Archives 2009

I sent in an email to the Stern Show bitching about how Howard never talks about how Sirius has recently been screwing it’s subscribers.  I already pay for two subscriptions, one costs 13 a month, the other 7.  These subscriptions also included the ability to listen to Sirius online via a web browser.  Well several months ago Sirius decided they wanted to try to stick it to their subscribers by forcing them to pay an additional $3 per month to listen to the online stream. 

For a company that has been struggling it seemed like a pretty stupid move for two reasons.  First charging people an additional fee for something that they had included in their subscription for 5 years does nothing but piss them off.  In times when money is tight it very well could be the prick in the side that makes people say “f it” and cancel.  Second, terrestial radio now streams their content more often than not and for free of course.  When Sirius started streaming it was a groundbreaking thing that if anything could have been charged extra for in the beginning.  However today, when online free streaming is commonplace Sirius decides they are NOW going to charge extra for it, brilliant.

The more recent cluster-f is the release of the Sirius-XM Iphone app.  They release the app and of course it REQUIRES you to have the extra cost $3 a month premium online listening add on.  Well fine, that is annoying but I would consider it for the convenience of getting Sirius practically anywhere.  So I download the app and check it out.  I immediately noticed that the Stern show was conspicuously absent from the list.  I hop online and am further outraged when I see the app doesn’t include any of the popular content like the sports broadcasts or either of the Stern channels?  WTF???? 

Sirius-XM really have put a bad taste in my mouth over this bullshit and I’m disappointed that Howard hasn’t had the balls to even talk about it on air. If Howard leaves Sirius at the end of his contract next year I will have absolutely no reason to continue with the service… greedy, stupid bastards.

Friday after work instead of our normal pizza and Tivo session we instead met up with our ex-neighbor and his partner for dinner at Carraba’s.  We went to my favorite Carraba’s although it is consistently losing a bit of it’s charm every single time we visit the place.  There have been a lot of changes at this location over the past several years and I can honestly say I haven’t liked a single one of them. The latest changes again were unwelcomed.  They removed the deep, dark wood bar top and replaced it with a much less appealing marble unit.  They also decided that the darker, warmer colors that adorned the walls were no longer welcome, they painted the majority of the walls boring white!  I mean wtf are they thinking?  They have wrung just about every ounce of charm out of that place, it’s a shame.

Well despite the changes to decor we enjoyed a nice dinner with our friends.  After dinner at home I cracked open my PC and threw in the 2 additional gigs of ram, bringing me up to 4.  The combination of new video card and additional memory has helped the pc performance in line with my expectations.  I love it when things work out as projected.

So the plan for this weekend was first to not paint.  Second we wanted to go to the beach on Sunday so to me that meant I needed to bust my ass on Saturday. Bust my ass I did.  I worked non-stop on chores/projects until late in the afternoon.

One of the things I did was wash both the truck and the car.  After I washed the truck I decided to tackle an impromptu item.  I have Sirius in my truck.  To have satellite radio you have to put an external antenna on your vehicle.  The antenna looks like a little mini-hockey puck and it is magnetized.  They do this to make it easy to attach to the roof of your vehicle.  Well they don’t mention the negative aspect of this.  Over time the antenna which has metal in it obviously starts to rust.  This creates a nasty looking rust outline on your roof!  On a white truck this looks particularly shitty.  Well I decided to do something about it.

I removed the antenna from the roof and instead mounted it on the top corner of the windshield using double sided tape.  I picked up that trick from the Camry Sirius installation that was done by a professional installer.  I was able to route the cable behind the windshield molding and then cut across the door jamb into the passenger compartment.  Now I had to address the hideous rust outline on the roof.  To do this I pulled out the unopened bottle of Scratch X, a product that was recommended to me by an ex-coworker and neighbor of mine as a miracle product when it comes to getting stains off of paint.  I originally bought it to remove the staining from the tree that later took care of itself.

So I grabbed an applicator, squirted some of the stuff on the pad and went to work.  Scratch X performed as advertised.  After a few minutes of elbow grease the rust mark was completely removed and the area had a nice bright finish, awesome. Sometime I need to getting around to buffing out the entire truck in in a similar manner.

At our dinner on Friday the neighbor was talking to Ali about how he loves some of the Facebook games, two of which are called Farkle and Bejeweled.  Well Ali generally tries to avoid these type of games because she has the ability to get locked in addicted in a very short time period.  Well Ali tried these games and in short order got hooked.  I could care less if she played games, hell I wish she would play more games with me, however Farkle and Bejeweled have one big drawback, incredibly annoying, repetitive sound effects. They were so annoying I found myself slapping on my headphones to muffle the madness.   The very word “Farkle” is silly to me.  At one point when Ali was immersed in one of the games I was running around the house using farkle in various phrases.  It’s a word that can mean absolutely anything since it means absolutely nothing.

So our Sunday morning started a bit slow until we headed out for the beach.  I loaded the mountain bikes in the back.  We were going to go for a ride near the coast before hitting the beach.  Even at 10am it was already quite warm.  After our 10.5 mile ride both Ali and I were covered in sweat.  Ali, who was lukewarm about the whole bike ride idea initially admitted that she enjoyed it more than she anticipated.

We spent a couple hours at the beach.  I spent the time under an umbrella.  You know you are old when an umbrella is standard beach equipment. With my skin cancer episodes, lying out in the sun baking myself is just a stupid thing to do.  As we were laying there Ali commented how nice it was that she didn’t smell any cigarette smoke.  Almost on cue a couple to our left lit up, annoying Ali instantly.  Ali was also annoyed by the countless cigarette butts nestled in the sand.  She picked a bunch but it was only a symbolic effort at best, it’s like shovelling snow with a spoon.  It really is sad that people are too damn lazy to at least dispose of their butts in the trash. It’s sad but not surprising since the majority of the human race sucks.

While we were eating lunch at the beach Ali mentioned something she heard Rachel Ray say.  She said that when you are done with a soda and have a bit left instead of throwing it out you should do something useful with it like use it to clean your windshield, as soda is a good bug remover.  I immediately told Ali that may be one of the stupidest things I ever heard.  I said it was akin to saying that after wiping your ass with toilet paper you should rip off the clean sections to blow your nose on.  Ali was grossed out by my analogy but I think it made the point.  Rachel Ray is now officially a dipshit in my book.

After the beach we had another stop to make.  We wanted to measure the Run for the Paws course.  The course layout has to shift this year and we wanted to see if we could work it out so it was a true 5k instead of  a 3 miles and change race.  Initially we thought we would use the club measuring wheel for the job but since I had the GPS watch with we decided it would be easier and faster to just use that while riding our bikes.  We figured that if the start line was moved .12 miles down the road we could have an exact 5K at the new finishing point, cool.

On the ride home we stopped for a rare treat, Coldstone.  Ali mentioned they had her favorite flavor last time we were there, Watermelon Sherbert (yuck).  So we stopped, hoping she could get some as a refreshing summer treat.  I was hoping to get some light fruity flavor like raspberry or blueberry.  Unfortunately they didn’t have any of those flavors and we instead both got the regular packed with fat and calorie variety, me opting for cheesecake and Ali for Nutter Butter.  The ice cream tasted fine but even a small dish of it was too much.  Eating something that filled with fat and sugar makes me feel shitty physically and mentally.

The rest of the day was laid back.  Besides dinner and some laundry Ali and I both spent the time at our computers, her Farkling and me on WoW.   The lazy Sunday erased most sense of accomplishment from a very busy Saturday, it’s just the way things roll with me.

I think we are out of the woods with the Spook starvation watch.  Once we kick started her eating by hand feeding her and using different color plates/bowls she has eaten much more.  I’m relieved.  Hunger strikes are stressful.

So I get home yesterday and look at the plate of wet cat food and see that it is once again untouched.  Instantly my frustration level swells.  I talked to the vet earlier in the day about the reluctance to eat.   She said we should try to look at the area where the tooth was to see if there is a lot of redness or swelling.  She also said we should stop with the antibiotic and pain stuff in case it was causing nausea. (no problem with that!)  Three days of solid not eating is the time to sound the alarm according to the vet, well Thursday would have been the third day since I saw the cat eat.  Of course prior to taking the cat to the vet I think she went at least a solid week without consuming any solid food.

On top of all that the vet said she was leaving that day for vacation for  a week so if the cat continued to not eat we would have to take her to a different vet that is handing emergencies, more hoops to jump through.  So anyway I was resigned to having to take the damn cat back to a vet at some point soon, exactly what I did not want to do. 

Last night I put her food down on the plate, the cat comes over like she is interested, looks at it for awhile and walks away, wtf???   So last night after Ali gets  home she is sitting at her desk eating a salad.  The salad has feta cheese on the  top of it.  Spook was mulling about at Ali’s feet so for the hell of it Ali pulls a piece of cheese off and holds it down for Spook.  Spook instantly gobbled down the piece of cheese hungrily!  I was in disbelief that Spook ate the cheese.  Quickly I encouraged Ali to give her more cheese which Spook continued to eat.  I was excited that the cat was actually eating.  Her mouth mustn’t be bugging her too much if she will eat from a hand.  I furthered the experiment by bringing in a small piece of tuna and handed it to her, she ate that as well.

Ok so what the hell is going on?  To me, it seems like the cat is visually associating the small plate with pain.  So last night before bed I took her food off a plate and put it in a small tupperware thing.  This morning it looked like she had eaten some of it.  I furthered the experiment by dumping the dry food out and putting a different color bowl down with fresh dry food.  For the first time in weeks I saw her by the dry food bowl a few minutes later!  It’s hard to believe if the cat was starving that something like bowl or plate the food was in/on would make an ounce of difference.  Well we will continue the psychological feline experimentation over the weekend.

Yesterday I decided to go grab an updated video card for my PC at home.  It’s hard to believe that my PC is now almost three years old.  In human years that means it’s probably my age, well into middle age.  The Nvidia 6800 card I built the system with is now pretty sad in performance compared to today’s hardware.  I didn’t go crazy I picked up a Nvidia 9500Gt board with a gig of dedicated video memory.  It was only 100 bucks.  This morning I picked up some additional memory I spotted at Wal-mart on clearance (along with a Wii controller!) to bump the puter up to a robust 4 gigs of system RAM.  These couple of improvements should extend the shelf life of the box a year or two yet.

This weekend we are NOT painting.

Our firewall is from a company based out of New Zealand. They recently did some major upgrades to the product which have resulted in some bugs.  I have been working with one of their main support/developers for awhile on the issues.  Their mail server also was having issues passing mail to our domain which further complicated back and forth communication.  Well I was taken off guard when my phone rang and it was Adrien the developer calling from New Zealand. 

 He explained about the mail problems he was seeing.  So we worked on a few issues while he was on the phone, I sent a diagnostic file which he received a few moments later.  I dunno, even though it is so common place today, I still get a little bit of a “gee that’s so cool” feeling when I can send something from my pc that instantly arrives on the other side of the planet.  We actually managed to fix one issue as a result of the call, gee, that’s cool.

My brother called me up last night to talk about various stuff.  One of the subjects that came up was related to our childhood growing up, specifically post divorce.  He was making comparisons to the rather chaotic and miserable times we went through and using those as a blueprint to not make the same mistake with his daughter.  He was recounting details of our times growing up that I honestly haven’t thought about in years.  In fact even if I am asked to recall much detail from that time period I am rather fuzzy.  I do know that generally speaking it was a period of time that was filled with lots of unhappiness but perhaps for that reason, I don’t think much about it.  A simpler explanation would be that so much time has passed that the memories are no longer sharp and instead are now just glazed over, dusty remnants. 

It would be quite easy to dig into my childhood and point fingers everywhere as the reason things are as they are however at least in my mind, that doesn’t do much good.  In the end the only person responsible for your actions is the schlub in the mirror.

Ever wonder where in the world duf.net visitors are from?  Well I’m sure you don’t but I do so I added a widget called Clustr Map to the right column of the blog.  If you click it you will get detailed info on duf.net visitors.  Take a peek, they span the globe.

It’s been a rather frustrating couple days.  Work has been a bear since my Windows Server 2008 upgrade over the weekend.  Issues have been popping up like weeds everywhere, some expected some not.  I have been systematically squashing them as I can but it makes for some difficulty when trying to keep a calm demeanor when my phone rings once again and the voice on the other end starts off with “Fill in the blank isn’t working…”

The Spook situation has been frustrating me as well.  When I fed her after getting home from the vet on Friday and she hungrily gulped down a plate of tuna I figured we were in the clear.  Well in the days since we brought her home she has reverted to hardly eating again.  I have gotten her to eat maybe 3 or 4 times but it’s never a lot.  She hasn’t touched her dry cat food or regular wet cat food, the only stuff she has eaten is tuna that I sit on a plate wherever that cat is currently hiding.  The tuna is ignored often as well. 

I find myself getting very pissed off at the cat.  Everyday I am going through the effort to chop up her food into extra fine sections with a knife only to come back later to see the food sitting untouched.  Last night after coming home to another untouched plate I had an angry one way conversation with the cat where I warned her if the no eating bullshit continued she was going back to the vet.  My stern talk did not seem to make a difference, she refused to eat again last night.  Add on top the joy of trying to give the cat her anti-biotic and pain meds each night and you have an outright boondoggle.  If she doesn’t eat something tonight we will have to call the damn vet again, stupid cat.  If I was being cold and logical I would just let her starve herself.

Ali helped pile on to my mounting annoyance this morning by scolding me for having the radio playing too long on the alarm clock.  Forever my work day wake up routine has been the same, the radio comes on at 5:30 and I usually get up sometime around 5:40 or 5:45 depending on my degree of drowsiness.  Well Ali swears that for the past two weeks I have been letting the radio play longer and she doesn’t like that it causes her to wake up.  I told her she was mistaken, nothing is any different than before.  Of course I didn’t appreciate starting my morning by getting bitched at for something stupid. Especially from someone  whose feet rarely touch the floor before 8 am.

Bill Clinton got those two reporters released from North Korea, he’s the man.

So just admire my 2010 Camaro

I would first like to offer the following disclaimer. Painting the inside of your house for three out of four consecutive weekends is not recommended and should only be let to the truly clinically insane.  Yes, once again we decided to consume the majority of our weekend with more painting but let me back up.

I picked up mom after work on Friday and then made a stop at Lowe’s.  The visit had two purposes.  We wanted to get color swatches to pick out the color of our accent wall and I needed to get concrete border blocks and some more rubber mulch to dress up the trees in Nicki’s area.  As I was loading up the blocks in the truck a torrential downpour started.  Instead of heading for shelter I continued to load the truck, to hell with the rain.  I went back inside to find my mom looking like a drowned rat.  I saw lots of smirks as I passed fellow Lowe’s shoppers. Mom and I grabbed a bunch of possible accent colors.  When we got home surprisingly Ali didn’t have much difficulty zooming on on the color she liked most as an accent color. It was a terra cota -ish color called Sienna Red, cool.

Saturday morning Ali and I wanted to knock out mowing the grass since it was now very long after skipping a week.  As Ali mowed I ripped around the property with the weed whacker and got the trimming done in record time.  I got done quick enough that I actually had time to set up the border around the tree in Nicki’s area before Ali finished the tractor work.

I then moved inside and started on the arduous task of disassembling the kitchen in prep for painting and I stress arduous.  We didn’t cut any corners, the fridge and oven were pulled all the way out so we could completely paint the wall behind them.  Pulling out the fridge was particularly disturbing.  As I moved the unit away from the wall a hideous collection of spider webs mixed with Spook fur was revealed.  I could not believe how much had collected.  I don’t quite get it, the refrigerator is not a hiding spot for the cat, why so much of her hair would have collected back there is beyond me.  The oven also hid some messes of it’s own like the food residue that always manages to fall down between the stove and countertop.  The shop vac was able to make short work of the scuzz.

Another very laborious part of the process was the pantry.  Our pantry is big, probably around 7 -8 feet wide.  Inside are four wire shelves that span the length of the space.  Holding these four long shelves in place are tons of little plastic brackets, those of you that have installed wire shelving should be very familiar with what I am talking about.  Well in the small linen closet Ali opted to just painstakingly paint around each little plastic support.  Well there were probably 50-60 supports in the pantry and initially Ali said she would just paint around those as well.  I assured her the half hour or so it would take me to pull them out would be far less than the time and frustration involved in painting around the shit.  Pulling them out wasn’t too bad.  Initially I used my fingers but then switched to a needle nose pliers to cut down on the finger abuse.

The last thing I had to help with before getting the paint was cleaning all the dust off the high areas like the top of the fridge, the top of the kitchen cabinets and the top of the partial wall that separates the kitchen from the dining room, fun.

So off to Lowes I went to grab 3 gallons of paint and a couple brushes.  Good paint is expensive nowadays, I dropped 100 bucks.  While I was gone Ali and mom started on the prep work. I was pleasantly surprised when I got back and they had already started putting paint on the walls.  By this time all three of us are pretty adept at the painting process and have our own designated roles.  Mom’s primary job is as the border painter, she paints along the taped areas as far up as she can reach.  Ali is the preferred baseboard / door jamb taper, as well as being a border painter and quality control.  I specialize in ceiling line taping/painting,  paint rolling and anything requiring you to be on a ladder.

We got the kitchen painted rather efficiently.  The Sandy Shell color looked great against the white kitchen cabinets.  We needed to let the paint dry before doing the accent wall since I was going to need to tape the line where the walls meet. We were all pleased with the fruit of our labor.

On Sunday morning while Ali went to spinning I put the pantry hardware back in before starting on the accent wall.  By the time she got home I was just finishing up the second coat, it was only one wall so it didn’t take long.  Mom was concerned that Ali would not be thrilled with the color, it’s a bit “daring” compared to the bland and safe colors Ali prefers. Ali said she liked it when she got back although I could tell it was only a half hearted endorsement.  However as the paint dried she became more of a fan.  I think it looks great.  That is the perfect accent wall and the color goes well with the Sandy Shell that is in the kitchen.

The color is definitely a bold step considering our walls have been stark white for 8 years but it is a welcome change.  I was very ready to be done painting.  Painting takes a physical toll on the body.  Pushing against a roller for two days aggravates the tendinitis in my forearms, my legs are tired from constantly going up and down the ladder and the back of my calves were tender from having rungs of the ladder digging into them.  Well it was done, we all liked the final result and throughout the afternoon we slowly got everything put back away and cleaned up.  Another job well done.  The rest of the great room should not be nearly as difficult.  The biggest challenge will be painting behind the tv with the huge cable monster that resides back there.

We tried to get some relaxing pool time in Sunday afternoon, we certainly deserved it.  I was just physically beat and exhausted.  Around 5 o’clock I was slumped in a chair like a zombie and declared I needed to go and lay down for a bit.  I was asleep for 90 minutes and could have slept much longer I’m sure.

Sunday night mom and I had a Wii sports rematch.  I needed to make sure that mom’s upset bowling win from a few weeks ago was a fluke.  The first game I stomped her 216 to 118 I think.  We bowled two more games, each one my score dropped a bit.  The third match was a much more competitive 168 to 143 score.  We followed up with some Wii golf.  Mom had  hard time mastering her putting stroke but didn’t do too badly overall.

In between all of the painting fun I was also doing work from home, trying to upgrade our work domain controllers to Windows 2008.  I ran into numerous unexpected snags along the way which turned into me spending several more hours than I planned on the project.  I eventually got the domain upgraded but did so in a some what hack and slash manner which resulted in some repercussions today. Did I mention it was a tiring weekend?

If you want to see the updated pictures from the project they are here.

Spook has still not been eating as I think she should be.  She has eaten some, more than the zero she ate for 7-10 days but I would expect a cat that was starving itself to be pigging out now.  She is certainly not doing that by any means.

  Giving her the medicine has been a joke.  As soon as we try to give her the liquid meds she instantly begins a mucus waterfall out of her mouth.  We are lucky if she actually ingests a third of what she is supposed to be getting.  It’s very frustrating.  If the eating doesn’t pick up we’ll have to call the vet again I suppose. Such a pain in the ass…..

My sister got around to posting the family pictures she had taken while we were out in Arizona on Facebook.  There are a number of good ones. I’ll post a few below.

I posted a little while ago about the Cash for Clunkers program the government was implementing to achieve two goals.  The first was to give the new car business a kick in the rear that it severely needs, second was to get older, less fuel efficient vehicles off the road and replace them with new vehicles that get significantly better mileage.  When the bill was introduced there was a lot of skepticism about it.  Negative pundits said it would not be an effective way to stimulate consumers to buy a car.  Wow were they wrong.

The program was scheduled to run until November or until the billion dollars allocated ran out, whichever came first.  The program only started 3 weeks ago.  I read today that the billion bucks is ALREADY gone. Some 250,000 people already took advantage of the incentive and traded in their “clunker” for more than they would have gotten on a traditional trade in. Holy shit.  Of course new car dealers now LOVE the program and are pushing for the government to put additional funding into the program since it has been such a runaway success.  Yea it’s just another hand out/ stimulus but this time it’s one people seem to like.

Hell I was rolling around the idea of trading in the party van just to get about double what I would hope to get on a private sale, it’s a great deal.  I would be surprised if they didn’t find additional money to pump into the program.