Recharged, playon.tv delivers, squirrely, rebated

So last night I did another electronics project, replacing the guts on a couple Roomba battery packs.   It’s a procedure I have done many times in the past.  Even with my past experience I had some difficulties.

Typically when I do these swaps I just cut the wires of the old pack and solder it to the wires of the new pack so I don’t have to f with soldering the connectors onto the ends of the wires.  Well for some dumb reason last night I thought I would try to solder the connectors on. Well that proved to far more troublesome than necessary.  After unsuccessfully trying to get the wire position right on the connector at least 10 times I bagged it and went back to my “just solder two wires together method”.

This expedited things greatly.  Because of my initial blunder it took me nearly 90 minutes to complete both packs which is very slow.  I wrote the date on each pack so I could track just how long they last before dying this time,  something I should have started doing years ago.

After I cleaned up I planned to watch this week’s Ultimate Fighter using my Playon.tv set up.  I fired up the app on my PC and the Wii, the two parts of the equation.  Using the Wii to navigate the Playon menu is a bit annoying.  Instead of allowing you to use the crosshairs on the controller to drill down the various trees you have to point to arrows on the screen with the controller to do all of the navigation.  It quickly gets tiresome.

I navigated to the Ultimate Fighter module and was frustrated when I couldn’t load this week’s episode, it would just sit and spin.  After farting around for awhile I loaded up the web only TUF Aftermath which gives commentary on each week’s episode.  It was there I saw a crawler that said that they release the show on the web Saturday’s at 11pm, a few days after it is broadcast live, explaining my problem. From watching Aftermath I found out who won and who lost, I’m not sure if I will even bother to go back and watch the actual show.

I followed it up with catching an episode of Ice Road Truckers.  It was quite cool to be able to still be able to watch cable only shows without paying for cable tv.

Of course there are some trade offs.  As I mentioned, the interface for playon with the Wii leaves something to be desired.  Also I need to have my pc up and running if I want to watch a show in this manner.  The video quality is not very good.  A video that looks good on a 22 inch computer monitor looks significantly worse when blown up to 73 inches.  I have become accustomed to the crystal clear HD broadcasts the tv normally delivers so stepping back to poor video quality is a bit annoying.   Even with the trade offs required when watching TV in this manner, I am quite happy so far with my decision to cut expensive cable tv from my life.

I currently don’t have a way to watch playon content back in the bedroom.  I am thinking about snagging a used Xbox 360 off Craigslist for that purpose.  It seems there are a ton of people selling their old units right now as they upgrade to the newer slim model or the Kinect bundles.  If I could score one for $100 that would be a nice score.

I didn’t see Ali at all yesterday besides the kiss goodbye in the morning.  She worked until I’m not sure when.  I fell asleep at 10 with Sadie in her spot.  That theme is going to continue throughout this weekend.  Ali is running a women’s only half marathon in St Petersburg with Christie.  She has been training very hard for the race and I expect her to do well.  I am pretty sure she will post her best half marathon time ever.

Yesterday instead of going to the gym, since I still am feeling tired and wiped out from the cold, I went to my buddies place over lunch.  He showed me his temporary pet, a squirrel.  This squirrel was found by a buddy of his on the ground as a baby, a hairless, defenseless baby.  He took the squirrel in and took care of it which included feeding it via bottle.  As a result this squirrel looks at humans as it’s parents.

My buddy took over care of the squirrel a week or so ago when his friend had to go out of town for a couple weeks.  He has the squirrel out in a decent size cage on his lanai.

When we got there he called the squirrel out, he was sleeping in his box.  He was a little slow until he woke up but once he did he was a non-stop bundle of energy.  He let my buddy handle him like you would handle a normal pet.  It was the first time I ever saw a tame squirrel.  He even would wrestle with my friend’s hand and play like a kitten with a pine cone.  It was very cute. The little guy even warmed up to me after a little while sitting on my leg and running up on my shoulder.

Now my buddy has no plans to keep the squirrel long term, it’s actually illegal to do so.  His idea originally was to release his little buddy in a few weeks into the wooded area behind his house once the squirrel is weaned.  However he has had some second thoughts now.

He has become attached to the squirrel and he is worried that if he released it near his house he could become an easy meal for predators.  So instead he is thinking about taking the squirrel to the local conservancy so they can finish the process of getting the squirrel ready to go live in the wild.

I asked him if he was going to be sad when it was time to part ways with his squirrel buddy and he laughed, trying to portray that it won’t be that difficult.  I don’t believe him.

This weekend I need to get cracking on some projects that need to get done before the holidays, trimming the cabbage palms and pressure washing the sheds/lanai/pool cage.  I have no delusions of getting it all done, the tree trimming alone is a huge ass job.  I am hoping my energy level improves a bit.  The idea of taking these tasks on right now doesn’t sound appealing at all.

You may remember back in September when we got our AC replaced I mentioned a big part of why we decided to do it when we did was because of government incentives to do so. There is a federal $1500 tax credit and was a $1500 REBATE from the state, along the same lines of the appliance rebate program a few months prior.

The Florida program had 15 million dollars allocated to it, money that was supposedly from one of the national stimulus plans.  Well less than 10 days after the program launched, they suspended it, saying there was some sort of technicality that was holding up the funds.  At the time I was told by our AC contractor the delay should be a few days.

Well the program remained on suspension.  Of course I was annoyed.  That $15 million was earmarked for this program for 6 months or more.  Somebody really f’d up.  So earlier this week I get a call from my AC sales rep.  She said they FINALLY got around to deciding what to do.  The politicians were much too concerned with getting reelected the last 3 months so it got back burnered.   What they came up with was they were only going to honor installations that happened during the first two weeks of September.  They are only putting $2.5 million into the program now and supposedly are using the rest to pay out funds on solar rebates that they somehow f’d up as well.

I asked my sales rep when our install date was, she said it was the 13th of September, just barely under the deadline.  So now I have to gather my considerable amount of documentation and mail it in asap to get the rebate.  I am just hoping I have everything up to snuff.