Eviscerated, Breaking my sanity

When I got home last night  I had a headache and was feeling pretty annoyed.  For some reason I got it in my head that I should go out and try the hard mode of the BB challenge (20 pull ups as fast as you can go), despite my state of being.

It was again another wet evening and it was in fact drizzling as I headed outside with my tripod, camera, towel (to dry the bar) and chalk.  I didn’t do any warm up or stretching, I just dried the bar, chalked my hands and started pulling.  You can definitely tell I was in a shitty mood from my commentary. 

I did manage to best my prior attempt by exactly one second although while I was in mid-set I thought I actually was going faster than that.  20 pull ups in 30 seconds.

So my major project for last night was more work on my Tuffwing construction.   I got my hands dirty (and sticky) with CA glue.  The use of CA accelerator really helps move the build process along.  I got the wing halves, carbon fiber spars, motor mount and electronics hatch assembled and glued together.

I will need the radio receiver that was used in the Speedwing so I had to extract it.  I felt genuine remorse as I used a combination of scissors and my fingers to rip apart the wrecked plane to get to the electronics.  When Mike built this for me he meticulously and professionally embedded the rc gear inside the body of the plane.  As I ripped it apart it gave me a greater appreciation of just how much care he utilized when building the plane.  It also made me more angry at myself for crashing and destroying the wing.

I considered filming the build process but there is already a very well done Tuffwing build video out there so I didn’t bother.  I’m not in a rush to get the wing done since until my yard dries out I won’t be doing any non-quadcopter flying anytime soon.

So I got back to the bedroom early, around 9pm,  hoping to catch up on the triple header of shows I am currently watching, Breaking Bad, Dexter and Ray Donovan.  I fired up my Xbox and tried loading Breaking Bad.  It acted like the episode was available however each time I tried to view it I would get stuck in “trouble loading video” loop.  Ok, well I guess I’ll watch Dexter/Ray Donovan.  Nope, neither of their latest episodes show up as being available on the Xfinity 360 app either.  Mother f…

Ok, I grab my Kindle and browse to the Xfinitytv web site.  I see the latest Breaking Bad episode is available on their site. Awesome.  I try to load it up but get stonewalled by the version of Flash running on the Kindle.  I am unable to update it conventionally on the device so again I am left jonesing for my Breaking Bad fix. Ok on to plan C.

I grab my laptop and again bring up the Xfinity site.  I am finally able to launch the episode, sweet.

Watching shows the the Xfinitytv web site sucks, of all the ways to watch a show, their website jams the most commercials down your throat.  On top of that they disable your ability to cleanly navigate through the shows timeline.  So yes, this is normally annoying, however last night it was maddening.

Ever since I upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 my video does not work well on the Xfinity site.  Right in the middle of a show the video will freeze, (audio continues) and I get a message about the video driver encountering an error.  The only way I can get video back is to refresh the page which is where the problem snowballs.

Let’s say you are at the 35 minute mark in a show when you have a problem and the last block of 6 or 7 commercials last played at the 30 minute mark.  If you try to resume the show it will make you watch the most recent block of commercials again, even though you already suffered through them before.  As time went on the error was popping up more and more often, sending me back into this maddening advertisement downward spiral.

I tried a video driver update and still had no luck.  I then resorted to using a generic video driver with poor resolution to just get through the damn show.  I finally finished the hour long show after a nearly 2.5 hour ordeal.  It was so fcking annoying.  Thank goodness the episode was awesome and worth the effort.