Archives 2010

The past two days on my way walking into the gym I have been solicited.

Yesterday as I was approaching the sidewalk two guys in a vehicle pull up beside me slowly.  The guy on the passenger side said “Hey buddy, this is going to sound really strange but I have this extra surround sound system to sell real cheap! I was accidentally sent two of them!”

I immediately dismissed the guy saying no thanks, I’m not interested.  He continued to try to get my attention but I just continued walking.  Why I looked like a good candidate to fence stolen property is beyond me.

Then today as I am walking up to the front door I see this girl wearing a tube top that shouldn’t be.  She had walked up to an old guy standing on the sidewalk and was talking to him,  however as I approached she turned her attention to me.  She asked me if I had a phone on me.  The red flag definitely went up, there was something weird about this chick too.

I told her I didn’t have my phone on me but if she needed to make a call she could come in the gym, I’m sure she could use their phone.  Well that option was not viable to her for some reason which further raised my suspicion.  After I went inside I saw the girl still walking around and accosting other people.  She followed one guy all the way out to his car before walking away with some paper in her hand.  She wanted something but I don’t think it was a phone.

Wow the NFL is going nuts over the big hits on players over the weekend.  I think it is pretty stupid personally.  Over the past decade the NFL has already done a ton to “protect” players.  Hell you can’t even play paddy cake with a QB without getting called for roughing the passer.

Now they want to suspend players that hit too hard if they inadvertently make contact with the other guys helmet.  What the F?  Is this the NFL or not?  Football is about contact, sometimes the contact is violent and players get hurt. It’s an unavoidable thing when you have two elite 250 pound athletes hurdling towards each other at high speeds.

What the NFL is asking is totally unrealistic.  In the heat of a  play when a defender is going all out to make a tackle it is physically impossible to make split second adjustments to ensure your helmet never touches the opposing players helmet.

Hell when a receiver senses a hit is coming his first reaction is to curl up to absorb the impact.  In that process he drops his head which could actually CAUSE the contact.

It’s just a stupid thing to try to enforce.  What we will get is a a team of defenders that are more worried about getting fined than making a tackle.  Sure we don’t want head hunters but some of those hits that were the fuel behind this movement were not head hunting, including the hit on DeSean Jackson.  The Falcon defender actually hit Jackson in the shoulder pads.

Political correctness has even seeped into the NFL.

My eyes lit up when I saw this subject line pop up in my inbox last night. – “Sirius XM Requests Your Feedback”  It was a follow up to my call the other day to change my billing to monthly.  I was quite happy to let Sirius know how I felt about the 25 minutes of hold time as well as their company in general.  Hopefully it gets in front of some eyes that aren’t located in India.

Damn Phillies went down in flames again.  They at least showed some ability to hit the ball but this time their middle relief fell apart.  After taking a two run lead in two consecutive innings the Phillies pitchers walked the first batter, a cardinal sin, in the process allowing three runs.

Now the team has a huge mountain to climb.  If any team can do it is the Phillies.  Over the past three years they have demonstrated an ability to get off the mat and win big games.  Hopefully this year isn’t when the streak ends.

Yesterday I took advantage of early voting in Florida and cast my votes.  I went over to the election office in the late afternoon.  I was surprised there was absolutely no line, it was kind of cool.  I have to just shake my head when I used the NEW voting system for the second time.

As you all remember Florida was in the middle of the 2000 election cluster f with their ridiculous punch card voting system.  Who can ever forget the term “hanging chads”?  Well afterwards a huge initiative was put into place to modernize the voting process in the state.  Tens of millions of dollars were spent on fully computerized voting machines which were used for several years.

Well a couple years ago, some genius decided that the electronic voting systems were just too unreliable.  Yea our entire financial system is run 100% on computers but we can’t trust them to be used for elections, brilliance.  So, they threw out all of the computerized voting machines that were still being paid for and went back to paper, yes, paper.

They print out a paper ballot where you darken in circles with a pen to indicate your choice.  There is still an electronic element to the process as you feed your completed ballots into a scanner that reads and records your choices.  Having the back up of paper makes the old farts feel more secure I guess.

So anyway I made my choices, voting mostly democrat but in a few instances voting with my registered party of the republicans. I even voted for one independent.  I am not a dyed in the wool anything.

I also am not oblivious to just how sour the environment is for Obama and democrats in general.  The republicans have done a bang up job of driving home the message that Obama is a reckless spendaholic that must be stopped at any cost.  Hell it has gotten to the point where accusing a candidate of liking Obama is akin to saying he kicks puppies.

To me, this is utterly ridiculous when you actually look at reality instead of the narrow spun version neocons would like you to look at.  Yes, Obama has SPENT a ton of money since he took office, the question is what was it spent on?

Ok so let me ask, what would you have preferred the man do?  Would we have been better off if he let the majority of the financial system implode, the automobile industry evaporate, let the millions of unemployed people dig in trashcans for food,  pump zero money into stimulus packages that have provided work for countless construction and energy conservation initiatives across the country?  Even with all he has tried to do the economy is in a state that the population is unhappy with.  Imagine if he did NOTHING?  Think about that.

I love the constant bullshit that is thrown out by republicans regarding the health care plan.  The same plan that they fought viciously to neuter down to it’s current state.  The huge insurance companies spent hundred of millions of dollars to influence the American public into actually believing that providing health care for individuals is a bad thing. Did you know when Medicaid and Social Security was implemented there was a similar reaction, yet today you wont find a politician on any side that will say these programs are a bad thing.

One of the headlines that you see thrown about the plan is how it will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicaid.  What it doesn’t tell you is that “cut” is actually a savings from clamping down on the rampant fraud and waste that exists in the system today.  You know, the stuff that Florida Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Rick Scott took advantage of that earned his company a 1.4 BILLION dollar fine.   Yea, that sort of fraud.

So anyway, when you do eventually find yourself in a voting booth all I ask is you do yourself a big favor and don’t let public spin managers that carefully create smear campaigns built on nothing but one liners be the major deciding factor in your choices.  Think for yourself and think about what would have happened if we did NOTHING.

I watched the Phils go down yesterday after work.  Once again they struggled offensively.  Ali’s new boyfriend Cole Hamels pitched a good game but it’s hard to win when you don’t score a run.

The Phillies as a team have hit very poorly during the entire playoffs but have still managed to win because of strong pitching and scratching out runs here and there.  It’s time they start bringing some pain with the bats.

Today is Jeremy’s birthday, be sure to pull his ears.

Just when I thought Sarah Palin was the most ignorant woman in politics here comes self admitted former witch, Christine O’Donnell. (ok she just dabbled with witchcraft)

Admittedly it is a very close call who is dumber, Sarah Palin for saying she had foreign policy experience because Alaska was next to Russia and Canada or O’Donnell for not realizing that separation of church and state was part of the Constitution.

Yes you read that right.  Here is the exact quote when she was questioning her democratic opponent at a debate.

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.

Feel free to read all about it here. Did I mention she is one of the Tea Party candidates?

I could care less if she was a “good” witch or a “bad” witch.  The last thing we need in government is another dumb witch.

Last night I was busy doing more prep work for the cross country meet I am timing on Saturday.  As I was toiling away I had Stern 101 playing in the background.  I was fortunate enough to catch an episode of the Sour Shoes show.

Only Stern fans would know who Sour Shoes is. He is an amazing combination of amazing dysfunction (he is in his mid 30’s, jobless, and lives with his parents) and amazing talent.  He is a master impressionist.  He can imitate scores of people and is able to move effortlessly between them.  He is able to carry on a 5 person conversation with himself no problem.

However he is even more impressive when he displays his uncanny musical ability.  He is able to remember and imitate countless amounts of songs and perform them on his synthesizer as various people.  When Stern has Sour on the phone he will just blurt out song/artist combinations and SourShoes will immediately be able to jump into the tune.  It’s just amazing.

Getting to listen to him just go off for an hour straight was hilarious.  As I was sitting there doing boring data manipulation I was constantly smiling as he carried on.

The guy is just brilliant.

Ali has us signed up to do another triathlon.  It is in early November.  We once again will be doing the sprint distance.  My biggest goal is to knock a bunch off my woefully slow transition times from the Miami race.

Ali said she thought I could have a problem with the swim since the water will be on the cool side.  Since she has her new wet suit she will be fully insulated.  I told her I would be fine.  Yea if the water is in the mid to low 70’s it is going to feel cold at first but after a minute of swimming it will feel just fine.

I forgot to mention how the latest IX outage panned out.  In total my email was offline from early Friday morning until late Saturday night, a pretty incredible amount of downtime for a huge web host.  I monitored things unraveling on IX’s system status blog. What went down was borderline comical.

In a nutshell IX scheduled to do what they thought was a routine hardware upgrade.  It was so routine that they didn’t even alert their customers it was happening since it should only take a few minutes to complete.  Well evidently things went bad, very bad.

Perhaps because the upgrade was viewed as so mundane that no thought was put into contingency plans if something went wrong.  Well the little upgrade turned into almost two full days of downtime.  As you can imagine, IX customers were not happy.

On the status blog there was a wide variety of methods customers used to voice their displeasure from mild annoyance to all out losing their mind, going ape shit craziness.  For me, I was more on the annoyed but not insane side.  Sure having email offline for me and people I provide email to is a big inconvenience since it is the preferred method of communication for both Ali and myself. However there are people that use IX to provide services for their business customers.  Trying to explain why their services are unavailable for two days is a pretty tough thing to do.

There also was some conflicting information during all of the craziness.  At first we were told all of our emails that came in during the outage should be stored on their Ironport server and delivered eventually.  Well later that story changed and we were told that many people got NDR (non-delivery messages) while attempting to send to the affected servers.

Well knock on wood, everything appears to be back to normal now.  For the inconvenience I was given an extra three months of free service added on to my account which was pretty decent of them.

All I can hope is that a very important lesson was learned by IX’s IT staff.

I forgot to mention Ali got her cold water wet suit delivered on Saturday.  She was still out when it arrived.  I hid the box, thinking I would surprise her with it later that night.  My plans were scuttled when she checked the tracking of the box and saw it was delivered.  She was very excited and wasted little time before she tried it on. Speaking of wet suits, if you want to see Ali swimming a 50 at the water park you can do so here.

Over the weekend I got my letter from Sirius warning me of an upcoming billing cycle for another year of the service.  As I have documented here repeatedly, Sirius has really pissed me off.  If Howard wasn’t on the service I would have dropped it years ago.  Sirius has repeatedly dicked over their customers with bullshit extraneous music royalty fees, online listening fees and outright lies.

Well my year subscription expires in November.  The letter basically said they would be happy to automatically renew me at that time for another year.  Woah.  Sirius has a big problem.  Howard is at the end of his current 5 year contract.  He has mentioned repeatedly on air various issues he has regarding resigning with Sirius. At this point nothing concrete has been put in place to indicate he is going to renew.

Well if Howard leaves I have no reason to keep the service.  So I called up Sirius support and after waiting on hold for 25 f’ing minutes I finally got to speak to someone. Well to be accurate I waited 13 minutes to talk to worthless first level support in India and then another 12 minutes to talk to someone whose first language is English.

I told the guy that I wanted to change my billing to monthly with a paper invoice sent to me.  I wanted the ability to cut the cord immediately if Howard announces he is leaving Sirius.  I told the guy that Sirius is in deep shit if Howard leaves.  He said he had no idea if Howard was going to stay or not but he agreed there will be big problems if he goes.

I almost hope Howard does leave Sirius.  I would much prefer to never give Sirius another penny of my money.

Ali informed me of two more candidates for her “hot” list, Curtis Stone, the celebrity chef guy and Pasha, some ballroom dancer kid from So You think You Can Dance.  The list is getting pretty big.

The weather this weekend was spectacular with temps in the low 60’s in the morning and highs in the low 80’s with low humidity later in the day.  Getting to enjoy weather like this for most of the winter is exactly why I moved to Florida.

Ali was gone for the majority of the day at a meeting.  That left me alone to do my thing and do it I did, all day long.  I wanted to let the grass dry out so after doing the weeding and a few other things I loaded the dogs up in the van.  We hit the recycling center to drop off an old UPS and some batteries, Home Depot to grab some weed n feed and pvc fittings for a sprinkler repair and finally Wal-mart.

At Wal-mart I grabbed  supplies to do oil changes on the Camry and the Tacoma.  I also had an unplanned purchase, a tiller attachment for the weed whacker.  We have an old tiller that was given to us by the ex-neighbors years ago. The problem is whenever I want to use it I have to f around for 20-30 minutes to get it running.  Plus, it takes up a decent chunk of shed real estate.  With the attachment I can till when I need to without having to take up a lot of space or elbow grease to get it running.

When I got back I worked on fixing a leak in the sprinkler system.  The leak was in a spot that I tried to fix before.  I originally tried to fix it  by splicing in a straight section of pipe a few months back but it was leaking around one of the joints.  The problem with a straight splice when you have two ends of pipe that are already in the ground is that you can’t move much to get a tight fit into the connector.

This time I decided to put in a little C joint to fix the problem.  Using this configuration allowed me to work the fix back and forth to ensure it is fully seated on the old pipe.  I let the repair set for a day before applying pressure on Sunday.  It was drip free which I was happy to see.

After the pipe repair I turned to the Tacoma oil change.  Last time I did the oil change I used an extended life oil filter so I literally only had to change the oil this time around which was uneventful.

By this time it was mid-afternoon so I decided to hop on the mower and get busy.  Ali came home while I was in the middle of the job.  She offered to come out and mow so I could change the Camry oil which was nice.  However I told her that I had to wait to do the Camry as to avoid getting bathed in boiling hot oil.

I told Ali she could just work on getting all of the leftover food from her conference organized and put away.  We wound up with enough spare food for a week.

After I got done mowing the Camry had cooled enough to work on.  I changed the oil and filter and reset the annoying MAINTENANCE REQUIRED message on the dashboard. Finally that wound up my labor for the day.

Saturday night we watched the Phillies game.  Some no name guy all of a sudden became Babe Ruth and smacked two home runs off Halladay resulting in the Phillies losing a close game, 4-3. Damn it.

I originally had ideas on Sunday of tagging along with Ali and her girlfriends for their run.  They had talked of doing 7 miles.  Even though I had never run that far, the challenge of doing it sparked interest for me, just for the hell of it.  Well Ali was lukewarm to me inviting myself to their girl party and let me know that my presence may be tolerated but not necessarily welcome.  Um ok, I can take I hint.

So I decided to do my own thing Sunday morning.  The plan was Ali would meet up with me at the waterpark after she was done running.  I had her take the truck so I could ride my bike to the park and throw it in the back of the truck for the ride home.

Once again it was nice and cool Sunday morning, 61 degrees when I woke up.  It was cool enough that I felt rather chilly for the first mile or two of the 16.25 mile bike ride until my body temp made up for the cool air.  I kept a decent pace on the way to the park, a bit faster than the week before but not significantly so.

Once I arrived I started to prepare for my run.  I still had it in my mind I wanted to do a 10k run.

A 10K run has always held significance in my mind as something I always had wanted to do but never accomplished.  When I was younger my dad was a pretty consistent runner.  I remember him running in a couple 10k races.  For whatever reason once I reached adulthood I had always had the goal of equaling dad’s 10k run.

Over the years I got close.  I used to do a run from our place in Wernersville to Robesonia and back.  I always thought it was close to 10k distance but when I punched it into Google maps yesterday I found it was actually only a 5 mile run.

Years back Ali and I did a 5.75 mile run after work.  I believe that was the closest I came to the actual 6.25 mile 10k distance.  Because of my various knee problems over the years I had pretty much dismissed the idea of ever crossing a 10K run off my bucket list.  Well yesterday I got to finally do it.

Over the past 3 or 4 years the farthest I have run was 4 miles and that was on a treadmill. The most I have done more recently has been a 5K.  Doubling your distance on the spur of the moment is generally frowned upon in running circles. Oh well, I had it in my head to do it so unless I developed shooting knee pain I intended to do it.

The cool temps were just a perfect fit for my intentions.  If I had the same idea and it was 90 degrees and humid the outcome would probably have been different.

I intentionally went out slow and steady since I was going to be going further than I ever had previously.  I didn’t pay much attention to my gps watch during the run but when I did was tracking around a 10 minute mile pace, nothing fast compared to 8:30 pace I use on my 5k training runs but good enough.

The course I run around the outside of the park is almost exactly two miles.  When I finished the first lap, I felt good.  At that point I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to compete the full distance.  At the end of lap two I felt a bit more tired but nowhere close to being ready to stop, especially with a lifetime goal staring at me and within reach.

I was wearing my Naples Triathlete Bike top for the run.  It zippers down the front.  Each lap the zipper got pulled down a little further to allow for more airflow.  By lap three I probably looked like a cast member of Saturday Night Fever.

Even on the third lap around the park which was all beyond my recent running distance, I didn’t feel terrible.  Perhaps it was the excitement of closing in on my first full 10K that helped subdue the fatigue.   By the time I made the final turn towards the parking lot I could see that the Tacoma was in the parking lot meaning Ali had arrived.

To get to the full 6.25 mile distance I had to do a little extra loop in the parking lot.  I picked a stop sign as my finish line and I accelerated towards it, still having a good amount in the tank from my reduced pace.  I finished and did a little internal cheer, it took 30 years of intentions, but I FINALLY ran a 10K.

Ali came over and congratulated me.  Before the attempt she had said she didn’t think it was a good idea for me to jump up so much in distance, which it wasn’t, but as my past history will show, if I get an idea in my head it is hard to get me off it.  The other good news was I didn’t feel too worse for wear.  The muscles in my hips felt pretty tired but my troublesome knees didn’t feel bad at all.

After re-hydrating we headed inside to swim. Christy and Michelle showed up to swim as well.  I should have told them I would have preferred to swim alone. 🙂  I upped the game in my swimming as well, covering the same 1600 meter distance but doing it in two 800 meter blocks instead of four 400 meter segments.  I did each 800 in just over 18 minutes which I was happy with.

We didn’t stick around the park long after we finished swimming, the Eagles played at 1.  Needless to say I was pleased with my amount of physical exertion for the day.  I was 9 miles on the bike short of an Olympic distance triathlon.

The Eagles smoked the Falcons.  It was a big surprise to most people.  Hell, the Fox pregame guys all picked the Falcons to win.  Well the team came out and basically kicked the Falcons ass.  All of those fly by night Eagle fans that deemed Kevin Kolb a failure after one half of football can suck it.  He had a great game throwing for 300 yards with three touchdowns and leading the team with authority from start to finish. It was a great win.  To add to the goodness both the Redskins and Cowboys lost yesterday.

The Phillies got back to their winning ways by beating the Giants last night.  Unfortunately I was so exhausted I passed out around the 6th inning or so.

IX Webhosting was really having problems 12-18 months ago.  During that time their servers were riddled with problems that they blamed their customers for first before they admitted/realized it was actually shoddy security on their part.

Since that rough period of time they have performed much better.  I have had nearly zero issues, until recently.  First there is the well documented complications with my server move that was made worse by a support hero that didn’t act very heroically.

Then last week there was another somewhat lengthy outage.

Well today once again there is an even longer outage.  My mail server has been off line for 8 or 9 hours at this point.  Evidently there was some hardware upgrade that went bad, real bad.

Luckily it isn’t the end of the world for me although it is rather annoying.  Others that depend on IX to host crucial services are not quite so understanding when a company that preaches 99.9% up time has their stuff off the wire for half a day and counting.

Last night I did a video for this month’s Bar-barian forum challenge.  Once again it was push ups.  I decided to do the push ups outside on the deck just for something different.  The dogs came out with me.  About 20 seconds before I was ready to start Sadie was nice enough to drop a deuce about 15 feet away.  I was thrilled.

The dogs didn’t understand they shouldn’t be walking in front of me during Bar-barian videos so I had to put them back inside.  I was able to knock out 42 push ups on the attempt.  Not a bad number but definitely on the low side compared to some of the elite guys on the forum.  I hope to to do another attempt late in the month to see if I can add a few reps.

Ali got home around 7:30 last night, the earliest she was home all week.  She has had a shitty work week.

This weekend I have various things to do as usual.  I need to do oil changes on the vehicles.  Ali is going to be gone once again for a good portion of Saturday. I literally spend more time alone than with her at home anymore.

Ali is scheduled to go run 7 miles with her girlfriends on Sunday.  I am contemplating  joining them.  If you have paid attention to my running workouts you will know that the most I have run in the last 6 months is probably just a 5k, even if it was sandwiched in with bike and swim workouts.

Standard running protocol states that you should not increase your mileage by more than 10% week to week.  I have never been much for standard protocol.  My thinking is the girls will be doing their run at a slower pace than I normally do my three so it should help split the difference.

It may be pretty silly to more than double the length of my current running base but I sort of am looking forward to the challenge.  The longest I have EVER run is somewhere around 6 miles.

One of my FB friends that I find very cool, except for her politics, posted a link of some people in Chicago protesting and holding up signs.  Some of these were along the lines of the Glen Beck Viking I posted the other day.  Here is the actual link that was posted.

Ok first take a moment to digest THIS link.   George W. Bush borrowed more money during his administration than the prior 42 presidents COMBINED!

THEN take another moment to realize this is just a small part of what was handed over to Obama to “fix”.  Add an imploding banking system, automobile industry, two fabricated wars and an economy that was in the midst of free fall.  Now, ask yourself if it is reasonable to think if even Jesus Christ himself could fix this in two years, especially with non-stop sabotage by tireless Neocons?

Any reasonable person would say, of course not. Yet this is what many actually seem to expect.

The Tea Party for the most part is a fraud.  It is funded by two brothers in big oil that just happen to be some of the richest individuals on the planet.  Where was the Tea Party when Bush was borrowing money by the billions and treading all over our constitutional rights in the name of protecting us from TERROR?  The fact is the Tea Party only came into existence when Obama was sworn in.

It is more a mass brain washing scheme than anything else in my opinion.  Remember when Vladimir Lenin said “A lie told often enough becomes truth”? This has been a main stay in politics for decades for both Republicans and Democrats.  Unfortunately, the Tea Party is just the face of this latest effort to exercise the same strategy.

Hey am I happy that things are not remarkably better after two years of Obama in the White House? Nope.   Do I agree wholeheartedly with his stance on all things? No.  I don’t like illegal immigrant coddling or individuals that view public assistance programs as a careeer path. Do I think that he has been busting his ass to try to get things done regardless of the mountains of bullshit in front of him? Absolutely.

The extremes that are on display at tea party congregations sometime border on a lynch mob mentality.  It is downright disturbing to me.  It’s amazing that the last president who undeniably was responsible for downright atrocities against the citizens of the United States escaped with far less scrutiny, or maybe, it isn’t.