All posts by Duf

Huessein must take us for a bunch of idiots. He unexpectedly plays a video of him walking through a jubilant Iraqi crowd, supposedly today, high fiving, kissing. Such a sham, the guy is obviously one of Saddam’s body doubles. Looks strikingly younger. I highly doubt it is recent footage either. I mean come on, really………….. I’m so sick of the SOB. I hope they capture him alive so we can make the rest of his days hell on Earth.

This weekend we are going to the East Coast to see the opening weekend of the AVP tour. I am looking forward to it. Should be tons-o-fun.

Today the live video feed is out one of our front windows in the office. Watch the traffic drive by and maybe even catch a glimpse of Spook our cat. Open windows media player then OPEN URL http://duf.homedns.org:9090 Happy weekend!

Is there a medical condition that makes you smell like mothballs? There is an older gentleman at the gym, probably late 50’s who ALWAYS smells like a freshly opened can of mothballs. It smells horrible. So much so that you will normally see a ring of unused equipment around wherever he is in the gym. People who venture into the smell zone quickly give a look of disgust and vacate. I can not believe this guy does not smell himself and what in the world he would do that makes him smell this way. Nasty.

My mom’s stuff arrived from PA last night. We got all of the furniture placed in her room and all of the other stuff put away through out the house. Not too bad. She will be on her way down here in approximately a month. Should be fun.

We watched this weeks 2 American Idol shows on Fox last night (TIVO). Another contestant got thrown off the show because of criminal charges so they wound up not kicking anyone off last night. Of course they didn’t spring this until the last minute of the show. Kicking someone off would have meant Fox would have one less episode to milk the public with. Bastards. Can you detect the slight contempt? The new Bachelor series has started and I haven’t watched it at all. I think I have pretty much hit my reality tv limit. It seems as though many others have as well. New reality tv entries are not doing very well at all.

People that know me well claim that when I get a “bug up my ass” there is no stopping me. Last night was one of those nights. My mom’s furniture is going to be arriving either today or tomorrow and I still had a ceiling fan to hang in her room so I had to get it done last night. Once I began, I discovered that there was no power to the outlet in the ceiling that I was attaching the fan to! I had 2 options, wait and call the builder the next day and tell them they installed a dead outlet or look at it myself. Of course I HAD to get it done last night so I ripped into the wall switch. Upon comparison with identical switches in other rooms, it appears as though they wired that switch wrong. Through lengthy trial and error and innumerable trips back and forth to the breaker box to kill power so I could try a new rig, I finally got it working. After getting power I had to go through the business of getting the fan mounted on the ceiling. In all I spent 3 and a half hours on it and got to bed close to midnight. Yea, I had a bug up my ass but at least I got it done.

No puppy problems in the last 24 hours.

Interesting things going on in my buddies site. Check it out. Some real funny stuff if you dig around a bit.

The tuki live video feed has audio today as well! Open windows media player and OPEN URL http://duf.homedns.org:9090 to see what the green feathered friend is up to.

I ain’t no cheat, I’m just a regular failure – Kid Rock

Good stuff….

I got the live video feed working from the house. 30 FPS from my house using a regular broadband connection. Granted if I go above 2 simultaneous users it is going to slow down dramatically. Still the video quality is awesome. If you want to try it out start windows media player. Choose FILE/OPEN URL. Enter http://duf.homedns.org:9090 With any luck you will be connected to a live feed of whatever my camcorder is pointed at. Right now it is pointed at our parrot.

Can you get more dutch than this:

They make great ring bologna, you pay a little more than in a store but the shit is awsome. i can go to lens and buy a ring of berks and half of it goes to wasted because we dont eat it all. if i go to the highway, the ring lasts around 2 days

i’ll go there saturday and get some lunchmeat, cheese, rolls, chicken salad, mac or pot salad, maybe even go to highway meats and get a ring bologna

You would think this was posted by some 70 year old PA dutch guy, nope someone in their early 30’s. Funny as hell.

Does anyone else play those Orbit pop under flash games? They are simplistic as it gets but for some reason I find myself playing them from time to time. Something about being able to hit a homerun everytime……

As usual, the weekend flew by. I got all of my chores done more or less. I also got in some flying time and did a new plane video which can be found here. We got to watch Bourne Identity and Road to Perdition. Bourne Identity had a solid B rating going until the last 5 minutes when Matt Damon rides on the back of a dead fat guy, falling down 6 floors, while he bullseyes a baddie right in the forehead and then lands on top of the fattie without a scratch. Otherwise, it was a solid movie that kept me entertained. Road to Perdition was a very good flick but dont look for anything uplifting about it. Tom Hanks is a great actor.

The puppy had one accident inside this weekend, however this morning was classic. The puppy is getting too big to sit up front in the car with Ali so we have been letting her in the back seat with a towel. Normally she is fine. This morning, she was very antsy, climbing all over the place and wouldn’t settle down. As we are about 5 minutes out from the house, Ali yells PULL OVER! I am like, “What the hell?” Ali yells, NICKI CRAPPED IN THE BACK SEAT!. Ugh. So I pull off the road where there is no shoulder and Ali yanks her out and the crap covered towel. Of course the puppy has stepped in it by this time so it expands the mess. Ali tried to clean her up as best she could with tissues. She threw the crap covered towel in the trunk and we continued on our merry way to work with the windows down to try to minimize the strong smell of dog shit that enveloped the interior. GROSS. Happy frickin Monday.

Homey turned me on to the Windows Media 9 encoder. He asked me to open a URL in windows media player. I did and shortly there after I was looking out the window of his office in what looked to be realtime! Thw new encoder allows you to become a mini streaming video service. It really is amazing. With 250k of bandwidth you can get 30 fps video. You really need to see it to believe it. I set it up on my home box and had Charlie test it. It worked great. I set it up as a test on my parrot this morning, but for some reason it isn’t working right now. I need to mess with some settings. Next week I will have a test up for you to check out. It really is cool.

As I mentioned previously, last weekend I installed a cat door so the the cats have a safe haven from the puppy. The door has a plastic swinging door on it. The cats would not go through it so I had to rig it to stay open. Last night I spent 45 minutes trying to get our one cat to understand the concept of a cat door, to no avail. I sat there on the floor and repeatedly demonstrated how the door easily swings open. All she would do is look at me and meow. Then I put her inside the room so the only way she could come out was to go through the cat door. I sat on the other side coaching and encouraging her. No luck. I walked away. She sat on the other side meowing for 45 minutes and would not walk through the damn door. I finally broke and wired the door back up again. Dumb cats.

This weekend has nothing noteworthy on the schedule besides watching some DVD’s and doing house maintenance chores.

Last night was a puppy setback, although it was probably due to our negligence. She pee’d in the kitchen after we got home. Normally she has to go after long car trip but we didn’t make sure she did. Later in the night Ali took her out and she did a number 1, so she brought her back in and went back to take a shower. I came walking out of the office and discovered 5 large turds in the middle of the carpet. I had to control my rage. The initial urge is to hammer the dog but I know it is because Ali did not let her outside long enough. I cleaned up the mess and then put the dog in the bathroom with Ali. The puppy held it all night again without making a mess in the cage so hopefully it was just an isolated incident.

This morning I reported my first reckless driver to the police. It was just ridiculous and I have decided instead of catching up and shooting the idiot the finger, I will be much better served by getting his license plate in front of the police on a regular basis. The moron passed me on the right in a right turn lane, cut me off and then crossed the double yellow line and passed a truck illegally on the left. Who knows if the police will actually do anything but I hope they do. I was sure to give an accurate description of the vehicle, all the way down to the “Good Ole Boys” windshield sticker.

The war coverage almost is too much. In the rush to be the first to report information, a lot of the first reports on things later turn out to be inaccurate. I’d prefer they wait a bit and get the news right. I saw the POW tape that was shown on Iraqui TV. Bad stuff.

We had a good weekend. On Saturday we went to a Red Sox spring training game versus my hometown Phillies. The Phillies won in a game with 5 or 6 homeruns. The stadium was PACKED and it had a nice aura about it even though it is smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The stadium was old but I preferred it to Hammonds stadium which we attended last year for a Twins spring training game. We could only get general admission seating which meant we either got to stand or sit in a old style bleacher area in the right field corner. It was shoulder to shoulder but we had some nice folks around us. It brought back memories of my youth when baseball meant EVERYTHING to me. I used to know everybody on every team. I hardly give it any thought anymore. I don’t know if it is the disappointment of my own failed aspiration of playing pro baseball our just my disgust with all the player strikes and greed in the game. I just don’t care much about it anymore. Even so, it felt good to be back in the environment again.

On Sunday we hung gutters for our neighbors and then did a number of little home projects. It was dreary and rainy all day which is a rarity in Fla, so we took advantage of it. We put in a cat door in the utility room so the cats have a safe haven from the puppy. The puppy has been ok. She is a handful that requires a LOT of our attention but we are sort of getting used to it. Maybe we don’t notice just how much our our focus is on babysitting her since we have been doing it for close to a month now.

I got a bunch of flights in with my RC planes in, including an onboard video flight session with my new SlowStick. You can check out the videos at my RC site.

We watched two movies this weekend. Bowling for Columbine, a limited release documentary that focuses on guns and violence in America and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Crouching Tiger was a unique flick that had some unbelieveable fighting scenes with WOMEN! They were truly amazing. Overall the film was average but it was a nice change of pace. BFC was VERY good in my opinion. It really opens your eyes regarding why America is what it is. It is amazing how violent and fearful our society is. If you have a chance to watch this one I would recommend it. Unfortunately the director, Michael Moore really turned me off at the Oscars. He won for best documentary, but then decided to use his speech time to spew anti-war propoganda, something the recepients were specifically told not to do. It was very distasteful and he was booed off the stage. Good.

Tempering any good feeling I had about the weekend was the war coverage. Things are starting to get real. POW’s, loss of life and the realization that this is not going to be a walk in the park. I really feel terrible for the people involved. I often wonder how I would react in a situation like that. I would hope I would respond favorably to the call of duty but I can imagine it has to be terrifying to realize that you are literally throwing yourself into a potential meat grinder. I have faith in our preparation, technology and personnel. I hope that translates into a swift resolution to this.