Archives 2004

Last night I made my return to the sport of volleyball after a 5 month hiatus. Evidently they start earlier than they did before so when I got to the gym, they were just about ready to start so I jumped right into the game without getting a chance to warm up at all. It was ugly. The first 2 or 3 games were really , really ugly. Attempted passes caromed of my forearms like foul balls, attempted hits were into the net or mistimed and hit weakly. We were playing a team entirely made up of mexicans. The tallest one may have been 5’9″ or 5’10” but they were fast, wicked fast. If the ball was in the air they got it. I took a dive on the court that made me literally see stars and took a short serve I didn’t get in the family jewels which froze me for a few secs. We played 5 or 6 games, we lost every one but the last one. By the end I was actually performing the basic skills ok and had more good plays than bad. It was a lot of fun. I am sore today as my body is not used to volleyball movements anymore so I’ll have to work through that. I have 2 matching bruises on my forearms as well.

Last night, Nicki had bad gas. Paint stripping gas. I took her out multiple times but she did not want to do a number 2. Ok, I figure if she had to go, she would so we put her to bed. At 2:15am I hear her crying loudly. I fear the worst and my fears are confirmed as the smell of dog shit hits me as I open the bedroom door. She has shit her crate again. Not as terrible as episode one but plenty nasty. I pull her dog pillow out and lug it outside carefully, trying to not get excrement anywhere else. As I am outside hosing off the pillow case, Alison comes out asking what was up. I didn’t even have to speak, she just had to look at my disgusted face. I hosed it off best I could and we took it inside to throw it in the laundry. As I am coming out of the laundry room Nicki squats in the living room and pisses on the floor! I freak out. WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!! I scream at her as she scurries away and cowers in fear. So now Alison works on the urine as I take Nicki outside so she can finish up. By the time we are done with the clean up it’s 3 am. Back to bed and attempt to fall back asleep. I may have gotten an hour of sleep the rest of the night.

To top off the sleepless night, the commute to work was horrific. The god damn dump trucks clogged the road as far as I could see. The commute took a shade under under an hour and a half. Every intersection was clogged, there was no way around it. I was a half hour late to work. It can only get better from here, hopefully.

Evidently Tatoo had multiple talents. See?

One of my projects at work is to update Double Take, a disaster recovery software we run, to the latest version. We currently are running 4.2.something, the upgrade will take us to 4.3.something. On the support site it said to call before you upgraded if you were running certain versions, all the versions listed were newer than ours. So I thought it would be wise to call. Got Joe Shmoe tech support guy, told him I was calling because I wanted to put the latest and greatest on our systems. He confirmed my version. After a brief delay, he came back with “With a version as old as yours we recommend you uninstall the app and reinstall it with the new version” I said to him “Hmmm, I can’t simply upgrade it????” Thinking to myself, WHAT THE F? It is only 4.2 to 4.3 it requires an uninstall??!! He replies “Yes that is what we recommend because of all the changes” Fine, I hang up and thank him even though I don’t know why. I proceed to take screen shots of all my settings so I can rebuild the structure and run the uninstall. I need to reboot so that has to wait till this evening and then tomorrow I have to reinstall it from scratch. Later I was having an internal conversation and wondered why I didn’t simply try to run the upgrade anyway? I mean what was the worst that could have happened, I would have had to reinstall from scratch which is what I am doing anyway! Stupid….

I have been known to post unflattering pictures of people from time to time. So to be fair here is a silly one of me from Green Bay. I look really drunk but in reality I think I am more sleepy than drunk.

I saw an incredible new invention on the way back from the gym today! A full size remote control car! Well not really, but that is exactly what it looked like following this vehicle. It was late model Mercury Sable driven by an old lady who was so tiny that you could see absolutely none of her from behind, not even a tuft of purple hair, just 2 headrests. It looked like the car was driving itself, slowly, down the road. Funny as hell.

This weekend was the definition of nice. Before I forget, let me get the negative rant out of the way. This morning I am behind a woman putting on her makeup in the car. Not just while she was stopped, AS SHE WAS DRIVING. She had her rear view mirror turned so she could use it as her beauty mirror (ironic cause she was an overweight middle aged woman that looked liked Julia Childs) She was styling her hair and applying facial makeup as she drove in the passing lane of the road. Needless to say I was infuriated. As soon as I got a chance I passed this idiot. Unfortunately she wasn’t looking at me as I mouthed DONT DO YOUR MAKEUP IN THE F’IN CAR when I passed her. I mean come on, get a clue.

On Saturday I got up without an alarm at 5:30 am so I could get into work to do some stuff I had been putting off for awhile. It went well and I was done in less than 3 hours. So I was home before 10 am and ripped right into the cleaning duties. We knocked that out quickly.

Since we moved into the house we have had an idea of how we wanted our house to be utilized. We wanted to use one spare bedroom as a nice guest room, the other for hobbies, crafts and as a secondary guest room. It’s been about 2 and a half years and we still hadn’t gotten things under control to where we could do this. Finally this weekend we got it all setup. In order to do this required us getting the outside shed to store junk, my mom moving out to clear up that room, and then on Saturday we went and got a decent but inexpensive computer desk for myself at Wal-mart that allowed us to setup both of our old ones in the craft/hobby room. Our day didn’t end till close to midnight by the time we got done moving all the crap around and assembling the new desk. The new layout is great! Hopefully we can keep things in order. We are gathering stuff for a flea market and our new motto is if we buy something new, we get rid of something old.

We also found time to watch Finding Nemo saturday evening. It was a good flick but I don’t know that it was good enough to me to understand why it did HUGE box office numbers. Enjoyable but nothing outstanding for me.

Sunday was my first football-less day in 4 months. Luckily Sunday was near perfect weather, mid 70’s, blue skies and low humidity. Just going out on the lanai, sitting in the sun and realizing that it is the end of January can make you forget even something as dramatic as the impending end to football season. I finally conquered my Tivo project on Sunday. I am now able to run my second Tivo independently using tv listings that are downloaded off the internet. If Tivo used good sense and offered customers with multple DVR’s a discount on their service for multiple household dvr’s I would have never investigated this option. However there was no way I could justify paying close to 30 bucks a month just to have two Tivo’s download the same tv guide data. It is one of the most involved and complicated hacks I have tackled, it’s good to have it behind me.

Sunday afternoon I came up with the idea to take Nicki to the dog park. We have talked about doing this for months but never got around to it. Nicki needs socialization. Whenever she meets someone or some new dog she cowers in fear and immediately retreats. The dog park is a beautiful large fenced in area with benches, water stations and tennis balls lying around everywhere. When we first got there she was terrified as normal. It was comical, when dogs would approach, Nicki would retreat to a bench and hop onto it, almost like what you imagine with women and rats. It was quite entertaining. We stayed almost an hour and a half. By the end she still wasn’t participating in the dog games but at least she would let the other mutts come up and sniff her without jumping on the bench. We will just have to keep taking her to these sort of places till she relaxes.

Got in my first rc plane flight in weeks. It was a high speed acrobatic fest in relatively high winds. I zigged when I should have zagged and put it into a tree at high speed but it came out unscathed. I was able to reattach the battery and chuck it right back into the sky.

Tonight I am planning to head to the community center to kick off my 2004 volleyball campaign. 5-6 years ago volleyball was such an integral part of my life. Back then I could not imagine not playing for 6 months at a time. But that is exactly what I have done and not even thought twice about it. I’m hoping to stay more consistent with it again. It’s good exercise, quenches my competitive thirst and is a good way to meet people. I get to break in one of my 3 new volleyballs too. 🙂

Naples, FL 59…77 F
Reading, PA* 11…20 F

There are certain things in life that you think “Why in the F did they do that?” One such thing struck me today after passing a Saturn Ion. Apparently Saturn has adopted the center instrument gauge cluster idea. What is the point of this? I believe Toyoyta started this a couple years ago on one of their “Speck” cars. Is it just to be different? Do up and comers think it is cool to have the passengers be able to read the speedometer? I mean why would you put the instrument cluster anywhere except IN FRONT of the person driving the vehicle???? Some of the stupidest engineering I have seen in recent automotive history. Of course auto engineers also thought the Pacer was a futuristic vehicle.

My 3 week project with the Tivo is almost done. The original goal of having the entire process automated is not going to happen but with 5 minutes of effort every 2 weeks I can maintain my second tivo. This has been a project with deadends everywhere from intentionally vague directions and a lack of help from people in the know. If you want to tackle such a project yourself someday, take a look at what you need to work through.

I have to do some work at the office Saturday so the weekend will be abbreviated. Nothing exciting on the schedule, no football, no problem.

I also have had a problem with a stopped up drain just like Keener. For a couple months I just put up with the slow draining water. I could see the sludge built up around the sink plug but could not get the plug out to clean it properly. I twisted, I pulled to no avail. The other day I got motivated enough to get down on my knees and look under the sink. Doing so revealed that I had to release the sink stop from underneath. After doing so I was able to clean it properly. Sink is good as new. A 5 minute effort was able to end a 2 month annoyance.

Mom had scheduled her phone service in her new place to be hooked up Jan 12th. Noone showed, noone called. Mom called, they can’t even find the install order. Rescheduled for Jan 15th. Friday comes, noone shows, noone calls. Mom now has spent two days of her time sticking around the house waiting for them. She calls again. Finally the install takes place on Monday. Time spent waiting for Sprint to show up – 3 days Knowing your website www.sprintblows.com is still well founded – priceless

I just had a chance to skim through the game on Tivo. After doing so I came to realize that the game actually could have easily swung the Eagles way. 2 of the interceptions came within the Panther 20 yard line and a third directly lead to the Panthers 2nd touchdown. Throw in the half dozen dropped balls the Eagles had and we have an entirely different result. I don’t know why it seemed more one sided when we were watching it live but now that I have seen the broadcast we could have easily been heading to houston with only a couple less mistakes. The luck that had been on our back for so long must have decided to jump off at the exact WRONG time.