Category Anything and Everything

I haven’t done any Flash

I haven’t done any Flash / Swish stuff in quite awhile. Check out this recent good natured comedic effort I just completed. Flash is fun.

2 weeks till I drive my mom down from PA. I’m looking forward to it.

This Easter weekend will feature a busy saturday of mowing and straightening up the house. Later in the day I want to try to find some new volleyball sneaks. I am going to go to a gym to try to play some indoor vball. I haven’t played indoor in 3 years probably. It should be a challenge. Sunday is our Easter cruise/brunch. I have not been on a boat in YEARS. I am hoping I don’t have any adverse side effects if ya know what I mean….

Got some new videos up on my RC page, check them out if you have broadband. One of them is a camera mounted on a remote control 4 wheel drive mini-hummer. Kinda cool perspective 🙂

Happy Friday to all.

Jordan

I watched almost all of Jordan’s last night. Besides the All Star game, it was the only other game I saw to the end this year. I think Philly gave him quite the send off. They may be a tough bunch but they also know sports and recognized how special Jordan is to the game. Granted he is only a shell of his former self. The clips of him playing during his early days were incredible. I don’t know that I have ever seen anyone make jumping look as effortless as he did. I was genuinely saddened to see it all come to an end. The game itself was secondary. It was disappointing that he played so little in the second half. I think the only reason he came in at all during the 4th quarter was because the crowd was relentlessly chanting for his return. He made his 2 free throws and checked out. It certainly wasn’t a storybook finish but it didn’t tarnish my image of him. The NBA was a much better league with him than without him. It always makes me sad to see staples in sports get old and retire, always. I’ll miss Mike.

Puppy had an accident last night and this morning. Very frustrating. She isn’t giving us any hint that she has to go out.

Yesterday I booked an Easter brunch cruise. It’s something we have talked about awhile. Something different. There are so many things we say we want to do but never get around to doing. It isn’t a purposeful act of neglect, we just seem to have a full plate more times than not. I am trying to make an effort to make sure we do some of these things. What fun is life if you don’t make an effort to keep it interesting?

Puppy school

Last night was the first night of puppy school for Nicki. To be honest, I thought it would be a drag, but I agreed to go with Ali to check it out. It’s a very nice facility they have down here. As we parked I immediately spotted a full size car with religious messages on all four doors and a mini billboard with more religious statements mounted on the trunk lid. Oh boy….

It was really funny seeing how Nicki reacted to the dogs. Initially she was terrified, but once we got into the training room she wanted to be buddies with everyone. It turns out the owner of the pope mobile was a senile old lady that was in our class. She had a huge cross around her neck and looked to be at least 85. During the evening during the different training exercises, she would totally ignore the instructions the trainer gave her. The trainer said to her at least 10 times, tell the dog LET’s GO. Instead she would be saying SIT and HEEL to the dog. She acted confused all night. The trainer had one of his dogs there. It was really amazing to see how obedient it was. I couldn’t help thinking that a little puppy training mentality applied to kids today would go a long way.

As we left we saw the old lady get into her rolling church and putt away. Just this one class already opened our eyes to how we need to change some of the things we do with the puppy. She actually seemed to be a little better with some of her bad habits already.

I recently finished the Charles Barkley book, “I may be wrong, but I doubt it” I was somewhat disappointed in it. Parts of it were interesting, but more of it was repetitive and boring. It’s up for sale on HALF.com under my account if you want to check it out. 🙂

I am running my work cam through different software. It allows you to do silly things to the image. Exciting eh?

I just saw a trailer for the upcoming Matrix sequel. Incredible. It looks FANTASTIC. I can hardly wait.

Beautiful weekend

Thw weather this weekend was about as perfect as it gets in Florida. 80 degrees, sunny and low humidity. We have to enjoy it now cause 90 degrees, 90% humidity is right around the corner. I accomplished a lot of small things I have been wanting to for a little while but still had plenty of time to kick back and relax. Got some RC plane time in, rollerblading, video game playing, and some simple sit on the patio and relax time.

The war news has been generally good. The rebuilding process is going to be huge. It amazes me that they have a plan for everything. The capabilities of our military is incredible. It seems that Syria and Russia have been disingenius with their activities with the Saddam regime. I think all sorts of shady dealings will continue to be dug up and I doubt any of it will make us feel much better about our “allies”.

Geeked out and hooked up my puter to the 60 inch TV to play some C&C Generals. It was a pain to hook up, the resolution wasn’t great but I wanted to try it anyway. 🙂

My next few months are gonna be eventful. My sis is getting married the end of June in Arizona, my Mom moves down the beginning of May, we will be going up to PA the third week of June for a tournament and Rich might be coming down the beginning of June for a tournament. Should be fun stuff.

The puppy had two “accidents” in the house this weekend. Grrrrrrr. She starts obedience classes this week, hopefully it makes a difference.

War, Best Buy and miscellaneous goodies

I watched the marines pull down the statue of Saddam in central Baghdad yesterday. It really was reminiscent of the scene when the Berlin Wall went down. Hopefully they are able to actually govern themselves and not just have a different dictator in charge. It was great to see the Iraqi people so excited about the regime falling apart.

I just had another friend of mine get the shaft by Best Buy. I LOVE Best Buy but hate the service. Is that possible? I love going into the store, love the layout, love the STUFF. However it seems they are very stand offish when it comes to returns. I am sure they have countless attempts by people to do dishonest things when it comes to returns, but it seems this paranoia causes them to give people with legitimate issues a hard time as well. If you look a little on the internet you will see many, MANY sites dedicated to bitching about Best Buy.

AVP & Tire rotation

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.

Saddam is an ass

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!

Moth ball cologne

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.

Bug up my ass…..

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.