All posts by Duf

A fun weekend for sure. Saturday we got all of our weekend duties done to clear the plate for Sunday since we would be gone all day at the AVP tournament. I spent the better part of 4 hours, washing, waxing, and rotating the tires on my truck. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to rotate tires if all you have is one floor jack and a few jackstands? It took forever. After all that cleaning, scrubbing and polishing, I thought we would take my nicely cleaned vehicle to Walmart to pick up a couple things we needed. The sky was cloudy but didn’t look like rain. Of course, we wound up driving through areas that DID have rain meaning the truck got covered in dirty water spray. ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH. I shoulda just taken the car. Damn it!

We got up early Sunday, even earlier than normal since the clocks jumped ahead this weekend. We made it to Lauderdale in about an hour and 45. Not bad. The event was great. No admission fee. Tons of stands, loud music, great volleyball, nice warm weather and good food. The only cash we laid out all day was 6 bucks to park and maybe 20 bucks for food & drink. Got some nice free handouts as well. If you are a volleyball enthusiast and have a chance to go to an AVP event I HIGHLY recommend it. It really is a blast, they do a great job with it.

Karch was there, as a matter of fact we got there just in time to see his match. Unfortunately, he lost in a close 3 set match but took 5th place overall. A very respectable showing for someone in their EARLY 40’s! He got served to EVERY SINGLE TIME. He had very few hard hits but sided out relatively well anyway using smart placement shots. He was incredible on defense. His hustle and digging ability is really amazing. He’s the best.

The AVP is making a real big effort to make the sport fan friendly and had tons of chances for everyone to meet the players. Ali and I got to get our pictures taken with Karch & his partner. (pic on the above link) That was the second time I got my pic with Karch, the first time was 5 or 6 years ago on Fort Myers beach after another AVP event.

Another change was the men & women compete at the same time! They used to run 2 totally seperate tours, now they are combined. It was cool to see the women compete. Their skills were fantastic as well. I had on SPF 25 sunblock and still wound up getting a nice little burn. For the women’s finals, we managed to get right down courtside. The event is going to be televised on FOX SportsNet. We may have gotten some camera face time however I am sure it would be hard to distinguish us from the thousands there with hats and sunglasses. 🙂 We returned home tired, but it was well worth it.

Huessein must take us for a bunch of idiots. He unexpectedly plays a video of him walking through a jubilant Iraqi crowd, supposedly today, high fiving, kissing. Such a sham, the guy is obviously one of Saddam’s body doubles. Looks strikingly younger. I highly doubt it is recent footage either. I mean come on, really………….. I’m so sick of the SOB. I hope they capture him alive so we can make the rest of his days hell on Earth.

This weekend we are going to the East Coast to see the opening weekend of the AVP tour. I am looking forward to it. Should be tons-o-fun.

Today the live video feed is out one of our front windows in the office. Watch the traffic drive by and maybe even catch a glimpse of Spook our cat. Open windows media player then OPEN URL http://duf.homedns.org:9090 Happy weekend!

Is there a medical condition that makes you smell like mothballs? There is an older gentleman at the gym, probably late 50’s who ALWAYS smells like a freshly opened can of mothballs. It smells horrible. So much so that you will normally see a ring of unused equipment around wherever he is in the gym. People who venture into the smell zone quickly give a look of disgust and vacate. I can not believe this guy does not smell himself and what in the world he would do that makes him smell this way. Nasty.

My mom’s stuff arrived from PA last night. We got all of the furniture placed in her room and all of the other stuff put away through out the house. Not too bad. She will be on her way down here in approximately a month. Should be fun.

We watched this weeks 2 American Idol shows on Fox last night (TIVO). Another contestant got thrown off the show because of criminal charges so they wound up not kicking anyone off last night. Of course they didn’t spring this until the last minute of the show. Kicking someone off would have meant Fox would have one less episode to milk the public with. Bastards. Can you detect the slight contempt? The new Bachelor series has started and I haven’t watched it at all. I think I have pretty much hit my reality tv limit. It seems as though many others have as well. New reality tv entries are not doing very well at all.

People that know me well claim that when I get a “bug up my ass” there is no stopping me. Last night was one of those nights. My mom’s furniture is going to be arriving either today or tomorrow and I still had a ceiling fan to hang in her room so I had to get it done last night. Once I began, I discovered that there was no power to the outlet in the ceiling that I was attaching the fan to! I had 2 options, wait and call the builder the next day and tell them they installed a dead outlet or look at it myself. Of course I HAD to get it done last night so I ripped into the wall switch. Upon comparison with identical switches in other rooms, it appears as though they wired that switch wrong. Through lengthy trial and error and innumerable trips back and forth to the breaker box to kill power so I could try a new rig, I finally got it working. After getting power I had to go through the business of getting the fan mounted on the ceiling. In all I spent 3 and a half hours on it and got to bed close to midnight. Yea, I had a bug up my ass but at least I got it done.

No puppy problems in the last 24 hours.

Interesting things going on in my buddies site. Check it out. Some real funny stuff if you dig around a bit.

The tuki live video feed has audio today as well! Open windows media player and OPEN URL http://duf.homedns.org:9090 to see what the green feathered friend is up to.

I ain’t no cheat, I’m just a regular failure – Kid Rock

Good stuff….

I got the live video feed working from the house. 30 FPS from my house using a regular broadband connection. Granted if I go above 2 simultaneous users it is going to slow down dramatically. Still the video quality is awesome. If you want to try it out start windows media player. Choose FILE/OPEN URL. Enter http://duf.homedns.org:9090 With any luck you will be connected to a live feed of whatever my camcorder is pointed at. Right now it is pointed at our parrot.

Can you get more dutch than this:

They make great ring bologna, you pay a little more than in a store but the shit is awsome. i can go to lens and buy a ring of berks and half of it goes to wasted because we dont eat it all. if i go to the highway, the ring lasts around 2 days

i’ll go there saturday and get some lunchmeat, cheese, rolls, chicken salad, mac or pot salad, maybe even go to highway meats and get a ring bologna

You would think this was posted by some 70 year old PA dutch guy, nope someone in their early 30’s. Funny as hell.

Does anyone else play those Orbit pop under flash games? They are simplistic as it gets but for some reason I find myself playing them from time to time. Something about being able to hit a homerun everytime……

As usual, the weekend flew by. I got all of my chores done more or less. I also got in some flying time and did a new plane video which can be found here. We got to watch Bourne Identity and Road to Perdition. Bourne Identity had a solid B rating going until the last 5 minutes when Matt Damon rides on the back of a dead fat guy, falling down 6 floors, while he bullseyes a baddie right in the forehead and then lands on top of the fattie without a scratch. Otherwise, it was a solid movie that kept me entertained. Road to Perdition was a very good flick but dont look for anything uplifting about it. Tom Hanks is a great actor.

The puppy had one accident inside this weekend, however this morning was classic. The puppy is getting too big to sit up front in the car with Ali so we have been letting her in the back seat with a towel. Normally she is fine. This morning, she was very antsy, climbing all over the place and wouldn’t settle down. As we are about 5 minutes out from the house, Ali yells PULL OVER! I am like, “What the hell?” Ali yells, NICKI CRAPPED IN THE BACK SEAT!. Ugh. So I pull off the road where there is no shoulder and Ali yanks her out and the crap covered towel. Of course the puppy has stepped in it by this time so it expands the mess. Ali tried to clean her up as best she could with tissues. She threw the crap covered towel in the trunk and we continued on our merry way to work with the windows down to try to minimize the strong smell of dog shit that enveloped the interior. GROSS. Happy frickin Monday.

Homey turned me on to the Windows Media 9 encoder. He asked me to open a URL in windows media player. I did and shortly there after I was looking out the window of his office in what looked to be realtime! Thw new encoder allows you to become a mini streaming video service. It really is amazing. With 250k of bandwidth you can get 30 fps video. You really need to see it to believe it. I set it up on my home box and had Charlie test it. It worked great. I set it up as a test on my parrot this morning, but for some reason it isn’t working right now. I need to mess with some settings. Next week I will have a test up for you to check out. It really is cool.

As I mentioned previously, last weekend I installed a cat door so the the cats have a safe haven from the puppy. The door has a plastic swinging door on it. The cats would not go through it so I had to rig it to stay open. Last night I spent 45 minutes trying to get our one cat to understand the concept of a cat door, to no avail. I sat there on the floor and repeatedly demonstrated how the door easily swings open. All she would do is look at me and meow. Then I put her inside the room so the only way she could come out was to go through the cat door. I sat on the other side coaching and encouraging her. No luck. I walked away. She sat on the other side meowing for 45 minutes and would not walk through the damn door. I finally broke and wired the door back up again. Dumb cats.

This weekend has nothing noteworthy on the schedule besides watching some DVD’s and doing house maintenance chores.

Last night was a puppy setback, although it was probably due to our negligence. She pee’d in the kitchen after we got home. Normally she has to go after long car trip but we didn’t make sure she did. Later in the night Ali took her out and she did a number 1, so she brought her back in and went back to take a shower. I came walking out of the office and discovered 5 large turds in the middle of the carpet. I had to control my rage. The initial urge is to hammer the dog but I know it is because Ali did not let her outside long enough. I cleaned up the mess and then put the dog in the bathroom with Ali. The puppy held it all night again without making a mess in the cage so hopefully it was just an isolated incident.

This morning I reported my first reckless driver to the police. It was just ridiculous and I have decided instead of catching up and shooting the idiot the finger, I will be much better served by getting his license plate in front of the police on a regular basis. The moron passed me on the right in a right turn lane, cut me off and then crossed the double yellow line and passed a truck illegally on the left. Who knows if the police will actually do anything but I hope they do. I was sure to give an accurate description of the vehicle, all the way down to the “Good Ole Boys” windshield sticker.

The war coverage almost is too much. In the rush to be the first to report information, a lot of the first reports on things later turn out to be inaccurate. I’d prefer they wait a bit and get the news right. I saw the POW tape that was shown on Iraqui TV. Bad stuff.