Archives September 2012

So yesterday was a frustrating day.  The news about my AdSense account getting yanked really bothered me all day.  The remote class I was sitting through was not all that exciting and for the most part, was dealing at a level of TCP/IP expertise that I am nowhere near.  I knew I was out of my league when the first two students that were introduced where from the Department of the Interior and AT&T.  So for the most part all day I just tried to cherry pick the information that would be helpful in our relatively small network.

Ali dropped off the dogs for me to dog sit so she could get more time in at work since she is leaving for PA again at the end of the week.  Having the dogs all day was nice except for the times Sadie is sitting by my office chair, staring,  giving me the “I want to do something fun” face and the two times that Nicki threw up in the bedroom.

This class is based out of Denver and was supposed to have hours of 10-5.  Well the instructor, who is extremely good and knowledgeable, unfortunately also has a tendency to talk a lot off the class material.  As a result we didn’t finish up to close to 6pm EST.  That isn’t very cool.

After I was done with class I was rammy from sitting in a chair all day.  I immediately headed outside to do a Ray’s Way.   Later last night I decided I had enough of “long” hair and gave myself another head shaving, on video.  Yesterday I also put together the footage Jeremy shot of proper pressure washer operation.

I received word back from Google overnight that they are reviewing my case.  I am hoping I beat the odds and get the account reinstated.  It would be such a pain in the ass to start over.

So today is 9-11.  The idea that 11 years have gone by punctuates just how quickly time can fly.  All of the memories and feelings of that day still seem very clear and tangible in my mind, unlike most of my other 11 year old memories.

If you asked me on 9-12-01 if I thought we would still be dealing with issues from the horrible events the day before, 11 years in the future, I would have said , no way.  But here we are, still feeling the repercussions from those few hours where the world basically stopped and watched with mouths agape.  The open wound has healed but the scar tissue will remain for generations to come.

So Saturday morning was the cross country meet that I was timing.  I showed up on site about 5:30, the first race didn’t start until 7:45.  I was glad I got there as early as I did, there was a lot to do since this event didn’t have the normal collection of volunteers that a typical race has.

Even before the sun came up I was sweated through my shirt, it was brutally warm and humid, without the sun beating on me yet.

The timing for the event was a challenge.  I had various issues.

One of the most frustrating issues was the physical danger the finish line provided.  Because a cross country meet is run on grass, the finish mats are placed upon grass.  Well the grass at the park was relatively high.  Very early on we saw issues with kids stumbling across the finish mats.  They would not be paying attention to their foot placement as they finished, most likely because they were exhausted, plant their foot right in front of the mat and then catch that same foot as they took the next stride.

We had a bunch of near misses where kids almost fell and a handful that actually did fall.  The one boy went down really hard.  We tried to minimize the problem by weighting down the sides of the mats to keep them taut  but it did not prevent the problem.  To be honest I am not sure how to avoid the issue in the future short of having the finish area grass mowed very low.

I noticed about halfway into the event that a number of kids that had not run yet would gather by the finish line to cheer on the other kids.  Unfortunately some of these spectators got too close to the timing mats with the timing chip that was on their sneaker, inadvertently getting scored for the wrong race.  If there was any good fortune in this, it was for the most case JV runners  got mis-scored which is less critical.  However it still wound up as a big headache at the end when I was trying to figure out why I had so many scoring anomalies.

Finally we had a number of kids that simply were wearing the wrong chip.  The coaches were responsible for making sure their kids wore the correct chip.  There was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening.

It was a pretty stressful morning as I had some other technical challenges to figure out on the fly but in the end everyone was happy.  By the time everything was cleaned up and put away it was after noon.  By the time I was done doing all of the associated work at home it was about 2:30, a long day of timing.

I quickly worked on whatever chore related items I needed to get done, cutting a few corners this week because I was just too damn tired to give a shit.  Saturday night I stopped over at Ali’s to drop some stuff off.  She threw in some pizza we had for dinner.

So Sunday morning I had to get up early once again, this time to drive over to Jeremy’s place to pick up some furniture items he no longer needed, a computer desk and a queen size bed.  In exchange I was giving him my old pressure washer that I no longer needed.

I left my house right about 7AM and pulled into Jeremy’s place a few minutes after 9.  After hanging out and playing with the kids a bit we headed over to the townhouse that they rent out, where the items were located.

When I first saw the desk I grabbed one end and lifted it, the sucker felt HEAVY, too heavy to lift into the truck without mutual hernia risk.  I lightened the load by removing all drawers and doors.  After doing so it was more manageable.  The back of the Tacoma barely accommodated the desk, box spring and queen mattress but we squeezed it all in there.  I used two high strength ratcheting straps to lock everything securely for the long 70 MPH trek back across Alligator Alley.

Jeremy suggested we grab sandwiches before I head back which we did and took back to his place.  I got back out on the road about 11:45.  Obviously I was going to miss the start of the Eagles game but I could listen to it on Sirius en route.  I recorded a how to use a pressure washer video for Jeremy which will be released shortly.

The drive back across the state SUCKED.  The furniture in the back of the Tacoma had various negative effects.  Crosswinds caused a lot of unwelcomed swerving  as I was rolling along.  I needed a firm grip on the wheel at all times.  The stuff also stuck up above the cab of the truck by a couple feet, creating an aerodynamic nightmare.  The truck was working hard to simply maintain the speed limit and the gas gauge was dropping at a rate I had never seen before.  I was quite glad when I pulled into the driveway with the gas warning light on.  I had filled the truck to the very top before leaving, meaning I only got something like 250 miles out of a full tank of 15 gallons.

When we loaded the desk onto the truck I had a brief thought in my head about the usable work area on the new desk.  It kind of looked to be on the small size, especially since I have a 27 and 23 inch monitor.  Well the first thing I did when I got home was put a tape measure on the desk space, it was only 36 inches.  I instantly knew I was f’d.  There was absolutely no way I could make my stuff fit.  I started chastising myself for not considering this before driving across the state.  My thought process was simply “uh that desk looks nicer than my desk and Jeremy wants to give it to me” and nothing else.  I was frustrated, very frustrated.

Well my original plan was to give my existing desk to a neighbor that was looking for one.  I guess the new plan is to see if she wants Jeremy’s desk.  Luckily she did.  Getting the desk into her place was quite the challenge and required temporarily removing some parts of the desk and a closet door so I had space to clear a tight corner.  After much effort we finally got it slid into place.

I did set up the queen bed in the guest room so the trip wasn’t a total fail but damn I was annoyed with myself.

The annoyance didn’t subside after watching the Eagles game.  Wow.  Vick threw 4 interceptions and had the Browns drop another couple should be int’s.  He did not look good at all.  The Birds were very lucky to pull out a 17-16 win against a BAD Browns team.  How bad?  Their rookie QB completed a THIRD of his passes for just over 100 yards and threw 4 interceptions as well.  The Eagles performance did absolutely nothing to convince me they learned a damn thing from last year where they lost a TON of games they had absolutely no business losing.  However if this trend continues, Andy has exhausted his last safety net.

This morning I got a very alarming email, saying my Google Adsense account was disabled!  As you know, my recent good fortune with generating ad dollars via Google, primarily from my YouTube videos has been something I am VERY excited about.  In order to have more of a good thing, a month or so ago I added a small banner ad to the bottom of the posts on my blog and encouraged people to click the ads, thinking that driving more traffic to the ad sites is a win/win.

Well evidently this behavior is frowned upon by Google and is laid out somewhere in the encyclopedic terms of service that they provide.  Somehow they determined that too many of my clicks were coming from the same IP addresses and as a result killed my account.  I have a couple problems with this.

First off, if my blog readers were clicking the ads, the extra clicks could not have been more than a couple dozen a day, it isn’t like I have some bot out there registering thousands of ad clicks.  Second, if this behavior was problematic, why is it outside the scope of reason to send me a warning, saying , “Hey this shit is not allowed, here is your one warning and then you are done”  I think that is reasonable.  As is, my only option is to submit an appeal through their sterile, faceless, email only support system and hope I get connected with someone that is reasonable.

This decision by Google f’s me several times over.  It negates any outstanding money they were due to pay me and stops my generation of any further income via AdSense via the blog OR YouTube.  This snowballs into my YouTube account, removing my YouTube partner status, meaning I no longer generate totally legit ad dollars on my YT videos, which infuriates me.

If my appeal is successful, I can get that reinstated but I think I am screwed out my unpaid revenue dollars regardless which is bullshit.  Unfortunately in their terms of service, you agree that Google can basically say FU at anytime for any reason.  I have no leverage and can only hope my appeal is successful.

Yes, in the big picture those clicks violated the terms of service, although if I actually knew they were a violation, I certainly would not have encouraged blog readers to click away.  I am really bummed out about it.

I think I have reached my frustration limit for a three day period…

I always enjoy spotting oddities at the gym.  Yesterday was one of those days.  In the free weight area was a  guy that looked like he was trying to cut weight.  He had on sweat pants, a sweat shirt and a knit beanie.  When I walked in I thought it was odd that his “exercise” seemed to be laying on the bench press with his Iphone above him, pressed against the barbell, texting.  He was laying on the bench for a long time doing this, lasting beyond my normal pre-workout stretching session.

Eventually he got up, walked over to the squat rack, did about 8 squats and then immediately returned to the bench and texting on his back. He continued this cycle of laying on the bench for 5-6 minutes combined with 25 seconds of exercise multiple times.  His ratio of exercise to rest/texting seemed totally out of whack.  Luckily I didn’t need the squat rack yesterday.

Yesterday Ali took Sadie into the vet to get her teeth cleaned.  Sadie has an issue with her teeth getting nasty.  We had her teeth cleaned once before a couple years ago.  Luckily Nicki doesn’t seem to have the same dental misfortune.

Cleaning a dog’s teeth is a bit of a pain in the ass and somewhat risky.  The vet has to totally knock the dog out to do it.  There are always dangers with anesthesia.  Once the cleaning is over it takes a couple hours until the dog is awake enough to take home.

When we had this done before Ali was quite upset because Sadie literally looked like she was dead when she first came out, which is a normal anesthesia look, but disturbing none the less.

After the gym I went over to the vet’s office for about 45 minutes to help Sadie wake up.  It’s funny how disoriented she was at first.  By the time I left she was close to being ready to go.  Ali snapped this cute picture of Nicki looking over Sadie shortly after she came out.  They are such good buddies.

Oh man the political rhetoric is getting insane, made worse by the party conventions being in prime time.  I had my first FB friend casualty as a result, I just couldn’t take the ranting and hypocrisy any longer.  It’s been a long time since I did some FB housecleaning anyway, I have a feeling the 2012 election will give me ample motivation to do more of it.

Last night I was quite busy, stopping at Trader Joe’s and Sam’s on the way home from work to stock up on a few items.  Once home I tried to lessen the weekend load by cleaning Tuki’s cage, doing laundry and watering all of the indoor plants.

Tomorrow I will be timing a large cross country meet.  Timing these events is significantly more involved than timing a normal 5K.  Instead of one race, it is 4 races. Each race starts 40 minutes apart so I need to be quick with processing the results of each event as well.  It’s a challenge, but I’m always looking for those anyway.

On Sunday I might be driving over to pick up some stuff from Jeremy.

Next week will be an oddball.  I am training from home all week long.  Later next week Ali heads back up north so I will be the full time dog sitter for a few days as well.  It’s always good to break up the normal monotony of my work week although sometimes sitting in a “classroom” environment for 5 days straight can get old pretty quick.

Regardless of my class experience it will definitely be nice to “work” from home for a week.

I have been very equitable in my treatment of the DNC convention in comparison to the RNC convention.  I haven’t watched a second of it, either.  I read last night Bill gave a kick ass speech.  That’s all well and good.  However at least personally, I have no need to watch a glorified rah rah session from either party to help me make up my mind on anything.

Last night I skipped yoga and instead decided to get the yard mowed.  No, I didn’t feel nearly as refreshed afterward but I did enjoy a similar sense of accomplishment.

Did you ever think, I mean really think, about how ridiculous it is the marijuana is illegal, or, almost any other drug for that matter?  One of the things the Obama administration has done that I am not happy about is a stupid crack down on marijuana use.  It is a HUGE waste of resources.

When I was on the mower last night my mind was wandering, as it often does.  I was analyzing why alcohol, which has the potential to cause the exact same problems as illegal drugs, is legal and everything else is not.  Well it is the same reason that many things in the world are, that’s just what we were told and told and told again.  Alcohol is ok, all other drugs, bad.

Well if you are able to pull yourself out of that haze you realize how stupid this policy is.  Our prisons are stuffed with people arrested on drug related charges.  You and I pay a fortune to facilitate their incarceration.  There is a huge, violent underground dedicated to the production and distribution of these drugs simply because they are illegal.  The question is simply, why?

Why is it acceptable for someone to drink a half a case of beer but they can’t smoke a joint or pop a pill?  The end result is the same.  The individual becomes chemically altered.  Why can’t we simply apply the same rules for alcohol to all drugs? Basically, as long as your behavior on these substances does not negatively affect other individuals, go nuts.  Kill yourself if you want to.  If you start f’ing with other people while in this state THEN we have a problem.

Just think of the positives that could come from such a policy change.  No more illegal drug trafficking.  Huge dollars could be both saved and earned.  No more BILLIONS of dollars spent policing, prosecuting and imprisoning drug users.  Then add in HUGE dollars from taxing the legal sale of these substances.  It would be a huge win/win.

To me green lighting alcohol sales and nothing else is pure hypocrisy. It’s like saying you can only buy Honda’s.

You would think from this rant I was a closet marijuana smoker or pill popper.  Nope, never touched the stuff. Although I think if you chose to align your life around any drug use, including alcohol, you are heading down a path with a brick wall at the end, I fully endorse your right to do so as long as you don’t throw up on my shoes.

This issue, like so many things in life that our society accepts blindly, is revealed as ludicrous once a bit of logic is applied.

Last night I finally got back to some cleaner eating after 4 days of consuming fantasy football draft party leftovers.  I had a salad containing baby kale, spinach, tomato, carrots, almonds, pecans and sunflower seeds.  I followed up with a wrap that included hummus, carrot, tomato, more salad greens and a slice of low fat swiss cheese.  Desert was celery with peanut butter.  My beverage was water.

It felt good to eat better, my body literally felt ill from the pizza overload combined with an overdose of sweets I put down at work the last few days.

I was very busy last night.  After doing a little bit of silly body weight work, I was on the computer most of the night.  I had to do some network upgrades at work remotely and also do the legwork for the cross country meet I am timing on Saturday. The meet is shaping up to be quite large, with over 600 kids signed up.

Yesterday I set a a new one day record in Adsense dollars, raking in a MASSIVE $9.40.  I now try to keep the camera rolling as much as possible.  If I am lucky it will catch that magical moment when I face plant doing something stupid which could translate into YouTube gold, just like this kid did.

I got so many things done this weekend I literally can’t remember it all, so I will touch on what I DO remember.

Saturday morning I had my first race to time in a couple months.  The race had a huge swell in registration in the last three days, over half of the people signed up in that compressed time period.  We wound up with right around 550 people signed up.

Before the race we had some lighting problems.  The club has several high power halogen light sets.  They throw a nice amount of light.  The problem is they also pull huge amounts of power.  Over the years we have had issues with the lights popping circuit breakers.

Well Saturday the lights kept popping my power strip that we were also using for the laptops so it was a major pain in the ass. One of the things I have wanted to look into is getting some fluorescent lights to replace them to eliminate this problem.

It was so humid Saturday morning.  Even before the sun popped it’s head out my shirt was thoroughly soaked from the massive moisture in the air.  Race timing went ok, any issues I had were human error related and easily corrected.  I was out of there around 9:15 or so.

Ali was scheduled to do a long run for her marathon training so she asked if I could pick up the dogs on the way home so she didn’t have to worry about bathroom breaks.  The girls were quite surprised to see me pull up in the party van to take them out to the house.

After getting all of my post race processing completed I started on my long list of to do’s.  Later in the afternoon I turned my attention to the two ripped pool screen sections.  It seemed like almost on queue, as soon as I started working on hanging the first replacement section, the wind started kicking up.

The wind was blowing towards the house.  A section of loose screen catches wind like a sail.  I went inside and got some of my paint masking tape.  My hope was I could use it to temporarily hold the screen in place until I could get some spline in.  I used a bunch of tape and it worked, briefly, until a strong gust would break the screen loose again.  After repeating this process 5 or 6 times I was getting pissed, yelling at the wind like it had a set of ears.

Finally I had enough, I texted Ali and asked her if she wanted to be a screen holder.  She said she didn’t mind coming out.  While she was in transit I wasted no time, super setting in cleaning the master bathroom.  Like I said, I had a monumental list of things to get done.

Once Ali arrived we got to work on the screens, her role being keeping the screen taut I as I sunk in the spline.  Her job was not exactly fun as these sections were right in front of rose bushes with sharp and abundant thorns.  I got both screens replaced in about an hour with Ali’s assistance.  I was quite glad she was able to help.

We had talked about taking a few items to Ali’s place so I suggested we get that taken care of as well.  Among those items were one of the two desks in the hobby room, some rolling storage things and a spare shelf from the shed.  We loaded all the stuff in both the Camry and the Tacoma and headed back to Ali’s place along with the girls.

The shelf will be put to good use in the storage area in Ali’s garage and we lugged the desk upstairs to her spare bedroom/office to be used to hold her sewing machine and various other items.  I had brought my cordless drill and drill bits to hang some stuff for Ali.  Unfortunately the thing she wanted me to hang didn’t come with drywall anchors and I didn’t bring any along.  I told her I would hang it in the next day or two.

Ali heated up some of the leftover fantasy football pizza I gave her for us to eat for dinner.  By the time I left I was a zombie.  I had been literally on the go all day long since 4:15 AM.  I was done.

Sunday morning I was up and busy by 7:30 am, continuing on various things I wanted to get done.  My goal was to have my Labor Day completely free of labor, so I could do whatever I wanted to do.

Mid-morning I shot back over to Ali’s to hang up the stuff I couldn’t the night before.  I also picked up the girls again to hang with me since Ali was going to work.

I actually got the time to finally give the SSR a bath.  I had not gotten a chance to do so since I took the truck across the state to visit Randall and Tracy.  Before I started washing the truck I threw it up on my ramps.

I wanted to crawl underneath to see if I could spot any obvious cause of the P0420 error (catalytic converter issue) I was reading.  All the wires looked intact but I did see something else.

Since I had all that work done on the truck (Vette clutch installed, both cats replaced), I noticed I heard a new vibrating type of noise under hard acceleration.  Well as I was under the truck I noticed the heat shield right above the rear weld on the new passenger side cat had been burnt and split, an obvious by product of the rushed replacement of the cats, the installer was in a severe time crunch.

Anyway the slice created a flap of heat shield that could very obviously rattle against the pipe, so I simply bent it upward.  In my subsequent test drive I no longer heard the noise.  I also used my code reader to clear the CEL code, curious to see if it would immediately reappear.  It didn’t, so I guess I am on a wait and see pattern with that issue.

The truck looked great after it’s bath.  I even took the time to clean the tail pipe extensions.  When all the work was done I also had bigger, stainless steel exhaust tips put on the SSR.  However they were already covered in black soot/carbon, totally negating the coolness factor.

I read on SSRFantatics that the best way to clean them up is using plain old oven cleaner.  I sprayed some on, let it set for a few minutes and then scrubbed it out with a brush.  It worked like a charm.  My tips were back to being an eye catcher instead of an eye sore.

Mid-afternoon Sunday I headed over to my mom’s place with the girl’s in tow.  She had asked if I could run the steam cleaner in her two bedrooms as well as help her flip over her mattress.  She hadn’t had the carpets cleaned since she moved in.  I told her it was no problem.  She was worried about my having time to get it done before she had to leave to meet some friends for dinner.

Well compared to the time I spend when I clean the carpet at the house, mom’s condo was a piece of cake.  I don’t think it even took me a half hour to finish both rooms.  She was surprised.  I told her whenever she wants it done to let me know since it is so easy to do.

When I got back home I finished up whatever chore related items needed to be done.  Finally, I was done.  So what did I do next? Relax?  Of course not.  Instead I headed outside to shoot some work out videos.

I actually produced a total of 5 videos out of the footage.  3 of them were BB forum related, depicting what is and isn’t considered good form for the monthly challenges.  It seems every month there is a question on what is good form.  I am hoping instead of typing it out time and again I can simply link these videos.  The two other videos were my attempting to do muscle ups with my legs tied together with yoga bands and another funny one where the dogs get involved as I do dragon flags.

Ali came and picked up the dogs Sunday night after she was done working.  It was odd having both her and the dogs out at the house two consecutive days.

So Labor Day arrives, the day I was busting my ass for so I could have a a day free of must do’s.  I woke up on my own around 6:30 and was out the door before 8 am to go do a bike/swim training brick.  I have done very little endurance training over the last month or so because of blowback knee issues after playing in the KOB volleyball tourney.  My knee is still not 100% well but I deemed it good enough to at least do some non-impact work.

My trusty Forerunner 201 seems to have finally bitten the dust.  It stopped working a couple weeks ago so I was without a GPS.  I improvised by firing up MapMyRide on my Iphone a storing it in my seat bag.  I did a long ride, for me, approximately 24 miles.  My average pace was about 17 mph but that was with a number of lengthy stops at traffic lights.  My actual riding pace felt much stronger than that.  I was pooped when I pulled back into the parking lot.

It was then into the water park for the swim portion of my brick.  I was not pleased when I jumped into the lap pool and it felt like a hot tub.  I bet the temperature was just under 90 degrees, a terrible temperature to swim distance in.  I scaled back by original goal of 1600 yards to 1200 solely because of the high temps.

I want pleased to see that the water park was only going to be open for weekends until the end of September.  I thought last year it stayed open until sometime in October although I could be mistaken.  The swimming weather easily could extend into November but I guess this is purely a monetary decision.  Bums me out none the less, swimming definitely helps my aching shoulders.

When I got home I was starving so I slammed down lunch.  Early in the afternoon for some reason, despite already getting in a significant amount of exercise in the AM, I decided I wanted to go out and do a Ray’s Way circuit.  In layman’s terms this is doing 5 sets of dips, pull ups and push ups within certain time constraints.  It’s tough.

I actually failed to complete the sets successfully.  The combination of my morning exertion, outdoor hot and humid conditions and a less than positive mental disposition all contributed to my failure.  It was still a good workout.

I didn’t really get off the treadmill until late Monday afternoon when I sat down to play some WoW.  There is a new expansion coming out in 3 weeks which may finally get me back into the game that I basically had stepped away from for 4 or 5 months.

I have yet another busy week laid out in front of me.  Some night this week I need to get the grass mowed.  Next Saturday I will be timing a large invitational cross country meet and then Sunday I may be heading back to the east coast to pick up a desk and queen size mattress that Jeremy and Mandy are graciously donating to me.  I plan to trade them my old pressure washer in exchange.

Did I mention how badly I feel for Clint Eastwood?  He made himself out to be basically a stumbling loon in his RNC speech.  I actually heard some people say that the thought he “killed it”.  Yes I agree he did kill it, but in the literal sense.  I like the guy too much to see him turned into a laughing stock, it’s a shame.