brian's daily rant

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Locked Out
Donna and I decided to walk up to the Chinese Restaurant to eat supper. It is about a mile one way, so it makes a nice evening walk. Walk, eat and walk back helping to burn off the meal. When we got back to the house, I went to unlock the front door and when I pulled my keys out of my pocket I realized I didn't have the house key anymore. When I got the custom caricature keychain I didn't put the key back on, hadn't used it in so long that I figured what the heck, leave it off. Donna reached into her purse to get her keys and it turns out all she had was a car key, a key to her desk and a house key that we have no earthly idea whose house it goes to, but we do know it doesn't go to ours. Normally Donna's mom would be home and she could let us in or maybe the door wouldn't even been locked, but tonight we had to use the emergency key. I took the screen off a window that we knew was unlocked, Donna boosted me up and I climbed in.

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Hillary Rodham Clinton Ankles
I haven't ranted about my spastic blood pressure here for awhile because I have come to expect the ups and downs and changing medicine as a normal way of life, but this here takes the cake. I am now officially a 47 year old living in a 67 year old body. First it was the beta blocker (which I still take in a small dose) that made my feet and hands cold in anything less than 75 degrees. Now I'm taking something called Lotrel to go with it. Started at the smallest dose back at the end of February and in 3 week intervals stepped up to the max dosage pill until my BP got down to near the gold standard level of 120/80. Just last Thursday I had an appointment with the doctor and we agreed that this was the stuff and I can go about living with this set of meds. Well wouldn't you know it last night after showering I noticed that my ankles were swollen big time. This is a side effect of the Lotrel, but why did it wait until now to rear it's ugly head? Do I have to go to support socks? Black, calf high socks. I can wear with some sandals. Just need to buy some madras print shorts to complete the ensemble. After that, moving to Florida.

Monday, April 28, 2003

Hudson Hawk
Borrowed Hudson Hawk on DVD from a friend at work, I think I deserve either a medal or some commitment papers for lasting 1 hour and 1 minute into this movie before hitting the eject button. I like Bruce Willis usually, but this must have been something he shot during a hiatus of Moonlighting, back when he was grasping with being a "star." As a bonus bit of ugliness it had my least favorite movie actress of all time in it, Sandra Bernhard.

Sunday, April 27, 2003

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

Saturday, April 26, 2003
PCC Hat
I try to be polite by taking my hat off while eating. It is kind of like not putting your elbows on the table, not always practiced anymore, but just a small nicety that I hope people appreciate. I either hang the hat over the back of the chair or try to hang it off my knee and invariably it falls to the floor in the normal dining movements. Most of the time I remember it and search the floor or I don't remember and get lucky by accidentally kicking it when getting up to leave. For the second time in 3 months I left my Palmetto Cycling Coalition hat behind in a restaurant. The first time we were near Charlotte, NC so we could go shopping at a big ol' mall. When I got back to the hotel and realized that the cap was gone we called them and they had it. Rather than make a return trip that evening I told them I'd get it the next day when we were over there again. This time we were in northern Georgia following a bicycle race. We had dinner at the fine establishment of Pruett's BBQ, so I didn't even really need to take it off, but did. When I got back to the motel this time and realized I'd left it behind again, I just said forget it. It was raining and I didn't want to drive back the 10 miles to get the hat. Tomorrow we were leaving town early and weren't coming back, so that option was out. Figuring it must be fate that I don't have that hat, I abandoned it in rural western Georgia. Anyway, I've got a spiffy new Master's Miata Club hat to start wearing around waiting for me at home.

Friday, April 25, 2003
Concrete Parking Stops
You know those 6" high things that are there to prevent you from pulling to far in? Well because of the lowered stance of the Miata I have to be very careful how close I pull in and park anywhere. This one snuck up on me in a restaurant parking lot. It was the first in a line in the middle of a run. The usual visual clues were misleading as the car to my left could actually pull up closer because of the staggered shape of the sidewalk. Fortunately this one was short enough that it only scraped the bottom of the spoiler on the way in. On the way out, because that was now against the shape of the spoiler it made an ugly noise, but didn't do any more damage. Luckily all these bits are made of flexible space-age polymers, if they had been custom fiberglass parts I'm sure shards of my front end would still be lying there in the parking space.

Thursday, April 24, 2003
Atlanta Traffic
Yikes! Where are all these people going. It is like 9:00PM and there are 5 lanes across just chock full of cars all going faster than I really want to go too. We used to live in New Jersey, so crowded fast moving lanes of traffic didn't used to bother me. NJ Turnpike, no problem. Garden State Parkway with tollbooths every few miles, piece of cake. Never really liked it, but could deal with it. Not anymore. After living in relatively rural SC for the last 13 years, I can really do without it.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

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

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

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

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

It's Pledge Week
On the NPR radio station that I record Echoes off of, so I don't get their regularly scheduled programs nor their special Earth Day programing, instead I get something that is interupted several times by someone begging for money.

I have whined here about paying for RADIOIO, Radio Paradise is listener supported like NPR and I listen to all of them and don't send any of them money. Damn, when did I get so cheap?

Monday, April 21, 2003

It's No Paradise At Work
No dice on listening to Radio Paradise at work. I bet they have all that bandwidth hogging music listening stuff locked down. Oh well, Plan B, is to record 12 hours of music using Streamripper and burn it to a CDRW and take it to work, lather, rinse and repeat.

Sunday, April 20, 2003

RADIOIO
To listen to the free stream with Windows Media Player you need a plugin called Abacast. Tried installing it here at home and for whatever reason it doesn't work. The low band (mono) mp3 stream is still there, but I can't listen to mp3 at work because it uses an IP address and the network weasels have blocked access to anything with just an IP. In searching for a replacement I found something really close, Radio Paradise, and there stream is stereo. They are also listener supported and if I can get the stream at work I will consider donating something to the cause.

Saturday, April 19, 2003

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

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

Friday, April 18, 2003

Was I The First To Run It Update
I'd like to call my wife to the stand. She swears that the signs were not in place at 4:20 when I made the left into my subdivision yesterday. Also the yellow diamond shaped signs warning of a stop sign ahead weren't there either. When we left the neighborhood this morning there were 2 city cop cars out making up for the cost of the signs by catching unsuspecting drivers as they motored through the new signs. One had somebody pulled over and the other was just lurking on our street far enough back not to be seen from Two Notch Road.

Thursday, April 17, 2003

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

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

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

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

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

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

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Procrastination Man Strikes Again
I have known for weeks that I have to get a Master's Miata Club newsletter in the mail Thursday (always a week ahead of the big event or meeting.) Well I had done nothing until tonight when I realized that Thursday is really only a little more than a day away. Not only that, but I have fallen behind on the web page calendar. It still lists the next event as the April meeting on the 3rd. There was an event added for May 9th and it hasn't found a way to the web. Plus tonight I got an email from another member that he wants to round up some members and go to Charleston for a car show on the 3rd of May, so now I'm 2 events behind. I guess I'll finish the newsletter and update the web page tomorrow at work. :-D

Monday, April 14, 2003

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

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

Sunday, April 13, 2003

What The Heck Is This?
On a whim we decided to replace the area rug in the dining room. Off we went to our favorite rug store, Lowes. We have hard wood floors and they really need refinishing, but we just cover them up with cheap $100 8 x 10 rugs. All the others are just plain tan/beige things, but this time we went with a pattern that has most of all the colors in the wallpaper and curtains. Fortunately today was sunny so we could get this rolled up rug home in the family pick-up truck, the Miata. On the way home we had to stop in a mini-mart for a quick item. Donna ran in and left me in the car guarding the rug (like anyone would steal a 9' long, 12" diameter roll.) While lolling around waiting I noticed the tag on the rug, underneath the plastic wrapper, it said, "Contents: 100% undetermined fibers." Soda bottles? Tires? Mattress stuffing? Barbershop floor clippings? I think I'll keep my socks on.

Saturday, April 12, 2003

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

Friday, April 11, 2003

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

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

Thursday, April 10, 2003

Temp Tech Support II
Guess how I spent my day? That's right, repeating Monday's assault on all the PCs in the plant. The worm had returned or our pitiful human attempts at squashing them merely made them duck back into their holes. Today, instead of just updating the data files, we upgraded to version 7 of McAfee VirusScan from the version 4 we were using. I have a good felling that this time it worked. If it doesn't, I think next time they ask for help I'll have to tell them I am too busy.

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Tickets To The Masters
Tickets to the 4 day Masters tournament are handed down from generation to generation. They have closed the waiting list to get on the waiting list. That is not say they are impossible to get. For a price nearly anything can be had.

My wife and I don't golf and are not really into following it as fans. We used to go to one of the practice rounds each year in the early 90s, because it was like $5 to get in and you just walked up to the gates on the day and in you went. It would be like living in Indianapolis and never going to the 500, so we went. The course is better looking in person than it is on TV and during practice the golfers are loose and having fun, you could take pictures and get autographs. Always thinking how cool it would be to go to the actual tournament.

Somewhere around 1995 they made a decision to limit even the practice round tickets. Can't blame them the place was getting too crowded and the crowd was getting boisterous and the traffic jams outside the gates were getting really troublesome. The first couple of years after they instituted the lottery we got tickets, but since then we have been shut out. It seems like the tickets are going to all out-of-towners who come to Augusta and spend big bucks on hotels and meals. Of course the officials claim that it is a fair lottery, but too many of the locals who used to go are getting shut out too. Urban legends have cropped up of getting distant relations to apply for the practice round tickets and then pass along to the locals so they can go.

Tonight my across the street neighbor called and asked if we wanted a couple of tickets to go see the Masters tomorrow. We turned him down. We have nearly all our vacation for the year either taken or scheduled. Plus it is going to be raining and low 50s. If the weather was going to be sunny and 75 we might have burned one of the last two free vacation days we have left free. I wonder if our neighbor will think of us next year or was this our one and only shot at this.

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

Those Aren't My Hands!
I'm not sure why I never noticed this before, because it certainly didn't happen overnight, but the backs of my hands look like they belong to some old person. No age spots, but crinkly, lose skin which because of the current weather are chapped and dry looking (which I suppose accentuates the aged look.)

Monday, April 07, 2003

Temp Tech Support
We got snagged with a virus at work sometime last week and today was a big push to eradicate from the roughly 100 PCs in the building. I was called on to help go around to each PC and update the virus definitions, run a scan and regedit the little booger from the local_machine/software/microsoft/windows/run branch it had stuck itself to. Big fun. Made me really appreciate the fact that I don't do that for a living. There was one section of the building that had some Pentium 60 machines that were recalled into service and they were running Win2k, talk about a slow combination (and some with only 32M of RAM!)

Sunday, April 06, 2003

It's Been Like 3 Years & I Still Miss It
Sunday night isn't the same with out the X-files. The only thing that is remotely worth watching is "Inside The Actors Studio" with James Lipton. This week I skipped it because it was a rerun of Richard Gere, but next week is a must watch because John Travolta will be on. On a somewhat related note, I could have sworn I saw Mr. Lipton as a court sketch artist this morning in "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" on the Fox Movie Channel. He is not credited with that role on IMDB or on the Bravo site's biography of him.

Saturday, April 05, 2003

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

Friday, April 04, 2003

Blogspot Archives
For some reason there are no April archives. The archive area shows that it is published right after you post, but it doesn't exist as far as Blogspot is concerned. Tried to link to a post on my other blog and I get the friendly Blogspot 404.

Thursday, April 03, 2003

Mint Oreo Blizzard
A little background - Donna's favorite Girl Scout cookies are Thin Mints. Her favorite ice cream treat is a scoop of chocolate chip and a scoop of mint chocolate chip on a sugar cone. Every time we go out to eat Mexican food she always gets one of those peppermint patties for a dime at the cash register. She keeps a stash of mint life savers in the door pocket of the car, her purse and lunch pail. I on the other hand hate mints, I like the taste, but if I get one little bite of a York peppermint patty it keeps repeating on me all day.

After our lousy dinner Donna and I stopped at the Dairy Queen just down the street to split a blizzard to cleanse our palettes. There was a sign for a Mint Oreo Blizzard that even looked good to me. I asked if she wanted one of those, and Donna said sure. After it was made and she took one spoonful, she turned up her nose and said, "I don't want anymore." Great, I was stuck eating it while she went back inside and got a vanilla cone. Fortunately we'll be going to sleep soon and I won't have to put up with the mint burps for much longer.

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

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

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

We Changed Stuff But Didn't Tell You
They we very snappy with the help email and after a couple of exchanges I fixed the problem. They have always IIRC asked that the "My server requires authentication" option be checked, but I never had. Didn't need too apparently, until sometime last week while I was on vacation. Once I checked that box all the accounts were working except for one, my Brian_the_Red one.

I tried changing the password, but that didn't help. I could sign on to webmail, but every time I tried to send from Outlook Express it kept hanging during the authentication process. I stumbled on a clue when in an attempt to fix this I deleted the user Brian_the_Red and added it right back in. When I entered all the info and I hit OK it informed me that it was changing the username to all lowercase. Sure enough when I changed the login name to all lowercase - bingo- the mail got out.