to be working as planned so far.  No standing water was present behind the house.

I had no desire to play WoW last night.  Instead I fired up the Wii  and played some Mario Kart by myself.  After that Ali joined me for some doubles tennis.  We had some dramatic, tough matches that found us coming back from being down 3 match points to come back and win.  Ali gets so upset if she screws up, it’s funny.  I did a Wii Fitness test just to see how I was holding up.  I clocked in with a Wii fitness age of 26, up 3 from the last time I took the test damn it.  Ali took the test as well and for the first time was able to break into the 30’s in her Wii Fit age, clocking in at 38.

I just happened to catch the home run derby last night and caught that guy from the Rangers banging out 28 home runs in the first round.  The guy was a hardcore drug addict and out of baseball for two or three years.  He found God and now is back in the game tearing it up.  That was an amazing show.  I was equally captivated by the 71 year old guy that threw the pitches.  He had a decent arm on him, even after seven decades.  It was a feel good moment all the way around.  And yes, it looked FANTASTIC in HD on the 73 inch Mitsu. 

Recently I cancelled our US Airways Visa card.  It offered air miles for rewards but it just wasn’t worth it.  The air mile plan had been castrated over the years to the point where you had to spend truck loads of dollars to get a basic ticket. Even if you had the miles, availability for the flight you wanted was always questionable as they only allocated a few seats on each flight to be used for air miles.  It sucked.  Well when we got the notice about the $90 annual fee coming due that pushed me over the edge to cancel the shitty card.

So yesterday we get the last statement in the mail for the card.  You can imagine my anger when I see one of the line items is the $90 ANNUAL FEE!  Mother f’rs!  So of course I was on the phone in short order.  I get a rep on the phone after navigating the annoying phone menus and explain the deal.  I told her I cancelled the card because of the annual fee yet the annual fee was sitting on my statement.  The woman said that I cancelled the card on June 16th but the fee was charged June 6th.  I told her I didn’t care, I wasn’t going to pay an annual fee for a card I cancelled.  She said that the fee could be credited if the card has a zero balance within 30 days of cancellation.  WTF?  There was no mention of this when I cancelled, of course.  Looking at the calendar revealed I had exactly two days until 30 days would have passed so if I would have procrastinated even a little bit they would have tried to stick me with the fee on the down low.  That really pissed me off even more.

So I asked the woman if I could pay off the remaining balance, minus the annual fee over the phone to ensure that the payment is received on time.  She said I could use their voice activated payment system for free to make the payment.  Ok fine, transfer me to that.

So again I get to navigate a very long series of phone menus where I have to enter my cc account number, my zip code, as well as my routing and account numbers for my bank account.  It was a pain in the ass but I was almost done.  Then right before the transaction is completed, the recorded voice on the other end tells me there will be a $15 charge to make the payment!!!!!  What the F??!!  I hang up the phone and slam it on my desk angrily.  I knew that I would have to go through the bullshit of calling up once again, navigating the phone menu once again and explaining the situation once again to another rep. 

So I make the call and get a guy on the phone.  I told him up front that I was very annoyed and I quickly recapped the issue as well as the bullshit advice I got from a rep a few minutes ago that said I could pay over the phone for free.  The guy looked at the information and clarified that you can pay over the phone for free ONLY if you have a Bank of America checking account.  Oh, the woman forgot to leave that little detail out.  So I told the guy that I wasn’t going to pay the f’ing bank a fee to pay their bill.  What a ridiculous concept.  The guy said I could pay the bill online and there is no fee for that.  He said that the annual fee can’t be waived until the other balance is cleared.  I asked him if that happens automatically once I pay the balance.  No, of course not, it requires yet another call.  I told him that was annoying.  He said that if I wanted to go online and pay the balance now he could watch the account and then remove the fee once he saw it was posted.  I told him to not be offended but I didnt quite trust that.  How would I know for sure that the fee would be removed?  He said he would call me once he removed it.  Ok great.  I hung up very doubtful that “Andy” would actually do as he promised.  I paid the bill online, he never called of course.  So today I have to make my third call to them to make sure the fee is wiped clean.  CC companies are pieces of shit.  

So I deemed this weekend as the weekend we would redo the garden.  Usually I am pretty good at estimating how long something will take.  I figured a half a day would be sufficient to get the expanded area dug out, the border and fence posts installed and the fencing attached.  Well I misjudged the time and effort required by a mile.

The project started Saturday morning. Before it did, the game plan for the border was totally trashed and reexamined.  Because of space considerations, building the garden border and then installing a fence a half foot outside of the border would not work out well.  We would have hit the sprinkler pipe.  Ali and thrashed out various ideas.  Ali suggested that we incorporate the fence posts into the corner of the border instead of using the nifty aluminum corners I bought.  I initially resisted the idea just because I didn’t want to have the stuff I bought go to waste.  However after thinking about alternatives it turned out to be the only way to practically do it.  I would sink the poles at the corners and then attach the composite lumber to the posts with metal brackets.  It turned out that we didn’t use any of the aluminum connectors, we just attached to the posts all the way around.  I pledged I would use the corners in the rebuild of the orchard border.

So we were ready to get to work.  I pulled the tractor out and attached the lawn cart to it.  The idea was I would dump all the sod I was removing into the yard cart and then we would use it to fill in part of the one remaining ditch we have towards the back of the fenced in area.  Removing sod is not a fun job.  The grass was a combination of St Augustine and vine-like weeds which is a mess to remove.  Ali came out and helped me before she had to leave for some luncheon.  I was sweating buckets.  The humidity was off the dial and the sun was broiling me.  I chugged Gatorade like I just walked out of a desert.  My shirt was drenched with sweat.

When Ali had to go in to get ready I decided to come in and eat lunch as well.  Before I did I stripped down to my boxers and jumped in the pool.  I didn’t want to wait for Ali to bring out a swim suit, I was so hot.  It’s amazing how a minute in a pool can instantly rejuvenate you.  The water felt great and it washed away all the grime and sweat that made me feel disgusting.  So after I ate I headed back out to resume the digging on my own.  The progress of course slowed down going at it alone.  After each time I filled the yard cart I would have to drive it back 200 yards to the ditch, try to back the cart up to the spot where I wanted to dump it (more challenging than you would think), dump the cart and then hop out and shovel out what is left in the cart by hand.  Luckily Ali and I got a lot done before she left, I only had to take three or four more cart fulls of dirt back after she left.

The sky started looking very foreboding around 2pm.  I reluctantly threw stuff into the shed for safe keeping.  The skies opened up shortly after I got in the door.   It rained for awhile, seriously putting a kink into my mental time line for the project.  Finally the rain let up later in the day and I got to go back out and attach some of the border pieces.  Later the rain started up again, I worked in the rain for awhile.  By the end of Saturday I had the composite lumber attached to the fence posts on three sides.  I had hoped to have the project totally done on Saturday.  I realized I still had a long way to go.  

Saturday night we watched Semi-Pro, yet another Will Ferrell movie.  It followed the standard blue print for his flicks.  His character is a funny screw up in life that somehow manages to find success in the end.  It had a modicum of laughs.  It was nothing fantastic, not horrible, just like most of his stuff.    It was entertaining enough I guess, although I would not recommend going through the effort of renting it at a video store.  Your life will still be complete if you don’t get see it. B-.

So Sunday I got started on the garden project a bit earlier.  I wanted to get this damn thing done.  We hadn’t even gotten a chance to mow the grass yet!  Ali skipped spinning class so she could help expedite the process.  I got the last section of border attached and Ali came out for the next phase, the fence.  We had several sections of fencing left over from when we enclosed the property.  I kept them specifically for this project, knowing that we wanted to enlarge the garden for quite some time.  My original thought was we would attach one end of the fence to a post and then pull it by hand as tight as we could.  Well after our initial attempt at manually stretching the fence looked like shit I said that we had to try to stretch it with the come-a-long like we did with the main fence.  I was concerned about doing so however.  The fence posts in the garden were not supported like the pull posts we used before where you had 8 foot posts connected together with a middle H brace.  These were 6 foot line posts that were just plopped two feet in the ground.  If I applied too much pull I would easily yank the sucker out of the ground.

Using this method also introduced other problems.  Instead of using one continuous piece of fencing we would have to pull each direction one at a time, using a small piece of fencing for each side.  So I pulled the Tacoma around, slipped a pole through the fencing and attached the come-a-long to it.  I had Ali by the fence post monitoring the amount of pull she felt on it.  I cranked on the come-a-long just enough to get the fence semi-straight and then hammered it in place.  The fence was far from taut but it was better than it was by hand.  Initially I could tell Ali wasn’t thrilled that the fence wasn’t super straight but later she agreed with me that it is a garden border it’s not a big deal.   We got a little more than half way done with attaching the fence when the skies once again blackened, much earlier than normal around 11 am.  We once again threw everything back in the shed and headed inside before it started to rain, hard.  

I was frustrated.  These rain delays threw everything out of whack.  This was no quick storm.  It rained for several hours.  I made sure anything on the chore list that was inside was done.  I was chomping at the bit to get back outside and get the damn garden done!  Finally the rain let up and we were able to resume construction.  The final pull that went across the front of the garden was the most troublesome.  When I pulled it the fence was psuedo tight but when I released the tension the fence post shifted back and the fence looked floppy.  I did some quick searching in the shed and happened to see a pressure treated 2×4 that just happened to be almost the exact length we needed to wedge between the two front posts to create some support between them.  After trimming of a fraction of an inch we were able to wedge the board into place which once again applied some tension to the fencing.  It actually lined up perfectly with the top of the gate, making it look like we planned it that way all along.

So after getting the area totally enclosed we went to the inside of the garden and used some spare lumber to block holes along the bottom of the border section to inhibit grass and weeds from attempting to grow underneath the border and into the garden.  We then did some minor backfilling inside before cleaning up and calling the garden project a wrap for now.  There is still the major job of buying endless bags of dirt/organic material to fill in the areas we dug out.  I bet we will spend $200-$300 on dirt alone, there is so much to fill.  The expanded garden was much more laborious and time consuming than expected but we now have significantly more room to grow stuff.  Ali is really excited to have the room to plant a lot of different things.

So even though it was late Sunday afternoon, Ali and I took no breaks and jumped right into lawn maintenance.  She zipped around on the tractor and after I ran to the gas station to get more gas for the tractor, I manned the weed whacker and knocked down the jungle as quickly as I could.  I rewarded Ali for helping me bust ass all weekend by telling her to order a pizza from Hungry Howie’s for dinner.  She was quite excited by the prospect.

We finished up around 7pm.  We enjoyed our pizza and watched tv for the duration of the evening.  We were both spent from a weekend filled with hard, sweaty, bust ass work.  This morning when I woke up it was once again pouring.  I delayed Nicki’s walk outside until right before I left for work during a small break in the rain.  As I walked her around the front of the house I noticed there was something all over the walls of the house.  As I looked closer these things appeared to be thousands of tiny worms.  It was bizarre, I never saw anything like this before.  They were everywhere.  I have no idea where they came from or why they would decide to hang out on the walls of the house.  

I have a few pics of the garden project that I will get up there as soon as I can.  

So evidently the rumors of Brett Farve unretiring were based on truth.  So now he is pushing to get released since the Packers haven’t just blindly shit canned their new plans for a post-Farve era and welcomed Brett back with open arms.  It really is an asshole move by him IMO. Imagine if he forces his release, hooks up with another team and then SUCKS.  What a way to put a black eye on his career.  I can’t believe he is willing to walk away from his legacy as THE Packer QB for the last decade and a half just to stroke his ego one last time.  It really makes him look bad to me.  If he does come back with another team I will be finding myself doing something I have never done before, root against Brett Farve. 

Yep, the world server is down.  Might as well go back to bed until the world is back online.

So I stopped at Home Depot and grabbed the composite lumber last night.  Like I mentioned it is very expensive, for 72 feet of it I dropped $180.  I got six 12 foot boards.  A Tacoma is not really a great choice in transporting something of that length, half of the planks were hanging out the back.  I did my best to secure them in place with my bungee collection.  I even tied a red bag to the end of one of them as a safety precaution, too bad it blew off within the first 5 miles of the drive home.  I drove cautiously on the way back, making sure to accelerate slowly and take any turns with the utmost care.  I made it home with everything intact.

After I ate supper I decided to go outside and start demo work on the old garden border.  As I was undoing the bungees I had a close call.  I unhooked one of them and before I knew it the bungee snapped around the boards and the hook hit me right above my left eye.  An inch or two lower and it could have done some serious damage.   Ripping apart the old border was pretty easy.  Much of the wood was rotted so it simply broke apart as I pried on it.  The pieces that did not fall apart got knocked apart easily with the sledge hammer.  Instead of trying to yank the old pieces of rebar out of the dirt I just pounded them deeper below ground level. I threw the old wood into the back of the truck and then threw it into the ditch next to our property line for it to continue to decay.

I had Ali come out to help my eyeball how the new garden border will be situated.  The new garden will be 50% bigger than what we had in place.  I am going to have to do a lot of shovel work digging up the grass that occupies the space where the expanded garden will reside.  It’s going to be bust ass, sweaty work but hopefully the end result is worth it.  We are somewhat limited on how far over we can go with the garden due to sprinkler lines.

Besides the garden work we will have our normal weekly chores to address.  I’m not sure what else the weekend will hold.  Maybe a movie, who knows.  There are a number of movies that are out that I would like to see like Hulk, Wanted, Hancock and Batman.  Unfortunately Ali has indicated she has little interest in seeing any of these movies.

Remember how I mentioned that Ali said something about cooking all of Nicki’s meals and how crazy of an idea it was?  Well she spent much of her day on Wednesday doing just that.  She went to the store and bought a number of items and cooked them all up.  Then she documented the ingredients in the various varieties of dog food we give Nicki.  Based on that list she mixed up combinations of rice and vegetables to be added to each can of dog food.  She put each portion in it’s own container, put a yellow sticky on it indicating which type of dog food it is designed for and put them in the freezer.  Then as we prepare Nicki’s supper we are supposed to pull out the home made portion for the next day’s meal and put it in the fridge to thaw. No, I am not kidding.  Hey if Ali wants to go through all that trouble more power to her, I’m just not doing it.  The biggest negative for me is our fridge has more food in it for the dog than us.  Space is rather tight.

Once in awhile Ali and I catch an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition.  Last night we were watching another one.  I made a comment questioning the choice of families to receive the latest brand new mega-home for free.  The father developed liver cancer and died.  As a result of his death the family is undergoing various hardships.  My comment to Ali was basically that, yea, it’s a horrible thing to have your father/husband die.  It’s a gut wrenching experience.  My point was it is something that tons of people have to endure.  Well these people also happened to run a horse ranch that offers horse riding to disabled people.  I guess that was the feel good hook that landed them the golden ticket.

Ali pointed out how it seems like every time we watch the show I am somehow critical of the family.  I don’t think I have been critical of EVERY family.  I don’t remember saying anything about the family with the disabled, blind kid that could play the piano and sing.  But yea for the most part I do have something negative to say about most of the families and it usually ties into my thoughts that most of these families appear to be looking for a huge handout as opposed to working their way out of their situation.  I’m not one to ask for help, perhaps I project that onto others.

  Maybe it is just the ridiculous, over the top way they do the show.  Between Ty Pennington screaming the entire show to the crazy themed bedrooms where they stick parts of cars into a room or turn another room into a jungle.  Or maybe, I’m just jealous.

After work I am going to stop and pick up composite lumber to build the new expanded garden area.  The composite (plastic) lumber is way more expensive than pressure treated lumber, however unlike regular wood, it won’t turn into a rotted mess in 4 or 5 years.  My thought process is it is worth the extra money up front to build a border that could last 20 years or more.  We also bought aluminum corners to tie it all together in a secure manner.

Our existing garden design is a bit of a pain in the ass.  I have it bordered with landscape timbers and then have the timbers enclosed with fencing to keep rabbits out of the garden.  The problem is grass and weeds wedge themselves between the landscape timbers and the fencing creating a mess.  You can’t stop the junk from growing in between and you can’t effectively weed it either.  With the redesigned garden we are going to be expanding it’s size from 8′ x 16′ to 12′ x 24′.  Instead of having the fencing right against the composite lumber border I am going to have the fencing about a foot off the perimeter so I will be able to get in there with the weed whacker and knock any vegetation down cleanly.  I think it will work out well when we are done.  We also will have to buy a ton of dirt to fill the new expanded area.  The end result hopefully will be an expanded, easier to maintain, and more bountiful garden.  I still have several other borders to replace.  I’d like to get them all done this summer so I can finally cross this line item off my long term project list.

I am disgusted about the republicans dusting off their tactic from 2004 and labeling Obama a “flip flopper”.  It sickens me to think that they believe Americans are stupid enough to fall for that line of bullshit again.  The scary thing is they just might be.  The republican party has a pretty dismal track record of running the country since Reagan left office but one thing they seem to be masters at is public relation manipulation.  They love to try to divert attention from issues and instead focus on catchy labels  they can affix to their opposition.  They have come to realize that many people are too dumb or just don’t care enough about learning the issues.  It’s far easier for the masses to base a candidate on one sound bite or single adjective.  Of course the democrats are not immune to trying similar tactics.  Obama routinely refers to a McCain/Bush policy in an attempt to join these two into one mutated person.  It’s all so disappointing to witness.  It’s so much more about psychological manipulation than making an educated decision.

How about Jesse Jackson muttering something about wanting to cut Obama’s nuts out?  How in the world is this guy still a public figure?  Over the years he has inserted his foot into his mouth time and again as well as leading the charge for what equates to racial blackmail, using his propped up status as prominent black leader to serve his own personal agenda and gain.  He’s a dirt bag.  He needs to go away.  Having him as a visible supporter of the Obama campaign is not a positive thing. 

Over the holiday weekend I got my new home NAS device, the D-link DNS-323 online.  Set up was extremely easy and intuitive.  Even if you know next to nothing about computers there is a wizard you can follow to get the NAS configured and up on your local network.

I slapped two 500 gb SATA drives into my unit and configured it for RAID 1 so I would have data redundancy.  The web driven menus reveal the many functions this device can perform.

Sure it will do quite well as just a huge depository for your many AV files that clog up your computer’s hard drive but it can do much more.  It can serve as an FTP server, a UPNP server, an Itunes Server, DHCP server,  participate in a Windows network and even act as a Bittorrent client (with version 1.05 of the firmware).  It can do even more.  It comes with software that can automate backing up important files on your computer to the NAS.  It also has a function built into the firmware that allows you to ftp in to a web site and remotely back up your files from there over the internet on a scheduled basis.  It has a USB port that will allow the device to also serve as a print server on your network. It’s simply very cool.

If you are a bit more daring and aren’t afraid to get dirty there is even more coolness to be found.  The DNS-323 runs a stripped down version of Linux which opens up the possibility of many “hacks”  A simple hack will allow you telnet access to the unit.  Once you have telnet access it opens the door to a myriad of other modifications you can do.  A goo point to get a feel for the hacking possibilities of the unit can be found here.

I haven’t done any hacking to my unit as of yet.  I’m not sure if I really need to for it to give me all of the functionality I am looking for.  For less than $200 it is a powerful little NAS device, I highly recommend it.