Gave up, Restarted, Four Hours, Paid, 16X, Switched, Just Listened

Friday night I once again worked on my ripped apart AnyCubic I3 Mega.  After another frustrating session where I determined my X axis stepper motor was trashed I decided to pack it in.  It would take a long time for me to get another X stepper and I doubted with as much shit that I had to go through to get it apart, if it would ever print well once put back together.  I instead decided to give up on the repair, something I normally don’t do very easily.  My plan became to keep this printer for parts as I have two more I3 Mega’s in production.  I then furhter realigned my plans, setting a goal of filling the empty workbench spot with ANOTHER Prusa printer, I love my MK3S that much.  Yes it’s a bit scary that I could buy five I3 Mega’s for the price of one pres-assembled Prusa but I don’t plan to do so until funds from my 3D printing store can cover the cost.

Saturday morning I headed to the track to reboot my running program, again.  It seems like I can’t string together more than 2-3 weeks before something starts hurting that derails me again.  This time Cindy and Elsa came with.  They walked the track while I ran around it, slowly.  I finished the 12 laps and was a sweaty mess to prove it.  The only good news is I didn’t have much residual pain afterward.

Despite doing the weed whacking during the week I still wound up spending 4-5 hours outdoors on Saturday doing tasks.  Most of that time was spent on the mower.  We have had an extended few days with little to no rain which resulted in all of the standing water disappearing.  I felt I had no choice but to mow everything while I could.

Saturday night we watched Glass, the follow up to Unbreakable, a movie made years ago, when M Night Shamalan actually made movies people liked.  I didn’t think the movie was bad but it certainly wasn’t great. I’d award it a B, pretty good by M Night’s low bar standard.

The weekend also included me wrapping up my testing of the 16X.  I made a couple videos as part of the process, both of which seem to be well received.  My EUC videos have been getting more traction with a lot more views than I had been getting in the past.

Late last week all of the devices on my home network that were hardwired stopped communicating.  It was odd, all of the devices had link lights and were showing activity but none of them could communicate out to the internet or with each other.  The only thing that made sense to me was to replace the main network switch which fixed the problem.  Switches rarely fail so I am wondering if some sort of surge caused the failure.  Everything is back up and talking once again after the swap.

I did my bills as normal on Sunday morning.  The session did include a big event, paying off the Tacoma.  The funds from the sale of the RV finally cleared Cindy’s bank account after nearly two weeks.  It’s sort of ridiculous how banks hold your money hostage like this.  While they are waiting for it to “clear” what the are really doing is floating that money for themselves to make a few bucks.  The process was further retarded by another restriction that only allowed Cindy to transfer 5K a day over so it took three days to complete that as well.

Regardless, it felt good to get the truck payment eliminated as it has not been fun floating a Tesla and Tacoma payment for around six months.  It also feels good to have a truck with less than 30k miles on it paid off already.  The remainder of the proceeds from the sale got applied to my HELOC balance which I will be working on knocking down at a more rapid pace from here on out.

So on Saturday I spent about 25 minutes trying to get the Sunday Ticket reactivated on my DirecTV account.  The level one, India based phone rep was clueless on how to do so even though I told her up front that she would need to get a supervisor involved and that there are notes on my account on how to handle this.  Because I do not have a normal programming package with Directv, the Sunday Ticket subscription requires additional steps to complete.  Dinner was ready so I told the woman I didn’t have more time to sit on the phone with her and hung up.

I then saw that supposedly Directv was offering week one of the Sunday Ticket free for everyone as a promo.  Great, I guess I will watch it for free on week one and then slog through the reactivation this week sometime.  Well 15 minutes prior to kickoff I switched to the channel and had the 721 error which means “too bad, so sad”.  Evidently the free spiff was only for those people that had a base subscription.  I called in but hung up shortly thereafter when I got the message about “unusually long wait times”, f it.  Instead I just listened to the broadcast on my computer which was not the same as watching the game, but tolerable.

Early on I felt fortunate to not see the disaster on the field with the Eagles falling behind 17-0.  They sounded very rusty, perhaps from the strategy of very little real playing time for their starters during pre-season.  Luckily in the second half the team woke up and won 32-27.  DeSean Jackson had a HUGE homecoming for the Eagles, putting up big numbers.  Having a legit speedster in the WR position I think is going to really help Carson open up the field.  The end result of the game gave me a good feeling about the potential this team has, if they can stay healthy.

Speaking of staying healthy, I could not believe Nick Foles lasted less than one half before getting injured in his game.  He broke his left clavicle after a big hit.  I was really pulling for Nick to prove he can be good for another team besides the Eagles.  Who knows when he will get the chance to do so now.