Category Politics

I left work a little early to meet my dad and step mom since they were supposed to arrive mid to late afternoon.  I actually got home shortly before they arrived,  followed shortly after that by Cindy.  I was first greeted my by their dogs, Maggie and Clara who both seemed to remember me.  Once everyone was there I needed to come up with a game plan to go get the Prius, which had it’s wheel bearing replaced during the day.  Once I got the Prius I wanted to go pick up Sadie.

Katie was also at the house and was heading out.  I asked her if she could give me a ride to where she turns on Golden Gate Blvd, I could ride my EUC the remaining 5 or 6 miles.  So that was the plan, I threw my wheel in her trunk and did my first ever riding on GG Blvd, all on the sidewalk.  When I got down to Collier Blvd I was actually in the bike lane for around a mile which was a bit hairy with rush hour traffic but I survived.  I arrived in one piece at Tuffy, threw the wheel in the trunk and went to pick up Sadie.  I told her I had a very big surprise for her while we were driving.

When we got back it was funny seeing all three dogs reacclimate which didn’t take very long at all.  They were happily running around the house.  We spent the majority of the evening just hanging out.  Dad, who did a poor job of bringing any Florida appropriate clothing (brought long pants only), made many, many comments about how hot and humid it was.  Cindy made a great vegetable lasagna that we all enjoyed.

On Saturday morning I was outside early attending to a few things.  Dad had asked me about any good oil change places nearby, their Outback was due for one.  I told him I’ll just change it. We went to the nearby Autozone where I dumped my two containers of old oil and we bought the stuff for dad’s car.  When we got back I wasted little time getting the Subaru up on ramps.

Of course I used the oil change as an opportunity to add to my already pretty extensive automotive section on my YouTube channel.   Changing the oil on the Outback was not very difficult although turning the oil filter in/out was a bit challenging with the hot exhaust pipe surrounding it.  I was done in less than 20 minutes.  It was dad’s first ever appearance on YouTube.

Late morning we all piled into the Subaru to head to Rural King.  Getting four people and three dogs in there was a bit of a challenge with all laps taken except mine as I was driving.  The dogs had a lot of fun surveying the store.  We needed a few supplies and dad wanted to pick up some shorts, realizing that jeans just were not going to be a comfortable way to spend the next week.  On the way home from RK we had a nice lunch at Panera which allows dogs in their outdoor seating areas.

Later in the afternoon I got the itch to go get the grass mowed, the precipitation from Matthew had pretty much dried up and the grass was looking shaggy.  As I was finishing up mowing the first of my four quadrants the tractor all of a sudden got VERY noisy.  It was bad enough that I immediately stopped and got off to see what was going on.  It was something related to the transmission drive.  When I stepped on the brake the noise stopped, when I released it it sounded like something was ready to fly apart.  I got back on and mowed a little bit more.  Despite the noise, the tractor was cutting and moving ok so I said f it and finished up the mowing session, hoping it held together until I finished.  It did.

I did some research afterward and found that defective idler pulleys were a common cause of this problem which makes sense.  I ordered replacements online.  I thought it was odd these pulleys were made of plastic.  They hopefully will show up this week so I can get the tractor back in action before it is called upon for it’s next mowing duties.

Saturday night we decided to go see The Magnificent Seven at Silverspot.  It was a movie that I would normally just rent but it was the consensus to be the best available option out right now.  I am certainly not typically a western movie kind of guy.  The theater was pretty full but with assigned seating it doesnt really matter.  I thought the movie was entertaining and had a strong cast.  I did not realize it was based on a prior movie that had Yule Brenner until after Cindy, my dad and Teresa told me afterward.  Anyway, I thought it was a B+ flick.

On Sunday morning I drug myself out of bed with the alarm to get out and run.  I was solo this time.  I once again logged four miles in the humid early morning air.  When I got back I wanted to remain productive so I pulled out the Tacoma and gave it a well needed bath.  I was sort of stuck at home all morning because DirecTv was supposed to be sending out a tech to give me the new B band filter I needed.  Their arrival window was 8-12.  Of course the guy didn’t show up until the last 25 minutes of the window.

So it didn’t take me long to realize this guy was odd.  He was eastern European with a heavy accent that was difficult to navigate.  Before he walked in the door he had located my dish and was already telling me how the tree that is in front of it is a problem.  I told him that actually all I need from him is a new b band filter.  I tried to explainin to him the sequence of events leading up to now.  He seemed to either not understand me or not care to listen.  He was focused on the tree.

I became somewhat irritated and forceful, telling him the tree is not the problem as the old receiver was working just fine.  I said all I needed was a new filter.  He eventually relented and got a filter and hooked it up which allowed me to see the channels I could not see before.  The only problem was when he went to the Sunday Ticket channels it said I was not authorized for them.  The tech said I must not have the Sunday Ticket.  I was really annoyed with this guy already.  His lack of understanding, poor communication skills and an odor that was a mix of BO and cigarettes was just really aggravating me.  I tried to calmly explain to him that I do have the Sunday Ticket and the new receiver just needs to be authorized for it.

So he pulls out his cell phone and calls in to Directv.  Even though he tried to identify himself as a technician, the woman on the phone was acting like he was a customer because she couldn’t understand him either.  Eventually he just handed me his cell phone I and worked with the woman to get my Sunday Ticket channels activated. I figured I was in the clear.  I found the tech, who was out sitting in his vehicle.  I told him it’s working now.

So instead of leaving he comes in and starts futzing with the remote control.  He was trying to get it programmed to also control the tv which I didn’t need but fine, if he wants to do it…  But then he was trying to get it to work with my surround sound and couldn’t get it to work.  I told him more than once that I didn’t need that functionality and either didn’t hear me, didn’t understand me, or didn’t care.  It was then that I got the definite feeling that this guy was just trying to intentionally waste time.  I was not sure what the reason would be why he wouldn’t just pack up and head to his next call.

He then went out on the lanai and was talking on his phone to somebody for another 10 minutes or more.  When he came back in he said he wanted to change the LNBs on my satellite dish (the receivers).  I asked why since it was working.  He just mumbled something about it should be done.  I asked him how long it would take since the Eagles game was coming on in 20 minutes.  He said 10 minutes so I said fine, go ahead.

He completes the unnecessary work and then comes back in to run another test on the receiver which shows it was getting no signal from the satellites at 103 degrees.  He said unless he can verify signal on this satellite he cant close the call.  I told him as long as I get the Sunday Ticket I don’t care.  He said he then had no choice but to cancel the call which seemed odd.  I said whatever and the guy finally left.  It was a bizarre, unpleasant, and annoying experience.  It annoyed me enough that I spent another 20 minutes on the phone later in the day waiting to get a hold of someone at Directv to tell them how bad the guy sucked.

So ironically I did not even need the Sunday Ticket to watch the Eagles/Lions game.  It was being locally broadcast.  The outcome of the game was disappointing with Ryan Matthews literally giving the game away with a crucial late game fumble.  The officiating seemed to have a very heavy Detroit bias with multiple situations where questionable flags wiped out big plays for the Eagles.  But whatever, the Eagles weren’t going to go undefeated and overall, I saw more positive than negative in the game so it isn’t worth ranting about.  I still feel much better about the 2016 Eagles than I ever expected to.

Cindy and I rode our PTVs a little bit last night, running into a couple that Cindy knows from the gym which was ironic.  When we got home we enjoyed some tofu sausage dogs with baked beans and sauerkraut, good stuff.

Of course we watched the debate and laughed and gasped our way through it.  Seeing Donald come out in full deflection mode was funny as hell, using the term “locker room talk” repeatedly to explain his actions where he described some sex acts/situations that were very, um, unpresidential.  As entertaining as the debate was, there is part of me that feels very sad that this is what American politics has now become where you literally have a three ring circus going on.   It made me ill when Trump would repeatedly bring up Bernie Sanders name as if Sanders supporters would somehow think Trump was their best option.  Anyone that knows Bernie knows Donald Trump is the last person he would want sitting in the White House.

Gladly there is only one debate to go.  I can’t wait till this political nightmare is behind us so Americans can go back to doing what they do best, not knowing, not understanding, and not caring.

So my last day off had the most relaxation time in it of any of the last seven days which I guess is a good thing.  After I dropped off Sadie at Ali’s place in the morning I parked the car in the Target parking lot for another Ninebot One ride.  I took a route that I used to run once in a while, taking Oakes Blvd, to Vanderbilt, to Livingston, traveling to the water park before turning around and reversing the trip.

In total the ride was damn close to 10 miles and I stayed on the wheel the entire time, only stopping a couple times to briefly shift my feet while holding onto a pole.  The overcast skies made the ride much more enjoyable than it would have been if the sun was beating down on me during those long, unshaded sections of the route.  I managed to avoid a single low battery tiltback warning, keeping my speed in the 10-12 mph range for most of the ride.

During the afternoon I decided to perform the last appearance upgrade I had in store for the EUC, covering the bottom of the foot pedals with carbon fiber looking wrap that is designed to cover things like automobiles.  Installing the covering was not very difficult at all and I liked the way it covered the scratched and mauled surface, the end result of many, many crashes.   The few changes I have made on the bot recently have really improved the appearance in my opinion.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon deeply involved in some WoW Legion.  It was a fun way to disconnect from the here and now for a few hours.

Of course last night Cindy and I tuned in to the debate that had more hype leading up to it than a Super Bowl.  It was in a word, amazing.  For the first few minutes of the debate you could tell Trump was trying really hard to do what his advisors coached him to do, act calm, speak slowly and carefully, using the talking points they thought would be most effective.  However it took precious little time until he came unglued and flipped back to what comes natural to him, talking loudly, interrupting, being aggravated, and expressing himself using a vocabulary that never gets out of the middle school level.

Even if you have identified yourself as a Trump supporter, you would be hard pressed to say he did anything but hurt himself with his performance last night.  Using one of his favorite words, it was a disaster.  I’m not going to waste my time breaking down the countless amazingly poor choice of words he made like how not paying any taxes is “smart”, alienating the nation’s large supply of 400 pound citizens, or that immigrants have guns and shoot people.  That is only a very small portion of what was a dump truck full of missteps he made.  The thing is, he did the same thing during the primary debates and his hard core supporters seemed to not care so I doubt they will care about yet another embarrassing outing.

The split screen was certainly not Donald’s friend.  Seeing him get all bent out of shape while Hilary was speaking did nothing but drive home the point that he is a tantruming man-child at heart.  Sure Hilary seemed almost over prepared at times with well rehearsed responses to some of the questions but there is no doubt she carried herself far better that Donald did.  It’s not even close.

The debate was entertaining for sure.  Unfortunately, entertainment is not high on the list of my qualifications for a presidential candidate.

I neglected to mention that we added a Dyson V6 to our already massive floor cleaning army recently.  Now you may ask why I would need this with two vacuum robots and three hard floor cleaning bots.  The answer is very simple, corners.

Although the bots do a decent job of cleaning the main surface areas they can not get into corners or other tight spaces.  I have a small 10 year old corded Dyson that up until this point was what I had to use in these situations.  It’s a pain in the ass to lug it out of the closet, unwind the cord, plug it in and convert it to wand mode to clean spots like this only to have reverse the process when you are done.  As a result these nook and crannies don’t get attended to as often as they should.

The Dyson V6 removes all of these obstacles.  Pull it off it’s wall charging station and you are ready to suck and suck hard.  Despite it being a battery powered device it has VERY powerful suction.  When you squeeze the trigger it sounds like you are holding a small jet in your hand.  It comes with a number of tools that allow it to be useful in a bunch of situations.  You can remove the long tube altogether if you are doing something like cleaning out the car.    The box states that the V6 actually has more suction power than a lot of it’s plug in counterparts.  After seeing it first hand I don’t doubt that claim at all.

So despite my desire to keep plugging away at my Ninebot One rider training I decided to take a break last night to give my mildly sprained ankle a chance to heal a bit.  During the day Cindy stopped in at our local Sports Authority that is in it’s last week of business before they close the doors for good.  She scored some incredible deals with most everything in the store marked down 80-90%.  I now have an impressive array of body armor to hopefully minimize my Ninebot related injuries including a skateboard helmet, elbow and knee pads.  I also plan to get a cheap set of work boots to help protect/support my ankles.

I was doing more reading and thinking about the balance issues I have on the one wheel bot.  I started to think about if I am able to ride a bike slowly with my feet stationary.  Of course the answer is yes.  Although a bike has two wheels your brain is doing similar left right balance movements.  I need to put my mind more in bike mode when riding the One as front back balance is more or less handled by the internal gyroscope in the wheel.

I also realized I was handling leans/turns which lead to crashes wrong.  Again a bike analogy made sense here.  If you watched any of my learning videos you will see a common scenario is I get on and the wheel leans to one side or another and I can’t recover and fall off.  On a bike, if you are traveling slowly and start to lean to one side or another you steer into the direction of the lean to correct yourself.  So if you are wobbling to the left, a slight left turn of the wheel gets the bike back under you.

When I am on the Ninebot One I am trying to do all of my turning via leaning which works ok when you are cruising along but not at slower speeds.  What I need to be doing is turning the wheel into the direction I am leaning/falling into.  Your legs act almost like forks on the front wheel of a bike, you just sort of twist them to turn the wheel.  Now I have not gotten to put this new found revelation to a real world test but it makes perfect sense to me.  Hopefully it translates into less crashing and more cruising.

Cindy and I watched a good chunk of the DNC last night while we were in bed.  Some of it was awesome some of it wasn’t.  I didn’t particularly like the woman speaking at length about Trump University like it was a major reason to oppose him.  Donald Trump sold his name repeatedly over his career to many, many projects.  To confuse use of his name as him overseeing the daily operations and decisions made at this “university” is just disingenuous.  It’s like people that like to “Blame Obama” for pretty much anything negative in the country.  Your doctor didn’t call you back? Blame Obama! Cable bill is too high? Blame Obama! You hit a pothole in the street? Blame Obama!  My point is Donald has plenty of personal shortcomings to be critical of without having to try to pull in things he lent his name to as simple figurehead.

I thought Michelle Obama was nothing short of fantastic in delivering her speech.  I told Cindy I don’t think there has been another first lady during my life that would have been able to pull that off, including Hilary Clinton.  You can just tell she speaks from a sincere and true place.  Although I like and admire Elizabeth Warren I was not all that impressed by her speech.  I thought she sort of dropped herself down a few levels and delivered a speech that did not come off as sounding overly intelligent, instead resorting to a lot of tactics I’d expect from Trump with a lot of bashing meant to rile up simple thinkers.

It was pretty amazing when Bernie Sanders took the stage.  He got the loudest and longest applause of the night by far.  He tried a dozen times to start his speech and was drowned out by the thundering cheers of the crowd.  It was incredible as they panned the audience showing people literally in tears.  It was a very powerful moment.  These people felt so invested in Bernie and his unwavering, simple, and honest dedication to what he believes in.  With the revelation that the DNC was actively trying to influence the outcome of the primaries in Hilary’s favor it made the moment even more bittersweet.

His speech was filled with mostly the same points that he hammered home tirelessly during his campaign, most of which I support.  Even though he was unable to dismantle the HRC political juggernaut, his efforts have made a lasting mark on the American politics scene.  He showed that even with meager resources, a good person with the ability to communicate his message in a passionate way can still gain traction with the public, regardless of the media and even your own political party attempts to derail you.

Anyone else think Bill Clinton looks incredibly frail?

Yesterday was an unconventional work day that didn’t really start until noon.  My boss and I attended a user conference for a software package that we are considering implementing.  During the morning I jumped on the treadmill for a 3 mile run and did some chores around the house to make productive use of the time. The conference was beneficial to us as we got to talk to other customers to get their feedback which was overwhelmingly positive.  The staff of this company are very impressive and they all seem to absolutely love working there, a rarity nowadays.

The conference was held at the Marriot just outside of Sanibel.  I rarely get up in that region but it is quite beautiful.  The hotel that was hosting the conference was top notch.  At the end of the formal sessions they had a happy hour where everyone hung out and got to talk about business and non-business related things.  It was a good time.  By the time I dropped my buddy off and got back home it was almost 8 o’clock.

I did not get to watch any more of the 3 ring circus aka, the RNC last night. I did catch some highlights like Ted Cruz getting booed for refusing to officially endorse Trump during his speech and the awkward and weird “air kiss” embrace Trump exchanged with Mike Pence during his speech.  The convention has done a good job of echoing the chaos and idiocy that is now the de facto standard in American politics.

So yesterday was not a fun one at the office. We had an employee contract the Cerber ransomware on her pc.  Ransomware has been around for a little while.  We had another user do the same thing a couple years ago.  This employee clicked on a link that was in an email that was sitting in her QUARANTINE folder.  The email was in quarantine for a reason, geezus.  After doing so the program quickly encrypted the majority of the files on her pc.  It did not stop there however.  It proceeded to also encrypt almost a quarter of a MILLION files on one of our network servers, knocking a couple of our important applications offline. When Cerber completed it popped a message on the desktop with instructions on how to pay the ransom for the decryption program to undo the damage..

Of course this was four alarm fire mode. I came up with a plan of action along with our programmer who maintains the applications that became corrupted. It consisted of a combination of restoring from our nightly back up and fixing a few corrupted files.  To me, paying the ransom was not an option.  Not only am I against it in principal, I have no trust in paying someone who just sabotaged me to undo the damage they did.  If anything I would expect it to compound the problem where the decryption program plants further malicious seeds on the machine, no thanks. In the end we had downtime in those applications of maybe a couple hours which was annoying but not the end of the world.  It was a wake up call to how vulnerable you can still be despite firewalls and other security measures if you have employees that are asleep at the wheel in terms of safe computing practices.

Last night Cindy’s daughter stopped by.  Of course we had to have her try out the Segway MiniPro.  In a span of 5 minutes she went from being shaky to comfortable.  Before she left she was zipping around the driveway with ease.   She shared Cindy and my opinion that the Segway is just a lot of fun.

Cindy and I saw a small portion of the RNC convention last night.  Wow it sounded pretty exciting with Dump Trump people getting shouted down, Colorado delegates refusing to sit in the arena, and the the Ohio governor, John Kasich refusing to attend, further reenforcing why I wish he somehow had the nomination instead.  We did not catch respected republican keynote speakers like Cha Chi (Scott Baio) or Antonio Sabato Jr, the hunk from General Hospital soap opera.

We did catch the speech from Melania Trump which made me laugh out loud repeatedly.  The hypocrisy of the anti-immigrant candidate’s Russian bride (Slovenia technically), reading a speech that evidently had large portions that were word for word from a past Michelle Obama speech was simply amazing.  It’s going to be a very entertaining week for sure. Merica rulez, the rest droolz! Hell yea!

I had planned to fill today’s entry with light and mostly pointless jabber about stuff like how my Segway miniPro arrives today, our discovery of a cool show called Mr Robot or how I decided to solo the end raid of Wrath of the Lich King last night.  Instead I woke up this morning (without an alarm between 4-5AM) to news that there has been another terrorist mass casualty event in France.  This tragedy deviated from the normal gun and explosive tactics most used by suicidal maniacs.  Instead this man drove a large truck at a high rate of speed right into the middle of a large crowd gathered for a Bastille Day celebration.

The casualty count is somewhere in the mid-80s with many of them being children.  It is yet another horrible event in the long stream of horrible events that seem to be a regular occurrence in the world nowadays.  With these tragedies happening so often it gets hard to discern between them.  Regardless of the corresponding death toll with each event the rhetoric is typically very similar with leaders vowing to “defeat” terrorist groups which is a crock of shit.

When politicians say they are going wipe out terrorism they are appealing to simple thinking people.  It is impossible to wipe out a group that blends in among the populace and that views blowing themselves up as badge of honor that has rewards in the afterlife.  You can’t defeat extremism because they are willing to go beyond the boundaries civilized society exists under.

Of course as is the case far too often, religious beliefs are at the rotten core of this endless conflict.  There is no foreseeable resolution.  Religion has been the cause of conflict throughout human history and to think it’s changing anytime soon is naive.   I have no answers, no light at the end of the tunnel although I am sure the executives of military mega-conglomerates have a little spring in their step everyday they wake up to news like this.  Anything that helps to propagate fear and panic is good for business.  My personal plan of action is to just keep moving forward and hope human beings don’t totally eradicate themselves before the century is over.

Have a nice weekend hunting Pokemon.

So yesterday was Prime Day, a self serving event that Amazon invented a year or two ago as an excuse to have a large sale.  Early in the day Cindy and I took advantage of the combination of Prime Day pricing and an Amazon Echo voice ordering spiff to get a second Fire TV stick for 15 bucks.  However later in the day a much larger purchase occurred.

When the hoverboard craze hit last year I thought they were pretty cool however I never jumped on board, no pun intended.  In retrospect I was relieved I didn’t as the stories of shoddy workmanship as well as reports of the boards catching on fire when their lithium batteries burst into flame surfaced.  They were yet another example of a long list of sub-par Chinese products.

Well when I was browsing Prime Day deals I stumbled across the Segway miniPro.  First I was surprised to see the Segway name on a new product.  I had thought they went out of business years ago.  When I did some brief research on Segway I found that the company was actually sold a couple times, the last time to a Chinese company named Ninebot.  Of course seeing it’s Chinese ownership did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling however I saw that Ninebot sort of has followed the Lenovo blueprint.

Lenovo is a Chinese company that took over the IBM PC business.  They have managed to maintain a high quality product over the years.  I have actually owned a few Lenovo PC’s.  Ninebot has the reputation of doing much the same, building high quality, well engineered products instead of the typical knock off Chinese junk.

The miniPro has been available in other markets for a few months but only has been released in the US recently.  It is somewhat similar to hoverboards in appearance but there are a lot of differences when you look closer.  The base specs of the unit are impressive being able to support riders weighing up to 220 pounds.  It has a maximum range of 14-15 miles and has a maximum speed of 10 mph which is way faster than I could run for anything beyond short bursts.

The steering of the Segway differs greatly from hoverboards as well.  You still go forward and backward by adjusting your weight in either direction but the steering is not done with the feet.  Instead you use the thing that looks like a seat which is positioned between your legs.  By applying slight pressure you control left and right turns.  All the reviews I saw of the Segway indicated it felt like a superior control method to the foot pressure other hoverboards utilize.

Instead of the solid, unforgiving tires that other hoverboards use that cause traversing anything other than smooth sidewalk a bone jarring experience, the Segway has rubber pneumatic tires which absorb bumps much better.  I saw a video of a guy off roading on a trail with the miniPro and having very little difficulty doing so. It was pretty impressive.

The Segway has some other flashy features like Bluetooth integrated with a phone app that gives you lots of information about your rides as well as a bizarre remote control mode.  The miniPro can be driven around without a rider by a phone, having no issue keeping itself upright.  It also has very cool LED lighting and a status panel that lets you know exactly how much juice you have left in the battery.  Unlike the cheap boards, the Segway is UL certified and has a higher end battery charging system that will not potentially ignite the battery if left plugged in for too long.  You can completely charge the unit in four hours. Ninebot actually has some bigger plans for the platform, demonstrating a “robot” add in that utilizes the miniPro as it’s base at the most recent CES.

So anyway, enough of the sale pitch. The whole reason I did all of this investigation was because Amazon had them on special for Prime Day for over 40% off what they normally list for.  Now if I did a logical analysis of my need for something like this the end result would of course be no, I do not.  However being an adult approaching 50 with no kids I have more disposable income than my child bearing counterparts so I decided to bite the bullet.  I only did so once I got Cindy’s enthusiastic approval for the idea.  It will be fun, plain and simple.

I also noticed that there is rather gaping black hole of US based real world YouTube videos with the Segway miniPro.  I hope to help fill that void in the near future.

Yesterday Bernie officially endorsed Hilary for the democratic presidential nomination.  Within milliseconds the criticism started rolling in.  Of course I thought this was ludicrous if anyone took a moment to look at his options.  If Bernie decided to run as a thrid party candidate he would probably do better than any other third party candidate in history, but still lose. The end result of his run would be siphoning off mostly HRC voters which would surely make a Trump presidency a reality.  Even if he simply withheld his official endorsement out of principal, once again all it does is give Trump more opportunity to succeed which the majority of the country clearly does not want.  To me it is Bernie being a realist and sacrificing himself up for the greater good.  In my opinion this election is clearly a “who is less bad” scenario which is sad and depressing but it’s the choice we will be given.

Regardless, for people to take shots at Bernie, who may be the most honest and committed presidential candidate I have seen in my lifetime, is low class and serves no useful purpose.

I got a rather thick envelope in the mail yesterday from none other than Donald Trump.  I was surprised since I had not written him any letters recently.  I was disappointed the envelope was stuffed with a campaign donation request form and a promotional letter that I am sure Donald penned himself.  The material was responsibly recycled.

Last night after work I got out in the bar park to do a circuit workout.  I also shot a video of the session.  Shooting bar park videos was something that used to occur  on a very regular basis, probably once or twice a week.  That has not been the case for quite awhile, I can probably count the bar park videos this year on one hand so far.

The weather conditions were punishing with temperatures in the mid-90s and high humidity.  I decided to do a type of circuit unlike anything I did before where I inserted a nearly 1/4 mile run around the back yard as part of each of the five rounds.  Each circuit included the run, 10 pull ups and 20 push ups which I thought would be challenging since I have done no pull ups or push ups in close to a month because of the skin cancer surgery on my deltoid.  Instead of challenging I found it to be back breaking hard, leaving me gasping for breath by the end of it.

The workout gave me a good sense of my current fitness level.  The sense I got was it is bad.  Regardless it was good to get out there after work and get some reps in.  It’s something I need to do more regularly.  Hitting the gym over lunch hour is sufficient to maintain but if I want to improve I need to put in the time at home as well.

Last night when I got home Cindy’s daughter, her boyfriend and his brother were all at the house.  They had stopped by to visit with Tank who seems to be doing well.  While they were there Cindy talked them into doing a group effort in the 22 kill push up challenge that Cindy and I have been participating in this month.  We shot the set from two angles to add visual variety.  With Camtasia it’s very easy to blend the clips together.

So with the Orlando shootings  it gave social media a big burst of energy to once again fuel the circular argument regarding gun control that accomplishes very little except making people on both sides of the argument seem ignorant to/angry with the other.

Yesterday I saw a lot of gunners deciding to post “educational” information regarding guns, playing down the power of an AR-15, the assault rifle that was the primary death bringer in the attacks.  They thought it important to point out things like how it was not a fully automatic weapon, meaning you can’t just “squeeze and spray” bullets.  You have to pull the trigger for each shot.  Put your hand in a gun position and see how fast you can repeatedly squeeze your index finger. Wow, thanks for that clarification I feel so much better about it now.

Others felt it important to point out that the incident was being misreported as the worst mass shooting in US history when in fact there were other shootings where more people died in different circumstances.  Again, thanks for the education.  How stupid of me to think the real issue was  a man using an assault rifle to mow down people like a carnival game was a terrible tragedy that once again emphasized the need for real change regarding gun laws in the country.

I educated myself a little bit yesterday as well.  I did not realize that assault rifles such as the AR-15 were actually banned for a decade, starting in 1994.  When the provision expired in 2004 Congress chose to not renew it, presumably under HEAVY NRA lobby influence.  If you look at the history of mass shootings since the ban has been lifted, which has sky rocketed, the connection seems pretty damn obvious.  Of course I know it is ridiculous for me to think that common sense could prevail in a situation like this but I can continue to hope lobbyist dollars doesn’t have the final say.

Tomorrow I once again go under the knife for more basal cell skin cancer surgery, this time removing a spot on my left deltoid.  This will be my 6th or 7th procedure to have skin cancer removed.  I remember when I was first told I had skin cancer in my 30’s being very freaked out about it.  I have since become more numb to the diagnosis since my cancer has all been the basal cell variety, it has not been a huge concern.

Having a history of basal cell cancer does put me at risk for the more serious type of skin cancers like melanoma.  I have had friends and former classmates die of melanoma so I do have more serious cancer concerns tucked away  in the back of my mind.  It’s an area that rarely gets opened however.

Cindy told me that my tonneau cover for the new Tacoma had arrived yesterday so it immediately took front and center of my evening plans.  The “Vanish” model I bought was a roll up variety, different than the trifold and snapping covers I have had on my old Tacoma.  A friend of mine had recommended this cover as he has one on his 2015 Tacoma and is quite pleased with it. As is the case with most of my automotive work, I had the camera rolling.

It did not take very long until I became frustrated.  The instructions for the install were not well done.  The descriptions were vague and the accompanying pictures they had in there were low resolution and small, making their usefulness limited.  Repeatedly I found myself having to read sections again and again, trying to interpret exactly what I was supposed to do next.

I then got to a point where I was supposed to be attaching an adjuster assembly to the front of the cover.  The bolt I had seemed ridiculously short, I could only get a thread or two to catch.  When I went to attach the cover to the side rails it was impossible.  By this time I had Cindy out there trying to help me make sense of it all.  Finally I realized that the problem was ultimately mine, as is often the case.  All the bolts were the same type but some were slightly longer than others.  I figured out that I had used a couple of the longer bolts for the side bracket mounting where they weren’t needed.  After swapping the shorter and longer bolts around the problem had been solved.

Yes the error was mine but the manufacturer could have made more effort to distinguish the different length bolts to avoid this confusion.  Even in the parts list it does not indicate how many of each size you are given.  Instead it is just listed as “nut’s, bolts, washers”. Anyway, the install took much longer than I expected.  By the time I cleaned up the tools and went back inside it was almost 8PM.  The good news is the new cover does indeed look nice and is much easier to open and close than my trifold cover.  This was the last current upgrade I needed to complete on the 16 Tacoma.  Now I can just get moving on simply enjoying the truck.

Yesterday was an interesting one in the presidential race.  Bernie won the Indiana primary after being behind in the polls leading right up to the election, a scenario that has been repeated several times thus far.  No matter how much big money pushes the Hilary campaign ahead, Bernie refuses to go quietly into the background.  Regardless of what you think of his ideas and policies, it is unlikely you question his honesty and commitment to his ideals.  The guy believes what he says and does so without influence from the mega-money conglomerate that runs the majority of American politics.

I was much more surprised to hear Ted Cruz drop out of the race, especially since as recently as Monday he vowed to stay in the race until the end, regardless of the Indiana primary outcome.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since Trump has famously nicknamed him Lying Ted. Hell a few days prior he seemed to double down on his commitment by oddly naming Carly Fiorina as his VP, something that is typically not done at this stage of the race.  Watching her frozen botox face creepily sing at the press conference might have been enough to finally sink the ship.

I am curious what else changed in the span of 24 hours to force Ted to adhere to his namesake one final time.  I am happy with the end result regardless.  It’s too bad that Kasich has no shot at this point.  I have really come to like him as a candidate and somehow he has managed to avoid the incessant mud slinging that has become a foundation of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign.