Month: December 2008

It’s My Blogging Anniversary

Okay, it is officially tomorrow, but it will be my 1 year anniversary of committing to this whole blogging whim.  If nothing else, I get to check another thing off my life list.  I held myself to completing at least a year of this with a determination at the end of that time to decide to continue or not.  For my own selfish reason I decided to provide a summary of this year’s output (data includes this post):

  • According to the WordPress Stats: Total Posts 99 and 27 comments
  • Total pages (according to MS Word):155
  • Total number of words (according to MS Word):66,172
  • Post topics (some posts had multiple categories)
    • Birds:9
    • General:9
    • Observation:59
    • Ramblings:6
    • Recollection:10
    • Service:13
    • Uncategorized:0
    • Wildlife:0
  • Blogs by month (numbers did not come out right – think WordPress was reporting wrong by month
    • 12/0:1
    • 1/08:12
    • 2/08:7
    • 3/08:9
    • 4/08:7
    • 5/08:13
    • 6/08:7
    • 7/08:6
    • 8/08:6
    • 9/08:6
    • 10/08/:10
    • 11/08:7
    • 12/08:7
  • Writing style: conversational
  • Most common grammatical error: using “to” instead of “too”- Word loves to point this out to me
  • Number of WordPress uprades:1
  • Number of reference links used:45
  • Number of images used:81
  • Languages uses: 2 (English and a Greek word)
  • Completed Life List Items: 4
    • Ran the Steamboat 15K – toughest in IL
    • Purchased apiece of art
    • Blogging for one year
  • Maintained convictions:2
    • Never giving Metallica a penny of my money
    • Ban from RIAA backed musicians (and I won by the way – RIAA has decided to stop suing their customers – await upcoming post on this topic)
  • Posted 85 more items than my brother over at Dead Reckonings (he clocked in at 13) – yeah, he has me on quality by far… really far actually, but I like to harp on my tiny infrequent wins over my parent’s favorite 8^)
  • Personal Revelations:
    • I actually read more books than I thought this year
    • My disposition is clearly on the sarcasm side
    • Pet peeve – bad service
    • I remember more than I thought from my childhood
    • Clearly interested in marketing and economics – ironic since those were my worst subjects in school
    • Definitely leveraging all of his elective psychology classes
    • Enjoys nature

I must admit, I enjoyed my time blogging and I am pretty pleased with the end result.  It strange being able to look back and actually have snapshots in time with aspects that impacted your life along with your person reaction or reasoning at that time.  Since only a year has passed, most of my viewpoints have not changed a great deal, however, it may be interesting to review this content in 5 years or so to see if my disposition has changed or life experiences have altered the way I look at certain situations.  As of now, I have decided to continue with this effort, but I want to change a few things in an effort to improve upon the output:

  • Infuse a more graphic perspective – what probably has not come out in all this is my interest in photography and all things related to art in general.  You probably caught a little bit of that with the art purchase post and the photos of wildlife etc.  While creating this summary, I was shocked at how skewed it was to the textual side.
  • I need to get caught up with my observations.  I still have a large number of items written down that I want to post on the blog.  If nothing else, I want to be sure and capture the thoughts associated with those occurrences when they happen.
  •   Branch out into some additional topics.  This year I focused on the bird side of the wildlife (and thus why it had its own category).  Being out in the country, I have a great variety of different insects and animals that I get to observe just about every day including; deer, snakes, spiders, coyotes etc.  I also want to add a new category on the topic of stupid engineering.  I am getting tired of poor execution on product delivery and have a growing list of examples I would like to share.
  • And finally, and to be honest, the most apprehensive goal is to increase viewer numbers and comments.  I purposely left this site unadvertised and somewhat private as I navigated through what I wanted to do with this site.  I was also struggling with the ramifications of knowing others would be viewing the content and might be offended or think differently of me if they did not agree with a position I took or a comment that was made.  This is still a concern of mine, but the only way I’ll get an answer to this is to simply try it.

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone that did take the time to read my ramblings and especially appreciative of those who invested time to add comments.  It has been fun and looking forward to continuing this in 2009.

Merry Christmas To All

Just wanted to take a quick timeout and wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  Hope you got everything you were wanting (and admit it, clearly did not need) and if you’ve been partying a little too much, slide those keys to someone you trust as a true friend.

Now back to my new ION Drumset to improve my under 300 world ranking on Rock Band.  Thanks Santa!

Not A Creature Was Stirring, Not Even A Mouse

I must admit, today I was utterly surprised.  Every Christmas Eve, I head out to the shopping malls and popular stores.  No, I am not a procrastinator and usually have all my required gifts already purchased (maybe not wrapped yet, but that is whole different story).  No, the only reason I do this is for the sheer entertainment value from watching holiday shoppers.  The best time to observe people is always at times of stress and there is not too many other days that rate higher on the stress meter than the day before St. Nick breaks into our homes and showers the good with presents.  I can remember the numerous occasions of people attacking line-cutters, angry shoppers engaging store employees, customers wrestling for the last Furbie and the all too common denial of credit card.  For a people watcher this is good as gold and since I was not in any time constraints I could slink back into the crowd and take it all in.

So, off I went today anxious as to what I might observe.  First off, Best Buy.  I wanted to do a quick check to see if there were any last minute reductions on laptops and figured I would check if they happened to have a gift for Linda someone had mentioned a few days ago (again, just a bonus since her shopping has been done for awhile).  There was the usual traffic cop directing traffic through the ridiculous single entrance to Cub/Lowes/Best Buy stores, but he really was not doing that much.  I was not even stopped or delayed once all the way into the parking lot.  This was definitely an odd occurrence.  Once parked, in a semi-filled BB lot I headed into the store expecting to see people defending their finds.  Again, nothing.  Some people were milling about, but that was about it.  I checked out the gift idea and there it was sitting on the shelf and nobody even looking in that direction.  I decided to go ahead and grab it and would instead have fun watching all the people get extremely annoyed in the checkout line.  When I arrived up front, I noticed they had recently put the blue line guides on the carpet and had snaked it out into the store for optimal capacity.  For clarification purposes, I had NO PROBLEM noticing it because I could see it clearly the entire time as I was walking straight up to an empty cashier.  Only two other people were checking out in the 3 other open registers.  This was an absolute first.  I disappointingly paid for my items and walked out of the store in disbelief.

On my way out, my wife called and wanted me to get some driveway salt for her mother who was having difficulty locating it in the Quad Cities.  Excellent, another opportunity to see the mad dash for last chance gifts for Dads.  This soon became ominous when I ended up parking about 8 spots from the door and that included the protection buffer I keep to protect my doors from those who apparently have no appreciation for others.  I crossed over the door beam and walked into a nearly empty store.  I counted no more than 40 people as I walked through the various aisles.  I located in the salt, found some lithium grease for an upcoming blog topic and again walked directly up to the cashier and paid for my items.  This is totally unbelievable.  In fact, I was so amazed, I ended up calling my wife to relay my disappointment.  Luckily she mentioned the dogs probably needed a couple more items for their stockings (don’t laugh, they are treated better than most kids) so I headed down past Cub to the local PetSmart.  This looked more like it.  I had to park pretty far out into the lot (buffer still included) and had a significant walk to the door.  There were definitely more people there than at Lowes, but there was definitely a more low keyed if not joyous atmosphere as people discussed how cute a particular collar was or validated the squeaker actually worked on a particular stuffed animal.  I had my first chuckle of the day since I validated a previous observation I had been working on.  Based on my findings, almost all people will check a squeaker no less than 2 times before they are satisfied that it actually works.  This testing process rarely goes past 4 squeaks because I think people start feeling self-conscious at that point because about then people in view start to stare.

I continued looking around, but could not find a single instance of any stressed out people.  Even the dogs were being nice to each other.  I grabbed a few stocking stuffers and headed up to the cashiers.  There was finally a small line at the registers and by that I mean each of the open registers were checking out a customer.  Finally, I could experience a wait scenario which usually breeds grumpiness.  My chance had finally arrived… NOPE.  A lady walks around the corner and asks to check me out in the register a row over.  So reluctantly, I moved over to that counter and completed the transaction.  She was even very nice indicating that she had not had her fill of unruly pet owners for the day.

Drats!  A complete waste of time.  Where is everyone?  Are the holiday shopping activities really this bad?  Has the economy in Peoria finally caught up with the rest of the States (as of last month, our housing market was still going strong)?  Has the recent Caterpillar announcements on layoffs and pay freezes significantly dampened the holiday festivities?  I doubt everyone has done their shopping early this year for that would be in out of character for the previous 18 or so years I have been making the Christmas Eve run.  For now, my best guess is the bad economy has hit everyone hard.  I will be interested in seeing the final revenue statistics from the local merchants.

Oh well, best wishes for a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Look at all the Deers and Gooses

Holiday Greetings everyone.  I am still getting back on my feet after experiencing the network issue which eventually degraded to an all out rebuild of my system(s).  I am still experiencing an annoying problem with my FTPs into GoDaddy.  I am not sure if it is a Satellite Internet problem or an incompatibility on the GoDaddy side.  Unfortunately, this is limiting my ability to upload images, but I hope to have this resolved soon.  In the meantime, I thought I would share some recent observations on the language front.

The other day, I was in Best Buy looking at some laptops they had on sale.  For some reason my hearing attention was instantly drawn to a lady employee assisting another couple out.  I honestly do not know what the actually conversation was about, but what struck me immediately was her comment “Oh, you wanted to check out the mouses as well”.  Before we go any further, I will quickly put a disclaimer that I am not the most English language versed individual out here and if you read many of my posts, I do make some grammar and spelling mistakes from time to time.  This is likely a result of choosing physics and computers over English in college.  I did have a number of electives in English Literature which I enjoyed tremendously, but in an elective and non-career situation only.  I actually asked my wife if she heard the same quote and she actually asked if I was referring to the mouses.

Unable to make a decision regarding the laptop, we headed for home only to turn around again to quickly purchase a gaming console HDMI cable at Target.  I finally found what I needed and was putting my my item on the checkout counter when I hear “Where he now”.  That officially makes two language errors in different stores within the same hour.   I can just imagine how this would go in the texting crazed world – “O U wantd 2 chck/o mouss” and “? he nw”.

On my way home I tried to understand if this was a global phenomenon or whether I was more sensitive to it that night.  It then occurred to me that there was probably a catalyst to all of this based on an observation that happened a couple of weeks ago.  I was coming back from reserving a Wii Fit and passing through the Alta residential area.  In one of the driveways, there was a large white pickup truck sitting in a driveway just off the road.  The back of the truck had giant white letters that spelled “You’re In America Speak English” (I was going too fast to verify the punctuation).  Interesting, here was an individual that was extremely sensitive to non-English conversations – so much in fact he needed to announce it to anyone he drove past.  I almost doubled back to get a picture, but decided it was too cold to be wasting time.  The part I found ironic was the very next day we were invited to a coworkers house for a late lunch/early dinner gathering.  These people live no more than 2 blocks from where the truck was sitting and are on assignment our European facility.  The guy I work with speaks fluent French, Portuguese and English (probably more as well) and his wife speaks French, Portuguese and a good amount of English.  They also had some friends over to share the event.  For the record, he was from Wisconsin and spoke Portuguese and was working on learning French for a new assignment overseas.  I believe his wife was from Brazil and spoke fluent Portuguese and English (also working on learning French).  We had an absolutely wonderful time and at various times we heard both French and Portuguese depending on who was communicating to who or if some clarification was needed regarding a translation or explanation of a particular experience.  What was astonishing was how well they had grasped a fairly difficult (strange rules yet by their experience basic on the verb/subject combination) language.  I would bet that they could give the truck owner a run for his money on any language skills competition and even knew to keep the tricky ‘s’ at the end of multiple deer.

In summary, I think I was more attentive to the spoken word having seen the truck visual and having recently experienced a multilingual dinner.  It is more likely that Americans need to spend a little bit more time listening in class and a little less time worrying about losing our national language.  If we cannot use it correctly, how can we expect others to willingly adopt it?  What was probably the most disappointing aspect was the fact my 3 years toiling away in Spanish class did not provide any help at dinner.

Ciao!

An Entertaining Night

Just back from the Trans Siberian Orchestra Concert in Peoria tonight.  This is somewhere around my 4th time seeing them and I can tell you they still put on a great show.  I think for the third year in a row we got the West coast version with Al Petrelli.  It appears he previously took a nasty fall off the stage and destroyed his knee.  He had a pretty big brace on it and was moving on it gingerly.  That did not stop him from shredding up the night alongside his wife on the keyboards.  I will not go much into the show since you really need to experience it yourself – especially you like your music fast, in your face and played to perfection.  I did appreciate the fact they changed it up since the last time we saw it.  They changed the dueling keyboards and moved up the “Strat” vs “Gibson” shred-off into the middle of the Christmas story.  A strange place for it, but it worked for me.

There were two interesting aspects of the night I did want to comment on.  First off, we could not locate our seats.  My wife had purchased them at the Civic Center Box Office so we new they were legit.  Unfortunately, the row numbering scheme confused us.  When we got to our section, we headed into the first level concourse and showed the tickets to the attendant there.  He directed us to the first rows in the level above us.  So we headed up there, passed the press box rows and checked out the first row number.  Turns out it was row 9.  We looked at the press boxes and noticed there were only two rows there which on best guess would make it rows 8 and 7.  Totally confused, we went back down and talked to another attendant and explained our situation.  He was confused as well and walked us up to the press boxes and told us to just sit in the second row (our guess row 8 ) and see what happens.  This NEVER works out for me so I went back down and talked to the first attendant and told him we were still confused.  I do not think he actually believed me, but he did walk up to the seats with me and I re-explained the situation.  This time he understood the situation and decided he needed to contact his supervisor.  So we walked back down and located her.  We ALL proceeded back up to the seats and had the exact same discussion resulting in the exact same confusion.  This time the lady told us to go ahead and sit there (I had Linda move down to row 7 which seemed more logical to me) and she would go to the box office and get it straightened out for us.  10 or 15 minutes later she came back and confirmed that we were now actually in the correct seats.  I still think we were in row 7, but the deduction we made is that the rows were wider to fit the tables in so they had to remove a row.  Anyway, we sat in the press box which ended up being a pretty cool place to watch the concert from.  The table actually cut down a bit of the stage view, but you could stretch out and see the rest if wanted to.

About 75% into the concert, we noticed a security guard talking to someone two rows below us (in the lower bowel).  He seemed to be getting upset because the person he was talking to wasn’t cooperating with him.  Eventually a guy about 55 or 60 in a brown sport coat stood up and followed the security guard.  It was just him and he really didn’t say anything as he weaved through the row.  We speculated that it might be smoking or possibly filming but his age threw me off for the latter.  A little later, my wife went out to the restroom.  On her return, she relayed the fact that same individual was out in the hall with multiple security guards and he apparently was holding a high end 35mm digital camera.  Turns out the security guards were forcing him to delete the pictures off of the memory card.  A smart person would have put spares in his coat pocket and periodically switched them out so he at least got some benefit for the effort.

That is it for tonight.  My ears are still ringing a little and my eyes took a beating with the strobes.

Shred On!

We Have Confirmation

I freed up a few minutes from work to make a quick post.  I hate going this long, but I am closing out some large projects which is taking me on some long days.  I thought I would comment on things I did not know Monday morning, but I do today.

  • I now know who my Lieutenant Governor is for my state.  For Illinois, this would be Pat Quinn
  • Our soon to be EX-Governor knows some naughty words
  • Our soon to be EX-Governor is married to someone that thinks she is worth 150K a year
  • Jesse Jackson’s kid is now also known as Senate Candidate 5
  • Attorney General Patrick Fitzgerald has an impressive trial record
  • Soon to be EX-Governor Rod Blowjobovich is living with visions of grandeur coupled with delusional thoughts
  • Illinois actually averages a governor being jailed once in every 10 years
  • Taking on the Chicago Tribune is not a winning situation
  • There are people out there willing to withhold funds to children focused charitable organization for personal campaign contributions
  • Soon to be EX-Governor has had his phone wiretapped since before the election
  • There are a tremendous amount of people who dislike the soon to be Illinois EX-Governor as much as I do
  • EX-Governor Jim Edgar is a complete idiot based on his comment that the problem with the Illinois politics is the voters – last I looked, I can only vote on the small list of candidates each party focuses on – and if you look at the past Illinois election and see who the Republican party put their hopes on you’ll understand why it is not OUR fault – at least we are rid of you and your ridiculous tea toting policies on alcohol at the State Fair.

Notice that I did not include the following in this list because they were already known

  • Political corruption runs deep with Illinois
  •  Rod Blowjobovich is as crooked as they come – I wonder if he would have been in this much trouble if he had actually moved to Springfield like he was supposed to!
  • Downstate voters have very little influence in high level elections
  • Did I mention Rod Blowjobovich is as crooked as they come?
  • Rod Blowjobovich looks like Deputy Dog

Oh well, back to reading this fascinating affidavit.  Hey Rod, don’t drop the soap and good luck on that planned presidential run.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties – Translated… Firefox Sucks UPDATE – WTF?

Sorry for the delay in posts.  I have now come to my end with Firefox.  For the 3rd or 4th time now, Firefox all of sudden stops loading one of the websites I go to at a high frequency.  Sometimes it is this blog, sometimes it is my brother’s blog, sometimes it is one of my other popular sites.  It was working fine right before I traveled for Thanksgiving Holidays.  Then I return and it stops loading my blog this time.  It keeps giving Connection Interrupted – Ser…

 I don’t believe this…

I brought up Firefox again to capture the error message and low and behold it works now.  I cannot figure this out at all.  I searched all of the web and got the usual… it is your ISP, it is your Firewall, turn off IPV6 in Firefox blah blah blah.   In the previous times, I had been able to go back to an old restore point and get it to work again.  Unfortunately, this time it was to long and it had rolled off my restore.  So to put things in perspective I:

  • Tried all my restore points
  • Rebooted numerous times
  • Flushed my DNS
  • Released and Renewed my IP
  • Cleared out all caches – cookies and content
  • Reset all of my networking and assigned new IP addresses
  • Yes, I did the stupid turn off IPV6 setting in Firefox
  • Gave up and completely rebuilt my entire machine checking it at every single install to see if it would start working – no luck
  • Reapplied gigs worth of OS patches (thanks Microsoft, I appreciate it)
  • Reinstalled all of my apps
  • Stopped short of kicking my PC through the window when it still didn’t work.

Turns out my friend is having a similar problem with some different sites he is trying to view with Firefox – and yet tonight I write a post about it and magically it is working again.  The only good news about all of this is I have an extremely clean windows install now that I plan to clone so I don’t have to go through this crap again.

 Hope you week was better!