All posts by Duf

Found out some interesting news. They are planning to have a large catholic university a few miles from our house!! I heard the property values have basically skyrocketed overnight. They are expecting for it to be done 2005-2006. Wow that would be something else. I even heard ideas they have about having a big time athletics program. It looks like we really hit the jackpot as far as property placement goes.

Big job this weekend is to give the grass a good cutting. It will take 3 or 4 hours but it should be the end of it till spring.

Lots of gaming and RC plane flying this weekend!

The Bachelor finale was on last night. He picked who I thought he would. Although the woman has an incredibly annoying nervous laugh that she does incessantly. She also talks during kissing which could be a real pain in the ass. He actually proposed which was quite surprising. Hope it works out but I doubt it.

Went out early this morning to fly my plane. Thick fog made it a little tough as well as creating a risk from water on the electronics. It was fun anyway. I did my first low altitude roll. I hope to get a lot of flying time in this weekend.

Wow I can’t believe it is the end of November. The holidays really seem to creep up on you down here because of the weather. It doesn’t seem possible for it to be Thanksgiving because it is 80 degrees and beautiful. I guess I will get used to it. I suppose the Christmas shopping must commence soon. Yuk.

3 day work week next week! Should be great. We are supposed to have a “party” next Saturday. The guest list is small and getting smaller. It may wind up just being us and one other couple. Coordinating parties sucks.

Last night at the gym I did 6 plates each side on the leg press 4 times. A new personal best. Yea, who cares but I was happy about it. My bad knee has definitely been better since I cut back on the vball and started taking that wonderfully slimy and bad tasting flaxseed oil. Yep it tastes bad but has all sorts of good stuff in it for you. Chasing it with a shot of OJ minimizes the aftertaste.

Here is another gym gripe for ya. Put the plates back in order! How annoying is it when you are trying to get plates for the barbells and someone has but 5’s, 10′, 25’s and 45’s all on the same arm of the weight tree? Drives me crazy that people are too lazy to put them back in order. How damn hard is it? People suck.

If you are considering buying a new pc, DO NOT buy it here. These idiots have jerked around a friend of mine on a system he bought like you would not believe. They have been saying the system has been shipping for 2 weeks, it still hasn’t shipped. A bunch of rip off artists. I can’t stand companies like that.

Well I got a DVD-RW disk finally. Expensive little bugger. 10 bucks. So I threw it in my pc and used the Sony DVD app to copy a small 10 meg video file to it. It only burns at 1X so it took awhile. That was successful so I tried to burn another file to it. No can do. Evidently the program closed the disk so no further writing was possible! Argggggh! A 4.7 gig rewriteable disk now has 1 10 meg file on it with no further writing possible. DAMN IT! I guess I will get the hang of it eventually. I want to be able to rip my vball videos all to one DVD and have it playable in a DVD drive.

I think I have the PC set up as I want it. Using XP Home is a bit of a pain but I don’t feel like loading hacked Pro and then have the issues with updates. It does what I need it to.

How is this for the ultimate in geekiness. Sunday I am sitting in front of the big screen playing my Xbox online that is wired into my CAT 5 home network into my cable modem against some dude from Texas. At the same time my wife is watching her Home and Garden show that was taped on our digital video recorder. She has 1 side of the tv and I have the other in a split screen. Shudder. I scare myself at times. 🙂 I do other things, honest!

Mailed in all the rebates for the computer pacakage yesterday. You ever notice how much of a pain in the ass they make it? I suppose they do that purposefully in hopes that people won’t go through the hassle. I wonder how many people just say “F it”?

There is a 30 something looking woman that goes to our gym that is chubby, yet she always wears super tight spandex and a tight sportsbra top that squishes all of her fat around the midlle out so that she looks like an overstuffed sausage. Why? She can’t possibly think that looks good. Here is a hint for overweight people working out at the gym, COVER UP! T shirts and baggy shorts are your friends. At least until you start losing some poundage. I give them credit for going and making the effort to exercise, just don’t squish your fat out for all to see.

I spent most of last night reloading applications on the new puter. I almost have it where I want it. Did some video encoding on the new box to see the speed difference. MUCH faster! That’s cool. I am gonna try to return my DVD+RW media for DVD-RW media today at Target. Hopefully they don’t give me a hard time.

I made a page that has the video clip from my news interview. Here it is.

2 more half.com sales yesterday. In my first 2 weeks I made 110 bucks. Not a bad deal for minimal work. I am close to 20 sales overall at this point.

Happy Monday. An uncharacteristic gloomy weekend in SW-FLA. A massive cool front came through that made the entire weekend rainy and COOL. This morning it was 49 degrees out at our place! It is supposed to warm up gradulaly the next few days.

So what else is there to do on a dark, cold and wet weekend? SPEND MONEY! Our Best Buy had it’s grand opening this weekend. It is a HUGE store with everything a techno geek like me could ever want. I went on Saturday AND Sunday. On Saturday it was a mob scene so I only stayed long enough to grab an XBOX live package. Read more about that here. However on Sunday I saw the Best Buy ad in the paper. They were offering 2 year interest free financing so I HAD to jump on that deal. I picked up a P4 2.4 gig Sony box, 17 inch monitor and printer. I will sell my old box to help offset the expense. Now I am in the middle of the cumbersome task of migrating from one box to another, always a fun time, NOT. It came with a DVD-RW drive. Did you know that there is a difference between a DVD-RW drive and a DVD+RW drive? I didn’t. I bought a 3 pack of DVD+RW media to try on my system. Of course, I have a DVD-RW drive which does not play or write DVD+RW media. I had no idea. Dumb standards. SO now I have to find some DVD-RW media.

My wife pointed out to me that my money spending over the past couple months has been rather crazy. Unfortunately, I have to agree. Let the belt tightening commence.

The Eagles beat up on the Cardinals but Donovan broke his ankle. Ouch. Fans will love him forever for playing with it. Strangely enough he had his best passing performance in a month and a half on the bad ankle. Perhaps because he couldn’t hop on his happy feet and overthrow balls. Oh well, sounds like the rest of the season will be the Koy show. Should be interesting.

Nothing much going on. A couple people from work saw me on the news and harrassed me about it, no big deal.

I flew my plane this morning in brisk 55 degree weather before work. I wanted to test out the new battery pack. It seems to be heavy but provides good duration.

Today, goin to the gym, go home, watch reality TV for a couple hours, go to bed.

The new Best Buy opens tomorrow. I could get a job there and was semi offered one but I just can’t imagine giving up the free time.

I was on the local news last night. Weird eh? A week or two ago I wrote a letter to the local paper regarding the abundance of dangerous, unsafe vehicles on the road down here. I suggested the Sheriff’s department provide the public with a hotline, email address or website that we can use to easily report unsafe vehicles. Florida has no annual safety inspections of vehicles so people drive cars that are literally falling apart. Anyway this letter happened to be published yesterday. Coincidently, yesterday there was a big truck accident that killed the driver where his load of plywood was not securely fastened and began pulling off the truck, causing the accident. Evidently a woman reporter saw my letter and wanted to use it as a tie in to the truck wreck story. She evidently had been waiting for some sort of opportunity to do a piece about the lack of safety of many vehicles in our area. I got home from the gym and heard a message from her asking for me to contact her. I did and she said she wanted to come out to do a quick interview regarding the letter. Surprised, I said sure. She showed up 45 minutes later. Both she and her camera man were very nice. We talked a bit beforehand and then shot a quick interview. I was very nervous but tried to give answers that sounded credible and genuine. However the main point of my letter was about vehicles that had obvious safety failures. The point of her story was primarily all of the construction and lawn maintenance trucks that don’t secure their loads and have debris flying out onto the roadways. So in the final piece on the news they used one sentence. It sounded pertinent and fit in with the piece so I guess it was ok. I am gonna rip it to a video clip just to have around. My 5 seconds of fame, woopee.

Cool front blew in today it is soooooo nice right now. Mid 70’s and low humidity, perfect.

Where to start? Hmm well Friday night Ali and I did the Teco concession stand thing again. They needed someone to do the cotton candy stand so I volunteered our services. Ugh, I spent 3 hours spinning my right arm around the cotton candy machine. You also get covered in the junk. It was not a good time. I’ll never eat cotton candy again. For all you youngsters considering cotton candy making as your vocation of choice, DON’T!

Saturday we did some house work and Mike came over in the morning to fly our RC planes. Look for pics and videos here. We got some cool aerial shots of our property.

Sunday was our big Disney day. We left at 6 am and didn’t get home till about 10:15 pm. It was a lot of fun. We ran into an unsuspected snag. Evidently Disney has implemented biometrics (finger print scanning) in an effort to stop people from using 4 day passes with a day or two left on them that people buy. Basically when a card is first used they scan the fingerprints of the person using it. Then any subsequent uses they scan again to make sure the fingerprints match. Ali and I saw this and were nervous, of course we failed the scan. However after simply saying that we were the people on the cards they typed in a code and let us through. Even funnier at Epcot, Alison passed the fingerprint scan. 🙂 Evidently they aren’t that accurate so that would explain why it was easy to get in.

We went to Animal Kingdom and Epcot. The parks weren’t packed but full enough. By the end of the day we were both so sick of humanity we could have thrown up. You are inundated with big fat slobs, screamin kids and armies of strollers and wheelchairs. I can’t imagine doing 4 days of park hopping back to back. Regardless it was fun to do something different and we saw all sorts of cool stuff at the parks. The weather was perfect! My favorite things were the free flight bird show, the dinosaur ride, and the safari ride. Look for pics of the trip here. I used our new digital camera for the pics. Great pics and with a 128 meg flash card you can do over 200 pics one one card at the highest res. WOW!

I was off work Monday for Veteran’s Day. (Government jobs rock!) Had a list of about 10 or 11 things I wanted to get done. I did em all. 🙂 Finally got the steering wheel straight on the Buick. I also flew my plane 6 or 7 times.

This week the new Best Buy opens in Naples! I can’t wait to check it out!

5 more half.com orders going out today. I am really surprised at the amount of sales I am getting.

Wow temperature in the 50’s overnight the last 2 nights! A pleasant change however the warmer weather is back already. Sooner or later we will settle into the awesome winter pattern of highs in the 70’s lows in the 50’s.

I have the Xbox all hooked up, it will replace my 3 year old DVD player as well. The games look great on the big screen and sound even better on the surround sound. I hooked it up to my broadband connection already so once I hook in to Xbox live I will be ready to rock.

My half.com business is booming. I just received my 9th order in a week today! How easy.

My webcam seems to be getting semi regular visitors. I often forget I even have the one in my office. I am sure there are lots of stupid pics hitting the net.

This site is EXTREMELY funny. You must check it out.

We are going to Disney this Sunday, it should be a fun long weekend. I got my extra batteries and charger for the RC plane. Mike is coming over Saturday morning to do some flying around our backyard. Should be cool.