Archives October 2007

I lopped another 45 seconds off my time, bringing it down to 26:47.  It seems every day before a 300 my lower back starts to ache, maybe it is just anticipating the pain from the dead lifts.

 Since I am now doing 50 total reps of each exercise I thought it would be interesting to compare how long it takes me to do 50 of each movement.

50 pull ups (25 first set, 25 second set, including whatever breaks needed to finish) – 3:26
50 dead lifts – 3:10
50 push ups – 1:19
50 box jumps – 3:01
50 floor wipers – 4:34
50 one handed clean & press (including break in between sides)- 2:59

It seems that with the exception of push ups and floor wipers, three minutes is a pretty consistent time to do the sets.  It doesn’t surprise me that floor wipers take the longest by far, consuming around 20% of the total time, since you are really doing two reps each time that count as one.

Now it is all about recovery time.  I can lop a few seconds off here and there doing the actual exercise but cutting down the rest periods is where the real time savings come in.  Getting under 25 minutes would be a pretty big deal to me.

The weekend started with me feeling ambitious and motivated it ended with me feeling the opposite.  On Saturday morning I cut short my WoW session early so I could start on my list.  I changed the air filter on the Camry and rotated it’s tires, part of what the dealership wanted to charge me 300 dollars to do.  Ali was going to a group class at the gym at 10:15.  We decided I would go with her, drop her off and get the Sam’s Club shopping done while she was there.  I putzed around Sam’s as slow as I could, looking in detail at things that interested me.

  I snagged a new socket set.  Ironically I had bought the exact same set from Sam’s a few years back.  That set met an untimely demise as it just happened to be in the passenger seat of my Buick the day it burned up.  I never had gotten around to replacing it and had been scraping by with the shitty, incomplete socket set I have had forever.  I also looked at TV’s, computers, surround sound systems and various other appliances and gadgets.  I went as slow as I could and even so I still had 25 minutes to waste in the parking lot which I spent listening to a rebroadcast of one of the Stern shows.

When we got back home the afternoon was spent mostly back inside doing various cleaning and picking up around the house.  However while we were finishing up watching a Kitchen Nightmares that we started while eating lunch, the doorbell rang.  At first I hoped it was just the mailman dropping a package at the door or something.  Normally they will ring it and go back to their jeep.  Nope, there was someone standing there, I cringed, imagining they were selling something and indeed they were, kind of.

I open the door and see a bald guy, around my age wearing a Florida State polo shirt.  Initially he thought I was the neighbor across the street, when I corrected him,  he looked at the long print out he was carrying (list of registered republicans)and found my name. He shakes my hand and introduces himself, Eric Zichella.  I was befuddled, not knowing what the punchline was.  I recognized the name but wasn’t quite sure where from.  Then he says he is running for the vacated seat in the Florida House of Representatives.  He handed my a little postcard with his face plastered all over it.  Now I knew where I heard the name from.  This guy has been doing a media blitz.  We have received 2 or 3 cards from him as well as a message on our answering machine about his campaign, all of which I paid no attention to.  However I was flabbergasted that the guy was standing on our doorstep. The idea of a politician going door to door just struck me as bizarre.  He seemed very personable as he tried to befriend Nicki who was barking incessantly at him and to Ali whom came up to see what was up.  He said something about how he was just going around to meet people in his district to introduce himself and to see what people’s issues were.  Well my brain was stuck in neutral.  I really could come up with very little to say as I looked over his card he handed me three or four times.  I commented that the I heard the guy he is trying to replace, who died, was a good man.  After that I could manage little more than an awkward smile and laughs.  He could sense that the conversation had ended, asked us for our support and left.  Even as I closed the door, I was dumbstruck that the guy was going door to door. The guy must really want to be a politician.

After he left, Ali brought over several of the cards we have received from Eric in the mail.  She said she didn’t want to make a big scene but evidently she was paying more attention to the card than I was.  Evidently Eric is a hard core, right winger.  In the one postcard it has several pictures of him holding a gun, another pose with him in front of Ave Maria (the new catholic university that opened up) and various blurbs about his opposition to gay marriage.  So he is an anti-gay, bible thumping hunter??  Um no, I wouldn’t vote for him.  I really need to get off the republican voter list.  Even though I don’t agree with Eric’s political views, I can’t help but be impressed by his determination. I wish I wasn’t so tongue tied and would have taken the opportunity to ask Eric his views on some issues like Iraq and illegal immigrants.   Knocking on doors is tough business.

Saturday evening was our official anniversary dinner.  All week Ali was trying to get me to tell her where we were going, she doesn’t like surprises.  She was very surprised when we pulled into the Turtle Club.  The Turtle Club is a fancy place with outside tables that are right on the beach.  We went there once before, a long time ago with my mom.  I researched sunset times, the 5:45 reservation was the latest I could get and I calculated the 7:01 sunset would be within reach.  I purposely arrived a few minutes late to ensure we would get to see the sun drop from our table.

Not only did we get to eat outside, we got one of the best tables there, right beside the railing to the beach, a front row seat.  Since it was our once a year dinner, nothing was held back, I even got an appetizer.  When we first looked at the menu we were a bit worried since pretty much everything had meat involved somehow.  The waiter told us that they did have a vegetarian plate that is not listed on the menu. 

 The sun was beating on us a bit early on.  We both had on sunglasses and the long pants I decided to wear made me a little warm.  As the sun dropped lower in the sky things became quite pleasant.  Ali and I did some talking about the 9 years of marriage we were celebrating talking about the things we most enjoyed about it.  As sunset drew closer the beach filled with people.  You saw many flash bulbs going off as everyone wanted the postcard shot in front of a beautiful sunset.  The sunset was indeed beautiful.  I confirmed with Ali that it is the first time we could remember watching a sunset as we sat at a table eating dinner at a restaurant.  It was extremely cool.  I took a couple pics with my camera phone, they probably don’t do the scene justice.  I was so relaxed that we even ordered desert. 

The bill was steep but I knew it would be.  I didn’t give the kid waiter a full 20% tip as there were a few annoying things about the service like them bringing out Ali’s veggie plate with rice pilaf done in chicken stock as well as long periods where our guy would just disappear.  He was less than attentive.  For the nearly 100 bucks that we dropped I would expect a little better service. 

I had another first, actually using the valet.  I never use valet service for several reasons.  First it seems lazy to have someone park your car. Second I don’t really trust some kid to drive my vehicles around.  Third I guess I’m cheap.  I hate paying someone to do something I can easily do myself.  Being a valet newb, I wasn’t quite sure what to tip so I erred on what I would consider the high side and gave the guy 5 bucks for the 45 second retrieval of our car.  I asked Ali how she liked the anniversary dinner.  I got 5 star reviews for my effort and thoughtfulness. 

Sunday was a blah kind of day for me.  In the morning I had some motivation and some energy.  While Ali was away at spin class I buzzed around the house doing this and that.  After she got home we headed outside to pay attention to the back part of our property that gets infrequent mowing/trimming.  I went out with my new trimmer and worked on knocking down the high grass and weeds in the two long ditches while Ali mowed.   The new trimmer did an ok job of hitting the high stuff but it had noticeably less power than the older Homelite.  My theory is this is because the new unit has a clutch in it in able to use the attachments where as the old unit is direct drive.  Once I ran out of gas on the new trimmer, I retrieved the old one to finish.  It ripped through the heavy brush much better.  I guess I will keep it around for those situations. 

We finished up just in time for the Eagles game. Ugh what a boring, lethargic game.  Both Ali and I fell asleep during it.  To see them struggle to beat a shitty team like the Jets did nothing to make me feel better about the team.  By the end of that game I didn’t care if the Eagles won or lost, I was just praying it didn’t go into overtime, it was that boring.  So they managed to beat a 1-5 team, yay.

Ali had talked about us going back out after the game to work on another one of my list items, pruning the landscape.  However by that time I had zero ambition left and just didn’t feel like doing it. Instead after the game, while we ate dinner we watched Ocean’s 13.  It was entertaining, unrealistic and confusing like all of the previous Ocean Whatever flicks.  Somehow it is just fun to see all these big name actors in one flick, even if you can’t keep track of the hundreds of things going on at once.  I’d give it a B+.

For some reason I was thinking about a couple odd things over the weekend.  First, why is it that so many reality tv shows have adopted this idiotic practice of showing the same footage over and over and over again within the same show.  Of course the answer is it requires them to actually produce less content, but here is how it goes anyway.  The show starts and they show a preview of everything that happens during it. Then the first segment airs and then a commercial hits.  After the commercial hits instead of continuing the show they instead repeat the last minute or so before the commercial.  I mean do they think that people have such short attention spans that they forgot what happened three minutes ago??  It’s moronic.  You can easily see the same footage three times per episode.  Thankfully with Tivo I can skip it.

Advertising is such a me too racket.  The big thing in truck ads nowadays is to show a truck doing these unbelievable things that would never happen in real life.  I think Toyota started it recently with ads showing the Tundras doing things like hauling huge loads up and down a gigantic see saw, narrowly avoiding massive swinging girders and other crazy demonstrations.  Now Nissan has an ad where they show the frame of a Titan stopping a locomotive engine and Ford runs one where a a truck drops put of the back of an airplane that is landing and brings it to  a stop.  Ok, ok we get it these trucks do all of these amazing things but my real question is what gas mileage do they get and how comfortable are they to drive when I am lugging my small collection of stuff from Home Depot back and forth? I have no immediate plans to rent out my truck as an auxiliary airplane brake system.   

I knocked a full 3 minutes off my 300 time from Monday.  F, I was a tired, smelly, sweaty mess afterwards.  I piled on the deodorant and shower to shower afterwards.

I haven’t been playing a whole lot of WoW over recent months.  I have been in the game for over 2 and a half years now.  The majority of my in game buddies have left the game for one reason or another.  The only real friend I have in the game anymore is Charlie and he has been playing on a different server with some guys he works with.  The days of me staying up till 1am during the work week to gain just one more level are far behind me.  I am working towards getting the last two of my characters to the game’s maximum level of 70.  There are routinely days that I don’t play the game at all and it doesn’t bother me in the least.  It’s just a fun way for me to entertain myself at this point as opposed to the burning obsession it held for me for awhile.

Last night  I was in Zul’Furrak with my paladin running with a group.  I was happy when the one boss guy dropped a sword I had been looking for awhile.  It was the second piece of the puzzle I needed to create the ultra-cool sword you see pictured here.  It is called Sul’thraze the Lasher.  Look at it’s stats!

It is an EPIC sword, meaning it is very rare and very powerful.   If I had this drop 2 years ago for one of my early characters I would have nearly wet my pants with excitement.  However now, it got a brief grin to my face and then it was back to business.  It’s all about grinding XP.

Playing the paladin can be fun and frustrating at the same time.  A paladin is a hybrid class.  He has a huge collection of buffs, blessings and auras that are very beneficial to a group.  A paladin primarily does melee damage but also when properly specc’d and geared can be a very good main healer for a group.  A paladin can also be incredibly difficult to kill when facing in pvp battle.  Their ability to heal themselves can make them nearly immortal.  The downside of a paladin is they kill things slowly.  Where some classes can rip down a bad guy in 10 or 15 seconds, a paladin can be chopping on the same bad guy for 45 seconds or more. 

 Other than our dinner plans for Saturday evening, the weekend should be straight forward.  I still have lots of things to do around the house which will keep me quite busy.  We still have a backlog of shows on the Tivo and movies on my computer to check out which hopefully we can chop into a bit over the two days.  The Eagles play the Jets Sunday too.

I have been looking more and more at robotic mowers.  Realistically I certainly don’t need one.  The pitch for getting one has several positives.  They are much more environmentally green than pollution spewing two cycle motors.  They save the homeowner time spent mowing grass.  They keep the grass looking good all the time as they go out daily to maintain the lawn as opposed to once a week. And of course the biggest plus for someone like me is they are just geeky and cool.

On the downside is the initial setup of the property for a robotic mower which requires you to lay down boundary wire to act as an invisible fence for your robot.  The standing water we sometimes get would translate into a mess for a robot.  We have too much grass to expect the robot to maintain it all.  I would in all likelihood confine it’s mowing to the areas immediately around the house.  It wouldn’t eliminate mowing or weed whacking for us.  It would cut the time down significantly though. Plus they aren’t cheap.  On the low end you can snag one for around a grand, on the high end you can spend 2500 or more. 

There are many home projects on the list I would rather complete first before jumping into a robomower.  That hasn’t stopped me from mentally laying out it’s boundaries and imagining it buzzing around our yard keeping our grass looking good, constantly. Yep, I just love robots.

Some guys seem to have nice orderly beards or goatees when they grow out.  Mine looks like mess.  The hair doesn’t lay down, instead it shoots straight out at various angles.  I have been told that with the beard it makes me look like the guy that used to play Hercules in the old movies, a mountain man, and “mean”.  I really don’t enjoy the look all that much but am determined to stick with it through the end of the contest at the end of the month.

Our anniversary night wasn’t all that bad.  Ali decided to skip ballet and I got stopped at Carraba’s on the way home for take out.  We enjoyed our fine meal on the couch as we watched Biggest Loser on tivo.  No I am not a total loser.  I had roses sent to the house and made reservations for a nice dinner for us Saturday night which Ali is looking forward to.

At work we participate in a program from Microsoft called the Action Pack.  For 300 bucks a year you get a ton of software from Microsoft to use in your business on a limited basis.  You get all the betas, all the new stuff that comes out.  It is the same as what you buy in stores and most of it comes with licensing that allows you to install each copy 10 times or so.  It is a sweet deal.

 We have to renew it once a year and when that time comes around I ALWAYS have an issue doing it.  In order to take advantage of this you have to be associated in the Microsoft Partner Program. Every year when I try to log back in to renew I have problems because you have to remember your Windows Live id which I basically never use except to renew the Action Pack.  The problem is further complicated since over the years I have established no less than three Windows Live (formally called .net) accounts. 

So when I try to log in t the site I am told that my account is not associated with a partner.  I try all of the account names  I remembered, none of them worked.  Eventually I break down and call Microsoft to get it sorted out.  I spend a very frustrating 40 minutes on the phone with a rep that was polite but basically got me nowhere.  The call ended with me still being locked out but getting a case id from Microsoft and a promise that they would call me back.  I was pretty sure I would never hear from them.

Then for the hell of it I tried logging in with an ancient account that I created six years ago that was based on a msn.com email address that is defunct.  That worked!  I was able to reactivate the partner account and invite the other Windows Live id’s I had.  I sent myself an email with every single ID, username and password associated with our partner account so I don’t have to go through chasing my own tail year after year.  Through the process I also discovered that Microsoft has a TON of comprehensive, online and most importantly, free training on their products.  I went through a few of them and the information seemed similar to what I experienced in classroom training.  It used to be that you had to pay for this sort of stuff.  I plan to dig into it some more.  In IT you can never sit still on your existing knowledge base unless you want to become a dinosaur with limited value.

Information overload regarding the people in your zip code.

I forgot to mention I got a kick in the ass over the weekend.  Remember the sweet Treo 750 I just got for Ali?  Well the reason I got it was because I was sure her plan expired in mid-September.  I don’t quite remember where I got that date from whether it was online or from a rep on the phone.  Well you can imagine my surprise when I see a bill notification from Verizon show up for 220 bucks!  Immediately I think to myself how those Verizon idiots charged me an early termination fee even though the contract was done.  Before I got on the phone, I wanted to grab an old bill so I had all of my account info in front of me when I was on the phone with them.  I pull out a bill and in big letters, right on the front it lists the contract end date as mid-NOVEMBER!  DAMN IT!  I cursed myself as I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on.  Shit.

Today is my wedding anniversary. Nine years ago I entered into marital bliss, for the second time.  It’s hard to believe that nearly a decade has passed since the big day.  I remember much detail about our wedding pretty clearly.  I remember I was unusually calm leading up to it but then right before the service started I was very nervous.  I remember Ali getting mad at me when we were exchanging vows because at one point I sort of half laughed but it was because I was trying to cover up.  Ali had tears in her eyes as I spoke and it made me start to well up, the laugh was an involuntary way to try to keep things under control.

It’s a weird feeling to be walking down the aisle of the church with a room full of people there for no other reason than to see you in that moment.  It is the closest many people come to being a rock star.  Maybe that is why such a big deal is made out of it.  I had a lot more fun at the reception this time compared to the first time, thanks to alcohol.  When I got married the first time I was still adhering to my “no drinking” rule, which I broke shortly after getting married, ironically enough.  Drinking at the reception really helped take the edge off and allowed me to enjoy the moment instead of dwelling on being the focus of the event.  It was probably the most fun I ever had at a social gathering. (well it’s right up there with some of the old Entre Christmas parties at O’Kelly’s)

Like all marriages, mine has had multiple peaks and valleys.  However compared to marriage number one, which was nothing but a stress factory, this is  a walk in the park. We have come a long way from living in a little townhouse on West Gaul street.  We both love the little home we have carved out for ourselves in SW Florida.

 We don’t have any huge plans for the event.  We are going to put off going out to dinner to celebrate until the weekend.  My weed whacker was my anniversary present.  I bought Ali a new cordless phone for the office as hers 🙂  Romantic huh?

Stories like this that appear in the local newspaper really annoy the hell out of me.  I don’t like living among a bunch of elitist assholes that have nothing bigger to worry about than if their beach parking sticker looks nicer than everyone else’s…

 A quote from the article:

“It’s our only identifier,” he said. “One of the badges of honor (of living in the city) is to have a city of Naples beach sticker.”

I hope this guy brushes his teeth with Ben Gay.

So last night after work I stopped at my mom’s on the way home with my meter so I could figure out what was wrong.  Of course I pull out the meter, hit the power button and it’s dead, the battery is toast…  SOB.  I pull the cover off the meter and see it runs on a 9 volt battery which I commandeered from one of mom’s smoke detectors.  Ok so I go out to the lanai and check the wires with the switch off, no juice as I would expect.  I tell mom to throw the switch.  I take another reading, still no juice.

Ok so I moved inside to the switch.  I pull the face plate off and decide to take a reading on the two screws on the side of the switch.  I reach in with the first probe and BLAM, a huge flash of light, a loud noise and me instantly dropping the probe and jumping backwards.  Obviously I grounded something out.  I looked at the probe.  About half of it had vaporized and what was left was a melted mess.  The meter itself was still functional.  Holy shit.

I don’t like admitting much scares me but electricity scares me.  I have had several run ins with electricity over the years that have not been favorable.  I remember when I just started at Entre computers I was assigned the job of pulling down a light fixture from the building we vacated.  The light was off so I assumed there was no power applied.  I took my cutters to one of the wires and was instantly knocked to the floor as electricity surged through the cutters and me.  Much like yesterday, the metal in the cutters was instantly melted.

Then there is the Buick incident.  The wiring in the dash shorted out somehow turning my beautiful convertible into a burned to bare metal pile of junk in the span of 15 minutes.  Ever since then, the smell of something that is electrically hot sets me into a mild panic as it reminds of the what I smelled right before the flames started shooting out of the dash.

If there was a positive to come out of the incident at mom’s it was that we now knew which breaker controlled that circuit as it tripped after my ill advised probing.  Mom’s next door neighbor is an electrician.  She is going to see if he can take a look to see why we aren’t getting juice out to the lanai.  I was fine with that. 

So the Phillies made the playoffs for the first time in 13 or 14 years.  I was mildly excited about it and hoped to catch the games.  I caught exactly one inning before they got swept away by the Rockies.  The first two games were at 3 and 4 in the afternoon so by the time I got home the games were done.  On Saturday night the game didn’t start until 9:37 pm.  I was exhausted from busting ass all day and fell asleep after watching the first inning.  It’s awesome that they made the playoffs but getting swept definitely stings a bit.

It is looking like the indian casinos in Florida are going to be getting “Vegas Style” slot machines as well as being able to run blackjack tables.  That would be very cool since blackjack is one of my games of choice.  It would give me more of a reason to venture 15 miles east to gamble once in awhile.

Here they are and they all speak english.