Archives March 2011

Yesterday there was a story that Rick Scott was up to more fun and games.  On a special website he had made to prop up his crusade to bastardize state employees, he posted a link to 500 former state workers that receive a pension worth more than 100K a year. This makes for a great headline for the sheep, STATE WORKERS GET $100,000 PENSIONS!!!!!!

This is so insulting on so many levels.

Let’s start with the most obvious.  All of this rhetoric and pining for government transparency is coming from Rick Scott.  The same Rick Scott that was so transparent that he pleaded the 5th 75 times during his questioning regarding Medicare fraud committed by the company he was in charge of.  The same company that wound up paying 1.7 BILLION dollars in fines for their transparently fraudulent activities. The hypocrisy here is sickening.

To have someone that was able to spend upwards of 70 million dollars of his own personal fortune to narrowly get elected via one of the dirtiest smear campaigns on record point a gold encrusted finger at a former state employees is equally ludicrous.

Ok let’s look at these $100,000 pension holders.  They represent .17 percent of all state pensions.   Yes, there is a period in front of the number.  A percentage that is so small that it would be categorized as statistically insignificant by anyone that knows numbers.  Even with these few individuals with these admittedly huge pensions it doesn’t change that the average pension for a state employee works out to something like 16k a year. Oh also, all of these pensions referenced were over a decade ago, minor detail he left out.

Headlines like this work the tea party crazies into a frenzy. LOOK, we are paying for all of these fat cat pensions.  They shouldn’t have pensions because WE DON’T.

This is where the hypocrisy slaps me in the face a second time.  Tea Party folk are almost exclusively Obama haters, crying from every rooftop, STOP THE MUSLIM SOCIALIST!  They lament the idea of national health care or other government benefits that come from redistributing wealth from the upper tier of society.

Yet, this same hive mind has no issues bitching and complaining about state workers if they perceive they have benefits that exceed something they have.  They would prefer if state employees were paid in exactly the same manner as they are?  Sounds hypocritical huh? That’s because it is.  They basically are looking for a SOCIALIST employment compensation system where individuals are paid the same regardless of their education, experience or qualifications.

Don’t give me this bullshit line “yea, but state workers don’t have to pay into their pension”.  A pension is just part of the compensation for the employee, in this case deferred compensation.  Just because it is deferred doesn’t mean it should be looked at as any less real than an hourly wage.

And for the record, I am not in the pension plan.

Idiots.

So before I left yesterday I turned on my wi-fi netcam that I had on the dash of the party van.  Throughout the day I was able to monitor the progress of the painters.  I became quite nervous when I saw the main color being applied, it was looking pinky/peach’ish.  Now I didn’t know if it was because I was viewing it through the netcam which is not exactly a great image or if they maybe messed up the tint.

When I sent a copy of the still image to Ali she was freaked out as I figured she would be.  I went as far as to contact my sales guy and tell him I was watching the process via a remote webcam and the color looked off.  He assured me the tint is a dead match for what we gave him.   So I nervously crossed my fingers what I was seeing was a result of wet paint, lighting and poor web cam color.

During the day yesterday one of our remote branches was down in Everglades City.  They had a power problem the night before, a common occurrence, but their network line did not come up after the outage.

I called in the problem like I have done many times before after verifying the simple stuff like everything was actually turned on.  Throughout the day I got calls back from our provider, unfortunately all of them basically different ways of saying “not fixed”.

So now it is late in the day and I get a call from a tech assigned to the call.  He tells me the circuit is testing fine from a point outside the office.  I ask him “Have you actually gone inside the office to test from there since that is what actually matters?”  No, he hadn’t he isn’t that kind of tech.  What does that mean, he isn’t allowed to walk into buildings? He is an open air only technician?  What the F??

So he tells me that since our equipment is under service contract they need to have it handled by a different department.  Now I was officially annoyed.

He transfers me to another department where I am greeted by a very soft spoken girl.  It quickly becomes very obvious that she is new to the job when she asks me to hold while her “coach” gets on the line to listen.  Again, WHAT THE F?

The girl knows nothing about everything that has gone down already and starts asking me to reinvent the wheel.  Asking for our company name, phone number, etc….  I stop her right there, unable to tolerate any more of this bullshit.  I told her “Can you please get the “COACH” on the line?”   Coach was a woman as well.  As soon as she introduced herself I cut her off and said “Listen, I know this isn’t your fault, but the way this call has been handled is ridiculous”  “I have made many calls for downed network lines over the years and never had to go through this crap to get something fixed”

I continued, “I’ll tell you what.  I am going to hang up, call my sales rep and HE will straighten this out”  Well mr Outdoor Tech only evidently was still lurking on the line, unbeknown to me.  He says that whether I call my sales rep or not, I am going to have to go this route to get the issue addressed.  Of course this turned up the anger dial a few notches on my part and I fired back “Actually no, I won’t have to go through the same procedure” knowing that the county carries a big stick and when we have a problem with our carrier, they will ask how high if we say jump.

I hung up on Team Ineptitude and sent an email to my sales rep, asking him to call me, which he did shortly afterward.  I recanted the circus I had gone through trying to get this circuit back up.  The rep apologized for the confusion and promised he would step in and get it expedited.  We’ll see how things roll today.

On the way home I stopped back at Home Depot to grab another Dapper Tan swatch since I gave my original to Jay.  I wanted to make sure that the color on the walls was what we picked out.

I already knew from monitoring the web cam that they appeared to be damn close to finished as I saw them pulling down paper used to mask the roof line.  It was hard to believe they could repair the cracks, prime it and get two coats of Rhinoshield all in one day.  Later I was told that since they had two sprayers on site instead of the normal one it really makes the job go faster, plus they had an extra set of hands or two.

So I pulled up to the house worried I would see the peachy hue that adorned the web cam.  I was relieved that it looked much better in person.  Holding the swatch up to the wall confirmed the color was right.  The visual difference in the house was pretty stunning.

As I walked around the house it became obvious that these guys really do nice work.  I literally saw no flaws.  I was particularly interested in the areas that were in the worst shape like the hell wall on the east side of the house.  Man, what a difference.  The wall looked perfect.  The entire house literally looks better than it did when it was brand new in 2001.

The only issue I had was on the back deck where they only painted the face of the wood border the accent color and not the sides.  They went back and painted the edges per my request as I knew it would drive Ali nuts.

The crew that was doing the work were very friendly and nice, just as our sales guy has been.  Thanks to the extended daylight they were able to totally finish the job, pulling out after 7.  I signed over my same as cash financing check, thanked the crew and Jay for their work, and that was that.

I walked around the house and took a number of pictures to post on Facebook.  It is very interesting comparing the stark difference in the before and after shots.  I am very glad that we decided to mix up the colors instead of sticking with something very close to what we already had.  It feels like I am walking up to a new home.

Unfortunately Ali didn’t get home till after dark so she couldn’t get a great look but she liked what she saw from the lit lanai.

I am still amazed that they could do all that work in such a short time while doing it in such a high quality manner.  I guess it helps to have the right equipment and years of expertise. I’m very pleased with the result.

This weekend I need to put everything back around the house as well as pushing the stone border back in place.  They recommended I give it a couple days to fully cure.  The yard is in desperate need of attention as well so that will get addressed I’m sure.

Ali’s training buddies have other plans this weekend so I will be Ali’s primary training partner this weekend.  I am thinking about doing a two or even three headed brick at the water park possibly on Sunday.  We’ll see if Ali feels up to it.

Yesterday at the gym I literally raised the bar on my muscle up progress.  Up until a few weeks ago I had been unable to do any variety of muscle up.  Oh, for you bar work noobs, a muscle up is when you get your body from a position below a bar to fully extended above a bar.

I have been working off and on on the movement for a long time.  Well a few weeks ago I read a blurb on beastskills.com that described the transition portion of the muscle up as “getting your shoulders over your wrists”.  Well once I visualized getting my shoulders over my wrists I was able to get my first muscle up, albeit on the cross bar of the smith machine which is maybe six and a half feet high. This allowed me to use some leg assist. Still, I had never been able to do this before using any sort of assist.

So yesterday I upped the ante, moving to the bar that is probably 7.5 feet high in between the pulley stations.  I set up a Reebok step under it with only one step installed, giving me a few extra inches but the bar felt noticeably higher than what I was doing on the Smith machine.  On the Smith machine I was false gripping around a large, rounded support.  Grabbing just a bar felt less substantial.

So I kept running “shoulders over the wrists” through my head as I prepared to give it a go.  I yanked hard, exploded up and forward and found myself in position to easily lock out the dip portion of the movement. I did it, nice!  I tried two more times, missing one mostly due to sweaty hands and then making the last attempt.

It really encourages me, now that I know what the transition is supposed to feel like, that I can soon do a free hanging muscle up in the not too distant future.  I will be trying some assisted muscle ups at home with plenty of chalk soon.  Look for it at the YouTube channel nearest you soon.

There has been another episode released in the epic Jeremy cartoon series.

So yesterday I got home to a crew of 6 or 7 people finishing up pressure washing the house.  As I approached I was really surprised how clean they managed to get the gutters.  I asked the crew leader what they used to do it?  He said it was just a bleach solution.  Wow, I never had that kind of success with bleach.

In addition to cleaning the exterior they did some other prep work like pulling the downspouts off which will be painted the house color.  I walked the perimeter of the house with our sales guy Jay and Felix the crew leader going over exactly what would be done.  Felix seemed very confident in what he was doing which made me feel confident as well.

The job of painting the house which seemed so daunting to me is just another day in the park for them.  They didn’t see any real complications.  Today they will be repairing cracks, applying primer and maybe even getting a first coat of paint on the house depending how stuff goes.  Jay said they pulled additional help in to make sure they get everything done.

Yesterday Randall asked if I was going to stream the paint job.  I hadn’t really thought about it but Randall’s suggestion got my wheels spinning.  After thinking about various ways to do this I came up with a pretty solid option.  I used my spare car battery that I have for powering my timing box and connected it to my DC inverter to provide me with AC.  I then took my wi-fi netcam out to the party van and slapped it on the dash, connecting it to my rigged power source.

I turned it on this morning and checked it out, it seems to be working just fine although the picture is not as clear as I would like.  I am not quite sure how much power the cam uses but I think the battery should be able to power it all day with little difficulty.  It will be kind of cool to peek in on the crew to see what is going on.

If you would like to take a look yourself go here.  Be warned you may have issues viewing the cam with internet explorer, sometimes it can crash the browser.  It is solid with Firefox.  To see the stream enter “dufguest” for both the user name and the password.

If that isn’t geeky enough, last night I decided to install Hyper-V on my home server.  Hyper-V is a Microsoft product that allows you to run virtual servers.  I used a simple tool to create a virtual version of my old Windows 2003 server.  I then mounted that server within Hyper-V.  Just like that I had two servers running one one piece of hardware.  It works great.

Now I can decommission the old server hardware without losing any sleep since I will have a virtual version of it available to fire up whenever I may need it.  Although Hyper-V has been around for a couple years I never really played with it much.  Better late than never, it’s a great product.

Wow Tony Hawk is quite the scum bag huh?

It was recently announced he was divorcing his 3rd wife. Oh well lots of famous people go through marriages like cars, right?  Well yea but not quite like this.

Tony left his first wife in order to marry his nanny.  Then, he later divorced his nanny to marry his publicist.  This time around he is leaving the publicist because he is banging the wife of his longtime best friend and business partner, Matt Goodman.  Goodman and his wife had been married for 20 years.

Obviously Tony is one of those guys that gets off on the forbidden fruit syndrome.  What a dope.

Today the first step of Rhinoshielding begins, they pressure wash and clean the exterior of the structure.  I am a bit concerned that because the time line for this was accelerated that perhaps they could rush and cut corners.  I plan to express that concern to Jay, my sales guy, who is supposed to meet me after work to confirm the game plan.

I did them a favor by not making a stink for double scheduling their work.  I don’t want to be rewarded by that with work that is not done up to normal par.  I have been so conditioned by years and years of poor service that I automatically have my guard up, expecting that someone is going to try to screw me.  Since I have a check at home with both the contractors and my name on it,  I have the hammer.  I won’t be signing until I make sure everything is done as promised.

Last night I was at the monthly meeting for the running club board of directors.  It went relatively well compared to some of our meetings that can run on for seemingly endless hours with lots of jaw flapping and little actually getting done.  I actually took up a good chunk of the time talking about various mostly technical issues.

Recently, George, my part time run pacer, running store owner and board member became one of my Facebook friends.  Many people that know me personally and then meet my virtual self are surprised by my online verbosity, considering in person, I am relatively quiet.  I have always been and always will be better at writing than speaking.

Well like many others George has taken to reading my blog.  At the meeting he was recanting my entries from the past few days as proof of his devout readership.  If I actually considered who potentially reads my stuff I am sure I would steer entries more to the vanilla side of things which in turn would result in stuff that is as interesting to read as obituaries.  After all, I am exposing opinions, experiences and feelings that many people just keep to themselves.

No worries, I have been going strong with blogging for 8 years.  I have been told by a surprising amount of people that I have a weird ability to describe my mostly mundane existence on this planet in a way that makes it somewhat interesting.

George, look on the right column of the blog under the Archives section.  There is enough there to keep you reading for days.

Did you happen to see the video of the young woman thanking God for the earthquake and tsunami in Japan?  Her spin was God was punishing Japan for not being a christian country.    And yes, she appeared totally serious. I’d link it to you but it looks like somebody was wise enough to take it down.

She is far from alone in her idea that God was punishing Japan for it’s atheistic ways, in fact even Glenn Beck insinuated much of the same hooey on his show.  Anyone that prays at the altar of that guy should be ashamed in my opinion.  I mean what the f are these idiots thinking?

God is sort of like a street punk and if you piss him off he is gonna pop a cap in your ass?

Religion is on shaky enough ground without people like this shining a bright spotlight on just how bizarre the hardcore nut jobs really are.

After work last night I met up with Ali over at Sugden Park, one of my favorite places to run.  We are in the middle of a beautiful stretch of weather right now which added to the experience.  We did some interval work where you run slower and the faster for a period of time.  I am a good training partner for this type of work for Ali since I can run slightly faster. Ali did a good job during the speed miles, running one of them in under a 9 minute mile pace.

Right after we got done I heard my phone ringing in the truck.  It was our sales guy from Rhinoshield, he said an issue came up.  “Oh no” I thought to myself, let me guess, he is going to try to come back at me with a higher price or something.

Well it wasn’t anything like that at all.  The problem was he didn’t realize that they had a large commercial job scheduled to be done next week when our house was supposed to be painted.  He said however that they could actually start on our house THIS Wednesday.  I quickly conferred with Ali to see if we could make that work.  It seemed like we could so I said sure, let’s start Wednesday.

So now all of a sudden the paint prep that I planned to do either later in the week or this upcoming weekend had to be done NOW since Tuesday night I wasn’t going to be home.  So as soon as I got home it was immediately into haul ass mode, thank goodness the clocks changed to give me an additional hour of sunlight.

I headed out on to the lanai and removed everything from the area to be painted.  I removed the big nasty tv holder that was on the wall, hoses on the sides of the house, the two rain barrels, trash cans, etc…  The rain barrels were gross inside, both covered with some variety of black slime.  I plan to give both of them a thorough cleaning before they are put back into service.

The plan is the crew arrives Wednesday to do the exterior cleaning and then prep and painting should be finished up by Saturday.  It’s cool that it is happening that soon. I wish I would be around during the day so I could watch and document the process some more.

Can you imagine going through a 9.0 earthquake, a horrible tsunami and THEN having to worry about being microwaved by a runaway nuclear power plant?  Wow.  But, if anyone can handle it, it’s the Japanese. They are as tireless and resilient as they come.

Wow I don’t even know how to describe my feelings when it comes to the Japanese tsunami.  The pictures and video coming out of the country are just incredible.  I mean how do you even begin to address both the immediate emergency needs to make sure more people don’t die in the short term as well as formulate a plan for long term recovery?  Overwhelming doesn’t begin to describe the task at hand.

The scenes looked straight out of a movie, it was just unbelievable.  If a 9.0 earthquake and a hellacious tsunami wasn’t bad enough now they are trying to prevent several nuclear power plants from melting down.  It is just an horrible calamity.

Ali told me she read that the quake literally moved the coastline of Japan 8 feet and altered the axis of the planet.

On Friday night Ali asked me if I was going to go do the early Saturday run and then go to work.  I initially told her no, that the last thing I wanted to do was to go run and then go into work.  However as the night went on I almost found myself feeling guilty since time wise it would work out about perfectly, run at 6, be at work by 8.  I told Ali I changed my mind and that I would go do the run.

Saturday morning it was quite chilly when we got up with temps in the mid to upper 40’s.  Ali had all of her skin covered except her face.  I went the other direction, wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and shorts.  Although the air felt chilly when I first emerged from the truck once I got moving I felt just fine.

Ali prefers running in warmer weather, although I like warmer weather for most everything else, for running, I much prefer temps in the 50’s than the 80’s.  I ran with George and some other club members the entire way while Ali ran with Christy and Michelle.  I had a great run, feeling solid throughout.  Running with others really helps settle a noisy mind and keep it from driving you insane.  I finished 7.12 miles at a 9:20 something pace.

When Ali got back to the park she said she had an awful run.  She later told me how she was freezing on the run back and how the headwind was really bothering her.  I told her I honestly hadn’t even noticed a headwind coming back in.  We had much different runs.  Ali and I are supposed to run together after work tonight which should be good.

After the run I changed clothes and headed to work.  I had a project going on that involved replacing all of the switches on our network as well as connecting everything in our NOC to brand new wiring that was installed a couple months back.  We also replaced all of the patch cables at every patch panel in the building as well as in the NOC.

It was tedious work for sure.  We had several rat nests of old cable piled through out the room.  When I was removing old wire under the floor I resorted to just cutting a bunch of it out with scissors than try to untangle countless snags from years of neglect.  I had two other guys in there helping me which was great.  Originally I had ideas of taking on the entire project myself which would have taken FOREVER.

I left the office around 1:30.  There are still some loose ends to clean up but for the most part the job was incident free.  I have a second Saturday of work coming up sometime in the next few weeks.  I want to totally gut our two server racks and redo them so everything is more functional, organized and aesthetically pleasing.

After work I headed right to mom’s place to pick her up.  I decided to go straight up Tamiami Trail which was a big mistake.  The road was just clogged with snowbirds, I swear at least half of the plates I saw were from non-Florida destinations.  A drive that should have taken 25 minutes took 40.

On the way back to our place Mom and I stopped at Home Depot.  The stop was so I could grab some more weed and feed to battle dollar weed in the yard as well as picking up some additional color swatches for potential exterior house colors.  We wanted mom to help us in the process of picking out color combo’s since she is much better at that than either Ali or myself.

When we were there I told mom I wanted to grab a couple more things for the garden.  Mom saw a mature tomato plant that already had a small cage on it and a few tomatoes starting.  It was cheap, I told her to throw it on the flat bed.  I then talked her into letting me get her more stuff to start her own mini-garden at home.  When you are unemployed, growing your own food is a smart idea.

We got her two long and narrow rectangular planters, the type you could normally put on a window sill.  Mom got some herbs, a pepper plant, lettuce, arugula and some spinach.  She was excited about the idea of starting her own mini-garden.  Over the years she did a lot of gardening, it was nice to see her eager to jump back into it.

Saturday night Ali prepared a good supper which we enjoyed while watching Grown Ups, my latest Netflix dvd delivery.  It was a cute movie with lots of laugh out loud moments that everyone seemed to enjoy.  I’d give it a solid B.

On Sunday morning I was greeted by the incessant yipping by one of the two new dogs our neighbor acquired a few months ago, a tiny chihuahua.   Whenever I would go into the back yard the dog, which is smaller than most cats would bark constantly.  The neighbor seemed to not notice at all as the dog was left outside for the majority of the day.  If you ever heard a chihuahua bark, (Amy) you know how maddening it can become very quickly.  I can see a conversation coming up sometime in the future with my neighbor if she allows it to continue unabated.

Originally we had planned to have mom come to the water park with us on Sunday while Ali and I did some swimming at the lap pool.  However I called Saturday and after getting a run around a few times, I was told that the lap pool would be closed until later in the month.  But, even with the lap pool being closed I still suggested to mom we go just hang out there and have lunch, it’s a nice relaxing way to spend a Sunday.

Well Sunday morning the temps started out cool even though the forecast high was in the 80’s.  Mom said it was too cold for her to go to the water park so after a few attempts to change her mind I relented and agreed to take her home first and then Ali and I would go to the park.

Well by the time we got to the water park it was beautiful out, a perfect day to be there.  As we approached the entrance I heard the splash of someone diving off the diving board, which is attached to the lap pool! Mother f, the lap pool is open!  Ali was pissed as she hadn’t brought her stuff to swim laps.  I did because I had a feeling that I got bad information from my call experience on Saturday which went like this.

I call the number on their website and get a recording.  Odd, I thought, it is during hours the park is open so I hung up and called back.  This time I got some young sounding girl on the phone.  I asked her if the lap and diving pool were open again.  She said in annoyed tone “What??!!” So I repeated the question a second time.  She says “Please hold” and I am unceremoniously dumped to some guy’s voice mail.

Now I was pissed.  I call right back and again get the pre-recorded message, F.  I hang up and call again in a few minutes.  It sounds like I get this same, phone challenged girl.  I say “I just called a couple minutes ago and asked what should have been a pretty simple question and got dumped into voicemail.  IS THE LAP POOL OPEN YET? I KNOW IT WAS BEING REPAIRED.”

“Oh” she said, “no the lap pool won’t be open until spring break for the schools” (later this month)  Finally, an answer, although I was not surprised at all it turned out to be the wrong one.  I just had a feeling.

So anyway, like I said, Ali was fuming that she didn’t have her swimming equipment with based on the bad information I was given the day before.  I told Ali she could use my stuff, I would survive without it.  Swimming in a heavily chlorinated pool with no goggles is not much fun, my eyes were burning like mad for  a few laps.  Eventually the burning subsided and I just dealt with the blurry view of the line on the floor of the pool.  I put in a 1000 meters in the pool but it felt quite difficult.  Hopefully this is the start to building my swimming endurance back up on a consistent basis.

After swimming we were ready for lunch, however one glance to the food area revealed two very long lines.  I asked Ali if she was ok waiting a bit to eat to hopefully give the line time to die down, she was.  I almost fell asleep on my lounge chair immediately, I was really tired.  The only thing that kept me awake was the noise from the dancing fountain right in front of us.

Well after waiting maybe a half hour or so I looked at the line and it was still the same.  I told Ali I would just bite the bullet and go wait, she could come up and join me when I made it to the front.  Well wait I did, I was in the line for a good half hour.  The wait was not without entertainment of course.

The line was divided in two by wood stands that had string running between them.  Behind me in line there was a child that decided it would be fun to hang on the ropes.  As she did this it was pulling the front wood stand backwards, almost tipping it.  The two older ladies that the stand almost hit turned around and told the child to not do that.

Well of course the child ignored the women and the father seemed oblivious to what his daughter was doing.  Again she hung on the rope and this time the women had to catch the support to keep it from tipping over completely.  I knew I had to escalate the situation so I turned around and politely but firmly said to the father “Excuse me sir, if she keeps doing that she is going to pull the stands down” Well finally he paid attention although the child did not.  She continued to try to hang on the rope despite his increasingly strong verbal warnings.  Eventually he gave her a whack on the butt and picked her up which I am sure the PC’rs were appalled by.  Oh well.

As I waited I overheard the conversation behind me of the guy that was ex-military (Air Force) who has been out of a job for a year.  He was a generator and pc tech.   I also found out he is divorced, 40 something years old and that he once considered getting into Florida Highway Patrol.  He also was considering going BACK into the Air Force but he decided against it due to the age of his kid.  Yea that is a lot to overhear huh?  Hey I was in line a long time.

The rest of our Sunday was laid back.  Ali and I finalized our new color scheme which will be Dapper Tan for the walls and Olivewood for the accents.  I walked around the house and took various “before” pictures to document the transformation.  You can see just bad the stucco is in some spots.

So yesterday I was trying to migrate a physical server to a virtual variety. (need to do this?  get disk2vhd!)  I ran into a snafu with activation.  I was unable to reactivate the virtual version of the server using over the internet methods so I had to result to calling in for help.

I went through a series of four individuals in this process, every single individual was obviously Indian.  All of them were difficult to understand to varying degrees.  Of course I find this common strategy used by big companies of outsourcing their phone support to cheap Indian labor very frustrating and annoying.

Usually when someone resorts to calling a support line they are already annoyed enough as a result of whatever problem they are experiencing.  To compound that with having to muddle through communicating clearly with someone whose native language is not English is just stupid in my opinion.

I was unable to get immediate support for my issue and instead the third person I spoke to took my contact info for a call back.  By the time the 4th Indian, named Gurpreet, called me back I had already figured out the answer to my problem myself.

To be fair, all of the telephone representatives were polite enough albeit somewhat robotic.  I did my best to keep my tone with them equally polite, despite my dislike for what they represent.

FYI, if you are trying to migrate a physical server to a virtual copy and that server has an OEM Windows Server license, you will have issues.  OEM licenses live and die with that server hardware and can not be used in a virtual environment.

My solution to this issue is to upgrade the server to Windows Server 2003 R2 which I have a volume license for and THEN migrate it over using DISK2VHD.  I will then again use that volume license to activate the server in Hyper-V.

On Saturday I will be working at the office, replacing all of the switches with new ones as well as patching our NOC over to some new all CAT 6 wiring we had installed a couple months ago.  The hope is to squash a weird bug we have had with transfer speeds over our network in certain situations.

After work I plan to pick up mom to have her come out for a visit.  We want mom to help us cement the color choices for the exterior of the house.  We also thought on Sunday she could hang out at the water park with us while we get some laps in.

Ali probably had her best week in awhile as far as work goes.  Working less hours makes both her and I happier and results in a better quality of life all the way around.

So last night I decided to pop in my latest Netflix dvd, The Last Airbender.  I had read soemthing last week around the Oscar broadcast that the movie was actually nominated for a Razzie, meaning it was pretty terrible.  Oh well, I thought it couldn’t be that bad, I like people with super powers and special effects.  I was wrong.

I thought the movie was in a word, awful. When I saw in the opening that this was a Nickelodeon film I didn’t realize that the script was written by 3rd graders, which it appeared to be.  I mean the dialogue was horrible.  I find it hard to believe that M. Night would sign on to direct this piece of trash, it totally removed any remaining ideas that he was a competent director.

It’s really hard to pinpoint what was the worst part of the film since there were many things to choose from like the atrocious acting, bad casting, compressed storyline or the laughable dialogue.

After I posted how much I hated the movie on Facebook I found out that the Reading Pagoda is actually in the movie.  However there was no way I was going to subject myself to watching that garbage a second time to actually spot it.

The movie did have a couple good things.  It was  a great flick to have on if you need to get chores done around the house.  I emptied the dishwasher and checked my email without having to hit the pause button once.  The other nice thing was it was as short as most animated films, the torture ends around the 90 minute mark.

The funniest thing of all if the plot is only halfway done, the Air Bender still has two more elements to master!  Do you think they would actually have the balls to produce the second film?  I certainly hope not.  I give the film a big, stinky D.  Make your kids watch it as punishment if they talk back.  It will probably work better than a time out.

So yesterday the Wisconsin legislature worked a loophole to jam through legislation to castrate the state worker’s union.  I find it hard to believe that this is really happening.  The Tea Party zealots actually have managed to get the middle class to cannibalize themselves while the 1 percenters just sit back in their plush leather recliners, sipping their brandy with a large smirk on their face.  It is amazing just how easily human beings can be manipulated.