Archived News starting from 05-21-2004 and earlier
BlogLastnight, my
girlfriend and I went to rescue my motorcycle from the parking lot it broke down near. I brought along my portable power pack to use as a temporary battery and
hooked it up to the bike. With my girlfriend following, I balanced the power pack in my lap, passing a police car who looked at me funny. It's really quite difficult to ride a motorcycle with a 25lb 2'x3' power pack in front of you, but the extent of my cheapness that prevented me from hiring a towtruck also kept me going. Once I
got home, I disconnected the power pack, expecting the bike to die (which would mean the alternator was shot) but instead, it kept on going, and the power pack
registered 100% charge. Now I just need a $30 battery instead of a $100 alternator. There was much rejoicing, and I owe it all to my girlfriend.
The
GnomeCam caught me
leaving for work on my motorcycle today, unaware of the events that woud occur before I reached my destination. About 15 minutes from work, an old man pulled right in front of me oblivious to my existance. I decided not to honk since he'd most likely have had a heart attack. A fellow motorist pulled up at the light and said "That could have killed you, I hope you're alright!" to which I replied "Happens all the time, thanks." Once the light turned green the bike completely died! No power whatsoever. I had to push it off into a gas station where I was told "You can't leave that there, after 9/11 no abandoned vehicles are allowed on the property." At this point I felt like I was in the twilight zone, so I pushed it into an adjacent lot and had
Duane pick me up for work. Somehow the old man who cut me off was able to affect my timeline and force me into a parallell universe. If the bike starts right up after work I'll know it was his doing. If not, my battery most likely died.
After 2½ years of flawless operation, my
Snappy Video Capture Device errored out. The software jammed while acquiring an image, shutting down the
GnomeCam from 7:00pm until I discovered it around 10:30pm. I restarted the server and reset the Snappy and all appears well again. I have 4 backup Snappy units ready to go if the hardware goes kaput. At $12.95 each, it's the only good thing that came out of Play, Inc. going out of business.
Melissa and I went to
Niagra Falls for the weekend for a
Cougar event. After the Cougar event was over, we went for a ride on the Maid of the Mist and Melissa helped a few people out of the water. Apparently 4-5 people jump into the falls a day and at least 50% survive and are picked up by tourists. We also went to see a wax museum and did some shopping.
With the
Gnome Cam approaching 2GB worth of archives (5 minute captures every day for the last 3 years) I rewrote the code to first search the local HDD for a requested date, then search the CD(soon to be DVD)-ROM. I've offloaded all of 2002 onto a CD in the drive, and it seems to work great. The initial and image loads are a little slower than normal, but I've saved 700MB on my hard drive. Once I put in the DVD-ROM I'll have all the archives off the hard drive and my weekly server backups should be lightning fast. Thousands of tiny image files are harder to backup than the same size in large files.
I'm putting my house up for sale, asking $129,000. I'm trying FSBO (For Sale By Owner) so if you know of a high traffic area,
download the flyer and post it all over. Cross your fingers for me, I hope to sell before I move into my new house.
Stavos and I finally broke in my
InstaPool tonight. Initially, the neighbors called the police fearing for their children at the sight of two grown men in a pool. After we cleared up the confusion (and assured the parents and police we were not on the Michigan sexual predators list) we discovered that a 15'x5' pool is alot of fun. The pool has "No Jumping, No Diving, and no Tipping" signs all around it, so the first thing we did was jump, dive, and attempt to tip it, but it was too heavy. Then, using the law of rhythmic sinusodal waves (and an inflatable doughnut), we were able to get the water to alternate between the center and outside ring of the pool. This made for waves higher than us, and a good chance that the pool was going to collapse. Our need for destruction partially satisfied, we ordered Fat Kats pizza and watched Harvey Birdman to celebrate. I've finally scored a point in my
battle against Michigan.
With the price of gas reaching almost $2 for regular unleaded this summer, gas prices have again become a hot topic to complain about. Last year I also
discussed gas prices so I'll safely assume this is now a trend for the summer months. As a premium gas consumer, I'm also guilty of complaining, but I don't, however, claim that cheap gas is my birthright. Watching the news this summer, like last summer, people have expressed how un-american these high prices are and that "something should be done about it." This year, the free press
actually wrote an article describing what exactly can be done about it. While I am guilty of complaining as well (I think it's become a regular pasttime) I also try to keep things in perspective. In Europe, a gallon of gas is $4 but instead of demanding "something" should be done, they buy cars with smaller engines to compensate (which also means they get really cool tiny turbo cars and we don't). I already
ranted about fuel economy in last years article, so this year I'll just ask that the next car you buy be a fun (fuel efficient) sport compact. That way when I'm ready to buy a new car the bean counters at the car companies will finally say "The people don't want trucks anymore, they want sport compacts, so let's make some really cool ones with turbos and nitrous!"
Today was the
Detroit SCCA season opener.
Duane and I raced in the event, Gina and
Melissa were camera crew. As tradition dictates, I again recieved a major sunburn, which continued my tradition of not going to work the day after the season opener. The sun was definately preferable to the predicted rain, and despite the sunburn it was a great event.
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