Sweaty scoring, lack of planning, Ugly Eagles, cut off my own legs
So Saturday morning was the cross country meet that I was timing. I showed up on site about 5:30, the first race didn’t start until 7:45. I was glad I got there as early as I did, there was a lot to do since this event didn’t have the normal collection of volunteers that a typical race has.
Even before the sun came up I was sweated through my shirt, it was brutally warm and humid, without the sun beating on me yet.
The timing for the event was a challenge. I had various issues.
One of the most frustrating issues was the physical danger the finish line provided. Because a cross country meet is run on grass, the finish mats are placed upon grass. Well the grass at the park was relatively high. Very early on we saw issues with kids stumbling across the finish mats. They would not be paying attention to their foot placement as they finished, most likely because they were exhausted, plant their foot right in front of the mat and then catch that same foot as they took the next stride.
We had a bunch of near misses where kids almost fell and a handful that actually did fall. The one boy went down really hard. We tried to minimize the problem by weighting down the sides of the mats to keep them taut but it did not prevent the problem. To be honest I am not sure how to avoid the issue in the future short of having the finish area grass mowed very low.
I noticed about halfway into the event that a number of kids that had not run yet would gather by the finish line to cheer on the other kids. Unfortunately some of these spectators got too close to the timing mats with the timing chip that was on their sneaker, inadvertently getting scored for the wrong race. If there was any good fortune in this, it was for the most case JV runners got mis-scored which is less critical. However it still wound up as a big headache at the end when I was trying to figure out why I had so many scoring anomalies.
Finally we had a number of kids that simply were wearing the wrong chip. The coaches were responsible for making sure their kids wore the correct chip. There was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening.
It was a pretty stressful morning as I had some other technical challenges to figure out on the fly but in the end everyone was happy. By the time everything was cleaned up and put away it was after noon. By the time I was done doing all of the associated work at home it was about 2:30, a long day of timing.
I quickly worked on whatever chore related items I needed to get done, cutting a few corners this week because I was just too damn tired to give a shit. Saturday night I stopped over at Ali’s to drop some stuff off. She threw in some pizza we had for dinner.
So Sunday morning I had to get up early once again, this time to drive over to Jeremy’s place to pick up some furniture items he no longer needed, a computer desk and a queen size bed. In exchange I was giving him my old pressure washer that I no longer needed.
I left my house right about 7AM and pulled into Jeremy’s place a few minutes after 9. After hanging out and playing with the kids a bit we headed over to the townhouse that they rent out, where the items were located.
When I first saw the desk I grabbed one end and lifted it, the sucker felt HEAVY, too heavy to lift into the truck without mutual hernia risk. I lightened the load by removing all drawers and doors. After doing so it was more manageable. The back of the Tacoma barely accommodated the desk, box spring and queen mattress but we squeezed it all in there. I used two high strength ratcheting straps to lock everything securely for the long 70 MPH trek back across Alligator Alley.
Jeremy suggested we grab sandwiches before I head back which we did and took back to his place. I got back out on the road about 11:45. Obviously I was going to miss the start of the Eagles game but I could listen to it on Sirius en route. I recorded a how to use a pressure washer video for Jeremy which will be released shortly.
The drive back across the state SUCKED. The furniture in the back of the Tacoma had various negative effects. Crosswinds caused a lot of unwelcomed swerving as I was rolling along. I needed a firm grip on the wheel at all times. The stuff also stuck up above the cab of the truck by a couple feet, creating an aerodynamic nightmare. The truck was working hard to simply maintain the speed limit and the gas gauge was dropping at a rate I had never seen before. I was quite glad when I pulled into the driveway with the gas warning light on. I had filled the truck to the very top before leaving, meaning I only got something like 250 miles out of a full tank of 15 gallons.
When we loaded the desk onto the truck I had a brief thought in my head about the usable work area on the new desk. It kind of looked to be on the small size, especially since I have a 27 and 23 inch monitor. Well the first thing I did when I got home was put a tape measure on the desk space, it was only 36 inches. I instantly knew I was f’d. There was absolutely no way I could make my stuff fit. I started chastising myself for not considering this before driving across the state. My thought process was simply “uh that desk looks nicer than my desk and Jeremy wants to give it to me” and nothing else. I was frustrated, very frustrated.
Well my original plan was to give my existing desk to a neighbor that was looking for one. I guess the new plan is to see if she wants Jeremy’s desk. Luckily she did. Getting the desk into her place was quite the challenge and required temporarily removing some parts of the desk and a closet door so I had space to clear a tight corner. After much effort we finally got it slid into place.
I did set up the queen bed in the guest room so the trip wasn’t a total fail but damn I was annoyed with myself.
The annoyance didn’t subside after watching the Eagles game. Wow. Vick threw 4 interceptions and had the Browns drop another couple should be int’s. He did not look good at all. The Birds were very lucky to pull out a 17-16 win against a BAD Browns team. How bad? Their rookie QB completed a THIRD of his passes for just over 100 yards and threw 4 interceptions as well. The Eagles performance did absolutely nothing to convince me they learned a damn thing from last year where they lost a TON of games they had absolutely no business losing. However if this trend continues, Andy has exhausted his last safety net.
This morning I got a very alarming email, saying my Google Adsense account was disabled! As you know, my recent good fortune with generating ad dollars via Google, primarily from my YouTube videos has been something I am VERY excited about. In order to have more of a good thing, a month or so ago I added a small banner ad to the bottom of the posts on my blog and encouraged people to click the ads, thinking that driving more traffic to the ad sites is a win/win.
Well evidently this behavior is frowned upon by Google and is laid out somewhere in the encyclopedic terms of service that they provide. Somehow they determined that too many of my clicks were coming from the same IP addresses and as a result killed my account. I have a couple problems with this.
First off, if my blog readers were clicking the ads, the extra clicks could not have been more than a couple dozen a day, it isn’t like I have some bot out there registering thousands of ad clicks. Second, if this behavior was problematic, why is it outside the scope of reason to send me a warning, saying , “Hey this shit is not allowed, here is your one warning and then you are done” I think that is reasonable. As is, my only option is to submit an appeal through their sterile, faceless, email only support system and hope I get connected with someone that is reasonable.
This decision by Google f’s me several times over. It negates any outstanding money they were due to pay me and stops my generation of any further income via AdSense via the blog OR YouTube. This snowballs into my YouTube account, removing my YouTube partner status, meaning I no longer generate totally legit ad dollars on my YT videos, which infuriates me.
If my appeal is successful, I can get that reinstated but I think I am screwed out my unpaid revenue dollars regardless which is bullshit. Unfortunately in their terms of service, you agree that Google can basically say FU at anytime for any reason. I have no leverage and can only hope my appeal is successful.
Yes, in the big picture those clicks violated the terms of service, although if I actually knew they were a violation, I certainly would not have encouraged blog readers to click away. I am really bummed out about it.
I think I have reached my frustration limit for a three day period…