Category: Old Website

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

I went in with every intention to vote today. I was pissed that there was not a single Green party candidate on the sample ballot I saw, but I thought I’d vote for the lesser of the evils. However, I never actually saw the real ballot.

We just moved, and I changed my address with the DMV, and they said they would forward the address to the registry of voters. So I didn’t know if I’d vote at my old polling place or a new one. The old one worked fine. I got checked in, went to go to the machine and someone had to “get it set up for me.” I was sure that we weren’t getting electronic voting machines, but I was wrong. I asked for a paper ballot and was told “It’s electronic or nothing.”

“Fine. This fkng sucks. Scratch my name off, I’m not voting.”

Blank stares.

“Just record him as a canceled ballot.”

Yay. I wonder if that counts as “none of the above” like in “Brewster’s Millions”?

Posted in Political | 1 Comment »

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

i’ve slept … maybe 8 hours since tuesday 6AM. everything was so much more labor intensive than I expected… mostly ’cause I was doing it alone. My brother did help with some of the moving / loading, so that was nice. Now there’s crap everywhere. Dismantled furniture with screws in bags that were not taped to the furniture. We ran out of boxes so there are cloths baskets and piles of things everywhere. The “honeydo” list of things that were broken that we didn’t know about gets longer every minute.
word of advice. When the water heater is turned up to 170 degree, it may be because there is a problem with keeping the water hot.
Then, my boss called at 715 this morning and asked what time I was planning on coming to work… bastard. So here I sit helping ~2 customers an hour. yay.
But, we own the house. Oh yeah, did I mention that the sellers, who spoke little English, didn’t realize until about 24 hours before the closing that they were getting stuck with $5800 in pre-payment penalty? They were expecting to walk away with a couple grand and ended up owing close to $1000.
sucks.
sleep is for the dead. did I say that already?

Posted in Personal, Work | No Comments »

We’re closing on our first home on Halloween. Then we need to be out of this apartment by Nov 3. Sleep is for the dead, right?

It’s a nice place – up on the hill a little, real steep backyard with a nice deck, decent neighborhood etc. Needs a little work (new shingles and floor covering) but we can do that once we move in. We were going to take November to move in and fix it up, but we got an offer to sublet our current place in Nov. So, rather than risk not subletting and getting stuck with a mortage and a lease, we decided just to move in like Sr. Speedy Gonzales.

I’m excited about having a place of our own. No more money tossed out on rent. Now it’s tossed out on interest. But we’ll get to paint and decorate and re-shingle and install hard wood floors and stuff. I have big plans to redo the wooden retaining walls with cement blocks and pavers, but that’s probably a couple years off.

We’ll miss the park, and the location of our current place. But the house was just too good an opportunity to pass up. At least that’s what I’m thinking now. Who knows, maybe like most things that are too good, there’s a reason for it.

For now, I’m ready for the move. No, I’m not. It’s going to suck and we’ll be unsettled for at least a month. The current plan is to:

1. rip out the carpets and wall paper in 2 of the 3 main floor bedrooms (its a split entry with the main floor upstairs and a 1/2 finished basement 1/2 garage on the lower),
2. repaint and install new carpet,
3. move in to those rooms,
4. get everything else into the garage/basement (this much has to be done by 3nov… yay.)
5. repaint the family room
6. rip out the carpet there
7. intall new bamboo floors (like hardwood really)
8. move stuff upstairs and set up like we actually live there.

Then eventually we’ll redecorate the kitchen, and then re-carpet / paint the other bedroom, then ditto for the downstairs room (oh, and it will need a de-humidifer)

Then there’s the chimney that’s not connected to anything, and the floor vents that are covered over. We might discover a fireplace behind the wall, or a place where a stove vented.

Yeah. The retaining walls might be a little ways off.

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

When we left Boston, we took our neighboors cat with us. Actually I asked to hold on to the cat for a while until they could figure out how to get him to CA without slipping him the dog’s sleeping pills and hiding him in a carryon. Needless to say, we had the cat until yesterday.

Bootsie was the smartest of many, many cats that have lived at my home. Mostly at my parent’s home, where cats were always around. He was smart enough to expect certain outcomes from his actions. One of the first things he ever did was headbutt the bag of dog food while standing on the couch. When it fell over, he hopped down to the floor and looked for the spilled food. The bag was still shut, and he was pissed that there was no food. He had to go upstairs to see his old apartment empty before he would stay the night with us. Things like that.

He was also an annoying shit. He would howl the entire time he was caged on car trips, and most of the time if he was loose. “Surely no animal can howl like that for 8 hours straight.” No, he will go hoarse before then, but still try to let us know how pissed he was. After going outside, he would come in and gorge, then purge. I cleaned up almost as much cat puke as Sammy (the dog) did. And he would yowl if his water bowl had dog drool in it.

Apparently the puking and constant thirst were signs that his kidneys were failing. Over the last week, he quit eating, lost several pounds, and became lethargic. Those are pretty much the only signs

[the rest of this post is missing. Bootsie died of toxic shock from a blocked urethra. We miss him. Dammit Bootsie.]

Saturday, August 26th, 2006

If you’re still using Internet Explorer.. you deserve the viruses and spyware you are plagued with. The better alternative has been Firefox for quite some time. But you knew that. So I thought I’d just post my tweaks.

I run Firefox off linux at home and off my iPod using the PortableApps version when I’m at a windows machine.

Essential plugins:
Foxmarks – allows you to synchronize bookmarks across different computers
Tab X 0.9.2 – adds a “close tab” X to browser tabs
Adblock with FilterSetG (not plus) – stops advertisements before you see them whith a customizable black list.
FoxyTunes

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

I gave up on windows. Between the old Compaq laptop not liking the reinstall disc, and XP d ing a d sc n ct e ery f w s conds on the wireless… I gave it the boot. Currently running Xubuntu 6.06 (zoo boon too) on the desktop and I’m going to put Edubuntu on the laptop. The other laptop still has XP and Allison has her work macbook.

I chose Xubuntu because the Ubuntu user forums are fantastic, and I didn’t want all the bloat etc that comes on Ubuntu or Kubuntu. (Although Kubuntu is very nice and I used that for a while) Xubuntu uses a desktop manager called XFCE and it’s very lightweigh and bloat-free. It’s not quite as configurabale as KDE on Kububtu but it’s good enough for me.

Linux definately takes some learning. But that was always my complaints about macs… they assume that everyone wants a function to work the same way. That and one-button-mouse issues… I’ve actually reformatted this HDD several times with different linux “distros” (flavors) and redone ubuntu a couple times as well.

at the moment, I’m taking a break from installing

the rest is missing.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006

Folks… we should all become a part of a special group. We should all be awake this coming morning at 2 minutes and three seconds after 1 a.m…. why you might ask? If we do, we would be awake, alive and kicking at:01:02:03 on 04/05/06!thanks robyn