Archives August 2013

I swapped vehicles with Cindy yesterday so I could do some more work on her Miata.  The rear finish panel on the car has been broken since she bought it.  It was the major exterior flaw on the vehicle.  The Miata has had a number of mechanical issues that took priority over this visual flaw until last night.

I found the replacement panel on Ebay, it is from a 96 Miata, luckily the panels from 1990-1997 are all compatible.  From what I read, the first couple years of production, the plastic used for this panel was not great and became brittle.  By the time 1996 rolled around they switched to a higher grade, more flexible ABS style plastic.

I was really impressed with the replacement part.  The seller packed it VERY well, ensuring it would arrive undamaged.  The part itself was in great shape, looking practically brand new despite coming off a 17 year old Miata.

The replacement process was not difficult, the funniest moment was when I pulled part of the broken finish panel off and found an abandoned wasp nest inside of it. After removing the busted up old panel I had to move some of the mounting hardware to the new panel before mounting it.  All in all the swap went very smoothly and it really cleaned up the look of the back end of the Miata.

I didn’t see any other how to videos pertaining to this on YouTube so I had no choice but to create the first one.

So the situation in Syria has been in the news quite a bit.  The latest information casts doubt on John Kerry’s seemingly irrefutable evidence that the government was behind the chemical weapon release.  The UN is urging that inspectors are allowed to complete their investigation before any additional action is taken.  Britain whose leader, David Cameron, was very gung ho about military action, has now officially backed away after Parliment voted it down.

My initial reaction on Monday, supporting military action, was based on several presumptions, that there was  iron clad proof that Asaad was behind the attacks and that any military action would be a joint effort by multiple nations.  Despite the absence of both of these things now, there is now talk of the US going it alone and striking out at Syria.  I do NOT think that is a good idea.

There is a clear and recent precedent for our intelligence being incorrect (or us being outright lied to) and using that information to get the country into a long, pointless and infinitely expensive military conflict in Iraq.  I have no doubt that capability for the government to deceive is still there even with a different face in the oval office.  I would find it hard to believe that the Iraq lesson would not be heeded.  Going into another Mideast conflict on questionable intelligence, solo would be pretty stupid, frankly.

Let the inspectors finish their job and depending on what they come back with, reevaluate from there.

Tomorrow I step back into the race timing saddle.  The Labor Day weekend event is a pretty good size, we should have 400+ runners participating.  I am testing out some new integration with this event.  If it works as hoped, I will be posting finish results right from the finish line, providing runners with the ability to check their results online instantly using their smart phone. I also am testing pushing race results to runners via email or text messaging notifications that they were able to sign up for.

I am hoping it all works as planned, crossing my fingers.

This long weekend will be put to good use preparing for my upcoming road trip.  I have a list of things that need to be taken care of.  Unfortunately that list only resides in my head currently, not the safest place for it to be with my sometimes hit or miss memory.  I probably need to jot some things down.

Yesterday Alison and I got the final part of the divorce paperwork handled, the quit claim deeds that move the property around from a title standpoint.  I had already assumed the mortgage months ago, late last year I think.   The quit claim deeds were simple one page documents that just had to be notarized and witnessed by two people.  I filed the one for the house later in the afternoon at the clerks office next door.  The copies for the horrible investment chunks of land in Lee County went out in the mail today.  At least filing the paperwork is cheap, something like 11 bucks each.

It feels good to have it finally done, the process went on much longer than I expected or hoped for.  I am looking forward to moving ahead in life without the divorce looming over me like a gray cloud.  It has been an emotionally difficult journey on many levels.

I still will need to change some other stuff like life insurance, medical insurance, etc.. so if I kick the bucket anytime soon she still would be the lucky benefactor.

I have been trying to get things lined up to be able to do another roadtrip and an ambitious one at that, the Grand Canyon.  I have a total of 11 days to get out there, hike it and get back.  Cindy is going to be going as well.  I couldn’t afford to do this trip without someone to split the costs with.

I already warned her that a long road trip can be a true trial by fire when it comes to spending time with someone.  Little annoyances can become magnified 10 times over when you are in a confined space with another person for 100 hours or more.  We will either emerge from the trip feeling better about our compatibility or be ready to kill each other.

Regardless of that, the trip should be awesome overall.  I have only been to the Grand Canyon as a kid during a western road trip with my dad.  I hiked down only part of the way and recall feeling like I was near death by the time I got back up to the South Rim.  This time around the goal is loftier,  from the South Rim all the way down to the Colorado River and back up in the span of a day.  The National Parks website officially advises against this due to it’s difficulty.  Sounds like a good reason to do it.

During the various western road trips Ali and I took, the Grand Canyon was never a consideration because of traveling with the dogs.  Since this will be a canine free trip those limitations are lifted.

I have planned a not exactly direct route which will hit New Orleans, the flat plains of Kansas, and the mountains in Colorado on our way to the canyon.  Unfortunately there are a lot of miles to gobble up which is going to require a LOT of long driving days.  We will try to split the driving duties close to down the middle to make it less painful for both of us.

Then there is the party van, which has already taken me all over the country multiple times.  I have some concerns about calling on it once again to take me cross country, after all it is at this point 17 years old.  I suppose I will just cross my fingers and roll the dice that mechanical issues will not be one of the memories from the trip.

By this time next week I should already be on the road, well up into northern Florida with a day one stopping point of New Orleans.  Adventure awaits.

When I got home last night  I had a headache and was feeling pretty annoyed.  For some reason I got it in my head that I should go out and try the hard mode of the BB challenge (20 pull ups as fast as you can go), despite my state of being.

It was again another wet evening and it was in fact drizzling as I headed outside with my tripod, camera, towel (to dry the bar) and chalk.  I didn’t do any warm up or stretching, I just dried the bar, chalked my hands and started pulling.  You can definitely tell I was in a shitty mood from my commentary. 

I did manage to best my prior attempt by exactly one second although while I was in mid-set I thought I actually was going faster than that.  20 pull ups in 30 seconds.

So my major project for last night was more work on my Tuffwing construction.   I got my hands dirty (and sticky) with CA glue.  The use of CA accelerator really helps move the build process along.  I got the wing halves, carbon fiber spars, motor mount and electronics hatch assembled and glued together.

I will need the radio receiver that was used in the Speedwing so I had to extract it.  I felt genuine remorse as I used a combination of scissors and my fingers to rip apart the wrecked plane to get to the electronics.  When Mike built this for me he meticulously and professionally embedded the rc gear inside the body of the plane.  As I ripped it apart it gave me a greater appreciation of just how much care he utilized when building the plane.  It also made me more angry at myself for crashing and destroying the wing.

I considered filming the build process but there is already a very well done Tuffwing build video out there so I didn’t bother.  I’m not in a rush to get the wing done since until my yard dries out I won’t be doing any non-quadcopter flying anytime soon.

So I got back to the bedroom early, around 9pm,  hoping to catch up on the triple header of shows I am currently watching, Breaking Bad, Dexter and Ray Donovan.  I fired up my Xbox and tried loading Breaking Bad.  It acted like the episode was available however each time I tried to view it I would get stuck in “trouble loading video” loop.  Ok, well I guess I’ll watch Dexter/Ray Donovan.  Nope, neither of their latest episodes show up as being available on the Xfinity 360 app either.  Mother f…

Ok, I grab my Kindle and browse to the Xfinitytv web site.  I see the latest Breaking Bad episode is available on their site. Awesome.  I try to load it up but get stonewalled by the version of Flash running on the Kindle.  I am unable to update it conventionally on the device so again I am left jonesing for my Breaking Bad fix. Ok on to plan C.

I grab my laptop and again bring up the Xfinity site.  I am finally able to launch the episode, sweet.

Watching shows the the Xfinitytv web site sucks, of all the ways to watch a show, their website jams the most commercials down your throat.  On top of that they disable your ability to cleanly navigate through the shows timeline.  So yes, this is normally annoying, however last night it was maddening.

Ever since I upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 my video does not work well on the Xfinity site.  Right in the middle of a show the video will freeze, (audio continues) and I get a message about the video driver encountering an error.  The only way I can get video back is to refresh the page which is where the problem snowballs.

Let’s say you are at the 35 minute mark in a show when you have a problem and the last block of 6 or 7 commercials last played at the 30 minute mark.  If you try to resume the show it will make you watch the most recent block of commercials again, even though you already suffered through them before.  As time went on the error was popping up more and more often, sending me back into this maddening advertisement downward spiral.

I tried a video driver update and still had no luck.  I then resorted to using a generic video driver with poor resolution to just get through the damn show.  I finally finished the hour long show after a nearly 2.5 hour ordeal.  It was so fcking annoying.  Thank goodness the episode was awesome and worth the effort.

On my drive home last night I headed into what looked like a wall of black clouds.  Shortly after I pulled into the driveway the heavy clouds let loose, dropping another inch or two of rain on my already sopping wet property.  I am really ready for summer/wet season to come to an end.

Last night I was flying my Blade indoors in the great room.  It felt much less stable than before, it just wanted to drift around the room, requiring constant correction by me which often became over-correction followed by impact with some object.

I even tried setting the controller to it’s less aggressive control rate and still had issues.  Trying to trim the copter didn’t seem to make much of a difference, it just did not want to hover in place for shit.

I started on building my Tuffwing although I only spent maybe 10 minutes on  it until I reached a point where I would need to apply CA.  I need to get some wax paper to cover my work surface to prevent inadvertently gluing my wing to the table.   I need to abandon my normal somewhat play it by ear approach I use for many construction projects and make sure I follow the instructions to a T.  Failure to do so will result in an unstable, sloppy aircraft that will be a pain in the ass to fly.

I heard people talking about the ridiculous performance Miley Cyrus put on at the MTV VMA awards on Sunday night.  A 5 second search had the performance in front of my eyeballs.  It was like a car wreck, despite it being awful on multiple levels, I couldn’t turn my eyes away.  I don’t know what was the most terrible, her facial expressions, her creepy mouse back up dancers, her outfit or her disturbing gyrations.  The song was pretty damn awful too.

If this is the current state of what the music industry thinks is cool I suppose I am as uncool as it gets.

The performance and the associated buzz afterwards has somehow managed to drown out a legitimate horrific world news story, the use of chemical weapons, likely sarin gas, in Syria.  There have been reports of the use of sarin by the government against rebels for many months, evidently the most recent case was just the most extensive.  Syria’s government is claiming innocence, saying the the gas is actually being released by the rebels themselves to garner international support for their cause. Um yea, ok.

If this was the case, why is it that Syria blocked UN inspectors from entering the area of the attack for 4 or 5 days and instead proceeded to bomb the shit out of the area during that time to obliterate evidence?  Then yesterday UN inspectors were shot at as they again tried to enter the area.  Do these sound like the actions of a regime that has nothing to hide?

For most Americans that are wrapped up in the truly important things in life like how Miley Cyrus sucks, Syria may as well be on a different planet.  It seems incomprehensible that in 2013 there is Hitler style mass human extermination still going on.  Sadly Syria is only the latest example.  Human atrocities still occur all the time, however out of sight, out of mind keeps most of us from having to entertain that reality.

Kerry gave a speech yesterday that left little doubt that something tangible is going to be done by the US as a result of this attack.  The situation is made very sticky by Russia’s staunch support of Syria no matter what sort of genocide their government is involved in.

Evil is alive and well in the world, no matter how hard we try to insulate ourselves with ignorance.

The place where I work is typically pretty boring,  It got a big dose of excitement on Friday afternoon however when a a joint connected to a ceiling drain let loose in the middle of a downpour.  This was a big pipe, probably 5 – 6 inches in diameter.  By the time I got up front to see it there was already an inch of water on the floor of the department with a non-stop waterfall coming from the ceiling.

I felt sort of helpless, not having the means to stop the water although I wondered if I could stand on something to push the pipe back onto it’s fitting.  In total the water was pouring in for a good 15 minutes until someone from the maintenance department got up on the roof and plugged the drain.  Of course as the network administrator my first concern was the equipment.  Luckily most of the computers were off the ground although there were a number of live power strips/bricks laying in the water with juice still flowing to them.

Our department got busy disconnecting the computers and getting them up on the desks.  Within 90 minutes Fire Service was on site starting to suck up the excess water and hooking up their huge collection of dehumidifiers and fans. When I got into the office this morning that department was a mess.  All of the furniture was moved around to gain access to the walls where they drilled multiple holes to help dry out any moisture that seeped in there.

We have been told certain areas might not be completely dried out for a week.  We are going to have to juggle things around to keep at least bare minimum services available while allowing the repair/clean up to complete.  It will be a a frustrating week for sure.

Saturday any sort of mowing was cancelled due to the huge amounts of rain that fell during the week, I have standing water everywhere.  Of course I had no shortage of other things to do.  I did a bunch of work on Cindy’s Miata as well, replacing the spark plugs, fuel filter and troubleshooting a pesky water leak problem.  The fuel filter was much more inconvenient to change on the Miata than the van, surprisingly enough.

I brought the girls out to play with Lucky on both Saturday and Sunday.  They had a lot of fun.  Watching Lucky chase Sadie around the house brought instant smiles to my face.  It reminded me of how Sadie and Nicki used to play years ago.  Nicki still tried to get involved in the play the best that she could however nowadays that is relegated to a bit of squaring off with her dropping the “big paw” now and then.

On Saturday night we went out to see Kick Ass 2.  I saw the opening week box office for the movie was pretty poor, something like 16-17 million.  I was kind of surprised, until I saw it.  The original Kick Ass was a mostly light hearted movie about a kid who winds up being a real life super hero.  I recall there being a few moments in the first film that seemed overly graphically violent but for the most part they were minor.  Well Kick Ass 2 took it to a new, highly inappropriate level in my opinion.

The movie  vacillates wildly between a light hearted, silly theme to a Schwarzenegger in Commando style of violence. One minute you are laughing out loud at the snooty high school girl puking and shitting herself and then the next minute you are seeing Kick Ass’s dad brutally strangled in a jail cell.  It was ridiculous and in very poor taste.  Machetes through the chest while a guys dogs is watching, jokes about not being able to get it up to rape a woman, and graphic close up headshots of cops vaults over the line of good taste.  I was feeling legitimately disgusted during certain parts of the film.

It’s a real shame because the movie would have been quite fun if they would have dropped all of the graphic violence.  It was totally unnecessary and irresponsible.

If I wasn’t annoyed enough by the film, we had to deal with some young kids that decided out of an entirely empty theater, their best seating option was directly behind us.   The movie was rated R and most of these kids were probably 14 or younger, kudos to to whatever adult allowed them into to see the movie, idiots.

So of course the film is going to get a bad rating from me, it could have easily been a B+ if they dropped all the unneeded bullshit, instead I would award it a C- and would not recommend you waste money seeing it any format that requires you to pay for it.

During the day Saturday I had another annoying encounter at Dunkin Donuts.  I documented it pretty well on FB so in order to save time I will take the easy way and copy and paste.

So I am ready to turn left into DD and a Mercedes sedan comes whipping around the corner and turns in ahead of me (no turn signal). For some reason this man and female companion stopped for 30 seconds at the entrance to the drive thru before finally approaching the ordering area.

After I realize he has been at the ordering window for awhile I turn off my radio so I can hear what is going on. I see this asshole’s triple chin wobbling as he is chastising the young girl for not having the variety of donut he desired. He asked her “what the hell is going on in there?” in a total condescending prick tone as if this girl was responsible for making sure his favorite donuts are available at all times.

He instructs the girl to read him every donut variety they DO have. She does so without losing one ounce of pleasantness in her voice. Asshole says he guesses he will have to take a key lime donut since he has little choice.

He whips around the 90 degree corner of the drive thru. The girl hands the fat fuck his donut and then hands him his receipt which he promptly throws on the ground before he speeds away.

This is the exact type of affluent individual that I despise. I hope his key lime donut gave him explosive diarhea.

Moral of the story – don’t be an asshole

My post struck a chord with many people who chimed in with their thoughts about this chode.

On Sunday I decided to keep my brick close to home instead of spending three hours away from the house.  It was Lucky’s last day with me so I figured he would appreciate it if I stuck around.   I did a relatively quick 4 miles on the treadmill, most of it spent with Lucky observing me.  I made the time on the spinning belt more bearable by watching YouTube RC videos on my Kindle as I was running.  It definitely helped pass the time with less mental anguish than normal.

After the run I jumped in the pool and did around 30 minutes of swimming.  Since my pool is only 28 feet long I only get 4 or 5 good strokes in before having to spin around but it was good enough.  Again Lucky spent most of the time watching me, he is so funny.

On Sunday afternoon I thought I would take my Blade quadcopter outside.  Although there was standing water everywhere I planned to keep the copter up on the mound where the house is built, keeping it high and dry.  I had a huge scare while I was out there.  I was flying around cautiously when a gust of wind pushed the copter farther away from me than planned.  At the same time the copter gained altitude rapidly, almost like it had lost contact with my transmitter.

Before I knew it the copter was at least 150 feet high and moving away from me.  I was freaking out.  At that height I could not tell the orientation of the Blade at all, I was just trying to use trial and error to get it closer to me.  I wound up doing a huge high C shaped path over the house.  I was trying to cut throttle to get the damn thing down but at the same time not too much so I could keep bringing it towards me.  I somehow managed to get it somewhat close to me and cut the power just before it hit the oak tree branches.  I felt very lucky to have gotten it back dry and in one piece.

Sadie and Nicki were not fans of the copter, they both scurried inside when I started flying it.  Lucky on the other hand saw this as a flying dog toy.  As I was hovering it he would jump up and bark at it, he thought it was the best thing ever.  I had to keep calling him off of it, he almost got his nose nicked by the blades a few times.

My buddy came to pick up Lucky around 5.  It was sad to see him go, he has so much fun out at the house and just loves everything.  He’s a good boy.

Sunday evening I saw the latest GI Joe movie.  I was very tired and dozed off multiple times, especially towards the end.  What I saw was decent, I’d give it a B.  If I saw more I might have rated it higher, or lower, who knows?

I left work early yesterday to do prep for the draft party at the house.  On the way home I swung by my buddy’s place and picked up Lucky.  After about 5-10 seconds of confused growling Lucky remembered who I was and was all tail wags from there out.

Lucky has a history of getting car sick.  When he is in a vehicle it seems like you have a 50/50 shot of getting some barf on the floor mat.  In the past I seemed to have more success when I kept my hand on him at all times, petting him for assurance.  My technique worked, we pulled into the driveway sans puke.

I immediately went in the back yard with Lucky and he immediately took off sprinting around.  He has tons of energy and is fast, faster than Sadie.  He managed to find a few of the wet spots in the yard and looked thrilled to sprint through them.  Don warned me of his affinity for water so I pulled out a towel ahead of time to dry him off somewhat before letting him inside.

Once I was inside I immediately got busy with the considerable prep for the party.  I totally rearrange the great room for the event, pushing all the normal furniture to the outside walls and then pushing the big dining room table, perched on top of furniture sliding pads, into the middle of the great room.  This may be the only time in the past year the table has actually been utilized.

This is what the room looked like when I was finished moving things around.  I then worked on getting the laptop up and running which would be used to connect remote owners via Skype.  This laptop is getting pretty long in the tooth and is barely up to the task of supporting a 4 way video call.  I shut down anything that wasn’t absolutely needed so it could dedicate as much processing power as possible for the video call.  I also hardwired it to my network instead of using a wi-fi connection.

I did some loose math in my head and ordered 6 large pizzas from Hungry Howie’s, opting for the much more expensive delivery option as opposed to picking them up.  I was worried about getting back in time if someone showed up early.

Well I figured poorly on both accounts.  6 pizzas would have been reasonable if there wasn’t a mountain of additional food brought in by other team owners and nobody knocked on the door until 6:50, 10 minutes before the draft was supposed to start so I could have easily picked the pies up.  Oh well.

I was somewhat worried how Lucky would react to all of these strange men entering the house.  I was surprised he basically had no reaction, sort of taking a “oh here is another human” attitude.  He was quite happy to interact with anyone that approached him.

We wound up with three team owners dialed in remotely.  On occasion their video feed dropped briefly but for the most part it was almost like having them sitting in the room with us.  I had my normal draft diet which consisted of 5 or 6 Bud Lights in the cool aluminum bottles and a gluttonous amount of the various food items that were piled up on the kitchen island.

Despite my typical lack of draft prep, according to the draft analyzer I had a surprisingly strong draft, on paper the second best in the 12 team league.  You can see my initial roster on the left.  The draft wrapped up around 10:15.  Everyone thanked me for hosting the event once again.  I turned down offers for help with the clean up, knowing it was my burden to bear, it’s part of the deal when you agree to host something like this.

I first worked on getting the mountains of food sorted, cleaned up and in some cases thrown away.  I had 3 or 4 unopened bags of chips and pretzels to go along with another 2 or 3 partial bags.  I had two varieties of chocolate chip cookies and a big tray of nearly untouched mini-brownies.   The spanikopita I baked was hardly touched and only two of the six pizzas I bought were consumed, sheesh….  I also have enough beer left over to remain drunk around the clock for a couple weeks.

By the time I got the house back in order it was after 11, and my head didn’t hit the pillow until at least 11:30.  I have had precious little sleep this week by my standards.  I am hoping to score myself at least one night with a full 8 hours of sleep over the weekend.

On my way to work I offloaded some of my food surplus at Ali’s place, donating two cheese pizzas and a container of spanikopita.  I brought additional food to the office where it is sure to be consumed by my hungry, hungry co-workers.

This weekend I am looking  forward to bringing the girls out to the house to play with Lucky.  Sadie should especially have fun, playing with a dog that actually has more energy and is faster than she is.  With the tremendous deluge of rain we had last night I have lakes all around the property.  I have no doubt I will go through quite a few dog drying towels over the next couple days.

I’d like to get outside this weekend to fly the Blade MQX around but I won’t tempt fate by doing it with bodies of water nearby.  I also have everything I need to start construction on my TuffWing.  Hopefully I can steer some time into that as well.  I also might get out to see KicakAss 2 in the theaters.  I found the original surprisingly entertaining.  My meal plan for the weekend is going to be very heavily pizza based.

When I got home last night I felt really blah.  I had no desire to do a home workout or anything resembling work for that matter.  I treated my poor mood with play.

I got all of the parts of my Blade MQX out and ready to fly.  I had thumbed through the manual during the day to loosely familiarize myself with the copter.   I expected it to be a different flying experience from what I was accustomed to with the RC planes I have flown.  I didn’t expect it to be significantly more difficult.  I was wrong.

On my initial attempts I was trying to keep the Blade very close to the ground, not getting it more than a foot off the ground at any time.  The copter seemed to be drifting more than I expected but I later attributed that to my very conservative lift offs which could drag the landing gear, tipping it one way or the other.

I found myself really having problems with disorientation with the 4 additional control directions I had to deal with.  With my RC planes like my Sky Scooter I am controlling throttle, tail elevator  for up/down angle and the ailerons on the wing that handle turning.  With the quadcopter I have throttle to control altitude up/down, right/left rotation, bank left, bank right, and forward/reverse which is controlled by dipping or raising the front end of the Blade.  I really had issues when the copter was coming towards me, I just don’t have the reflexes yet to be able to react accordingly.

I went through three battery charges of flights.  I was surprised how long the tiny lipo battery lasted, giving me a solid 10 minutes of fly time.  As expected the Blade had a LOT of crashes however none of them caused any significant damage.  Luckily despite my issues with overall control, I was pretty good at just killing the throttle whenever I saw an impact coming, saving the Blade from any high speed crashes. The funniest incident was when I had the copter up 5 or 6 feet in the air.  It drifted too close to one of the plants on top of the media cabinet and chopped a few leaves off, sending the Blade back down to the carpet.

As you can see in the video, I did have some pretty controlled hover time going on but I was really bad at doing any “steering”.  I moved the Blade around the room almost exclusively using the banking capability of the quadcopter.  If I tried to turn it I always had problems with it either gaining or losing altitude since left/right is on the same stick as the throttle. I also expect that flying outside with the Blade will be a much better experience.  The living room, despite it’s size, just had too many obstacles for a noob copter pilot.  The backyard offers much larger open spaces to allow for pilot error.

Tuki was not a fan of the helicopter.  As soon as I put it in the air he retreated back inside his cage.  Perhaps he didn’t trust my flying ability.  He is a pretty smart bird I guess.

In between the charging cycles of the copter battery I supplemented my night of play by getting on my warlock, named KeddieFruger, in WoW.  I have not played anything but my panda monk in WoW for the last 8 months.  I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I had playing my warlock.  There have been a number of changes that make them much more powerful than they once were.

I did a couple 5 person instances.  Despite having gear that was not great via MOP standards and not knowing the instances or how to really play my warlock well anymore I still unleashed the most damage of anyone in the group.  It was cool.  It’s fun having 5 or 6 demons by your side unleashing all sorts of hell simultaneously on bad guys.

Tonight there will be no time for copter flying or WoW playing, I am hosting my fantasy football draft party.  I will be quite busy rearranging the furniture in the house, setting up food, drink, and getting all the tech up and running.  When I first started hosting this party a few years ago I provided a bunch of food that I had to bake/cook myself.

Since then I have streamlined things. I will only be baking some spanikopita and buying some pizzas.  The other team owners will be filling in the gaps.  I realized that although it is nice to provide a big, diverse menu for the party it was totally unnecessary.  This is a fantasy football party for cripes sake,  the core needs are pizza and beer, done.

This party also means another late night by the time I wind up cleaning up afterwards. Sure I could worry about cleaning up the place until the next day but I hate going to bed having the house in disarray.

To add to the formula I am picking up Lucky this afternoon for 4 days of dogsitting.  It will be interesting to see how Lucky does with a house full of fantasy football owners around.  It will be fun having Lucky around for a few days, he is so much fun and Uncle Shawn lets him get away with more than his dog dad does.  I am sure Sadie will be thrilled to see her good buddy this weekend.

I upgraded my monitors at work from two 19″ 4:3 format screens to two 24″ 16:9 format monitors yesterday. Wow, what a difference.  It is like I have a windshield size view into my cyber-reality.  It’s is pretty f’ing awesome, I have to say.

Last night after work I had a running club board meeting, followed by another meeting.  Despite having double the meetings, we actually finished up in less time than some of our regular meetings go.  After the meeting I headed to South Street with the core drinking crew and had a few beers while harvesting the normal amount of good laughs from the guys.

I didn’t feel like I was an equal opportunity contributor.  I was feeling a bit “locked up” conversationally, probably due to the big full moon.  Not only can the moon send my mood into a tailspin, it can make my speaking more difficult than normal.  Words just don’t want to flow.

So I am having issues with  IX Webhosting again.  On Monday all of my sites were down for close to two hours because of some power outage at their facility, supposedly.  Well then yesterday I get a dreaded TOS email, saying that my websites were once again consuming too many CPU cycles in their shared server environment.  As a result they turned off the biggest consumer of these cycles, the Bar-barians website.

So I called them and got the site turned back on with a promise to look into things on my end.  When I did look at the usage stats for my domains, I was confused.  It looked like the traffic being used was very low, nowhere near enough to consume the amount of CPU cycles they claim I was using.  Since I enabled the Cloudflare service on my busiest domains I have not had any issues with excessive usage due to Cloudflare’s caching and traffic filtering.

I replied back to IX telling them to look at my domain usage stats and that they did not seem to match up with the CPU usage they claim I was utilizing.  I didn’t hear anything back from them.

Then this morning there is another email, they once again killed the domain.  Included with the email were updated usage numbers that sounded absolutely ridiculous:

CPU minutes:

Aug. 20, 2013   825.18
Aug. 19, 2013   1426.28
Aug. 18, 2013   1275.42

For reference, their normal limit for daily CPU usage is 60 minutes.  When I had all my problems back in Feb/Mar when the new site launched I was consuming around 200 CPU minutes at it’s peak.  According to this email I used SEVEN TIMES more than that on Monday, it just made no sense, especially when I reviewed my domain usage stats.

The first number is number of visits, then number of pages, number of total page hits and bandwidth consumed.  For comparison sake, when the site first launched, I had days where the bandwidth used was 5 GIG with 100,000 page views per day.  The traffic now thanks to my efforts with caching, tweaking and implementing Cloudflare is a fraction of what it was.

So anyway, the end result is now I have to trudge through this with them to figure out what is going on.  One guy said something about all requests are not being logged correctly to the stats I am seeing.  He said that almost all of the traffic is coming from hitting the “store” I have on the site which is simply a plug in that connects to the BB Paypal account.  There are not many sales going on so I am not sure where all the hits would be coming from.

Regardless of what the final cause/resolution is, it already has exceeded my daily patience allotment.

I was pissed off that I drove home in an off and on downpour, dirtying Ali’s Volt that I spent considerable time cleaning over the weekend.  When I got out to the house it was not raining at the moment.  I figured I would take the opportunity to pull out my Absorber to wipe the Volt down so it still looked good.  Yes, I’m weird.

I wound up spending most of my night futzing around with some technical challenges instead of digging into my new Blade MQX which showed up.  The first challenge was race timing related.  I have been testing a new version of my timing software and trying to test out some new features.  It has been a bit frustrating as bugs are uncovered.

I then wanted to work on getting my tech set up for the FF draft party I am hosting Thursday night.  I normally hook up a laptop to the 73 inch tv and run Skype on it to connect remote owners to the draft virtually.  Last year I used my work laptop to do this which has a HDMI output.  The picture quality was much better with this type of connection but it was buggy.  My 7 year old TV does not play nice with the HDMI output from the laptop, the picture will pop off occasionally and there is a lot of noise that comes across the audio channel.

I futzed around with it a bit to see if I could resolve the issues with the HDMI connection, even downloading a new video driver which actually made things worse.  It was annoying.

I decided I would be happier with lower quality video if it wasn’t snapping and popping all the time.  I grabbed one of the race laptops which I have used in the past and connected it to the TV via it’s low tech S-video output.  Yes the picture on the TV now looked like I was watching an old VCR tape but at least it didn’t sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies are coming through the sound system.

While I was futzing around behind the tv making the connections it turned off.  When I tried to turn it on I had problems.  Instead of hearing the rotating mirrors spin up like normal I instead heard a repetitive clicking noise, like something was stuck.  The red FAULT led came on.  I think I said out loud, FCK!  I had ideas of having to rush out and go spend money on a new big screen tv.

Turning the set off and back on did not clear the error.  Turning off the surge protector the tv is attached to did not fix the problem.  The only way I managed to get the tv to breathe again was by physically unplugging it for about 30 seconds and then plugging it back in.  I have had this happen a few times before.  I am sure it is only a matter of time until I can longer resuscitate the set.  A new tv, oh how horrible it would be to have to buy one, not. 🙂

So anyway, by the time I was done screwing with everything it was was after 10PM.  Despite the time of night, I was committed to watch Breaking Bad after my shower.  Unfortunately I was so damn tired I kept drifting in and out.  I can’t tell you very clearly what happened during the second half of the show.  It was quarter to midnight when I finally closed my eyes for good with Sadie snuggling by my side.

So I made some adjustments in my attempts to entice Nicki into eating more.  I first took the mat which is normally in front of the door leading to the garage and put it in front of Nicki’s food stand.  This gave her a softer and slip-free place to stand while eating.

When I prepared her chicken I took more care, cutting it into smaller pieces and removing the skin.  Nicki seems to appreciate when I get the cutting board out.  And then when I was done with the prep instead of calling Nicki over, I yelled, “Sadie!, Dinner is ready!””  When Nicki saw Sadie coming over to her food dish, jealousy spurred her into action.  She cleaned her mostly chicken filled meal plate.

This morning I thought I was going to strike out with feeding Nicki.  When I started making her food, right after I let them out first thing, Nicki went back to the bedroom to sleep.  I decided I would halt her meal prep and make it after I ate breakfast.  My sleep cycle is much different than Ali’s, Nicki is used to starting her day later now.

So after I did my breakfast dishes I resumed dog breakfast prep with Nicki still back in the bedroom.  When I completed it I tapped the spatula used to mix her stuff on the bowl, one audio cue she normally responds to.  However again, she did not come out until I said “Sadie! Come get your breakfast!”  Nicki came out shortly and cleaned her plate.

It’s funny having to use psychological tricks on your dog to get her to eat but at this point I’ll do a full song and dance routine if it gets the job done.

I am going right from dog sitting the girls to dog sitting my buddy’s dog, Lucky, starting Thursday.  I have had Lucky out at the house a couple times before, he is a lot of fun.  I am looking forward to bringing the girls out to the house to play with him over the weekend.  Sadie and Lucky have a real blast playing together.

My Saturday was really busy from sunset to sundown.  After weeding before it got too hot, I headed inside to do the cleaning.  I was supposed to be picking up the dogs Saturday morning for a prolonged visit until Tuesday but Ali was delayed in her departure.  I wound up getting them early in the afternoon on my way back from stops at Home Depot and Auto Zone.

One of the items I picked up at Home Depot was a tile file.  When I installed the ceramic tile in the house a decade or so ago I had certain areas that were not as flat as they should be due to an uneven surface below it, despite my efforts to smooth it out with thin set concrete beforehand.  The end result was a few tiles that had an elevated edge/corner that I feel sometimes when walking around barefoot.  These edges also beat the hell out of the rubber portions of the Scooba when I set it loose.

For whatever reason, despite the annoyance this caused me, I never looked into how to address it, until last week.  I read about something called a tile stone that is designed to smooth sharp tile edges.  What I bought accomplished the same end result.  The file has a coarse texture on one side and finer texture on the other to finish the job.

I knocked down a couple high corners as a test.  It worked well, dulling the previously pointy reminder of my poor tile installation ability.  I plan to crawl around on my hands and knees in the near future, obliterating any and all sharp edges that remain.

I also did three different filter changes on the van Saturday afternoon, swapping out the oil, air and fuel filter.  The fuel filter swap was the most involved.  The old filter looked like it had been in place for quite awhile.  All three procedures were taped to be added to my growing collection of amateur automotive maintenance videos. 🙂

During the day Saturday I took 15 minutes out of my day to try to fly my Sky Scooter.  On my first flight the plane was up and down almost immediately when it banked hard right after my toss, crashing into the ground.

The impact broke one of the folding props.  I had another set of props inside although they were smaller and would provide less thrust.  I put them on anyway, I had nothing to lose.

I got the plane up in the air with my second launch attempt but the small prop made a big difference in power or lack there of.  Compared to what I was accustomed to with my SpeedWing, the Sky Scooter was trudging through the air.

The slower air speed also means it was more susceptible to wind, the plane was getting buffeted about quite a bit.  I had to be really on the sticks and paying attention the entire time.  I managed to get the plane down safely after a 5 or 6 minute flight.

Ali said she was ok with me borrowing her Volt while she was gone for some gas free miles.  The only thing she asked was that maybe I could clean it since it was very dirty.  I did so both inside and out.  It was indeed very, very dirty but I figure elbow grease is free, gas is not.

A spent a lot of time cooking chicken for the dogs.  Ali bought a ton of what she thought were boneless thighs to add to their meals.  Well it turns out they were the bone in variety.  I had a huge pot of boiling water filled with chicken thighs.  I then pulled them out one by one and had to dust off my old meat cutter skills to remove the meat from the bones.  It was very gross.  I can hardly believe I spent over three years of my life doing this sort of stuff day in and day out in my late teens/early 20’s.

On Saturday night I watched Wall-E for the second time, I just wanted to see it again.  It’s such a cute movie but I also am in tune with the underlying tones in the film of where mankind is headed, with everyone being a huge fat ass that is carted around 24/7 on flying chairs.  All these people do is consume, consume, consume and nothing else.  Many people today are practically there already, just slap some rockets on their recliner.

On Sunday morning Cindy did another training brick with me.  I suggested we abandon the bike portion this week and instead do a longer run like the 10K square, using the water park as a starting point.  I figured we could then follow it up with a swim.  Well since the water park doesn’t open until 10Am I figured it made sense to start the run a little before 9, assuming a 10K will take somewhere around an hour.

Well my logic had a flaw.  It didn’t take into consideration it was August in SW Florida.  There is a reason that many runners start their runs very early (6AM) in these parts, especially in the 6 month long summers, it gets very hot, very early.

I was ok for maybe the first 2 miles of the run, after that the heat and humidity really started to bother me.  I just felt like shit.  Despite not running very fast (an average 9:44 pace), my body just wanted me to stop.  To be honest, if I was running by myself I can pretty much guarantee I would have stopped either at the 3.75 mile mark at the corner of Oakes and Vanderbilt or at the corner of Vanderbilt and Livingston.  I just wanted the misery to end.

My ego and desire to not look like a pussy, prevailed, dragging me to the finish line.  The funny thing is Cindy said she felt awful as well but didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to seem wimpy.

I was totally exhausted as I sat down on a curb to try to catch my breath.  Running in the heat was bad enough but add into that we didn’t have any water stops along the way, adding to the fail in my logic. After a long break I finally got myself into the pool for three 400 yard sets.  My first 400 was really slow, about 9:30.  Surprisingly my final two 400’s actually got faster, 9:00 and then 8:15.  I guess I got a second wind.

I was so damn tired after it was all said and done.  I was sure at some point I would need to collapse for a nap but that opportunity never presented itself.

I got back outside to try to fly the Sky Scooter some more on Sunday afternoon.  After a non-damaging failed launch attempt I got the plane back up in the air on the second try although I barely avoided smashing into the fence on take off.  That flight went slow but smooth.  I landed the plane safely.

I had one of my two new battery packs out there with me as well.  I wasn’t quite sure if I had a full charge in the pack but I figured I would slap it in the plane and give it a try.  The new pack had significantly more punch than the 4 year old batteries I used on the first flight.  The Sky Scooter climbed steadily, much higher than I had it the first time around.

I was doing big loops around the back yard however after only a couple minutes I noticed a large drop in altitude like the battery pack was dying.  The plane at this point was out far beyond the rear fence line, I tried to get it back but it just kept going down.  I knew I was in trouble so just as it disappeared behind a large pine tree I killed the throttle and pulled full up on the elevator control, hoping to minimize damage.

I never saw the plane actually hit the ground, I just knew the general direction I last saw it, somewhere behind the pine tree.  As I walked out behind my property I saw the two fill pits in the vicinity, both filled to the brim with rain water.  I knew with my luck, the plane was probably in the middle of one of them.  I did a quick survey of both bodies of water and didn’t see my aircraft.

I kept looking around, figuring the blue fuselage should stick out like a sore thumb.  I also would stop and try to fire off the motor and rudder servos, hoping for an audible clue to the planes location.  I had no luck.  After I was out there for maybe 10 minutes wandering around, Cindy came out to help me with the search.

I was dumbfounded, how could we not see the damn plane!?  I canvassed certain areas 2,3,4 times, figuring I just had to be not seeing it.  At around the half hour mark of searching I was just about ready to give up and write off the Sky Scooter as lost in action.  I decided to do one more loop, farther out than I thought the plane could have been.

Finally I spot the scooter sitting in a ditch, a good 150 yards beyond my rear fence line.  The tail of the plane was broken but it was otherwise intact.  The battery was ejected on impact and was laying a few feet away from the plane.  I trudged back towards the house and yelled over to Cindy that the I found the Scooter.

I didn’t really care the tail was broken on the plane, I could get another if I want to.  I was more interested in recovering the plane for the various expensive electronics that are in it.  However repairing the Scooter will be a low priority since I have my TuffWing to build and my Blade MQX quad copter is supposed to show up today.

On Sunday night I saw the new Red Dawn.  It was pretty dumb but mildly entertaining.  For some reason the original Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze seemed much more believable than what was portrayed this time around. I’d give it a B.

Nicki once again has been concerning me with her eating or lack there of.  The last time I had them out at the house she was all on board with her new mostly chicken thigh diet.  She was chomping at the bit for me to put down her food and she was eating every last bite.

Saturday night she just picked the chicken out of her dinner, leaving all of the dog food untouched.  Then Sunday morning she ate nothing of her breakfast, despite it being loaded down with the chicken I just cooked the night before.  She has skipped meals before but I really started getting concerned when she didn’t even eat the treats I offered to her, something she normally never turns down.

Last night for dinner she ate a portion of her dinner but left at least half of it.  This morning she once again ignored breakfast until it was sat on the carpet next to her where she was laying down.  She then at least ate all of the chicken but once again would not touch the rest of the dog food.

I think her rear legs/knees are really bothering her, more so now that the baby aspirin was stopped after another vet visit last week.  When she is standing by her food platform I can see her back legs sliding on the tile, which she must find annoying/painful.  I am going to try putting one of the kitchen rugs in front of her food stand to give her better traction when eating.  If that doesn’t work I may be just feeding her from the sitting/laying position.

I hate seeing her struggle like this.