I’m glad you asked that ques­tion. I used to be a Libra, but now I’m a Virgo thanks to 2,000 years and wob­ble in the earth axis. link

Well, it looks like the Emperor is going to Florida, we struck out at 4 dif­fer­ent rental agen­cies at the Augusta Air­port. It was actu­ally three coun­ters, Enter­prise, National & Avis/Budget. The Enter­prise guy answered no right off, the two ladies at National went the extra mile and looked up to see when the 3 of their Sonatas were due back off rental and the woman at Avis sent some­one over to their ser­vice cen­ter to see if there were any hid­ing there. None available…

After leav­ing Indian Springs State Park on Sat­ur­day we angled our way back north­east to I-20 for the blast back home. When we got to Exit 130 it was time for din­ner and there were sev­eral chain places to choose from. We picked Zaxby’s as the lesser of 6 evils, but when we got inside and perused the menu board we both knew it was an unin­spired choice. There was noth­ing that either of us really wanted, so we sur­prised the girl behind the counter by turn­ing on our heels and head­ing for the door.

While walk­ing back to the car we noticed a large bill­board that adver­tised two down­town restau­rants just 3 miles north. This sounded more like it. A down­town eatery that would have some­thing besides a vari­a­tion on fried chicken parts. The Yes­ter­day Cafe was def­i­nitely the place to be on Sat­ur­day night in Greens­boro as it was hop­ping. We were greeted promptly by the host­ess and offered a booth. We scanned the menu and there were enough options that we each picked some­thing. Sev­eral min­utes passed and we changed our minds to a dif­fer­ent entree. Sev­eral more min­utes passed and we had yet to get so much as a nod from a wait-person. No water offered. No I’ll be with you in a minute. No noth­ing. Too make mat­ters worse, from where I was sit­ting I could see the host­ess sta­tion and there were two young ladies, dressed in wait­ress type attire stand­ing there, chat­ting away with the host­ess, where they had been since we entered. Finally the con­ver­sa­tion broke up and the wait­resses peeled off one by one like B-17’s over their Ger­man tar­gets and flew right by us. Need­less to say we stood up and left.

Well, I guess we’ll head back 3 miles south to the Inter­state. Donna sug­gested Waf­fle House next. She said, “I can have their soup” and I said, “I may just get a pecan waf­fle.” We picked a booth and a wait­ress came right over and took our drink order. She returned promptly with a coke for me and water for Donna. When Donna asked what the day’s soup was and our wait­ress had to go ask. She returned and said, “We are out of soup.” We both said, “We’re sorry,” as we stood up and headed for the door.

Right across the street was a Wendy’s. I said out loud, “Spicy Chicken sand­wich.” Donna replied with, “Baked potato.” If you already have fig­ured it out with the way the story is going so far, they were out of potatoes.

We still had a cou­ple snacks and half a ham & cheese sand­wich in the cooler in the trunk to tide us over for a while. Worse case sce­nario was the Cracker Bar­rel in Augusta 64 miles away. It would be closer to 7:00 PM before we ate, but we were pretty sure they would still have both pota­toes and soup when we got there.

We didn’t hold out that long though, 40 miles later we were sucked into a Taco Bell in Thomp­son. Three tacos for me and a chicken flat bread sand­wich for her, water to drink, in and out for under 5 bucks.

We bought the local paper this morn­ing and Donna pointed out this lit­tle bit in the paper’s Talk­back section:

Dog Park
The dog park is great, although some safety con­cerns should be addressed. The metal posts should be wrapped to pro­tect pup­pies from col­lid­ing into them. The sides of the pool are extremely rough and can harm dogs that try to exit the pool from the sides.

At first I thought it might be some sort of joke, but then I remem­bered just how deeply involved peo­ple can get with their pets. But I just couldn’t resist mak­ing light of the mat­ter. I hit the reply link which popped up an email win­dow and I wrote:

RE: Dog Park Safety Con­cerns
Per­haps dogs using the park should be required to wear hel­mets and pro­tec­tive padding like the folks who use the Skate Park behind the Odell Weeks Center.

About 30 min­utes later I got an unde­liv­er­able email back. Fig­ur­ing maybe the paper has some­thing against gmail addresses when I got home I tried again. A short time later:

Failed to deliver to ‘talkback@aikenstandard.com’
SMTP module(domain @10.10.10.57|aikenstandard.com) reports:
host mail.global.frontbridge.com says:
550 5.4.1 talkback@aikenstandard.com: Recip­i­ent address rejected: Access Denied

Nice, you can’t talk back to Talkback…

Last week I received this email:

Peri­odic audits by IT indi­cate that you have Mozilla Fire­fox soft­ware installed on your com­puter. Unfor­tu­nately this is not Emer­son approved soft­ware and must be removed. John Smith* (our in house colat­eral duty IT guy) will sched­ule a time for removal of this software.

*his actual name

The best I can fig­ure out the rea­son they wanted Fire­fox off is they couldn’t fig­ure a way to pre­vent folks from view­ing embed­ded video on web sites with it like they can with IE. So now I was stuck look­ing at annoy­ing ads when going to web­sites and­hav­ing to dimiss a sev­eral warn­ing dia­log boxes that a web­site was try­ing to con­nect to the intranet that was never a prob­lem with Firefox.

I thought maybe just leav­ing a thumb­drive with Fire­fox Portable installed on it was push­ing the lim­its, so I tried Chrome Portable. Chrome may be the fastest browser, but it was pig slow off a thumb­drive, so I gave up after 3 days. Now I just live with Inter­net Explorer…

Although today it is awfully hard to. Our Fam­ily Physi­cian paid us a visit around lunch time to check in on Donna and let us know that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama was refus­ing to pay him because they felt that she wasn’t sick enough to have been admit­ted into the hospital!

I hope that they can straighten this out. My guess is that he is her pri­mary physi­cian so he is charged with being the admit­ting guy when it was it really was the colon doc who called the shot. Maybe he didn’t cross a T or dot an I. All the docs are sup­posed to get together in the morn­ing and write a term paper to BCBSAL to get them to allow the hos­pi­tal stay. Or tomor­row night we might be out on the street.

I went into the break room this after­noon to get a drink out of the machine. Dropped a quar­ter in the slot and fed a dol­lar bill into the grab­ber thingie. I eyed my choice, a Diet 7•UP, punched in my 2 digit code and watched the the drink machine do its dance.

(We have one of those open front jobs with a mechan­i­cal beam across that goes up and down with an attached cra­dle that slides along the beam until it is in front of your selec­tion. Then some­thing in the back of the bot­tles pushes the row for­ward one bot­tle and your drink gets dumped into the cra­dle. Then the cra­dle moves down and over into the lower right side and is deposited into the out­put tray.)

It moves up a cou­ple of rows and to the left some and stops in front of #35. What? I hit 34. The selected Diet 7•UP stays right where it is and a Canada Dry Sparkling Green Tea Gin­ger Ale is dis­pensed. Hmmmm, I don’t mind a Gin­ger Ale every once and a while and green tea I can live with out, but I spent a buck & a quar­ter on it, so I’ll drink it. Like my last encounter with green tea out the machine at work, I fin­ish about two-thirds of it. Tasted just like what I imag­i­nee pond water would taste like with a lit­tle seltzer water mixed in.

Yes­ter­day morn­ing I wiped the dust off my mon­i­tor with a damp cloth. A few min­utes later I noticed a bright green dot 1/3 over from the right and about half way up while the screen saver was run­ning. I run an adjusted ver­sion of Eupho­ria and the back­ground is mostly black, so that bright green dot was very vis­i­ble. It doesn’t get any bet­ter when I’m work­ing either because I draw in Auto­CAD with a black back­ground and that green is the color I use for dimensions.

I Googled “dead pixel” and found a few places that offered meth­ods to fix them. But the first thing I learned is I didn’t have a dead pixel, but I had a stuck pixel. *The title of this post wouldn’t have sounded near as cute if I used stuck instead of dead.

I tried two dif­fer­ent soft­ware meth­ods and maybe I didn’t let them run long enough, only about 15 min­utes, but nei­ther had any suc­cess. I then moved onto the more dan­ger­ous phys­i­cal meth­ods. The pen­cil point directly applied to the stuck pixel insu­lated by a cou­ple sheets of paper fixed the prob­lem, for about 2 min­utes. Then we moved on to the tap­ping of the screen on the pixel with a Sharpie, with the cap on, this worked too. For about 15 min­utes. By the after­noon I was com­ing to the real­iza­tion that I was going to have to live with that one bright green spot and maybe change my Auto­CAD back­ground to white.

At the 2 o’clock break, with the usual gang gath­ered in my cube, I was regal­ing folks with my attempts to fix the stuck pixel. As I was demon­strat­ing the tap­ping tech­nique that had worked for the rel­a­tively longest time, I picked a ran­dom spot on the screen and prac­ticed hit­ting it with the right pres­sure, just enough to make a nice white halo around the cap of the Sharpie, when my stuck pixel unstuck. I was about 4 or 5 inches away from it, but on the sec­ond or third tap it winked off. Hasn’t returned since.

The plans for next year’s trip to New Mex­ico is in the very early neb­u­lous state. One week or two? Fly or drive? Fly part­way and drive in the mid­dle? Drive the Miata or rent a car for the drive?

Plan A is to fly to Albu­querque for just a week and rent a car. Stum­bling block num­ber 1, but not a deal breaker, is you can’t rent a con­vert­ible there. Only one com­pany, Bud­get, even listed one, but claims they are sold out. I can rent a con­vert­ible in Phoenix (465 miles away) for $560 a week or Den­ver (462 miles away) for $400 a week, heck we can rent one in Augusta, GA (1532 miles away), but that would mean a 2 week trip and the car rental would be $1,300.

You would think that New Mex­ico would be a great place for con­vert­ible rentals.

There is no base­ball game tonight, the reg­u­lar sea­son is over. The play­offs start Wed/Thurs, but it is the begin­ning of the end.

Today was a rainy, damp and rel­a­tively cold day (only got to around 60.) The leaves haven’t started chang­ing yet, but they will. And then they’ll fall.

It is only 7:30 and the sun set nearly a half hour ago, it is fast becom­ing dark too soon.

I can hardly wait until spring…

Three weeks ago light­ning struck near our house and fried the TV and sur­round sound sys­tem (plus some other stuff) and within a cou­ple of hours we had made a trip to Sears and bought a new flat panel TV and a home the­ater setup. They had a sweet deal on a Pana­sonic SC PT760 HTIB, so we opted for a Pana­sonic TC L32C12 TV so that they would talk to each other and there would only have to be one remote on the cof­fee table.

Because we were in such a hurry, it was near­ing clos­ing time, that it wasn’t ’til we got home that we real­ized they hadn’t given us the remote for the HTIB & one of the rear speak­ers. We went back on Sun­day and col­lected a remote and the speaker. When we got home and I started set­ting up the sur­round sound, I noticed that the remote they gave me was not the same as the pic­ture in the own­ers man­ual. It had most of the but­tons, some in dif­fer­ent spots, but it didn’t have other cru­cial ones. Because it was Sun­day, Sears closed early, so the right remote would have to wait until Monday.

On Mon­day I took back the wrong remote only to be handed another Pana­sonic Home The­ater remote that was not the cor­rect one either, but it did have more but­tons, so I took it hop­ing that it might work out. Didn’t.

Called the store on Tues­day and they said they’d order me one. At no cost. Shipped to me. At least the lat­est remote allowed me to set up the Viera Link on the sur­round sound unit so it and the TV would talk through the HDMI cable. Suc­cess. I could turn on the sur­round sound amp, turn off the TV speak­ers, pipe the audio from the TV into the amp and the TV remote made the vol­ume go up and down with the hutch doors closed on the sur­round sound sys­tem. It worked for about 2 hours. The remote no longer con­trolled the vol­ume. I checked the set­tings and it looked like it should be work­ing, but it wasn’t. I decided to wait on the cor­rect remote before try­ing again.

Fast for­ward to late last week and the cor­rect remote arrived at the house. Reread the instruc­tions in both the TV and the HTIB, reset both units to fac­tory defaults and ran the set ups. The dis­plays read like I had both boxes set to use the Viera Link, but the TV remote would not con­trol the HTIB vol­ume. I swear it did work the once.

Think­ing maybe it was the cheap $20 HDMI cable, I bought a $40 ver­sion with gold plated ends. Didn’t help.

I was now almost pos­i­tive it wasn’t the cable. (I mean I could have bought two bad cables, but what were the odds that two dif­fer­ent cables from two dif­fer­ent stores made by two dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies would both be no good? So did the TV’s Viera Link chip stop work­ing or was it some­thing in the HTIB?) My money is now on the sur­round sound sys­tem being the culprit.

Now if I could find a local store with another Pana­sonic HTIB I would buy it and try it to see if that fixes the prob­lem. This is not as easy as one would think. Choices in Aiken for elec­tron­ics is very lim­ited. There is Wal­mart, Tar­get & Sears. Nei­ther Wal­mart nor Tar­get carry Pana­sonic sur­round sound sys­tems. All Sears has left in stock is the $400 SC-PT770. Best Buy in Augusta has the next model down, SC-PT760, for $300, so we drove over there this morning.

We didn’t see the $300 one on dis­play, only the more expen­sive one, so when a sales guy shows up I ask about the SC-PT760. He says, “I don’t think we have those, let me check.” Off he goes. We wan­der around a bit. We stand and wait. We shuf­fle our feet. We wan­der some more. We stand around some. We give up and walk out. Silly us for think­ing the sign out front that said — No Inter­est on Any­thing in the Store — meant on your Best Buy credit card.…

This after­noon I dis­man­tled the Pana­sonic HTIB and returned it (and the $40 cable) to Sears. We are keep­ing the TV. For now.

Because my birth­day is in Sep­tem­ber and I gave Donna a hang dog look, plus she is thor­oughly dis­gusted with me and this whole sur­round sound mess, she upped the bud­get a cou­ple hun­dred bucks and the cur­rent plan is to pick up the low level Sam­sung HT-Z320 at Wally World and order a slightly larger TV that will just squeeze inside the hutch, the Sam­sung LN37B530. When the Sam­sung shows up we will take the Pana­sonic back to Sears…

Tried to print some­thing this evening and my free for buy­ing a lap­top Dell 720 printer wouldn’t print. Wouldn’t turn on. Zippo. I mea­sured the out­put volt­age at the ter­mi­nals of the trans­former, it is sup­posed to be 30VDC, it read zero.

I can take a chance on some fly by night out­fit and buy a new power cord/transformer for around ten bucks with ship­ping or I could just go ahead and buy a new printer. There is a dealer on Ama­zon that is sell­ing the same Dell 720, new, for just $39 includ­ing shipping.

Or I could get some­thing else in the $50–60 range, but what? Our print­ing needs are min­i­mal, an occa­sional receipt for an inter­net pur­chase and the Miata Club Treasurer’s Report once a month. Color is not required at all. Any­thing fancy I do it at work where I have access to every­thing from a let­ter sized color laser to a 36 x 48 ink jet plotter…

JC Penny had an ad in the paper pro­mot­ing $9.99 polo shirts. There was also a $10 coupon if you spent $50. I haven’t had any new shirts for work in about 3 years, so this seemed like a per­fect oppor­tu­nity to update my closet for cheap, buy 5 shirts and get them for only $40.

We hit the mall in town early and at Penny’s they only had one style marked at $10 instead of the fly­ers four with most of the polos there marked at $12.99. That didn’t seem right, so we left the store and checked the other major stores in the mall look­ing for deals on shirts. We had no luck so ended up back at JCP. I picked out 3 shirts I liked, another that would do and headed for the checkout.

There were two women at the counter talk­ing to the sales clerk as they checked out, they must have known each other. He kept reach­ing to one side of the counter into a large pile of clothes and scan­ning an item. Looked like he was going to be at it awhile, so we headed over to the other side of the store to the only other open reg­is­ter. There were two sep­a­rate woman in line there and the girl was fin­ish­ing with one as we walked up. The clerk looked at the remain­ing woman and said, “I’ll be right back. I’ve run out of reg­is­ter tape.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I put down the shirts and we left the store. We’ll prob­a­bly go to Augusta tomor­row and try their JC Penny.

It seems as if the Aiken Bicy­cle Club has for­got­ten to renew their web host­ing agree­ment, maybe even on pur­pose, so a Google search turns up an old link. That Geoc­i­ties page has me listed as the Sec­re­tary and Newslet­ter Edi­tor. The Pres­i­dent, VP and Trea­surer are, I think, no longer liv­ing around here, so none of their con­tact info is worth a darn. Nei­ther of my email addresses are valid, but the phone num­ber is still good and last week­end I got not one, but two calls ask­ing about bike rides. There have been oth­ers pre­vi­ously on a spo­radic basis, but two in two days made me want to do some­thing about it.

I cre­ated that page back in the early 90s on Geoc­i­ties and the page you see is a cookie crumb left behind in 2001 when the ABC went big time and got their own domain. It hasn’t been touched since and there is no way I can remem­ber what the log in info is so I could change it or take it down. Today I used the Yahoo con­tact page to ask then to take the site down. I’m sure I’m spit­ting in the wind.

A long, long time ago I cre­ated a web site for my local bicy­cle club. I have moved on and so has the bicy­cle club, but unfor­tu­nately the old Geoc­i­ties web site has not. I no longer remem­ber the user­name or pass­word for the site and undoubt­edly any email address I used as a con­tact is no longer valid.

If you search the web for the ABC the first result is the old Geoc­i­ties site and I am still get­ting phone calls request­ing infor­ma­tion I can no longer sup­ply. Is there any­way that the site could be decom­mis­sioned on my request?

If not maybe it could be removed for vio­lat­ing your Terms of Ser­vice, to wit:

7.2 Pro­hib­ited Uses
℗ use your home page (or direc­tory) as stor­age for remote load­ing or as a door or sign­post to another home page, whether inside or beyond Yahoo! GeoCities;

Thank you for any help in this manner.

There is another Geoc­i­ties page that comes in a close sec­ond when search­ing the web for the ABC and it also has my phone num­ber listed. I emailed the con­tact on that page over a week ago and have not heard back from the owner yet. If I had to bet he is in the same boat as I am and has long since for­got­ten his Yahoo login info too and is too embar­rassed to admit it to me. I search ed for his name, Andy Nagai, and found a pho­tog­ra­phy site with the domain of nagaiphotos.com. I know this is the same per­son because it has the same email address I used to try and con­tact him. It also listed his phone num­ber (626–392-9506.) A reverse look up of that num­ber results in a Cal­i­for­nia cell phone that may or may not still belong to him (and I’m not pay­ing any­thing to find out), so maybe I should just call it…

At work the pass­word required for net­work access is good for 45 days and when you get down to 5 days left it will start remind­ing you each time you log in that your pass­word is going to expire in “X Days.” ASCO also uses an AS400 for its busi­ness sys­tems soft­ware and it needs a sep­a­rate pass­word from the one you need for the PC net­work. The AS400 pass­word is only good for 28 days, that is not too bad, but the annoy­ing thing is that it starts to remind your pass­word will expire at the 14 day mark.

Why don’t they just go ahead and start remind­ing you when you get down to say…27 days left.

Noth­ing really wrong with the inter­face and it seems that Microsoft took the com­plaints (or at least that Hi I’m A Mac com­mer­cial) of those annoy­ing and pro­lific “Are You Sure You Want To Do That?” dia­log boxes seri­ously, but I think I have a video dri­ver issue. Try any full screen video and it locks up, not just Ctl+Alt+Del locked up either, but hold down the power but­ton for 5 sec­onds to shut it off locked up. The Net­flix stream­ing movie viewer didn’t even have to get to full screen, just a mere attempt to load and it was reboot city.

I thought an updated video dri­ver might help, but Dell only offers a video dri­ver in the XP fla­vor for my lap­top (it’s what came pre­loaded from the factory.)

I won­der what I have to do to undo the instal­la­tion with­out hav­ing to reload XP all over again. Maybe I can just for­mat the par­ti­tion and edit the boot loader file? Off to Google to see…

I just saw a trailer for the new movie Aus­tralia and is it just me, but did they totally rip off that theme from TDPM?

Do you think the newest ver­sions of the Chrysler mini­vans (which don’t seem to be too mini any­more) with it’s more angu­lar look is meant as retro in the same mode as the new Bee­tle or the new Camaro?

Dear Fox, I down­loaded the the ille­gally copied & shared bitor­rents of last three episodes of the Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles because I couldn’t watch them directly from your site. I used to be able to watch shows directly, but some­thing has changed since last year. The video herks, then jerks and then the audio becomes unsynced. At first I thought it might be my high speed con­nec­tion had slowed, but I can still watch stuff on ABC.com. Iron­i­cally when it usu­ally hap­pens is at your min­i­mal com­mer­cial breaks, even the ones where there is no actual ad there.

Thanks to the insistence of a co-worker (Hi Mark!) I registered at drpepper.com to play along with their current promotion. I have so far steadfastly refused to sign up for any of these soda company promotions as it seems as if the value reward is nowhere near worth the effort. (I can't say the real good payouts are too far between to warrant participation because after all I'm plunking a buck down twice a week in the state lottery.)

Don Draper when asked how he likes smoking pot: I feel like Dorothy, everything just turned to color.

The Dr Pepper promotion promises "1 in 6 Wins! Fan­tas­tic Prizes.” so how could I resist. After a cou­ple weeks and enter­ing 5 codes from 20 oz. Diet Dr. Pep­per bot­tles all I had ever got­ten was “Sorry, try again.” I fig­ured that num­ber six would be a win­ner, they promised. Bas­tards. Liars. “Sorry try again.”

When I tore the box up from my 12 pack in the home fridge to throw away I noticed that there was a game code on the inside. What the heck, I’m already signed up and besides now it becomes a test to see just how long it will take to win something.

Didn’t take long as seven was my lucky num­ber. What did I win? The Grand Prize, a trip for two to a col­lege foot­ball con­fer­ence cham­pi­onship game? Nope. Third Prize, an Aero Tail­gater Chair? No chance. Sev­enth Prize, an XL Dr Pep­per t-shirt? Hah! Tenth Prize, a Dr Pep­per Cell Phone? No sir. I just won 1 of 23,028,000 Fif­teenth Prizes, a Dr Pep­per Foot­ball Com­puter Wall­pa­per (Aver­age Retail Value: $.99)

Yippee!

Sorry I didn’t post any­thing last night, but I was too busy admir­ing myself in my new hat.

I made it 30 min­utes into the sea­son pre­mier of The Sarah Con­ner Chron­i­cles before giv­ing up tonight. Cred­i­bil­ity was stretched too far, snapped and I was returned to real­ity. I can bring myself to believe that killer robots have been sent back from the future to kill an indi­vid­ual that threat­ens them in the future, but I can not believe that that indi­vid­ual can be involved in an auto acci­dent at 35 MPH while not wear­ing a seat belt, get out of the car and trot off down the street. Alright, maybe I could have gone for that, but not after they show a close up of his pant leg and it looks like a river of blood run­ning down it, appar­ently caused by a com­pound frac­ture. Fol­lowed by that leg prac­ti­cally col­laps­ing when he first puts his full weight on it, then 2 baby steps later he takes off run­ning at 15 MPH.

That was just one of sev­eral things that made me wince. But if I remem­ber cor­rectly I may have had the same trou­ble when I first started watch­ing this series last year. Maybe I just need to be in the mood?

I use Auto­CAD at work and ever since they upgraded me to ver­sion 2007 a cou­ple of months ago I rou­tinely have to attempt start­ing it a half dozen times before it will load. I will invari­ably report that it can’t find a license sever. I hit ‘Can­cel’ and instead of just shut­ting off it will pop up a ‘Warn­ing’ box that informs me I’m not autho­rized to use that appli­ca­tion. I have to hit an ‘OK’ but­ton to clear the screen allow­ing me another attempt. I am not the only one either, every Auto­CAD user has the same issue.

Turns out our licens­ing server resides not on a box in our com­puter room, but in one at our com­pany HQ, 700 miles away in New Jer­sey, so Auto­CAD wasn’t get­ting a response in a timely man­ner. To fix the prob­lem and envi­ron­ment vari­able had to be added to everyone’s PC — FLEXLM_TIMEOUT=1000000.

I know the speed of light is fast, but appar­ently on our net­work it can’t rou­tinely make a 1400 mile round trip in under a second.

Donna decided to mow the lawn yes­ter­day evening around dusk, because it was as cool as it was going to be until about 3:00 AM this morn­ing (and the neigh­bors might not appre­ci­ate it hap­pen­ing then), but she never did get it done. Never even started.

Because I never got the lawn mower started. After about 30 pushes of the lit­tle red but­ton and 80 pulls on the cord thingie with no luck, I started to think there might be some­thing wrong. The gas tank had plenty of fluid. I knocked a thin layer of dirt of the foam air cleaner fil­ter. I removed the spark plug. AHA! The end of the plug that is stuck inside the engine was cov­ered in an awful lot of black pow­der, sort of looked like a Wooly Willy face toy. I sprayed it with some brake cleaner and that got rid of the fuzz, but it was still so black that no light could escape it’s sur­face. I tried to small file I had and man­aged to turn it light gray, so I tried it in the mower again. After a half dozen pulls, I knew I wasn’t going to get the thing started.

Today, on the way home from work, we stopped in the lit­tle hard­ware store down­town and bought a Cham­pion CJ8 spark plug. The lawn is now sev­eral inches shorter.

This morn­ing after a not so spe­cial break­fast at IHOP, Donna got luke­warm water with not so mixed in pow­der instead of the hot choco­late she requested, we had a very inter­est­ing visit to the North Augusta Post Office. And I think I fig­ured out why Postal employ­ees “Go Postal”, it is not so much their work­ing con­di­tions, but more like hav­ing to deal with surly cus­tomers all day.

They aimed for camp, but fell short. There were some clever lines that will prob­a­bly be seen as sig­na­ture quotes on inter­net mes­sage boards and I actu­ally sort of liked the musi­cal num­bers. See it for free before its gone (Sun­day, July 20th @ midnight.)

Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Every once and a while the local Mazda dealer will send me a mail­ing that is sup­posed to get me to come in and let them ser­vice my car. The one I got today offered a free oil change using a new fil­ter and top­ping off of vital fluids.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Until you get to the fine print, then things get strange. “Plus applic­a­ble taxes.” Seven per­cent of noth­ing is…ahhh, let’s see, zero times zero point zero seven…carry the zero…is Noth­ing. Oh, wait a minute, I see how it is applic­a­ble, the next bit of fine print says, “Some vehi­cles may be slightly higher.” How much higher? Define slightly?

George Bush’s check came in the mail yes­ter­day and in an effort to help stave off a reces­sion we decided to spend some money today.

Stop #1 — Bank. We needed to deposit the stim­u­lus check and cash a cou­ple med­ical flex spend­ing reim­burse­ment checks. We had the same male teller we had about a week and a half ago. Our first expe­ri­ence with him led us to believe it was his first day on the job. He kept look­ing back and forth between the check & the com­puter, hes­i­tantly hit­ting keys some and then look­ing back and forth again. He seemed so shy at it that he stum­bled on his words when ask­ing us if we were hav­ing a good day. Today was more of the same and by his man­ner­ism there was a cou­ple of times that Donna was wor­ried he was actu­ally deb­it­ing our account the total of the two checks along with giv­ing us the cash. After we left we thought that maybe next time we’ll just wait on a dif­fer­ent teller.

Stop #2 — Home Depot. I needed a cou­ple of shiny new white light switches and four new white out­lets for the bed­room I just fin­ished paint­ing. (Why is it that you get the cov­ers included when you buy the switch, but they have to be pur­chased sep­a­rately with the out­lets?) At the check out counter our cashier scanned the lights, she scanned the out­lets with three com­ing up as $1.99 and one rang up as $2.30. I wasn’t going to quib­ble over 31¢, but when she dragged the out­let cov­ers over the scan­ner it booped instead of beeped, didn’t reg­is­ter. She tried again, and again, and again. She pulled out the hand held scan­ner and it wouldn’t reg­is­ter a price either. Scan, boop. Scan, boop. Next she attempted to key in the num­bers below the bar­code and was greeted with the same noise sig­ni­fy­ing fail­ure. Now what? She tries scan­ning it again. And again, and again. Donna and I look at each other, nod and tell the cashier good­bye. She can be heard in the back­ground plead­ing as we exit the door, “You don’t want any of this?”

Stop #3 — Kroger. I needed bananas and Donna wanted some Eng­lish muffins. When we were shop­ping on Sat­ur­day I man­aged to get 3 bananas that were ripe enough to eat, the rest were the color of the Master’s Champion’s jacket. Tonight there weren’t any at all that weren’t bright green, esti­mated time on the counter until ripe enough to eat, 4 days. We turned around and left, not even pick­ing up the Eng­lish muffins.

Stop #4 — Cable Com­pany. July is com­ing up and as always we will tem­porar­ily upgrade to the dig­i­tal ser­vice so we can get Out­door Life Net­work Ver­sus. Even though Lance Arm­strong is not rid­ing any­more and most of the Amer­i­can hope­fuls aren’t liv­ing up to their per­ceived poten­tial or have been sus­pended for dop­ing we still like to watch the Tour de France. This year we decided to go ahead and get the con­verter box a cou­ple weeks early to check out some other bike rac­ing action lead­ing up to the big race. We entered the office and there were 4 women sit­ting at the counter and all four didn’t look up when we came in. We were the only cus­tomers in there yet it took a minute or so for one of them to look up and say, “I can try and help you.” “What can I do for you?” I said I’d like to upgrade to basic dig­i­tal ser­vice. She said, “I can give you the box, but it can’t be pro­gramed until the com­put­ers come back up.” “I tell you what,” I said, “We’ll come back.” When she tried to apol­o­gize I waved her off, “We aren’t tak­ing it per­son­ally, it’s just the way our day is going.”

Stop #5 — Olive Oils. Donna had a coupon from the local paper that enti­tled us to a buy one, get one free entré (from a list of 4.) After the last few stops Donna ques­tioned the intel­li­gence of try­ing to go out and eat. I told her don’t worry, after the last few expe­ri­ences, the law of aver­ages was on our side. Olive Oils opens at five and closes at ten, but the best time to get there is early because the place is small and pop­u­lar. We got there at around 5:30 and the park­ing lot was empty. The restau­rant looked dark, we began to won­der if they were even open. The door was unlocked and as we opened the screen door the inner door opened and a wait­ress wel­comed us. We told her that we would sit out­side on the porch if they turned on the ceil­ing fans. Although it was wicked hot, we would rather be out­side and the shade of the porch with the breeze of the fan would make it bear­able. There was a flurry of activ­ity as two wait­resses hunted for the switch. It seemed to be tak­ing a while so Donna started count­ing slowly up to ten. I knew if she made it to the top we were leav­ing. At about 9 one of the wait­resses came back and said that the fans were on a timer that is locked up. After last night’s 2–1/2 hour power fail­ure every clock in the place was 2.5 hours early. We opted for inside. We were their first cus­tomers of the evening and as such our meal was served pip­ing hot. By the time we left there were two other cou­ples din­ning there. I guess Tues­day is a pretty slow night.

The lat­est disc from Net­flix is House: Sea­son 2 Disc 5. It includes episodes 2–17 “All In”, 2–18 “Sleep­ing Dogs Lie”, 2–19 “House vs. God” & 2–20 “Eupho­ria, Part 1″. Part 1? That means there must be a Part 2 and it’s on the next disc. We’re humped. Guess we are going to go to the local video store to see if we can get House: Sea­son 2 Disc 6.

If you are a reg­u­lar reader here you’ll remem­ber my tri­als with the lighted key­board, I guess I need to spend more than $75 to get a qual­ity one. Maybe I just need to spend 25 times that total — Opti­mus Max­imus!. While you are there, poke around the site a bit, some really col stuff there…

When I went to blog on Fri­day night I tried sev­eral times to upload the image you see in Friday’s post. It would never fin­ish upload­ing, always timed out. So I wrote the words out and guess what? I couldn’t save the post. I used the repair tool in Cpanel but that made no dif­fer­ence. I backed up the data­base with a plu­gin and I exported it using WordPress’s built in fea­ture. I con­sid­ered upgrad­ing to 2.5.1. I tried again this evening and couldn’t get it to work again. I tried adding a com­ment to a post. That worked. I triedto post by adding a chunk at a time. That worked for one chunk, any more that 10 words and it wouldn’t save. I gave up. Wait ’til I get home and then I’ll try and post stuff.

In spite of the rain, which was mostly light, we enjoyed spend­ing a cou­ple three hours shop­ping and eat­ing in down­town Blue Ridge before head­ing back to the cabin for the rest of the day. Later in the day the skies cleared and the sun came out, but by then we were to set­tled to go back out. There was a game room with a foos­ball table, an arcade game con­sole with sev­eral vin­tage games and a pool table. I was reminded that I sucked at pool when I was younger and that 30 years away from play­ing hadn’t improved my game any. For­tu­nately most every­one else was as sorry at it too.

My guar­an­teed to please every­one movie was not a total suc­cess, one per­son didn’t even watch and another got up and went to bed at about the halfway point. And truth be told I would have rather seen the orig­i­nal ver­sion. And prob­a­bly the other three peo­ple were just being polite by stay­ing to the end.

Just got through watch­ing the first seg­ment of last night’s New Ams­ter­dam and when it went to the Toy­ota Corolla com­mer­cial the deci­bel level jumped 4 fold.

So far my toy­ing with Word­Press 2.5 has not been very pos­i­tive. The My Net­flix plu­gin doesn’t work (no big deal.) When I did have it work­ing, the new image upload­ing thingie didn’t place the alt or title tag in the link­ing image, so it didn’t have a title on the Lightbox2 pop up (I think I can hack that.) Now, tonight for some rea­son, I can’t upload an image at all, it uploads and then stops with this: An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later. (Deal breaker.) Then, once the upload fails, I can­not nav­i­gate away from the post page with­out get­ting a 412 Pre­con­di­tion Failed error. I will have to test this out as it may be just a plu­gin con­flict. This blog remains the same for now as I’m test­ing the upgrade using the thumbdrive.

Toi­let shop­ping is harder than you might imag­ine (at least for us.)

A cou­ple of weeks ago my work PC crapped the bed. I ended up with one that was ear­marked for some­one else in QC. Unfor­tu­nately the mon­i­tor that came with the unit was a 17″ flat panel and that had less real estate than my present 20″ tube behe­moth, so I didn’t take it. My cubi­cal neigh­bors (they work for a dif­fer­ent manger) just had their same vin­tage tubes replaced with 22“wide screen flat pan­els, so I fig­ured now was the time to press the issue with my boss man.

He agreed and passed the request through chan­nels so I could get a new screen too. I was lob­by­ing for a 24″ Ultra Sharp Dell Widescreen, but the man­ager in charge of pur­chas­ing the new PC equip­ment thinks that the money for this sort of thing comes out of his pocket, so I got the same bar­gain mon­i­tor as the oth­ers. It is a GE and while it has a small tilt adjust­ment there is no ver­ti­cal height adjust­ment. Sit­ting on the desk­top was too low, a 1″ thick Reid Tool cat­a­log was close, but the 2″ thick ream of copier paper is perfect.

We really wanted Roma Pizza to work out for us. It is a mile away from the house, so it makes a per­fect dis­tance for walk­ing to, hav­ing a meal and strolling back from. We have been there three times since they opened a few months ago, the first was about a month after they opened. The last was last Friday.

On our first visit the ser­vice was spotty, which we chalked up to teething pains. The pizza was great, right up there with our old favorite Ferrando’s.

On our sec­ond visit the pizza was great, as was the service.

Last Fri­day when we walked in, the host­ess grabbed two menus and looked over towards the bar area and asked a woman sit­ting there, was Missy in yet. To which the woman, pos­si­bly a man­ager or owner said, “She’ll be here momen­tar­ily.” We were seated at a booth and off the host­ess went with­out fur­ther word. We really didn’t need the menu as we knew what we were get­ting, a five top­ping pie, two gar­den sal­ads, water and a sweet tea. We sat for a few min­utes and won­dered among our­selves what momen­tar­ily meant. After a while a wait­ress appeared and stopped at the booth behind us and asked the occu­pants did they want any­thing else, as they were fin­ish­ing up. The wait­ress didn’t even look our way, obvi­ously she wasn’t Missy. We had now been seated for a good five min­utes and we had got­ten not so much as a some­body will be right with you from any of the 4 restau­rant employ­ees in sight. Not even water yet. We then decided that we didn’t feel like wait­ing for Missy any longer, so got up to leave. As we headed for the door, Donna said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by nearly every­one in atten­dance, “I guess we’ll have to go some­where else to get waited on!” The host­ess replied, “OK.” I kept on going out the door, but Donna turned around and gave the host­ess a piece of her mind before join­ing me in the park­ing lot. We went to Krogers, bought a Digiorno Frozen Pizza, went home and ate it.

We were boy­cotting Ferrando’s because they closed the loca­tion we liked in down­town and opened a store on the south side. And while the new spot is actu­ally closer to us, it is less con­ve­nient and always crowded mak­ing get­ting a table hard. But tonight when we wanted “real” pizza we went to Ferrando’s. But we went early, almost right after work at five o’clock and it was a smooth experience.

When I went to watch The Incred­i­bles the other day there was a sec­tion of the disk that held some set up rou­tines for opti­mum THX view­ing. What the heck, I’ll give it a try. The video por­tion was a piece of cake, but the audio sec­tion was a dis­ap­point­ment. My decade old Onkyo receiver has 5:1 Dolby pro­cess­ing, that I have had work­ing in the past, but for some rea­son now there is no sound at all from the rear sur­round speak­ers. No big deal, they aren’t in their ideal place­ments for that total immer­sion feel­ing anyway.

We have a JVC DVD player and we have a JVC TV that are about 5–1/2 years old. JVC used to have a sys­tem called Compu-Link that hooked up their elec­tronic com­po­nents, so that when one did some­thing that effected another set­ting auto­mat­i­cally changed. When­ever we used pop a DVD in, the TV would turn on and change to the video input the DVD was hooked into. Notice I said used? Stopped work­ing the other day. It is no big deal to push a cou­ple but­tons, but when you are used to hav­ing it easy…

When I hit the Power­ball tonight I’ll prob­a­bly go out and buy one of those all in one box sys­tems. Of course if I actu­ally did win the $71 mil­lion I could hire some­body to come in set up a killer media system.

When I took POTC:At World’s End out of the sleeve I noticed the run­ning time, 2 hours & 49 min­utes. Yikes, that’s nearly three hours, may have to split watch­ing it into two nights. Well I needn’t have wor­ried about the run­ning time, at 19 min­utes in, I hit the eject button.

What started with a sur­pris­ingly good romp of a movie, then in the sec­ond turned into some­thing try­ing too hard, by the third had turned into a pompous Mad Mag­a­zine satire of itself. It took George Lucas 22 years to screw up the Star Wars fran­chise, it took Gore Verbin­ski three short years to sink the Pirates of the Caribbean.

For­get the end­less line of dirty peo­ple head­ing to the gal­lows, when 4 would have done to let us know that Lord Cut­ler Beck­ett was bad and needed his come­up­pance. I could almost over­look the fact that they make Ms. Swann undress to make sure see wasn’t hid­ing any weapons (of which she had as many as there are clowns in a cir­cus car) when Bar­bossa walks in with a long bulky coat and fluffy hat that could hide 9-pounder can­nons. Why does Bar­bossa tell Cap­tain Sao Feng he needs a ship, how did he get to Sin­ga­pore? There are nine pieces of eight? But most incred­i­bly, Jack’s a Pirate Lord? He’s lost his ship what seems like a half dozen times and got eaten by a giant squid!

I think tomor­row I’ll watch POTC:The Curse of the Black Pearl to cleanse my palette.

The DC adapter for the Dell Lap­top started to go wonky about a month ago. The cable near the plug was break­ing inter­nally from all the hang­ing it does off the back of the com­puter. I worked around it for a while, but it got tir­ing try­ing to prop it just so that the wires inside touched and it didn’t run down the battery.

I checked the Dell site for a replace­ment and they wanted $69.99 + S&H for the adapter. Yikes! Hunted around the web for a generic replace­ment. I found a few places and decided on Ebatts.com. They had a unit, the AC-C10, for $39.47 with the ship­ping included (must have been on spe­cial as they want $52.95 for it tonight.) Ordered it on the 31st of Octo­ber and got it Novem­ber 6th, UPS ground from California.

The cords were as long as the OEM unit, but the whole thing was a lot lighter, prob­a­bly mostly in the wall cord. The Dell unit has a 3-prong plug and the Ebatts unit has only two, which is an advan­tage in my 50 year-old house with almost zero grounded out­lets. Another nice fea­ture is it has a 90-degree angled plug for the back of the lap­top which should elim­i­nate the bro­ken cord syn­drome I had from repeated bend­ing in between the plug and fuse block thingie.

Things were all wine and roses until last night when the bat­tery stopped charg­ing and the task tray icon reported time remain­ing as 100 times longer than it should be for my then dwin­dling bat­tery power (98% 2830.57 hours remain­ing.) Huh? Unplugged the adapter and re-plugged it in, still the same. Ran the com­puter on bat­tery for a while before shut­ting it off and going to bed.

Tonight when I got home from work, I started up the lap­top, it said I had 53% bat­tery with 1430.66 hours remain­ing. Went into the garage and got out my old Radio Shack Mul­ti­me­ter (it still has a nee­dle and sev­eral scales to read from) to check the adapter. Fif­teen volts. Returned to the garage and got the old AC adapter to check it, 19 volts, that’s prob­a­bly the prob­lem. Won­der if the volt­age was higher when I first got the generic unit and it went bad in 9 days?

Logged onto Ebatts.com and filled out the form to return the unit for a refund. There was a place to select Check and Replace, but opted for a refund because I’m sure they think that the unit is OK as it is listed as a 15-20v part and it is putting out 15v.

With the new cord no good, I decided to try and repair the old cord. Cut, trimmed, spliced and sol­dered, not very pretty like, then wrapped it in duct tape. Hey, dont’ laugh, it works (for now.

Might as well break down and buy the Dell branded unit, after all, that $69.99 doesn’t look too bad com­pared to the $52.95 for the who knows if it’ll work Ebatts part.

At work there are 4 of us in the “Car Guys” group. We each sub­scribe to a car mag­a­zine and then pass it around among us. Thank good­ness the mag­a­zine peo­ple don’t have a RIAA like group look­ing out after them, we’d be in trouble.

Today the lat­est Motor Trend was sit­ting on my desk. You couldn’t see the cover because of the card stock over­wrap announc­ing your chance to get two sub­scrip­tions for the price of one, your renewal and a gift sub­scrip­tion for some­one, just in time for the holidays.

The tear out card has the cur­rent sub­scribers name already on it, it served as the mail­ing label, so all you have to do is fill out the blanks for your friend and send it back, just check the box marked bill me later. To the left of the address area is the text read­ing, “Yes, I accept! Extend my sub­scrip­tion for 1 year (12 issues) at the pre­ferred sub­scriber rate of only $20 and enter my 1-year gift sub­scrip­tion to the per­son listed above — that’s two sub­scrip­tions for the price of one!”

Sounds great, until you real­ized that you can sub­scribe to Motor Trend for $10 a year from a bunch of places, includ­ing the Motor Trend site itself…

I won­der what their non-preferred rate is?

The Emperor had it’s 60k mile ser­vice last week. Not only did they change the tim­ing belt, but while they were in there they changed out the two acces­sory belts. We picked it up Thurs­day evening and all was well until Sat­ur­day morn­ing. We had a MMC break­fast date, so we left the house at about 6:15. Less than a half a mile away from home in our quiet neigh­bor­hood is a 4-way stop. When pulling away from the stop the Emperor started to squeal like a stuck pig. I felt about 2″ high. I was sure that lights were going on in the houses around me as the peo­ple tried to locate the Siamese cat in heat. The sound went away after about 5 sec­onds and didn’t reoc­cur. I fig­ured a lit­tle con­den­sa­tion from the car com­ing out into warm moist air from the air con­di­tioned garage, so the belt slipped a lit­tle bit.

Nice the­ory, but how do I explain what caused the same squeal this after­noon after work. It lasted longer than Saturday’s episode, about 10 sec­onds. I had time to cycle the A/C a cou­ple times and when off the first time the squeal stopped and restarted when the A/C was turned back on. When I turned off the A/C the sec­ond time the squeal con­tin­ued, but stopped shortly there after. Donna said lets take it back to the dealer. I would have, but the place is over 60 miles and an hour away. If they were less than half that I prob­a­bly would.

So, what causes belt squeal? Too tight? Too loose? Either? Bite the bul­let and take it back? Is this fix­able by a novice knuck­le­head? Learn to live with a ran­dom dying pig noise?

We’ve got an old Dirt Devil vac­uum cleaner that is start­ing to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t pick­ing up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fan­gled bag-less picker upper. Tar­get had a cou­ple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law man­dated 1:30 PM open­ing we headed out to Tar­get. Allow me to inter­ject an obser­va­tion from my cubi­cle neigh­bor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a gro­cery store on Sun­day morn­ing and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you can­not enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bis­sell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and gen­er­ally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a cou­ple rea­sons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an out­let, but couldn’t find one. We cor­ralled a sales team mem­ber and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team mem­ber and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal depart­ment team mem­ber had some­thing to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the dis­play vac­uum over to the TV sec­tion and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our cur­rent unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card men­tion. We pointed it out to the cashier team mem­ber and she pro­ceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vac­uum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team mem­ber, whose response was the gift card auto­mat­i­cally shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vac­uum.” I hit can­cel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imag­ined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trou­ble was that offer expired 7/7 (yes­ter­day.) Some one had obvi­ously for­got­ten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fif­teen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apol­o­gized for the con­fu­sion, sold us the vac­uum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do with­out the sale and jeop­ar­dize future pur­chases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Ama­zon for $95, no tax and free ship­ping. Hoover U5507-900

Here is the sec­ond excerpt from an arti­cle by Jack Framp­ton called Sci­ence, Reli­gion, Pas­sion, Cohorts, and the Much-Heralded Doom of Planet Earth from the cur­rent (#21 June) issue of Wind­ing Road and online auto mag. If you would like to read the whole thing all you have to do is “sub­scribe” by giv­ing them your email address and down­load­ing the 17Meg PDF file.

Time is run­ning out for US based inde­pen­dent web radio streams. From the savenetradio.org website:

On March 2, 2007 the Copy­right Roy­alty Board (CRB), which over­sees sound record­ing roy­al­ties paid by Inter­net radio ser­vices, increased Inter­net radio’s roy­alty bur­den between 300 and 1200 per­cent and thereby jeop­ar­dized the industry’s future.

At the request of the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica, the CRB ignored the fact that Inter­net radio roy­al­ties were already dou­ble what satel­lite radio pays, and mul­ti­plied the roy­al­ties even fur­ther. The 2005 roy­alty rate was 7/100 of a penny per song streamed; the 2010 rate will be 19/100 of a penny per song streamed. And for small web­cast­ers that were able to cal­cu­late roy­al­ties as a per­cent­age of rev­enue in 2005 – that option was quashed by the CRB, so small web­cast­ers’ roy­al­ties will grow exponentially!

These exor­bi­tant rates go into effect on May 15 (retroac­tive to Jan 1, 2006!). With­out Con­gres­sional action the major­ity of web­cast­ers will go bank­rupt and silent on this date. We need your help. Please take a moment to send a let­ter to your mem­ber of Con­gress to keep Net radio from being silenced.

Go to the Act Now! page on the Savenetradio.org and fill out the form to email your leg­is­la­tors and ask them to stop this huge rate increase on web­cast­ers. Don’t know who your rep­re­sen­ta­tives are? Nei­ther did I, but by fill­ing out your address infor­ma­tion you will get their names and a mugshot so you can rec­og­nize them on the street or CSPAN.

The bat­tery in my digi­cam is get­ting tired. After tak­ing only a cou­ple dozen expo­sures it is start­ing to shut down and it has always been doing 2–3 times bet­ter than that. Yes­ter­day, some­where in Mary­land, after strik­ing out in a Radio Shack and a cam­era store, we ended up at a Best Buy. They didn’t have a Kodak labeled bat­tery, but they did have a generic. For $20.99 I was out the door.

When we stopped last night I opened, with great dif­fi­culty, the plas­tic oys­ter shell and put the bat­tery in the cam­era. All three lights on top of the cam­era started blink­ing, mean­ing that the bat­tery was fully dis­charged and would be a while before it would be ready for use. In the morn­ing all three lights were still blink­ing. Bad news.

Today on arrival in New Britain, Donna wanted to got to Friendly’s and I wanted to go to Best Buy. My brother knew just where to go, a shop­ping cen­ter on the Berlin Turn­pike. We started at Friendly’s where we were seated and promptly ignored. After wait­ing 5–6 min­utes and no one even acknowl­edged our pres­ence, we walked out.

In Best Buy I went over to the Ser­vice Desk and explained that I pur­chased this bat­tery at a dif­fer­ent store in a dif­fer­ent state and that it wouldn’t charge. The CSR started enter­ing stuff in a ter­mi­nal from my receipt, mid type another employee walked up with a phone and handed it to my CSR say­ing, “This per­son wants to speak to some­one in cus­tomer ser­vice.” The CSR stops what he’s doing and starts to talk on the phone. After a half minute or so when it is appar­ent he isn’t wrap­ping up the con­ver­sa­tion, Donna looks at him and says, “We were here first.” He takes the hint and tells the per­son on the phone to hold on a sec­ond. More typ­ing and then he hands me a paper voucher and says go to the cashier and they will give me my refund.

The cashier takes one look at the papers and says, “I’m not nor­mally at a reg­is­ter, I don’t know how to do this.” She gets on her radio and asks for help. After some non essen­tial chat­ter we finally see another CSR head our way. She tells our cashier this is how you han­dle a sus­pended trans­ac­tion and pro­ceeds to hit an 8 or 10 sequence of keys so fast I don’t know if any­one could fol­low. When she gets to the end, she goes, “Uh-oh. Did you buy this in another state?” “Yep,” I tell her. “Must be the tax mess­ing it up.” Off she goes with our cashier in tow.

After another cou­ple min­utes the orig­i­nal CSR walks over and hands me $21. I guess the extra penny was because I had to wait so long.

..and all the other smaller Inter­net Radio Sta­tions. No money required, just a lit­tle bit of your com­puter time.

The US Copy­right Office has released their new set of rates for the pay­ment of roy­al­ties by Inter­net Radio — roy­alty rates so high that they will put Radio Par­adise and every other US-based indie web­caster out of business.

What can you do? Sign the online peti­tion and open let­ter to the US Con­gress. My sig­na­ture num­ber is #10423. Then please send an email mes­sage to your Con­gress­mem­bers. You can use the sug­gested text, change it, or write your own mes­sage. I also sug­gest that you print your email (you’ll get a copy) and mail it to your Rep­re­sen­ta­tive and Sen­a­tors and, to show them that you really are a com­mit­ted geek boy, call their offices. You can look up their addresses and phone num­bers here.

This after­noon I had the sud­den urge to get a bag of chips or some­thing from the gedunk machines in the cafe­te­ria. I usu­ally don’t need a snack, but today for some rea­son I just had to have some­thing. This unnat­ural crav­ing must have come from some left­over sub­lim­i­nal sug­ges­tion implanted dur­ing my watch­ing of Super Bowl commercials.

Mixed in between the three soft drink machines, the cof­fee machine, the change machine and a sand­wich machine are two snack machines filled with a selec­tion of salty or sweet or salty/sweet choices. Even though the 2 machines have a nearly iden­ti­cal mix of prod­ucts, before choos­ing an item you have to look over every item in each machine before buy­ing some­thing. Almost every­thing is a national brand, but there are usu­ally a cou­ple of regional selec­tions. Today, if I wanted (and I didn’t) I could have had a bag of Danny’s Pork Bits, AKA pork rinds, AKA the skin of a pig with a layer of fat still attached that has been deep fried to a crunchy con­sis­tency. The nutri­tional infor­ma­tion proudly dis­played on the front said that a serv­ing of this snack would have 7.5 grams of fat and 70 calories.

I opted for some­thing I thought might be a healtier, a 1–1/2 ounce bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Chive Potato Chips cooked in sun­flower oil and adver­tis­ing no trans fats. As I sat at my desk enjoy­ing my chips, I read the back panel’s nutri­tion label and dis­cov­ered that one serv­ing of these chips had 15 grams of total fat and 240 calo­ries. Wait a minute, how could this bag of chips have twice the fat and 3 times the calo­ries of a larger 2oz bag of pork rinds (which are essen­tially fat fried in fat?)

I went back over to the machine and re-read the pork skin’s nutri­tion label again. Yep, 7.5 fat and 70 calo­ries. Oh, here it is, serv­ing size 1/2 oz, serv­ings per bag 4, so if you ate the whole bag your­self, not shar­ing with 3 of your bud­dies as expected, you’d get 30 grams of fat and 280 calories.

Yes­ter­day I whined aboout the lap­toop droop­ing the let­ter ‘a’ if the key wasn’t hit in just the right way. Toonight my nifty lighted key­booard seems too be doo­ing doou­ble ‘oo’s.

OK, maybe I exag­ger­ated that a bit to much, but ear­lier when I was com­pos­ing an email it must have hap­pened ten times. I know there is a set­ting in win­dows to reg­u­late the key­board pres­sure, but it was only hap­pen­ing for the let­ter ‘o’. And now, later, I can’t seem to get it to do it unless I force it, like above.

I was still a few appli­ca­tions short of a full com­pli­ment after the refor­mat of New Year’s Day. Tonight I wanted to scan some­thing, so I decided to install the soft­ware suite that came with my HP4850 scan­ner. Usu­ally I just install the TWAIN dri­ver, but I wanted to do a lit­tle OCR work, so I opted for the full boat. Turns out when I say full boat, that is close, it is more like one of those Indone­sian fer­ries that are for­ever cap­siz­ing from over­load­ing. We got an appli­ca­tion to con­trol the scan­ner, a thing that wants to be my mul­ti­me­dia gallery, some other stuff, includ­ing Microsoft.NET, all told over 500 Meg.

When I plugged in the scan­ner it wasn’t rec­og­nized. Huh? Turned it off and back on again. Still no joy. It used to work. I tried plug­ging it into a dif­fer­ent USB port on the PC. Noth­ing. I unin­stalled the soft­ware and reloaded it. Still unrec­og­nized. I tried to man­u­ally install the dri­vers and it still said that the thing was an unrec­og­nized piece of hard­ware on my USB con­troller. I tried using a dif­fer­ent USB cable and that didn’t help either.

Don’t ask me why I tried it, or more impor­tantly why it worked, but I decided to plug the scan­ner into the cheapo 4-port USB hub I have and DING, new hard­ware found, HP 4850 Scan­ner. Now all I have to do is to get XP to stop remind­ing me that the device might work faster if it is plugged into a USB 2.0 port…

We went out briefly today to run a cou­ple errands, one of which was to burn up Donna’s gift card at Tar­get. She wanted to buy some rib­bon and other Christ­mas stuff at half off. As we made our way to the back of the store where all the hol­i­day stuff was we passed by the greet­ing card area where an asso­ciate was busy putting out the Valentine’s Day cards.

A stop at Kroger to pick up a cou­ple of pre­scrip­tions took us by the sea­sonal aisle. The Christ­mas stuff was piled into shop­ping carts with hand let­tered signs pro­claim­ing 50% off while unopened cases of heart shaped boxes of choco­lates stood by ready to take their places on the empty shelves.

While watch­ing TV this evening we saw a com­mer­cial for a Hugh Grant / Drew Bar­ry­more movie that will be open­ing Feb­ru­ary 14th.

I’m glad we got that whole Christ­mas thing out of the way.

I was root­ing for you to get the Yan­kee job back when rumor had it that Joe Torre was on his way out after they lost the divi­sions series against Detroit. Now you’ve taken the job as the manger of the Cubs and it’ll be great to get you back in the dugout…

…and OUT OF THE BROADCAST BOOTH ON FOX because you really sucked at that.

After our morning’s shop­ping both Donna and I needed a lit­tle snack. At the exit road of the shop­ping cen­ter was a lit­tle gas-n-go place, so we pulled in and got me a Coke and her a bag of chips. As we leaned on the fender of the car we both could smell char­broil­ing ham­burg­ers, mmmm. Shar­ing the build­ing with the quick shop was a Back­yard Burger place.

It was a lit­tle early for lunch at 10:15 AM, but we had an early break­fast. The smell of cook­ing burg­ers was too much, we were now hun­gry. Dang, they didn’t even open until 10:30. We left and started our way back to Aiken. As we drove we tried to come to a con­sen­sus as to what to have for lunch when we got home, but we kept com­ing back to those burgers.

So we drove around Augusta aim­lessly for a while and by the time we got back, the Back­yard Burger place was open for busi­ness. We were actu­ally their first cus­tomers of the day and it took a minute or so before some­one came from out back to take our order which con­sisted of two 1/3lb. burg­ers and a small foun­tain drink. The fel­low gave me a receipt and told me my ticket num­ber was 134, the time was 10:34 AM. I almost made a smart ass remark about good thing he gave me a num­ber, what with all the peo­ple in here, I’d hate to get the wrong order, but held my tongue. I sat down and Donna went off to use the rest room. It seemed like it was tak­ing her a while, but they had a TV in the cor­ner, so I watched some inane col­lege foot­ball pregame show for a bit. Donna came back and we chat­ted for a few more min­utes, we were still the only ones in the place. What could be tak­ing so long? Finally, not want­ing to shout out “134” to a nearly empty room and/or per­haps to give him­self some­thing to do, our order taker brought the two burg­ers to our table.

While tasty, the burger was not really hot or fresh and it should have been con­sid­er­ing the amount of time it took to get it to us. I think the pat­ties we were eat­ing were prob­a­bly the ones we smelled cook­ing at 10:15 and they had been laz­ing about under a heat lamp for the last 40 or so minutes.

We wanted to do our weekly gro­cery shop­ping late tonight to avoid the heat, so we left the house at 10PM mainly because that is when the Trad­ing Spaces Donna was watch­ing ended. We shop at Kroger because it is con­ve­nient and they sell gas too. Because we have a cus­tomer loy­alty card I get to save an extra dime off the per gal­lon cost of their gas. This is usu­ally a good deal as most times their price per gal­lon is a nickel or so less than the sur­round­ing sta­tions to begin with.

I dropped Donna in front of the store, so she could start shop­ping while I went and filled up the tank. When I got around the side of the store where the gas is it looked kind of dark. The over­head lights of the gas sta­tion were off, but the pump lights were on bright, so I went over. As I pulled in there was an atten­dant in the booth, so I stopped and opened the gas cap. I scanned my loy­alty card and then inserted my debit card. When it told me to lift the noz­zle and select a grade, I did just that. I started pump­ing and it was com­ing out really slow and then stopped at 17 cents. Hmmm. maybe they are out of pre­mium. I walked over to the win­dow and asked the atten­dant if they were out of gas or some­thing, when she told me they were closed and that must have been all that was left in the hose.

I went back to the pump replaced the noz­zle and closed my gas cap. The lit­tle LCD win­dow on the pump asked if I wanted a receipt and I replied yes, to which it told me to see the cashier. Back to the win­dow I go. The atten­dant said that she couldn’t get me a receipt because she had already closed the reg­is­ter. When I asked her, “If you are closed, how come the pumps would let me even attempt to pump some gas?” Her response was typ­i­cal min­i­mum wage earner, “I don’t know.”

NBC’s news mag­a­zine show, Date­line, just hap­pened to be doing a show on pos­si­ble dam­age if a major earth­quake hit sev­eral US cities, when after that show ends the net­work would be air­ing 10.5: APOCALYPSE the story of major earth­quakes hit­ting the country.

Called the body shop at 2:00 PM to make sure the Miata was ready. They were putting it back together, so they could get it washed up. The fel­low said it should be ready by 5:30 (coin­ci­den­tally their clos­ing time.)

Tonight was the May meet­ing on the MMC and we needed to be in Augusta by 6:30. A 5:30 pick-up time would be cut­ting it close. About 4:00 PM we decided it wasn’t going to work out, so I called the body shop to let them know I’d just get the car tomor­row. The recep­tion­ist passed me through, but I spent the next 2 min­utes on hold. I just hung up. Tried again at 4:30 with the exact same results. When I tried at 5:30, still no one picked up the phone in the body shop. Prob­a­bly all fran­ti­cally try­ing to get my car ready. To bad, I wasn’t coming.

I’ll call again tomor­row at lunch and see if any­one will answer the phone then…

Every­day since our lit­tle fender ben­der on March 31, I have been on the phone with All­state Insur­ance who cov­ers the woman who smacked my trunk lid. Some­times twice a day and a cou­ple a times more than twice. But not today.

If they were hop­ing that I might develop amne­sia, for­get­ting about my claim, from beat­ing my head against the obsta­cles they have thrown at me, they were almost right.

At first they refused to do any­thing with­out get­ting the acci­dent report from their agent. South Car­olina law says that you have 15 days to turn in the report to your insur­ance com­pany, so you can guess when the per­son at fault will be turn­ing it in. After 4 days I finally got them to agree to accept my copy if it was faxed from my agent to theirs and then their agent would fax it to them. When they got it last Wednes­day they said that because they hadn’t actu­ally talked to the dri­ver yet, a man­ager had to OK it to assign lia­bil­ity and that might take up to 3 days!

In this time I have called the 1–800 num­ber for All­state Claims about 8 times and had spo­ken to 8 dif­fer­ent peo­ple with vary­ing hoops to jump through or bits of advice, includ­ing one kindly south­ern old lady who sug­gested that I make the claim against my insur­ance and let the 2 com­pa­nies fight it out. Right!?! I had also spo­ken to the local agent who insured the vehi­cle sev­eral times and they have been as nice as they can be, but keep run­ning into the same walls as me. They have tried to con­tact the insured on sev­eral occa­sion and keep get­ting a busy sig­nal or no answer. The All­state Claims office had got­ten the same non-responsiveness. They had even sent a let­ter to them, but noth­ing yet.

Thurs­day, 6 days after the event, the dri­ver turns in the acci­dent report. But claim­ing time con­straints can­not talk to the claims office. Finally on Fri­day the local agent gets the dri­ver on the phone and con­nects them to the claims office. When I con­tact the claims office it turns out that talk­ing to the dri­ver was not entirely enough. She is not specif­i­cally men­tioned on the insur­ance, so now the insured (mom or dad) has to be con­tacted to be sure she had per­mis­sion to drive the car. Jeez, if not, that is a whole ‘nother depart­ment and the 10th dif­fer­ent per­son I have spo­ken to at 1–800 claims office says that might take weeks.

Over the week­end we make no progress con­tact­ing the insured and even take a step back when the “man­ager” deter­mines that he needs a real acci­dent report, not just the basic exchange of infor­ma­tion form that got filled out at the time of the inci­dent. I kindly explain to the cus­tomer ser­vice rep, which I know will do no good, that is all they are going to get because both vehi­cles were dri­vable and no one was injured.

Yes­ter­day, Mon­day, day 10, we have a break­through, my pes­ter­ing the local agent gets them to try the insured again, after all, how much man­power is All­state going to com­mit to the job of con­tact­ing them any­way? The local folks get the insured hooked up with the 1–800 claims peo­ple. When she hangs up with them she calls me and says it looks good I should be hear­ing from the claims peo­ple later that day or tomor­row (which is today.)

So I don’t try and call them today for fear of tying up my phone and All­state not being able to get through to me. So far, silence from the Good Hands peo­ple. I guess I’ll call tomor­row and see what the Excuse Du Jour is.

After reread­ing the blurb from the email:

MLB.com will honor any refund request for a sea­sonal sub­scrip­tion made within 10 days of the pur­chase for the cur­rent sea­son or at any time before the sub­se­quent sea­son begins.

I haven’t missed my oppor­tu­nity to get a refund, now is the time. My credit card was charged on Mon­day, so I have until the 13th to request my money back.

They’ve got it cov­ered though, take the phone off the hook. I tried call­ing them 4 sep­a­rate times today and all I got was a busy sig­nal. I’m sure the phone is not off the hook, but their lines are over­loaded by folks like me try­ing to get their money back.

Now I’m not so sure I want it back. While lis­ten­ing to tonight’s broad­cast it was fine up until the 6th inning or so, then it started to break up. At the half inning I shut down the player, cleared IE’s cache, closed and restarted the browser, restarted the player and it has been fine ever since. Once is just anec­do­tal evi­dence, more exper­i­men­ta­tion is required.

This is so much worse than hear­ing the theme to Shaft smoothed into back­ground sounds for my Local For­cast on the Weather Channel.

“We Got The Meat” to the tune of the Go-Go’s “We Got The Beat” sell­ing deliv­ery pizza. Or worse still, the Gilligan’s Island theme bas­tardized to sell shrimp at trendy chain restaurant.

Sprout­ing out of lawns every­where are another indi­ca­tion that spring is here — For Sale signs. On our street, in the 1/4 mile to the stop sign, there are 3 houses for sale. Well, tech­ni­cally only two because when the real­tor put up their sign at one house, it already had the cute SOLD ban­ner across the top.

What’s up with the blue lines in the snow? I can almost under­stand the ones that are mark­ing a cor­ri­dor down the hill, but if you don’t get points off for ski­ing out­side the lines, why bother? And just what pur­pose do the ones per­pen­dic­u­lar to the course serve? The lines are all fuzzy too. This is the Olympics, man, every 4 years, big world­wide audi­ence, couldn’t you get them a lit­tle sharper?

Super G? Is there a Reg­u­lar G?

Giant Slalom, same ques­tion? (And is it just me or does the word slalom look misspelled?)

Curl­ing. Enough said.

If Skele­ton is the oppo­site of the Luge, why don’t we have Back­wards Bobsledding?

I’m think­ing that those women’s ice danc­ing cos­tumes might be sexy with all that “skin” show­ing, if they didn’t look like they were designed by the elim­i­nees of Bravo’s show Runway.

Who designed the medals? They look col­ored CDs on a rib­bon. And why does it take 6 peo­ple 10 hours to make one?

So far the coolest thing about the Olympics was in the sur­real open­ing cer­e­mony, red-clad in-line skaters with spe­cially designed flame-shooting hel­mets. I gotta get me one of those. Wait here while I go check Ebay.…nope, but it is only a mat­ter of time.

First we added bread sticks. Then it was stuffed crust pizza. Then two crusts with one on top. We’ve had Thin, thick and deep dish. Square shapes. Four sep­a­rate piz­zas in the same box. Two for Two. Three for three. Five for five. They keep invent­ing new gim­micks to get you to keep order­ing their piz­zas. The lat­est, unveiled using a Super Bowl com­mer­cial is break free cheese stuffed bits of bread around the edge.

They just don’t get it, make a good tast­ing pizza and peo­ple will come back with­out hav­ing to resort to trickery.

Reg­u­lar read­ers will know that I’m strug­gling with my fledg­ling home net­work. Set­ting up the Linksys WRT54G wire­less router was no snap, but I did man­age to get both to wired desk­top and wire­less lap­top to share an inter­net con­nec­tion in short order. Shar­ing files and print­ers has been another story.

Last night after read­ing on the Linksysinfo.org forums and thanks to this one post with a nice lit­tle check­list, I finally man­aged to get the 2 PCs to talk to each other. I had most of the items taken care of already, but the thing I did that turned the tide was turn off DHCP and give the two com­put­ers there own IP address. After reboot­ing every­thing I was in busi­ness, woohoo.

One small prob­lem, nei­ther PC could access the internet!

To quote my favorite British Prime Minister:

Mar­garet Thatcher: “It’s a funny old world.”

My new replace­ment fan from Dell arrived this evening. I cracked open the case and felt the fan force when it was run­ning, not much air move­ment. Popped out the assem­bly and pulled the fan off its rub­ber mount­ing posts. Installed the new fan and snapped it back into the case. Leav­ing the case open I hit the power button.

Fan started run­ning, so far so good. I felt for air move­ment and it didn’t seem any bet­ter. As the com­puter fin­ished boot­ing up I just lis­tened. It seems like the new fan has a tick to it that the other didn’t. Sigh, but at least it isn’t mak­ing the hor­ri­ble vibrat­ing sound. I scis­sor the case halves together and stand it upright. Just as I reach vertical.…brrraaattttttttttttt. The sound is back.

I care­fully laid the case back down horizontal.…brrraaattttttttttttt. Opened up the case again and unplugged the new fan and.…brrraaattttttttttttt, the noise is still there. Put my ear up to the power sup­ply and that is where the racket sounds like it is com­ing from. Rap on the power sup­ply grat­ing hard with my knuckle and the noise stopped.

Damn! I was so sure. While trou­ble shoot­ing it was mak­ing the noise and I unplugged the CPU cool­ing fan and the noise stopped, how could this be? The only thing I can think of is the first time I unplugged the fan it jos­tled the com­puter enough that the power sup­ply fan qui­eted down.

Back to the Dell web­site to see about order­ing a power sup­ply. If you remem­ber I com­plained about strug­gling to find the parts order­ing sec­tion on the Dell site, I couldn’t see the for­est for the trees. All you have to do is click on the per­ti­nent sys­tem type on the blue menu bar along the top and right there sec­ond from the bot­tom is Dell Parts & Sup­plies. But you didn’t think it would easy though did you? Nope, drill down through the hier­ar­chy and sure enough you are told that these items can not be pur­chased on line, please dial 1–800-Phillipines.

Well, I’m not going there. I’m going to go to Cen­trix Inter­na­tional. It might even be a used power sup­ply, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to have to deal with the refus­ing to buy a book or putting it on my Dell account mad­ness again. Let alone how much they will want for that sucker. Centrix-Intl has four num­bers listed as fit­ting my box, Guess I’ll be crack­ing open the case again to check the part num­ber of the P/S.

Every Mon­day morn­ing when I come into work I go to CalvinandHobbes.com, down­load the Sun­day car­toon and print it out. It goes on the cubi­cal wall along with a photo I have taken over the week­end or a pic­ture of the Miata from when­ever. Just my lit­tle attempt at per­son­al­iz­ing my environment.

The comic site always has a ban­ner ad at the top of each comic page dis­played and there is always at least one pop-under ad to dis­miss when I’m through read­ing. I’m not sure if this is the first time this par­tic­u­lar ad has been there, quite frankly I’ve learned to tune most of them out, but I really like this one:

I think just the act of click­ing on the “answer” says an awful lot about your IQ already.…

While not ter­ri­bly loud, it was annoy­ing enough for my wife to wake me up at 2:22AM this morn­ing to go shut off the PC.

Just fig­ur­ing out how to get to the replace­ment parts area of the Dell web­site was a chore and then after drilling down thru the hier­ar­chy to get to the fans I was greeted with a “We’re sorry” page, please call 1–800-357‑3355. I was then shuf­fled off to the Philip­pines to order the fan. But before I could actu­ally get the woman to order the fan I had to politely refuse, twice, to buy some sort of com­puter ser­vice book espe­cially tai­lored to my PC. It was also a minor fight to keep them from putting it my Dell Credit line (unused for the last 2–1/2 years after I took advan­tage of it to buy this very PC) and place it on my reg­u­lar credit card. Total with ship­ping — $22.95.

In one of my attempts to find out how to order a fan, I was rum­mag­ing through the sup­port forums and learned of a web site that sells Dell spare parts, Cen­trix Inter­na­tional, but unfor­tu­nately, both of the fans listed as com­pat­i­ble for my PC were out of stock.

I’ve changed the design of one of my black T-shirts that I’m sell­ing through Cafe­Press. Instead of say­ing Real Navy, it now says Reg­u­lar Navy. When I uploaded the image and pre­viewed the new shirt, what I had as white in the image appeared gray online. I thought I had messed some­thing up, so I checked the col­ors and uploaded again, same gray results.

I next went over to the Cafe­Press Forums to see if there was any men­tion of this issue. Sure enough, there is a sticky at the top of the gen­eral announce­ments board that they have muted the col­ors on the black T-shirts to bet­ter rep­re­sent the actual fin­ished prod­uct. Seems they were overly opti­mistic on their abil­ity to get good solid print­ing on black.

Actu­ally it works out kind of OK for me, the print­ing comes out look­ing like it is done in ‘Bat­tle­ship Gray’, which is pretty much the offi­cial color of Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club anyway.

It is easy to buy some­thing for some­one close to you, with per­sonal inter­ac­tion you get an idea of what they want by how they react to the world or even through bla­tant hints from them.

I speak to my mom on the phone once a month or so. I get to say a few words to my brother if he hap­pens to answer the phone when I call mom (he lives with her.) A stray email passes between my sis­ter and I. Approx­i­mately once a year Donna and I pop in for a visit rang­ing from a few hours to a few days. So buy­ing gifts for my fam­ily back in Con­necti­cut is dif­fi­cult, they are prac­ti­cally strangers. In a the 30-odd years since I left the Nut­meg State behind when I joined the Navy, the gift giv­ing process has mor­phed from tra­di­tional to mean­ing­less in a pace slightly faster than geological.

At first we exchanged gifts based on our mutual knowl­edge, but as the years apart grew, our tastes changed and the gifts given and received no longer were relevant.

Next we grad­u­ated to swap­ping lists. For a short while the generic ones would suf­fice; v-neck sweater in large or jazz records, but we soon decided that there were still more misses than hits.

The next level was the detailed list. J.C Penny Fall/Winter Cat­a­log, Page 436, Item A, Men’s Mock Turtle­neck in Heather, Size Large, etc. We got just what we asked for, but col­ors, tex­tures and sizes were not always what we expected.

In the never end­ing quest for the per­fect gift, we next ush­ered in the Gift Card era; Best Buy, Old Navy or B.Dalton Books thank you very much. I really don’t like the idea of trad­ing gift cards in the mail. Sup­pose my brother said send me a gift card to Lowes and I tell him that I would like a gift card to Lowes too. Shouldn’t we just skip mail­ing them to each other? Save the time and energy of mail­ing them to each other. For that mat­ter why even buy the gift card at all. Some­time in Decem­ber go to the store and buy some­thing you like and thank him for it in his Christ­mas card, “Love than cord­less drill you got me bro’, it was just what I needed!”

The end of the gift card era is com­ing and I’m not sure that the next step is any bet­ter. Last year I gave my sis­ter a gift card for Amazon.com. I bought it online, they mailed me the plas­tic card, I mailed the card to her and she redeemed it online. Which leads to the 21st cen­tury dig­i­tal gift giv­ing era…online gift cer­tifi­cates. You just cut out that whole messy US Postal Ser­vice mid­dle­man. Dead­line, schmed­line, you can get up Christ­mas morn­ing with mamma in her ‘ker­chief, and I in my cap, log on to the net and email every­one an elec­tronic gift card redeemable for mer­chan­dise avail­able at an online store.

Well, I’m not going there, Donna and I are going down to Hilton Head Island this week­end and my mother, brother, sis­ter and her hus­band are get­ting gifts with an HHI theme whether they want or like them.

I got a new mouse at work today. Spiffy new wire­less job­bie with a tilt wheel (AKA: hor­i­zon­tal scroll) and because I’m a lowly user, I can­not install the dri­vers and I can’t even plu­gin a dif­fer­ent mouse and have the sys­tem rec­og­nize it, it takes an admin­is­tra­tor. Our local IT guy was off, so I called the Help Desk in Florham Park.

Mike answered the phone. When I explained what I wanted to do he assured me that just unplug­ging the old mouse and plug­ging in the new mouse to the same USB port was all I needed to do. He said it works 9 out of 10 times. I said, if I hap­pen to be a num­ber 10 I’d call him back.

Every con­tact with the help desk gen­er­ates a ticket num­ber. I got my email telling me that a ticket had been cre­ated with the trou­ble listed as: “client had new mouse he thought he needed some­one to install the soft­ware. ” Time on the ticket was 3:09:41.

Because I wasn’t sure if the weasel was going to check on my PC sta­tus, I went through the motions even though I knew it wouldn’t work. Shut­down PC, unplug old mouse, plug in new mouse, restart PC. Oh, geez, the mouse doesn’t work. Shut­down PC, unplug new mouse, plug in old mouse, restart PC. Look at that, the mouse works.

Once I’ve logged in I notice I have new mail. The trou­ble ticket has been closed with a solu­tion of: “explained to client that soft­ware is not required to oper­ate new mouse.” Time of clo­sure was listed as 3:09:45.

Elapsed time from open­ing to clos­ing, 4 sec­onds. Didn’t even give me a chance to see if it was going to work. You don’t think the Help Desk Grunts are graded on aver­age ticket clo­sure time, do you? As I stew whether to call back and open another ticket or not, I get a new piece of email with the sub­ject line of: “Help Desk Cus­tomer Sat­is­fac­tion Sur­vey for Ticket # 26443.”

“The Help Desk is com­mit­ted to deliv­er­ing the best ser­vice to you our cus­tomers. As part of our com­mit­ment, we would like to invite you to par­tic­i­pate in our online sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey.” Per­fect, I’ll fill out the sur­vey and give them a piece of my mind. There is a click­able link in the email that goes to a server in Florham Park where the sur­vey is hosted. So I click. Noth­ing hap­pens for a bunch of sec­onds until the con­nec­tion times out and I get a “the page is unavail­able” error.

Nice ser­vice guys. I think I’ll just wait to Mon­day to let the local guy do it…

Called Trac­fone cus­tomer ser­vice today at lunch and was lead through a series of steps, one of which was restor­ing fac­tory defaults, and when noth­ing worked the barely under­stand­able CSR said I am turn­ing this over to our tech depart­ment. If it doesn’t start work­ing by 1:00PM call back. Here is your case num­ber. Tonight, still noth­ing so I tried to call just now and got a busy sig­nal. Waited a few min­utes and tried again. This time the phone rang and it was answered by a record­ing that announced, “Due to high call vol­ume, you call can­not be com­pleted, please try again later.”

Last week­end reg­u­lar gas was going for $2.42 a gal­lon. Yes­ter­day it was $2.29. In the busi­ness sec­tion of today’s paper there was an arti­cle titled, “Oil Com­pa­nies See Record Prof­its in 4th Quar­ter.” Do you think that the sud­den drop had any­thing to do with pub­lic relations?

Is it just me or do the new GM mini­vans look an awful lot like the Mutt Cutt van from the movie Dumb and Dumber?

If you are a reg­u­lar reader here you know that the one show left on TV that I make a point of watch­ing is The West Wing (it prob­a­bly should have it’s own cat­e­gory.) But the last cou­ple of Sunday’s I just haven’t expe­ri­enced that same magic. I’m think­ing it is this whole cam­paign thing, I really enjoy the White House stuff a whole lot bet­ter. It was OK when a cou­ple sea­sons ago Bart­let was run­ning for re-election, because we still got a healthy dose of, well, the West Wing goings on. I am begin­ning to think, as hap­pens with most TV shows and me, I lose inter­est. I want the same old com­fort­able stuff and they move on or I tire of the same old stuff they are giv­ing me and I want them to move on. Oh, well, there are always the repeats on Bravo.

Wasn’t for me. A non-computer lit­er­ate per­son at work was given a iPod Shuf­fle for his birth­day a cou­ple weeks ago. He asked me today to take some music CDs and put them on the iPod. Took a lot longer than it should, maybe because I’m not an Apple guy. I had to load iTunes and it went on willy-nilly installing and lit­ter­ing my task tray and desk­top with Apple icons. I fig­ured out how to load the burnt MP3s to the library, no prob­lem, but couldn’t get them on the iPod. Every time I plugged in the iPod it would say, “Updat­ing iPod, don’t dis­con­nect.” But noth­ing was put on the player and I did have the lit­tle square in front of the song checked. I did say yes to some­thing erased the poor fel­lows exist­ing music though, so I had to get some­thing back on there…

All the options I wanted seemed to be grayed out or miss­ing. Where was the menu item that said load these songs to the iPod? Turns out you have to click on the lit­tle iPod thing on the left side and drag and drop the files on it.

Now that I’ve done it the “hard” way, I’m going to see if I can do it the easy way — using a free­ware pro­gram called Shuf­fler. Then I can unload iTunes from my PC.

How do you keep those ear bud cords from get­ting tan­gled? Seems like every time I put them down I have to spend the next cou­ple min­utes untan­gling them.

Last Fri­day this web site went off line for sev­eral hours. I checked some­one else who who uses the same host and his site was up when mine was down. Well, We Are The Cips met the same fate as Mr-Miata a day later. Tom decided to open a help ticket (some­thing I couldn’t do, as that fea­ture was down at the same time as I was) and here is a syn­op­sis of of it went:

Mon­day 8/15 at 11:59am — I open the ticket with the fol­low­ing:
What hap­pened this week­end? Accord­ing to Inter­steer, my site was down from Sat­ur­day 8/13 2:09pm to Sun­day 8/14 10:09am. I also received an email from another cus­tomer that their site was down as well. Also what is going on with the forums? I went there first look­ing for infor­ma­tion and they are not up. Thanks.

Mon­day 8/15 at 12:51pm — Their reply and they closed the ticket.
Hi,
The site wearethecips.com is load­ing nor­mal now with­out any prob­lem and our NOC Engi­neers are mon­i­tor­ing the log files for your site down­time and update you once we received infor­ma­tion for them.
Thanks,
Sup­port Team.

There were a few more entries back and forth that I will not bore you with but the gist of each one was they would close the ticket with no expla­na­tion of the down time and I would reopen in. Below is my last entry and their reply.

Sun­day 8/21 at 3:10am (I couldn’t sleep)
Why do you keep clos­ing this ticket. No one has answered my ques­tion. What was the rea­son for the down time last Sat­ur­day (8/13/2005).
Thanks.
Tom

Sun­day 8/21 at 4:27am (Cut and pasted right from the ticket)
Hi,
We had some upgra­da­tion done on the server due to which there was a down­time and every­thing is back to nor­mal. You will def­i­nitely be inti­mated if there is any here­after.
Kind Regards,

I echo Tom’s sen­ti­ment in his last email to me, “Let’s
hope there is no more upgra­da­tion in the near future.”

This is from the Fri­day before last:

Every Sun­day for the past month I have had to go out and put air in the left rear tire of the MSV. I put 30psi in and a week later it is down to 15. Never really have had a chance to get it taken care of, but as we had the after­noon off today I fig­ured it be as good a time as any. We came home and picked up the car and headed down by the mall. There is a Goodyear store right next to a Chi­nese Buf­fet that would be per­fect to go eat lunch at and wait for them to fix the tire.

The perky girl behind the counter took down my infor­ma­tion and the car’s infor­ma­tion and said that it would be $27.71. To which I said, “I just want a flat fixed, not a new tire. Why so much?” “Well,” she says, “We have to patch it, then rebal­ance it and then there is the new valve stem.” “Valve stem? Huh? That is way too much, the last time I had a flat fixed else­where it was $15,” I tell her. She sighs and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll see what I can do to cut you a break.” She points at a stack of 2-liter Pepsi bot­tles and says, “Take one. It’s free because of a pro­mo­tion.” No thanks,” I reply, “Dr. Pepper’s my drink.” Donna and I leave to get lunch.

When we are done eat­ing we walk back over to the Goodyear place and the car is in a dif­fer­ent spot, so we fig­ure it is done. When we enter the store the perky clerk says, “It’s ready. That’ll be $18.41.” I write her a check and as I head to the door I turn to her and say, “I think I will take one of those Pepsi 2-litters. I can sell it on eBay and recoup some of my costs.” She wishes us a good weekend.

Do they tell you that it is $27 so you will feel good about pay­ing $18 for a $15 job? My favorite bit from the invoice is: “Shop Sup­plies*…$1.19.” The aster­isk leads to the bot­tom of the page and an expla­na­tion, “*Shop sup­ply fees cover misc mate­ri­als used in ser­vic­ing your vehi­cle that do not appear else­where on this invoice and for profit.” What you aren’t mak­ing enough profit charg­ing $25 and change to fix a flat!?!

That is exactly how long it took for the ice maker in our new refrig­er­a­tor to stop work­ing. FUCK! There are cubes in the tray that feel frozen, but they haven’t been ejected. After read­ing the trou­bleshoot­ing sec­tion of the “man­ual” we got with the unit I have cranked the tem­per­a­ture knob up one, it has been warm around here the last cou­ple of days. Plus I removed the refrigerator’s built in water fil­ter as that was listed as a prob­a­bly cause. SHIT!

Lets hope one of those things fix this. Although I don’t hold out much hope, it is obvi­ously cold enough in there as the ice cubes that were already made are still ice and if the fil­ter was clogged there wouldn’t be any frozen water in the ice maker right now. DAMN!

And here is why: Feel­ing ‘blogged down’ on the Internet

And because Matt DiFebo is the man­ag­ing edi­tor of The Daily Tri­bune News in Cartersville, GA. and prob­a­bly has sev­eral Pulitzer Prizes on the rick­ety pine shelf behind his desk, if I ever do blog again I’ll be sure it is about pol­i­tics or edu­ca­tion and that it will “incite dis­cus­sion on these very impor­tant topics.”

Oh yeah, did I men­tion that we went to Kroger’s tonight and that I couldn’t get any lun­cheon meat for next week’s sand­wiches because the Deli Counter was closed. No? Good, I wouldn’t want to bother Matt with that…

Last Sun­day while sit­ting in front of the PC I felt an itch on my inner right fore­arm. Look­ing down I noticed a lit­tle bump, dang a mos­quito got me. Twice, as now the out­side of my left ankle is itch­ing. If I can avoid the first scratch I can tol­er­ate the urge pretty well, but if my guard drops the scratch­ing feels so good that it is hard to stop.

Mon­day morn­ing while mou­s­ing at work, because of the loca­tion of the one on my arm, I notice that the itch is worse and I have got a lit­tle seep­age from the bite. I head on over to the nurse’s sta­tion and get one of those lit­tle dots to cover it up. Mon­day night at shower time the bite has turned red. So too has the one on my ankle, might not have been a mosquito.

By Tues­day night it is ugly, pen­cil eraser sized and raised about 1/16 of an inch. My wife tells me that I bet­ter go see the nurse again tomorrow.

Wednes­day morn­ing our nurse gets our her lit­tle scalpel, picks away for awhile and squeezes out a bit of ooze. She then gets out her caul­dron and mixes up some hydro­cor­ti­sone and a lit­tle antibi­otic cream to apply over the top, then cov­ers my lit­tle red mesa with a 2″ x 4″ ban­dage. She tells me to come back tomor­row and if it is any big­ger I will have to go to the doctor.

Thurs­day I report in for boo-boo inspec­tion. It doesn’t look any worse, but it doesn’t look much bet­ter either. Then she tells me why I would have had to go to the doc­tor if it was big­ger, she at first sus­pected it was a Brown Recluse Spi­der that bit me. I get another coat­ing of duo-cream (patent pend­ing) Because I whined some when about 50 hairs were yanked out by the roots dur­ing ban­dage removal, now I grad­u­ate to a folded 4x4 gauze pad held in place by a 3″ wide magic wrap thing that feels like rub­ber coated gauze that stretches and adheres to itself by mol­e­c­u­lar adhe­sion. She wants to see it again tomorrow.

This morn­ing when the dress­ing is removed it now looks like a small red mole with a black dot in the mid­dle. Bet­ter. More cream and a rewrap. Good thing as I was wor­ried where we were going with the ever esca­lat­ing ban­dage size…

I guess I got lucky and it wasn’t a Brown Recluse, maybe just a Tan Her­mit Spi­der or some­thing. If you ever want to get scared about spi­ders, for­get Taran­tu­las or Black Wid­ows, do a lit­tle Googling for Brown Recluse and read some. I’m warn­ing you though, don’t ever click on any of the pic­ture links, because see­ing as the Brown Recluse can’t bite through cloth­ing, you will never get naked again.

Ever since I had to have a lug replaced I have had a ching­ing sound com­ing from that wheel. It is not a very loud sound and is high pitched. It occurs every time I hit a bump or rough spot of road and also when mak­ing 90 degree cor­ners. Sounds kinda like brake chirp­ing, but it does not seem brake related, i.e. it is present whether brak­ing or not.

I pulled off the wheel, caliper and caliper mount­ing bracket over the week­end to see if the new lug was hit­ting the back­ing plate and it looked like there was plenty of room.

Could it be in the wheel that was rotated there? Unlikely. A fam­ily of small bats has nested in my wheel well? Highly unlikely. Is it some­thing they did when replac­ing the lug? Likely.

I have bor­rowed a rub­ber mal­let and plan on jack­ing up the car this week­end and pound­ing away while sys­tem­at­i­cally remov­ing car bits until the noise stops. Hope­fully once the noise has stopped, the last item removed won’t be too important…

On today’s trip to the air­port to retrieve Donna’s aunt I stopped into the book/magazine store and browsed around. I checked out all the car mag­a­zines, but I had seen most of them and the oth­ers I will see thanks to friendly co-workers. But there on the bot­tom shelf was was one called MPH, I hadn’t ever seen it before. Intrigued, I picked it up, that there was a photo of the new Miata didn’t hurt. I read the table of con­tents and bought it. On page 36 is an arti­cle called GPS Explained and they had this tag line to entice you to read it: How does it know where you are when you have no clue? They seem to be shoot­ing for all irrev­er­ent humor, all the time. Maybe you kids love that, but I find a lit­tle goes along way. Not that I’m offended by some of the non-PC humor, I like it, but I think it might wear thin over time. When Maxim mag­a­zine first came out I sub­scribed and looked for­ward to every issue for the first nine months, then not so much. I let my sub­scrip­tion lapse.

Speak­ing of sub­scrip­tions, my copy of the mag­a­zine had 6 blow-ins beg­ging you to sub­scribe to MPH. 10 issues, each only $10.00* Right below that they tell you it is $9.97* for a 10 issue year. So they rounded a lit­tle. There’s that aster­isk again. If you look to the bot­tom of the card and the other aster­isk you find that it says *Plus $2 ship­ping and han­dling. That’s sneaky. I think that is the first time I’ve seen them add a S&H charge to a mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tion (at least for US res­i­dents for US magazines.)

Check out a sam­ple of their style at www.mphmagazineonline.com, might be right up your alley.

If you look to the right, just under Sturgeon’s Law, you will see a new addi­tion — a list of Radio Par­adise’s Recently Played Songs. Some help­ful soul over on the RP forums cre­ated a file that scrapes the recently played page and turns it into a feed. Now all that was needed was a way to dis­play that info on my page.

First I tried the RSS­Feed plu­gin. After a bit wrestling I got it to work, with one buga­boo, the only time it updated (read the feed) was when I rebuilt the index page. Not refreshed, rebuilt, as in post­ing an entry. This meant if you checked my blog in the after­noon, the songs listed as recently played would have been heard about 20 hours before. I guess if you are a rock, that is real recent, but in human terms that is like so yes­ter­day. And in Inter­net terms, with recent mean­ing mil­lisec­onds, that is unacceptable.

The sec­ond attempt is using another plu­gin, GETXML that looked promis­ing. It took a lit­tle more mon­key­ing that the pre­vi­ous plu­gin to get going, but I per­se­vered. Unfor­tu­nately it exhibits the same behav­ior as RSSFeed.

Some Mov­able Type forum search­ing turned up another plu­gin that might help either of the first by forc­ing a rebuild of the index file at pre­de­ter­mined inter­vals. That would keep the file list updated and recent. But I can’t seem to find it listed in the Plu­g­ins Direc­tory and quite frankly, I’m get­ting tired of mess­ing with this thing that prob­a­bly has no redeem­ing value to any­one.*
Con­tinue read­ing Recent Is A Rel­a­tive Term

This morn­ing Donna and I went to Colum­bia, SC to watch some friend’s kid play in a base­ball tour­na­ment. He plays on an 11 & under “trav­el­ing” team that seems to play in these tour­na­ments every other week­end all over the state.

Gotta run into bucks. They have two dif­fer­ent com­plete uni­forms, there is an entrance fee for the team to get in, meals and if it is more than 100 miles away there are hotel rooms. The place we went to today charged $5 a head to get in. The play­ers get in for free (if you don’t count the entrance fee,) but par­ents and sib­ling have to pay to watch. Priced an alu­minum bat recently, the $20 bat from Wal-Mart won’t cut it, the bat they want costs about a hun­dred and a half. Most of them have their own cus­tom air brushed bat­ting helmets.

I don’t know if the team picked up the tab for it, or a par­ent bought it, but both teams seemed to have a small radar gun that they used to track the oppos­ing team’s pitcher’s speed. I’m sure the level of microwave energy com­ing from these things is low, but if my kid was a pitcher, he’d have a metal lined cup for his jock­strap. Wouldn’t want to take any chances with his still devel­op­ing fam­ily jew­els.

They say that imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery, so the folks over at Girls Gone Wild HQ must be pretty happy. I stum­bled onto an infomer­cial for a GGW knock-off this morn­ing called Wild Party Girls. Instead of $9.95 for a video, really usu­ally 2 because they throw in a “free” one, these guys are giv­ing you two DVDs for Free!* (*$5.95 ship­ping and handling)

Not only are the DVDs free, but they are going to toss in a free hat. It is one of those foam trucker hats that have become, for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son, fash­ion­able again. The hat is bright red with a white front panel. On that white front panel, in match­ing bright red let­ter­ing, are the words “Wild Party Girls.”

It might as well just say “I’m A Loser” on it. This thing screams, “Hey look at me, I’m a schlub! My idea of excite­ment is to watch girls expose their breasts.” The only pur­chasers of these things that can’t be con­sid­ered per­verts are, the peo­ple who aren’t sup­posed to buy them in the first place, boys 17 and under.

Does the buyer of these type of videos think that if he wears that hat around, nubile young women will just lift their shirts and flash him, hop­ing to get a star­ring role in the next series of DVDs?

Spring bet­ter show up here soon or heads are going to roll. Today was another day where the high tem­per­a­ture did not even get above the aver­age low for this time of year. We are sup­posed to be at the 70 degree mark for cry­ing out loud.

Smi­lies. I’ve got them and you don’t. They work on the main page, but I couldn’t get the things to work on the indi­vid­ual post pages. So you see them here, but on any other page you will get the plain ol’ ASCII ver­son. I couldn’t get them to work on the com­ment form either and they were sup­posed to have click­able entry too. I think it is because I use the dynamic pub­lish­ing fea­ture of MT.

Well, what do you think? Some­thing is still screwed up with daily archive pages. In the monthly cal­en­dar that appears there the daily links all want to lead to a cer­tain date in Jan­u­ary that doesn’t exist. The cat­e­gory and monthly archives seem fine. Maybe I should just go back to indi­vid­ual entries as my pri­mary archive and just chuck out the whole daily bit. Then again maybe it is time to export all my entries and do a fresh MT install. That is a lot more work, but what else do I have to do with my life?

I’ve been read­ing other blogs. Other blogs with writ­ing of sub­stance, filled with words with flair, unlike here. As is the norm with these blogs they like other blogs of the same ilk. Man I wish I wrote like that.

A cou­ple I vis­ited had these really cool rounded cor­ner things going on. So see­ing as I can’t write like that, I can at least look like that, right? Style is bet­ter than sub­stance, right?

So I did a lit­tle google search for “css rounded cor­ners” and poked into all the links that came back on page one. About a half dozen ways to do basi­cally the same thing and every­one of them was kinda under­stand­able, but they seemed just out of my reach. Not that I couldn’t have fig­ured it out with cer­tainty, but the ques­tion came down to, “Is this worth the effort?” Nah. Besides once some­thing so cool becomes eas­ily acces­si­ble to yucks like me, it is def­i­nitely not cool anymore.

But now I’ve got­ten the bug to mon­key with the look here, this one is get­ting tired, after all it has had this look for almost a month now…maybe I should do RetroWeb. All gray mot­tled back­ground with bright lime green bul­lets. Maybe I’ll do it in one big table. Maybe frames.

A cou­ple weeks ago a co-worker asked me to help out with his son’s sci­ence project. It was a sim­ple job, print out the head­ings for his tri-fold dis­play. They want some stuff that was longer than they could print on their home ink-jet. He brought me the Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions and asked if I could print out the head­ings in a nice dark blue, no prob­lem, I thought. We have a nice big ol’ Hewlett-Packard DesignJet800 plot­ter that can print on 36″ wide paper and I guess maybe the whole 150′ length if you didn’t run out of ink.

When I printed out the first page, much to my sur­prise, it was a lovely shade of pur­ple. I started test­ing other shades of blue and they all came out dif­fer­ent shades of pur­ple. The really dark blue-green came out with almost no pur­ple, but it looked black or gray not blue at all. When I asked if pur­ple was OK, he said yes with lit­tle enthu­si­asm, but what could we do? I ended up print­ing out every­thing for the sci­ence project because there was no way that they would be able to match my pur­ple shade at home on their printer.

Yes­ter­day I had to make up a sign for here at work and not think­ing I choose a nice blue for some of the let­ter­ing. Of course I cussed loudly (to myself) when the blue printed as pur­ple. After com­plet­ing the sign project I made it a goal to find a fix. The inter­net knows all, so off I went in search of a solu­tion. My first stop was at the HP sup­port forums. I searched for “blue prints pur­ple” in the DesignJet800 forum and was rewarded with seven hits. The first one says, “Lat­est firmware has new color maps to help with this.” Bingo.

I check my plot­ter and it says I have firmware A.02.09 installed and A.02.12 is avail­able, so I down­load all 24Meg of it and put it on my desk­top. The file is an exe­cutable, so I dou­ble click and it installs some main­te­nance soft­ware on my C: drive. After it installs, it auto­mat­i­cally starts the pro­gram and promptly tells me it can’t find the printer?! I do a quick dou­ble check and the printer is listed as one of my printers.

I go back online to the page I down­loaded the firmware upgrade from and scroll fur­ther down the page to where the trou­bleshoot­ing sec­tion is. There is my prob­lem, you can not do this over a net­work, you have to be directly con­nected to the printer or run the pro­gram from the server. I hunt down our local IT guy and ask if he would run this update from the server. Yes, but not today, ask tomorrow.

Fast for­ward to this morn­ing. I copy the main­te­nance pro­gram file to a net­worked drive and fol­low him to the com­puter room. He logs on and has to map a drive to the direc­tory I used, and then he dou­ble clicks on the appli­ca­tion. The hour­glass appears for a half a minute or so and then dis­ap­pears. We wait. And wait. And wait. The nat­ural reac­tion is to try again and sure enough, his­tory repeats itself, noth­ing. We go to the task man­ager and there are 2 processes run­ning and nei­ther of them are using any CPU time. I tell him to go ahead and kill the processes and I’ll move to Plan B, direct connect.

I go see one of the assem­bly engi­neers to bor­row a lap­top. First I check and see if it has a USB port so I can load all 24Meg of the main­te­nance pro­gram to it. He hands me a power sup­ply too, as the bat­tery, like every lap­top bat­tery in the plant, is dead. I dis­con­nect the printer cable from the net port and plug it into the back of the lap­top and turn it on. The Windows98 start screen dis­plays and I hope to myself it is at least 98SE. I get lucky, as it turns out the OS is 2nd Edi­tion, so I can use the USB thumbdrive.

But first I need the dri­vers, so I go back over to my desk­top to surf the net. My thumb­drive is made by a com­pany called Wolver­ine, so my first cou­ple of searches brings back a lot of hits for Mar­vel Comic’s X-Men and the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan foot­ball team. I finally find it, www.wolverinedata.com and down load the dri­vers. See­ing as I can’t use the thumb­drive yet, I have to trans­fer the dri­vers to, egad, a floppy disc. Rifling through my desk, I find a disk in the bot­tom of drawer #4. After load­ing the USB dri­vers on the lap­top, I to plug in the thumb­drive and can’t. Nice design work Dell, the USB port is too close to the par­al­lel port to accom­mo­date both devices at the same time.

I unplug the printer and copy the main­te­nance pro­gram to the lap­top. Dou­ble click and it loads right up. The pro­gram starts and it can’t find a printer, again. This time there is a good rea­son, its not plugged in. Unplug the USB drive and plug in the printer, still no joy. Of course you knuck­le­head, the DesignJet800 is not installed as a printer on the lap­top, this is the first time they’ve seen each other. Back to my desk­top PC and back to the inter­net to down­load the dri­ver for the printer. It is of course 1.9Meg so Have to use the thumb­drive again.

Unplug the printer, plug in the USB drive, copy the dri­vers to the desk­top, unplug the USB drive, hook up the printer and install the printer dri­vers. Whew. Run the main­te­nance pro­gram and it finds the printer. Yippee! It reports that an upgrade is avail­able and I should not turn off the printer until it is fin­ished. I click OK and watch as a process bar creeps along the screen installing file 1 of 3. It fin­ished the first and starts the sec­ond when a BSOD pops up on the lap­top! F%*k! I hope I haven’t screwed up the printer’s mem­ory. I shut down the lap­top and when the screen on the printer says, Turn off printer”, I do just that.

I start the printer again and boot up the lap­top. The printer seems to start up nor­mal, so that is a relief. I start the main­te­nance pro­gram again and when I click OK a progress bar creeps across the screen installing file 1 of 2. So at least it knows it fin­ished the first file OK. After both files are loaded the lap­top pro­gram says, “Suc­cess.” The printer shows an hour­glass and then it tran­si­tions to a pic­togram indi­cat­ing I should unplug it, I do just that.

I unhook the lap­top and turn the printer back on. The printer boots nor­mally and I check the firmware screen and it says I have A.02.12 installed. Hook it back into the net port and return to my desk­top PC to retry yesterday’s sign where the blue printed pur­ple. After all that song and dance the blue still prints out as pur­ple! Sh#t!

I go back to the HP forums to check out the other 6 hits from yesterday’s query. Response num­ber 3 looks promis­ing, it is from a mod­er­a­tor: “When load­ing the paper, be sure to scroll down all the way to the bot­tom of the paper list and select the enhanced color pro­files. These selec­tions, along with the cur­rent firmware, should get you up and print­ing blue in no time.” I trot over to the printer and select enhanced color pro­files. The paper list I just scrolled through is repeated, but with an EC on the end of the paper name. I select the appro­pri­ate one and try print­ing the sign, one more time. Finally, I got blue.

Last week some time I noticed the “Invite a Friend to Gmail” link was back at the top of the page when using Gmail. I ignored it.

Later in the week I noticed the “Invite” link was gone. Oh well, I fig­ured if I wasn’t giv­ing them away to “friends” fast enough, they were pass­ing them along to those who would. Turns out they weren’t gone, just moved. The invite think has its own lit­tle block on the lower left of the Gmail page right below the labels menu. I have 50! to give away. Ha, I don’t have one sin­gle per­son to give a Gmail address too, let alone 50.

I have pestered every­one I know, I have offered them up free to strangers who have stum­bled onto my blog via the Insane Give­away Nights, I’ve tossed a few to fel­low Miata.netters and I have even given them away phil­an­throp­i­cally via gmailo­matic, so how the heck am I to rid myself of these?

Even though it is against the Gmail Terms of Ser­vice I am going to sell them that’s how (what are they going to do, take away my account?) So if you want one of my Gmail Invites, just pay­pal $1,000.0 US to me at brian AT mr-miata DOT com. I fig­ure if I sell enough of them I can buy one of those brand new next gen­er­a­tion Miatas that they are going to intro­duce in about a week at the Geneva Auto Show.

OK, maybe Ed Bradley I can under­stand, Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor is a stretch, but Kobe Bryant? We know Kobe has sex with the cor­rect gen­der and of the proper age, but as to con­sen­sual, eh, maybe.

We have three lights in front of the house that we leave on all the time. One to light the house num­ber and stairs, one bug light to light the door and one at the end of the dri­ve­way. It seems like these burn out way too often and all 3 will go about a day or so apart, so it seems like I am always com­plain­ing about burnt out light bulbs. My mother-in-law found some 2,000 hour bulbs in a cat­a­log so she ordered me a six pack.

Last Fri­day I changed out the one at the end of the dri­ve­way with a long last­ing bulb. I can see why they last that long, these suck­ers are dim. I guess it is expend­ing 60 watts of power and giv­ing off 30 watts of light and 30 watts of heat. I’ll let you know it lasts 76 more days.

Its Christ­mas Eve and see­ing as I have a tra­di­tional hol­i­day greet­ing reserved for tomor­row, I just go ahead and post a pic­ture of Paul and George together:

The Bea­t­les arrived today, one day ahead of sched­ule, so far, only Ringo is out of his box:

Last night I ordered my Christ­mas present, the Bea­t­les “action” fig­ures. The only ship­ping option was FedEx ground, because I couldn’t be sure of the deliv­ery day and time I didn’t want it to go to my house because who knows if any­one would be there to meet the dri­ver. Instead I chose to have them shipped to work where some­one is always there to sign for a pack­age. Today I got a con­fir­ma­tion email with my FedEx track­ing num­ber and an esti­mated deliv­ery date of Decem­ber 23rd. Cool, just in time for Christ­mas. Let’s see, the 23rd is next Thursday…uh-oh.

The plant is going to be closed next Thurs­day and Fri­day for the hol­i­day. No one will be there to take deliv­ery. Every­one will be at home, just like me.

I got a piece of email at work that was for­warded from some­one who always for­wards this stuff, so I’m guess­ing this has been around the world a cou­ple of times already.
——————————————————————
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Which of these five lovelies had a breast implant?

Scroll down for the answer.

Scroll down for the answer.

Who gives a big Rat’s As^!
———————————————–
I’m curi­ous, who sends a pic­ture of nude women in an email, but then sub­sti­tutes a sym­bol for the sec­ond ‘s’ in the word ass? Were they afraid they would get in some sort of trou­ble for send­ing and email with a swear word in it?

I could have sworn I made up a CD full of Christ­mas music in MP3 form last year, but can’t seem to find it. I guess I’ll have to make another one up. It should be easy as I’ve got 341 Christ­mas songs tak­ing up 1.2Gig on my hard drive. I usu­ally buy CDs that are a lit­tle out there because I can hear all the usual stuff on the radio, so not all of those songs are gems. A A Big Band Christ­mas nets a cou­ple of keep­ers, ditto Cajun Christ­mas and Hill­billy Hol­i­day. On the other hand, on Bummed Out Christ­mas, Just In Time For Christ­mas and The Best Of Cool Yule every song is a gem. I can’t really explain hav­ing pur­chased Another Rosie Christ­mas at all. I’m sure I can get 700 Megs worth to cram on a CD. For in the car lis­ten­ing, that should last me to Christmas.

I’ve started work on what my New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion for 2005 is going to be. My first instinct is to pick some­thing doable, but that got me in about 15 pounds of trou­ble a cou­ple years back when I vowed to eat more and exer­cise less. So I think maybe I’ll shoot for some­thing hard to do, like watch more tele­vi­sion. How can that be hard you ask? Easy, I will not watch any real­ity shows (as much as I am intrigued by the Gilligan’s Island one.) I’m not inter­ested in and CSI show. Ditto it’s imi­ta­tors. No Law & Orders. The only sport I’m remotely inter­ested in is base­ball, so there won’t be any of that until April. I’d watch MTV if there was any M in it. VH1 is as bad, as it has become the net­work of “The 100 Most Insipid Music Related Count­down Shows.” About the only thing left is MXC on Spike and it isn’t on but a few times a week. But con­sid­er­ing I only watch West Wing on Wednes­day nights now…

In the 80’s we had posters above the uri­nals of the Swedish Bikini Team to get us to drink a par­tic­u­lar brand of beer. How quaint. Flash-forward into the 21st cen­tury, I give you Wiz­mark.

“Hey, buddy, after you fin­ish up here, you ought to have room for a cou­ple more ice-cold bot­tles of Duff.”