Archives 2010

My knees have been doing quite well for several months even with a regular running program, 300’s, 275 pound dead lifts and more.  Well the string of good fortune came to an end this week.  My knees don’t feel real good right now although I don’t think it is anything a few days of rest won’t correct.  The funny thing is the cause, clutter.

Well actually clutter is indirectly responsible, teamed up with laziness.  Early this week I was having problems with my home server so I went into the hobby room to work on it.  I knew I had to be in front of the screen for a little while so I looked over to Ali’s area for the small office chair we have in the room.  Well that chair had become the home for a box of junk so instead of going over, taking the box off the chair and wheeling the chair over I decided to just get down on my knees in front of the server.

Well putting pressure on my knee caps for any length of time is a prescription for trouble.  I might have been on my knees for a total of 5-10 minutes but that was all it took to aggravate them.  Ever since my kneeling session my knees have felt sore.  Lesson learned, less clutter and move the damn box.

I read the Eagles have been busy cutting/trading  players, mostly ones that were worthless.  Some of the names that are gone include Kevin Curtis, Darren Howard, Reggie Brown and Sean Andrews.  Besides Curtis, I am fine with the Eagles parting ways with pretty much all of these players, especially Sean Lazy Big Baby Andrews.  The guy had tons of physical talent, too bad he didn’t have the work ethic to match it.  The way he has strung the team along the past two years made me sick.  So long Sean, maybe you can find another team to whore some money from, ya bum.

I have a bunch of things I’d like to get done this weekend, as usual.  Ali’s new road bike is supposed to show up today.  It’s the same model as what I have which is low end on the road bike scale but more than adequate for beginner cyclists such as ourselves.  I’m sure I will be assembling it tonight for her.

My first workout at Retro Fitness went well.  I dead lifted 275 pounds without having to worry if I was under surveillance, did cardio on both a recline bike with it’s own personal tv and in the cardio theater while watching Bill& Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  Two big thumbs up so far.

I heard a very funny commercial on one of the Stern channels on the way back for hotornot.com  hotornot has been around for awhile, the premise was a picture of someone comes up and you simply rate their appearance on a scale of 1-10.  Well they evidently expanded it to be a dating site.

Some of the tag lines from the spot are things like ” if you are lucky you could be a 7 and score an 8, if you are REALLY lucky you could be a 5 that scores a 9!”  The best line of all is the last one where they say “hotornot.com, because you don’t need another f*cking “friend”…”  (Facebook reference)

I am officially a member of Retro Fitness.  I joined on my way home last night.  I can hardly wait to check out all of the stuff today.  It always livens up your routine when you start in a new place.

I have not been sleeping soundly at all the past several days.  I’ve been waking up frequently.  Luckily I have been able to fall back asleep pretty quickly but I wake up feeling rather exhausted.  I wonder what cycle the moon is in.

Florida, like most states has money problems.  Florida is one of the few states that does not have an income tax however they make up for it by taxing everything else under the sun.  One of Florida’s big revenue streams of course is tourism and the tax dollars generated by it.  The recession that followed many years of living high on the hog caught Florida by surprise like everyone else.  As a result they now have been coming up with “creative” ways to both save and generate money. 

This year they were nice enough to raise vehicle registration and drivers license service costs by 50%. 50%!!!!!!  They also had the lame idea of selling interstate toll roads to private industry (that fell through thankfully).  They also froze all state employee salaries (applied to us as well) .  Ok fine, hey times are tough right? 

Well now there is a new proposal in Tallahassee to F with our pension plans.  One of the benefits of  committing yourself to a state job is the pension plan.  The Florida Retirement System (pension) is one of the best run pension plans in the nation and is fully funded as opposed to running in the red like most pension plans. 

Well some stuffed shirt politician thought this would be another great way to save money.  He has proposed a myriad of changes to the plan, none of them good. Some of the most notable changes are pushing back the age where you can receive full pension benefits to 65 (from 62), changing the benefit calculation percentage down as well as averaging your salary over your entire career instead of your top 5 earning years and not grandfathering in current employees. 

Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of somebody that has spent 25+ years in the system.  You were probably looking forward to retiring in 5 years, enjoying your retirement and pension that you earned over three decades of work.  Now, just like that there is the possibility that not only do you have to work 3 additional years, you will receive significantly less benefits for doing so.  That is total, unadulterated bullshit.

To f with tens of thousands of state employees retirement benefits to address a short term budget issue is ridiculous.  Do you think if the money crunch subsides they will magically restore the prior benefit levels? Of course not.

Imagine if you worked at something for 30 years with the promise of a Corvette at the end of it and near the finish line they tell you “sorry, you get a used Dodge instead”  To further muddy the situation, a state worker can’t expect to get any support from the general public since there is such an anti-government sentiment.  I’m sure the general consensus would be “Eh F the state workers and their pension”  It’s one of those bandwagons that is easy to jump on unless you are the one that is getting the shaft directly. 

The most hypocritical part of it all is the representative who is so eager to axe state worker benefits is a home owner in Naples with a property on the books for 5.8 million.  It’s so easy to propose slashing somebody else’s retirement income when you are filthy rich.

So I cancelled my membership to Planet Fitness yesterday.  Of course I had just been billed so I am technically a member until mid-April.  My plan is to stick around PF for a day or two to get the word out to the people I would like to see come with me.  I was debating if I wanted to write a letter to Planet Fitness corporate to let them know exactly what sucks about their franchise. 

I just noticed yesterday that the owner may have been anticipating the opening of Retro and started to make some changes to make PF seem less nazi-like.  Gone is the sign by the bathrooms with a dozen rules that members have to obey.  Gone are the signs back in the free weight area that threatened members with immediate expulsion if they grunt, drop weights or swear.  I actually didn’t smell sewage yesterday either.  Oh well PF serves it’s purpose I guess, it’s cheap.  I won’t miss it one bit I can pretty much assure you.

Last night Ali informed me we had a guest, in our toilet.  It was a full size tree frog.  I would be shocked by this if it hadn’t already happened before.  Somehow the frog got into the drain pipes of the house, came up into the toilet and swam through the water until he made it to the bowl.

Ali was nice enough to leave the frog for me to capture.  I corralled our little guest in a big plastic cup and promptly returned him outside to the pond area.  It should be big upgrade from living in the septic system.

I emailed my dad about the latest Moto Guzzi situation.  He said he contacted the guy that worked on the bike.  The mechanic said that the ethanol that is now in most gas could be causing the problems with the float sticking.  The ethanol could attack the rubber in the needle/seat assembly.  The bike is so old that it is supposed to run on regular leaded gas.

I replied to dad that it would have been nice if the mechanic would have let him know of the potential problem before dad dropped a good chunk of change for all of the work that was done.  Dad gave me his blessing to sell the bike if I want to.  After hearing what Dad spent to get it running, I feel obligated to recoup as much money as possible for the bike to give to him.  The only problem is I don’t think there is much of a market for a 1984 Moto Guzzi with carb and electrical issues.

I had heard from a couple people about a new gym that recently opened up near work.  On Friday I cut my workout short so I could pop over there and check it out.  The gym is a chain called Retro Fitness.  They put it into a space that used to be occupied by a Walgreens.  I walked in and instantly knew my days of looking at a lunk alarm were soon to end.  The place is spacious and filled with brand new equipment.  All of the cardio equipment has it’s own dedicated lcd tv.  The free weight area is large and COMPLETE.  They have weights up to 120 pounds instead of the measly 60 pound cut off at Planet Fitness.  They even have a squat rack, something that PF bans because it attracts too many lunks.  Retro Fitness also has a theater cardio room which is what it sounds like, cardio machines in a movie theater.  If you prefer you can do your cardio while watching a movie on a 22 foot screen. Oh and the place doesn’t smell like sewage either.

There are only two negatives which are insignificant.  It costs $20 a month instead of $10 at PF, still very cheap, and it is a little farther away than PF, again no biggie.  So now my plan is to spread the word to my inner circle at Planet Fitness in the hopes that I can get them to jump with me.  I’ll cancel my membership at PF and hopefully be working out at Retro Fitness sometime this week.  I am hoping PF doesn’t give me any bullshit when I go to cancel. I’m excited about the prospect of getting away from Planet Fitness with their laundry list of bullshit rules and most importantly the f’ing lunk alarm.  I’ve always felt like I was sacrificing part of my soul by working out in that place.

We had another nice weekend weather-wise although it was ultra windy on Saturday.  The new front screen door was utilized heavily over the weekend.

On Saturday we weeded which included the garden.  Despite the cold temps that killed a bunch of our garden we still are getting some nice production as you can see.  Ali pulled a PERFECT carrot out on Sunday.  Many of you may remember the mutant carrots we produced last year.  This year we raised the area that we planted carrots in so the soil would not be compacted.  It looks like the effort was worth it. In addition to the carrots we have been harvesting great quality beets, peas, broccoli, romaine lettuce  and spinach. 

Ali was gone a good portion of Saturday, first at a Phi Mu luncheon and then she went to a concert with a girlfriend of hers.   I spent a couple hours doing data entry for work.  It was extremely tedious, by the end of it I was starting to lose my mind. 

I also sat down and watched Dark Knight again.  I enjoyed it but not as much as seeing it the first time.  I also played WoW until after 11.

On Sunday, despite the time shifting one hour forward I wanted to be productive out of the box.  I worked on getting my various Sunday house chores knocked out early.  Ali and I talked about running during the day so I didn’t want to have to do a shitload of work after running.

We decided to go back to the North Collier Regional Park to run, the place that also houses the water park.  The temps were nice, but not swimming nice for me.  The park was open and I saw people in the water!  Well, I saw kids in the water, I didn’t see any adults getting wet.  They HAVE to heat that water, our pool is at 66-67 degrees right now.

We had a great three mile jaunt around the park.  I love running there, it’s so scenic and diverse visually.  The park is a bee hive of activity.  Everywhere you look there are people being active which is great to see.  I get so used to seeing so many human sloths day to day, I sometimes forget that there are some people that actually “get it”.

After our run we had a couple errands to run.  First we stopped at Best Buy.  I was pricing a flat screen tv’s in the 32 inch range.  On Friday at Sam’s Club I saw a 32 inch LG 720P set for $360 and change.  I was curious what Best Buy would come in at. Surprisingly they had nothing that was a similar deal on display.  My thoughts are to replace the monstrous conventional tube 32 inch set in our bedroom.  The thing weighs a TON.  In conjunction I would like to update the Tivo in there since an upcoming Comcast change is going to limit the existing non-hd device to only getting the major networks.

While we were at Best Buy we also looked at washer/dryer sets.  We got sucked into a 5 minute sales pitch from some guy despite us telling him we weren’t looking to buy right now.  Both Ali and I would definitely like to update our set sometime soon.  The new models save a lot of water/electricity in comparison to the older conventional models.

While I was there I was taken in by some baseball game that was running on a PS3.  I took a couple of at bats and failed miserably, the highlight was fouling off a couple pitches before striking out.  The graphics in the game were simply amazing.  The detail and realism that is possible on the new consoles just blows me away.

After a quick lunch at Panera we headed to Sports Authority.  Ali needed to get a new pair of swimming goggles for her new endeavor, swimming.  She started swimming lessons last week.  It was her New Years resolution, to learn to swim. 

Once we got back I decided to finally work on the Moto Guzzi.  The last time I took the bowl off the one carb I noticed the float assembly was sticking which was surely causing the fuel leakage issue I was seeing.  When I took the bowl off this time the assembly felt just fine, no binding.  I still removed the float as well as the needle and seat that I replaced previously to verify all looked well, it did.  The only difference between now and when I checked it last was the carb was dry yesterday and wet with gas originally.  Perhaps something in the gas is gumming up the works.

Well I wanted to give starting the bike another try so I hooked up the battery charger.  Instantly I knew I had a problem when I saw the voltage on the battery didn’t cross 4 volts.  Dad had mentioned the bike has some “electrical problems”.  The battery is almost new, it shouldn’t have failed already.  Well 5 hours of charging failed to raise the voltage level, the battery is f’d.

 I suppose I will snag a battery for it but I am just about at the limit of the time/money I will put into the bike.  To be honest my desire to ride a motorcycle  has waned significantly.  It seems like since my dad brought it down I just happen to catch the “Motorcyclist dies in accident” headline more and more.  A Camaro will deliver more thrills without the risk of getting taken out by some blind q-tip.

Back to the grind.

This is my box.  I have had this box for at least 30 years if not longer.  I have no idea where the box came from, who gave it to me or anything else about it’s origination.  I just know it’s my box.  I have a long pattern of holding on to material items for incredibly long periods of time.  This box, my 7th grade camouflage t-shirt and 20 year old lunch box are all good examples.

As you can see my box is adorned with stickers, mostly of NFL teams.  When I was young I had a great idea.  I wrote a letter to each and every team I could get an address for and asked them if they could send me stuff.  Looking back, I am curious how I actually got the addresses to send the letters to since the internet was not around.  Anyway as you can see, several teams responded to my request.  I have stickers from the Saints, Cowboys, Eagles, Broncos, Redskins, Oilers, and one baseball team, the Orioles.

When I started actually receiving these items back in the mail I can’t describe how excited I was.  Getting an envelope filled with stickers and a letter on official team letterhead was more than enough to blow the mind of a kid that just hit double digits in age.  I’m not quite sure how I decided that my box would be an appropriate item to adorn my prized stickers.  All I know is the stickers and the box have been with me forever. Based on the Broncos 1977 AFC Champs sticker my approximate age at that time would have been 10.

Nowadays the box just sits quietly on my computer desk.  For years it has housed diskettes that I no longer need/use.  It also has two expired credit cards as well as the ticket to the Eagles/Panthers NFC championship game I attended.  I need to repurpose the box to hold more valuable items since it holds such a sentimental value to me.  Perhaps when I kick it my ashes could go in it, that would be cool.

This weekend I have more office work from home projects to straighten out.  All week I have been struggling with issues at work, my brain hurts.  Ali is going to be gone a good portion of Saturday so I should have plenty of time to work on stuff.

We might go for a run on Sunday.  Last night I felt a slight twinge in my right ass cheek, surely from my heavy dead lift / power clean session.  I am hoping I am twinge free before I run again.

Ever since I went back to Planet Fitness, home of the lunk alarm, they have had an issue.  By the back door of the gym that leads to the dumpster area, there is a small notch where they have a few pieces of equipment.  That area has always stunk.  I remember back when I rejoined talking to the owner about it.  He said something about how he was all over the management company to get it taken care of.  The smell was distinctly that of sewage.

Well the smell has never gone away and gym staff has tried to address it by putting multiple air fresheners back in that corner which did nothing but make the smell mutate into french vanilla sewage.  Well the past couple days the stench has become more powerful, you could smell it walking in the front door.  The staff had towels around the base of the rear door held down by 25 pound plates, additional stationary air fresheners and a staff member patrolling the area regularly spraying even more air freshener.

You can imagine how disgusting this combination smelled.  I saw somebody up on a ladder looking at pipes in the ceiling.  Hopefully it’s gotten bad enough that they actually address it.  If I owned the place I would be going ballistic on the property owners.  Exactly how many people are you going to sign up if they start to dry heave as they take the tour?

Yesterday at the gym I did some stuff I don’t normally do, power cleans and heavy dead lifts.  A power clean is when you start with a barbell on the ground and wind up with it at shoulder height in front of you.  In one powerful move you bring the weight off the floor and snap it up to your shoulders while dipping your legs a bit.  I did three sets of eight and that was plenty for me.

Dead lifts are a staple exercise in the 300 but they are with a relatively light 135 pounds.  Yesterday I pushed the weight all the way up the 260-270 pound range, doing three reps at the max weight.  It felt good to see an impressive looking amount of weight on the bar and be able to get it from the floor to upright.  However doing heavy dead lifts also can be an express ticket to back pain if you aren’t careful.  It felt good to do these core power moves.  I hope to rotate them into my routine more regularly.  Doing a 300 pound dead lift would be a nice little feather.

All week I have been screwing around with ISA 2006, changing things during the day and then seeing if they work after hours.  I STILL do not have it working.  I have no reason to implement ISA 2006, what I have in place works fine.  But now I am taking this as an insult to my technical prowess, I have to get it working just for personal satisfaction.  I had one small victory last night after I successfully was able to ftp out to the internet through ISA.

  Tonight I am going to mom’s to return her laptop.  Last week her windows install got corrupted somehow.  I reloaded it with the system restore cd’s but I have to get it reconnected to her dsl connection.  I’m going to score a free dinner out of the deal.

I moved the web cam to the top of the grill.  I see that Sadie is working on her tan.  🙂

We have had credit card fraud committed against us twice in the past couple months.  The first time was on Ali’s account that is used for her business.  Not only did they charge bogus items, they also changed the billing address on the card.  Now this past weekend we received an email from American Express about some possible shady charges, including $700 to Dell!  Ali called up and got it cleared up but regardless, it is quite disturbing.

I wonder how strongly the CC companies pursue these cases since they are so numerous?  I would have loved to pursue this person myself.  It wouldn’t be that hard to do, find out what address the Dell computer was going to and you have your criminal.  People that do this are absolute criminals and deserve every ounce of punishment the law allows. 

The next question is where are they getting the CC information from?  Ali and I both use our CC’s freely on the internet.  You never know if one of these vendors has been hacked and in the process exposed your info.  Hell CC info can be stolen by shady clerks, waiters or even skimmers.  I had one situation a year or two ago where a waiter casually padded the tip when he ran the CC, assuming I wouldn’t notice.  People are dirt bags.

I tried to roll out ISA server 2006 into production last night.  During my initial testing last night I was able to ping to and from our branch networks, connect to the internet and open network shares.  Stuff seemed to be working.  Well this morning there were fires everywhere.  People signing on to the network could not do so, it would just sit and spin.  I was unable to connect to our web host via ftp either despite having a rule in place that would clearly seem to allow such access.

I have found ISA server 2006 to be a royal pain in the ass to configure.  The rules which seem logical and simple to create just do not work as they should.  I am getting quite annoyed.

Our weekend once again started very early as we had another 5K to time.  Once again it was COLD with temps in the mid 40’s to start.  The race was small with around 300 registered runners. Timing went well.  We had a few issues but they were all related to human error during the registration process.  It always amazes Ali and I how something that appears to be so simple as registration can get messed up as much as it does.  Even with the race starting at 8am we were cleaned up and out of there by 9:30 which is great.

Once we got home I finished my post race processing, web site updating and equipment clean up.  While Ali retreated to the bedroom for her customary post-race nap, I was ready to dig into installing the retractable screen door I bought earlier in the week.

I came to the decision to try a retractable screen door when I recalled that our neighbors had one.  Originally I had plans to screen in the front landing of the house.  The purpose was to allow us to open the front door and let air flow through the house.  Both Jeremy and Randall said they didn’t think it would look great when they were over in January.  Plus that option would involve considerable expense and effort to complete.  A retractable screen costs a fraction of the money, is easier to install as well as being removable.

Installation of the screen was a bit of a pain in the ass for me.   The main body of the unit that conceals the screen is held in place with two wood screws.  The problem is they are like 1/4 inch from the top and the bottom.  They are designed to screw into the trim around the door frame.  Well attaching to the top was no issue but screwing into the bottom was for two reasons.  The trim on the door does not extend all the way to the floor, there is a small gap that is filled with grout.  The hole in the screen body line up right where the wood met the grout. So I drilled my pilot hole into half grout, half wood.

Secondly having the hole so low to the ground made drilling the hole and tightening the screw a pain in the ass because you could not get on the head of the wood screw straight on.  In no time I stripped out the phillips head screw.  I went into the garage and got one of my own high quality wood screws with a star head fitting.  Using this sort of screw allowed me to get more torque and get  the bottom attached.  It was still less than ideal in my eyes but the assembly felt secure on the door frame.

I had a second issue when it came to cutting the track the screen slides on.  The directions were not very good at all and I wound up cutting the track shorter than I should have because of the unclear picture.  I was pissed since I knew that it wasn’t like I could go to Home Depot and just buy more tracks.  After some reevaluation I came up with a way to still utilize the tracks without sacrificing functionality of the screen door. After overcoming that hurdle the rest of the install went well.

Then the big moment of truth came.  I opened the front door and pulled the screen door across, and BAM instant big window!  It’s awesome.  At first glance it almost looked like there was nothing there at all.  In fact when Ali awoke from her nap she was going to come yell at me for leaving the front door open until she realized the screen was in place. 

I showed the dogs their new portal to the front yard.  The weren’t sure what to make of it at first but I am sure over time they will enjoy having an unobstructed view out the front of the house.

 Having the front door open in conjunction with the slider that leads to the lanai let a wonderful breeze flow right through the house.  Both Ali and I were very pleased with the end result.  Can’t beat it for $139.

We decided to continue to take advantage of the temps that had warmed considerably from their chilly 40’s in the morning.  Ali and I spent a good portion of the afternoon working out in the yard.  We weeded and harvested from our garden collecting lettuce, carrots, broccoli, beets and our first ever home grown peas.   We also transplanted a number of things around the yard and Ali trimmed up a few of the landscape areas that were damaged from the cold temperature.

I also was able to do the final rearrangement of the sheds now that the lawn sweeper was out of my hair.  Things look much better.  However the very final step of the garage clean out will involve relocating the generator to one of the sheds.  If the Moto Guzzi was history it would be a piece of cake.  The bike has two strikes against it and is walking on thin ice.

After our yardwork session we wrapped it up nicely by enjoying an alcoholic beverage out on the newly resurfaced deck.  We sat out there for almost 45 minutes just taking things in, appreciating how much we love our property.  It surely isn’t fancy, isn’t spectacular but it is significantly improved from what we bought back in 2001, thanks almost exclusively to our own labor.  We like our little piece of the planet, even after being there for close to 10 years now.

Sunday was another pleasant day.  I had most of the housework done in the morning.  The rest of the day we again enjoyed the weather and hung out.  We noticed that our tax refund hit our account over the weekend.  I celebrated by buying a couple items online I had been waiting on from cyberguys and Duluth Trading.  I anxiously await my first pair of fire hose jeans. Since I appear to have improved our water quality the money can be directed towards a few smaller projects as well as possibly paying off a decent chunk of the remaining Camry loan.

Today Ali and I have another post work running date scheduled, should be fun.

Here is a view of the retractable screen door courtesy of my Trendnet wireless cam which is sitting in the dining room area today.