Archives 2011

Ali leaves today for yet another venture up north to visit her nieces.  It is Lauryn’s birthday weekend.  I know Ali really has fun during these visits although they almost inevitably wind up with her returning with renewed desires to want to have a cute little kid of her own.  It sounds like there could be a lot of snow in the forecast for her visit, fun.

While she is gone I don’t have big plans.  I am thinking about going to see Tron in 3D, by myself if necessary.  I may go for another longer than normal run.  I was thinking 6 miles around the water park sounds about right.  I probably will do some more handstand training following the advice in this 60 year old guide.

V finally is back on the air, I watched the episode last night.  It wasn’t all that great although Anna’s daughter is incredibly hot.  The gratuitous bra and panties scene was not wasted on me.  The best part of the episode however was the final scene where we get to meet Anna’s mother.  It is none other than the super bitch from the ORIGINAL V series in the 80’s! I thought that was pretty awesome.

Randall texted me last night.  He said that syfy dumped the final 5 Caprica episodes online.  I love Caprica and was quite disappointed that they unceremoniously pulled the plug on the show, not allowing it to grow into a hit like BSG did. Now I will have to digest the last 5 episodes in rapid fire to see if they were able to loosely wrap up the numerous storylines in any thing resembling a satisfying manner.

On my way to work I was driving along and saw some movement in the middle of the road.  As my eyes focused I realized what the movement was, what looked to be an otter flopping around after he was just recently struck by a vehicle.  My first instinct is to want to pull over and help the poor animal but logically I knew there realistically wasn’t anything I can do.   Next comes a wave of sadness mixed with anger as I picture a clueless, moronic driver texting or doing their make up that struck the animal.  Finally the emotion cocktail is topped off by guilt as I feel like I should have stopped anyway to at least try to get the otter off the road.

Hitting an animal like that is inexcusable in broad daylight in my book.  There was plenty of empty space on either side of the road where if you were paying attention, you would have plenty of time to avoid it. F’in people suck.

I think I may have seen this a couple years back (last year actually) and mentioned this but if so it is worth repeating.

I walk out to the gym and come upon a massive tricked out Hummer H1.  The thing has at least an 18 inch lift kit and tires/wheels that are probably worth more than my Tacoma.  The inside of the gold plated front license plate holder has the sign for some plumbing outfit.

To me, this guy is a total idiot.  I mean unless you intend to scream to people “HEY LOOK, I OVERCHARGE PEOPLE SO MUCH ON PLUMBING JOBS THAT I CAN AFFORD THIS”

I would never think for a second of using this company.  Perhaps he prefers to deal with only the elite super wealthy whom such a vehicle would impress. (like our new governor)

First Class Tools.   Haha look in the comments, the wife is very proud of her Hummer.

So on New Year’s Eve shortly after I got home my cell phone rang, it was Randall.  He was just asking me what was up and what I was doing for New Year’s which was nice but unusual.  Randall doesn’t typically call me just to shoot the shit, he knows me well enough to realize that I enjoy prolonged phone conversations as much as opera.  I told Randall I was considering going to the casino but more than likely we would just watch a stroked out Dick Clark this year at home.

Then I realized that maybe he was interested in coming over so I asked him, “Are you thinking about driving over?”  He said he was thinking about it.  Randall lives on the other coast but evidently the two hour drive to Naples wasn’t a concern. Now of course I had made no plans for a Randall visit but a quick confirmation with Ali was all that was required. Randall said he should arrive around 9 (which means closer to 10)

The dogs were extremely excited when Uncle Randall showed up unexpectedly at the door.  They just saw him three weeks ago.  I didn’t waste much time before I had the Kinect fired up.  Randall and I engaged in various full body video gaming.  We had an epic battle in track and field where I squeaked out a victory due to Randall fouling all three long jump attempts. Randall got some lucky wins in ping pong and volleyball while I dominated in bowling.

We tuned in to Dick Clark’s Rocking Eve about a quarter till midnight.  I was sort of hoping that this was the year that Dick finally stepped away from in front of the camera.  I wasn’t so lucky.  Instead we got treated to Dick mumbling the count down once again.  I really don’t get it.  Yea Dick you made your point when you came back after your stroke.  The only point you are making now is your ego is too large to allow you to step away gracefully.  It’s almost like he and Brett Farve are brothers.

After the ball dropped I got the urge to work on my handstands.  You see this month the Bar-barian challenge is a hand stand hold for time.  The problem is, I can’t hold a handstand.

I demonstrated my form or lack there of for Ali and Randall. I have this issue where when I overbalance (start to tip over) where instead of pirouetting out of it I instead just flop over on my back clumsily.   I tried several times and each time was an epic fail.  Randall, who was a gymnast in his youth is still able to do a handstand briefly which he demonstrated, show off.

Our Saturday was devoid of normal housework but full of activity.  Randall brought his road bike over.  We decided we would ride to the water park which was open over school xmas break.  We then figured we could actually get a New Year’s Day swim in.  Ali decided to drive the truck there instead of ride bike.  It was a good move on her part.

The ride was rough.  It was very windy.  I had not ridden since the triathlon in early November, I just either had other stuff going on or it was just too damn cold to ride.  The layoff was felt immediately.  For the first couple miles I was the windbreaker and there was a lot of wind to break.  My legs immediately felt fatigued.  Once I was struggling to maintain 13 mph Randall swung in front and lead the rest of the 16 mile ride which I had no problem with.  It was one of the few situations where being second didn’t bother me in the least.

We weren’t really sure what to expect at the water park.  The temps earlier in the week had been in the 30’s so we were afraid that even with heating, the water would be very chilly.  We were very pleasantly surprised when we were told the water temp was 84 degrees.  Wow, they must have spent a TON keeping the temp up.

My swimming has had a similar layoff to my biking.  The last time I swam was the end of October when the water park closed.  I experienced similar results to my biking performance.  In October I was swimming a straight 1600.  I did 500 meters and felt very fatigued.  Well it at least felt good to get back in the water, on New Years Day at that!

After swimming we ate lunch at the pool and hung out for a bit.  We threw the bikes in the back of the truck for the ride home.  Neither Randall or I had any urge to pedal our way back.

The rest of Saturday was a Kinect marathon.  Randall and I played a ton, to the point where I was really feeling fatigued, as was he.  It felt good to sit down and play a “conventional” video game like South Park Tower defense after awhile.

During dinner we watched the Big Lebowski on Netflix, a movie I saw before but remembered little about but that it was funny.  Randall said he had it in his queue to watch but he hadn’t seen it yet.  To be honest, it wasn’t as funny as I remembered.

We had a break during the film to do some dog searching duties.  The neighbor’s little chihuahua got out… The neighbor was panicked as they just got the dogs (there is a second one).  These things are tiny, smaller than most cats and an easy target for nighttime predators.  Randall, Ali and I walked around their property for a good half hour with flashlights looking for the dog but had no luck.  We were all relieved to hear the next day that the dog came back on it’s own.  The neighbor was VERY lucky.

My Sunday was extremely lazy.  It was actually a throw back to a time long ago in two areas.  First I never got out of my pajama pants all day long.  This just never happens if I am left to my on devices.  Second I spent the majority of the day trying to BEAT a video game.

You see Randall and I had beaten the normal mode of South Park Tower Defense on the 360 earlier in the weekend.  However we started a new challenge, clearing all 11 levels on INSANE difficulty, which as the name implies, is insanely more difficult.

Managing to get through the game at this setting requires solid team work.  Randall and I each assumed different roles the game.  Randall was primarily the intricate maze builder, tower maker and money collector.  He performed these duties mostly using the one character whose power up was the least valuable.

My role was to position and utilize the power ups of the three remaining characters, monitoring when their power ups were available, utilizing them at the right time and making sure they did not killed in the process.  We started mid morning with this challenge and didn’t finish the last level until around 5 pm.  Of course you will have no appreciation for the difficulty of this accomplishment unless you try it yourself.

Randall headed out shortly after we finished up.  Ali and I half halfheartedly watched the Eagles/Cowboys game.  Even though the Eagles were playing mostly second stringers and the Cowboys were playing starters, I found myself very annoyed at the final outcome where the defense allowed yet ANOTHER third string QB to beat them.  To me, it just sets a bad vibe for the team going into the playoffs(just like last year).  I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Green Bay comes in and beats them.

My Monday wasn’t bad at all.  In the morning I hit a few places with the dogs in tow in the van.  One of them was a quick stop at Target to get another negative ion wrist band for myself, the same thing we got for my mom.  Hey, what can it hurt?

I know for sure that the different levels of magnetism from the moon affects the way my brain functions, maybe something on my wrist can help balance that out. Or maybe, the placebo effect will do the same?  Who cares, if it helps me feel better about day to day existence it is well worth the couple bucks.

Monday was the day we would take down all the decorations, something I originally planned for earlier in the weekend before Randall’s arrival. During the day I took down the outside lights.  The process went better this year since the new LED lights came with a storage spool that made wrapping them up a snap. I also pulled down all of the high sitting decorations inside the house as well as bring in the storage containers. Monday evening Ali and I put everything else away.

Another one of the projects for the day was upgrading the 60 gig hdd on my Xbox 360 to a 250 gig model I picked up off buy.com.  For some reason I assumed this was a genuine MSFT drive but it turned out to be some Chinese/Japanese knock off.

I also bought a 360 data transfer kit which again turned out to be some sort of shitty Asian version.  This kit was supposed to allow you to back up your old 360 hdd to your pc and then copy it back to the new one.  Well it didn’t work.

The directions were so sparse and written in such poor English they were next to worthless.  When I did finally figure out how it was supposed to work I realized it still didn’t work.  My educated guess is an Xbox Live update broke whatever back door this program was using to read the data.

So I decided to just slap on the new 250 gig hdd on to the 360 and see what happens.  I was able to initialize the new hdd and load my Xbox Live profile although I had no local content.  I was able to easily redownload what I already paid for and was back to where I was pretty much.  The biggest annoyance was instead of my new hard drive being identified as the HDD it instead was named a couple Japanese characters.  Thankfully after a bunch of fumbling around in various menu’s I figured out how to rename the drive.  So I am up and running with 4 times the amount of space as before.  I will keep my 60 gig hdd for a rainy day.

Yesterday I purchased a new “server” on ebay.  Our current home server runs Windows Server and Exchange 2003 on a small form factor Lenovo desktop.  I have been having some problems with it lately like unexplained NIC connection failures, a dead CMOS battery, and overall sluggish performance from the Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM system.

Since the server houses my and Ali’s email and data it is rather important.  Well yesterday I had problems again and it took me a few hours to get email flowing again.  I mentioned to Ali it may be a good idea for me to look into upgrading the box sooner rather than later.  Ali said she was fine with doing it.

It didn’t take me long to find a suitable upgrade on Ebay. It’s another small form factor box, a Dell this time.  It has a 2.66ghz dual core processor, 160GB hdd and 3 gig of RAM.  I may upgrade the ram all the way to it’s max of 8GB to maximize the workstation’s ability to function as a server. I only paid $250 including shipping for the box.

I am not looking forward to the migration process. My plan is to install Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 on the new hardware, picking up 4 or 5 years in the product life cycle.