Whacked, Fixed, My Annual Call, Fell on Face, Ad Astra
On Saturday I took a more reasonable stance towards yard maintenance. We still have had minimal rain so overall the grass has not grown much but I had not weed whacked in a couple weeks. The chicken area also was skipped in last weeks mowing so I took care of that as well. The end result was only spending a couple hours this weekend on grass maintenance instead of three or four.
Staurday afternoon I decided to get my annual painful call to Directv out of the way to finally reactivate my Sunday Ticket package. As is always the case, I spent around an hour on the phone getting my non-standard configuration working again. There was a bit of good news that came out of it. I found out that if I wanted, I can stream the games via my Echo TV Cube. There is a Sunday Ticket app that just requires your credentials to access. I used the streaming option for the first part of the game on Sunday to test it out. It got a bit annoying with a feed that paused and had some jerkiness in the video. By the second quarter I had flipped over to my old fashioned satellite dish feed. Hey, at least it works.
I did a decent amount of work on my one 3D printer over the weekend. I replaced the ABL sensor from a capacitive to an inductive type for more consistent performance. I also fixed a very poorly designed extruder arm assembly. The way it comes from the factory the gear grinds the aluminum arm underneath. I purchased a modified arm kit that eliminates this problem and keeps the gear spinning straight and friction free.
On Saturday night Cindy and I went to go see Ad Astra, the new Brad Pitt space movie. I generally love Brad Pitt films and I’m a huge sci-fi guy as well so it was a sweet combination. I thought the movie was very interesting and thought provoking although I didn’t really like part of the message at the end. It was an A- experience for me.
The audience for the movie was pretty thin but almost entirely adults and from a quick survey a lot of older adults, meaning older than me. Despite this scenario we had multiple issues with people using their phones during the movie. With the background of the film being space, the majority of the scenes were dark making the phone use even more obvious and annoying. There was an old man next to us that had to be pushing 70, he was one of the offenders. Cindy actually told him how distracting it was and he later apologized. It’s easy to stereotype cell phone addiction as a mostly millennial problem but the reality is all age groups are affected.
In addition to the cell phone use the old guy piled on the annoyance by eating food, noisily, for over half of the movie. Sure sometimes Cindy and I grab something to eat in the seats but we don’t make a seven course meal out of it. Dealing with other people that give little thought to how their actions impact others is a reality you can never escape if you go to a public movie theater. You either grin and bear it or just watch everything at home.
Sunday morning I went on a solo ride on the KingSong 18XL. I threw on my backpack so I could run some errands along the way like dropping off a couple packages at the post office and picking up some watermelon for the chickens at Publix. I think it made for an interesting video and demonstrated how a PEV can be utilized to fill basic transportation needs in certain situations.
The Eagles game was sort of a mess, they lost at home to the Lions which is not an outcome that was expected, even with the number of injuries the team had on offense. The Birds just made a shit ton of mistakes with two fumbles, seven dropped passes (a couple potential TD passes), and soul crushing penalties, including THREE offensive pass interference penalties, which is unheard of.
On defense they could not get pressure on Stafford and their effort all game was mediocre at best. It was a shitty game and the type of loss that comes back to haunt you at the end of the season when playoff berths are on the line. The bad news is they turn around and play on Thursday night against the Packers, another potential loss. If a team with this much talent comes out of the gate 1-3 there are going to be a lot of unhappy campers out there. Wentz is a gamer for sure but a gamer that doesn’t win games is going to get ugly in Philly real quick.