Tag roomba

Well as you can tell, I really dug into changing things up with the blog yesterday after I installed WordPress 2.5.  I found a way to incorporate my random image header with a newer theme that supports “widgets”.   These widgets allow me to plug in all sorts of extras into the blog.  I added a NASA image of the day, a traffic analyzer that shows information about the traffic coming to the blog, a link to a post one year ago, weather, how many spam comments were blocked, a cleaner drop down menu for browsing prior posts, a new “popular” posts widget and more!  I also signed up for Google ad-sense and installed a WP mod to easily incorporate it into the blog.  I figure if I can make a few bucks while blogging, why not do it? You will notice that some of the Google ads relate to the blog post you are looking at, kinda cool.  It’s a whole lot of change but I like it, a lot.

Small side note, the site crossed 30,000 unique hits.  The accuracy of the hit counter  is questionable since I have had to reset the count from memory quite a few times due to issues with my web host.  Speaking of my host, I requested for my content to get moved to a different box due to the issues I have been having.  When the change happens the site may be unavailable for a day or so while net DNS servers are updated.

Last night I finished up sinking line posts in the ground.  After I scooped out my last bit of dirt with the post hole digger I lifted it high and drove the digger into the ground deep in celebration.  It felt good to be close to the end of the nearly month long project.  All that is left to do is string about 600 feet of wire which I plan to get done Saturday afternoon/evening.  

Ali got home last night just after I finished up with the last line post.  I had Nicki out with me on her leash.  Even though the fence is not totally enclosed, I let her off leash even though I’m sure Ali cringed when I did it.  Nicki immediately started sprinting around in circles, thrilled to be able to run around without a 16 foot restraint attached to her neck.  Ali and I both laughed as we watched her run and run.  We left her off leash until we went back inside.  She was just fine and didn’t try to sprint away from us as Ali has always feared.  As daylight was fading I loaded up the 3 big heavy rolls of fence wire into the back of the truck and dropped them off where they would be installed, saving me from pushing each roll several hundred feet.

This afternoon I am leaving work early so we can head up to Tampa.  Ali is running a 5k up there tomorrow called the Iron Girl.  The race is all women.  She is very excited about competing in an out of town race.  We are taking the pooch along.  I am bringing a laptop with that is loaded with the Slingbox client.  I am hoping we can watch some of our normal Friday night Tivo stuff at the LaQuinta we are staying at via the net.

The cat is still at the vet, we are still in no rush to get her.  I came up with a plan to set up the automatic litter box AND the manual litter box in the utility room once Spook returns.  Then the stupid cats will have a choice.

I received yet ANOTHER Roomba yesterday.  This time it was a jet black scheduler model with “intellibin”.  Intellibin sounds really high tech huh?  All it does is flash a little red led if the dust bin is full.  Since I empty the bin after every run it really is just fluff for me.  I currently have NINE robots at my house, well TEN if I count the Scooba.  It’s time for me to get busy, parting them out to sell on Ebay.  I am going to give one to my mom to try and I plan to keep three for my cleaning crew. (and maybe one more for hacking) All the rest will be finding homes elsewhere either intact or as organ(part) donors.   

I can’t wait to see how Ali’s Wheel of Fortune tryout goes.

I started Tivo’ing Battlestar Galactica.  I keep hearing how awesome it is.  I love sci-fi, I think I will wind up being sorry I got in on it so late.

Oh I forgot, we had another bad experience with RCI last night, what a surprise.  Ali’s friend Sue is going to be driving down to visit us next week.  Her car has some problems so we suggested that she rent a car for the trip.  We offered to help her out.  We had about 30,000 unused RCI points that are expiring at the end of May.  I f we don’t use them, we lose them.  One of the things we can use them for is stuff like rental cars, perfect!  We at least can get some use out of them.  So Ali calls up RCI and explains that we want to rent a car for a friend using our points.  Ok no problem, we can do that.  Oh by the way, there is a $49 fee to do so, another f’ing fee.  When Ali told me about the fee I grumbled but it is to be expected at this point, RCI is all about fees.  So she gives the rep all the info and is told she would be transferred to Budget to complete the reservation.  It will cost us 33,000 points PLUS the $49 fee. Oh and there COULD be additional charges by the rental company but we need to find that out our self.  So Ali gets on with the Budget rep and again gives all the information.  Then I see Ali’s face turn to concern/disbelief.  The rep is telling Ali that they have NO cars available at that location to rent with points but they would happily rent us a car if we wanted to pay for it conventionally.  What a crock of shit.  The rep said that they normally only allocate cars for points at airports.   Ali asked for a supervisor, the guy said he was a supervisor.  Ali hung up, disgusted.  She spent close to a half hour going through this circus only to be told that our points were no good.  By the end of the ordeal she was chiming in on my chant of “RCI sucks”.     

The weather the past week or so has been FANTASTIC.  I don’t think we intentionally had the AC running at all during that time. 

Friday night I relayed to Ali all I found out regarding the attempted CC fraud.  Of course this has made both of us rather paranoid.  I have printed out all the fake gmail account emails as well as the CC statement.  The problem is since those charges were fraudulent they were instantly removed from my statement.  I am going to call the sheriff’s office again today to get a clarification.  They said they needed a copy of the statement with the fraudulent charges on it.  Since those charges are not on the statement because my CC company immediately cancelled them, I’m not sure where I stand.  I think I will go to the sheriff’s office regardless today to talk to them about it.

My 3 day weekend started with a super busy Saturday.  Ali was behind at work so she decided to go in on Saturday.  I was on the first day of a three day weekend so that means one thing normally, bust ass like mad to get all the work done so I can do whatever afterwards.  I went outside and trimmed up the remaining trees that were in the back half of the property.  Some of these hadn’t been touched in years and years.  It wasn’t so bad since it was only a total of 5 trees.  Then I went inside and cleaned the bathrooms, the bird cage and did some other minor indoor clean up.  I remember thinking it was ironic that I was the one cleaning when Ali  was home three days during the week. However I rationalized it because Ali was at work on Saturday and during the week she had been having some serious issues  with her back hurting. Plus it doesn’t kill me to do the cleaning once in awhile. I was surprised that it was 1pm and I had most of what I wanted done, done.  I came up with something else to do.

I pulled the party van out of the spot it has been more or less sitting in since we got back from out west to examine the large wet spot under it.  I wanted to verify what substance it was.  A quick swipe of the finger confirmed it was oil.  So I popped the hood, checked the dipstick and saw it was a quart low.  I told Nicki we were going on a trip. She was very excited.  I stopped at the convenience store to grab a quart of oil and throw gas in the van.  What I was doing was making the trip out to Lehigh Acres to pull the For Sale signs of our lots.  The market is so depressed right now the only way we could sell the lots would be at a number barely over what we paid for them which we aren’t interested in doing, hence there was no reason to have signs up.

So I get to the first lot on Genoa.  As I drive up I don’t see the sign.  Well I figure maybe it got knocked over or something.  I get out and walk back and forth looking for the sign.  It is nowhere to be found, someone snatched it.  Bastards!  I angrily hop back in the van and head to the Bell Blvd lot.  This lot had the sign stolen once before.  The last time we went there I installed a sign hanging off a mailbox mounting post to make it less likely to be easily plucked from the ground.  Well the sign and post were there but they were knocked over. From the looks of it they had been knocked over for quite awhile. The signs themselves were busted up.  I was even more annoyed.  Of course since we don’t live exactly close it is quite difficult to police our signs.  My theory is the signs are stolen, knocked over by other people trying to sell lots in the area to minimize their competition. Who knows, maybe even the realtors themselves do it.  I don’t know for sure, all I know is it annoys the hell out of me. Oh well it doesn’t matter anyway, we aren’t going to unload the lots at firesale prices.

Late in the afternoon I decided to plop down to watch 28 Days Later.  28 Days is a modern day Dawn of the Dead.  When I was younger I would routinely watch scary, horrifying stuff like this.  It gets the adrenaline going.  Since Ali hates stuff like this, over the years I simply have not sought it out.  Well now since there are a lot of times when I am home alone it is a perfect opportunity for me to watch movies that Ali would not deem watchable.  I saw Dawn of the Dead.  That was some scary, scary stuff.  There is something classically horrifying about watching your friends get attacked and killed by zombies and then have them become a zombie themselves and be faced with killing them or being killed or zombified yourself.  This situation presents itself quite often in 28 days. 

The movie is pretty damn nasty.  You get attached to characters only to have the become infected with the “rage virus” and see them killed.  There is tons of gore, tons of horror. It is all very well done.  If you like that sort of stuff you would like this, A.

On Sunday morning Ali was planning to go to the gym.  She said her back was feeling better.  So much so that she was thinking about doing a spinning class AND a group power class.  I told her she shouldn’t overdo it but I wasn’t strong enough in my warning.  She did the group power class and came home looking for an icepack.  She aggravated her back again.  I told her it’s funny, she did something I normally do, push things when they shouldn’t be pushed. last night she said she hardly slept cause her back was bothering her so much.  Backs are a touchy thing.

The Eagles played the Redskins Sunday.  I pretty much expected the Eagles to lose.  Into the fourth quarter they were well on their way.  The defense allowed the Redskins to march up and down at will for most of the second half.  However the Eagles managed to mount a comeback and actually make some plays on defense.  At the end of the game there was almost a monumental f up by the Eagles.  The Redskins had no time outs and just turned the ball over to the Eagles.  The Redskins were down by one.  The Eagles had the ball with something like 2:13 to go.  They had the ability to basically run the clock all the way out and end the game.  Instead they hand off to Westbrook, the Redskins part like the Red Sea and allow him to go in basically uncontested.  This was brilliant on their part because after the Eagles kicked the extra point, the Skins were only down by 8, a touchdown and two point conversion away from tying it.  Of course Fat Andy didn’t even think about this possibility.  Luckily for the Eagles and Andy, their coaches oversight didn’t get a huge glaring spotlight cast on it because the defense was able to squash the Redskins final comeback attempt.  The point is a good coach would have eliminated the possibility of that chance from ever coming to be. Oh well, they won.

My day off yesterday that was pretty chore free wound up just not being all that great.  In the morning I did a couple chores to make me feel useful like washing the truck followed up with cleaning the water equipment.  After that all I did chore wise was unleash my robotic cleaning arsenal on the house.  I had the 3 roombas sweeping, the Dirt Dog running in the garage and finished up with he Scooba scrubbing the kitchen, utility room and bathroom floors. After that the day was mine.

Of course one of the ways I spent the time was playing WoW.  I had yet another incredibly frustrating incident that follows the same script as most of my other frustrating incidents.  I got grouped up with a bunch of annoying as hell, ADD-riddled kids.  The group unraveled within the first 10 minutes but only after a series of insults back and forth.  Afterwards I was just disgusted and logged off, seriously wondering why I spend time playing a game that can make me so angry over virtual, meaningless shit?

To clear my head I decided to watch the second 28 flick, 28 WEEKS later.  The movie starts with an absolutely terrifying scene as a cottage of people hiding out gets overun with the zombies, killing all but one person.  The story line of the second one was actually a little better than the first movie.  It was scarier, more gory, more disturbing than the first, a hard trick to pull off.  It makes one take a look at mankind and just how fragile our existence could be if a deadly, untreatable virus was introduced into the human race.  I’d give this one an A as well but be warned, nightmares are a pretty safe bet as a result.  I woke up this morning at 5am with scenes from the movies running through my head.

Eh this is long enough.

Here they are and they all speak english.