I’m trad­ing a cou­ple of CDs with a fel­low blog­ger. Sin­clair lives in the UK and he sent me 2 discs already, got them yes­ter­day. The fine folks at the Royal Mail charged him 1.89 pounds for postage or the equiv­a­lent of 3 bucks and I got it in less than a week. For me to rec­i­p­ro­cate I will have to pay the USPS $6.40. I can mail it cheaper, $3.80, but that has a deliv­ery time of 4–6 WEEKS.

We had the deck installed on the back of the house 2 years ago, a por­tion of it was built over the con­crete pad that was out­side our bed­room door. The only thing on the pad was the grill and the only time I used it was when grilling steaks once every month or so. The con­crete was mostly cov­ered in moss and every cou­ple of years I go out with some bleach and a broom to try and erad­i­cate the green stuff, never 100% suc­cess­ful. They were sup­posed to get rid of the con­crete pad, but it was poured like 8″ thick so after wast­ing a day with a jack ham­mer and only nib­bling around the edges I told them to go ahead and just build over it. Big mis­take, the moss just jumped up the 6″ onto the wood of the deck. I spent a cou­ple of hours this morn­ing try­ing to get all the moss of the deck. Just like the con­crete pad I was not 100% suc­cess­ful. I got a big por­tion of it off, it is no longer slick in spots and the green color is almost gone. I used some deck cleaner stuff in a bot­tle and scrubbed with a big stiff brush. I think to do a thor­ough job I am going to need a pres­sure washer. Must be some one at work with one I could bor­row, instead of spend­ing sev­eral hun­dred bucks on one.

Sun­day night isn’t the same with out the X-files. The only thing that is remotely worth watch­ing is “Inside The Actors Stu­dio” with James Lip­ton. This week I skipped it because it was a rerun of Richard Gere, but next week is a must watch because John Tra­volta will be on. On a some­what related note, I could have sworn I saw Mr. Lip­ton as a court sketch artist this morn­ing in “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” on the Fox Movie Chan­nel. He is not cred­ited with that role on IMDB or on the Bravo site’s biog­ra­phy of him.

I’ve been using Auto­CAD in my work since 1987. I am com­fort­able doing stuff in it, mat­ter of fact, before we got net­worked and Microsoft Office I used to do a lot of stuff in ACAD that it really wasn’t designed to do. I am by no means an all around expert, 3D is a for­eign lan­guage to me, but when any­one at work has a ques­tion, I’m the go to guy. Well now I know how they feel when they face with the myr­iad com­mands of Auto­CAD and over­all com­plex­ity of the pro­gram, I just installed Adobe Illus­tra­tor. I need to redo the Barn­door Fan Club logo and design some­thing new for some T-shirts and it helps the screen printer (and saves me money) if I can give him an Illus­tra­tor file.

I’ve bought a 3 inch thick book on using the pro­gram, but boy howdy, it’s got a lot of com­mands with strange names and noth­ing works like I think it should. I imported an Auto­CAD draw­ing and the text stuff came through OK, but I need to fill some­thing and it won’t coop­er­ate. I have fig­ured out the object is a com­pound path, but I need to turn it into a plain path to fill it. Back to the book.

Though I was going to have to refor­mat the PC this evening. I rebooted and when it came back up every­thing was really slow and when­ever I tried to open an explorer win­dow or the con­trol panel, noth­ing would hap­pen, then it would lock up. Rebooted in safe mode and even that seemed to take for­ever. When it finally did come up I copied all my files to the 2nd hard drive incase some­thing bad was hap­pen­ing. I exported the run tree of the reg­istry and then deleted all the keys per­tain­ing to pro­grams. I cleaned out the start up folder and rebooted reg­u­lar. Tried to open an explorer win­dow and it was still crap­ola. I then real­ized that Zone Alarm was run­ning. It must have been started some­where that I missed. As soon as I shut it down the explorer win­dow popped up. I got on the net unpro­tected and went to Trend­Mi­cro and ran their free online virus scan just to be sure it wasn’t some­thing besides ZoneAlarm. They gave me a clean bill of health. Next I unin­stalled ZA and then rein­stalled it. Same thing. So I unin­stalled it again and pruned the reg­istry of any­thing with Zone Alarm or Zone Labs in it. Down­loaded and installed Sygate Per­sonal Fire­wall.

Today we got all 4 of the Net­flix movies in the mail due to the week­end before last’s movie marathon. So tonight we watched one of them, Play­ing Mona Lisa. Funny movie but the main attrac­tion for me was watch­ing Ali­cia Witt.

What is it about us men that makes us ter­ri­ble that way? I am sit­ting on the couch enjoy­ing a movie with the one I love, but I am think­ing about being with Ali­cia. If you know the answer let me know.

I’m not a fan of NASCAR, I believe until proven oth­er­wise that NASCAR is to auto rac­ing what the WWF is to wrestling. I’m not a fan Domino’s Pizza either pre­fer­ring Papa John’s when I’m just to lazy to travel the 3 miles to a local pizze­ria. But the two of them make a fine com­mer­cial, I just love the way the “pit crew” hop over the couch to “set” the table, nicely done folks.

I found a place where some­body hates this com­mer­cial, it is amaz­ingly enough on a forum enti­tled, “Com­mer­cials I Hate.”

At the end of our street in this sub­di­vi­sion there is a stop sign. The road you come to, Two Notch Road, is a through street. It is 1/4 mile away and par­al­lel to a big thor­ough­fare so some­time we get a lot of traf­fic trav­el­ing on this cross street. And because it is con­sid­ered a “short­cut” when the big­ger road gets busy, speed lim­its don’t apply, it is posted at 30 mph, but please don’t let that slow you down. In the past 2 years 2 motor­cy­clists have been killed right near our inter­sec­tion (1 t-boned a car turn­ing left in front of him and the other just lost con­trol) because they were trav­el­ing at a high rate of speed. For the past 10 days or so we have had one of those radar things the cops use that flashes your speed at you on Two Notch near our inter­sec­tion. We use that road to go to and from work every day so it has been fun to see how accu­rate it thinks my speedome­ter is.

Today on the way home the radar thingie was read­ing the usual 34 (I rou­tinely travel at +5 and the Miata’s speedo was right on 35,) but right before it was a sign pro­claim­ing “One Lane Road Ahead.” As I approached the inter­sec­tion I noticed to the right a SCDOT truck and there were broad white stripes in my lane and another on the other side of the inter­sec­tion in the other lane. As I made the left into the sub­di­vi­sion my wife and I spec­u­lated on what was com­ing, a light? Or a 4 Way Stop?

Forty-five min­utes later as I went for my evening rollerblade I pur­posely went in that direc­tion to check out the inter­sec­tion. As I rolled up I noticed under the usual stop sign there was a lit­tle addi­tion that said “4 Way.” Sure enough there were stop signs up on Two Notch Road. That didn’t take long to put those up. Or did it? With the new sign, new stripes and the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion truck to dis­tract me at a very famil­iar inter­sec­tion, were they already up and I missed them? Was I the first to these new stop signs?

Our cord­less phone/answering machine went weird on us about a week ago. You would pick it up and it would just beep three times when try­ing to use the hand­set. I checked the owner’s man­ual and all that was men­tioned was two beeps and that meant you were too far away from the base, which wasn’t the case, unless 2 inches is too far away. One thing the owner’s man­ual said was if it wasn’t work­ing at all was to reini­tial­ize the hand­set to the base. This pro­ce­dure involved unplug­ging the bat­tery in the hand­set and unplug­ging the power sup­ply to the base for 5 min­utes. That worked once — the very first time I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Hung up and tried again right away and three beeps were it. Bought a new bat­tery for the hand­set and charged it overnight. It too worked once and then beeps. While in Tar­get this after­noon we fig­ured we should go ahead and replace the phone, the answer­ing machine por­tion still worked, but we really use the cord­less phone too.

Picked up this snazzy look­ing 2.4Ghz phone for only $55. Got it home took it out of the box and plugged it all up. Broke out the man­ual for it to see how to set up the answer­ing machine por­tion and couldn’t find any men­tion of it in the papers. Read them again slower, still noth­ing about answer­ing machine. That’s when I looked over the box and it didn’t say any­thing about an answerer. The pic­ture sure looked like it would be an answer­ing machine, but looks can be deceiv­ing, it was a speaker phone, That is why it had a speaker in the base. Doh! Boxed it back up as best I could and back to Tar­get we went. This time I made sure it said Answer­ing Machine on all 6 sides of the box. Dif­fer­ent com­pany and dif­fer­ent looks, but $5 cheaper. Got to find a neat record­ing to put on there, guess I’ll go Googling for a wav file.

After liv­ing with the 4-Way Stop at the end of our street for 6 days and hav­ing passed through it a cou­ple dozen times I have come to the con­clu­sion that peo­ple here in Aiken don’t know how a 4-Way Stop works. It is not just because they are unfa­mil­iar with this par­tic­u­lar one, they just plain don’t know how to deal with one. As a pub­lic ser­vice here is the sec­tion on 4-Way or Multi-Way Stops from the South Car­olina Driver’s Manual:

Another sit­u­a­tion is at an inter­sec­tion where all streets have stop signs. When this occurs, a sign read­ing “4-way” or “Multi-Way” is added to the stop signs. A motorist arriv­ing at the inter­sec­tion must yield the right of way to motorists who arrived before him, wait­ing his turn to enter the inter­sec­tion. If two motorists arrive at the same time, if on dif­fer­ent streets, the dri­ver on the left should yield to the dri­ver on the right; or if on the same street, a dri­ver desir­ing to turn left should yield to the dri­ver from the oppo­site direction.

This is one of those things that is remem­bered long enough to pass the test and then for­got­ten if you never use it. This may be part of the prob­lem, my wife and I racked our brains try­ing to locate another 4-Way Stop in town and couldn’t do it, Aiken­ites never get to prac­tice this art.

When came back from the week­end trip we noticed that they had replaced the puny new stop signs on Two Notch Road with King Kong sized stop signs. I guess peo­ple were still cruis­ing through them so to help out our no-account, not pay­ing atten­tion dri­vers to notice the signs. For ref­er­ence stan­dard stop signs are 30 inches across, these pup­pies are 48″ and require two posts to sup­port them. They have even put two orange flags on the “Warn­ing Stop Ahead” signs.