Start sucked, Saturday night surgery, brake job, handicap hoax, Hachi, Dexter is back, Publix PR

So Saturday morning we had our second race in as many weeks to time.  Once again I brought along the new equipment so I could do a chip start.  The set up of this race was not conducive to having AC power run out ot the start line so I did several things differently from the week before.

Last week I connected to the timing box using regular CAT 5 cables plugged into a switch.  This time I used a CAT 5 crossover cable to eliminate the need for the switch (and AC), I also connected a different laptop to the timing box than the week before.  None of these changes should have been problematic or so I thought, so I didn’t bother testing it ahead of time.  My bad.

So I run out to the start line with about 5 minutes to go to set up the equipment.  Just getting the mats physically laid out across the road was a major challenge with 500 runners all converging on the start line.  Finally after pushing bodies out of the way I got the mats down and turned the box on.

There is an application on the laptop that I have to use to connect to grab the times.  The app was unable to connect.  I verified I had a link light on the ethernet port  of both devices but I was not able to connect over the network.  Now the race director was waiting on me to start the race.  After some more fast attempts to fix the issue I realized it wasn’t something I was going to do on the spot.  I turned off the box and just told George to start the race.

I was frustrated by the failure.  I knew ultimately it was my fault for not testing this combination of equipment together.  It was a good learning experience which is the basis for my bringing the start line equipment to all of the races, even those that don’t warrant a chip start, to work out the bugs for when it does matter.  Further investigation at home revealed that my lack of connectivity was caused from a class A subnet mask being configured on the laptop instead of a class C mask, something that in normal pc networking would not cause the devices to not talk to each other, especially when direct connected. When I changed the mask to 255.255.255.0 everything was peachy.

Other than the start line f up the race timing went fine.  Once the race started Ali was off and running with Michelle who started running much earlier.  Ali wound up running 11 of the 21 miles with Michelle.  I sat around and waited for Ali to return. The race was done and packed away by 9:20 or so.  Ali and Michele didn’t roll into the parking lot till about 10:15.  I passed the time going out and getting coffee and then sitting on a bench at the park watching the ducks and an anhinga drying off after a swim in the lake. I didn’t really mind just hanging out for awhile as I sipped my coffee.

I had hoped to get the grass mowed this weekend but it didn’t happen.  Repeated dumping of rain during the week left many areas of the yard too soggy for productive cutting.  It doesn’t look horrible yet so I figured I could hopefully knock it out one of the nights after work this week.  One less thing to do this weekend.

Ali had done the weeding on Friday so that was one less thing to do and we had the cleaning crew in for the first time in a couple months on Friday as well.  It all added up to a three day weekend without a crushing load of must do’s, a nice thing.

Ali spent the majority of Saturday afternoon sleeping.  I headed out with the dogs in the party van while she snoozed.  I had a few stops to make.  The first stop of all was to put air in the tires of the party van.

The van had developed a vibration in the front end in recent weeks and it was getting worse.  I thought that perhaps uneven tire pressure could help matters.  Well when I got out at the gas station and approached the drivers side front wheel I could feel heat radiating off the alloy wheel along with the distinct smell of burning brake pad.  Great.

Realizing that on the drive to the gas station I hardly applied the brakes I knew that something was rubbing, seized up or any other number of not good things, all of which will add up to a good sized repair bill. Well I knew it was already f’d up so I decided to just finish my errands anyway.

The first stop was at Home Depot where I grabbed silicone sealant and a couple spring clamps to facilitate the repair of my Garmin gps.  Next up was a stop at mom’s place.  Mom’s Roomba developed an issue a few weeks ago where it just wants to back up.  I gave her a couple things to do to fix the issue but they were unsuccessful.

I brought a can of compressed air with in the hope of being able to blow out some of the sensors that typically cause this problem.  I struck out as well and told mom I would need to take the robot with me for further surgery.

My last stop was Wal-mart to grab oil and oil filters to swap out on both the Tacoma and Camry.  I use high grade Mobil 1 synthetic on the Camry.  Damn that stuff gets expensive..

When I got home I told Ali about the van brake issue.  I told her I planned to drop it off at Tire Choice on Sunday on our way to the water park since I had a 10% off any repair voucher from them.  I knew the repair was going to be costly and the 10% would actually add up to a sizeable chunk of change.

My Saturday night was spent doing robot repairs, how exciting. In total I have 7 Roombas of different flavors, 8 if you include the one I gave mom.  5 of them had problems.  I decided I was going to take a crack at fixing as many as possible.

In many cases, Roomba problems are the result of scuzz getting into the guts of the robot.  Depending where this scuzz winds up it can do stuff like block sensors, strip gears or burn out motors.

When I opened up my mom’s Roomba it was stuffed with lint.  Evidently her carpet must shed the stuff in droves.  I sucked out what I could with the vacuum cleaner and then I took it out to the garage to be blown out extensively with my air compressor.

I reassembled the robot and fired it up, it still backs up, damn it.  I turned my attention to the other robots hoping I could get another one working that I could give to mom.

I next worked on my second Dirt Dog robot, the garage/workshop sweeping robot.  This one had a similar backing up issue.  I cleaned the robot up extensively and initially thought I fixed it.  Unfortunately after further testing the backing up returned.  I am not sure where the issue is.

On the positive side I did get three robots working that were not operational before, two of the three were fixed by thorough cleaning.  The third Roomba got the brush deck from mom’s Roomba to fix a stripped gear problem.  It felt good to bring several Roombas back to life.  I designated one of them, an older Discovery model to go into service at mom’s condo.

I also finalized my Garmin repair.  All I did was goop in some sealant, wipe off the excess and let the spring clamps in place overnight.  I used the watch later in the weekend without incident.  I was pleased.

On Sunday we headed to the water park as planned, me driving the party van and Ali following in the car.  I dropped off the van and asked for them to call me later when they find something out.

I originally had hoped Ali would go out and ride bike with me on Livingston Road, something she has refused to do since her crash months ago.  Ali still refused to do so, claiming it wasn’t fear at this point and instead she just didn’t feel like having to “keep up with me”.  I assured her I was fine with not pushing pace in order to just get her back out on the road and over her mental obstacle with doing so.  Ali still adamantly refused which frustrated me.  I told her I would then just follow her and Christy around the park, which frustrated Ali. Oh well.

So we rode around the park at a casual pace not getting out of the 13mph range very often.  In total we probably rode around 10 miles, I accidentally had my GPS stopped for a portion of the ride.  After we got done riding Ali said she wanted to just run for a couple minutes with Christy. I said fine, I would get the bikes racked up and ready to go.

As I was sitting on the curb removing my bike shoes I noticed a SUV pull into a handicap spot.  I then see a hispanic guy  get out, I would peg him as somewhere in his 30’s.  He looked perfectly healthy to me.  He went around to the other side of the vehicle and let out his two kids who looked perfectly healthy as well.

Of course this immediately annoyed the piss out of me.  People that somehow think they are entitled to beat/scam the system for their own personal benefit sicken me.  What if a person with a genuine handicap needed that spot that was filled by this f’ing lazy asshole?  When Ali got back I told her about the unhandicapped hispanic.  She went out and took a picture of his license plate which she forwarded to me to investigate.  So far I found out  that there is no handicap placard assigned to this vehicle so this jerk either stole it or is using somebody else’s placard.  Either way, I am on to him and his fraud will not go unnoticed.

So Ali and I both put in some laps at the pool.  I had not swam in quite awhile, probably 5 weeks at least.  For this reason I was very surprised that I had my fastest times of the entire summer.  I averaged right around 8 minute 400’s where I was averaging closer to 8:45’s for the last 4 months.  I theorized to Ali that maybe it was because the bike effort was not of the strenuous variety, although I hardly use my legs anyway when swimming.

After the swim we ate lunch and hung out a little bit.  I received a call from the garage after the swim regarding the van.  As expected the damage was substantial, one of the calipers had frozen.  In addition to the damage on the driver side, the woman Tires Plus said the passenger side rotor was right at the minimum thickness and would need to be replaced in the near future.  Of course her recommendation was to fix it now which I agreed to.  I told them to put off work on a slightly loose right upper ball joint which is a longer term issue.

Well anyway, all this work was going to take some time so I was ok spending some of it lounging around the water park.  We laid around for a little while but the combination of persistent bees and the heat from sitting in only a partially shaded spot became annoying.

We planned to go back to mom’s place after the water park so I could give her the replacement Roomba as well as some cheese she left at our place while house sitting.  We hung out there with mom for a bit and chatted.  By the time we left it was about 2:15.  I called the garage and told the woman I was going to driving back towards her area in a little while and wondered how the repair was going.  She told me the van should be done in about an hour.  Ok fine, I will find something to do until then.

That something was a stop at Best Buy to get a couple fans for my computer.  My computer which is now at least 5 years old, a record for me, has developed some noise issues.  They have been going on for awhile so I almost don’t even notice them at this point.  Ali however finds them quite annoying.  I bought two fans which I theorized would excise the noise demons, one that blows hot air out of the side of the case and another that pulls fresh air in from the front vents.

When I replaced the fans later the majority of the noise was gone however later a high pitched squeal still made itself heard now and then.  I will have to do some further investigation to see if I can track it down.  It annoys Ali so much that I could say I will just buy a new computer and she would be fine with it, just to be rid of the noise..

Ok so after Best Buy Ali drops me off at the garage a little after 3.  She asks if she should wait to make sure it was done.  I told her it was no big deal, if it wasn’t quite done I would just hang around, it was better than…..

Ok f it.  The f’ing connection dumped so I lost the last half of the entry and I don’t have the patience to recreate it.

A Cliff Notes version of the rest of the weekend.  The van repair had me waiting two hours instead of the one promised.  We watched Hachi, A Dog’s Tale.  I give the movie an A.  If you get through it without crying you have no soul.  I took my new Trek on the Publix Ride and PR’d, yay for me. I cleaned out the hobby room, again. I am now watching season 5 of Dexter.  It isn’t as good as the prior 4 seasons but still well worth watching.

The End…. f’ing blog…