Archives September 2011

So Saturday morning we had our second race in as many weeks to time.  Once again I brought along the new equipment so I could do a chip start.  The set up of this race was not conducive to having AC power run out ot the start line so I did several things differently from the week before.

Last week I connected to the timing box using regular CAT 5 cables plugged into a switch.  This time I used a CAT 5 crossover cable to eliminate the need for the switch (and AC), I also connected a different laptop to the timing box than the week before.  None of these changes should have been problematic or so I thought, so I didn’t bother testing it ahead of time.  My bad.

So I run out to the start line with about 5 minutes to go to set up the equipment.  Just getting the mats physically laid out across the road was a major challenge with 500 runners all converging on the start line.  Finally after pushing bodies out of the way I got the mats down and turned the box on.

There is an application on the laptop that I have to use to connect to grab the times.  The app was unable to connect.  I verified I had a link light on the ethernet port  of both devices but I was not able to connect over the network.  Now the race director was waiting on me to start the race.  After some more fast attempts to fix the issue I realized it wasn’t something I was going to do on the spot.  I turned off the box and just told George to start the race.

I was frustrated by the failure.  I knew ultimately it was my fault for not testing this combination of equipment together.  It was a good learning experience which is the basis for my bringing the start line equipment to all of the races, even those that don’t warrant a chip start, to work out the bugs for when it does matter.  Further investigation at home revealed that my lack of connectivity was caused from a class A subnet mask being configured on the laptop instead of a class C mask, something that in normal pc networking would not cause the devices to not talk to each other, especially when direct connected. When I changed the mask to 255.255.255.0 everything was peachy.

Other than the start line f up the race timing went fine.  Once the race started Ali was off and running with Michelle who started running much earlier.  Ali wound up running 11 of the 21 miles with Michelle.  I sat around and waited for Ali to return. The race was done and packed away by 9:20 or so.  Ali and Michele didn’t roll into the parking lot till about 10:15.  I passed the time going out and getting coffee and then sitting on a bench at the park watching the ducks and an anhinga drying off after a swim in the lake. I didn’t really mind just hanging out for awhile as I sipped my coffee.

I had hoped to get the grass mowed this weekend but it didn’t happen.  Repeated dumping of rain during the week left many areas of the yard too soggy for productive cutting.  It doesn’t look horrible yet so I figured I could hopefully knock it out one of the nights after work this week.  One less thing to do this weekend.

Ali had done the weeding on Friday so that was one less thing to do and we had the cleaning crew in for the first time in a couple months on Friday as well.  It all added up to a three day weekend without a crushing load of must do’s, a nice thing.

Ali spent the majority of Saturday afternoon sleeping.  I headed out with the dogs in the party van while she snoozed.  I had a few stops to make.  The first stop of all was to put air in the tires of the party van.

The van had developed a vibration in the front end in recent weeks and it was getting worse.  I thought that perhaps uneven tire pressure could help matters.  Well when I got out at the gas station and approached the drivers side front wheel I could feel heat radiating off the alloy wheel along with the distinct smell of burning brake pad.  Great.

Realizing that on the drive to the gas station I hardly applied the brakes I knew that something was rubbing, seized up or any other number of not good things, all of which will add up to a good sized repair bill. Well I knew it was already f’d up so I decided to just finish my errands anyway.

The first stop was at Home Depot where I grabbed silicone sealant and a couple spring clamps to facilitate the repair of my Garmin gps.  Next up was a stop at mom’s place.  Mom’s Roomba developed an issue a few weeks ago where it just wants to back up.  I gave her a couple things to do to fix the issue but they were unsuccessful.

I brought a can of compressed air with in the hope of being able to blow out some of the sensors that typically cause this problem.  I struck out as well and told mom I would need to take the robot with me for further surgery.

My last stop was Wal-mart to grab oil and oil filters to swap out on both the Tacoma and Camry.  I use high grade Mobil 1 synthetic on the Camry.  Damn that stuff gets expensive..

When I got home I told Ali about the van brake issue.  I told her I planned to drop it off at Tire Choice on Sunday on our way to the water park since I had a 10% off any repair voucher from them.  I knew the repair was going to be costly and the 10% would actually add up to a sizeable chunk of change.

My Saturday night was spent doing robot repairs, how exciting. In total I have 7 Roombas of different flavors, 8 if you include the one I gave mom.  5 of them had problems.  I decided I was going to take a crack at fixing as many as possible.

In many cases, Roomba problems are the result of scuzz getting into the guts of the robot.  Depending where this scuzz winds up it can do stuff like block sensors, strip gears or burn out motors.

When I opened up my mom’s Roomba it was stuffed with lint.  Evidently her carpet must shed the stuff in droves.  I sucked out what I could with the vacuum cleaner and then I took it out to the garage to be blown out extensively with my air compressor.

I reassembled the robot and fired it up, it still backs up, damn it.  I turned my attention to the other robots hoping I could get another one working that I could give to mom.

I next worked on my second Dirt Dog robot, the garage/workshop sweeping robot.  This one had a similar backing up issue.  I cleaned the robot up extensively and initially thought I fixed it.  Unfortunately after further testing the backing up returned.  I am not sure where the issue is.

On the positive side I did get three robots working that were not operational before, two of the three were fixed by thorough cleaning.  The third Roomba got the brush deck from mom’s Roomba to fix a stripped gear problem.  It felt good to bring several Roombas back to life.  I designated one of them, an older Discovery model to go into service at mom’s condo.

I also finalized my Garmin repair.  All I did was goop in some sealant, wipe off the excess and let the spring clamps in place overnight.  I used the watch later in the weekend without incident.  I was pleased.

On Sunday we headed to the water park as planned, me driving the party van and Ali following in the car.  I dropped off the van and asked for them to call me later when they find something out.

I originally had hoped Ali would go out and ride bike with me on Livingston Road, something she has refused to do since her crash months ago.  Ali still refused to do so, claiming it wasn’t fear at this point and instead she just didn’t feel like having to “keep up with me”.  I assured her I was fine with not pushing pace in order to just get her back out on the road and over her mental obstacle with doing so.  Ali still adamantly refused which frustrated me.  I told her I would then just follow her and Christy around the park, which frustrated Ali. Oh well.

So we rode around the park at a casual pace not getting out of the 13mph range very often.  In total we probably rode around 10 miles, I accidentally had my GPS stopped for a portion of the ride.  After we got done riding Ali said she wanted to just run for a couple minutes with Christy. I said fine, I would get the bikes racked up and ready to go.

As I was sitting on the curb removing my bike shoes I noticed a SUV pull into a handicap spot.  I then see a hispanic guy  get out, I would peg him as somewhere in his 30’s.  He looked perfectly healthy to me.  He went around to the other side of the vehicle and let out his two kids who looked perfectly healthy as well.

Of course this immediately annoyed the piss out of me.  People that somehow think they are entitled to beat/scam the system for their own personal benefit sicken me.  What if a person with a genuine handicap needed that spot that was filled by this f’ing lazy asshole?  When Ali got back I told her about the unhandicapped hispanic.  She went out and took a picture of his license plate which she forwarded to me to investigate.  So far I found out  that there is no handicap placard assigned to this vehicle so this jerk either stole it or is using somebody else’s placard.  Either way, I am on to him and his fraud will not go unnoticed.

So Ali and I both put in some laps at the pool.  I had not swam in quite awhile, probably 5 weeks at least.  For this reason I was very surprised that I had my fastest times of the entire summer.  I averaged right around 8 minute 400’s where I was averaging closer to 8:45’s for the last 4 months.  I theorized to Ali that maybe it was because the bike effort was not of the strenuous variety, although I hardly use my legs anyway when swimming.

After the swim we ate lunch and hung out a little bit.  I received a call from the garage after the swim regarding the van.  As expected the damage was substantial, one of the calipers had frozen.  In addition to the damage on the driver side, the woman Tires Plus said the passenger side rotor was right at the minimum thickness and would need to be replaced in the near future.  Of course her recommendation was to fix it now which I agreed to.  I told them to put off work on a slightly loose right upper ball joint which is a longer term issue.

Well anyway, all this work was going to take some time so I was ok spending some of it lounging around the water park.  We laid around for a little while but the combination of persistent bees and the heat from sitting in only a partially shaded spot became annoying.

We planned to go back to mom’s place after the water park so I could give her the replacement Roomba as well as some cheese she left at our place while house sitting.  We hung out there with mom for a bit and chatted.  By the time we left it was about 2:15.  I called the garage and told the woman I was going to driving back towards her area in a little while and wondered how the repair was going.  She told me the van should be done in about an hour.  Ok fine, I will find something to do until then.

That something was a stop at Best Buy to get a couple fans for my computer.  My computer which is now at least 5 years old, a record for me, has developed some noise issues.  They have been going on for awhile so I almost don’t even notice them at this point.  Ali however finds them quite annoying.  I bought two fans which I theorized would excise the noise demons, one that blows hot air out of the side of the case and another that pulls fresh air in from the front vents.

When I replaced the fans later the majority of the noise was gone however later a high pitched squeal still made itself heard now and then.  I will have to do some further investigation to see if I can track it down.  It annoys Ali so much that I could say I will just buy a new computer and she would be fine with it, just to be rid of the noise..

Ok so after Best Buy Ali drops me off at the garage a little after 3.  She asks if she should wait to make sure it was done.  I told her it was no big deal, if it wasn’t quite done I would just hang around, it was better than…..

Ok f it.  The f’ing connection dumped so I lost the last half of the entry and I don’t have the patience to recreate it.

A Cliff Notes version of the rest of the weekend.  The van repair had me waiting two hours instead of the one promised.  We watched Hachi, A Dog’s Tale.  I give the movie an A.  If you get through it without crying you have no soul.  I took my new Trek on the Publix Ride and PR’d, yay for me. I cleaned out the hobby room, again. I am now watching season 5 of Dexter.  It isn’t as good as the prior 4 seasons but still well worth watching.

The End…. f’ing blog…

So yesterday I left early to prepare the house for the fantasy football draft I was hosting, there was a TON to do.   The good thing was since this was the third year I was hosting I already had a pretty solid game plan on what had to be done.

On the left you can see how the great room looked before I began the rearranging process.  I worked a solid two hours buzzing around the house.  I needed to set up two tables so there would be ample space for owners to set up their laptops since many of them would be bringing one along.

I also had to work on getting the connection up and running for the three remote owners attending the draft.  Last year we used a new feature introduced with Skype 5.0, group video conference calls.  Last year it was a free feature in the beta.  Well evidently in the last year Skype decided to make this feature a PREMIUM feature that required you to spend some money.  Luckily they had a free 7 day trial of premium features that allowed me to slide by without dropping any cash.

By the time I was done with my efforts this is what the room looked like.  I wound up dragging in the chairs from the lanai for seating around the fold up table.  I also ran power strips under each table as a power source for the multiple laptops that would be in attendance.

To ensure adequate lighting I temporarily replaced the CFL bulbs that normally reside in the room with old fashioned 100 watt incandescent lights.

I filled the cooler with beverages and ice, labeled the recycling box, set up table snacks and handled a dozen other small details.

For my part of the food contribution I had a couple pizzas from Publix, spanikopita, tacquitos and bagel bites (which never even made it out of the box).  Luckily Ali got home before 6 to help with the food prep, I would have been in deep shit without her.

Prior to people showing up the house was hit with a SEVERE storm.  Leading up to the storm there was huge wind hitting the front of the house.  I could hear the garage door straining against the pressure.  When the rain hit it was literally a deluge.  Our property was actually well on it’s way to being water free until last night.  Unfortunately now we are back to living in marshlands.

The owners started showing up.  Most of them brought food or drink or both.  The kitchen island was stuffed with unhealthy food and we had three coolers of beer and other drinks against the wall.  Again Ali was a big help getting it all somewhat organized.

I had some issues getting the remote Skype connection stable.  One of the owners kept crashing Skype on my laptop when he connected.  It turned out that we only had 1 of the 3 remote owners connected in with a video feed, the other two were audio only connections.  It worked out ok.

In addition to our remote owner connection we used some more tech in this years draft, doing a “live” draft on the CBS Sportsline site.  It was pretty cool.  Basically you logged into the league website and launched a draft room app.  The app kept track of whose turn it was, who they picked and who was next all in real time.  It worked very well.  In the past after the draft one of the commissioners had to manually enter all of the picks into the system, a large pain in the ass.  This way, when the draft was done, all of the teams were already populated on the web site.  In fact this might make a physical gathering of owners in future drafts unnecessary except for social interactions.

Like I mentioned yesterday, for the second year in a row I had the last pick.  This is both a good and bad thing.  The bad is it means I had no shot to get an elite top 3 player on my team.  It also meant that my wait between picks was ridiculously long.  On the good side, when I did pick I was making two consecutive picks since the draft order tick tocks back and forth each round.

Just like every year, my fantasy football draft prep was very minimal.  All I had was a print out from the CBS site that ranked the players by position.  I was also busy doing party maintenance so not a whole bunch of thought went into the picks.  There were a few times when I kicked myself realizing I could have made a better choice.

You can see my team on the left.  For the first time ever I don’t have the Eagles defense which bums me out.  I did grab a few Eagles but only one of them would be a starter in my regular lineup.  I grabbed Ronnie Brown on the chance that if McCoy goes down, Ronnie could suddenly become a big point getter.  I also took a flyer on good old Donovan McNabb.  My logic was he now has a good offense around him plus he should have a huge chip on his shoulder after his embarrassing season last year.  He’ll have a hard time though bumping Matt Ryan out as my starter.

During the party I sampled some of pretty much everything.  My body isn’t very used to eating large amounts of junk food.  I felt pretty gross.  In addition it seemed like my illness symptoms ratcheted up somewhat during the draft.  I was blowing my nose and coughing more than I had been for a few days.

The draft wrapped up around 10pm, not bad considering we had 14 rounds of picks and didn’t get started until 7:20 or so.  Despite my encouragement of owners to take some food with them almost all of it remained.

My ass was dragging but I HAD to get stuff back in order before bed because the cleaning chicks are supposed to show up today for the first time in a couple months.  Ali had dozed off in the bedroom and was not thrilled to have to help me in the process.  I worked as quickly as possible to get the unwelcome chore over and done with.  On top of it all I had to do some data work for yet another race we are timing Saturday after the clean up was done.

By the time my head hit the pillow it was after midnight.  I woke up this morning feeling miserable.  Not only was I tired and feeling guilty from eating all that shitty food I was gimping around on very sore legs and ass due to first time in a month squats on Wednesday.

As I mentioned, we have a race to time Saturday.  I am hoping the rest of our Labor Day weekend is not too strenuous.  Yea of course I have stuff I need to get done but the list isn’t double digits long at least.  Ali is off work today so hopefully she gets a head start on the normal crap.

I heard on the radio today that many schools no longer teach children how to write in cursive. WTF?  What would be the logic behind that?  We want kids to print everything?  Granted there is very little pen and paper writing going on in the world anymore but to me learning cursive is still a viable skill set.  Maybe I am just old.

Last night was my last chance to film an attempt for this month’s Bar-barian pull up challenge.  I wasn’t even going to bother based on how I had been feeling this week with my gym work outs.  I felt pretty weak doing my pull up sets, the most I managed was 17 reps, 4 short of my 21 rep high.  I figured I would try anyway, nothing to lose.

I was amazed that I managed to actually beat my best number by one rep, struggling mightily to get 22 reps.  I’m not quite sure where that came from.  The last 4 or 5 reps involved me hanging around on the bar a long time while my back muscles recovered for a few seconds, it was tough.  I was very happy to end the month on a good note.  As a point of reference my 22 reps only put me mid-pack in the contest, the winner knocked out a sky high 37 reps.

My participation in the Bar-barians forum has really helped my training.  Seeing 14 year old kids up to 50+ year olds still pushing themselves does something to help keep the ball of motivation rolling.  Reversing the normal downward curve of age related performance from a downward to an upward arc is something I enjoy trying to do.  Sure in the end the grim reaper will claim me just as anyone else but I can guarantee I will go down kicking and swinging all the way.

Last night I sold my old Trek via Craigslist.  I got $100 less than my asking price but it was still enough to take a good chunk out of what I spent on my new wheels.  The guy that bought it is just looking to get into triathlons so I passed along whatever knowledge I could to get him started in the right way.  It’s nice to have one less bike in the garage.  I want to get rid of two more yet.  One more will be easy since it is mine, the other will take some work since it is Ali’s.

Tonight I am hosting the draft for our fantasy football league.  This will be the third year in a row I am hosting it.  Despite the far less than convenient geographic location of our house for the other league owners, they have actually requested I keep hosting it because of the other perks.

I do a good job of geeking out the event, providing wi-fi access to all owners and connecting remote owners via a remote video Skype connection that is displayed on the big 73 inch tv with sound coming over the Bose surround system.  I also rearrange the great room with two tables and put out a decent spread of food.

I am actually leaving work early today so I can get home and begin the preparations which are pretty extensive.  Should be a fun night.  Ironically, despite my hospitality I will be picking last of all the teams for the second consecutive year.