Archives August 2013

Yesterday was great as far as Mondays go.  Training/working from home allows so much flexibility and freedom, especially when your training class doesn’t start until 10 am.

The class itself is interesting enough and utilizes a remote lab environment that is the best I have seen by far.  The instructor is on point and doesn’t ramble unnecessarily.  And despite starting at 10AM I still got done about a half hour before the posted 5PM finish time.  During class I am able to multi-task easily keeping one eye/ear on the instructor while the other is working on other stuff as well.

At lunch break I was able to take 10 steps into the hobby room and get a decent workout in and when class was over my commute home was exactly ZERO seconds long.  Since I got home from work early it allowed me to get outside and finish up mowing the areas that were underwater a few days earlier and shoot an updated form requirements video for the BB forum challenges.

Hell I still had time to play close to two hours of Heart of the Swarm and catch this weeks Dexter episode.  Yes, it was a pretty awesome Monday.

Tuesday isn’t looking too bad either, waking up without an alarm clock is a simple pleasure that I get to enjoy very infrequently. 🙂

So once again Saturday I managed to consume almost my entire day doing work around the house.  Part of the work got particularly messy when I decided to use the pressure washer, which I had already pulled out to blast crud off the mower deck, to clean the castle stone border around the pool.  In the 9-10 months that the stones have been in place they had become encrusted in black mildew just as many things do in the south Florida climate.

Hitting the stones with the high pressure washer did a great job of blasting the scuzz off the stones.  Unfortunately it also did a great job of bouncing alot of it, along with dirt/sand all over me.  The front of my body was coated with shit from head to toe, the price of pressure washing…

I did take a break to do something fun for a little bit.  A little while ago my sister and her husband went to a race track where you could take various high performance vehicles out for a spin.  I saw my sis driving a high end Audi and Damon driving a Lamborghini and a Ferrari.  Video was provided by something similar to a GoPro, mounted behind the driver to give a FPV (first person view)  It was cool.

So anyway, it gave me the idea to do my own first person view video with the SSR.  I don’t have a GoPro or a GoPro style mount so I used the next best thing, a paper towel roll and duct tape.  I jammed my Flip camera into one end, placed the paper towels on the top of the SSR “waterfall” that separates the driver and passenger seats and crudely secured it to the windscreen with a big chunk of duct tape.  It looked absolutely ridiculous.

I had no idea how the rig would work once I got on the road.  My biggest concern was it didn’t fly out of the truck.  I turned on the camera and hit the road.

As you can tell from the 4:30 of video, the rig didn’t work all that well once I was up to speed, the video starts to shake violently from getting buffeted by the wind.  However there was one part it did work pretty well for. Behold my FPB (first person burnout)

On Sunday morning it was brick time but in a different manner than normal.  Cindy agreed to do the DD ride with me which is an out and back to the nearest Dunkin Donuts which is almost exactly 10 miles from my house, making for a challenging 20 mile overall ride.  Despite leaving before 8AM, the heat and humidity arrived in force very early on.

I lead on the way to DD, we covered the first 10 miles in something like 31:30, a good pace considering I haven’t done this ride in ages.  After downing a small coffee we headed back east, typically the more difficult of the two directions since the wind is normally working more against you.  Cindy got in front and maintained a crazy pace of 20+ mph, at times even scraping 23,  I was down on the aero bars of my Dawes giving everything I had to stay within 6 or 7 feet of her to catch some of the wind blocking.  Otherwise there would be no way I could have maintained that speed.

We actually wound up doing a negative split on the ride and I am almost positive it is the fastest that 20 miles has ever been gobbled up, even faster than when I have done the ride with Randall. Cindy is a really strong cyclist obviously, significantly better than I am.

So after arriving home I was exhausted. Staying on the aero bars for 10 miles pedaling my ass off had sucked all of the energy out of my legs.  Still, I wanted to get some swimming in.  So we changed and headed to the water park.  I got 1500 yards in the pool.  I wasn’t as fast as the week before when all I did was swim and averaged 10 minutes per 500.  I still pulled a good time for me, averaging about 10:30 per segment.

After the laps we got some additional ancillary exercise by climbing the water slide tower 5 times to do each slide one time.  By the time it was all over I was spent.  The bust ass bike in the heat followed by the swimming was like pulling the drain plug on my energy reserves.  I had ideas of changing the oil on the Tacoma Sunday afternoon but I said f it, I was just too tired to head back out into the afternoon frying pan heat to do it.  I took a two hour nap instead.

Last night I saw Ted, the movie about the talking, crude teddy bear.  I heard it was funny, really funny.  It was.  I laughed out loud a ton, it was lots of fun as long as you don’t get offended by dirty humor.  If you haven’t seen it and are looking for a way to fill a couple hours with laughs rent it. I give it a shiny A.

This is one of those weird weeks for me, I am doing remote classroom training from home.  The best part of it is the class doesn’t start till 10AM, meaning I get to sleep in and get stuff done around here (like the write the blog) before having to “work”.  I am hoping this training will be more interesting than the last I attended.  It should be since it is a subject I am more interested in, Windows Server 2012 installation and configuration.

So as planned I headed  to mom’s condo after work to set up her new PC to replace her long in the tooth Toshiba laptop.  Setting up the computer was without incident.  I showed mom the differences with the new system but most of them are are basic or just cosmetic. For the very basic things that mom uses a computer for, web browsing and email, there isn’t much direction required.  The bigger screen and much faster system should both contribute to making mom’s computer experience more enjoyable from here on out.

As normal mom had a short list of things for me to look at or do while I was there.  They took me all of 5 minutes to complete.  After enjoying a nice dinner consisting of a salad, ziti and garlic bread we got back on mom’s computer for a bit to look at a couple things.

We tracked down a new negative ion bracelet.  We bought one that seemed to be the Rolls Royce of such things, sporting two negative ion loops instead of one as well as a pair of rare earth magnets.  I am very skeptical of any tangible benefits these items provide but mom is convinced she has had benefits from the bracelet(s) she has been wearing for a couple years so I figured we might as well go top of the line.

We then looked at cell phone upgrades available to mom since her phone, which is on my cell plan is eligible for an upgrade.  We didn’t really see a compelling reason to upgrade her.  The new phones seem like her old phone and getting mom a smart phone just would not make sense since she wouldn’t use 95% of it’s capability.

Mom thanked me for the new pc and I headed home.  On the way I stopped for a very unconventional Thursday evening coffee from Dunkin Donuts.  It provided fuel for me to get some laundry done, Tuki’s cage cleaned and the indoor plants watered, despite not getting home until after 8pm.

For some reason this morning as I was getting ready I was reflecting on the time period of 20 years.  Perhaps it is because of my visit with my mom who is 20 years older than me.  I thought about that amount of time in both the forward and backward direction.

When I realized that 20 years ago I was already married the first time, living in Wernersville in the townhouse and already working in the computer business at Entre, it shook me up a little bit.  That does not seem all that long ago in my minds eye yet it occurred two full decades ago.  What shook me up is in that same period of time, in the opposite direction, I would find myself my moms age.

As you get older, the perception of time’s passage accelerates at a constant rate, meaning the next 20 years would fly by even faster.  That is a damn scary thought for someone like me.  Although I obviously put mountains more effort into my personal health than my mom ever has, I still can’t be immune to the toll the flipping calendar has on a human being, no matter how hard I try.

It was not a good way to put a bright and cheery spin on my Friday.

This weekend will comprise mostly of labor, but I’m ok with that.  It keeps my mind busy so it can’t dwell on old age.

So yesterday I finally got my first virtual WoW avatar to level 90, the maximum level in the latest expansion to the game, Mists of Panderia.  I actually leveled this character all the way from level 1-90 since he is a monk, a new class introduced with this version of the game.

When I compare this to my past WoW track record, taking 8 months to reach max level seems like pure fantasy, ridiculously slow.  There was a time I could reach max level in 2 weeks or less.

Of course this is simply a reflection of how little I play the game anymore.  In the past year I would have brief spurts where I was playing somewhat regularly but for the most part my account sits dormant most of the time.

This dramatic decrease in the time I spend scurrying about a virtual existence is a good thing in the big picture.  It means I am busy interacting with tangible items in my life instead of using the game to hide away from things I don’t want to deal with.

Still, there is a part of me that laments the lack of progress for my small army of virtual heroes.  I have 10 or 11 characters all sitting at the old level cap of 85 that have not seen the light of day in 2013. I imagine them all patiently waiting for me to take the time and effort to put them back at the pinnacle of in game seniority.  Unfortunately I think they may be waiting a long, long time.

I tried to keep my Wednesday evening busy and diverse. I did some laundry, finished a mission in Heart of the Swarm, watched this weeks Dexter and Ray Donovan, worked on Mom’s new computer as well as the refurb Ipad 2 I got for the running club.

Originally I was expecting to have to resort to Craigslist to get a used Ipad for the club however when I saw I could get a refurb Ipad 2 direct from Apple for $318 it was a no-brainer.  The laptop will initially be used at the running store to allow people that are handing in paper apps to pay with a credit card via Square or even better, convert them to signing up online on our club web site.  We may be able to use the tablet to take credit cards on race day as well, something we currently do not do.

I installed the SSD drive in mom’s new computer, the third SSD drive I have now installed.  I have to say, I wouldn’t buy anything except the Samsung SSD drives at this point just because their data migration software is so damn easy.

I attached the SSD drive to the system via USB using an external USB to SATA rig I have. Then I fire up Windows, load the data migration app, hit one button and wait.  Once it completes I pull out the conventional mechanical drive, velcro in the silent, tiny SSD drive and start the system.  The only remaining tweak is installing the Samsung Magician software which allows you to do one click OS optimization, performance testing and firmware updates. Done.

This was the oldest PC I have installed a SSD drive into.  As a result the SATA controller is half the speed of newer controllers and does not support AHCI mode which maximizes SSD performance.  Even with the older controller the SSD drive performance was dramatically faster than the old 80 gig platter drive it replaced.  The window disk performance score jumped from 5.2 to 7.1 (max is 7.9)  The boot time of the system was cut by at least 80% and everything that relies on disk I/O was much, much better.

Tonight after work I am going to my mom’s place to set up the computer.  I already utilized Logmein and Dropbox to do most of the migration ahead of time.  I think she will be quite pleased with the new computer although I am sure at first she will have anxiety about the new aspects of it like Windows 7 and full Outlook email. (instead of Outlook Express)

I’ll be scoring a mom cooked meal for my efforts, a fair trade.

Good job Eagles wide receiver, Riley Cooper, for exposing yourself as a racist douchebag. At some concert after he felt slighted about something he was caught on video saying he would fight ever n-word that was there.   I would be surprised if he is wearing Eagles green when the season starts.