Archives 2016

So when I got separated Ali took the sleeper sofa and oversized leather chair we had in the great room.  I wound up replacing it with a used sofa and love seat I bought from Craigslist for a whopping $200.  The set was well used and had some warts but I have been fond of it regardless as it was pretty much the first thing I bought once I embarked into post marriage life.  I have always had intentions to eventually replace the Craigslist sofas but I just haven’t pulled the trigger, until yesterday.

Cindy had mentioned how she saw some good sales on Rooms to Go sofa pairs over the weekend.  Yesterday she stopped in at the local store and checked one of them out, sending me the picture on the left.  Well seeing her happy face while reclining on the sofa was enough to trigger an impulse buy.  I told her to buy it, saying it would be nice to have the new set for our Super Bowl party we are hosting this weekend.

By the time I got home one of the two old sofas was already out of the house, Cindy’s daughter was happy to take possession of the old stuff.  She will come get the bigger sofa hopefully today.  It seemed weird to have the sudden change in seating arrangements, something that was not even in the ballpark of my intentions 24 hours earlier. The new stuff is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.  It will be nice to have some decent furniture that will be a better fit for the massive flooring upgrades we completed last year.

Timing-wise the purchase is not ideal.  The past several months I have spent a bunch of dough.  Cindy’s daughter’s boyfriends car is getting the door fixed that I backed into as we speak and I have another potential 4 digit expenditure that is on the horizon as well.  Luckily my income will allow me to stabilize things if I can get through a couple months of normal spending.  Lately it just seems like the normal up and downstream flow of dollars has been consistently in the downward direction.

When I got home last night I was surprised to see Cindy with a head full of curls.  I know she was talking about getting a perm but she didn’t tell me she was doing it yesterday.  It looked cute on her and matches her bouncy personality.

Every night we “put the chickens to bed”.  What that means is once it is dark one of us walks out and locks the door to the chicken run.  We then go into the coop and make sure all of the hens are up on the perch.  Quite often Cutie Pie, one of the black hens, will still be on the ground, waiting for us.  She seems to prefer when we pick her up and place her on the perch for some reason.  It’s cute.

Last night I also had to place Stephie, the beautiful arucana on the perch.  Stephie seems to be the general outcast of the flock.  A lot of the other birds pick on her and quite often she is off in the yard by herself somewhere.  Of course Cindy and I feel bad for her and we try to give her special dispensation.  Stephie has learned to follow us when we call her.  Quite often if we give the other hens a treat Stephie will hang back.  Often in those situations we were give her her own individual treat out of the view of the other chickens.  It’s funny how she looks for the special attention now.

Last night was the Iowa caucus.  There was big news on both sides of the ticket.  First Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump, most likely on the backs of the evangelical vote.  A few years ago Rick Santorum won Iowa so if I was Ted I wouldn’t get too excited by the win.

On the democratic side Bernie and Hilary basically tied with something like a couple tenths of a point separating them.  Considering that when the race started, Hilary was looked at as being basically unopposed in her quest for the nomination, for Bernie to tie her in Iowa was a huge turn in momentum.  Make no mistake about it, Bernie has an uphill battle in front of him.  Without massive corporate dollars funding his campaign and the ridiculous practice of “super delegates” that are very heavily financially influenced,  he is going to have overwhelming grass roots support to make it happen.

To be honest I am more excited about the prospect of Bernie being elected than I was about Obama in 2008.  In 08 I think the idea that the country had progressed far enough to actually elect a black president was very exciting.  Although I think Obama has done a decent job in office, I still saw too much of old guard politics in play with the most benefit to those that need it the least.  Obamacare is a perfect example.  By the time lobbyists got done with it, the bill that started out as something aimed at helping the uninsured get coverage became more of a way for insurance companies to get even richer through rewrites of the plan that benefited them much more than the everyday Joe.

Bernie is a no nonsense guy and is really the only candidate that acknowledges and is willing to fight over what is depicted in the graphic to the left.  Feel the Bern.

Saturday morning after a very poor night of sleep Cindy and I drug ourselves out of bed at 4:30 for the last time for a running club event.  We got on site a little after 5:30 and started work on the start line mats immediately. Despite having cones and lights out we still had idiots that zoomed by us without even touching the brake pedal, unreal.  By the time we got back to the main registration area it was a little after 6.  One of the nice things about this race is it starts at 8AM, a half hour later than most of the club race start times.

So we got busy setting up the registration area and running power for various things that required it.  I had Chris helping me with paper registration entry.  Ever since we got the MyLaps equipment I can no longer do race day data entry due to the extra time requirements equipment set up now takes.

Laurie, who is slated to take over race timing responsibilities and myself hopped in the golf cart to get to the start line about 15 minutes ahead of the start time.  The start of this race is always problematic because of the dog involvement.  The congestion at the start leads to many tripping hazards as excited dogs inadvertently cut off people around them.  This year they tried to address it by lining up runners by expected race pace.  It didn’t seem to help much.

Because of the distance between the registration area and the start line there is always a huge number of people that don’t get to the start line on time.  As a result I am stuck at the start line waiting for as many as stragglers as possible to cross the timing mats so they get an accurate time.  The end result of all of this was me not getting back to the finish line until we were 8 minutes into the race, meaning I only had 8-10 minutes to make sure the finish line was up and running.

So runners started streaming across the finish and times were getting recorded.  I sat back and exhaled, the hard work was done and all that was left was to do a few result print outs and I was done, or so I thought.  At the finish line I normally have two timing boxes, one main box and a second one for back up, just in case.  The back up box is normally never needed because the MyLaps hardware is generally very reliable.  Well I noticed that I was accumulating more chip reads on the back up box than the main box which was odd.  At first I wrote this off as some runners that had already finished the race standing too close to the back up timing mats, causing them to get read again.  I asked those people to step back a few feet.

After printing out a set of finish results we started having some people coming up and telling us their times were wrong, off by a little more than 40 seconds.  We used the security dvr to watch footage as the first finisher crossed.  His time matched what we posted, as did the second finisher.  However when the third finisher crossed the video showed a time roughly 46 seconds faster than what was posted in the results.  WTF???

Over the years I have had situations where all runner times were off due to various issues.  This was the first time I ever just saw a few random people with a consistent time offset.  Through a hive mind collaboration between myself, Chris, and Laurie who were at the table with me we pieced together what happened.  I took a look at the raw data for one of the missed runners on each timing box.  It showed he had not been read on the main timing box but was read on the back up box.  Ok so it appears that any of the problem times were associated with runners that did not get read on the main box.

Laurie said it seemed like the time on the second box was off.  When I took a look at the box I saw we forgot to confirm the GPS time synch on it, meaning it’s internal clock was off by roughly 40 some seconds.  Now that I knew the issue I had to come up with a way to fix it.  The solution I came up with was to delete all of the race chip times and reimport the times, using only the back up box as a source.  In the timing software I was able to apply a 43 second time adjustment to all imported times which corrected all of the errors.  Whew, crisis averted, again.

This was a particularly challenging issue because it was two headed.  The problem with the main box, which after the race was determined to be a bad cable, was bad enough.  Having the time synch on the back up box wrong added another degree of complexity.  Nearly every race has some sort of hurdle that needs to be cleared, this just happened to be a pretty high one.  Having this occur on my last race timing for the club put a nice exclamation point on things.

It’s these sort of issues that are going to be particularly difficult for a novice race timer to address.  Not only do you have to be able to identify the source of the problem, you need to have the background knowledge to be able to logically arrive at a workaround for the issue, even if you have never seen it before, such as what happened Saturday.  I think there is a very bumpy road ahead for whomever assumes the timer responsibility.

The times problem put me into more of a focused haze than normal, meaning I really had no time to enjoy what makes the race so special, the dog participation.  I hardly saw or talked to anyone outside the people involved with the registration and timing parts of the race.  I heard later that everyone had a great time. It seems bizarre that I really couldn’t tell you much about the race outside of what was directly in front of me.

This race was special not only because it was the 10th year for the event but also because it was the first time the race has been held since Nicki died.  Evidently Ali said some touching words about Nicki on the PA which I unfortunately did not hear as I was in the midst of trouble shooting mode.  On the back of the event t-shirt there is a a line that dedicates the race to Nicki and will forever be in her memory.  It was both very touching and sad.

Our post race route was quite different than normal.  Instead of heading home we headed to a storage area for Laurie’s business where we dropped off all of the remaining club owned equipment.  It felt odd but refreshing at the same time to be passing the torch both figuratively and literally.  We have a whole lot more space in our spare bedroom now since I have housed running club equipment for close to a decade.

I did need to take the main timing laptop back home with me.  I used it to prepare and post my final set of results as the running club timer.  As you can imagine I have been asked a number of times how it feels to be stepping away from a role I have held for such a long time.  Of course the first reaction are words like relief and happiness.  When I announced that I was stepping away three months ago the eight events I had to plow through to get here seemed formidable.  Bearing this responsibility when your heart is no longer in it was not an easy thing.

Now that I punched my last time card I do feel that sense of relief I anticipated for so long.  Being free of the anxiety that surrounds this sort of gig is going to be very, very welcome.  Despite serving in the role that I did for so long I can’t totally get away from some feelings of guilt, as I know that in the end it is the race participants that could suffer from my absence.  They are devoid of responsibility for my decision so having them potentially be affected by it does not bring me good feelings.  All I can do is hope the club finds it’s way now that my hands have completely been pulled off the wheel.

Saturday afternoon we worked on a number of things that needed to be done.   Ali stopped by to pick up Sadie.  She actually hung around for a little bit and chatted with us which was very nice.  She was very happy about how the race went which was good to hear.

I had some ideas about going out to dinner and/or a movie Saturday night to celebrate timing my last club race.    Reality sunk in that we would be drop dead tired which would be counter to doing much celebrating.  We instead ordered a take out eggplant parm sub that we enjoyed as we watched Scorch Trials, my latest Netflix rental. I would describe the movie as long, confusing, and weird, only worthy of a B rating in my book.  Cindy rated it even lower.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I decided to do another track run, this time increasing our distance from 2 miles to 5K (3.12 miles)  The temps in the lower 60’s combined with overcast skies made for some good running weather.  I felt ok during the run however later in the day and to a degree this morning I am feeling some minor discomfort in the IT band area, the first I have felt in quite awhile.

We went straight from the run to running errands, stopping for coffee as well as Lowe’s and Costco.  At Lowe’s we got some more plants for the garden although my major intention was to get a dryer vent cover that I could re-purpose as a crude cover for the Ring doorbell I have mounted on the chicken coop run.  The vent cover will provide some degree of shade and precipitation protection for the device.

At Costco I picked up a LED garage light that was on sale.  The conventional florescent light I had in the garage had one bulb out, replacing it with an affordable and mercury free solution seemed like a good option.  I hung the new light which included cutting off the power plug and splicing it directly into the house wiring, a simple chore.  The new LED lights don’t have the warm up time the old bulbs suffered from and appear to be brighter overall.

Last night Cindy and I were passed out in bed at an incredibly early time of 8:30PM.  We both just felt exhausted.  Depsite the early bedtime I woke up this morning feeling not particularly rested due to restless sleep.  I can’t tell you the last time I fell asleep and the next thing I remembered was waking up with the alarm the next morning.  Instead my nights have been filled with sessions of waking up and then not being able to fall back asleep, sometimes for hours at a time.

I heard this morning that yet another Stern Show “whack packer” died recently, Crackhead Bob.  Bob (real name George), was a former crackhead that wound up suffering multiple strokes from his drug use.  The end result was an incredibly funny speech impediment that lead to many, many funny moments on the show.  Bob dropped off the show radar in 2007 when he moved to Texas.  He was only 56 when he died.  In the past year there have been a number of prominent whack packers that have kicked the bucket.  I suppose it is a sad reminder of the age of the show as well as a large segment of it’s loyal listener base.

So yesterday it was off and on rain for most of the day.  When we were eating dinner one last heavy deluge rolled through, almost like Mother Nature giving us a nice FU before the nearly 3 days of wet weather relented.  I am pretty sure outside of tropical storm and hurricanes, this is the MOST standing water we have had at the house, ever.  The fact that this occurred in the middle of winter is flabbergasting and a testament to the power of climate change.

Once the rain stopped I got a head start on race prep loading up all of the timing mats, 15 in the Tacoma and another 9 in the Prius.  The mats in the Prius and a bunch of other stuff I won’t be needing for the race will be dropped off to the running club today as part of the equipment purge.  I have been housing all of the timing equipment and a bunch of other race related stuff in my house for close to 10 years, it felt good to get some of that space back.

As I mentioned before, having this race be the last I time for the club feels appropriate. It is the 10th year for the event dreamed up by Ali in response to our adoption of Nicki.  The early versions of the race website that I created had Nicki’s puppy picture plastered all over the place.  This year the race could potentially draw close to 1000 participants which is simply awesome.

This race has it’s own set of challenges, the biggest of which is the distance between the start and finish line which is damn close to a 1/2 mile.  Luckily I should have the club golf cart to transport me back and forth.  The thermometer will add more excitement since race time temperature is forecast to be in the 40’s.

By this time tomorrow the race will be well underway and I will be coasting towards my own personal finish line of close to a decade of involvement with the running club.  I am proud of the countless improvements I have helped facilitate over that time.  Life is all about change and doing what makes you happy. My relinquishing of my role as the dedicated club race timer will be big examples of both.

The extreme standing water we had yesterday morning only accumulated throughout the day, bolstered by the unrelenting storms.  When I got home the visual was pretty unbelievable.  It was the most standing water I have EVER seen on the property outside of a tropical storm or hurricane.  The fact that it was the end of January seemed surreal.  This just doesn’t happen.

There was just a ridiculous amount of water in the front and back yards.  The chickens of course were soaked but didn’t seem to care all that much.  The big shed that they often like to hang under was totally flooded out underneath.  The standing water seems to be wreaking havoc with my internet connectivity in the coop.  Although the coop has power it seems like the buried, ground rated ethernet cable isn’t getting very strong signal out to the back yard, making some of my tech out there malfunction. I drove to work today in a steady light rain and I saw a chance of showers still in the forecast for tomorrow.  Please, make it stop.

Warning a couple paragraphs of WoW talk follow.

A little while ago WoW introduced something called Timewalking Dungeons.  They are basically a way for current players to play old 5 man dungeons that have been part of the 11 years of WoW’s existence.  Last night I did one of them from the Cataclysm expansion which was something like 4-5 years ago at this point.  I ran it as the “tank” aka. the guy that leads the group and tries to get all the bad things to attack him.

Despite not setting foot in this dungeon for approaching a half decade somehow “muscle memory” kicked in and I was able to know exactly where to go and what to do as a result of running through this dungeon dozens upon dozens of times when it was current content.  It almost felt similar to how I feel when I am back in the Reading area, still able to more or less get around despite not living in town for over 15 years.  It just felt weird in a good way.  Anyone that has played WoW and only someone that has played MMORPG’s like WoW will understand that playing these games is literally like living in a different world, complete with it’s own set of road maps, hot spots and rules.

So you may recall a week or two ago I mentioned how Cindy was getting a heavy metals blood test based on some health issues I heard Howard talking about on his show.  It turned out his fish heavy diet had resulted in him having high mercury levels.  Cindy has been having a lot of issues that most people would quickly write off as just the side effect of getting older.  However our diet was very heavily seafood based with us having seafood for dinner 5-6 times a week and possibly a couple more times on the weekend in the form of a tuna wrap for lunch.

Well after a long wait the test results came back earlier this week, Cindy’s levels were indeed high.  The test results are going to result in a change of our diet where the majority of our protein will come from plant based sources instead of seafood.  Fish is ok to eat in moderation and there are certain types of fish that are much more prone to high mercury levels than others.  However in our case we need to take steps to remove the heavy metals in our bodies that become embedded in many organs which causes a myriad of problems.  Over time the metal leaves your body through body fluids but it is a good idea to kick start the process as much as possible.

I already assume my heavy metal number is elevated as well since for the most part I eat whatever Cindy eats although perhaps because of my larger dimensions I am affected to a lower level.  I do have memory issues at times and my eyesight has definitely gone downhill dramatically since seafood became my main animal based protein.  It will be interesting to see how the next few months go as we try to “get the lead out”.

The incredibly odd winter weather in our area continued last night.  Winter in Florida usually means high temperatures in the 70’s, blue skies, and long, long stretches of no precipitation whatsoever.  This morning we woke up to SEVERE standing water on our property, possibly more than we saw at any point during the summer rainy season.  I woke up several times during the night from the sound of hard rain but it still did not prepare me for the very wet landscape pictured above.  Winter is not supposed to be about sloshing through ankle high water.  The chickens will get to work on their swimming skills today.

Yesterday I got a couple automated messages on my home phone supposedly from the IRS, stating they were filing a lawsuit against me.  A quick Google search revealed this has been an ongoing scam for quite awhile and can be safely ignored.  It seems unreal to me that the perpetrators of this scam are able to do so for months on end without any repercussions.  Sadly there are surely some people that have fallen for this scheme, after all the words “lawsuit” and “IRS” make for a potent combination.

I am in the process of building a new application server for the office.  It is going to be the first time I will be implementing a RAID 10 configuration for the hard drive array.  One of the most vulnerable parts of a computer is the hard drive which consists of platters spinning as fast as 15k rpm’s 24 hours a day.  In order to provide protection from hard drive failure, servers normally have multiple hard drives that use RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks).  There are different type of RAID that are identified by number.

RAID 5 is what I have used for most of my IT career.  In this configuration you need a minimum of 3 hard drives.  RAID 5 allows you to lose any one of the drives to failure and not lose your data.  If a drive goes bad you can remove it, slap in a new drive and not lose a beat.

With RAID 5 there are some drawbacks. The parity bit stripe that has to be written across all disks inflicts a performance penalty.  Also when a new drive is inserted to replace a dead one, the rebuild process is very resource intensive, causing server performance to drag.  The rebuild also hammers the good disks, in some rare situations the rebuild process is intense enough that it will cause a SECOND drive to fail in the middle of it.  (this has happened to me)  If you lose a second drive it is game over.

There is RAID 6 which uses a similar method that requires a minimum of 4 drives but will allow you to lose up to two drives and still have your data intact.  The con of this is even more of a write/read and rebuild penalty than RAID 5 has.

The server I am working on will have a total of 12 hard drives, 10 of which will be used for a RAID 10 array.  The remaining 2 drives will be “hot spares”, meaning if a drive goes bad one of the spares will be fired up and used in the array automatically.  RAID 10 uses a combination of data striping and mirroring which gives you MUCH better performance than RAID 5 or 6.  In my situation with 10 drives I have 5 mirrored drive sets in the array.

The con to RAID 10 is you lose HALF of your drive capacity to redundancy.  In my situation my 40 terabytes of drives will only deliver 20 terabytes of usable space.  RAID 10 can only be guaranteed to be able to lose 1 drive without data loss but potentially could lose more drives and still function depending on your luck.  Since the drives are in mirrored pairs, as long as you don’t lose both drives in a mirror you are still ok.  So in my situation, in theory, I could lose as many as 5 drives and still have my data intact.  Of course that would require incredibly good luck.

Now I assume the vast majority of the blog audience won’t really be interested in server RAID discussion but it just happened to be the thing on the top of my thought barrel today so that is what comes out.

So on my commute to work this morning there was an accident on Immokalee Road that had a lane closed, causing traffic to have to merge to the left.  I was already in the left most lane so I didn’t have to do much but slow down.  I started to hear a horn going off repeatedly to my right.  I look over to my right and see a Rogue that for some reason refused to let a small pick up truck from the right lane merge in.  The truck was trying to get in the middle lane in front of the Nissan repeatedly as there was little room left in the road before a merge was required.  Each attempt was met with a horn and the Nissan quickly darting ahead to make sure there was absolutely no space for the truck to merge.

When I recognized what was going on I had to get a look at the Rogue driver that apparently valued being one car ahead in the traffic jam so dearly that they had to be a complete and utter asshole.  The driver was an obese black woman who had one unbroken slope of flesh that flowed seamlessly from head to body.  She looked ahead stoically as if being inside the confines of the car somehow separated her from the rude driving behavior.  Thankfully the person behind this bitch had a degree of common courtesy and let the pick up truck in.

The Rogue, that was so intent on not letting anyone in front then inexplicably turned into the ultimate rubberneck, slowing down to below walking speed to look at one of the two vehicles involved in the crash.  Both I and the truck she cut off swung out around her as she continued her turtle paced gawking.  About 30 seconds later the woman apparently had her fill of staring and went zooming up the middle lane, once again passing us before she had to slam on her brakes at the traffic light.

People like this just annoy the shit out of me.  I can only wish a lifetime full of flat tires for these individuals.

I sent a couple of our coop Ring videos with chickens mulling about to the company via their community sharing link.  They like to post interesting, unique videos captured by the smart doorbell.  They responded back with a release form, indicating they wanted to post the videos.  Evidently nobody has installed a Ring on their chicken coop yet.  Imagine that.

This has been the oddest winter weather I have ever experienced since moving to Florida.  At first it was like there was no winter at all with highs near 90 degrees for extended periods of time.  Recently we have been having summer-like storms as well including the storm last weekend that cancelled the half marathon. Last Friday’s storm was bad enough that it actually placed standing water on our property, something that has NEVER happened in January.  Usually this is the the heart of the dry season where the time between precipitation is measured in weeks or even months. On Saturday we had extreme amounts of wind as a cold front blew through with some gusts topping 50 mph.

Of course our weather didn’t hold a candle to the massive snowstorm that pounded the northeast.  I saw pictures from my old stomping grounds in PA with snow 2 1/2 feet deep with drifts much, much higher.  I was also shocked at the pictures of many of the Jersey/Delaware shore areas I used to vacation in under water from terrible flooding. Despite the bad weather we have been experiencing locally, pictures from the NE this weekend make me feel quite glad to be 1200 miles south.

We picked up Sadie for a weekend visit after an errand run that included stops at Home Depot, Rural King, and Pet Supermarket.  While we were at Rural King we saw they got a new shipment of baby chicks.  I joked around with Cindy about picking up a couple Sicilian Buttercup chicks that looked particularly cute.  We could accommodate a couple more birds if we had to but I hate to mess what seems to be a pretty good balance with our chicken family now.  I also think we are forgetting just how much maintenance the chicks required while they were in the house.

When we got home I decided to finally rip into the Tacoma which has been sitting in the driveway all week.  I had my new set of plugs and wires that I ordered on Amazon.  The winds had not only continued but intensified at that point.  My tools and supplies were blowing around everywhere.  The hat I was wearing got thrown in the garage after it blew off my head four times.

The first step was to gap the 6 new plugs.  Since the Tacoma uses dual electrode style plugs gapping them takes twice as long as normal.  I then got under the hood and got busy.  My plan was to do one wire and the two corresponding plugs as a set to make sure I don’t get any coil/wire connections screwed up.

Normally any automotive project I do I will film as they are some of my most viewed entries on my YouTube channel.  Unfortunately with the amount of wind going on I knew it would be pointless as either you wouldn’t be able to hear me or the camera would get trashed from blowing over.

The plugs on the passenger side are easy to get to.  Once you remove the intake rubber tube there is nothing in your way. The driver side is much more annoying because the intake plenum looms above the plugs.  I ran into various problems with the driver side plug/wire removal.  I had to use my long extensions with a swivel attachment to get on the plugs.  Plug six, in the right rear of the engine compartment was especially tough to get swapped out for a couple reasons.

I had mentioned last week the entire reason I went down the plug/wire path to address my cylinder 4 misfire was I discovered the terminal in that wire was falling apart.  Well when I pulled the wire for cylinder 6 once again the insulating boot stayed down in the hole, requiring another tedious fishing session with my hooked small wire so I could pull it out.  I am really disappointed with the quality of these Duralast wires that I bought from Autozone,  I installed them maybe three years ago.  To have two of the three wires fall apart already was very aggravating.  I have used Duralast parts for many other repairs and have had good luck.  I won’t be getting their plug wires ever again, that is for sure.

I also had an issue with my spark plug sockets.  I had two 5/8″ sockets, one from my big socket set and an Autozone socket.  I had different problems with each.  The one socket had a loose rubber boot that is used to keep the plug in place as you stick it back in the hole.  The end result was after I would get done torquing the plug back in the socket would come back up sans rubber boot, it was stuck on the plug terminal.  So I had to jam the socket back on, back out the plug and try again.  The Autozone socket had a maddening precise fit, making it very difficult to get the spark plug securely inserted.  In total between the two socket issues I bet I wasted another 20 minutes of futzing around.

So finally I had all six plugs and three wire sets replaced.  I hopped back in the truck and turned the key, hoping to hear the engine roar to life.  Instead it fired up for a split second and then shut down.  I was not happy.  I jumped out and did a quick survey under the hood, hoping I just forgot to reconnect something.  Luckily I quickly spotted a coil connector on cylinder 5 that I forgot to snap back in.  After clicking it together the truck fired back up and sounded normal.

Now last week during my testing the truck also sounded normal briefly until I got it out on the road so I knew I was not in the clear yet.   I took the truck east on Immokalee Road and was encouraged that I did not feel the chugging engine the truck had when the misfire was present.  In total I did a 10 mile test and the Tacoma passed with flying colors.  I drove it a few more times over the weekend and to work today without a problem so I feel confident declaring the issue as fixed.  I feel very fortunate that the simpler solution fixed the problem this time.  Replacing fuel injectors would have been a much, much larger pain in the ass.

On Saturday night we decided to stay home and plow through the remainder of the Making a Murderer.  If you are looking for a happy ending out of this documentary, look elsewhere.  The story is such a bizarre collection of situations all cross contaminating the other.  The theme of the documentary is basically how Steven and his nephew Brendan are unjustly in prison for a crime they did not commit, largely in part to shady activity by the local police department.  Although Steven’s guilt or innocence is a bit foggy, it is crystal clear that Brendan had nothing to do with the crime, yet he is in prison until the year 2048 at the earliest.

My friend Cheryl found this well thought out explanation that does a good job of unwinding the various evidence and points the finger in a direction not really touched on in the documentary.  After you watch the series, read this explanation.  It makes a lot of sense and connects a lot of dots.

We woke up Sunday morning to some cold for Florida temperatures in the upper 40’s.  We decided to go out and do a short run, something I have note done for at least a couple of months for a myriad of reasons.  Our goal was a simple two miles around the middle school track.  I really like running in colder temperatures, I just feel better.  Cindy does not, the cold air can make her lungs feel like they are closing up.

Despite the cold Cindy was actually the pace setter, I constantly was a stride or two behind her, working to keep up.  I was surprised when Cindy said we averaged right around 9 minute mile pace, 30-45 seconds per mile faster than what we were carrying for a normal pace for most of our runs in 2015.  Of course it was only two miles of running but still it felt like a minor accomplishment.

I added two more pieces of tech to the chicken coop on Sunday.  The first thing was adding a Ring doorbell to the front of the run.  It allows us to take advantage of the coop based wi-fi network to monitor back yard motion and do two way communication if one of us is in the house and the other in the yard.  Is it overkill? Yes.

The other addition was another WeMo smart outlet that is used to control the LED light in the coop.  The light is used at dusk to provide light in the coop so the hens can get themselves situated on their perch.  Since the chickens like to push their bedtime right until the edge of darkness, without light in the coop they would be nearly blind in there.

With the WeMo switch I now have the light on a precisely controlled time cycle that is controlled by my phone.  I can use the phone to also turn the light on and off whenever I chose from anywhere I have internet service.  Plus the coolest thing of all is we can control the light with our voice via the Amazon Echo.  A simple, “Alexa, turn on/off the coop” gets the job done.

Early Sunday afternoon I was debating if I wanted to tackle the rear brakes on the Tacoma.  I really hate taking on an automotive project on a Sunday.  I decided to be productive in another way, hopping on the tractor (after jump starting it with the Tacoma), and mowed the front and back yard.  Nearly a month of no mowing with ample precipitation had left areas looking somewhat ratty.  A couple hours later things were looking much more uniform.

I got to catch a good amount of the Patriots/Broncos game.  It was what you would hope out of a conference championship.  Although I was pulling for the Broncos for Peyton Manning’s sake, there was no denying just how great Tom Brady and Gronkowski are.  Brady got hit CONSTANTLY the entire game yet somehow managed to convert on a do or die 4th down situation twice to put the Patriots in the position to tie the game with time running out.  Only a deflected pass on the two point attempt halted the epic comeback attempt.  It was a hell of a game.  The Panthers/Cardinals game was a different story with Carolina winning in a blow out.  The Carolina offense versus the Denver defense should make for an interesting Super Bowl.

This week I begin my final week of preparations as the running club timer.  To have the finish line so close is intoxicating.  To have it all wind up with the race Ali started in Nicki’s honor seems fitting as well.  By this time next week this chapter in my life will be written and I can move on to whatever comes next.

Sorry for being mostly incommunicado the past few days.  My attention has been needed elsewhere other than my daily brain dumps.

I had heard the discussion in the news the past few weeks about the Netflix documentary named “Making a Murderer” .  I had no idea that it was literally a series, I thought it was something like a two hour film.  Well by the time we went to bed last after 1 AM we had plowed through 5 episodes.

The sequence of events in this story just seem incredible.  The layers of deceit, corruption, tampering, and all around shadiness are countless.  Make no doubt about it, Steve Avery is an uneducated, simple man with a history of making some bad decisions and exhibiting poor behavior.  When you see the various members of his family interviewed it is clear this bloodline did not spend a second in any sort of higher education.  They seem to be Wisconsin rednecks in simple terms.  However being a redneck does not mean you are not entitled to fair treatment by the local law enforcement and court system.

In a nutshell, Steve served 18 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.  The county sheriff department apparently knowingly ignored evidence that would have exonerated Avery.  When he got released after DNA evidence proved his innocence, he filed a 36 million dollar lawsuit against the county.  Shortly before that trial was to begin he got accused of being involved in the murder of a woman.  This documentary is all about unwinding the incredibly complicated story surrounding all of this.

It is compelling for sure, hence our 5 hour binge watch on a Thursday night.  It really puts an exclamation point on just how corrupt, deceitful, and dangerous a good old boy local government system can be.  I am sure Cindy and I will finish up digesting the documentary this weekend, tonight perhaps. Do I know 100% that Avery is innocent? Hell no.  Is it clear as day that the sheriff department had an axe to grind and clearly ignored/altered evidence  to fit their agenda?  Absolutely.

This weekend I need to spend some time under the hood of the Tacoma that has been sitting dead in the driveway all week.  I am crossing my fingers that the set of plugs and wires that I bought will fix the cylinder misfire problem I have been experiencing.  If not I have a much more involved and potentially expensive problem to deal with.

I’m just busy.