Archives February 2011

Last night when I got home I headed immediately outside to work on setting up the two new raised beds in the garden.  I knew daylight was still at a premium.

Putting the beds together is a snap and requires no tools.  The recycled plastic material will basically last forever, another big plus.

Before doing anything I had to pop out the plants that were in the construction zone which included cauliflower, a bean and fiji plant.

Next I tried to more or less level the area where the beds were going using a rake and shovel.

After putting together each frame which is 3.5 feet wide by 7 feet long, I filled each with 360 quarts of top notch Miracle Gro garden soil, the same stuff that has worked so well in our other bed.

After some tamping and raking I was ready to put the popped out plants into their new, much improved accommodations.  By the time I was finishing up it was pretty much pitch dark outside.

I am looking forward to using the new beds to grow all sorts of stuff.  Not only should they help increase our yield, they will also cut down on the amount of weeding required in the garden which is always welcome.  Once the stuff on the right side of the garden has run it’s course I am looking forward to adding some more beds.

It looks like our trip up north to see my dad is going to have a brief detour.  We are going to stop by Ali’s brother’s place for a bit on Friday.  The girls are off school that day so it should work out pretty well.  The plan is to drive like a maniac on Thursday to maximize our available time on Friday.

This weekend I have to quickly give the van a once over to make sure it is ready to go for the trip.  The oil needs to be changed, anti-freeze topped off, bedding cleaned and a number of other small items to make sure the party van is ready for a journey into the frozen north.

Yesterday I had an odd injury at the gym, I felt like I bruised my chest.  The weird thing is I did it while working out my biceps.  You see Monday is my normal chest/back day at the gym.  This past Monday I worked my chest pretty hard and as a result had some residual muscle soreness.

Well part of my bicep routine yesterday was curls on the preacher bench.  During my last set I was curling 70 pounds.  The physics of the exercise puts pressure on the chest as it presses against the pad.  Well this pressure on top of the area already being sore resulted in me walking around the rest of the day feeling like somebody whacked me with a bat across the chest.

Last night after work I stopped at Home Depot to grab garden soil to fill the two additional raised beds I got for our garden.  It was a whopping 12 bags of dirt, each one holding 2 cubic feet of soil.  These suckers were heavy and did not feel good to lug around with a lower back that was sore.  The ass end of my Tacoma dropped down a good 8-12 inches once the bags were all loaded up. I have ambitions of putting the raised beds together after work tonight.

When Jeremy visited a couple weeks ago he brought with a cd that contained pictures he took of our pets the year before.  There are a bunch of really good ones but this is my favorite of all.

Yesterday I got my blog talking to Twitter once again.  It had been broken since Twitter moved to a more complex security scheme.  So now each post will be linked to Twitter.

Since I also just turned on FB/Twitter communication people may see the blog entries listed twice in FB, oh well.  Oddly the gateway between the services only appears to be working one way, the Twitter to Facebook direction.  I have not seen a FB status update hit my Twitter feed yet.

Over the past year or so I have had a bunch of people I know run into job issues where they wound up collecting unemployment.  What I find interesting is the hypocrisy involved in a few of these situations.  Some of these people were very hard right leaning individuals that looked down upon people that relied on the government to support them. However, when THEY found themselves without a job it suddenly became no problem to be given a handout, in some cases, for a very long time.

My point is, this is the case with so many things, unless you find yourself in the situation yourself, it is difficult to have compassion for those that are already there.  Health care is the perfect example.  You have good health care?  You are lucky enough to not be diagnosed with something like cancer?  Good for you.  Now let’s take away that health care and give you some cancer.  Let’s see how you reevaluate your position on the topic at that time.  Everyone is a hypocrite.

My blog to Twitter integration broke a few months back when Twitter hardened their authentication scheme.  This is a test to see if it is working again.

So it looks like the trip to western PA is a go. I got the time off from work, confirmed the dates with my dad and secured a bird sitter.  My dad and step mom are excited for us to come visit. Ali mentioned it would be cool if we could stop by at her brother’s place briefly to see our nieces.  I am trying to figure out scenarios to make that work since it is about 4 hours away from where my dad lives.

Last night I saw an amazing thing when I got home last night, the Camry was in the garage.  The fact that the car was in the garage wasn’t the amazing thing, what it represented was, Ali was actually home before me.  I can’t tell you the last time this happened.

Not only was she home, she was already working on the dog’s dinner and had harvested salad from the garden. It was great.  Originally when Ali started contracting this was the intended plan.  I had ideas of  how nice that would be for both Ali to work less hours for the same money and still be able to enjoy at least a partial housewife life style where she only was working two or three days a week.

For a short period of time after the transition things were pretty close to what we laid out.  However after not so long stuff morphed for various reasons.  For the last couple years I have been lucky to see Ali home before me one day a month.  I protested about it several times only to see things revert back in a short time period. I am hoping last night will become more routine instead of an annual event, it sure was nice.

Yesterday Ali took the dog’s in for their annual physical.  Sadie has turned into the little porker, tipping the scales at 59 pounds, a full 5 pounds heavier than Nicki.  To put this into perspective, when we adopted Sadie she was a scrawny 38 pounds.  Evidently she has found life in the Duffey household quite to her liking.

Last night I used a Zappos gift card to snag another pair of retro Adidas training pants.  I really like the other two pair I own.  After my gift card and a $4 credit I already on my account I wound up paying a whopping 90 cents for the pants, sweet!

Florida’s new governor has really been making headlines recently.  The other day he revealed his proposed changes to gut the Florida Retirement System, the state worker pension plan.  Yes this is one of my benefits as well.

Why he is targeting the pension plan in the first place is questionable.  The Florida pension system is one of the healthiest programs in the country, currently ranked at number 3 nationwide.  Ironically, it’s health may be why he see’s it as a fat juicy apple to pluck since there are literally billions of dollars in it.

Now on top of this he revealed plans for his budget in front of a pay per seat tea party gathering instead of announcing the budget in the state capital.  This is the same cowardly strategy he used when revealing his pension plans which was done in front of a local business that were strong backers of Scott’s campaign.  Tricky Rick likes to announce stuff only in front of the people that want to hear it.

Rick’s budget highlights include cutting taxes left and right, especially for businesses, and laying off around 7,000 state workers.  Local governments that are already spiraling from property values that have plummeted are besides themselves if faced with even slimmer revenue.

Scott is doing just what he did during the campaign, throw out highlight line items that sound good to the lightly informed.  PAY LESS TAXES, SCREW THE STATE GOVERNMENT WORKERS, it is the classic “me first” attitude that focuses on the short term and ignores the repercussions.

These same morons that cheer lower taxes will also be the first to complain when the various services provided by local governments are no longer available or are at a level less than the community has come to accept as the norm.  There is no free lunch.

The good news is Scott can not single handedly dismantle the state.  He would require the backing of the majority of legislature to do that.  Those legislators have already been besieged by people outraged by many of these proposals and have thus far demonstrated an awareness of the backlash.

Tricky Rick is acting like he was given some sort of enormous mandate this last election.  The reality was that despite the  70 million dollars of his own personal fortune that he spent to win the election, he only did so by less than 1% of the vote.

As aggravating as I find Rick’s ideas, there is one thing I find more aggravating.  It’s any state worker that actually voted for this guy (there are a lot of them) that are now whining because Ricky is now gunning for their retirement.  Scott made his intentions towards state employees well known during the election.  Don’t cry about the bed that you helped make.

So I started my 24 hours of epic exercise at noon on Friday with a version 2.0 300 work out at lunch.  Part two of the trilogy was Saturday morning we started running at a crazy 6am start time on a 10 mile jaunt.

Saturday morning was the most humid conditions I have attempted a 10 mile run in, it definitely had an effect on my performance.  The humid air did a good job of bringing fatigue around a little quicker than I would have liked.

I actually ran a decent portion of the route with Ali before I pulled ahead during the last few miles. Up until this 10 mile run, each subsequent attempt was a little more manageable than the previous.  That streak ended Saturday.  I covered the distance about a minute slower than my PB that I had set 2 weeks prior.

After the run they had a burrito breakfast set up.  I ate one of the burritos, something I regretted later as it felt like cement in my gut.

We drove back home since the pool wasn’t available until 10:30.  Ali was exhausted and immediately went to the bedroom to catch a mini-nap before we had to go right back out the door again. I was quite tired myself and was finding it hard to find the motivation to go swim.  Still, I woke up Ali and we piled back in the car to go swim.

We were swimming at a pool that is a full 50 meters long.  I was looking forward to swimming Olympic style laps.  Unfortunately they had the pool configured for 25 meter lanes to accommodate more people.  In retrospect it was good they did as there were probably 15-20 NATS members there swimming away.

When I swam around Christmas I was surprised how much my swimming endurance had faded in two months. At that time I did 500 meters and felt pretty spent.  I wanted to try to do better this time around.

In the lane next to me was a guy that made me look like I was treading water.  I would start my lap ahead of him and each time he would blow by me and finish 10 meters ahead.  I think he was actually enjoying blowing by me as he did this again and again and again.

I decided to do 1000 meters of swimming, it felt like a good number to go along with 10 miles of running work.  I did the laps at an 8:15 per 400 meter pace, about 15-20 seconds off what I was doing at my best a few months back. I was happy to compete my exercise trifecta.

When we got home Ali was even more exhausted and again retired for additional napping.  I certainly could have used a nap but I had stuff I wanted to get done, as always.

Saturday night we had a group couple dinner planned in downtown Naples.  It was with several women in Ali’s local sorority group along with their spouses. I was seated right next the elder member of the group and her husband.  She had a ton of interesting stories, the two biggest were her daughter was in the tsunami (and survived) and the Volvo new car buying experience.

Evidently when you buy a new Volvo you have the option of being flown over to Sweden on Volvo’s dime where you will take delivery of your new Volvo right at the factory doors.  They will then ship your car to the United States. No, I am not kidding.  I guess this speaks to the profit margin in these vehicles but hey that is pretty damn awesome none the less.

Dinner was nice but I got a bit of sticker shock when our portion of the bill arrived. Despite Ali and I both getting entree’s that were in the mid-$20 range our bill topped out at a pretty crazy $111.  I tried to keep my jaw in place as I quickly surveyed the bill, trying to find out how we managed to get up to such a high figure.  I saw such niceties as $10 salads, double digit glasses of wine, stadium beer pricing and a desert price (that we split) that could pay for meal for four people at McD’s.

I wish I kept the itemized bill because even with all those pricey add ons, $111 seems high.   I am suspect that since we had a party of 8 that they pulled they mandatory gratuity bolt on.  If so I really got screwed since I threw a $25 tip on top.

When I mentioned the extravagant bill to Ali after dinner she immediately dismissed it, saying that we very rarely go out for an expensive dinner so it isn’t a big deal.  Although I agreed with the basic premise there is a line where it crosses over from expensive to ridiculous.  For me, we crossed it.

By the time we got home I was utterly exhausted from my day of exercise, no naps, followed by a high calorie restaurant meal.  I was so tired it literally felt painful to be awake.  I fell asleep in no time at all.

Sunday morning Ali was meeting up with Christie to do some more swimming.  I stayed behind and did the majority of the house prep for our Superbowl party.  We had invited probably close to a dozen people but the invite didn’t go out until last weekend. As a result we wound up only having 3 people RSVP.

Despite the relatively small gathering we made enough food for many more mouths.  As a result our fridge is jammed with left overs today.  I think I will be eating bagel bites and spanikopita all week for dinner.

Despite the small attendance we once again set up the betting board where daring souls can place 50 cent bets on any/all of the 16 available wagers.  I made out surprisingly well, winning far more bets than I lost.

The game itself was entertaining although I really didn’t have a rooting interest despite wearing my number 83 Louis Lipps jersey.  I was really fine if either team won as I like them both to a degree.  The Steelers were my team when I was VERY young since they were so good at the time.  The Packers became more likable after Troy and my trip to Green Bay when we were exposed to  some of the nicest people in the country.

As a fan you can’t ask for much more than to have a team with a chance to win on the final drive.  Unfortunately for the Steelers , big creepy Ben just didn’t have any magic left this time around.

As always the commercials are one of the highlights of the event.  There are so many of them they become a bit of a blur.  I missed some of them, so I need to review a few.  Out of what I did see I had a few highlights/lowlights.

A lot of the the commercials relied on physical humor to get a laugh and it worked pretty much every time.  Someone getting hit in the head or plowed over just always seems funny.

The Kia commercial was pretty funny.  I had no idea what brand of car it was until the end.  My initial guesses were Saab (which makes no sense since they are out of business) and then Ford.  It’s a sweet looking car.  In the car genre I thought Chevy had some nice spots.  Of course I most appreciated the two Camaro ads. The Hyundai “Don’t Settle” spot was pretty damn creative too. The VW one where the kid is Darth Vader made everyone in the room laugh out loud, it was very cute.

There were a lot of movie trailers shown.  Of course I was all about the the action / super hero genre.  Cowboys & Aliens, Thor and Captain America are all on my “want to see in a theater” short list.

Of course the beer company ads were all funny, they almost always are.  Doritos once again had a strong showing too.  There were a bunch more creative/entertaining/good spots but you don’t need me to tell you that.

There were some fails of course.  I thought Coke’s spots were weak, very weak.  Also godaddy really needs to come up with a fresh idea.  What is this, the 5th year in a row where they tease you with T&A that is supposed to tantalize you into going to their website to see a totally lame conclusion to the the tv spot? I mean really, it has run it’s course.  There were other fails as well but with 91 commercials who has time to go in depth about them all.

If you would like to review all the spots yourself go here.

A few more random thoughts about the game….  Christina Agulierra f’d up the national anthem.  Sure there is a lot of pressure singing in a spot like that but wtf, she is a pro, there is no excuse for that in my book.

The half time show was a bit of a mess too.  It was amazing that they didn’t have Fergie’s mic turned on at the beginning and the lights on the V on the LOVE stage were 75% out.  How does that happen?  WTF was the point of bringing Slash and Usher in?  Slash to make the performance more manly and then Usher to appeal more to the urban crowd I guess? Odd.

All together it was an enjoyable evening although it was filled with far too much consumption of junk food.  I had the perfect storm of crap, salt, fat, sugar and alcohol.  No wonder I feel so rotten today.  I will be spending the week trying to beat that junk out of my system.

This weekend is the Super Bowl.  Ali invited several people over but so far we only got a positive response from one couple.  So our Super Bowl party may be more like a Super Bowl gathering instead.  Oh well.

Last night I had a nice harvest from the garden that included lettuce, beet leaves, swiss chard and a perfect head of broccoli.  Ali created quite the tasty salad from our home grown ingredients.

Yesterday two more raised beds I bought off Ebay arrived, the exact same type as the one we have out there now.

This is definitely the way to go.  Stuff we have planted in the raised beds have done better than what we put in the bare ground.  The raised beds are filled with pure, high grade garden soil.  The rest of the garden is amended dirt which unfortunately is mixed in with the crappy sand fill that was used to raise that area.

Plus the raised bed hardly ever has any weeds in it, again because it is pure soil that has not ever been contaminated by weed seeds.  We will have a total of three raised beds when the new ones are set up.  Eventually I would love to have the entire garden filled with them.  I bet we could get 8-10 of them in the area.

Yesterday my step mom sent me pictures of their snow covered property in western PA which included several pics of their two dogs having a blast in the snow.  Later in the evening I asked Ali out of left field if she would have any interest in driving up to dad’s place just for a long weekend to hang out.

She said she thought it would be fun however our weekends are pretty booked for the foreseeable future.  The one opening we did have was President’s day weekend.  I happen to have that Monday off as a holiday so it would mean one less vaca day I would need to use.

I envision this as a  2 day commute up and back and two or three days at dad’s place.  Of course all of this has not even been brought up to dad yet.  They have been in the middle of some extensive renovations to their new place.  They were supposed to be wrapped up in late 2010 but as in most projects dad contracts out for, this one has run long.  I don’t even know if the house would be ready for guests at that point.

So anyway, we’ll see what dad thinks.  It could make for a fun little trip.  I know our dogs would have a blast.  It would be a an opportunity to see how the party van does in winter driving conditions which could be useful if I ever get to make that trek to Yellowstone during non-summer months.

Yesterday I FINALLY received the 8 gigs of RAM for my home server.  I initially order the RAM probably close to 3 weeks ago but it was defective.  It took this long until I got my replacements.  Thankfully this set of sticks appears to work.

Getting this ram should allow me to finalize the migration to the new server.  I was waiting for it to install my enterprise AV software on it.  Hopefully tonight I can shutdown the old server and cross my fingers no unforeseen issues crop up by doing so.

You may or may not notice that all of my blog entries now have a Facebook “LIKE” button.  Clicking this button will post a small blurb to your FB profile saying you like this entry along with a link to it.  Feel free to LIKE as much as you want, it will only help bring more minions into my kingdom.

Yesterday at the gym I did my first brick workout in a couple months going 5 miles on the stationary bike and another 2 miles on the treadmill.  I really was pushing to get through the run even though it was only two miles.  I’ll be bricking more consistently from here on out.  Saturday I may be doing a 10 mile run followed by swimming in a legit 50 meter pool, should be fun.

I checked back on my HVAC rebate status today.  I was thrilled to see it was now marked as APPROVED.  My persistence actually paid off in this instance.  I am sure many people would have written this $1500 off a long time ago with all of the roadblocks I had to clear to get it.

That little Itunes Apple issue that I thought was cleaned up still is not.  We are now a week past my initial call to Apple.  During that call they told me I should see the money that was stolen from my account refunded back within 3-5 days.  Well it was not there yet so I called.

I am talking to a nice enough girl on the phone but what she is telling me is pissing me off.  She said technically, she isn’t supposed to be even talking on the phone to me since only Apple Care subscribers $$ are privileged enough to talk to a human being on the phone.    Well she stayed on the phone long enough to tell me that I had to be the one to follow up with Itunes support which annoyed me greatly.

I said to her “So you are telling me that I have to email Itunes support to follow up on something your representative said was going to be handled?”  Yes.  When I entered my case number in on their web site it showed it had a status of CLOSED.  Great, now I have to trudge through another pile of bullshit, one email at a time.

This morning we had another extended outage at my host IX Webhosting.  There have been a number of these in recent months.  Despite these outages IX still has no fear of putting a GUARANTEED 99.99% up time in big letters on their home page, funny.

It seems that despite their repeated problems recently, they refuse to implement much in the way of proactive monitoring to head some of these problems off at the pass.  Instead they seem to prefer letting their customer base be their monitoring system and then go into Chinese fire drill mode when stuff breaks.

Yes, it’s frustrating.

We have had a bittersweet relationship with Vonage over the years.  The biggest problem has been spotty performance.  Sometimes the call just flakes out and you can hear the other person but they can’t hear you or vice versa.  Well Vonage just included a feature on our account that I like, voice to text transcription of voicemails.

We already had a nice set up with Vonage where any messages we had were sent to Ali and my email accounts as a .wav sound file.  Well transcription takes it to the next level.  Now we get a text version of the message dropped in our email, it’s great.

It’s a smart move by Vonage considering the need for a real home phone line becomes less and less as time goes on.  This is a nice little feature that might keep Vonage off my chopping block for a little while yet.

If you have seen any of my various workout videos you will know that a lot of them are tied into various challenges that are posted monthly on the bar-barians forum. Well this month I am actually the one that came up with the challenge which is kind of cool.

It is called The 180.  The challenge involves doing alternating pull ups and chin ups, switching your grip at the bottom of the motion with out dropping off the bar.  Unlike some of the challenges which can be a pain because you have to accurately time them or others that are too physically difficult for the average body weight enthusiast to attempt, this challenge is very simple, yet difficult at the same time.  It scales to the individuals ability.  The goal is simply max amount of repetitions.

So far the forum participants seem to think this is a good challenge.  I was pumped that even Zakavelli himself ( a legend in body weight feats) thought it was a good challenge.  Since it is my challenge, I will certainly attempt it several times throughout the month.

Back home they are enjoying an ice storm today.  Last night I had the front door wide open.  These days make me quite content in my decision to leave Berks County 1200 miles behind a decade + ago.

Florida’s new governor made an announcement about his plans for state workers.  Tricky Dick Scott wants to put state employees and their benefits in his cross hairs.  His plan to balance the budget and create jobs is to lay off 5% of the state work staff and attack the remaining workers pension plan. (which includes me)

Scott has portrayed the Florida pension plan as some money sucking, in the red,  monster.  The truth is the Florida Pension system is actually very well funded and managed, currently rating as the third best program in the country.

These changes could potentially not only affect me but all workers in the plan including, teachers, firefighters and law enforcement.  A large part of the reason people commit to working these type of jobs is the security a pension offered them, even if their wages were less than the private sector.  Now, that jobs in the private sector are hard to come by, the have nots want to feel better about themselves by tearing down state workers as well.  It’s bullshit.

This reactionary measure is like everything else, it is a band aid to fix a short term budget issue.  When the economy rebounds and the private sector is living high on the hog are they going to restore these benefits to state workers? Nope, of course not, they would be gone forever.

Only in Florida could a crook that pleaded the fifth 75 times during his companies Medicare fraud case get elected governor.  Does this look like a guy you can trust? Unreal.

Another new visual at the gym today.  As I walked back to the free weight area my eyes instantly gravitated to a tall, middle aged black man wearing a tight dri-fit long sleeve shirt.  None of those things drew my eyes to him.  It was the 18″ to 24″ diameter sombrero looking hat he was wearing that got my attention.

He wore this hat during the entire workout.  I joked to one of my gym buddies, “Maybe he just wants to keep the sun out of his eyes?”

I have continued to feel very tired since the weekend.  Last night I was in the shower by 8:30 and out like a light before 9 pm.  I can only assume it is a hangover from the high activity/low sleep weekend.

Ali is finally emerging from what has been a several month tunnel of oppressive work duties.  She is very excited about it.  Maybe she can finally get back some semblance of a schedule similar to what we imagined when she first started contracting.

I have a bunch of projects on the burner at work which will keep me busy for awhile.  They  include replacing all of our network backbone switches, installing a new domain controller, reconnecting our entire NOC to the brand new CAT 6 wiring we had dropped in and cleaning up our two cabinets of rack servers. Unfortunately a lot of it is the type of work that has to be performed on a weekend.

Ali ordered 6 or 7 boxes of Girl Scout cookies from my nieces.  They arrived yesterday. After dinner I asked her if she minded if I had some of them which of course Ali agreed to.  After surveying the selection, I told Ali no thanks, I didn’t really like any of what she picked out.  Ali was somewhat offended that I didn’t like her choices which included uninspired flavors like shortbread, lemon and something that looked like a muddy nickel.

I mean geez, if you are going to order 7 boxes of cookies maybe you could have at least asked me what flavors I liked?  I wound up  having a few of the one variety of cookie that Ali ordered that is marginally good, peanut butter.