Archives July 2009

I posted a little while ago about the Cash for Clunkers program the government was implementing to achieve two goals.  The first was to give the new car business a kick in the rear that it severely needs, second was to get older, less fuel efficient vehicles off the road and replace them with new vehicles that get significantly better mileage.  When the bill was introduced there was a lot of skepticism about it.  Negative pundits said it would not be an effective way to stimulate consumers to buy a car.  Wow were they wrong.

The program was scheduled to run until November or until the billion dollars allocated ran out, whichever came first.  The program only started 3 weeks ago.  I read today that the billion bucks is ALREADY gone. Some 250,000 people already took advantage of the incentive and traded in their “clunker” for more than they would have gotten on a traditional trade in. Holy shit.  Of course new car dealers now LOVE the program and are pushing for the government to put additional funding into the program since it has been such a runaway success.  Yea it’s just another hand out/ stimulus but this time it’s one people seem to like.

Hell I was rolling around the idea of trading in the party van just to get about double what I would hope to get on a private sale, it’s a great deal.  I would be surprised if they didn’t find additional money to pump into the program.

So Spook did indeed have a broken tooth, one of her front canines.  The vet pulled it and cleaned the rest of her teeth, she didn’t find any other problems in her mouth surprisingly.  The bill was about what I expected, $275.  When I got home I got some more tuna out and chopped it up with knife to make chewing optional.  I was very happy to see that the cat cleaned the plate.

Spook was still somewhat whacked out from the drugs, after she ate I looked in and she had her head down on the plate, asleep.  The bad news is there are antibiotics and pain meds we are supposed to give the cat each day.  They are liquid that you inject into the mouth with a syringe.  We knew from past experience that this procedure never goes well.   We did it anyway last night.  Ali administered the death grip while I tried to shoot the stuff in.  We wind up wearing as much as Spook gets in her mouth, oh well.  Bottom line is Spook is on the road to recovery.

Last night I originally had ideas to mow the grass after work but rain derailed that plan.  Instead I decided to rip into three of my Roombas that needed repair. Two of the repairs were pretty straight forward, I replaced the brush deck assembly on them.  The brush motor is a common failure for the Roomba.  It is subjected to lots of hair and junk that can clog up the works.  The one Roomba actually had the string that adjusts the deck height snap.  I could have just replaced the string if I had one but I didn’t.

The Dirt Dog, the same one that has been in the pool 3 times needed more help.  It had a bad habit of constantly backing up.  This usually occurs because the sensors in the bumper are going bad, causing the robot to think it is constantly going over the edge of something.  I had a spare bumper assembly from one Roomba that had been relegated to scrap.  Getting the bumper off is no easy task however.  You have to rip the Roomba almost all the way down to get it out.  As you can see from the picture it was quite a mess but I systematically worked through the process and got it all back together.  I was thrilled when it tested out fine after the repair.

As you can see all three robots made it back together and all three work again.  My current working stable of Irobots is 5.

Mom is coming out this weekend and we are again going to paint.  It was really an impromptu decision but it will be great to get more of the room knocked out.  We are going to be adding an “accent wall” to help break up the sea of brown in the huge space.  It’s going to be a super busy weekend as we need to knock out some other projects as well over the two days.

Since Buttons was put to sleep most of our cat drama had subsided.  Spook has more or less been “healthy” except for her one urinary tract infection thing.  I mentioned a few days ago how Spook, who always has shedded hair like crazy,  had taken up to accelerating the process by pulling clumps of her shaggy hair out with her mouth and spitting them out.  That condition while gross, wasn’t seen as life threatening in our eyes. 

I think I also mentioned that the cat has been eating less and less.  In fact in the last week she has hardly touched her food at all.  As a result she looked very emaciated although she was still acting “normal” which at this point means she sleeps and pulls her hair out when awake.  Well after so long without eating I was getting more concerned. Last night I decided to take some tuna out and put it down for the cat, it’s her favorite food.

Spook immediately came over and hungrily picked up a piece.  She immediately shook her head in pain and spit it out.  She tried to get another piece and again winced in pain and spit it out, she ran away after that.  So now I had a clear picture of what was going on.  I originally theorized that maybe Spook’s stomach was packed with the fur that she has been pulling out.  Now it seems pretty clear that the problem is in her mouth.  She must have a very painful/infected tooth that is causing her to not eat.

So obviously the cat needed to go to the vet.  Ali asked if I wanted her to take the cat today which I agreed to.  However shortly thereafter Ali became belligerent to the very premise that she suggested herself.  Ali changed her mind and decided that I should be the one to drop off the cat at the vet since the vet is about a mile from my office (even less from her work place)  Ali wanted to go to ballet class Thursday morning at 11 am and having to drop the cat off at the vet beforehand would for some reason be incredibly inconvenient for her.  Ali thought it made much more sense for me, the person getting up early and that is supposed to be at work by 8am drop off the cat instead.

Well this resulted in a back and forth discussion.  To be honest I was flabbergasted that the discussion was even occurring.  If the situation was reversed and I didn’t have to be anywhere until 11 and Ali had to be at work by 8 of course I would take the cat without a peep.  It only makes sense.  Well in this situation, common sense didn’t apply.  Ali bitched and moaned all night about having to take the cat to the vet. 

I was really put off by Ali carrying on so much about it so I decided I will just take the f’in cat myself.  This morning I corralled Spook into the crate and drove her down to the vet where I pulled in to the lot about 7:45.  My already high level of frustration cranked up a few more notches when I see on the door that they didn’t open until 8:30!  Well that seals the deal, there was absolutely no way I should have been the one playing cat taxi since the place doesn’t even open until a half hour after I am supposed to be at work.  I sat there and stewed until I saw an employee outside that would let me in.

I dropped off Spook, who had her customary mucus fangs from the trip and asked the vet to give me a call with an update. Ali, who only admits wrong doing once a decade was clearly on the wrong side of the fence on this one whether she wants to fess up or not.

I was surprised when I saw some of my Facebook friends posting about Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson dying yesterday.  I knew he was in bad shape but had not heard any updates on his condition since the end of last season. It made me sad.

Even though there were times over Johnson’s tenure I was screaming at his defense for going into a soft prevent instead of dropping the hammer on a team, for the most part, the Eagles defense has been stellar over Johnson’s decade as defensive coordinator.  He brought back a psuedo Buddy Ryan type attitude to the team.  Johnson’s defenses were known to be the aggressive, blitzing, exciting variety that a fan appreciates. 

As a fan I appreciate what he brought to my Eagles for the last 10 years, as a person I feel badly for the team and Johnson’s family.  Hopefully Johnson’s memory will inspire the defense to kick some ass this year.

A couple months ago I was all ready to update our domain controllers to Windows 2008.  However I was stopped dead in my tracks when I found out that in order to upgrade an 03 server you needed to have a RIDICULOUS 12 gig of free space on the system drive.  Standard practice for the longest time was a 4 gig C partition and more recently maybe I did a few with a 10 gig C drive with the rest of the RAID volume dedicated to data.  Well I had nowhere near the free space required.  I stopped the upgrade process and my first thought was I would have to back up all the data, reinstall the OS with larger partitions for C and then restore the data.  It would be a pain in the ass for sure and time consuming.

Well during my training last week I came up with another idea.  I was familiar with the tool Partition Magic that has been around for years although I never used it.  What the software does is allow you to dynamically resize your partitions.  It shifts your data over, allowing additional space to do neat things like expand your C drive.  Well when I went to find the latest and greatest version of Partition Magic I found that it was gobbled up by Symantec, like so many other software companies and apparently was discontinued since then.

I did a search on alternatives and stumbled across something called EASUS Partition Master.  We bought the enterprise version of it and I tried it out yesterday.  The procedure used to increase the system drive isn’t exactly intuitive but it does work.  Basically you carve extra space off your data partition which creates free space, that free space is then able to be added to the system drive.  You do this by dragging around graphical representations of the space in a rather confusing manner.  After doing so the system reboots and a boot level program is launched that moves the data around as requested.

After it launches to the OS another reboot is required to recognize the different partition sizes and then poof, all is well.  Instead of spending hours using the method I originally described I instead spent a half hour total getting the partitions resized on two domain controllers.  I’m all set to reattempt my Windows 2008 upgrade.  EASEUS is a GREAT tool for those admins that find themselves in a similar predicament.  Of course it goes without saying that you want to make sure you have a good backup of your data before proceeding, just in case.

Yesterday in general was a very productive day at work.  I addressed and fixed a number of issues, some of which that were the long term nagging variety.  At this point our Exchange 2007 migration is almost complete.  I deleted the connector between the 03 and 07 server yesterday and have the 03 server turned off right now.  The only thing left to do is uninstall Exchange 03 from the box.  Turning off that server pointed a spotlight at a number of devices like copiers and other software that were still pointing to the old Exchange server to send mail.  I am addressing them as they come up.

Last week since I was home all week I didn’t shave.  As a result I had a good faceful of hair going on.  I decided I wanted a crazy moustache looking deal so I shaved my face but left the hair above the lip and let it extend down to my chin.  It was sort of goatee with the chin section missing.  Ali hated it and thought it looked ridiculous.  To be honest I thought it looked ridiculous as well but I decided to go into work yesterday still sporting the mean looking moustache.  As expected it generated many comments.  I was asked if I was trying out for a new porn role, if I was trying to look like a biker along with various smirks and smiles.  It was a brief lived experiment, I shaved it off last night much to Ali’s delight.

I still have this desire to shave my head….

Friday afternoon my training got done a little early so I put the extra time to use, trying to knock out some of the normal weekend stuff early.  Although it wasn’t really planned out officially, Ali mentioned something about possibly painting some more this weekend.  Although my hate of painting is well established, I wasn’t disagreeable to the idea since the dining room turned out so well.

On Saturday morning we decided to do something other than housework, we went to Corkscrew Swamp to walk the boardwalk.  Our primary reason for going was to buy another bird feeder to replace a rusted out one that we can no longer use.  Our second hope was to catch a glimpse of the Ghost Orchid.  For late July the swamp was incredibly dry.  Normally it would be full of water, instead we hardly saw any water, it was bizarre and a testament to how dry our “wet ” season has been so far.

We saw a ton of pond apples along the way, many more than we ever recall seeing before.  We came upon an area of the boardwalk with a number of stationary scopes set up, all pointing at the ghost orchid.  The ghost orchid is an incredibly rare plant that only shows up in South Florida and Cuba.  This particular Ghost Orchid is the largest known specimen in the world.  The plant is estimated to be 30-50 years old and sits high up on a cypress tree that is estimated to be between 400-500 years old.  I was able to zoom in with my camera and get a decent shot of it. It was very cool to get a first hand look at something so rare, not to mention it is 10 minutes from our house.

 After the swamp visit we headed out to grab some stuff.  I snagged my own set of furniture sliders to make the chore of moving heavy stuff much easier on the back.  All I need to do is lift the item an inch off the ground while Ali slides the pads underneath.  After that it is super easy for one person to move a piece of furniture around the room. 

At Lowe’s in addition to another gallon of paint I picked up a hand held, rechargeable TWO MILLION candle power flash light.  To call it a flash light isn’t very accurate.  It’s more like a hand held stadium light.  This thing has amazing power.  Over the weekend I had fun shooting it out around the property and seeing it instantly lit up brightly.  I was able to hit all of the surrounding neighbor houses that are hundreds of yards away like it was nothing.  I love it.

While I was there I came across some chaise lounges on clearance.  They had a model that was similar to ours that are ripping for $99.  Hell I was looking at spending $90 just on a replacement sling.  I had Ali look at it, she said it was cool.  She told me to get two since we currently have two.  Well it turned out that they only had the one that was on display left.  I went back out and asked Ali if she wanted me to just snag the one. The idea of having a single chaise that didn’t exactly match anything else would annoy Ali so she said to forget it.  Oh well, maybe I’ll find a deal elsewhere. Evidently it is patio furniture clearance time. 

Saturday afternoon we did our prep work for painting.  We decided to divide the great room into three sections due to it’s size.  We picked a stopping point right next to the TV area.  We cleared out the area and Ali started taping.  I taped the ceiling line again since it resulted in a carefree straight ceiling line during the living room portion of the project.

On Saturday night we finally got around to watching Quantum of Solace.  I really liked the last Bond film with Daniel Craig so I hoped for more of the same although I had heard some negatives about this latest installment. The naysayers were right.  The movie was basically nothing but a non-stop series of action scenes with next to zero plot.  At the end of the movie Ali turned to me and said “The only thing I got out of the movie was the bad guy was trying to hoard water” I had to agree.  At the VERY end of the film Bond finally meets up with the guy that was involved with his love interest from the first flick who dies.  Although the entire movie was supposed to be about Bond getting revenge for her death, you never really saw that tie for 99% of it.  It was dumb,  C.

Sunday morning Ali and I both rode bikes, hers a stationary variety at the gym, mine on the road.  I tried to get out early to beat the heat.  It was my first extensive ride since installing my new seat and cargo rack.  It also was the first ride after my front brake adjustment so wheel didn’t have constant drag on it.  I suppose the combination of things worked out.  I did the long 17.25 mile ride to Publix and back in just under 1:03.  That time was a minute and a half better than the time I logged with Randall pacing me.  Although I didn’t hit as high of speeds on the ride out I managed more consistent speed on the way back.  My average pace was 16.5 mph, not fast by any standard but hey I am just a casual rider on a basic road bike without clipped in feet.  On the way back I was surprised when a “real” biker blew by on his couple thousand dollar bike with all of the trimmings.  He didn’t even look like he was working that hard.  Oh well.

After the ride I was pooped, so much so that after lunch I agreed to lay down and take a nap with Ali even with a painting project looming ahead.  Ali’s rest was disturbed when she heard Sadie barking outside.  Evidently I forgot she was still outside when I went out to grab a drop cloth.  By the time Ali let her in she was panting like crazy.

We didn’t start actually painting till close to 2:30.  We finished up close to 7.  This section had it’s own set of challenges like the very high vaulted ceiling and the little knockout in front of the guest bedrooms that has a tiny linen closet.  All in all things went smoothly. You can see all of the pictures from the project here.  I just added them to the dining room shots.

While you are clicking links you can go here.  These are a few shots of the Wii action mom and I had while she was over, including the legendary score sheet from our bowling match where I bowled the worst game of my Wii career and mom rolled her best. Click here to see.

Even though I have been home all week doing Windows Server 2008 training I have been trying to remain productive.  Every day during the lunch break I have been putting in an EA Active session.  I also have been trying to do things around the house like laundry, work on the van, work on my bike, etc…

Well yesterday after class I decided to do something that has been well overdue, clean up the hobby/fitness room.  That room has slowly turned into an in house dumping ground for things that would be “done later”.  It had gotten to the point where Ali’s desk had piles a foot high as well as other piles on the floor and elsewhere.   It was to the point where there was a narrow walkway and that was about it.  The other day when I ripped out the speakers I got very annoyed when my access to the power plug was blocked by a pile of junk.  That is what got me motivated to take care of it, myself.

You see most of the stuff in that room had been put there by Ali, she is both a pack rat and idealist by nature.  She will keep things for a rainy day when she will get around to doing them, unfortunately that rainy day hardly if ever comes so as a result this stuff just accumulates.  So I knew that the cleaning process would be much more efficient if I did it myself since I would apply my logic to the process instead of her sentiment.  It was sort of simple, pick up an item, ask myself, while this EVER likely be done or used?  If the answer is no then it’s just taking up space.  Now in reality I got rid of very little of substance.  A lot of it was empty boxes that I condensed, some bags of broken styrofoam and some of my old, unusable plain parts.

Well in the span of about 90 minutes I had the room looking tons better.  Ali could actually sit at her sewing desk now and sew if she felt the desire to.  Clutter begets clutter. It’s my job to cut it off at the pass.

I watched Fight Club last evening.  I forgot just how awesome that movie is.  It’s another fantastic performance by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.  I just love the sarcastic, cynical, biting view it puts on today’s cubicle farmed, Ikea furnished, white collared, soft, American male and the society that has created him.  It has some incredibly powerful statements in it.  If you don’t come away from that movie thinking then you are already one of the hopeless sheep.

I said to Ali as I watched Obama’s news conference last night on the health care plan, ” Wow is it nice to hear a president speak intelligently on a subject, off the cuff.” as Obama answered reporter’s various questions.  After 8 years of “terror, terror, God Bless America” and little else it was refreshing to listen to a president that could speak in detail on a subject (even if you don’t agree with his point of view) and able to intelligently explain his position even when the teleprompter is turned off.   Good Lord could you imagine Sarah Palin answering those same questions? “Well it’s the 2nd half, we need a three pointer but I double dribbled… God Bless America.”

I ordered two replacement brush decks for my Roombas as well as a battery.  I will have to set aside a few hours for extensive Roomba surgery.  I have three that are in need of repair.

So I went out with some Lime Away to wipe off the black residue left by the rust converter on the party van.  It did a nice job of taking the gunk right off.  In this picture you can see one of the rust spots on the drip rail, Now imagine about 10-15 more of these. In the second picture you can see the after shot for comparison. I posted all of my Iphone pics of the project here if you are dying to see the painstaking process I went through.

Last night I had a dream that I was playing 2 on 2 football.  However instead of a football we were using a half full water bottle as the ball.  We were the kicking team.  For some reason the referee “Kicked off” (threw the bottle) however she had a very bad arm and only threw it maybe 20 yards.  The short throw meant the opposing two players had to rush up frantically to get the water bottle.  In their haste they fumbled the “ball” and I was right in the vicinity when it happened.  I leaped at the water bottle, trying to recover it, as I did I simultaneously launched myself out of bed.  I caught myself before I hit the floor on my hands, my legs were still propped up on the bed.  I just sort of mumbled to myself “wtf…” and went back to sleep. Ali is lucky she wasn’t my tackling dummy.

So yesterday during my class I accidentally knocked over and pulled a  bit on the head unit to my computer speaker system.  I realized shortly after that that I had no sound.  Well obviously I need sound to take a class so I jump under the desk and start scrambling to see if I pulled something loose.  Power? Check. Audio cable? Check.  WTF, the power light on the unit was still dark.  Well I had no time to f with it so I quickly ripped out the speakers we have in the exercise room and hooked them up.

On a break I decided to rip apart the head unit and see if there was anything loose that I could maybe fix.  I take it completely apart to the point where the circuit board is hanging out.  I apply power again and still see nothing.  Nothing looked loose, nothing looked wrong.  WTF? Well I was pissed that it would mysteriously die.  I angrily ripped the system off my desk and unraveled the mess of cords.  I threw the equipment on the floor, figuring it would wind up going to the electronics recycling dump.

Well later on for some reason I thought I would f with it one more time.  As I was fiddling with the head unit I noticed the power lied flickered for a second and then turned off.  Again I am diddling with the cords trying to bring it back to life with no luck.  Then it hits me.  I PRESS on the led which also doubles as the on and off switch. Bingo, it lights up, everything is fine.  Evidently when I set up the system a year or two ago I turned on the head unit and since then forgot that the led doubled as the power switch.  When I knocked it over the first time it must of simply bumped the switch off.  I felt both relieved and stupid at the same time.

So after class I decided I was going to whip out the white paint can and paint the drip rail on the van. The drip rail had a ton of very rusty spots on it.  Up to this point I had stripped the rust off with a drill attachment and then treated the areas with rust converter that supposedly stops the rust chemical process as well as creating a primer like black surface. 

I figured the weather was good for it, the sun was out and we have not had any appreciable rain for at least two weeks.  I grabbed some of the left over masking tape from the dining room painting project and went to work.  Taping it wasn’t too tough and even if it wasn’t perfect no one would notice or care, it’s a 16 year old party van.  The paint I used supposedly also had some sort of rust inhibiting properties.  The paint went on easily.  I couple times I was a bit off in my aim and had some over spray, like on the windshield but for the most part it wasn’t bad.  It was quite breezy outside.  Several times I found myself downwind and as a result inhaled a bunch of fumes that gave me a headache later.

As I was moving around the van I noticed the skies were starting to look a bit ominous off in the distance.  No worries, it has looked like that the past several days and we got nothing.  Once I put two coats on the drip rail and thought it looked half decent I decided to do some impromptu other spots like a couple rusty spots on the passenger side where the old man that owned the van before me drug it along a post at a drive up window.  I even quickly taped off the wheel well skirt to apply some paint to the area that was bare fiberglass.  A few spots down low I didn’t even bother to mask, just shoot and spray, f it.

I pulled all the tape and admired my handy work.  For an hours labor and $30 in materials it looked good to me, certainly much better than it did.  The only thing that I need to do is use some fine sand paper to blend in some of the spots I hit on the body of the van as well as remove some shit that dripped down from the rust converter goop.  As the last bit of tape was removed the sky was looking even more unfriendly.  Of course as I could have predicted, we got a downpour.  However it was about an hour after I had finished and the paint appeared to have enough of a skin on it to hold up, thankfully.

This project took me back 25 years when I painted not one but TWO cars completely with spray paint.  One was an old shitty Chevette that I painted red.  I can’t remember how we got the car all I remember is it never made it on to the road because it had major problems that prevented the car from passing state inspection.

The other car was Missy’s Vega.  I went all out on her car.  It was painted a deep blue with white racing stripes.  I pulled off the trim and painted it all black.  At the time, I thought I did a bang up job considering it was done with spray paint.  I had blue snot for days afterward.  I hadn’t thought to wear any sort breathing protection, smart. Probably melted half of my brain cells.