Archives 2004

We’ve all exercised bad judgement in our lives. The other day for some reason I was thinking about some of the f ups I have been involved in over the years. Here are a couple that came to mind:

Putting bald tires on my 69 Buick Special deluxe when I was 16 or 17 so my inline 6 cylinder motor could do better burnouts. Shortly afterwards in a torrential downpour I hydroplane, slide into oncoming traffic and take out 4 vehicles in addition to my own.

On a trip back from AC with my girlfriend, I decide to pull over and pick up a hitchhiker. In the course of the drive we find out he is carrying a knife although he never threatened us with it. I drive the guy to the Harrisburg bus terminal somewhere around midnight, give him money to get a bus ticket, along with my address so he can repay me. Needless to say I never saw the money but at least we didn’t die. Never picked one up since.

In a quest to find my way career-wise, I spent close to 300 dollars for a starter kit for a vinyl repair business. At the time, 300 bucks was a HUGE amount of money to me. I read the book, did a little bit of practice on my own and never touched it again.

I drop out of colllege after my first trimester because I desperately missed my girlfriend from home. The same girlfriend that later keys my car and almost puts me through a fatal attraction type scenario trying to get rid of her.

I am selling my 87 Firebird. I have had little success but finally get a call from a motivated buyer named Whitey. I take the car to Whitey’s place to show him since he presently does not have transportation. In the course of conversation he tells me he doesnt have a car because he recently got out of prison. He loves the car but needs a way to get insurance and get to the bank. I ignorantly offer the firebird for him to drive with my tags and under my insurance to use to run these errands. After 3 days with multiple calls from me and multiple excuses from him, I finally track him down with my brother along as backup and reposses my car. At one point when I was driving home I could have sworn that a state trooper was following me. I was sure that Whitey had used my car in a crime and they were after me. What an idiot I am.

There are many more examples, I’ll be sure to post more. I amaze myself sometimes, amazingly dumb.

If you would like to review the Super Bowl commercials to see which of the subpar group was the best, go here.

If you were looking to see the video from the controversial Janet Jackson boob scandal, here is a clip of what was broadcast on TV. (removed due to reports it had pop ups and junk with it)

The past 3 nights we have let Nicki sleep on the floor in our bedroom. It was a proactive move in anticipation of us starting to have company stay at our place again. When crated, Nicki would start wimpering between 5 and 6 am everyday, even weekends. Since her crate is right outside the guest bedrooms this would make for a very unpleasant alarm clock for our guests. So far it has been going well, last night she didn’t make a peep and I slept straight through the night.

Last night I returned for week 2 of my volleyball follies. After week 1 my knee felt some little twinges of pain but nothing horrible. Last night my hitting shoulder went dead. It is a typical problem for me when I haven’t played for awhile. Something in my shoulder pinches and it deadens my arm. After 4 games I could hardly even lift the arm so I bagged it. My hitting was pathetic as a result. Other aspects were ok but if I can’t hit, I am not having any fun. I’ll keep pressing on and hope that it gets better. Normally after a few weeks of the aches and pains it tends to settle down. Towards the end of the night, one of the mexican guys had a collision that left him lying on the floor for an extended period of time. It was a bit scary, he said something around his neck hurt real bad. He usually walks to the gym but we stopped him in the parking lot and then I drove him home. I felt like a dope, I asked him if he spoke english and he said yah yah. I immediately realized that I heard him speaking english during the games so I felt stupid for asking him that. I dropped him off and wished him well.

Has there ever been an actor that has been in more movies in a 5 year period than Samulel L Jackson? It is incredible how many flicks he is in. I don’t quite understand why. He is a decent actor but not anywhere good enough to explain why his face is in so many films. I mean look at this list, incredible!

My letter to the editor hit the paper on Saturday. Evidently a lot of people here at work read that section with regularity. Within my first 15 minutes at work I had gotten a half dozen comments about it. Some were supportive, some thought it was cheap that I would get free tickets in the first place, oh well.

In contrast to last weekend where everything felt right with the world, Friday and Saturday felt like everything was a mess. I don’t know if it was the rainy weather we had those 2 days but I just felt antsy and anxious. I felt like the house was a mess, the outside was a mess, and there were a million things that need to be done. I spent a good part of the day trying to create an automated process to roll the numerous steps I have to take to update the Tivo into one batch file. I almost have it, but not quite. Saturday night we watched Bruce Almighty. Although it has several laugh out loud, real funny moments, in general I found it to be overly average and non-memorable.

On Sunday I loaded up the truck with the tractor and other lawn maintenance equipment and trucked over to mom’s place to clean up her yard. It took about an hour and a half. It normally would take less time but I had to chop up a huge fallen branch that was in her back yard. Mom said the branch was no wider than 6 inches in diameter. Hah! It was about 10 at it’s widest spot and a good 25 feet long. Mom never was good at estimating stuff.

The Super Bowl looked to be super boring during the first half. It was scoreless for a long time. I was already drifting off from being very tired from a night of bad sleep. The halftime show woke me up. Good performances and then the boob shot. Since I was watching this through the Tivo I was able to rewind and pause to verify what I just saw. Yep, it looks like her boob, imagine that. They acted after the fact that it was accident but I don’t understand how it could have been. Justin clearly pulled it off and it came off like it was designed to do so. I’m no stick in the mud but that was definitely inappropriate. I’d hate to have a kid and explain to them what that was all about. Then as the second half is ready to begin, somehow a person dressed as a ref manages to walk right into the middle of the field, strip and dance around. It is amazing that he was able to pull that off in our new airtight security environment that is SUPPOSED to be in place for an event like this.

The second half was like a totally different game. The teams marched up and down the field making big play after big play. It turned out to be one of the best Super Bowl games ever with a dramatic finish which enabled the Patriots to win their 2nd SB in 3 years. I tried to imagine how the Eagles would have performed in a game like that. I think they would have sucked. Thankfully this year they did not do a post game concert to go along with the pregame and halftime shows. Instead I hung on and watched All-Star survivor.

I am too tired to go into a lot of detail about it but it looks like it is going to be a GREAT show. They are making it way tough on the contestants. Rudy, Rupert, Colby and Richard Hatch are going to be the ones that make this very interesting, at least for me. So far, 3 days, and they can’t for the life of them get fire going. As a result they have no way to boil the contaminated water. They are hurting already and it looks to be getting worse.

SB commercial notes, there weren’t very many memorable commercials for me. The volleyball in the snow one was a personal fav of mine. The explosive horse fart one made me laugh. The Gilette Mach 3 one was ridiculous. How does being on top of your game, with imagery from Muhammad Ali and other sporting events equate with shaving? Shaving makes you feel like you are in the zone? Silly.

Check this out if you enjoy flash games, a TON of them here.

It’s been awhile since I fired off a letter to the editor but last night I was motivated to do so. We are big and popular now so f u.

“As a resident of the northeast estates, my wife and I always look forward to the county fair. One of the benefits of living right next to the fairgrounds has been the fair organizers offering free tickets to the residents that live next door. They did this as a courtesy for the increased traffic and noise that is generated by the fair during the 10 days it is running. I stopped by the fair office last night to pick up my tickets for this year.

I explained to the woman I was there to pick up two tickets. She said that the fair was no longer offering free tickets. She said that the event has become very ?popular? and ?big?. Puzzled, I tried to understand why the fair being popular or big had a correlation with extending this courtesy to the residents that border the property. Disappointed, I left and gave my wife the news.

It?s a shame that the fair officials have decided that the event has become popular enough that they no longer need to be good neighbors. We used to visit the fair two or three times during the 10 days. Although our tickets were free, we spend plenty on food, drink and entertainment. Now we will go no more than once. This apparent greed motivated action, may in reality hurt the fair?s bottom line as the residents that have frequented the fair with greatest regularity now stay away. “

Usually in the evenings I have a have a pushup/situp routine I will do. If Nicki is around when I do these she usually sees it as an invitation to rough house and roll around on the floor. Ali took some pictures of her doing just that the other night. Funny stuff.

I’ve been asked before what I am in charge of down here. Basically 120 workstations, 2 unix servers and around 10 Windows 2000 servers. Here are a couple pictures of our computer room.

I have mentioned many times how my house is “wired” Here is a rough layout of my home network and all devices that are connected to it, at last count I have 8 devices on the network which all talk out on the internet. Here is a diagram.

Recently I did some maintenance for a work associate of my wife. He has issues with the computers on his home network, specifically his kids computers being infested with spyware. I used Spybot to kill most of it. Some I had to remove manually. The 11 or 12 year old daughter’s PC had over 400 items classified as spyware. Some of it was the sort that popped up porn in browser windows, really, really bad stuff. All of these kids have aol buddy lists numbering at 100+ members. These kids have no idea of what they are doing when they install stuff like comet cursor, weatherbug or any of the other junk that comes up when you use many of the popular file sharing programs. It’s easy money for me to come in every month or so and clean up the junk but it’s disturbing to see adult material popping up on a little girl’s computer. If I have a kid I would think twice about allowing them to have their own computer in their bedroom.

After a long hiatus, my tivo(s) have been working overtime snagging the reality tv stuff I am currently watching. For whatever reason, once my mom moved out I got hooked into a bunch all at once. When my mom was here, I spent most of my spare time in the evenings doing stuff on my computer. (is that any better?) Currently I have season passes for My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, Average Joe Hawaii, Celebrity Mole, The Apprentice, & American Idol. Survivor All-Stars premieres after the Super Bowl so add that to the list. Having these programs on the tivo allows us to watch them in third less amount of time of watching it live so that is a small consolation. I am not sure how I exactly got pulled back into it so heavy. However I do have to laugh at people that scoff at reality tv that when asked what they watch, come back with Friends, ER, Queer Eye etc… To me, TV is TV regardless if you are watching sports, soaps, sitcoms, movies or documentaries. It’s entertainment, plain and simple. Now if you tell me instead of watching tv you are reading a book, going to the gym, studying or doing a hobby you have one up on me. If you are simply on a different channel, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on. Do most of us need to watch less TV? Sure. It’s a big part of the overall problem our society has with health & fitness. We eat the wrong stuff and way too much of it and then pile into the couch while we rest our full bellies and stare at the tv for hours each night. Not a prescription for health. This could lead into all sorts of other thoughts I have on the subject but suffice it to say we are in trouble , as we reap what we sow, the problem will snowball into all areas of society. So anyway, once these shows are over, I will again vow to cut back my viewing to minimums, honest, I will, I hope….. My name is shawn and I am a TV addict.