Archives January 2014

Last night it dropped down into the kill zone outside.  When I woke up the outdoor thermometer was hovering in the 38-39 degree area.  Cindy was again off yesterday and was nice enough to cover the most sensitive things on the property.  I was amazed at how well she protected the banana trees, which are probably the most cold sensitive thing on the property.  If they die back after that sort of insulation I am just going to pull them out. Cindy did an equally good job of covering up the garden with frost cloth.

It looks like last night was probably the coldest of the next 4 cold days on tap but I am not going to pull the covers until the forecast is clear of predicted overnight lows of 45 degrees or less.

Yesterday was filled with half marathon/running club related work.  This will only intensify the next couple days.  Tonight I am heading right from work to packet pick up and then Saturday I will be spending a good chunk of my time there as well.

It’s times like these where I am glad that I am one of those no good, lazy government workers that gets MLK day off. I need a mental health day after half marathon weekend.

Unfortunately I have many matters that require my attention and focus for the next few days.  Until that time has passed any blog updates will be rather quick and to the point.

Last night’s board meeting meant I was delayed in getting home to do the prep for the first of three days of race packet pick up.  In addition I had to craft and send out a race instructions email to the 2300+ race participants.

The weather forecast for the next 5 days does not make me smile.  Tonight is promising to be another potential landscape killer with temperatures possibly dipping into the 30’s.  Cindy is off today and is going to try to get stuff covered herself although I think it will be very difficult with the gusty winds.  I will be heading home a bit early to handle whatever else needs to get covered.

Although it looks like tonight will be the coldest of the next several days, there are plenty of other mornings with lows that start with the number 4, including the day of the half marathon. It will translate into one of those miserable mornings where I feel chilled to the bone no matter how many layers I pile on.

Back to work….

So last night I had more packet prep to do.  I downloaded the names of everybody that registered for the race since Friday night and created labels for them.  I then had to affix the labels to the respective packet that just had a number on it previously.  There were more than 100 packets I had to label up.

On the way home I also stopped and bought 200 more 9×12 packets, just to be safe.  I have less than 100 to go until I hit packet number 2500.  Tonight Cindy and I will be working on creating the additional packets, fun.

I had not been doing hardly any Vining recently.  I either was lacking inspiration or just busy with other things.  Well last night I had a burst of Vines, something that seems to normally happen, you never do just one.  I think I made 5 or 6 of them.  As always they are viewable via the Vine app or my Twitter page.

Last night I also did some more messing around streaming Hearthstone utilizing Xsplit and Twitch.tv  I think it worked but nobody was in my channel to see. 🙁  Here is my Twitch channel.

Saturday morning Cindy and I were involved with a packet stuffing party for the half marathon at one of our generous board members home.  It was quite the production getting 2500 envelopes stuffed with pins, twist ties, hand outs, a race bib and timing chip.  We broke the process apart into sections where different people had different roles.  As in most things I tackle, I had a general mental framework of how I thought things would go but didn’t have anything written down.

I was primarily working on the processes where numbers mattered, as in applying numbered labels to the envelopes and then later making sure those numbered envelopes got a race bib and timing chip that matched.  Cindy played a very important role, the human sorter.  She was handed stacks and stacks of envelopes that were in order but in different numeric ranges.  She had to make sure they were in order twice, once when they left our packet labeling operation and a second time after we put the bibs and chips in them at the end.  She was on the move non-stop.

For some reason I thought the 3 hours we allocated to the project (9-12)was overly generous.  Somehow I thought it would take less time.  We used every bit of the 3 hours and then some.  It was just a ton of stuff to do, thank goodness we had upwards of 15 people there lending a hand at one point.  My dining room table now is completely covered in boxes of packets, ready to hand out.

The funny thing is I am actually going to have to make some more packets tonight.  The numbers for this years race are already 150 participants higher than last year with nearly a week to go.  I need to stay ahead of the curve.

We didn’t get home from the packet stuffing till almost 2PM.  I wasted little time before I was outside attending to outside chores.  When I was done with chores I set up the slackline again for more balance training.  I set it up between trees that are much closer together than last week.  The line was probably only 25 feet across.

The shorter line combined with utilizing some beginner tips I saw on a few videos helped me do better than the week before.   I had a couple slow and controlled steps that looked much better than the flail-fest I put on the week before. Cindy did very well too.  She discovered she is pretty adept at walking backwards on the line.  She even pulled off a couple 180 degree turns while we were out there.

Slacklining works muscles and joints in a way that I am not accustomed to.  Both of my hips are extremely sore.  Like anything else, continued practice should reduce the physical side effects. If you want to see a brief clip from our session, here you go.

On Saturday night Cindy and I saw Lone Survivor.  For the second consecutive visit, the normally quiet and lightly attended Cocounut Pointe theater was MOBBED, worse than last time.  Luckily the theater has the capacity to support large amounts of people but I don’t know why all of a sudden the movie population there has swelled so much.

My theory is that Cindy and I see a TON of movies in the theaters, way more than I ever did in the past.  I think I may have been just generally avoiding going to the movies during season in years past.  It is only now that I am seeing the belly of the beast the snowbirds bring with them.

The movie was compelling, tense and tragic.  It will give you a greater appreciation of what our troops go through in the name of service to our country, if you needed more more reason to appreciate them.  It gets a solid A.

Sunday morning Cindy and I resumed our weekend endurance training, doing the 20 mile round trip DD ride.  The ride there had some favorable wind resulting in a 20+ mph average pace.  The ride back was much less favorable but we still managed an overall pace for the 20 miles of over 18 mph.

While we were enjoying our DD coffee at the halfway point of the ride I created a FB event for a Super Bowl party at my place.  Cindy and I had been talking about it for a few days.  Ali and I did several SB parties in the past and although they were never hugely attended, everyone involved had a good time.  I would hope for similar fun levels  this time around.  I have a pretty big invitation list so hopefully a 73 inch tv with a nice spread of beer and food is enough to entice people to make the drive out to the house.  People that live more centrally in Naples view the Estates as living on the other side of the state practically.

Sunday afternoon my buddy Sean, his girlfriend and her two kids stopped out at the house.  They had been hiking at the nearby swamp where I sometimes take the dogs so I invited them over.  We had a great time with them and the kids in the backyard practicing slacklining, running the RC car / quadracopter, and messing around in the bar park.  It was a lot of fun.

Sunday evening we watched Hangover 3, something I even questioned using a Netflix rental on.  I had already heard it was lackluster at best.  The original Hangover had me laughing so hard, so many times it was hard to believe.  Hangover 2 was ok but used almost an identical storyline from the original.  With the 3rd film they at least changed up the story but it was for the worse.  Sure I laughed out loud a few times but overall the movie just wasn’t great.  Thankfully it appears this will be the last time we will be seeing the crew together. I’ll give it a B.

This week I will be mired mostly in half marathon related work.  We already have the largest field EVER for the race with a week to go.  There are so many things to do, so many T’s to cross and I’s to dot.  I hope to not run out of ink.

So yesterday I had my first firsthand experience with a Cryptolocker infection.  An end user clicked on an email attachment she shouldn’t have and unknowingly kicked off a silent, evil, background process that encrypted thousands of files both on her local pc AND on network drives where she had write access.  Once all of the files were encrypted the user was presented with a pop up window informing her all of her files were now locked and if she wanted them unlocked she had 72 hours to pay a ransom.

The ransom is paid via either a wire transfer or bitcoins, both of which allow the cyberthugs to remain untraceable.

I had read stories regarding Cryptolocker and places that had no choice but to pay the ransom since they had no back ups available.  Infections are growing by the day.

Luckily I have implemented a couple layers of back ups on the file server.  First we have the nightly back up to a tape library, however using that would mean potentially an entire day of work could be lost on any of the affected files.  Instead I used the shadow copy feature I have enabled on these network shares.  I had one that ran at noon yesterday, cutting down on the amount of lost work, especially since most of the updating of these files occurs at the start of a business day.

The person that triggered the infection did lose all of the documents stored on the local PC as those were not backed up.  Luckily, anything important was stored on the network as it should be.

Now don’t think that having shadow copies (prior versions) turned on will necessarily save you from Cryptolocker.  One of the first things it does is delete all prior versions of files on the PC it is launched on.  Luckily it can not do this to network drives.  Having an external back up drive might not save you either, as depending on how the files are stored there, they could be encrypted as well.

So all in all I spent 4 or 5 hours repairing the damage and making some changes to reduce or vulnerability to end user ignorance in the future.  This sort of attack makes options like remote cloud back up very appealing.

Last night I had a bizarre dream.  I was in my office at home and all of a sudden a red Ferrari came spinning up onto the grass in front of the window.  He did a big donut and then parked in his driveway.  He was my new neighbor.  Of course this pissed me off but he had done it before so I just let it go and continued working.

Well all of a sudden I start hearing what sounds like heavy artillery fire.  The walls and windows of my house are shaking with every shot.  The neighbor who was short, thin and bald, a real seedy looking type, was cackling like mad as he was firing towards the palm trees in my yard.  His three equally seedy friends were with him, cheering on his artillery assault on my yard.

Well I went ape shit and tore out the door.  They had turned around and were firing in the other direction by the time I got outside.  In between shots I yell at him to get his attention.  As I am about 20 yards away he spins around, drops to the ground in sniper position and fires a couple warning shots that fly by my side.  Instinctively I drop to the ground, trying to become a smaller target.

As I am laying there I yell “What the fck are you doing!?”  He stops firing and stands up, I stand up as well.  Despite just being fired at with heavy artillery my anger again boiled to the top.  I say “Two things”, as I hold up two fingers as a visual exclamation point.  “Don’t do donuts in my yard…”  Before I could continue the guy walks up to me menacingly with his 3 cronies following closely.

He says” You know why I did the donuts, because of the bucket you threw in my yard!”  I had absolutely no idea what he was referring to. “What the fck are you talking about? What bucket?” I responded, holding my ground.  Just as I was about to cover my second point, which was firing heavy artillery at my yard was unacceptable, I woke up.

This weekend will feature half marathon packet stuffing, a trip to the movies and some sort of endurance training.  The slack line will also be strung up for further adventures in balance and patience training.

Last night was on the quiet side.  Cindy was out to dinner with her daughter and Alfred so I had a nice night at home with the girls.  One of the things I did was my first indoor flight with the Phantom, I wanted to see how it’s stability would translate indoors.  The answer was, very well. I had no issue keeping the copter under control with one hand while shooting video with the other.  It would drift around a bit due to poor GPS signal but it was very easy to keep it safe from any potential impact objects, despite it’s size.

The pets were not at all happy with my indoor flight session. The Phantom is loud and pushes large amounts of air around.  Tuki hid behind the stand on the top of his cage, Sadie stayed put in the dining room and Nicki retired to the quieter bedroom.  It was fun hovering the Phantom indoors but obviously it is much better suited for outdoor flight where it has room to spread it’s wings (propellers) .

I ordered a prop balancer for the copter.  Evidently pretty much every prop you buy will be slightly unbalanced.  This causes slight vibration which can show up in aerial video.  In order to balance a prop you mount it on the balancer, turn it so it is parallel to the table and release it.  If it falls to one side or the other that is the heavy side.  You take sandpaper and sand the heavy side slightly and repeat until the prop stays perfectly balanced.  It sounds potentially tedious but everything I have read says it is one of things you really should do.

Ali flies home this afternoon.  I will be returning the dogs to her place after work.  It seems like the girls have been with me for a long time, so long that it almost felt like I was transported back to the days where the dogs lived at the house full time.

I have been fortunate to be able to accommodate them being at the house during weekdays between the kindness of my neighbor who let them out for me several days, and Cindy, who reappropriated vacation time so she could make sure the girls were taken care of.

Both of the dogs seem to have positive results from their longest uninterrupted house stay since the split.  Sadie, who has been getting increasingly chunkified has definitely lost some weight with her nearly unlimited access to the backyard, allowing her to run off some chub. Nicki’s energy level and mobility are noticeably better as well.  Watching her be able to do more than just plod along slowly has been great.  Watching her run a little bit around the shed the other day was one of highlights of the new year so far. Waking up tomorrow without them will feel weird for sure.

I am mired in a very bad losing streak in Hearthstone, which continued last night.  Strategies that were consistently working for me no longer do.  Looks like it’s time to reevaluate.

Last night I stopped at Staples to look at 9×12 envelopes.  We are planning to use these envelopes as packets to hold all of the race information for runners at this years half marathon.  Well I really didnt look into what these envelopes cost ahead of time but when I saw 16 bucks for a pack of 100 I was surprised.  If I multiply that out times 25 to accommodate the roughly 2500 runners we are expecting it added up to a big chunk of change, nearly 500 bucks just for dumb envelopes.

When dealing with a race of this size, even seemingly minor items can add up to significant expenses.  I have Cindy looking at other sources for the envelopes.  I’m hoping to be able to pick them up for less than $10 per 100.

The race size also gets big and ugly when it comes time to produce handouts for the event.  Have you ever tried printing 2500 copies of something? It takes forever, consumes over a carton of paper, a ton of toner and fills whatever area it is being printed in with enough toner dust to give you black lung.

All of this prep I am doing is for a “party” Saturday morning where a number of kind souls will be helping us create these 2500 race packets, stuffing papers, race bibs, timing chips and other accessories into each packet which then will be affixed with a label, which I also created.  This race is the most labor intensive of the year.  I have a long and detailed mental checklist of items I need to make sure I get handled.

So it looks like Ali will finally be getting back home tomorrow afternoon.  It will be weird not having the two black furry faces greeting me when I wake up or get home Friday.

I left work a few minutes early to give me some extra time to cover up sensitive stuff in the landscape.  The forecast lows of around freezing would surely wreak havoc.  Thankfully Cindy was off from work so she could help lay stuff out.  We covered almost everything in the garden which isn’t too hard.  What is hard is trying to protect the banana trees which are ridiculously sensitive to cold.

I have had these trees for at least 6-7 years and never got any fruit from them.  The reason is every time the temps even touch the 30’s the trees get destroyed, wilt back to the ground and then start to grow again.  Well last year winter they survived unscathed so I wanted to do what I could to protect them from the cold last night.

Cindy and I spent close to a half hour trying to wrap the 4 or 5 trees in a cocoon of frost cloth.  After running several strips of the cloth across the top of the trees we finished it off with another piece wrapped around the sides.  The cloth was held in place with a combination of twine and weight plates.  I told Cindy that if the trees get damaged after all of this work I am never going to bother covering them again.

Well when I woke up this morning and saw they thermometer reading 46 degrees I was relieved.  Evidently the forecasters were off 10 degrees or so in their forecast.  It was very windy, making the wind chill feel closer to freezing.  When I looked in the back yard I saw the wind had destroyed all of the work Cindy and I did on the banana trees, the cloth was blown apart.  Good thing it turned out we didn’t need it.

Of course complaining about 46 degrees sounds pretty ridiculous compared to what they are dealing with up north.  My weather magnet showed a temp of 1 degree in Reading this morning.  I heard that schools up there were closed due to the extreme cold, something I don’t recall every happening before.

Ali was supposed to be finally flying home today but her flight was also cancelled due to the brutally cold temps so I don’t know when she will actually be coming back.

This has been the longest Ali has been away from the dogs since we split, over 2 weeks.  The dogs seem to have reacclimated themselves to  being out at the house again.  Nicki in particular seemed to really improve with her extended time at the house.  Not having to deal with 2 flights of stairs definitely has been a good thing.  Last night while we were covering plants she actual ran a bit around the shed, something I haven’t seen her do in damn close to a year I bet.

She also seems more interested in play, indoor and out.  It’s been great seeing her energy level pick up.  When I see her playing I just stand there and smile.

So Saturday it was cold, dreary and rainy pretty much all day.  I decided I was going to use the bad weather as a reason to get a lot of stuff done indoors.  I was a chore whirlwind, knocking out all cleaning, watering, laundry, dusting, vacuuming and any other indoor task that came to mind.  I finished up my marathon chore session late afternoon.  The Eagles didn’t play until 8 so I decided to run out to Target to get a couple things.

Once I was in Target I happened to walk by the remaining Xmas inventory that was marked down a ridiculous 90% to blow stuff out.  I couldn’t help myself but to take a look.  I wound up getting 4 rolls of Xmas wrapping paper for a crazy 25 cents per roll, score.

Well when I walked in the store I didn’t grab a cart since the items I was targeting were small.  Well the addition of 4 rolls of wrapping paper all of a sudden made going cart-less very difficult.  It was made more annoying by my inability to find calendars in the store.  Despite directions from different Target employees, telling me the calendars were in a certain area, I was unable to find them.  Looking for calendars while holding 4 rolls of wrapping paper, fish food, and a card really taxed my patience.  I was shifting my grip strategy every couple minutes.  I eventually gave up my calendar search and figured I could look in World Market a couple doors down.

So I walk in WM and see they do indeed have 2014 calendars AND they are 60% off! Sweet.  The selection wasn’t great but I snagged a Peanuts calendar for the kitchen and a french countryside photo calendar for the office.  So there were two lines open for checkout.  Both of them only had one customer in them but both of the cashiers seemed to be having some sort of complication while checking them out.  I picked the line with the young, mildly attractive girl.  Well, I chose poorly. I literally spent 15 minutes waiting.

The first problem was some stupid candy bar where she couldn’t read the bar code.  She scanned the thing 10 times without success.  She even had the customer try scanning it.  I was wondering why she couldn’t just manually punch in the numbers in the UPC code.  When she called a manager up front to help her, they did just that, punched in the numbers.

Ok great, I thought I was in the clear.  Well then the customer plops down some $10 off coupon.  Well again the coupon had the clerk baffled, she said it scanned ok but it was not applying the discount.  This delay went on forever.  This time the same manager chick came up and this time was unable to fix the issue.  Now if I was the customer I would have said 10 minutes ago, f the coupon, f the candy bar.  Evidently the sugar fix and $10 was really important to them.

Of course I was annoyed and I could have easily jumped into the other cashier line which had started moving.  For some reason I stayed put, thinking to myself it was a good test of patience.  In fact it almost became comical, just how insistent the customer was and how inept the clerk was.  Well the end result of all of this fcking around was the guy did not get his 10 bucks off, the coupon in fine print had an expiration date of 1/1/14.  Lol. When I finally got to check out I assured the girl I didn’t need any candy bars and had no expired coupons to present.

So before the Eagles game I got to take in about the last half of the Chiefs/Colts game.  I was amazed how badly the Chief were destroying the Colts, holding as much as a 38-10 lead in the early 3rd quarter.  I was them amazed as the Chiefs imploded allowing that lead to evaporate, giving the Colts the second largest comeback victory in the history of the NFL.

I had odd feelings as I watched Fat Andy walk off the field dejectedly.  I had seen this scenario play out so many times when he was wearing Midnight Green, big leads blown, shitty time management, team crumbling when the game is on the line, in a weird way I was glad to see it happen to another team instead of my beloved Eagles.  A small part of me felt badly but that part sat quietly in a corner.

So the Eagles game had a lot of hype focusing on the Saints poor performance on the road and their failure to ever win a road playoff game.  There was also talk of playing in the open air of Philly in January but that wasn’t a huge factor.  Temps in the mid-20’s with almost no wind didn’t really put a huge cramp in the Saints game plan.

The game was closely contested where a few key plays could have made a large difference.  I have to question Chip Kelly’s apparent like of going on it on 4th and short when the offense has proven repeatedly they aren’t good at it.  McCoy may be the leagues best rusher this year but must have short yardage plays are not his thing.  Conversely, the Saints DESTROYED the Eagles in short yardage.  Drew Brees did a number of QB sneaks where the entire offensive line steamrolled the Eagles D, getting 3-4 yards when they needed one.

Despite their problems the Eagles actually grabbed the lead with a few minutes to go with a late touchdown.  The first thought that went through my head was there is too much time left.  The special teams then fell on their face, allowing a big return punctuated with a horse collar tackle penalty that gave the Saints a ridiculous starting position of the Eagles 48 yard line, 20 yards from field goal range. To win the game, the Eagles defense had to come up huge with no room to spare.  Well they didn’t, allowing the Saints to move the sticks easily before they kicked a playoff ending field goal as time expired. Damn.

I was disappointed but not crushed by the loss.  It was way better than the way Andy’s Chiefs went down, snatching defeat from the jaws of 99% assured victory.  The Eagles turn around from the halfway point this year had been dramatic, so much so that perhaps I had drank just a little too much Kool Aid, thinking the team actually had a shot to go deeper in the playoffs.

The good news is the team seems to be on the right track now, but make no mistake they still have holes to fill, especially on defense and special teams.  All things considered, year one of the Chip Kelly era is definitely a success.

I did so much on Saturday around the house that Sunday it felt like I tons of time to spare.  We didn’t do our psuedo-normal Sunday bike ride because of a late morning brunch that was scheduled for Cindy’s daughters birthday. (which was later cancelled)  I started off my Sunday slow, playing a bunch of Hearthstone.  I used to start my weekend mornings off with WoW play all the time however if I do it now I almost feel guilty.

The slow start to the day seemed to carry through, it felt like I got little done.

There were things that happened of course.  I installed the slackline that I bought for Cindy for Xmas.  I strung it between two palm trees roughly 50 feet apart.  Obviously a slackline needs to be very tight to support a human beings weight.  I had no idea how to judge if I was exceeding the 85 pounds of torque that is established as the red line in the instructions.

Both Cindy and my initial attempts on the line were very, very short.  The instability of the line felt impossible to overcome.  Cindy was practicing much, much more than I was and did much better.

If you have 12 minutes to spare you can see how day one of slackline training went.

I also got my Phantom up in the air for some more aerial video.  I bought some moon gel, a substance that is used primarily by musicians for vibration dampening.  Well I read it also works well for absorbing vibration associated with aerial video.  My clumsy camera mount looked funny but definitely worked better than my first attempt.  Even without using YouTube stabilization, the video was noticeably less shaky.  Eventually I need to snag myself a used/cheap GoPro to use for aerial footage.  You can see the videos I shot here and here.  On the second video I pointed the camera more forward instead of straight down.

I did manage to rip the dash of the SSR off again to crank down the stereo volume gain.  I think I have found a decent balance point now.

I then got wrapped up in a very frustrating battle with Cindy’s old iPhone and her laptop.  I still had not successfully gotten her music collection pulled off the iPhone.  Itunes would not see the phone and as a result I could not see her music.  Before I knew it it was close to 7PM and Sunday had almost expired.  It felt like I wasted the day, even though I was busy doing various things as depicted here.  I told Cindy my mood almost felt full moonish, even though we are two weeks away from the next cycle.

Tonight I get to do the cold weather scramble.  A huge blast of icy air is coming our way, necessitating the aggravating and often fruitless task of trying to protect the garden and fragile landscape plants.  Thank goodness Cindy is off so she can help me.

The transplanted fish seem to be doing ok in their new surroundings although the pond water is already looking murkier than I recall it being before they moved in.  I went down to get the remaining fish from the foreclosed houses pond but came up empty.  On Saturday a crew was in there cleaning the landscape up, mowing the grass, weed whacking and trimming up plants.

Well one of the things they trimmed was bush that hung over the pond.  They trimmed it hard, leaving the pond wide open.  The water, sitting on top of the shit bottom was actually still and clear and devoid of any fish.  My guess is once it was opened up a hungry bird came in and helped themselves.  I felt like I failed the left over fish a bit, no fish left behind….

It looks like today is a Friday Rant day.

So after work I needed to pick up a large package of chicken to use in the meals for the dogs.  I figured I may as well do so at Costco.  Well as soon as I entered the parking lot I knew I was going to be in for an annoying Costco experience, something which is the case more often or not.

I joined Costco last year, looking to a support a warehouse chain with a better business model than Sam’s Club.  Costco pays their employees better, treats them better and are generally viewed as the anti-Wal-mart, the godfathers of Sam’s Club.

I want to enjoy shopping at Costco.  I want to support the good things they stand for.  But regardless of my intent, time and again my shopping experience at our local store is anything but enjoyable.  The place is always packed and yesterday was even worse than normal.

There is nowhere you can look  that does not include human beings scurrying about.  Once you enter the store you merge into a current of shopping carts.  If you pause without making sure you exit the current you risk being rear ended.  If you forgot something and need to turn around against the river of humanity you are taking your life into your own hands.

Maybe they are just too successful, all I know is I can not STAND shopping at a place where I am bumping elbows with people repeatedly.  I literally feel like an ant in a colony, it sucks.

To make matters worse, for some reason they had absolutely NO CHICKEN.  I dipped myself into this humanity soup unnecessarily, great.  I grabbed a few other items but not the main reason I went there.

As I made my way to Sam’s to score the chicken, I tried to ascertain why Costco was SO horrible on a Thursday evening. I came up with a common cause of misery during this time of year, snowbirds.  A ton of them have probably just flocked back into town now that the holidays are over, necessitating stocking up their seasonal cupboards at Costco.

Ironically Sam’s was a calm and pleasant scene, 180 degrees from the Costco chaos I had just left.  The wide aisles left my personal space intact, I didn’t feel my blood pressure rising as I made my way to the poultry section where they had boneless breasts on sale for a very cheap $1.70 a pound.  I walked up to the self checkout line (Costco doesn’t have them) and exited the store without a fuss.

I wish I could get the shopping environment of Sam’s within the walls of Costco.

When I got home I had something else waiting to annoy me.  It was a bill from the state of Florida for their TOLL-BY-PLATE system.  It was from when Cindy borrowed the party van to go to Key West and I knew the bill was coming.  However I still found myself being very annoyed by the premise behind the system.

So basically in certain areas of the state they decided that paying toll takers was an unnecessary expense so they removed them.  Their removal meant you are no longer able to simply pay for a toll with actual cash.  You have to have one of the prepaid Sunpass transponders.  If you don’t have one, they have a system in place that takes a picture of your license plate and then uses the plate registration info to mail you a paper bill.  This aggravates the shit out of me on several levels.

I can understand wanting to save costs but I think having at least one booth available to take cash for tolls is not a lot to ask.  Maybe I would like to just throw a buck for the toll instead of having to get a bill in the mail that I have to write a check for 3 weeks later. To add injury to insult, the state charges you an additional $2.50 “administrative fee” for the privilege of not being able to simply pay for a toll on the spot.

I am sure the thinking behind this process was hoping the admin fee plus the inconvenience of having to deal with a physical bill will push more people into buying a pre-paid Sunpass, where the state gets to hold our money in advance before it is actually spent.

Perhaps I am just being old fashioned but when push comes to shove I still think physical currency should be accepted in these situations.

This weekend I have things to do of course.  I think I will be removing my interior Xmas decorations but once again will leave my outside lights up for an extended period of time.  I just like having them out there.  I’d like to once again rip apart the SSR dash to turn down the gain on the stereo to silence the maddening electronic whine.

I’d also like to to string the slack line I bought for Cindy for Xmas.  It will be interesting to see how well we can balance on a 2-3 inch wide strip of fabric.  I also am looking to do another quadracopter aerial video session.  I bought some stuff called Moon Gel that is supposed to do a good job of reducing the amount of camera shake.

Saturday night will be consumed cheering on the Eagles to hopefully a first round playoff win.