Axodys

TV Clashes

Tue, 23 May 2006 16:36:07 GMT

Didn't realize that 24's season finale started at 8PM rather than the usual 9PM so I jumped in half way and realized I had missed an hour! Doh! I started recorded the last hour anyway and went back to watching the Suns whip the Clippers for a while before heading downstairs to work on my office wiring some more.

The Dallas - San Antonio series final was really good and went into overtime before the Mavs finally took out the defending champs. It'll be interesting to hear Mark Cuban's perspective on his blog, unfortunately he hasn't updated for a couple days since talking about the Dallas - San Antonio rivalry. Phoenix is definitely my team at this point, but the Mavericks are a close second. I could care less about the Eastern Conference teams. West is best baby!

Office Progress

Mon, 22 May 2006 06:56:59 GMT

I made quite a bit of progress on the wiring upgrades in my new office today. I started out by making a run down to Home Depot to pick up some cable, electrical boxes and a couple data ports. Besides getting everything I had on my list I picked up a couple cheap electrical testers: one to test voltage and another that quickly checks ground wiring in outlet receptacles. The electrician that worked on our house a while back had one of those outlet circuit testers and when I saw how cheap they are ($4) I had to pick one up. It immediately paid for itself when it confirmed that the outlet in my new office's west wall isn't properly grounded and I've already figured out what I need to do to fix that issue. Unfortunately I didn't realize I needed to buy the little clamps for where the cables go into the electrical boxes so I'll have to pick a few up at Ace tomorrow after work.

Since I couldn't work on the outlet boxes without the clamps I ended up replacing the light switch in my new office instead and then running a long ethernet cable. Installing ethernet throughout our house is something I considered doing shortly after we moved in, but WiFi went mainstream right around the same time and it didn't end up being necessary. Now that my office is going to be 30 or 40 feet from where the dsl modem is going to sit (with lots of ductwork in between) it was time to finally bite the bullet and hardwire a connection. It took a fair amount of drilling and wire finagling, but I was able to get the wire installed in an out of the way and stable fashion. More importantly it actually worked properly when I tested it out with a hub and my MacBook Pro. Tomorrow with a little more effort I may finally be able to relocate the dsl modem to its new home.

Office Move

Mon, 08 May 2006 21:48:05 GMT

I made a ton of progress this weekend on my office relocation project. Two bookshelves, my desk and all three video tape racks are now where they should be and the baby-to-be's room is a lot closer to being ready for its coming overhaul. I also started the new office wiring overhaul last night, but I've reached the point where I'm going to need to buy additional supplies to get everything set up properly. Fun stuff!

Office Move

Thu, 04 May 2006 03:49:42 GMT

Spent a little time this evening working on the room in our basement I'm going to be relocating my office to. A couple years back I had the bright idea of running a coaxial cable to my current office through its ceiling and pulled down a quite a few ceiling tiles in the process. I was successful in getting the cable where I wanted it, but it was mostly a really big mess and I didn't end up using the cable enough to justify the effort and destruction. Tonight I finally finished putting all the ceiling tiles back in place. There's still a lot of cleanup and rearranging to do, but it's nice to have made significant progress.

Blood Draw

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:01:51 GMT

I had some blood drawn today to help figure out why Mary had some specific antigens come up when she had one of her many pregnancy related blood tests. I don't recall ever having it done before (and I've never donated blood) so I was mildly nervous, but I didn't have a problem with the situation at all and was completely willing to have it done. Getting poked with a needle isn't my favorite thing, but I don't have any particular fear about them, or seeing my own blood, etc. At any rate at some point during the process my forehead started sweating (as is typical for me in new, unusual or somewhat stressful situations) and I guess that worried the nurse because she kept asking if I was okay and suggested I get a drink of water and sit down once I got back to the waiting room. I complied, but I think having her react that way to me only exacerbated my mild nervousness by drawing attention to an involuntary reaction that I recognize as normal for me and find slightly embarrassing without someone pointing it out to me.

Garage Band

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 07:16:19 GMT

Tonight I discovered Garage Band has added a lot of nice improvements since I last used it a couple versions back. Manipulating software instrument tracks is a lot easier and you can even view them in musical notation if you so desire. I'm definitely going to have to play with this app further.

Jack Bauer Power Hour

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 06:57:28 GMT

24 was pretty good tonight. I totally called Jack's solution to being surrounded by Henderson's men when they were stuck in the bank. Of course the cops mostly got lit up until the Humvees rolled in. Martial Law rules!

Riverpark Square Accident

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:41:14 GMT

My mom came over to visit and told us that she had seen a car flipped upside down at the Riverpark Square parking lot ramp today. Initially she had thought the car had just gone up on a curb and rolled, then she realized it had fallen from five stories up. Apparently the driver was still alive and breathing when paramedics got to her, but it took a half hour for the firemen to extricate her from the mangled car and she ended up dying. Spokesman Review coverage here.

Having been in the Riverpark Square parking garage many times I'm somewhat at a loss as to how the driver managed to break through the way she did. There's not a whole lot of room to accelerate out the north side and even if you did strike the barrier hard enough to compromise it I think your car would probably come to a stop before completely exiting the building. One witness sounded like there was a loud bang and then squealing tires continued as if the accelerator was still depressed after the impact. It really makes me wonder if the driver had some kind of seizure or some other medical condition that caused the accident.

We need boulders. Lots and lots of boulders.

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:47:34 GMT

We live on a fairly busy arterial that seems to get its share of crazy/reckless/intoxicated? drivers in the late evening hours when traffic starts to die down and there aren't as many reasonable drivers to impede them. The trend seems to be for the crazies to accelerate to entirely unreasonable speeds on the straight away that runs through the nearby golf course since there aren't . The big problem is that they tend to lose control when the arterial jogs slightly to the right as they come out of the golf course at speeds pushing 90 mph.

Two years ago we had a car lose control at around that point, careen back and forth across the street as they tried to regain control before finally crossing our yard and coming to a stop part way between our two garage doors. Considering our house is set back from the street around 45 feet and the skid marks ran from the far side of the road the car was probably going somewhere around 2 and a half times the speed limit when it lost control. Especially galling was the fact that they immediately backed across our lawn and took off because their car was still drivable despite hitting our garage. My wife and I didn't even hear any of this commotion because of the portable AC we had running in our bedroom and it happened sometime around 2 or 3AM. We didn't discover the damage until the next morning when I went to let the dogs out like I usually do and noticed skid marks leading across our front lawn towards are garage. Needless to say I was quite dismayed to find out that the two garage doors and center post were destroyed and Mary's Explorer had been pushed into the back wall of our garage by the impact. We didn't ever catch that driver, but we did get two new garage doors out of the deal (and higher insurance rates unfortunately).

Up until last night I actually figured this was simply a freak once in a lifetime kind of accident, but now I'm not so sure. A reckless Jaguar (I know this because we still had the bumper in our yard this morning) failed to negotiate the aforementioned jog in the road around midnight last night . The car actually tore through two of our neighbors yards before losing its bumper on the massive landscaping mound our immediate neighbors to the north put in last year (thank goodness they put that in!). This time around there were police in the neighborhood and I think they caught the driver within a few minutes. Amusingly enough we only realized that something had happened because of their flashing lights. Once again we didn't hear any crashing noises outside. At least this time we didn't receive any damage other than some dirt from our neighbors mound. I'm beginning to think that placing a few boulders with car stopping power along our front yard is probably something we're going to want to look into in the near future.

Florida smacks the Bruins down.

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 06:52:52 GMT

The championship game wasn't much of one as Florida exposed UCLA's lack of consistent offense and put together a serious dunkfest on the other end of the court. I think Gonzaga could have given Florida a better game under the right circumstances, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Gators still would have won the way they played throughout this tournament.

Thank goodness for iTunes.

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 07:29:39 GMT

Eawyn has a fixation on Christmas music at the moment, specifically Bing Crosby's rendition of Deck The Halls. It's not a long song and she insists on hearing it again when it stops. Despite being 18 months old, she can actually push the necessary buttons on our stereo to get it to play again with a little prompting on my part. Unfortunately she's also smart enough to realize at this point it's still a lot easier just to get me to do it by saying "Push the button!" repeatedly. It took me longer to deal with than I care to admit, but I finally decided to regain the upper hand and burn a cd that is only that track. 15 minutes later I have a cd that plays Deck The Halls solid for over an hour, all thanks to iTunes and my MacBook Pro. What a relief!

Final Four Sucks

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 03:52:54 GMT

Well, both of the semi final games in the Final Four have been a massive let down. George Mason was pretty much overwhelmed by Florida's rebounding and 3 point shooting. The LSU UCLA game was pretty much over before it started as the Tigers got run off the floor by the Bruins in the first half. Zag fans all over Spokane are asking themselves, What if?

I think Monday's game should be better though and I definitely like UCLA's chances.

Hard Rain

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:50:32 GMT

It's really raining this morning so I had to break out the old umbrella. Doppler radar shows the storm extending all the way to Ritzville at the moment so it looks like we're going to be having rain all morning at least.

I picked up Getting Things Done by David Allen last night in an effort to get a little more organized and productive in my life. It's highly recommended by several blogs that I read like 43 folders and is geared towards streamlining the whole work process. So far it's interesting, although not totally revolutionary since I've already been exposed to some of its core ideas.

Showing up as a dinosaur bummed me out.

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 20:30:01 GMT

The newest Net Newswire Pro beta (with Newsgator synching!) automatically turns dinosaur feeds brown so it was kind of bumming me out to see a constant reminder that I hadn't updated in almost a year. I decided to rectify that problem today by downloading a recent OS X client (XJournal is very nice btw) and updating.

In other news I've been doing a lot of cleanup at work, both physical and electronic. My office has been in serious need of an overhaul for quite a while and my Inbox has been pretty brutal as well. I've made the most progress on the Inbox so far, it's now completely empty and I'm in the process of consolidating most email into a single Archive folder. At one point early in my career here at Gonzaga I had a pretty serious hierarchy of folders going for saved email, but that's just madness at this point. If there's one thing I've learned over the last few years, it's that computers can do that organization for you a lot more efficiently.

Okay, time to get back to cleaning and organizing.

Rainy May

Fri, 20 May 2005 14:29:49 GMT

I've decided to break my silence and throw a quick post LiveJournal's way. I was looking at my Dinosaur's list in NetNewsWire and I realized that it has been over a year since I've posted anything (meaningful or otherwise) over here.

In other news after our mostly dry winter it's turned out to be a very wet spring here in Spokane, especially over the last four weeks or so. All this rain is cool except for the fact that one of our gutters is clogged and is starting to become detached from the roof under the weight of all the water collecting. I'm going to have to take a look at that this weekend.

In other news I've been playing basketball in the morning 2 or 3 times a week and trying to get in a little better shape. The first couple weeks were kind of brutal, but my body is slowly starting to come along and doesn't complain as much during and after games as it used to. I've got a long ways to go though.

Mon, 10 May 2004 21:29:18 GMT

This is a test from MarsEdit. I'd be kind of surprised if it actually works, but if so cool!

Update: Okay, I've tweaked a few things that I think will allow this to post successfully. Let's see if that's actually the case.

LiveJournal is 4

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 21:43:24 GMT

Today is LiveJournal's 4 birthday. Pretty exciting stuff.

I wonder how long it has been since I last posted here?

Crap

Fri, 21 Jun 2002 14:10:16 GMT

Woke up at 4:15 because my alarm didn't go off at 3:45 as expected. Thank goodness I had early morning indigestion or I would have slept right through the USA vs. Germany game. Unfortunately Germany won, but it was a good game and the boys in blue had there chances.

The yellow card on Claudio Reyna during the direct kick was weak.

The number of yellow cards the U.S. received seemed way out of proportion with how they were playing.

Mathis really didn't do much to impress me when he came in.

I would have liked to have seen more of DaMarcus Beasley and less of Mr. Mohawk (see above)

As poorly as Agoos played in the first three games it's too bad we didn't have a young player in his spot gaining experience for the future.

I have a feeling this World Cup is Brazil's to lose now (maybe it always was).

I expect Spain or Korea will be their opponent

House Closing

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 18:59:39 GMT

Looks like we should have everything signed and ready to go by Wednesday or Thursday of this week on our new house. It's kind of hard to believe I'm going to be living somewhere else after two years at my current apartment and four years living on the same block.

Mary and I did quite a bit of packing over the weekend, but there's still quite a ways to go. The good news is that we've had lots of people volunteer their assistance for the move.

Between work, summer league basketball, and the new house, the rest of the month is going to be completely swamped.

Tired

Sat, 08 Jun 2002 00:37:08 GMT

I'm glad the weekend is here. Now I can sit back and enjoy some relaxation and basketball (on tv and in person).

Hmm. Someone seems to be playing with fireworks up by the Corbin Center. Vaguely annoying. A few weeks from now I won't have to deal with that anymore. Yay for the new house.

I think I will take a short nap so that I don't fall asleep during the Nets - Lakers game.

Ugh.

Sun, 02 Jun 2002 02:31:08 GMT

Okay, it's official. I am in rotten shape. Admittedly the course I picked is uphill for the first mile, but I had to walk after the first five minutes. On a positive note I never had to stop completely, but my lungs were burning the whole way. Well, baby steps I guess. It ended up taking 24 minutes for the entire loop. Not sure how long it actually was though.

Time to run.

Sun, 02 Jun 2002 01:58:29 GMT

In a couple minutes I'm going to go running for the first time in quite a while. Hopefully it won't be too painful. Hoopfest is exactly a month away and I'd really like to live through the experience. Getting in a little bit better shape should help.

House Hunting

Fri, 24 May 2002 14:09:39 GMT

Mary and I made an offer on a house that we're interested in buying yesterday. Depending on how things go we could have a place of our own by the end of June. I think we're both really looking forward to having a place with a lot more room then our whimpy one bedroom apartment.

Rainy Tuesday

Tue, 21 May 2002 23:11:35 GMT

It seems to have come to a halt now, but the rain was coming down at a pretty good pace earlier. I'm glad I opted to wear my green REI windbreaker instead of one my leather jackets.

The weird thing is that despite the large amount of rain that has been falling in Eastern Washington the last couple days Spokane hasn't really received too much until today. Pull up a doppler radar page and Spokane sits largely unscathed in the eye of a green rainfall hurricane. Odd.

House Shopping Tonight

Tue, 21 May 2002 17:21:37 GMT

Mary and I are going to meet with a realtor tonight to look at some houses. That should be interesting. I can't wait to get out of our apartment and into something bigger and a little more permanent. Hopefully we can find something we like (and can afford) and can get moved in before the end of the summer.