Archives January 2011

I left work a little early on Friday so I could head home to start getting things in order.  Randall and Jeremy were supposed to show up around 6:30 and I had a bunch of stuff to get together for Ali’s race.  Randall was going to carpool with Jeremy.

All week I was in communication with Jeremy.  He had indicated he was going to leave his house around 4 pm to pick up Randall and head over my way.  Jeremy is chronically poor at executing stated goals and this behavior once again came to the surface in this situation.  Instead of arriving at 6:30 he pulled up around 8 pm.

I had told Randall I was going to penalize Jeremy one pull up for the bedroom competition that was scheduled to take place for his blatant tardiness.  Earlier in the week Randall had challenged Jeremy to a pull off to decide who gets to sleep in the luxurious guest bedroom versus sleeping in the exercise room on the floor.

Randall has been working diligently on his chin ups the last few months and he thought he might actually be able to do more than Jeremy who has been woefully inconsistent in his pull up training, despite the weighted pull up challenge he had committed to.

We didn’t waste time before we headed out into the darkness to decide the outcome of this challenge.  I brought out two of my florescent lamps and a flash light.  It was getting chilly outside once the sun dropped, the temps were solidly in the 50’s.

Randall offered to go first.  He did 10 quality chin ups and surely could have done a few more but he dropped off the bar confident that double digits would be enough to take the title.

Jeremy hopped on the bar and shocked Randall netting a total of 13 chin ups.  The punking was intensified when Jeremy produced a card that was already stuffed in his pants, which he presented to Randall, duplicating the sympathy card stunt we pulled on him after we beat him at a vball tourney last summer.  Jeremy included a glossy 3 x5 picture of Randall as well in the card.

Randall was frustrated by falling prey to Jeremy’s chin up bluff and even attempted to hop back on the bar to try to beat 13.  Unfortunately for him he could only manage another 10 chins before the lactic acid took over. Randall was getting the floor.  Of course the entire episode was on video tape, watch it here.

After the chin ups we headed inside where Randall and Jeremy feasted on a Hungry Howie’s pantangle pizza.  We spent the rest of the evening competing in various Kinect sports events.  Over an hour of it was broadcast on Justin.tv.  There is some very funny footage sprinkled in there.  I only had a chance to pull out a couple highlights at this point, here and here. We were up late, much too late considering I had my alarm clock set for 3:45 am.  I think my head hit the pillow shortly after midnight.

Despite the lack of sleep, I drug myself out of bed.  It was my job to wake up Randall and Jeremy.  Randall was particularly difficult to get moving.  I let the dogs into his room with squeaky toys in tow and even put the singing birthday card he gave me next to his “bed”.  Jeremy was easier to get up as Sadie jumped up on his bed and startled him.

It was chilly out in the morning with temps in the 40’s.  I had three layers of clothes on.  We took the truck and the van to the race site since we had extra equipment and bodies along compared to a normal race.

Everything race related went very smoothly, despite having our largest turnout ever with 640 registered participants.  We had about 150 dogs on site which made for lots of fun.  It was great seeing them come across the finish line with their owners. This was also the first year that we actually had a close finish at the end, first and second place was decided by a mere second or two.

After the race was all cleaned up we headed up to the Humane Society to visit.  We spent a ton of time visiting the various dogs there.  The shelter currently has a ton of puppies, so many that they were doing two for one adoptions of them.  Words can’t really describe just how cute these puppies were.  Ali latched on to a little brown puppy that was getting bullied by the other dogs in his room.  She held him like a baby for a loooong time.

In addition to the amazingly cute puppies there were also many adult dogs that pulled at your heart strings. One in particular was a dog that Ali witnessed being returned to the shelter on Thursday or Friday.

Her name was Twix and she looked almost exactly like Nicki.  Evidently she was returned for excessive barking.  Well dogs bark, wtf do you expect?  She looked so sad laying on her little dog bed.  I encouraged Ali to go in and interact with her.

Ali knelt down next to the dog and started petting her.  Twix seemed very gentle and passive, similar to how Nicki acts most of the time.  She let Ali pet her without protest, even allowing Ali to hold and rub her paws, something many dogs won’t let you do. Twix gave Ali several dog kisses.

Of course Ali’s instant inclination is that we should adopt the dog, hell if it was up to her we would probably have a half dozen dogs at this point. I was not immune to having the desire to bring Twix home and provide her a loving home where she could enjoy lush accommodations and room to roam.  However the logical side of me knew that logistically it could be a huge problem.

Nicki and Sadie have finally achieved a decent balance of give and take when it comes to who gets what around the house.  Adding yet another dog to the mix would once again muddy the situation.  Even so I told Ali we can monitor Twix’s adoption status.  Hopefully a nice family comes and picks her up.

Jeremy took a bunch of great pictures from the day, if you would like to peruse them go here.

Even though it was lunch time when we got home, none of us were really hungry since we had a bunch of food forced upon us post race by the Civil Air Patrol who was running a pancake breakfast.  They had a bunch of food left over and they didn’t want it to go to waste.  Jeremy was the top dog when it came to food intake.  He probably ate enough to feed a family of six. I was no slouch, I probably had a dozen pieces of sausage when it was all said and done.

I had a bunch of post race work to do.  I encouraged Randall and Jeremy to go take naps if they felt like it, surprisingly neither of them took me up on it.

Once I finished up we headed outside to begin the various physical challenges.  The first thing we did was the weighted pull up challenge.  Jeremy agreed to do it now that his lesser punishment of eating a quart of ice cream was in place instead of the greater one gallon of whole milk he would have had to consume.  He secured this lesser punishment by officially forfeiting earlier in the week.

We did a pre-event weigh in.  I tipped the scales a bit lighter than I expected, 186 pounds fully clothed.  Jeremy hit the scales heavier than expected at 161 pounds.  That number seemed big since Jeremy told us he weighed as little as 155 pounds the day before.  That big breakfast must have been just laying in his gut.

I agreed to go first, Jeremy always prefers to go last so he knows the number to beat.  I have been training pretty consistently for this challenge since Jeremy offered it to me.  When I first started doing 50 lb weighted pull ups I struggled to get two.  After a few months of training I have been able to get 4 of them with a 5th rep being borderline.  I was quite surprised when I managed to get 6 reps, a personal best, on Saturday after three hours of sleep and a morning filled with race activities.

Jeremy was impressed with the effort and hopped on the bar for his own attempt.  He was feeling a small burst of confidence based on the 13 chin ups he did the night before.  He decided to try an awkward close grip attempt that supposedly would utilize kipping.  Well it didn’t work out very well, Jeremy faltered after two reps wearing a lighter, 42.5 pound vest based on his lighter body weight.

Randall even gave it a go even though he wasn’t officially in the contest.  He managed to squeeze out 3 reps with the 50 pound vest using a mixed grip, a solid showing.

Jeremy admitted defeat and crowed it was a smart move on his part to take the early forfeit option which had a less severe penalty. i guess that is hard to argue.  If you would like to see the video of this event you can go here.

We had several other physical challenges including sawhorse jumping and weighted box jumps.  if you would like to see these events, click the links.

Once we got back inside it was time for Jeremy to receive his punishment for forfeiting the challenge, eating a quart of the highest calorie, most fat packed ice cream I could find which happened to be Hagen Daz chocolate peanut butter ice cream. In one serving (1/2 cup) it packs 350 calories.  Jeremy’s 8 servings would add up to 2800 calories, ouch. Keep in mind Jeremy had already consumed at least a couple thousand calories during his monster breakfast sit down.

Jeremy had 30 minutes to down the ice cream.  I was unable to find a quart size of this flavor so I had to get 3 smaller containers which was a bit problematic.  In order to get the full 4 cups he would have to eat a portion of the third container.  This measurement turned controversial at the end.

At first Jeremy had to laugh at this being a punishment at all, the ice cream tasted great and was going down easily.  That started to change once he hit the second container.  Slowly the ice cream no longer tasted good.  The container was making Jeremy’s hand cold, he requested a towel to hold it.

Somewhere around the 15 minute mark he started to get up and walk around as he ate in an attempt to keep his body temp up.  As he was getting close to finishing the second container I measured out 1 cup of ice cream into the first empty container.

Even though Jeremy was getting delirious from eating so much ice cream, he did some quick math and protested the amount of ice cream I scooped into the container.  He said it looked like way too much.  I told him it was a cup of ice cream which should give him the 4 cups required to fulfill his punishment.

Jeremy continued to gripe as he hurried to get down the partial container before time ran out which he failed to do.  After time expired we continued to debate what I put into the partial container.  After getting four people with relatively strong math backgrounds involved, one of them being an accountant, we finally all agreed that actually Jeremy should have only had a 1/2 cup to eat at the end instead of a full cup.

It is debatable if he even ate a half cup before the timer sounded but he surely was close.  Jeremy felt pretty disgusting by the end of the challenge, who can blame him.  If you would like to watch the calorie stuffed footage of this food stunt, go here.

We decided to go to Iguana Mia for dinner, ironically because Mr 6000 calories consumed so far said he wanted Mexican food.  Ali is a big fan of Iguana Mia too so it was an easy sell.  We decided to wait to go there until later to avoid the crush of snowbird’s, we arrived a little after 8pm.  Even with our late arrival we did have to wait briefly until they seated us.

We enjoyed a nice meal.  You would have never known that Jeremy had already consumed enough calories for three days, he pounded his food like the rest of us.

On the way home I was so tired. It literally felt painful to keep my eyes open.  There were no Kinect shenanigans that night, I went right to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Jeremy and Randall stuck around until mid-morning on Sunday.  Most of that time Randall and I spent trying to knock out the sole remaining achievement in South Park Tower Defense, defeat the Mountain level using nothing but snowballs and walls.  We tried multiple times but didn’t get the achievement.  After our final fail I realized I misread the requirements.  I thought you just had to not use any towers on the very last level.  Actually you can’t so much as build a single tower in all 3 stages. Later in the day I worked on getting the achievement solo which required many attempts but I finally pulled it off by the skin of my teeth.

The rest of Sunday I worked on various things around the house, nothing too spectacular.  It was a beautiful day to have the screen door open to allow the cool breezes to flow through the house. It was a great weekend overall, exhausting as it was.

So I contacted Apple yesterday about my hacked Itunes account.  The rep on the phone seemed quite surprised my account was compromised.  I told him I saw online that Itunes account hacking happens quite often and that I was surprised he was surprised.

After about 15 minutes on the phone we got it resolved.  Apple is going to credit back the purchases I didn’t make.  I also changed my account password immediately.  I will be watching my account much closer from here on out.  If you have a credit card or Paypal account connected to your Itunes account you may want to reconsider that strategy.  Luckily I did not.

The HVAC rebate thing took more effort.  After digging around on Google I found a number in Tallahassee for the state energy department, the ones who are responsible for these f’d up rebate programs.  I left a message for someone to call me.  I was surprised when someone actually called me back in the early afternoon.

I quickly recapped my problem and reiterated how dumb it was that MORE efficient models were not on the golden list.  The explanation I got was rather wacky.

The woman said that the state was looking for a list from the federal government of all of the HVAC equipment that would qualify for this incentive.  Well the only list they were provided is what was posted online.  The state KNEW it was not a comprehensive list and that people would get rejected during the rebate process because of it.  Somewhere in fine print on the rebate web site it directs people to check the list and if your equipment is not on there you are supposed to take further action.

That further action is to obtain a certificate from your manufacturer that your equipment DOES meet the energy saving guidelines of the program.  Luckily for me, I was able to get this certificate right from Trane’s web site. I pointed out to the woman that this little catch is not highlighted nearly enough on the web site.

She gave me a phone number to call for the rebate processor.  She said they could direct me as far as what to include along with my certificate to ensure my rebate gets processed.  I thanked her for the info.

A little later after I printed out my certificate from Trane I called the number I was given and almost laughed out loud when I get the message “The number you dialed is not in service….”

I immediately called back the woman from the state and told her “the number you gave me is dead…..”  “That’s impossible!” she said. “Put me on hold and try it yourself” I replied, confident she would come back in a few seconds very apologetically.  Instead she comes back laughing (she was very good natured) saying she got through just fine! WTF?

Ok I told her now I was going to put her on hold and try again.  Again, I get the number is disconnected.  I then try the number on my cell phone and it connects right through.  Damn, evidently something in our office PBX must be blocking that number, wow.  I apologized to the woman for the call.

I finally got a hold of the rebate processor.  They instructed me to fax in the certificate and some other stuff.  They said once it was received it takes 8 business days to “get into the system”.  “Wow, you guys work fast” I joked.

So hopefully, all of this effort will enable me to snag that $1500 American Express gift card just before it was ready to disappear down the bottom of the toilet bowl.  Both Ali and I had written it off more than once.

Randall and Jeremy will be arriving this evening.  Jeremy is the official race photographer and Randall is both helping with race set up and running in the event.  We have over 540 people signed up for the event at this point.  We expect to have a record crowd for the race.

The weekend is going to be filled with various physical activities/competitions between the three of us.  The camcorder is going to be working hard.  Look for streams popping up now and then over the weekend on my justin.tv channel.

So I am scanning my email this morning and I see an invoice from the Itunes store.  Hmm that’s odd, I haven’t bought anything recently.  I look more closely at the items.

1 Learn English from Friends S06 – S10, v1.0, Seller: ZHANG YOUNG (12+)
Write a Review  Report a Problem  $2.99
2 Learn English from Friends Season 02 – 05, v1.0, Seller: ZHANG YOUNG (12+)
Write a Review  Report a Problem  $2.99
3 Learn English from Friends S01, v1.0, Seller: ZHANG

WTF is this?  So immediately I hop on Itunes and look at my account.  Not only are these three transactions there but there is also another transaction about a week earlier that I don’t recall seeing an email for. That transaction was for $40 and change.  These two purchases effectively cleaned out the gift card balance I had on the account.  Of course I am pissed.

A quick Google search revealed that Itunes account hacking is pretty rampant.  I immediately changed my password and sent off an email to Apple to see what my recovery options are.  Thank goodness I didn’t have something like a paypal account that is linked to a bank account linked to my Itunes account, I have read horror stories of people getting their accounts sucked dry.

Of course my attention now turns to how it happened.  Was it a brute force password crack?  Is their malware lurking somewhere on one of my systems?  Now I am paranoid.

Back when we replaced our AC system in September we jumped through the numerous amount of hoops to qualify for the $1500 state rebate.  The program was part of the federal stimulus program to promote installation of more energy efficient HVAC equipment.  The program was scheduled to run from September to the end of the year.

Well two weeks into the program, the state abruptly suspended it (read about the bullshit here).  They pulled the application from their website and said it was “temporarily suspended”.  The reason was somebody didn’t make sure the $15 million was actually available to be handed out, wtf?????????

Well for a couple months no updates were posted, the phone number that they provided to call for info was even disconnected. Finally, in late November (after the elections) an update was posted that said the state was only going to honor purchases made during that first two weeks of September.  There was some sort of gigantic cluster f of ineptitude going on somewhere.  Supposedly they were going to steal money from the HVAC rebate program to help pay off the solar rebate program which was also mismanaged.

Well as ridiculous as this was, I knew we had made our purchase just within that two week window.  I submitted the numerous forms and crossed my fingers.

Again there was no way to check the status of your rebate on the web site for a month or two.  Finally, yesterday I decided to check back in and saw I actually had a status on my rebate – DENIED.  For a reason it said “Invalid UPC Code/Model”.  I was like WTF, I triple checked that the numbers I wrote down were right, how can this be?

On the rebate site they had a 410 page document that listed all of the HVAC equipment that qualified for the rebate.  The guidelines when the program launched said the new equipment had to have a minimum of a 16 SEER efficiency rating (higher number is better).

So I start flipping through this huge PDF, looking for the Trane section.  I eventually find it but am flabbergasted that only a few Trane models are listed and none of them are mine.  As I looked closer I noticed that every Trane model listed was only a 16 SEER unit (ours is 18.5), nothing higher.  I THEN started scrolling through the entire list and saw that the entire list was 99% units that were no more than a 16 SEER rating???

What the f is this???  Surely this can’t be right, why would they exclude HVAC equipment that was MORE efficient than their baseline?  I needed someone to bitch at, badly.

First I contacted the company that sold me the equipment.  They were as baffled as I was, agreeing that it makes absolutely zero sense.  I initially intended for them to shoulder some of the blame since they were the ones that installed it.  However once I saw the absence of >16 SEER units on the list I knew I couldn’t really blame the contractor.

Hell the AC company got royally screwed by the state’s handling of this program as well.  They went out and spent $10,000 on equipment and certification to do the duct leakage testing, expecting to have a huge demand over the 3 month period the program was supposed to run.  Instead they performed 4 tests in the two week period and lost their shirts in the investment.

So now my problem is getting a hold of a real human being to scream at.  Obviously this is some sort of mistake.  Common sense would scream that any unit that is more efficient than the posted ratings would also qualify for the rebate.  The only problem is thus far my only avenue of contact is through some sterile email form.  Who knows what eyes that winds up in front of.  I will be digging deeper, much deeper today.

When I got home yesterday I was greeted by a yard filled with black birds.  They were everywhere, on the lawn, on the roof, in the trees and on the power lines.  Evidently the word has gotten out that we have 4 or 5 feeders in the back yard that get filled regularly.  I shot a brief video of them which you can see here.

Last night we had a freakish weather night, we had a SEVERE thunderstorm.  Thunderstorms in January just don’t happen in Florida.  Along with the lightning, thunder and torrential rain came wind, extremely strong wind.  Ali and I looked out the back in amazement as the wind howled.  It was very reminiscent to what we have experienced during hurricanes.  It was blowing that hard at times.  Later Ali said that gusts of up to 70 mph were expected.  I believe it.

We had a plant blow over on the lanai, a few branches snapped off and our dog deck furniture relocated throughout the yard but other than that we appear to have escaped serious damage.

I had turned Jeremy on to watching Battlestar Galactica via Netflix.  He has enjoyed the series just like I did.  He did me a favor by bringing to my attention that I had missed a two hour movie that came out at the beginning of season 4 called Razor.  I didn’t have Netflix when I did my BSG journey, instead digesting the series on dvd’s.  Evidently I missed this along the way somehow.

Razor deals with the back story of the Pegasus, a second battle cruiser that Galactica finds during it’s journey through space.  Pegasus was run by a woman that was as tough as they come.  She eventually crossed the line from tough to inhuman as a result of the situation she found herself in. Her thirst for revenge against the cylons made her callous to the value of human life.

It was great to be able to jump back into the BSG world and see something new (to me).  It made me wish the series hadn’t ended, it was so damn compelling.  Alas, all good things come to an end. Thanks to Jeremy for turning me on to that little nugget.

Yesterday Jeremy officially forfeited the weighted pull up competition that was scheduled to take place at my place Saturday afternoon.  He negotiated a lesser punishment for an early forfeit as opposed to the gallon of whole milk he would have had to consume if he lost.  Instead he has to eat a quart of full fat, max calorie ice cream in 30 minutes.

I’m a bit surprised he forfeited.  Sure he had been saying for weeks that he hadn’t been doing any training between the holidays and getting ill.  However, knowing that Jeremy is a skilled poker player, I always suspected that he could just be bluffing me about his lack of effort in order to lull me into overconfidence.  Evidently he had a 3 and 6, unsuited and decided to fold before the river.  It was a smart move in the big picture.

We had discussed various forfeit options.  I threw out stuff like doing the cinnamon challenge (try to down a heaping tablespoon of cinnamon), eating one habanero pepper, down a can of dog food and several others.  I originally was pushing for Jeremy to down a half gallon of ice cream instead of a quart.  I eventually relented as I didn’t want him to be sick to his stomach during the duration of his visit.

Despite Jeremy pulling out of the official competition I will still do a solo attempt.  I have been training for it so I might as well see it through to the end.  I did another set of weighted pull ups last night after work to get ready.

Ironically, Randall, who was not in the competition, has been much more vocal in his lambasting of Jeremy for the forfeit than I have been.  He has even gone as far as to challenge Jeremy to a conventional dead hang pull off to further stomp Jeremy’s pull up reputation into the mud.

This whole week will be full of prep for Ali’s race this weekend.  There are lots of things to do.  Hopefully we manage to not leave any details behind.

I was very saddened to see that Jack Lalanne passed away yesterday.  I was a big fan.  His overwhelming positive outlook on life was something I admired.  His lifelong dedication to fitness is something I try emulate.

A few years back I was really on a Jack Lalanne kick when ESPN used to rebroadcast his original show.  I used to go through the workouts on the show with him regularly and even drug Ali into it a few times.

I have a bunch of his shows on dvd and I even own a Jack Lalanne baseball hat.  I can’t tell you how many times I laughed while watching his shows.  Of course I loved his dog, “Happy” as well who showed up in many episodes.

Jack accomplished many feats of strength well into old age.  The pose you see him holding above is something I could only dream of doing.

I bet Jack would have liked to make it to 100.  He said many times that he couldn’t die, it would ruin his image.

No worries, your image is doing just fine Jack, rest in peace, you earned it.

I was at home training all week.  Instead of making the effort to try to blog at home I decided to just do a brief recap.  After all, blogging would have cut into the time I needed to go get DD coffee every morning with the dogs.

This week long class was for Exchange 2010.  Last year I took two week long Exchange 2007 classes.  There are a ton of similarities between the two versions, the differences probably could have been covered in a day.  This meant that the vast majority of the week was stuff I already knew about which equated to a lot of boring hours.

Sitting at home all day listening to the instructor was somehow more arduous than what I do normally at work, more sitting behind two screens all day.  Maybe it is because I literally had to be paying attention (more or less) the entire time.

Ironically I was in the middle of an Exchange 2010 migration of my own, on my home network.  This migration was expedited when my old server had an unexpected hard drive failure Wednesday night.  I had some very nervous moments while trying to get the old server up and running.  At one point I feared that the nightly back up I have been doing for years was not actually backing up my Exchange server properly which would result in catastrophic loss of email. Luckily, everything was there although I did lose one days worth of mail since the crash happened in the middle of the back up.

I had a very stressful day Thursday trying to get the old server back up.  I needed it up in order to migrate to the new one.  I worked on it until 11:30 that night.

Everything worked out in the end.  I now have our home network and email up and running on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.  There are a few more loose ends to attend to but everything appears to be functional and stable.  If there was a good thing from the crash it was that it gave me some first hand experience in the Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration process.

On Wednesday night we had a running club meeting that drug on for two hours +.  We had at least 12 people there.  With that many people in a room it is pretty hard to get things accomplished in a quick manner since varying opinions want to be heard.

One of the things we agreed upon is getting away from the online store that I worked so hard on.  The store was my idea and it is my idea to shit can it.  The store works very well from some perspectives.  Runners love it, it makes it very easy to sign up for races, even multiple races with a few clicks.  The low CC fees with this option allowed us to absorb the fees instead of tacking them on to the registration cost, another plus.

However maintenance of the store has become a nightmare.  I have wound up keying in each and every purchase made on the store as opposed to being able to download them in bulk.  Bulk entry with the store is just too much of a mess plus I feel personally responsible for each and every entry.  I fear if I don’t enter each one as it appears in my email I may risk missing someone.

We are going to go with a different online race registrar that charges more than what we pay with the store but far less than our former registrar.  A $20 entry fee used to cost us $3.25 in fees with Active.com.  With the store it cost a little less than a buck. With the new registrar, Raceit.com,  it will cost about $2 so we are splitting the difference.  That extra $1 will save me a hell of a lot of headaches.

Of course I had to get my exercise in during the week, else I would go mad.  I did a different lunch time routine each day, the most amusing of which was the one I taped. That session included a new activity, the death crawl, which is better seen than explained.

On Saturday I did another 10 mile run in prep for my new, unexpected goal of running a half marathon in early march. Although Ali and the girls were there I ran ahead with another group.  I ran with them for about 4 miles or so until they turned around.

I have found with long distance running it is much easier to do it with someone else, preferably someone who is chatty.  Having someone along to share the effort helps keep your mind off the actual run.  Doing that last 6 miles alone was not great fun.  I did try to pick up the pace considerably over my previous 10 mile efforts, shaving around 6 minutes from the time I posted two weeks prior.

My body is becoming more accustomed to going that distance, I felt negligible physical side effects and spent the rest of Saturday buzzing about doing stuff around the house as I normally would.

Saturday night Ali and I watched a documentary that my Exchange trainer turned me onto on Netflix, Man on Wire.  it is about some french wire walker that snuck into the Twin Towers shortly after they opened, strung a steel cable between them and walked the span back and forth for nearly an hour.

I was amazed that I never heard of this feat.  Granted I was only 7 years old at the time but still…  I found the documentary extremely interesting.  I was feeling the immense fear just from seeing the pictures and video from the event.

Some wire in the brain that controls fear had to be cut in this guys brain.  I absolutely can not imagine what it would be like to be out on a wire at the top of those buildings with absolutely no safety equipment whatsoever.  If you have Netflix put this in your instant queue, it’s a hidden gem. Even now, 35+ years later the people involved in the event are overcome with emotion when they try to describe that moment.

Sunday Ali and I were looking forward to a relaxed kind of day since I got most of the house stuff done the day before.  Unfortunately Ali’s day got cut in half when she wound up having to go to work to cover for kitchen staff that called off .

I kept myself busy doing car maintenance on the Camry and Tacoma. On the Camry I changed the oil/filter, rotated the tires and replaced the cabin air filter.  The Tacoma just got an oil change.

I had a problem with my one floor jack, it stopped jacking.  Luckily my neighbor let me borrow his jack to finish the tire rotation.  If you watch the broadcast of the event you will see the car teetering as it was balanced on the front and rear center point.  I didn’t realize how unstable it was until I watched the video back.  Next time I will change my jacking plan.

During the tire rotation I utilized my air wrench to remove and reattach the lug nuts.  I realized that working with air tools is even more satisfying than pulling the trigger on a cordless drill.  I just love the sound as I zip off nuts in milliseconds and the reassuring noise made as the tool drives them back in place.  Of course all of this was made possible by the repair I finally made on the air compressor a few weeks back.

Most of the latter part of my Sunday was spent watching the two playoff games.  I loved that both of them were played in frigid temperatures, the only thing that would have made it better would have been a snowstorm.

Ironically both games followed a similar storyline where one team was dominant early on with a sizable lead and had to hold on down the stretch to win.  My brother is a huge Steelers fan so I was glad they won.  My trip to Green Bay years ago solidified the Packers as one of my fav teams as well so no matter who wins the Super Bowl I will be glad for different reasons.

Thought so.

Wow I just went through one of the biggest cluster f’s of my IT career.

We were scheduled to perform an upgrade to the software we use for cashiering on Wednesday night.  You would think that the upgrade wouldn’t be that big of a deal since we were moving from version 2.37 of the product to version 2.45.  Well you think wrong.

When this upgrade was planned out we estimated it might take 2-3 hours max.  It was an after hours upgrade that we started on at 5pm.  I left the office at 12:30 am.

Without boring you with technical details, basically everything you could imagine going wrong did.  I lost count of how many technical hurdles we had to clear.  By the time we left we thought we had the core product working with some ancillary issues that we would deal with the following day.

Well when I arrived bleary eyed the next morning after a few hours of sleep it turned out there was a fresh new boatload of issues to hammer out, stuff we couldn’t have tested until clerks started doing stuff.  I spent nearly the entire day on the phone, sometimes with two or three people simultaneously working on both the problem and putting out fires simultaneously.

Finally late afternoon we figured out what was the root of our problem and corrected it.  There are still some minor things to squash of course.

Some of my co-workers commented that they couldn’t believe how calm I remained throughout what was an incredibly challenging and frustrating situation.  Despite my many personality deficiencies I am pretty damn good at fixing problems.  I learned long ago that panic does not assist in that process.

The timing for this was not great as at home we have all sorts of ducks to line up for the half marathon I am timing this weekend.  Registration for this year has swelled to the highest numbers since I have been involved with the club.  I have a bunch of people wanting my attention regarding various aspects of the race.

In addition to helping with issues before the race Ali is going to be running in the event as well for the second time.  She hopes to improve on her time from my last year. In a way I am jealous, now that I have the idea of completing a half marathon in my head.

After this event we still don’t get any breaks as we move right into preparing for Ali’s race two weeks later. Just gotta keep moving.

So I picked Ali up at the airport yesterday.  Her flight was delayed so I used some of the extra time to run some errands.  I grabbed some dog food. went home and picked up the dogs, stopped at my mom’s to drop off an unemployment form she couldn’t print and then scurried off to the airport.

The cell phone parking lot was the fullest I had ever seen it.  The snowbirds have descended upon southwest Florida big time.  There has been a dramatic increase in congestion everywhere since the weekend.

I talked to Ali pretty regularly while she was up in PA so there wasn’t much she had to tell me.  It didn’t take long until our attention turned to the mountains of work that waited for us for the next few days.

When we got home I pulled out the frost cover materials for the garden.  I have to work late this evening so I wanted to make sure I had everything pulled out so either Ali or myself could cover the garden and it’s newly planted additions from this latest dreaded cold snap.

The rest of the night was just spent doing stuff.  Most of my night was consumed labeling and organizing the rest of the 500 extra timing chips for the race.  It was extremely tedious work, I was borderline ready to snap towards the end of it.  I justin.tv’d a brief portion of the process to illustrate how cumbersome it was. I still have to scan all 500 chips to get them into the timing system.

During the evening Randall sent me his first ever youtube video.  Although he has participated in a number of my own videos, he never made his own.  For some reason he was shy about it, making the video private so only invited people could see it.

I had challenged him the other day to see how long he could hold a wall handstand.  I told him that part of my handstand training has been 60 second holds.  Randall turned in a 55 second effort which wasn’t bad at all however he included excuses about his weight being a limiting factor.

Well I had to shoot a quick video response to obliterate any idea Randall had that his 55 second effort was equal to mine.  I used Ali’s Pampered Chef timer.  I set it to 73 seconds, allowing three seconds for me to get my feet up on the wall.  Holding my body weight for that long was not easy.  The last 20 seconds or so my shoulders started to shake but I held it until the beeper sounded.  I immediately posted it to youtube to set the bar a few feet higher.  You can see the attempt here.

I am sure when Randall shows up in late January a wall handstand hold competition will be in the works.

A had a weird dream the other night.  I only remember bits and pieces but here they are.

I was a judge for some show that was like Junkyard Wars, two teams made something out of everyday materials.  The one team’s object was pretty ordinary, I recall not being impressed, but I can’t remember what the object was exactly.

The other team included a pair of twins.  Their project was up in the attic of the house.  Access to the attic was quite difficult.  At the top of the steps I had to crawl through something that looked like mail slot.  Their item was definitely superior but again I can’t recall what it was.

I later find myself outside in an alleyway.  I am approached by a young kid with very dark skin and a mullet style hair cut.  I later find out this is one of Gary Del’Abate’s kids (bababooey).  Gary starts talking to me briefly but then about 6 or 7 nervous cows approach us in the alley.  Gary says “I have to go take care of these cows, they have anxiety issues.”

Gary disappears around the corner herding the cows away.  End of dream.