Archives September 2010

I spent most of my morning at home while the third and final company came in to give us an AC replacement estimate.  I got the name of this company from mom who had heard they do good work.  This was our first woman AC person.  At first I was skeptical if a woman would know much about AC but she quickly removed that roadblock in my mind.  Julie knew her stuff inside and out.

She went all the way through the attic and looked at EVERYTHING.  None of the other reps were as thorough as she was.  In total she spent two hours going through the house, dropping me little tidbits of info along the way.  One thing I found appealing was Haines was able to do the airflow testing required for the Florida $1500 rebate.  She was confident that after the new system was in place , along with all of the other changes she was proposing, that the house would pass.  She said if it didn’t Haines would fix whatever needed to be fixed and retest for free,  another huge bonus.

The price she quoted on the actual hardware was significantly less than my other Trane equipment quote.  However the additional work they are proposing carries a hefty price tag.  Not only do they want to replace the air registers, in total they would also be replacing/increasing 7 air ducts, the assorted distribution plenums, rebuilding the air handler platform, addressing some insulation issues and replacing the refrigerant lines from the air handler to the condenser outside.  It would almost be completely gutting what we have which I like, a lot.

I thanked Julie for her time and headed out.  When I compared the numbers, the final out of pocket cost, assuming I WOULD get the Florida rebate is nearly identical.  For the same money I could get a lot more done.

I did find out one potential con.  Haines will charge us a point and a half more if we pay for it with our American Express card, I could run it through the Visa or Mastercard at the quoted price.

I am sending the quote to the other guy that I liked to at least give him an opportunity to counter. We’ll see what happens.  I expect to have a firm decision by Monday.

This weekend we have a race to time Saturday morning.  Randall is driving over later Saturday to hang out.  I plan on taking him as my date to see The Expendables.  I am sure there will be various physical challenges taking place as well, several of which will be video taped for sure.

This made me laugh.

I forgot to mention that Slick Rick Scott won the republican primary for Florida governor. Yea the same 1.7 billion fine paying dude that spent enough cash influencing the weak minded to rebuild Haiti with cash to spare.

Well now he appears to be furthering his assault on the weakly informed, taking a book out of the McCain Campaign strategy guide.

28. If your opponent is a woman or if  a woman is large factor in the opposing party campaign, you better go grab yourself a woman too!

You see, Scott’s democratic opposition this fall is a female, Alex Sink.

Not only has Scott grabbed an attractive woman as his running mate, he grabbed an attractive, black woman.  Now to be fair, I know nothing about her except what she looks like.  I can only hope she has more intelligence than “Maverick” Sarah does.

Anyway, my point is this is an obvious attempt to further dilute the election into people making choices in their leaders primarily on gender/race and little else.  Scott obviously hopes he can steal some votes from dummies that vote for a candidate because they use the same public bathroom stalls.

This guy is just pure scuzz.  He is such a cretin that the guy that ran against him refuses to bury the hatchet and endorse Scott which is normally automatic.  He is that disgusted by the man.  We all should take pause at that and ask how such a man could even be in the position to run a state.  Welcome to American politics, pay as you go.

I left work a little early yesterday to prepare for the draft party at our house.  Ali wasn’t going to be home so I had a lot to get done.

One of the first things I did was get my various incoming connections up and running.  I also tweaked the set up a bit so the audio from the Skype connection would be be played over the surround system.

A couple owners got connected in via Skype early, one of which was the guy that is over in Barcelona.  I was glad to to see that despite an ocean being between us his connection quality seemed good.

I placed the order for 8 pizzas a little after 6 and threw the two food items I was preparing in the oven around 6:30.  The first couple guys showed around the same time for the 7 pm draft.  They brought their own beer despite my having a healthy supply of my own.

The pizza showed up about 6:50, perfect timing.  Right about 7 the rest of the owners piled in.  A bunch of them carpooled from Naples.  I saw some of them coming in with even more food which we totally didn’t need.

The first part of the draft was very hectic for me.  I was handling several technical challenges.  The one remote owner was running Skype on a Mac.  Every time he would try to make a video connection he would wind up dropping from the call.  We actually wound up just having one of the 5 remote connections using both video & audio.  The audio only connection worked out fine though for the most part.  We had one connection that had some sort of noise that sounded like a submarine.  We just had him mute his mic unless he was talking.

It was very cool using the Skype group call.  I had the webcam on one of the surround speakers pointing back at the room.  It really was almost like having those 5 guys in the room, the interaction was very real time.

It became very apparent that I went too heavy on the food.  The pizza was not being consumed at nearly the rate I expected and the beer that I bought was being mostly consumed by myself.

The draft itself went smooth after the early technical glitches got worked out.  Just like last year, my picks were very rushed and produced with little thought since I was busy most of the time tending to things.  It was actually a little more challenging this year since I had the last draft slot which means when I draft I am always drafting two players consecutively.

My team is very Eagle heavy so if the Birds are no good this year my fantasy team is going to suffer.  Here is my current roster.

So the party wrapped up somewhere around 10.  Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves.  After  they left we did a food survey.  We had 5 full pizzas remaining, a pile of spanikopita (spelling), 15 mini-sandwiches and about 4 bags of chips, chex mix and other similar items.

Well Ali and I were certainly not going to waste pizza so we shoved it all in the freezer.  The sandwiches would be my lunch for a few days.  We literally have enough food to feed us for lunch and dinner for a week solid at least.

We cleaned up what we could.  I didn’t have the energy or motivation to put all the furniture back in order.

I woke up this morning feeling pretty wiped.  Between the drinking and eating too much crap food my body felt like shit.  Hopefully I can cleanse myself a bit at the gym today.

Tonight is going to suck at home.  I want to mow the grass, get the house back in order and we have 100+ registrations to put into the system for the race on Saturday. Yuck.

After work we had a meeting for one of our races in December.  I was worried that the dogs had been left alone for too long.  I left the house about 9:30 and we didn’t get back home until after 6:30. Luckily there were no accidents waiting for us.

I spent the majority of what was left of the night getting the house ready for the fantasy football draft party tonight. I made a number of improvements from last year even though last year’s draft was generally viewed as the best ever.

I drug furniture around so the normal great room furniture was now pushed against the perimeter. This gave me additional floor space to pull the dining room table in.  Last year I only had the smaller fold up table in the room.  As a result a lot of people wound up having to juggle papers in their lap.  The additional big table will give owners a better surface to work off of.

The food spread last year was extensive, the problem was I had to try to prepare it all. This year I have a couple things to throw in the oven but I plan to just order 8 pizzas and have that be the main source of nourishment.

I am also upgrading the tech at this year’s draft.  Last year I had a live windows media feed stream that allowed remote owners to see and hear what was going on.  The remote owners used AIM to communicate with us.  I had their conversations displaying on the 73 inch tv.

This year I will still have the video stream and AIM available but we are hoping to use a Skype group video call primarily.  If it works out it could be very cool.  We will have one owner participating in the draft from the other side of the world, Barcelona to be exact.

My ass will be dragging tomorrow for sure.