Month: September 2010

I Hope It is Worth It

First off, Happy Birthday Ron!

Okay, we’re down to the final hour with all the marbles on the line.  Let’s do a quick check 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …. 5…. oh crap, I’m down a post.  What to do, what to do.  Actually, there are no worries, I have been loading up my SmugMug site with a ton of pictures.  One of my recent favorites is a set of macro shots I took on our porch a few months ago.  I was was walking on the porch one sunny day when one of the more interesting insects decided to take a stroll on my siding.

Probably out of the insects I come upon around here, the praying mantis is the one that fascinates me the most (the stick bug comes in a close second).  From a photographer’s perspective, they have a nice vibrant color and a ton of cool features that pop out nicely under the macro lens.  They have a number of dynamic features ranging from the hook like feet, highly articulated legs and fine hairs running along the edges.  The best part of working with these specimens is that they are fairly docile and do not tend to panic at the presence of a camera glass shoved close to their face.  Speaking of which, this one was practically posing for the glass.

In case you are wondering, in this particular shot he is gnawing on his own foot.  Check out the creepy pupils.  They can track just about anywhere around the eye bulb and basically remained on me the entire time, regardless of what position or angle the camera was in.  Here is another on of the face with the pupils transitioned up to the top of the head.  Based on nature’s law, typically, animals with such range of vision are considered the prey where the more forward fixed animals fall in the predator range.  By that rule, one would think the mantis was somewhat docile, but the male mantis probably has a different opinion of that seeing as how the the female rips the cranium off of him after mating.

hit the jump for more shots!

Continue reading I Hope It is Worth It

LE[ts]GO Screw Up a Good Thing

Pretty much chalking this up to the month of angst.  It is hard to say if this is just due to over-sensitivity to all the poor service we have encountered over this period or if the current state of the economy and the incompetency in our government is starting to weigh too heavy.  We will know soon enough with November just around the corner, but for now, I’ll just chalk it up to the former and just assume we’ve stumbled into a nest of stupidity.  If you recall, from my previous post on Steam, we are very sensitive to bandwidth since our satellite service has limited throughput and a 24 hour 300M cap.  Yes, I know this is my own choosing, but you keep your large pipe and I’ll continue to use my firearms, burn when I need to and most of all enjoy the peace and tranquility the country offers.  With that said, we do have fun when everyone can make it out for  some Rock Band.  Up to this point, we have worked around the network requirements.  A few hours before everyone shows up, I fire the game up to make sure any required updates are completed and pull down any new songs for the night.  Well, that was up until last weekend.   Linda bought me LEGO Rock Band game as a gift sometime back.  One of the features of this release is it allowed you to export the songs into the Rock Band 2 DLC cache.  Not for free, of course, but like the AC/DC pack it just takes a key code, some Microsoft points and the physical disk to copy the songs from.  That is what I thought before 4:00pm the day of the gig.

First off, hop over to the LEGO Rock Band website and use the key code bundled with the game disk to generate a redemption code for the export – Check.  Next, get on the Xbox marketplace and redeem some Microsoft points – Check.  Following that, load up the LEGO Rock Band game and head on over to the Export option – Check.  Now purchase the export package and sit and listen to the disk whirl away as it extracts the songs off of the disk – Ch…. hmmm.. wait a second, it sounds a little too quiet.  Now that I recall, it did mention something regarding 1.2G download, but figured that it was just how much space the songs would take up once copied from the disk.  Could it be that it is really trying to download all those songs from the Marketplace?  This was not how the AC/DC pack worked.  A quick Google check seemed to confirm the download conclusion.  So let’s do some quick math… 1.2G / (300M) per 24 hrs gives about 4 days worth of standard download allotments.  Comparing that to the 3 hours I had left before the rest of the band showed up and you get SOL.  As with the Steam issue, the disk was legally purchased, I have the physical media in my hand, paid the required fee which added $10 to the overall cost of the disk, followed all the procedures and yet some genius decided everyone had high speed Internet and would be more than happy to wait for a 1.2G download before being able to play the songs.  Up to this point, RB has done everything right – plenty of DLC and imports of expansion packs, but this latest requirement is not appreciated.  Later that evening, I started the download in my uncapped window (1-5AM) and got it down that way so, at least  next time I’m ready.

Note to the RB coders, I’ll let this slide if you  will finally add some decent stats to the game so we can assess our efforts better.

Wait Equipment

My battle with a pretty nasty hamstring problem continues to rage on.  14 calendar pages have come and gone since injuring it during a run last year.  A local Sports Medicine/Surgery outfit has been putting the pieces back little by little.  Since getting diagnosed by them I’ve been spending twice a week in therapy with a steady diet of strength training and intense ultrasound.  In honor of today’s solid 2 mile run at a pretty aggressive pace, this post centers on a recently purchased piece of weight equipment.  A staple of the rehab has been leg presses/squats to re-strengthen damage in the hammie.  Up to this point I rarely strength trained the legs due to all the years in martial arts and my passion for outdoor work.  Now with the imbalance caused by the injury, it is a necessary evil.  In order to increase the pace of recovery, I decided to enhance my home gym with a freestanding leg press.  After a lengthy research and exhausting all local establishments, the winner was an offering off of Amazon.  The rest of my gym is based on a unit from Body Solid and I have had zero complaints about their product or service (they even replaced all of my cabling for free without a moment’s hesitation  after 8 years of heavy use thanks to their lifetime guarantee policy).

The unit was on sale (about $500 less than local places and free shipping), but the damage was in the grand range.  Here is what the new baby looks like.

Hit the jump to read the “Rest of the Story”

Continue reading Wait Equipment

Let Off Some Steam, Bennett

I happen to harboring some angst this weekend and decided to get this one out of the way while I am still feeling edgy.  So I’ve been dealing with the BMW issue (see last post), yesterday an estimator for a concrete company failed to show up as promised for some work I am looking to get done and then I have the topic of today’s post.  To set the background, keep in mind I have a satellite based Internet service due to a decision to live out in the country.  Trust me, I’d make that decision again in a heartbeat.  The downside of this is a) I can no longer game with my friends across the net, b) the best performance I can get is 1.5M on nice sunny days and lastly c) my usage cap is 300M every 24 hrs with unlimited between the hours of 1 and 5AM.  This is Hughes Net in case you were wondering, which far exceeds what we were getting with Wild Blue.  With all this, I can still enjoy local gaming and tend to gravitate to the war or fantasy based games.  These are all played in solo mode of course which means the cost of any multiplayer game far exceeds my usage.

At some point I acquired Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (either Xmas or Bday gift, can’t remember).  Finding some extra time one night in my schedule, I decided to install it and play a little to relax and let of some stress.  I Made it through the packaging and dropped the disk into the drive.  Next thing I see is it needs to install Steam.  For those not familiar with this product, it is an Internet service that provides patches, friend status and in some cases copyright control.  You could have heard my groan half way into town.  This was a pain when I had cable service and now my connectivity was severely limited.  A quick check of the back packaging did reveal a small warning (at the bottom of the package) that it required Internet access TO ACTIVATE the product.  Well, activation can’t be that bad can it?  Wrong!  So first I have to install Steam which immediately goes out and DOWNLOADS the latest version of the product which takes over 35 minutes to complete with no indication of how big it is in order to keep tabs on my download limit.

I lucked out and remembered an old account when I was still on a better network.  The program eventually loads and the actual game program loads from the local disk – for emphasis, loaded from the manufacturer’s disk which was legally purchased by someone’s hard earned money.  With eager anticipation, the solo campaign icon was hit and the game…. wait.. the Steam window comes up and logs into my account.  Fine, it is probably just a quick validation and on to the ga…. wait… apparently in order to configure Steam to play offline, I have to make sure the latest version of the game is installed.  Anger has now replaced all anticipation to play.  It is 10PM and now the game needs to download patches.  Just how long might this take on the satellite connection?

That’s right folks, 1 hour and 5 minutes and again, absolutely no indication of the amount of data it is downloading so I do not even know if I can get it all in under the cap.  How cute, a little toggle to automatically start the game as soon as it is ready.  I hope the bats enjoy the game because I’ve given up waiting on it.  The dogs decided they needed to go out later that night.  Since it was after 1AM, I dropped by the computer and kicked off the download.

The next night I decide to see if the game was worth the wait.  Immediately, those plans were ripped to shreds.

The iTouch alerts and mail checks were all successful so the problem is likely on Steam’s side.  Let’s summarize, the game was legally purchased, I have no plans to play the game on the Internet, assumed the game was thoroughly tested before packing it in the first place and have zero use for Steam beyond the copy protection capabilities it is providing to the game.  With all that, I still have not been able to play the game for two days.  Needless to say, my wish list and actual purchases will no longer contain any product that requires Steam to run.  If this is the future of copy protection, then I’m calling it quits.  This is doubly insulting based on the fact this particular game was selling out all over the place when it came out.  In case you are wondering, I did finish the game.  As a review, if you like console games you should feel right at home… if you are instead installing it on a PC then recall how you felt once Unreal Tournament 3 came out and ruined the experience.

In my best Arnold imitation, “Let off some Steam, Bennett”  and go and uninstall that crap.

Time For Some Pressure Words

Okay,do you happen to remember a previous post regarding our BMW 135i that was spending a significant amount of time in the shop due to a reoccurring engine light issue?  I believe that particular post was summarizing the third time we had to take that vehicle in to get it serviced for loss of pressure in the fuel system.  Now for the critical part.  Do you recall the last words from that post?…. let me remind you.  “So for now, no harm done, but if that light goes on again, we’ll be having some “pressure” words for sure.”  I might as well keep the quiz format going a little longer.  Any guesses as to what happened the second time out on the road with it?  If you said, “crappy German engineering took center stage again”, then give yourself 100 points because that is exactly what happened.  The first day after getting back from the shop, I drove it to work and back without incident.  About 5 days later Linda decided to take it on a drive.  Sure enough, the light came on again.  I about went ballistic when she told me this.

Being the weekend, we had to wait until Monday to call and make an appointment to get it serviced.  Linda dropped it off on Tuesday morning and once again picked up a 328 loaner – this one was a step up from the previous ones since it had the X drive (all wheel) and slightly improved interior.  For the record, if there is one thing we have learned through all of this is we definitely do not want to ever purchase a 328 – they might want to rethink their approach when customers are bringing in better cars to be serviced.   At first the service department claimed that the car was throwing random errors to the diagnostic device and therefore were unable to determine what the real problem was.  The following day, the conclusion was the same loss of pressure issue.  As before they were going to take the car completely apart and smoke the system to see if there were any leaks.  No word came the next day or and by later the second day we decided action was required.  In the meantime, I had read up on the Illinois Lemon Law and confirmed it was 4 service calls, but that particular law indicated it had to be in the first year.   It was over a year since we purchased the vehicle, however, it is a pleasure car that rarely gets driven – only has a little over 6K miles on it.

At wits end, we decided to head over there after work and get some answers in person.  Just before heading out, Linda called me and suggested we call first to give them some time to get answers before our arrival.  We did not want to waste our time if there was nobody to talk to.  We added the service rep into our conference call and asked him pointed questions about the status of our vehicle.  In particular, we wanted to know who in their management was aware of the issue and the name of the BMW district rep.  It didn’t seem like their service manager was aware of the situation and he became very concerned about giving us access to the BMW rep.  After some direct and sharp discussion, the rep promised to inform the manager and follow up with the mechanic working on the car.  At that point Linda recommended we stay put for awhile and wait for the response.  About 30 minutes later, the rep called Linda back and confirmed that he had talked to both the service manager and the mechanic.  They had found a small leak in the system and were expediting parts to fix it.  Somewhat to our surprise, the rep also said the service manager had approved giving us a financial payment for our troubles equal to one of our monthly car payments.  This would mean our car wouldn’t be ready until Monday which we accepted having no options at that point.  The payment became an interesting discussion since it didn’t occur to the rep we had paid cash and was not leasing or making loan payments.  He didn’t have an answer for that, but promised us he would get us a figure.  So at this point, we now have the proper people engaged, there is a plan to fix the car and we were going to be compensated for our troubles (well, at least they promised us)

That Monday Linda called in the late afternoon to get a status on the car.  They had completed the changes and were in the process of taking it on a test drive.  After that, they had to check it over and wash it.  Due to the time, Linda recommended she pick it up the following morning to give them time to get it done right.  Our baby is home now and with one test drive completed it seems to be holding together.  There will be plenty more drives before we are confident the issue is resolved.  We still have not received a check but we did get our fourth email from the dealership begging us to give them superior ratings on the BMW survey we might get from their corporate offices.  I even went back and compared it with the other 3 emails from before and it was almost verbatim (the fourth had an extra sentence due to a change on the survey).  Once again the blood pressure spiked to dangerous levels.  40 minutes later, the send button was pressed on a very scathing email.  In a nutshell, I asked her how she thinks we would feel having brought a car in four times for the exact same problem and their main concern is what our survey answers were going to be.

This has been extremely frustrating and Linda has already decided one more engine light issue means a one way trip for the car back to the dealer.  The hard part about all of this is she actually likes the car and enjoys driving it … when it isn’t in the shop.

An Interesting Visitor

A week or so ago, Linda called me regarding a creature that was staring into our great room patio doors.  The odd thing is she was unable to tell me exactly what it was other than it was big, furry and the dogs were quite upset about it violating their space.  Short of a large rat, I still was not sure what it could be. One idea came to mind – “did it look like an otter and have a long skinny tale?”, I asked.  That resulted in a negative response which ruled out my arch nemesis the muskrat.  Luckily, she managed to take some  pictures.

It definitely was not a muskrat.  Turns out it was a groundhog.  Oddly enough, this is probably the first groundhog we have seen on our property since we acquired it.  We have had our share of squirrels, snakes, ground squirrels (or chipmunks), plenty of deer and that damn muskrat, but not one of these oversized rodents.

Apparently they are pretty nimble seeing as how it managed to balance itself on a single 4 inch board on our deck.  By this time the boys were in full bark so it was probably figuring out what its escape plan was.  Guessing it was more afraid of the large human yelling at it and taking pictures through the glass doors.

Finally a shot that showed its bushy tail confirming that it wasn’t the devil spawn muskrat (yes, I harbor deep hatred).  Not only is it nimble, it apparently does not have any bones in that fur.  That railing is only about 5 inches off the deck and it managed to squeeze its whole body under it.  To be honest, it looks kind of cute with its perky ears and plush fur.  Cute or not, it still needs to find another place to roam – their holes tend to be fairly large and destructive.  We had one living under a shed at our old house and it managed to dig a huge ditch all the way around the skids it sat on.  I had to put up a screen all the way around the shed to keep it out.

Hit the jump for a few more shots

Continue reading An Interesting Visitor