All posts by Duf

My 300 time dropped by another minute.  I have to say, I am surpassing what I thought I would be able to do 6 months ago.

Remember how I said I was impressed by Eric Zichella coming door to door looking for votes? Scratch that, now the guy is just plain annoying.  He has deluged our home with nearly daily junk mail as well as having recorded messages calling our house at least three or four times.  He has crossed the line from “getting the word out” to being a genuine pest.  He is the son of a wealthy developer.  I read in the paper he is leading all the candidates in fund raising, having generated over 100 grand.  It’s almost like he is trying to buy the election, we have received at least four or five times more junk from him than any other candidates.  Even if I was voting republican, I would not support the guy.  You can’t be too smart if you think burying people in junk mail is going to win votes.

Last night there were two disgusting things I watched on two different shows.  On Survivor they had the traditional “eat disgusting things” challenge.  They are in China this season so of course knowing what Chinese eat, this isn’t going to be good.  Ali left the room during this segment, I wished I did afterward.  Among the disgusting things they ate were chicken hearts, eel, and most disgusting of all, baby turtles and unhatched ducklings.  I always fancied myself as being able to hack Survivor, however my love of animals would wreck me.  I would fall flat on my face being the hunter or fisherman.  In a challenge like last nights, if I had the turtles or ducklings in front of me I would have just bowed out.

Then while I was in bed watching Last One Standing, a show of a bunch of guys traveling the globe participating in various third world fighting competition, I had to fast forward through another segment.  They were in India doing some foot fighting thing.  The locals tradition before a tournament is to eat dog.  The actually showed the dog that was going to be eaten.  He was just lying there sleeping.  It really made me sick.  No they didn’t show them killing the dog but man, that was just shitty.  With as close as we are to Nicki, eating a dog is akin to cannibalism in our book.

  On last week’s show they sacrificed a cow. They showed the cow tied up, on the ground and then one of the villagers stabbed it to let it bleed to death. They showed the blood coming out while the cow was squirming around.  It was f’ing sick.  I didn’t know it was coming or else I would fast forwarded over that as well.  I know in the big picture it’s somewhat hypocritical of me to have this love of animals but still eat meat.  I have read all the horror stories about the meat business, how the animals are treated and if I think about it, it does really bother me.  So for the most part, I just try to not think about it. 

It was actually 69 degrees this morning.  Normally once we finally dip into the 60’s overnight that is a sign that the cooler, less humid weather is on it’s way.  It felt good.  90 degrees and 90% humidity does grow a bit old after awhile.

You can see just how hairy my face currently is, yuck.

This weekend I want to finish up the surprisingly big job of pruning the trees on our property.  I also am planning to swing by my mom’s place to caulk around her newly installed ceiling and at that time swap out vehicles.  I am going to let her drive my truck while I drive her Rav 4 for a few days.  Mom says that she has this weird issue that her brakes intermittently will fail momentarily while the AC is running.  So she has just not been using AC.  AC in Florida is kind of important so I want to see if I can recreate the problem.  If it happens to me I will probably be better at describing the conditions to a mechanic.

This hard to see but if you look closely you will recognize that this is the display of the HP Color laserjet in my office and yes, that is the local Naples weather conditions on the screen.   Pretty cool huh? It’s a little hack I found while perusing for Roboquad modifications.  This site has TONS of do it yourself, geeky projects and hacks.  Check it out.

So my Roboquad showed up yesterday.  As you can see, his coloring is a bit different than the one I posted last week which was all white.  This one I got from the Discovery store, I guess they have their own special color Roboquads, Sharper Image sells red ones.

  Before I was able to slap batteries in him and play, I had to release him from the shackles of his box.  Getting the robot out of the box was the most annoying unpacking experience I ever underwent.  Roboquad was secured by 8 thick wires coated in plastic.  They were twisted in a way that you couldn’t undo easily.  After trying to untwist the wires unsuccessfully for 5 minutes I had enough and wielded the scissors.  The wires were so thick that I had to squeeze mightily with the scissors to finally snip through.  By the time I got all 8 wires off I had to unscrew it from a plastic base that had another 4 screws in it.  I bet I literally spent 15 minutes getting the damn thing out of the box.

So I throw some batteries in it, fire it up and the Roboquad comes to life.  He does some quick diagnostic tests accompanied with flashing led’s and R2-D2 sounding beeps and noises.  The controller for him is a bit confusing at first and remains somewhat confusing even after.  There are dozens of movements the robot can do but they are accessed through various combinations of buttons on the controller.  You really need a manual handy at all times if you want to put him through his paces.

Of course the first thing I did was the demo mode where the robot “dances” it’s cute.  Then I started messing with the controller a bit, walking the robot around the floor.  Nicki of course was scared of it and scurried away to hide even though I assured her it was “safe”.  There were two modes so far that I liked the most. Guard mode, where the roboquad scans for movement in front of it while remaining still.  If it spots movement it roars to life, making a racket, flashing lights and moving around, a great cat prank.  The other mode I thought was cool was the autonomous one where the robot roams around freely, scanning back and forth for obstacles and avoiding them.  The noises this thing makes would drive Ali mad in no time so he may wind up spending more time at work with me than at home, we’ll see.  By the end of the night Nicki had lost her fear of it and actually jumped in front of it doing a play bow with the Roboquad, acting like she wanted it to chase her.  It was cute.   I will probably wind up doing some sort of “hack” with it, that is what makes it fun.

Last night in the shower I had an Alzheimer’s moment.  I normally wash my hair first.  Last night, I washed my hair, forgot I washed my hair, and started to wash it again.  I was like “What in the F is wrong with me??!!”  My hair was extra clean last night.

I can’t wait to shave this beard off, it sucks.  

On the way home from work I pull up behind an old, plump woman riding her pink accented scooter with matching pink helmet.  It just struck me as funny so I took a picture.

The first 10 minutes is scary enough, if you have an hour and a half to kill watch it all. Suspicious stock activity on American Airlines pre-crash, guy taking out a 3.5 million dollar insurance policy on building 7 six weeks before the event, government testing of remote piloted full size planes and much more.

You know I have heard for a long time about various conspiracy theories floating around regarding 9/11.  For some reason I never bothered to look into them for one second.  Maybe it was because 9/11 was such a traumatic thing, exploring the possibility that the rabbit hole goes much deeper than we have been told is a scary, disgusting thought.  Maybe even I put the possibility that the Bush administration was somehow behind the events of that day beyond the realm of even ridiculous possibilities.  Well yesterday I started watching and reading. To do the same all you need to do is punch in 911 conspiracy into Google. Let me just give the cliff notes version of what I saw and read.

Almost exactly a year before the disaster there was a prime directive of sorts put out by a group of Neo Con, right wingers that had members such as Rumsfeld, Dick Cheyney and other high ranking government officials that laid out a plan for America in the 21st Century.  There vision was one of the USA becoming a bigger global power than it already was.  A key component of this was to gain more control over world oil reserves.  They mention that in order to have the support of the populace in such a movement, it would take an event similar to Pearl Harbor which would catalyze the country through fear into support of whatever it took to keep them safe. (wish I could find the exact quote)  Low and behold, almost exactly a year later, we have our new Pearl Harbor.

I saw video of dozens of people describing what sounded like multiple explosions right before the buildings collapsed, possibly just the end result of the initial impact or possibly detonations going off.  I find it odd that I never saw these clips of what these people described when the event was going down.  Conspiracy theorists claim that steel buildings had NEVER collapsed due to fire up to this point.  Obviously this was no normal fire.  However, when you look at the building 7 collapse things get a lot more hard to believe. 

Building 7 was across the street from the towers and had some damage from falling debris from the north and south towers.  There were some fires on I believe the 7th and 12th floor.  The fires were nothing compared to what the WTC was experiencing.  However building 7 fell as well and it didn’t collapse from the top down, the bottom gave way, even though there was no explainable reason for it collapse.  Fireman, police, reporters and others on the scene heard a series of explosions before building 7 came down.  That one makes no sense no matter how I try to justify it.

Then there is this video documenting the second plane as it hit the building. 

Two things are described here.  First off if you look at the bottom of the plane there appears to be something attached to it.  The explosion that is created on impact is much larger than the would be expected based on the the fuselage size of the plane.  Second, it appears that just before the plane hits the building there is a flash of light that could be from a missile being launched right before impact which could explain the HUGE explosion once the plane enters.  How would a terrorist group get a commercial plane off the runway with something strapped to it’s belly without someone noticing?  The answer is they can’t.  There were also reports that witnesses described the second plane as having no windows on the sides and having a strange logo on the front of it.  This is really getting sticky.

There are many other suspicious things about that day like why normal protocol was ignored when these planes deviated from their planned routes.  The attack on the pentagon supposedly was caused by another commercial liner but there is no footage that shows the plan actually hitting the building even though the complex is under constant video surveillance, that surveillance was never made public.  The only public video of the incident I have seen does not show a plane at all, basically you see the building intact one moment and exploding the next.  The 75 foot impact on the Pentagon is much smaller than would be expected if a plane with 125 foot wingspan would impact the building.  The popular theory here is the building was actually hit by a cruise missile.

It is extremely disturbing to me to even entertain the idea that our government would even think about the idea of planning such events in order to cultivate enough fear to allow them to carry out their hidden agenda.   As much as I can’t stand Geroge W Bush, to imagine him signing on to something so insane seems just impossible.  But after spending an hour looking, reading and thinking about it,  maybe, just maybe we are really just under the control of a bunch of mad men whom have been playing us as fools for their own personal agendas.  History says it has happened many times before, history may prove that 6 years ago it happened again.

I broke the 25 minute mark today with my 300 workout, a number I didn’t expect to cross for awhile yet. (24:48)  The big time savings came when I cut down my normal 2:30 or so break setting up for floor wipers down to around 1:40.   I just felt pumped up to do it today.

I forgot to mention what I thought was the funniest stunt of Jackass.  The one guy walks into a hardware store, drops his pants, sits on one of the display toilets in the middle of the store and drops a deuce while reading the paper.  When one of the employees spots him they chase him away and then stand in disbelief at what the guy just did.  It makes me laugh just thinking about it.

Last week I posted a picture of a cool little robot I was getting.  I forgot to mention it to Ali.  Ali mentioned to me yesterday that she made a comment on that post, saying something about she would put her foot down about buying that robot if I asked since she thought it would scare the dog, woops.  I had to fess up that the robot would be showing up on our doorstep this week.  The news was not received warmly.

On Saturday morning after I did a few things around the house I went over to my mom’s place to put up the ceiling fan since we now had electric.  Things went surprisingly well.  In the span of an hour and a half I had the fan up and tested and even put the new bottom weather stripping on her screen door.  I called mom at work and let her know the procedure was a success and I was out the door.  I’m not used to things going so smoothly.  Mom called after she got home to tell me how much she liked it.  I need to get over there one more time to caulk along the outer edge.  While I was there I saw mom’s ashtray and lighter on the table.  When she smokes, she smokes only a tiny fraction of the cigarette.  I think she explained to me once that to her it was better than smoking the entire thing.  I guess it is but I would argue that if you can get away with only smoking a tiny bit of it, just take the leap and quit altogether?  I had ideas of stealing her lighter but I figured that she would just get mad at me like she did when I hid her cigarettes as a kid.

The rest of my Saturday was surprisingly laid back.  Ali was at work all day and a pretty steady rain kicked in during the afternoon that continued the rest of the day, keeping me indoors.  I played some WoW and sat down and watched the uncut, dvd version of the original Jackass.  There is a bit too much of balls and ass in it for me but it still is funny as hell.  I laughed out loud quite often.

One of the things I did during the day was harvest our crop of Lima beans.  I never tried to grow them before.  Our beans were on the small side.  Some of them I waited too long to harvest.  When they were cooked they were very hard.  I ate them anyway.

On Sunday morning while Ali went to two classes at the gym I went out and mowed and weed whacked everything so Ali and I could dig into our big project for the weekend when she got back, trimming the trees.  The cabbage palms we have throughout our landscape are cool but they need some regular maintenance to keep them looking good.  I haven’t done that regular maintenance in at least a year, maybe longer.  My idea was to start in the front of the property and work back.  I figured we could easily get it all knocked out before the Eagles game at 4:15.  Haha.

The trees have grown considerably since we have lived there, in fact the one nearest the road is so tall that I couldn’t even reach the upper limbs even perched on my fully extended ladder.  As cabbage palms grow, their old fronds die and eventually get brittle and snap off when a strong wind grabs them.  To keep them nice looking you want to trim the fronds off before this happens, else you have a bunch of jagged edges.  Well this front tree was full of jagged edges. 

The old branches also decay over time and some times this process is accelerated by carpenter ants that like to live in the tree and eat the dead wood.   I became quite intimate with these ants as the trimming progressed.  I was also introduced to another species of ant, a very tiny sort of ant that also lived among the upper branches of the tree.  As I was cutting down some branches and pulling and snapping off dead wood I was showered in ants.  Luckily neither of these type of ants are vicious like fire ants.  It was disgusting all the same.  The one time I pulled on a seed branch and  unleashed a downpour of the tiny ants AND their little larvae.  They coated my face and arms.  I scurried down the ladder and had Ali help get them off me, it was gross.  After that I constantly felt like I had ants on me.

It was incredible how many branches I cut down.  Initially we enlisted the tractor with the yard cart in tow to deposit the tree refuse into the ditch and the fill pit.  It become apparent that with the volume of limbs, the truck would make more sense.  It also became apparent that there was no way in hell we would get them all done by 4:15.  Plus Ali was rather grumpy.  She was understandably tired from two bust ass classes in the morning, she didn’t realize this chore was going to be quite so laborious.  We wound up just getting the trees in the front of the property done.  I told Ali we could finish them up next weekend.  I may go out during the week after work and cut some limbs too.

So after a quick jump in the pool it was time for another Eagles game.  Again the game was another display of ineptitude with the Eagles being unable to score touchdowns.  When Donovan finally got a touchdown late in the game to put the Birds up 16-12 he celebrated like he won the Super Bowl.  The Eagles were in position to win.  The Bears got the ball back with 1:43 left, no timeouts and pinned back on their 3 yard line, a very difficult situation, unless you are playing the Eagles.  The defense allowed the Bears to march straight down the field and score, offering nearly no resistance.  It was disgusting.  Although the game was a snoozefest up to the last two minutes, the collapse at the end got my blood boiling as I swore loudly at the TV.  This team just sucks.  They have no heart and constantly play down to whatever competition is in front of them.  I almost hope they lose out so we can get Fat Andy and the core of this team out of here and start over.  They have gone as far as they are gonna go with this group.  I want a coach and a QB with some fire in his eyes.

Although there is plenty of blame to go around let me list my biggest disappointments with the team so far.  In no particular order.

1. Jim Johnson – his scheme is old and ineffective, he has gotten a free pass over recent years despite a defense that has been squishy more often than solid.

2. Takeo Spikes –  has he made a single play this year?

3. Considine – it looks like that all that intensive off season training has served him well.  It seems like every week he makes the highlight reel as someone runs through a weak arm tackle of his or getting burned in coverage. He is a back up at best.

4. Jevon Kearse – he has nothing left, a taller Mike Mamula at this point that we are paying lots of money to.

5. Rocca – what good is a guy that can kick the ball 65 yards once every 10 punts if he mixes in 4 shanks in between?

6. Reno Mahe – the least dangerous punt returner in the NFL

7. Donovan McNabb – yes he is coming off injury, but he still after 10 years in the league is alarmingly inaccurate.  His knee isn’t connected to his arm the last time I checked.  Every game you can count on at least two or three one hoppers mixed in with a collection of bad behind/over throws.

8. Andy Reid – I never have seen a coach that is worse at adjusting to changing game conditions.  If A doesn’t work there is no plan B, just try A harder.  His mild mannered, vanilla style is just old.  I’m so tired of seeing no fire out of the guy in charge.

Last night I had more bizarre dreams, I only remember part of one.  I was playing in a Texas Hold Em tournament.  Keener was there as well.  It was an a very odd table that was filled with junk.  Keener only played one hand and then bowed out.  I played for a little bit but all sorts of weird shit was going on at the game.  Instead of having a dealer deal the cards, various players were dealing.  The one time an asian women was dealing and she dealt the cards face up.  I asked her what the hell she was doing??  She said that was the way she wanted to play, it made it easier if you knew the other players cards.  I was speechless with confusion.  One hand the guy next to me somehow had three cards instead of two.  He was all excited when he held three of a kind.  When I told him he should only have two cards he was very disappointed.

The rest of the night I had other dreams that I don’t remember details about except that they were scary, the type of dreams you are relieved to wake up from. 

Not much to say today.  Mom’s neighbor who is the electrician stopped by her place and got juice out to the lanai.  Mom said he said something about some wires being pinched or something.  I don’t quite know how they were pinched or how he fixed it but if it works, it works.  I plan to stop out there sometime during the weekend to get the ceiling fan in place.

Sometimes I really wonder why I play WoW anymore.  Last night was a perfect example.  I was in a group with four other people trying to do an instance and I was just miserable.  It was a PUG (pick up group) which is normally just a mess.  PUG’s are normally bad because more often than not they are filled with either inexperienced and/or young, annoying, stupid kids.  Well this was no exception.  I found myself getting incredibly annoyed, incredibly fast.  First the one kid joins the group, we start and then moments later he says he has to go, no explanation.  Then a little bit later, another kid says he has to go eat dinner.  I spew off some annoyed words about the idiocacy of people joing an instance group if they know they have to leave?  What is the point.  Well shortly after the kid left we all died on a boss that we shouldn’t have.  I simply say “Lamers…” and exit the game.  The game really is running out of steam with me. I just have no patience with it anymore.

The weekend looks to be once again a busy one.  Ali may wind up having to go into work on Saturday so I will be home plugging away on stuff around the house. 

The medical business in the USA is so incredibly ridiculous.  A co-worker here had her husband go in to the hospital for a total of two and a half days for back surgery.  She got her intitial bill from the hospital, $76,000. What in the F is going on???  If she didn’t have insurance she would be financially ruined, just like that.  Medical care is so broken.  

I find myself thinking about our trip out west quite often.  Specifically, the calmness and serenity of my dad’s place.  The isolation doesn’t sound quite so bad right now. I’m sick of society. 

I am now about 3 weeks into my growing a beard thing.  The opinion of females around the office is still leaning towards the clean shaven look  however the women that do like it seem to be much more energetic in their support.  Some women around the office I rarely talk to have made it a point to stop me and tell me how much they like it, how it makes me look more “mature” and “sophisticated”.  I just don’t get it.  I think it makes me look like a vagrant.

Having facial hair this long presents other problems.  For example anything you drink winds up soaking the hair around your mouth and winds up dripping down it. Eating anything messy which is normally a simple clean up with a clean shaven face becomes a chore with a beard.  When you blow your nose you are again directly in the path of more hair.  The hair is long enough that it sometimes will tickle the bottom of my nose which causes a considerable nuisance.  Thank goodness I normally sleep on my back.  Sleeping on my side would suck, having hair grinding into my face all night would not equate to good sleep.

I have quietly attempted to relaunch my running career, partly to assist in my lean out process for the spartan contest and partly because I simply miss running.  On both Tuesday and today I ran  one mile at a bit more than a 9 minute mile pace on the treadmill.  At least so far the only significant physical side effect has been the front of my shins being sore from my big feet flopping on the ground.  Other than that, it’s been ok.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed.