For lack of any­thing worth watch­ing on the tube this evening, I had the first Iron Man movie on. It was play­ing on FX, so it was chock block full of com­mer­cials, but it was bet­ter than Enter­tain­ment Tonight, Wheel of For­tune or the 38th view­ing of a Two And A Half Men repeat episode. One of the best sequences of the movie is Tony bust­ing out of that cave with his cob­bled together orig­i­nal Iron Man suit. Just after crash­ing into a sand dune in the mid­dle of the desert, miles from who knows where, we go to some commercials.

What comes next in the movie I saw in the the­aters 4 years ago, and what is on the DVD I got for Christ­mas later in 2008, is we see Mr. Stark walk­ing around in the sand and then within a cou­ple min­utes Colonel Rhodes shows up with some heli­copters to res­cue him. I always thought this a lit­tle odd because, how did they get to the mid­dle east and the scene of hun­dreds of Stark Indus­tries explod­ing in flames so fast.

What came next on TV was a scene of a bunch of sol­diers load­ing into some big heli­copters. Tony’s friend “Rhodey” Rhodes is there and gets stopped by some Gen­eral who teas­ingly chides him that head­ing off to find Stark is a fools errand as no one has any way of know­ing where he might be. This explains away that quick find.

Pretty coin­ci­den­tal tim­ing on the search mis­sion and Tony com­plet­ing his escape in the newly fin­ished Iron Man suit. Then again it is a “comic book” movie, so you really can’t dig too deep on any­thing going on with­out find­ing incongruities.

We had break­fast at DD this morn­ing and after walk­ing out on Sat­ur­day morn­ing because no one wanted to wait on us in a timely man­ner we were glad to see the lit­tle older woman behind the counter. She, unlike most of the younger kids that man the reg­is­ter, can enter our highly com­plex order* with­out hunt­ing for sev­eral sec­onds look­ing for the right but­ton to push. Not only that, she seemed to be the only per­son in the store and we got our food and drinks in a more timely fash­ion than usual.

On her badge, there was a label, right under her name with her title, SHEFT LEADER.

*Small Cof­fee, cream & sugar
Small hot Choco­late, no whipped cream
Cof­fee Cake Muf­fin
Plain Bagel, toasted with butter

After barely hav­ing any win­ter dur­ing the first 1/2 of its allot­ted time slot, it looks like we are going to have some this week­end. Our nor­mal overnight lows for this time of the year are 35°:

With the new PC in hand and all my files trans­fered over to it, it was time to wipe the hard drive so I can pass it along to a co-worker.* I use a pro­gram called KillD­isk to over writes every­thing on a drive with zeros, then re-install the oper­at­ing sys­tem, so that the next per­son starts with a clean slate.

*I was going to donate it to Good­will, but found some­one here at work who is start­ing a Tax Prep busi­ness and needed to keep that stuff sep­a­rate from the house­hold PC.

I made a bootable USB drive to erase the hard dri­ves, but for some rea­son the PC wouldn’t start up using it. So I installed the Win­dows ver­sion and it wiped the sec­ondary hard drive and it wiped the sec­ond par­ti­tion on the main drive, but would not com­mit sui­cide by wip­ing the drive it was installed on. Not unex­pected, the com­puter was just obey­ing the 3rd Law of Robot­ics: A robot must pro­tect its own exis­tence as long as such pro­tec­tion does not con­flict with the First or Sec­ond Law.

I ended up burn­ing a CD to kill the main drive.

Pub­lished this year’s “Best Of” page tonight. You can find it over on the left under High­light Reels.

In the begin­ning, ten years ago, this was two dif­fer­ent and sep­a­rate blogs, The Miata Diaries with sto­ries about the car and how it fit into my life and the other, called Brian’s Daily Rant, was a place for me to bitch about what got stuck in my craw each day. There was so much stuff writ­ten dur­ing the year that I had a hard time wean­ing out all the qual­ity posts to get it down to just one best per each month.

Some­where around 5 or 6 years ago I merged the two into this one. The total posts dimin­ished and soon after the cal­iber of con­tent did too. For the last cou­ple of years I have wished I could have cheated and used a sec­ond post from one month to use in the place of another month with noth­ing that I felt qualified.

And as I look back on this year I don’t see very many posts that qual­ify either, mostly they were just just recaps of geo­caching adven­tures or pic­tures of paper­craft projects. In an effort to at least post some­thing when I didn’t feel like writ­ing I would often upload a photo. So for the Best Of 2011 I have used no words, just my best pic­ture from each month.

I haven’t turned all mor­bid, stared tak­ing mor­ti­cian train­ing courses at the local junior col­lege or any­thing, but me merely enjoy­ing the slowly dry­ing out of our real pine wreath hang­ing on the inside of our front door.

We walked from the hotel to a place for break­fast, but it was just a drive-thru, so we went with Plan B, Micky D’s. As we were almost done eat­ing our Egg McMuffins we heard an employee shout, “We have a bus! We have a bus!” Sure enough, a stream of high school aged kids came pil­ing in the door. A few just came in and sat (the ones with not much spend­ing money), some headed for the restrooms (those with small blad­ders) and the major­ity of them got in line. They made a queue that was three wide that snaked all the way to the entrance door.

We fin­ished up our stuff and cleared off the table fig­ur­ing that it would be needed soon. As we were exit­ing the restau­rant through the door on the other side, we were met by an older cou­ple com­ing in. I looked at them and said, “You might want to find another place to eat, a bus just unloaded a big bunch of high school stu­dents on a field trip to Epcot.” The man replied, “I know, I just dropped them off. I’m the driver.”

There were 4 of us who went to the Tool Show the other day and after we had seen all there was to be seen it was time for lunch. At first we thought we were going to be treated to lunch by the sales­man who sold our com­pany that fancy-schmancy (and very expen­sive ) CNC machine, but he bailed on both the show and us. This was actu­ally not a big dis­ap­point­ment to two of us because that meant we could go across town to Mark & my favorite restau­rant in all of North Car­olina — Razoo’s Cajun Cafe! There was going to be a few toe-less rats around after we got there.

When the 4 of us arrived at the restau­rant after the 30 minute drive, 3 of us set­tled in to a booth and the other made a bee-line to the restroom. When our wait­ress arrived to take drink orders I ordered reg­u­lar Coke and the two oth­ers got Diet Coke. We didn’t know what the other fel­low wanted, so we ordered for him. I asked the wait­ress if they had any­thing pink and frilly. She said that they had pink lemon­ade and we said, “Per­fect.” Instantly catch­ing on, she asked, “Do you want me to put a lit­tle umbrella in it?” “Umm, why, yes we would.”

When she returned with the tray of drinks, poor unsus­pect­ing Kieth looked at the four glasses and won­dered who ordered that pink drink, but it slowly dawned on him what had hap­pened, as she passed out the other three drinks to us and he had noth­ing in front of him with the pink drink was still on the tray. Our wait­ress offered to go get him some­thing else to drink, but he waved her off and said, “I’ll just drink this.”

The new guy, Tom, is a quick learner, as he too needed to use the rest room, but decided to wait until after he had ordered his meal before going…

I hit the Daily Dou­ble yes­ter­day as both the 7:00 & 7:30 PM episodes of Two And A Half Men were new to me.

In today’s Draft Order Draw for this year’s at work Fan­tasy Foot­ball League I got #11 out of a pos­si­ble 12.

My wife said she felt today’s earth­quake that was cen­tered in Vir­ginia, me on the other hand, the first I heard of it was on Google News about 20 min­utes later.

Keep your fin­gers crossed that Irene keeps creep­ing east, because yesterday’s pre­dic­tions placed the west side of her pos­si­ble path over Char­lotte about mid­day on Sat­ur­day, which coin­cided un-nicely with our depar­ture on Delta Flight 2446 to Minneapolis/St Paul.

We did a lit­tle more prepa­ra­tion for our trip out Seat­tle way this morn­ing. We didn’t try and weed out any geo­caches, instead we watched 4 back to back episodes of Fraiser.

The typ­i­cal south­ern after­noon thun­der­storms have kept me from fin­ish­ing the stain­ing touch up on the deck, but I did make a lit­tle progress after work today with­out open­ing a can or han­dling a brush. I bor­rowed a friend and his pickup truck to make a trip to BBHIW to buy the required boards I needed to replace the top boards of the railing.

Even though I have tried to stay ahead of the curve with stain­ing, a few of the the top boards of the rail­ing do need replac­ing because of warp­ing and crack­ing. Rather than replace just the cou­ple of bad boards, I decided to replace them all with some of that new­fan­gled recy­cled 2-liter soda bot­tle stuff. The com­pos­ite deck­ing is expen­sive, $20 for an 8′ piece, but it does come with a 20 year warranty.

There were 8 sep­a­rate boards that need to be changed and it would have taken seven 8′ sticks because the next two small­est boards I have after one 2′-9″ piece, are 4′-6″ and then there is another one that is 4–8″. I did mange to save a few bucks by buy­ing 12′ boards because I could com­bine it down to 4 pieces.

We might have been able to deal with the 8′ pieces in the Miata, but 12′ would have been a lit­tle dicey, so we called for help.

I can’t be the only one who sees irony in Cap­tain Amer­ica. To do bat­tle with Hitler’s Aryan pure-bred super sol­diers we had to cre­ate our own spe­cial super soldier?

It looks like Mazda has a spe­cial pro­mo­tional tie-in to the Green Lantern movie by launch­ing the Karai spe­cial edi­tion in Germany.

We made a trip to Augusta after work and while we were there we passed a gas sta­tion that was adver­tis­ing gas for $3.94 a gal­lon. This reminded me to check the gas gauge in the Pur­ple Whale, it was below a 1/4 tank. Enough to get back in SC where the gas tax is smaller and gas is usu­ally 10 — 20¢ cheaper.

We decided to fill up at our usual haunt, Krogers, where we get a dime off the price of gas because we are fre­quent shop­pers. The sign on Pine Log Road said reg­u­lar was $3.52 so it would only cost us $3.42 a gal­lon. As I was fill­ing the tank I noticed that the price on the pump read 52 cents and I could have sworn that I hit yes when the pump asked if I wanted to use my reward points to save 10¢ a gal­lon. Then I did a dou­ble take, the cent fig­ure did read fifty-two, but the dol­lar fig­ure read TWO! Oooh, some­body made a mis­take, some­how they shifted the dec­i­mal point one place to the right, so we got nearly 15 gal­lons for a lit­tle over 38 bucks when it should have been over $50.

Then I remem­bered the weekly flyer say­ing some­thing about sav­ing a dol­lar a gal­lon. Sure enough when I got home I checked on the Kroger site and there it was in pix­els, redeem 1,000 points and save a buck a gal­lon, so no mistake.

In a story that would be per­fect fod­der for Gar­ri­son Keil­lor, Our Fair City™ yes­ter­day unveiled a statue of a man that never set foot in the town named for him. Not only that, there were no known pic­tures of him, so the artist used pho­tos of descen­dants and other folks from that time period to cre­ate his “like­ness.” Read the whole story — Statue hon­or­ing Aiken’s founder makes its debut

In other news that could be just as well be set in Lake Wobe­gon, a new bar pub opened in the Alley on St. Patrick’s Day here. The alley is what serves for nightlife in the town that was founded by the pres­i­dent of the South Car­olina Canal and Rail­road Com­pany. It has sev­eral pop­u­lar eater­ies, most with their own bar area and one end is anchored by a micro brew­ery. Appar­ently, the good cit­i­zens are aghast at the attire of the wait­resses, sort of Hooters-ish with an Irish twist. Tipsey McS­tum­bles draws ire open­ing day over skirt length

We don’t get the local paper, we get our news through Yahoo (Donna) and Google (Brian.) On the Google News page there are the main sto­ries on the left and in the right hand col­umn there are head­lines from var­i­ous news out­lets. These head­lines get tai­lored to your tastes, both con­tent and source, after time and to fill up tonight’s post I will give you excerpts, and then a link to, from 4 New York Times arti­cles that I have inter­est­ing in the last week.

1) A more accu­rate descrip­tion than “100 per­cent nat­ural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cran­ber­ries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweet­ened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingre­di­ents you would never keep in your kitchen.” — How to Make Oat­meal … Wrong

2) As any­body who has ever worked in any insti­tu­tion — pri­vate or pub­lic — knows, one of the pri­mary ways employee effec­tive­ness is judged is the per­for­mance review. And noth­ing could be less fair than that. — Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You

3) Con­sider what’s hap­pened with light­ing over the past three cen­turies. As peo­ple have switched from can­dles to oil-powered lamps to incan­des­cent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to pro­duce a unit of light has plum­meted. Yet peo­ple have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same pro­por­tion of our income on light as our much poorer ances­tors did in 1700… — When Energy Effi­ciency Sul­lies the Environment

4) The affected men were, in each case, those who’d trained the longest and hard­est. Spend­ing more years exer­cis­ing stren­u­ously or com­plet­ing more marathon or ultra­ma­rathon races was, in this study, asso­ci­ated with a greater like­li­hood of heart dam­age. — When Exer­cise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

Here at the Valve Store™ we play a Safety Bingo game. Each week day a new num­ber is “called” and the idea is that when each employee checks for the num­ber he or she will be reminded to be safe.

Nor­mally bingo num­bers are cho­sen by com­puter or the old fash­ioned way by a ball drop­ping out of a bar­rel, but here, the com­pany nurse, AKA: The Bingo Coor­di­na­tor, uses a deck of cards.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, I just noticed it with the cur­rent game (only because it started on a Mon­day), but a ran­dom num­ber from a par­tic­u­lar row is always called on a par­tic­u­lar day (on Mon­day it is B, Tues­day is I, Wednes­day it’s an N, etc.)

So my ques­tion is, how less ran­dom is that than call­ing a num­ber from all 75 at once?

Here at home, music is served up in the Emperor via MP3s recorded on 10 CDs stored in a changer in the trunk. I have not lis­tened to over the air radio for, well, as far back as I can remem­ber (which due to repeated drug use in my youth, is not far), so what was I to do for two weeks in a rental car. It will be a base model, so would it have an iPod inter­face? Doesn’t mat­ter, don’t have one any­way. Prob­a­bly have a CD player, but all my audio CDs are long gone. Satel­lite radio? Doubt­ful. Hey wait a minute, a friend in the Miata Club has an extra Sir­ius unit that I could bor­row, brilliant.

For test­ing pur­poses I tem­porar­ily hooked up the Visor in the Miata. Not bad, there were a cou­ple chan­nels I could enjoy and even a few I could lis­ten to for a while, nice.

The expected Chrysler Sebring turned into a Ford Mus­tang and it had a CD player that read MP3s. I had brought along a cou­ple of my Radio Par­adise MP3 CDs for lis­ten­ing to on the lap­top in case of spotty inter­net or what­ever, so I popped one in and off we went.

The Mus­tang even had an extra ciggy lighter socket along side the exter­nal input jack in the con­sole which would make pow­er­ing up the Sat Radio real easy. My inten­tion was to at the first early evening stop to install the Visor. Well one day led to the next when we weren’t done dri­ving and see­ing the sites until 7:00–7:30 at night, so I didn’t even get a chance to try the install until the sixth night of vacation.

I ran the antenna cable from the trunk through the rear seat backs gap, plugged in the power cord, hooked both into the unit and hit ON. Noth­ing. OK, maybe the key needs to be in run before the aux power jack is hot. Nope. Dang, did I break the radio in tran­sit? I plugged it into the pri­mary cig­a­rette lighter in the upper cen­ter of the dash and sure enough the satel­lite radio came right on.

So what gave? Was that port broke (blown fuse?) or was it there but not hooked up because the car didn’t have a cer­tain option pack­age? Any­way, I didn’t want to drive around with the wire drap­ing down the mid­dle of the front of the dash and I didn’t want to have to worry about unplug­ging it every time we stopped where any nefar­i­ous indi­vid­u­als would think there was some­thing worth steal­ing, so in the end I wrapped the Visor unit all back up and stored it the luggage.

I think we ended up play­ing those 2 CDs four times through (alter­nately) for the 2 weeks. Each disc holds about 170 songs, so it really didn’t come off as too repetitious.

Thanks any­way Rudy.

Taken just out­side the restau­rant the MMC was meet­ing at a cou­ple of Thurs­days ago. The fru­gal own­ers of the this din­ing estab­lish­ment have taken to illu­mi­nat­ing alter­nate words on their sign each night, tomor­row BUFFET will be lit and ASIAN will be dark.

OK, you got me, I just made that up. All the neon has prob­a­bly leaked out of the bot­tom word or a trans­former is bad or whatever.

What started as a cham­pi­onship game between two dis­tinct foot­ball leagues has some­how been trans­formed into a show­case for adver­tise­ments. Every­one watches the game, but every­one pays atten­tion to the ads.

Don Draper: Adver­tis­ing is based on one thing: hap­pi­ness. And do you know what hap­pi­ness is? Hap­pi­ness is the smell of a new car. It’s free­dom from fear. It’s a bill­board on the side of a road that screams with reas­sur­ance that what­ever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.

Tonight there was an hour show just show­ing famous Super Bowl com­mer­cials. They even had some sneak peeks of this year’s ads. If you missed the show, and can’t wait until tomor­row, you can see quite a few of them here: Adweek.com

Roy: So, what do you do, Don?
Don Draper: I blow up bridges.
Midge: Don’s in adver­tis­ing.
Roy: No way! Madi­son Avenue? What a gas!
Midge: We all have to serve some­body.
Roy: Per­pet­u­at­ing the lie. How do you sleep at night?
Don: On a bed made of money.

The cost of a 30-second spot for Super Bowl I in 1967 was $42,500 on CBS. Twenty years and 20 games later, the cost had spi­raled to $600,000. For this year’s game, CBS is ask­ing $3 mil­lion and they have sold out (pun intended.)

About 3 weeks ago I received an email ask­ing for per­mis­sion to use a pho­to­graph of mine that I had on Flickr! called 12-13-2007 Sun­rise. It was to be used at the bot­tom of a page to end a sec­tion of a 30 page Exec­u­tive Sum­mary enti­tled Savan­nah River Basin Tex­tile Recov­ery Plan and Gran­iteville Area Rede­vel­op­ment Plan. Yikes, that’s a mouth­ful. It is a set of rec­om­men­da­tions devel­oped over about a year of study for the local economies in Aiken, Abeville, Ander­son, Edge­field, Green­wood, Lau­rens, McCormick, Oconee, Pick­ens, and Saluda coun­ties that have been neg­a­tively impacted by the clo­sures of tex­tile mills and related facilities.

I said go ahead and use it, all I asked in return was that they send me a copy when they were printed. Came in the mail on Fri­day. Glossy thing with lots of con­sult­ing techno-babel that takes up a lot of space and doesn’t say much. I was sur­prised that mine was the only pho­to­graph in the whole thing (aside from the cover.) There were about 250 copies printed up, and the other 249 will be dis­trib­uted to stake­hold­ers through­out the region (what­ever a stake­holder is.) There is a list of them on the back page along with the Project Team, Steer­ing Com­mit­tee and at the bot­tom the Pho­tog­ra­phy credit of yours truly.

You can say you knew me when.…

Unlike a year ago, I wasn’t on rollerblades his time. I was on a lad­der, so my fall was from 5–6 feet instead of 3.

I was on the roof of the house blow­ing off the lit­tle branches shed from the trees and the hick­ory nut car­casses left behind from squir­rel meals with a leaf blower. When it was time to come down, I got on the lad­der care­fully, as always, to keep my weight cen­tered so as not to tip side­ways. After two steps down the lad­der feet slipped back­wards and the next thing I knew I was sit­ting on the deck on top of the now hor­i­zon­tal alu­minum exten­sion lad­der. My left cheek hit the I-beam stile and took the full force of the land­ing. Oooouch!

I sat, mostly lean­ing right cheek way, for a few min­utes col­lect­ing my thoughts on a chair on the porch. I then got up and fin­ished blow­ing off the deck and then the dri­ve­way (company’s com­ing you know.)

It hurts to sit on it (nat­u­rally) and 90 degree bends are not real com­fort­able, but I’m prob­a­bly alright. Stand­ing and walk­ing feels nearly fine. But that side is pretty swollen right now, so I’m sit­ting on a pack of ice while I type this. We’ll see what it feels like in the morn­ing, and what­ever hap­pens, I know that area will be look­ing multi-hued from the shorter wave­length of the vis­i­ble light spec­trum in a cou­ple days.

I received 4 tan cloth sam­ples from Cabri­oworld today. I’m guess­ing that they are the col­ors called Light Neu­tral, Tan, Dark Beige & Drift­wood. It would have been nice if the sam­ples were in fact labeled that way, but they have a series of SF num­bers along with the words Hirsch Auto and a 10 digit num­ber I assume is Mr. Hirsh’s phone num­ber on the back. Look­ing at my mon­i­tor I’m guess­ing the num­ber equate to col­ors thusly; Light Neu­tral SF-24, Tan SF-6, Dark Beige SF-30 & Drift­wood SF-22. What­ever it is called, SF-24 is nearly a dead ringer for the 2003 + up cloth top.

I asked for a sam­ple of Ruby Red and they didn’t include it, much to the delight of my wife who dis­missed the color as pos­si­bly being to close in color to the car. She has lis­tened to me say plenty of times, “If you can­not match adjoin­ing col­ors exactly you should have a large enough of a dif­fer­ence so that is doesn’t look like you tried to match and failed.” And has learned that les­son well. I told her that I had never done any­thing to the car that would make it look silly and was not about to start now (con­ve­niently for­get­ting about the plas­tic Rab­bit Teeth that I had in the mouth of the pre­vi­ous Miata for a short while.)

I am dis­ap­pointed by RR’s omis­sion and would still like to see what that color looks like, so I plan on re-asking for a sam­ple of it. And to make it inter­est­ing I’m going to ask that they send me a sam­ple of Bur­gundy and Dark Brown too.

For what­ever rea­son I am good at under­stand­ing peo­ple who are speak­ing with an accent. In my wife and my trav­els over the years I am always the des­ig­nated inter­pre­tor. I have never mas­tered any lan­guage other than Eng­lish (and some­times my mas­tery of that is in seri­ous doubt), but when other peo­ple speak ‘mer­i­can in a man­gled form, usu­ally after a minute or so I can fig­ure out what they are try­ing to say. Also, I don’t notice it, but my wife will tell me that as I talk for a while to peo­ple who have a strong accent, I will start to take on that accent in my speech as well.

Mike Ward’s 6-year old daugh­ter was hav­ing a sleep over and she wrote him a list of what she wanted to do. He can under­stand his daughter’s list, but was offer­ing a free beer to any­one else who could deci­pher it too.

* paly games
* and liscin to my inp3 palyer
* haev pytsa
* wactv
* and dowl
* and wac a moovy
* read a book
* and look at the Cis­r­mois tryye
* and do my karoke
* liin to radyo disny

I’m pretty sure I got them all (except for one.)

* play games
* lis­ten to my MP3 player
* have pizza
* watch TV
* and draw (guess­ing ????)
* watch a movie
* read a book
* look at the Christ­mas tree
* do my karaoke
* lis­ten to Radio Disney

So Mike, if I’m right on the draw thing, when’s a good time to stop by?

Free to a good home, one MGW Grip­per Shift Knob painted Gar­net Red. I’ll even toss in the extra grip­per ring because it might be eas­ier to sur­gi­cally remove the cur­rent one, than try and pry it off. Pay­pal me $3 for postage and I’ll pri­or­ity mail right to your home.

Vac­u­umed the car and then removed the week’s accu­mu­lated dirty using some Quik Detailer because this after­noon was the MMC’s show­ing at the Sno-Cap Drive-In’s 41st anniversary.

That and this week’s photo meme pic­tures came from the party. Through the magic that is MT’s editable Authored On data field, Wednes­day, Thurs­day & Friday’s pic­tures were posted before the event.

I found some­one to make my Calvin & Hobbes sticker and he mailed it late last week. Not here yet. I hope that they didn’t take a detour in time on their way here and were eaten by a T-rex.

Birth­day present update: Win­dow tint­ing is off the list, just doesn’t make sense for me. Rear lip spoiler is fad­ing fast. Cur­rent front run­ner is a mild com­puter upgrade. This Dell was pur­chased in March of 2003 and while it 2.53Ghz proces­sor is plenty strong enough for what I use it for, I’m think­ing bump­ing the RAM from 512M to 1024M and get­ting a faster and big­ger hard drive might be a nice thing. Hey, after­all I spend more time in the seat in front of the PC than I do in the driver’s seat of the Miata.