Category: General

The Airing of Grievances

Before my relatives panic, this post is not the airing of FAMILY grievances, but rather a small collection of annoyances that have been piling up on my desk over the last couple of months awaiting an opportunity to get them posted on the blog.  It occurred to me today that this would be a perfect time to get this done.  And why is this the perfect time… well, in tribute to the classic Seinfeld episode, it’s “Festivus for the Rest of Us”.  Taking the risk this post will make me out to be a heartless, puppy kicking grinch, I begin…

  • To Peoria news stations, stop reporting on the fictitious high unemployment rate the area is supposedly experiencing.  Why do I believe this is a waste of air time?  Well, this opinion is due mainly to one indicator that is almost always a positive side effect of high unemployment – the Service Meter.  High unemployment by definition implies there are multiple applicants for just about every job – especially in the service industry.  This in turn means the employer has a choice when hiring.  For example, an employer, could say, choose an individual that has higher math skills to fill a numbers related opening like a cashier.  Additionally, it could be a tipping point if one applicant is very positive and cheerful for a position that interacts directly with a customer.  But alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case around here.

    Example #1: A few of us went out to lunch at a local restaurant that begins with an A and ends with an S that serves cheap Italian food.  After completing our meals we headed to the lobby area to pay.  A friend ahead of me was joking about the condition of his penny looked (looks like it had been found by a weekend warrior with a metal detector) and was glad he could finally get rid of it.  It occurred to me that I didn’t have a penny meaning my change due would likely result his penny heading to me.  I gave the cashier my $6 for the $5.27 bill.  As soon as she rang it in, a friend behind me gave her two pennies to apply to my payment (jokingly to prevent me from getting the bad penny).  What proceeded stunned us both.  She literally stared at her register tray picking up random coins and looking dumbfounded.  After about 30 seconds my friend told her the change would be 75 cents which was met with “Thanks, I’m just not good at this thing”  I would have laughed if I wasn’t mortified.  Of course, this is the same restaurant that charges more for two half loafs of bread than one whole loaf (trust me, there is a picture of that menu coming in a future blog).

    Example #2: Linda and I went to a Burger King to get a quick bite to eat while shopping in the area.  After struggling to get my order taken (see the hamburger grievance below) we proceeded to wait for our order to be filled.  We waited and waited and waited while they worked on getting the chicken sandwich cooked – note, we were the ONLY people in there.  Meanwhile, they have my hamburger done sitting on the non-heated ready shelf.  Pretty soon the manager grabs up our fries from the heated fry shelf, slaps it on a tray and sticks it up on the non-heated shelf and proceeded to head for the bathroom.  For the next 10 minutes I stood there staring at my cooling fries and hamburger.  Eventually the chicken finishes cooking.  Sure enough the chicken and hamburger are put on the now cold fry tray and handed to us.  Needless to say, we demanded warm fries (note, manager never did come back).

    Example #3: We made a quick run to McDonalds to get something to drink before Linda’s doctor’s appointment.  The drive-thru was pretty busy (maybe 8 cars lined up) so we went inside to make our order (where there was only one party ahead of us).  Our total order was one small hot chocolate and one small Sprite.  I didn’t clock it, but I had to wait over 15 minutes for them to actually make my hot chocolate.  That 15 minutes actually felt more like 30 minutes having to endure their conversations:

    Hit the jump to see the rest of the grievances:
    Continue reading The Airing of Grievances

The Guys Guide to Bathroom Etiquette – A Work in Progress

Updated:6/16/2011 – Bathroom etiquette has been a pretty hot topic as of late with some of my friends… that is when we can tear ourselves away from discussing the drama of Weinergate or Paris Hilton’s latest reality show.  There appears to be some confusion on some of the guy codes associated with the bathroom and I blame it all on our education system.  Just kidding, we all know it’s the fault of liberals.  Regardless, this situation must be corrected or there will be big trouble come the next Rapture prediction.  Clearly god will not take the risk of someone crossing streams or heaven forbid someone talking on their phone while in the stall.  In an attempt to document the major rules, I decided to go ahead and make a reference post…. and to give my friends the ability to quickly look up some protocols before using the bathroom at work.  Amazingly, I was able to find some notes I made about 10 years ago on this subject to use as a starting point (some of the points on that old list were cryptically written and I am having some trouble understanding what those entries were for – needless to say I may have been under the influence of alcohol when that was first penned).  Please post comments if you need a further explanation, desire to contest a rule, want to add some additional rules or maybe even need a call on a sticky situation.

Hit the Jump to see the Guy Code Rules for Bathroom Etiquette

Continue reading The Guys Guide to Bathroom Etiquette – A Work in Progress

.. and I Have a Problem

Happy New Year Everyone!  Hope you had a safe return from all your festivities last night and if you are lucky, you are not a Big 10 fan as we took a slaughtering today.  I have not made a decision about the fate of this blog yet, but for now, everything as usual and with that… the first entry of the 2011.

“Hello, my name is Brian and I have a problem.”  There are those things that kind of bother you and eventually you find time to address them and get them resolved.  Sometimes those things are like icebergs and as long as you accept the part you can see, you don’t get a feeling for how big the issue is under the waterline.  Of course there are issue that are right in your face each and every day until it starts to fill you with disappointment and regret.  In the latter case, I think it is jut better to accept it, come to terms with it, and recommit yourself to lifting that weight off your shoulder.  This is where I am at with my problem so her goes….

“Hello, my name is Brian and I have a reading problem.”  There, I’ve admitted it.  For clarity sake, it isn’t really a reading problem, but rather a reading BACKLOG problem.  I actually enjoy reading books a lot, but they do take a time commitment of sorts.  I am always finding new titles to read and my hobbies tend to have a prolific amount of written word on them.  My Amazon Wish List always has a number of books on them and I find myself in bookstores from time to time perusing the latest offerings (which generally leads to purchases as well).  As a result, there is a steady flow in, which is great, but that means there needs to be steady flow of information from the book to the brain or you start falling behind…. waaaay behind in my case.  Every day, I walk into my den and look at my bookshelf and sigh.  That is about to end because the new year has brought a new commitment to get through THIS:

hit the jump to see my 2011 goal:

Continue reading .. and I Have a Problem

Another Year of Blogging in the Books

My how time flies these days.  It seems like less than a year ago I committed to this little project but in reality the end of this month marks my third year in the blogging community.  As probably all commitments that take a time investment, the blog content has morphed and expanded a few times, but the theme has remained steadfast.  It may have more entries on wildlife photography and a few new topics like projects and What is This, but they are all things that still intrigue me and hopefully something you find interesting as well.  To continue a year end tradition, I’m posting this summary of the year’s output (data does include this post as it is the 6th post of the month to hit my quota for another month).

  • According to the WordPress Stats: To Date Total Posts 246 and 101 comments
  • According to the WordPress Stats: This Year Total Posts 81 and 52 comments
  • Total blog pages this year (according to MS Word): 340
  • Total number of words this year (according to MS Word): 82,252
  • Post topics (some posts had multiple categories) 2010 / Total
    • Birds: 13 / 33
    • Fail: 0 / 3
    • General: 6 / 25
    • Insects: 2/2
    • Observation: 62 / 172
    • Phoadtography: 3/3
    • Products: 7 / 9
    • Projects: 5/5
    • Ramblings: 1/ 10
    • Recollection: 6 / 16
    • Service: 15 / 41
    • Uncategorized: 0 / 0
    • Wildlife: 29 / 46
    • WIT: 1/1
  • Blogs this year by month
    • Jan: 6
    • Feb: 6
    • Mar: 6
    • Apr: 6
    • May: 7 (bonus month)
    • Jun: 7 (bonus month)
    • Jul: 6
    • Aug: 7 (bonus month)
    • Sep: 6
    • Oct: 6
    • Nov: 6
    • Dec: 6
  • Writing style: conversational (although some service posts took an angry tone)
  • Most common grammatical error: Continuing to leverage Firefox to catch the easy spelling mistakes, but there are still some mistakes getting through.  I also copy all posts to MS Word for backup which does try to detect any grammar errors.  I have noticed a passion to use Do for Due, the misuse of To for Too and my thought stream seems to be outpacing my fairly proficient typing skills causing some small words to be skipped.  This year I decided to re-read all my posts before submitting them (which I ABSOLUTELY hate doing because it feels like I’m back in school) and probably the most helpful, Linda started reading my posts and pointed out a number of mistakes (sometimes with a little too much passion).   Oh, and I do retain all rights to make words up (if Palin can do it, I can do it).
  • Number of WordPress uprades:1 in July – I need to upgrade again, but will make that a task for the new year
  • Number of reference links used: 59
  • Number of images used:  (note, all posts but one had at least one graphic in it hitting my goal – note, missing one was just an update saying my Internet was down and was part of a 7 post month)
    • Wildlife Photos – 206  (oh yeah)
    • Other Photos – 101
    • Custom Graphics – 48
    • TOTAL: 355 (wow)
  • Languages uses: 1 (unless you count Engrish and Brigrish)
  • Completed Life List Items: 6
    • Ran the Steamboat 4mile  – experienced a significant injury this year which held me back on some running goals
    • Ran the BIX7 – (another year another medal)
    • Blogging for a third year hitting my self-imposed 6 post/month quota including three months with an extra post
    • Transforming a portion of my woods into a park setting – including a new trail
    • Constructing a bridge – put the finishing touches on it this year and it is still holding strong
    • Establishing a photo website (http://eddiesoft.smugmug.com)
  • Maintained convictions: 5
    • Never giving Metallica a penny of my money (still not a dime)
    • Ban from RIAA backed musicians
    • Not giving Sprint a dime of my money
    • Lost 12 pounds
    • Made it back from a significant running injury
  • Posted 78 more items than my brother over at Dead Reckonings (he clocked in at 3 again this year) – Of course, this number is significantly skewed when considering quality where his posts make mine look like scraps of trash.  Maybe this year I’ll finally give him a run for the money… yeah, I laughed at that as well.
  • Personal Revelations:
    • My graphic output was definitely through the roof.  A lot of this is due to finally getting my photo website up and running.  From a progression perspective the shots are definitely improving but there is ALWAYs room for improvement.  Having this blog to document the technical aspects and feelings regarding the photos has provided an excellent way to put a historical perspective on the work.
    • My disposition is still on the sarcasm side and my political angst has shown through in a number of posts (there might be a brightspot in the coming year, but I’m not holding my breath)
    • My bad service experiences are still on the rise and the top of that list is my disappointment with BMW.  They have now officially lied to me 3 times (once to my face) regarding a payment they promised and at this point my relationship with the local dealership is all but destroyed.
    • Continue to leverage my elective psychology classes
    • Our woods provides a great amount of enjoyment – it is hard work, but the lot is beginning to resemble the grand plans I made for it after walking the lot the first time trying to decide if this was the right investment for us.
    • Track record for New Year’s resolution is going quite well, but need to fully recover from the running injury to keep meeting those goals

As was the case last year, I think it was a better product this year.  I would love to have more comments and hoping this year will bring in more subscribers and feedback.  I did hit the century mark for comments this month which was very satisfying.  Next year’s resolutions are still in the percolation stage but blogging will likely be part of it (not sure of the quotas yet since this year it was a struggle each month).   If there is one area that I’d like to improve on is decreasing the time when a blog topic occurs and when it makes it to this post.  Not sure how to do this yet due to the backlog, but I might decided to make my topic list a LIFO queue instead of a FIFO queue.

In closing, another big thanks to everyone that took the time to check in on my ramblings.  There is some definite energy expended to keep this site going but it is pretty cool to look back and see what had caught my attention during the course of a year.  This is the reason my posts started having a little blurb before getting into the subject matter in order to put a little context into what was going around me at the time.  There are a lot of interesting things (both good and bad) going on in the world and this blog forces me to be a little more aware of that activity.   The odds are this will continue so hopefully you will all make it back to my little space on the i-superhighway.

Stoner Poodle

For a couple of weeks our youngest toy poodle, Rizzi, has been having some difficulties. He was diagnosed previously as having pancreatitis which has caused him to be on a special diet. At first we thought it was just another flair up that would eventually calm down, but he was continually struggling when he went outside and started having some accidents in the house. Since the symptoms seemed to be getting worse we decided to take him to see his vet. This is what they found:

In case you are not a doctor or stay at Holiday Inn Express, this is a sonogram of Rizzi’s bladder. For ease I went ahead and outlined it. See that huge mass in the middle of that outline? That is, unfortunately, a bladder stone and as you can tell, it’s relatively large in context of the overall bladder size. It was also one with sharp edges all around it which actually gives a clue to the issue – apparently there are smooth ones and sharp ones depending on whether the issue is due to being too acidic or too base (can’t remember which is which right now). Definitely too big to pass and the edges would make it extremely painful. The only course of action was surgery, so with sadness I had to drop him off on Friday to get the procedure done. Having also dropped him off for the pre-exam earlier in the week I have probably slid about 30 notches in his “like” scale. Of course Linda got to rescue him on those two occasions so she’ll surely score this upcoming Valentine’s Day.

Hit the jump to see how the surgery went.

Continue reading Stoner Poodle

Operation: Party on the Patio [Block]

I’m slacking off this month for sure.  I need to get this kicked into gear soon or I’ll be cutting my quota close for the month.  The good news is the smug site is now uploaded with material for this post and a couple more while I was at it.  From my previous post, there was a foreshadowing of upcoming additions on new “operations” that were underway around the lot.  Well, one of those particular tasks was a transformation of this particular part of the lot:

This is a shot of an area of my backyard that happened to be where the builders shoved all the brush and trees during the clearing for the house building phase (about 4 years ago).  A lot of work went into getting it looking in this shape since all the trees were simply piled up with a dozer and excavator.  It took about 3 months to systematically cut free the tree logs (on the right) and deal with the leftover brush it came from on the left.  It reminded me of the old pickup-sticks game having to work my way through the mashed and twisted trees one exposed foot to the next with a chainsaw, loppers and a shovel.  One of the reasons for all this work was the desire to put in a bonfire area.  We put on an annual Halloween cookout party and enjoy starting a fire every once in awhile to roast some hot dogs and have some tasty s’mores (food of the gods by the way).  For the first few years, I simply dug a fairly big hole in the ground and lined it with some of the large logs saved from the clearing pile.  This worked great as long at the weather cooperated (fortunately, the grass finally came in), but the uneven ground wasn’t the ideal situation for chairs and standing around.

This brings us two about one month ago and more accurately, a Friday exactly 9 days before this year’s Halloween party.  The night before my inner voice convinced me to do something to improve this particular area – knowing full well this voice always gets me into trouble by convincing me to take on tasks that have impossible time frames to deliver on.  “Build it and they will come, build it and they will come” kept bouncing around in my head until I finally caved and decided to build a quick patio around the fire pit.  How hard can it be, go to store, get large patio blocks, throw them into place and be done – one day tops!  There is another thing my inner voice always does to me … LIE!  Except for that time when it tried to convinced me to NOT do something on my skateboard (for the record a skateboard given to me by my brother) because I would likely smack headfirst into a concrete stoop… at that particular time it was actually telling the truth ..but alas, I ended up ignoring it and chalked up another visit to the emergency room.  But I digress.    I had already invested in a bunch of 16×16 concrete patio block to help shore up the ground under the bridge so decided to go ahead and just get more of that.  I had a couple left over from that effort and figured if something went wrong I could use one of those.  So Friday after work I cleaned up the area where I wanted the patio to go and made sure the area was mowed and trimmed up.  I also tried to set the dimensions to get and estimate of the block count.   The next morning bright and early I headed off to Menards in the Ram1500.  The blocks were on sale but still came out to around $2.34 each.  I went out and checked the yard to make sure they had enough and then went inside and placed an order for 30 16x16x3 concrete blocks.  At the yard gate, I asked the attendant if he could get someone to lift the block palette up for easier loading..  A clerk eventually came, got the forklift and raised it up to the tailgate where we proceeded to load them into the truck.  While loading them it became apparent each block was running from 30-40 pounds each.  It was then stark reality set in remembering how far the fire pit was from the driveway.  The dude was not willing to come home with me to help on the unloading phase so that left me hauling the blocks out of the bed, putting them on a cart behind the ATV  (max 8 per load), driving out to the pit and unloading them.  I wanted to see how this was going to look so went ahead and placed them down in a loose approximation of where they would go.  As soon as they were all dropped into place, I repeated the entire process with a load of 40 more concrete blocks.

Hit the jump to see when things started going off-course and pictures of the finished product

Continue reading Operation: Party on the Patio [Block]

364 Training Days Left

It’s another one in the books folks!  Yesterday was my 8th running of Bix7 and probably one of the toughest ones yet from a couple of perspectives.  I am still nursing a leg problem I have been trying to get resolved for a number of months and if that was not tough enough to deal with, the weather god decided to unleash on us.  As in previous years, Linda and I went up with some friends of ours.  Ron O. and his son Tim are pictured here BEFORE the race.

I emphasized before since it looks like we already ran the race and now soaked from sweat.  In reality, it was raining from the moment we arrived at the course (7:00am).  The day before the race, the Quad Cities was hit with a major thunderstorm that dropped power lines, tore off tree limbs and even took some roofs off.  The city crews were busy most of the day and night trying to get everything cleaned up for the big race.  Apparently another flare up occurred in the early morning causing even more scurrying around.  The local news were telling everyone to hold off a little longer before coming to the race location in case they had to delay it due to lightening.  I was wondering how they handle lightening due to the dangers involved with 15,000 runners massed in such a tight location.

So we decided to head downtown and hope for the best.  By that time, it was raining pretty good and we were soaked as we made our way to the starting chutes.  It was bearable temperature wise (~low 70s, but when the wind blew it would bring out the goose bumps).  The picture above was actually taken inside while we were making our last visits to the restrooms.  Around 7:40 we made our way to the staging areas and proceed to stand in the rain for the next 20 minutes as they prepared for the start.  Luckily the lightening was holding off so hopes were still on for an official start.  Linda snapped this shot as she waited in her start area.

Gray, gloomy and terribly WET.  I think from a conditions perspective, this was the worst I had ever run in.  Sure, runners like the cool temperatures, but a constant downpour tends to get on your nerves.  At race start time, they lined up the elites, completed the requisite introductions and sang the Anthem.  About 3 seconds after the last notes, a huge lightening bolt flashes across the sky followed by an impressive rumble.  I actually relaxed a bit thinking they would delay the race because of it, but there were no other bolts coming after it.  Sure enough, the gun went off and the mass of humanity starting making its way up the steep  Brady Street hill.  Here is another shot she took at some point after the gun went off.  Note, there is a significant delay before the start ripples down to those in the back staging points.

A couple things of note in this picture.  First, it is still raining (and not just a drizzle).  Second, you can get a feeling of how many people there were if you follow the mass of people up the picture and lastly, some people dress up for this race in various costumes.  Linda wasn’t sure exactly what the individual was wearing in the lower left, but she thought it looked like a giant round of cheese on their head.  Well, at least his head was dry and the cheese looked like it could double as an umbrella.  Linda was doing the 2 mile Quick Bix option (as opposed to the 7 miles for the full race).  This was why she was able to take pictures along the way.  Unfortunately, she was on the move and in the rain, so a lot of her shots were a blurry mess.  She did get a shot of the most important competition out of the entire race field.  This is the one individual that every Quick Bix competitor must beat or forever face humiliation.  Who is this nemesis that puts so much pressure on us (well, the Quick Bixers) every year…..

Sorry for the blur, but it’s the Oscar Mayer Wiener.  You can probably imagine what if feels like to lose to a hot dog.  Guessing this costume was horribly heavy due to the foam soaking up all the water.   Now, coming clean, I was passed at the halfway point by a Where’s Waldo dude, but he was moving pretty darn fast.

As mentioned, the race was pretty tough for me.  I made the first turn up the hill and found myself running through a small lake due to a low point in the road.  Immediately my shoes filled up with water making them feel like boat anchors.  This sucked, but not as much as feeling the squishy slosh every time my foot hit the ground.  At mile two, the left leg hamstring started tightening up as expected, forcing me to concentrate pretty hard on watching the stride length and ankle flex to help compensate for it.  The split times were okay up to the turnaround.  I was not on any PR pace so kept it controlled trying to save the leg for the hard climb back.  About mile 4, the rain subsided a bit which started raising the heat index to an uncomfortable level.  I decided to partake on a couple more water stations than usual to to keep the demons at bay.  About mile 5.5, the rain started up again which felt good at first, but quickly turned annoying as I approached the left turn back to Brady Steet.  Remember that lake I hit there at the start… well, I hit it again packing on all the water weight I had ran out of the shoe since the last dunking.  By now, the leg was hurting and the water on the road made me more cautious than usual as I made it down the steep incline.  When I passed over the finish line, I had nothing left in the tank.  I had given it my all which is all I expect out of myself in every race.  I came in around ~61:04 which is significantly slower than my previous (healthy) year of 56:41, but faster than the 66.24 the year before.  All things considered, with my leg problems and the hampered training schedule that caused coupled with the rain, I’ll take the time.  I have 364 days to prepare for a better run next year.  In retrospect, I guess any vertical finish is better than having to go home in one of these….

Ironically, we look about the same as when we started.  Oh, by the way, Tim came in just under 46:00 (he’s 21, give me a break) and his dad Ron came in with an impressive 64:09, surpassing his pre-race expectations.  Reminded by this picture, I need to point out a sad situation that occurred during they race.  Running is an athletic event that can stress your system.  Your training can have a definite influence on how your body handles that stress.  There are also health issues that may be aggravated by running and quite honest those things that just happen for one reason or another.  I am sad to say that a 41 year old male collapsed at mile 6 and passed away.  He was a wrestling coach in a city about 15 minutes North of us.  Our deepest sympathies to his wife (who was also running) and family.  Let’s all be careful on the road!

Also, congratulations to Ryan Hall for a tremendous performance to take the ribbon.  I always appreciate it when an elite runner comments on just how tough the Bix7 is and he even congratulated all the runners who competed in the race.  Everything looks good for him to have a great run in the Chicago Marathon and quite frankly one of the true bright spots in our Olympic Running program.

Now time for me to plan out this week’s training schedule.

What Is This (WIT)  ANSWER:

As you may know, the last post was the first WIT.  I thought it would be harder, but two of our readers nailed the quiz.  It was indeed a scaled model of a Wankel Rotary Engine.  They were pretty common in the Mazda RX series of cars, but I don’t believe they really caught on in domestic cars.  Apparently there were some issues with maintenance of them – See Skid’s great comments.  Congratulations to Skidmarks (who was first) and my brother for identifying the mystery object.

Another Successful System Upgrade!

Good news everyone, the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 is now officially complete.  As mentioned previously, I was a little hesitant to embark on this endeavor since it is my main workhorse machine and really the heart of my day to day activities.  Adding to the complexity, my new provider caps me at 300MB per 24 hrs with the exception of 1-5AM.  It did not start out exactly smooth, but some blame is on the space between the chair and the keyboard.  The upgrade was from Windows XP Professional 32Bit to Windows 7 Professional 64Bit.  There is some question where the 7 Professional was really needed, but that purchases was pre-release and thus too many months in the past to worry about.  Unfortunately, when I slipped the 64Bit upgrade disk in an error popped up saying the install disk was not compatible with my OS.  This definitely resulted in quite a surprise.  Of course I tried it again using the exact same process expecting for some reason a different result.. yeah, I know insanity.  It then occurred to me to try and boot off of it.  A couple of attempts at that before realizing my BIOS wasn’t set up to boot off the CD Drive.  This was corrected and sure enough the upgrade boot was successful.  From that point on, the install was pretty smooth – besides working around the download of the updates in the uncapped morning hours.  It took about 5 hours for me to get all but one of my applications re-installed.  A significant portion of that was getting my mail client (Thunderbird) to resync with my backup.  I was a little worried about getting my Firebird back to my preferred state, but it turns out there is an export file it routinely creates which allows you to quickly bring back all your bookmarks.  So far, every single app is functioning without issue and there is definitely something to be said about having a pristine install.  I am still getting use to the Windows 7 UI, but other than a few oddities and slight annoyances it should be fine.

I would like to make two comments that stood out.  First off, I am a heavy user of Casper as my recovery system.  Thanks to a Thermaltake bare drive external unit (BlacX) I can slap in a bare SATA drive, ghost the system on it and slap it on the shelf.  I rotate through 3 drives allowing me multiple backups to roll back to.  Trust me, stop wasting your time with resolving viruses and go the simple route of taking  2 minutes to replace the OS drive.  Now, I utilize Raptor drives for the base OS and my gaming needs.  I think there was a 150G in there to begin with.  Since I wanted to be able to roll back to XP if issues were encountered, I picked up a 300G Raptor to ghost and replace the original drive.  Got the new drive out of the box, removed all the packaging and slapped it in the enclosure.  Ugh, the drive would not seat into the slot.  After closer inspection of the drive, they had taken a small drive about 2.5 inches by oh 4 inches and slapped a heat sync around it which brought it up to standard desktop dimensions.  This would be fine, but the drive’s connectors were at a different offset.  As a result, I had to open the case and add it as secondary drive.  Even this had troubles since the spacing was different than the case SATA cables causing me to replace it with a cable that came with the drive.  After all this, Casper successfully completed the copy and the primary drives were swapped.  Note to WD, stick with the standards and keep your user base happy.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on the last application that I finally got running after about 2.5 hours of fighting with it.  First a little setup.  Recently a certain example has become the poster child  for arguments to switch away from Microsoft and go with Apple.  Any guesses what that particular example might be?  Hint, it has to do with a standard activity that commonly happens with all computer installations…. it has to do with a certain hardware component…. got it?  Yes, the process of adding a printer.  No less than three times last month I was subjected to case scenarios on how such and such a family member struggled time and time again trying to get a printer installed on their Microsoft computer but when [such and such person] gave [them an Apple or showed them theirs], they were able to tell it to just find the printer and PRESTO, the printer was spewing out test pages in seconds.    As a result, everyone in the world should switch to Apple because all their support problems would disappear and we will all be in Pandora.  Once my OS was successfully upgraded, I brought up the add printer dialog and started my st0pwatch.  26 seconds later my network printer was successfully found, installed and a test page was coming out of the printer.  I don’t know about you, but my life can spare 26 seconds.  Now let’s talk about the final app.  The last application that needed to be installed was Apple’s ITunes.  I have an ITouch and until I jailbreak it next week I’m stuck with utilizing this ridiculous excuse for software.  So I go through the install to find out that I have registered all 5 of my available 5 computers for my username and I’ll have to remove them all to add anymore in the future – translated, I have made 4 upgrades/installs of my computer and one on my laptop.  Oh, and I can only do this removal once a year.  Once I get everything installed, I have to wait for it to download all my purchased apps.  Once that is done, I tried to point it to a copy of my previous sync directory.  After what seemed like an eternity, the import completes, but all my playlists are missing.  Thinking this was not an issue, I deleted everything and went to simply sync the contents of my ITouch to the new desktop install.  Guess what – that ain’t happening ’cause you can only sync the other way (desktop to ITouch).  So I rebuilt all my playlists by hand and re-added all the music song by song.  Finished with that, I hit the sync button and and and and … it simply came back that the sync was done, but nothing showed up on the ITouch.  20 minutes later I found a checkbox on the music tab telling it to sync the files.  How silly of me to actually think that people who install ITunes and connect up an ITouch would want to sync their music by default.  It is finally all working now and needless to say I have a counter argument for anytime anyone brings up a similar contrived excuse to move to an inferior platform.  The irony is I have an iTouch, but that appears to be something they got right but of course the supporting software frustrates me more than any Microsoft product ever has.

Anyway, everything is done now so no more excuses for not blogging!  I just might have to break out some recent Acadia pictures in celebration.

No Internet Until Next Tuesday

Sigh, my Internet access bit the big one last Friday – was out for 3 days before calling Wild Blue to get the situation corrected – they apparently could not care less about assisting one of their long time customers and basically told my wife to go somewhere else to help troubleshoot the problem.  They wouldn’t even do a ping back to see if it was hardware related or an issue on their side – probably will post the details when my NEW provider is up and running next Tuesday.  Until then, don’t panic, I’ll be back to posting as soon as the connectivity to the Inet is restored.

It’s Coming up on my 2 Year Blogging Anniversary

Another year has passed and my blog is alive and well.  Chalk up 2 years now to this commitment which is pretty surprising to me considered I gave it about 2 months when I started down this path.  To continue a related tradition, I decided to once again provide a summary of this year’s output (data does include this post which is a good thing since this fulfills my quota for the month):

  • According to the WordPress Stats: To Date Total Posts 171 and 46 comments
  • According to the WordPress Stats: This Year Total Posts 73 and 19 comments
  • Total blog pages this year (according to MS Word): 234
  • Total number of words this year (according to MS Word): 61,813
  • Post topics (some posts had multiple categories) 2009 / Total
    • Birds: 11 / 20
    • Fail: 3 / 3
    • General: 10 / 19
    • Observation: 51 / 110
    • Products: 2 / 2
    • Ramblings: 3 / 9
    • Recollection: 4 / 10
    • Service: 13 / 26
    • Uncategorized: 0 / 0
    • Wildlife: 17 / 17
  • Blogs this year by month
    • 1/09:6
    • 2/09:5  (oops, I missed my quota this month, but made up for it in March)
    • 3/09:8
    • 4/09:6
    • 5/09:6
    • 6/09:6
    • 7/09:6
    • 8/09:6
    • 9/09:6
    • 10/09/:6
    • 11/09:6
    • 12/09:6
  • Writing style: conversational
  • Most common grammatical error: thanks to converting to Firefox most of the spelling mistakes have been cleaned up, but still getting caught on the wrong word for the context.  Mainly it complains about missing ‘;’s which I will immediately admit to since the conversation format I use does not work well with that.  There is also a problem with the WordPress editor which tends to lag and give me extra spaces between words.  I transfer everything to Word after I write it in WordPress so most of those errors are caught before it is published to the web.  I also tend to make words up, which again (like parkify), is perfectly fine with my style 8^)
  • Number of WordPress uprades:1
  • Number of reference links used:40
  • Number of images used: (at least) 272 Tough to count that many, but definitely improved over last year and with the exception of 1 time had at least one image per post and that was after I’d already met that month’s quota.
  • Languages uses: 1 (unless you count Engrish)
  • Completed Life List Items: 6
    • Ran the Steamboat 15K – toughest in IL (another year another medal)
    • Ran the BIX7 – (another year another medal)
    • Purchased a piece of art for the second year in a row although didn’t blog on it yet
    • Blogging for a second year with the exception of one month hitting my self-imposed 6 post/month quota but made up for it with two additional ones the following month
    • Transforming a portion of my woods into a park setting
    • Constructing a bridge
  • Maintained convictions:3
    • Never giving Metallica a penny of my money (still not a dime)
    • Ban from RIAA backed musicians
    • Not giving Sprint a dime of my money
  • Posted 70 more items than my brother over at Dead Reckonings (he clocked in at only 3 this year) – of course we are not measuring on quality or I would lose hands down but like the current government I can skew the stats anyway I want to .
  • Personal Revelations:
    • I was actually down a little bit on my book reading – this is likely due to all the outdoor activities this year – tough to read when you are so exhausted you can barely keep your eyes open.
    • My disposition is still on the sarcasm side and clearly not happy with the current government – I need a shirt that says “How is that CHANGE working out for you?”
    • Pet peeve – still bad service, but socialized government is right up there
    • I remember more than I thought from my childhood and based on the bridge work retained a lot of knowledge from my father.
    • 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 and spending time out in the woods
    • Stretched my creativity this year, the image per blog requirements was pushing my limits and kept the posts down a little
    • Track record for New Year’s resolution is going quite well
    • I think my photography skills are improving – a lot of this may be the new equipment, but I think in general the shots are getting more interesting
    • Have an affinity for books on special/elite forces.  I think it is an interest in what makes an individual willingly put himself in harm’s way and once in that position, what does it take to succeed.  I also think a lot of this experience/skills/training can be leveraged well in a corporation – commitment, dedication, quick thinking, problem solving etc.

Wow, another year of blogging.  This year felt like more effort than last, but again, likely due to stepping up the image counts.  I think it was a better product this year and on a content perspective I am very pleased.  It is a few days from New Year’s so the resolutions have not been set yet, but blogging is likely to be another item on that list.  Images were the focused improvement this year, so next year it may be time to work on increasing the readership.  I have been pretty guarded up to this point, but I think it is time to let a few more people know about the site.  I might even try having some guest bloggers to spice the place up a bit.  Hopefully there will be more comments in the future for those are what I really look forward to responding to.  Let’s take a look back at last year’s goals and see how it went:

  • 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.
    SURVEY SAYS: SUCCESS
  • 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.
    SURVEY SAYS: SOMEWHAT – I did whittle a few down, but the image creation tends to limit the number of posts I can really do a month.
  • 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.
    SURVEY SAYS: SUCCESS – I added a products category, had posts on deer, snakes, spiders, coyotes (okay, it was dead), marmots, bears, moose, elk, frogs etc.
  • 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.  SURVEY SAYS: UNDERACHIEVED – I did let a number of people know about the site and some are steady readers now, but once again the fear of accidently offending people put me on the cautious side.

In closing, a big thanks to everyone that took the time to check in on my ramblings.  It does take a lot of work/time to keep this thing going and nothing puts it into perspective more than someone taking the time to make a comment on a post or mention a topic in a conversation.  It has been fun and makes every day a little more interesting as I keep an eye out for blog material.  Until next year, happy surfing.