Archived News starting from 07-29-2007 and earlier
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Mowing my yard
yesterday I felt a sharp pinch in the back of my leg and saw a group of bees circling it. My initial attempt to swat them away resulted in a doubling of the number of bees, so my next move was to run as fast as I could completely around my house, which successfully eluded them. After I lost them, I returned to the scene and saw my mower was now taking the brunt of the attack. Satisfied my mowing was done for the day, I took off for Jairds BBQ. When I returned, I dumped a quart of motor oil into their nest in the ground and
pissed them off a final time. Hopefully the oil transforms them into super lubricating metallurgist modifiers and they bond themselves with my car to change it into a real-life transformer. Unfortunately it will probably be a Decepticon since they'll most likely still be pissed off at me. Fortunatley they stung me first so I'll have swollen to the size of a blimp and can take the abuse.
The driveway to my barn has been long overdue for more limestone rock, with some places so low it's down to bare dirt. Realizing this was an opportunity to overload my truck with excessive weight, I set off to the landscape supply place to discover limestone is only $32 a yard. Since broken limestone is 97 pounds per cubic feet, and 27 cubic feet are in a yard, I purchased the weight equivalent of my
Cougar and had it loaded into the bed of my truck for $32. (If you suck at math that's 2,619 lbs). I returned home with my
new low rider and started shovelling the limestone out onto the driveway. My second load I noticed the suspension was compressed all the way to the
bump stop (rubber thing on the left resting on the steel triangle) which meant I officially exceeded the maximum allowable cargo weight. After a total of 4 yards I decided the excitement of overloading my truck did not exceeded the exhaustion of shovelling it and quit for the day.
A
recent woot brought the
Netgear WNR834B Router to $50. I was holding out for the
gigabit edition but it seldom falls below $120 so I decided I can't have everything and grabbed the bargain. My last
router upgrade was a necessity for my then wireless media machine, but now that it's been properly wired this is purely a "looks better, runs faster" upgrade. The configuration screens between my old
WPNT834 router and the new one were virtually identical, making configuration transfer easy except for the security configuration. Apparently my 64-bit WEP security just doesn't cut it anymore since the only options on the new router are "None" or "WPA2-PSK". My older computers can't do better than WEP, so this had me bummed until I figured out I could backup the config file and manually edit it using my old routers config file as a guide. A quick restore of my hacked config file and the WEP option magically appeared. Score one for Netgear on lame software, I guess removing the option makes the router "more secure" by eliminating older protocols. As you can see, the new router looks
more menacing and has an equally impressive
light show. Both are key features that prompted the purchase.
Ron hasn't mentioned server speed in quite some time, but I'm again hoping I'll get a comment about a noticeable increase in packet handling speed.
Lisa and I had the opportunity to
play some disc golf with
Elder and his wife today at
Cass Benton park.
The Gator was a favored choice among the southerners, who played a fair game, but inexplicably had exactly one stroke more than me on every hole. This meant I won by an 18 stroke margin, proving the north can still crush the confederacy. This victory came about despite the Elder shooting my (now discontinued)
Rocket X2 into the woods with his pellet gun, a failed attempt to prevent my victory on yet another hole despite the extra stroke rule for lost discs. Lisa maintained a whine level under 30% for the day, suggesting the
Avenger served her well. Afterwards we went for some drinks and discussed my absolute superiority at the game of disc golf. A fine day indeed. The
Senator was notably absent from this outing, he obviously forgot I own an airsoft gun. He will be dealt with shortly.
Hiding from wedding planners at
Rons house, we decided to pass the time with some original
Starcraft. A perfect 75° day made staying inside a crime, so an
outside mini LAN was
formed.
The
Morlock closed on his house today, which is 4 houses down from my own. Yes, I was disappointed he didn't move to
Morlock street as well. He is now one step closer to abandoning my basement for an above-ground dwelling. This will finally answer the question regarding morlocks and their ability to change into eloi. Should he locate entirely into the below-ground area of his new house I'll continue to invite him over when my
fellow eloi gets out of hand. If, however, he spends the majority of time above-ground I'll have to start looking for a new morlock to meander menacingly and spread order through fear. The plus side of the move is a new riding lawnmower which doubles as a
sweet ride between houses. The neighborhood folk, who I've learned deem me anti-social and frequently plot my downfall, were quite amused. I already miss the morlock and he's not even gone. At least I still have the
original morlock.
While not a big fan of eCards, the cheap side of me appreciates them. A coworker passed these along today, they are quite possibly the best available on the net.
Check them out.
While I was eating lunch today the UPS guy stopped by with a "mystery package." Assuming it wasn't a bomb, I opened it up to find a
Mountain Dew Mini Fridge! I proceeded to jump up and down scaring Lisa enough to stop and explain the significance. For the past month I have been entering bottle cap codes into the
Mountain Dew / Transformers sweepstakes. I typically don't enter contests but anything with Transformers on it is gold to me so I had no choice. Fortunately John and Brian helped me out with their codes until I had 25 and entered them all into the July 4th drawing, which won me one of the 250 they were awarding. Ecstatic that I now owned a fridge probably worth less than $50, I filled it up with Mountain Dew and brought it back to work to share the winnings with my fellow cap donators. Today I can confidently call myself a winner. Not as big of a winner as Lazlo in "Real Genius", but a winner nonetheless.
After several possible
EMP strikes against my
GnomeCam, I decided it was more likely a bad connection. My solution was a single
100ft composite video cable to replace the 3 30 ft cables I had strung together to link the camera and capture card. No longer will your constant surveillance of my house be interrupted by melting images.
Cougarfest, the yearly event I started for 1999-2002 Mercury Cougars
ended yesterday. This year it was in Boardman, Ohio instead of our usual location for some variety. I drove down on Tuesday for a total of five nights of intoxicated Cougartainment.
I was joined by 18 other early arrivals with our first order of business being a showing of the new
Transformers movie, by far the best movie ever made. The hotel threatened to kick us out every night after breaking glass in the pool and parking lot, so the possibility that each night was the last increased alcohol consumption, which directly increased the level of shenanigans and brouhaha. Highlights included inflatable animal violations, pool volleyball, and a nose blowing SPL competition.
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