Archive for August, 2005

Lavender skies

8/2/2005

4:17am, Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

I am sitting outside my hotel room. The sound of diesel truck big-rig’s idling waiting to start their journeys can be heard closeby. Traffic is light on the road nearby.

At 6am yesterday, Pop and I headed North, truck packed with handheld GPS at the ready. We started on Interstate 395, then to Interstate 290, then Interstate 95.

The first few hours were uneventful. We listened to sports AM stations along the way. All of them were talking about how Manny Ramirez is a dope in one way or another. I don’t follow sports that much. All I know is that Manny was happy to stay with the ‘Sox.

Rest stop: New Hampshire border. Not a bad place. It was clean.

Pop and I marveled at how accurate his Garmin Rino 120 GPS handheld was. It was able to pinpoint our exact location to within twenty-six feet!

We hit New Hampshire and then it rained. Hard. There was spray all over the road and from other vehicles. This stayed constant for around an hour. I had said at one point “I hope the whole trip isn’t like this.” During the rain the radio was turned off.

Rest stop: Somewhere near Portsmouth, NH, I think. Not as clean as the first one, but still okay. It was still rainy outside.

One hour later, the rain stops (a sign of good things to come?)

Rest stop: Kittery, ME - I am very familiar with this welcome center and have been here many times before in the past. They seemed to have moved the smoking section twenty-five feet more away from the building compared to when I last remembered… The reason for stopping is so Pop can grab some real estate crap just in case we discover anything else we might want to take a look at while we’re up here. We also confirm our location by looking at the big map on the glass desk to get our bearings. A very helpful guy who works there indicates that we want Exit 157 for Newport after speaking with him.

I noticed immediately that the nature of people is much friendlier the farther you go North. I liked that.

Back on I-95.

Two delays are encountered. Both of them are I-95 construction related. Pop and I notice a sea of orange barrels. Seriously, they’re everywhere. We must have seen at least a couple hundred of these things. They went on so long in the distance that it gave you field effect. darn!

Traffic stops.

Blah.

Eventually we make it through. At least it’s not raining. Traffic resumes.

Rest stop: Twenty-three miles from destination. I’m hungry. We stop at Burger King and pollute ourselves appropriately.

We arrive at our destination a small while later.

I *thought* that we were going straight to a Motel to rest before seeing houses. Nope. We went straight to the realtor. I wasn’t too happy about that, but, whatever, that’s what we came here for.

We get to the realtor’s office without issue. A guy by the name of Kim is going to show us the properties. Yeah. “Kim”. He seems legit.

First property: Log cabin. Sucked. The tiniest two-floored house I’ve ever seen. We beat feet out of there fast.

Second property: Two acre gambrel. Very nice. House is in decent condition. View is spectacular. Problems are as follows. 1) NO CABLE TV! There isn’t even any coaxial wire going from the poles to the house. 2) Kerosene and wood heat only - no baseboard. definitely a problem. 3) Several unfinished portions of the house. It appears they ran out of money trying to prepare this one for sale maybe?

Even with those issue, the second house was *way* better than the first one. We told the realtor we’d be interested in it. Who knows, maybe we can get baseboard heat in there for a reasonable price.

After that part ways with the realtor, get a hotel and get two single rooms. About forty bucks a room. Not bad. Pretty cheap, actually.

I crash for a few hours.

We then go to dinner to a restaurant across the street. I ordered something simple, just boneless chicken strips. They were good. Not great. Just good. Waitress was a really cute redhead with a nice tiny girly voice. She might have not been a redhead… the color of her hair didn’t look exactly natural. Her voice made up for that.

Came back to the hotel. Crashed. Out like a light. Woke up at 3:45am or thereabouts.

I can hear the birds singing as I finish this. Air is clean. Sky is dark lavender - no sun yet. Looks awesome.

Looks like home.. maybe.

7:43pm, Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

Got back home about a half-hour ago. Weather was much more agreeable on the way back. The trip was uneventful - that’s a good thing.

We left at around 1:30pm. I am dead tired right now. Soon after I write this I’m going to lie down and put my head to the pillow a lot earlier than I usually do.

It was a good trip. The handheld GPS unit performed way better than I ever could have hoped. I’m looking forward to the next trip, because I’ll have my new Garmin i3 by then. Yeah!

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..now with menubar!

8/4/2005

I was running out of space for menu choices in my previous design, so I redesigned the site slightly to include a menubar to the right.

For regular visitors, if the pages look screwed up, just refresh the home page. Windows users can do this by hitting F5 on your keyboard (don’t know if a Mac has an F5 key or not…)

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Ask not for whom the perforations fold

8/6/2005

Today I received my last check from my old job. For some reason it arrived in the mail rather than being directly deposited to my checking account. I have no idea why. Whatever. Money is money.

One thing I would like to know is this: Who was the asshole that invented that fold-over with tiny perforations right after the fold thing on checks, anyway?

You know what I’m talking about. You get this envelope in the mail, but it’s not really an envelope. First you have to tear off the sides using those little tiny perforations. Then you have to fold open the thing. Then you have to tear off the check on yet another perforated line, BUT, the perforation is two fucking millimeters next to a fold. You can’t fold on the perforated line because there’s already a fold next to it that’s not matched up. So it takes you something like five minutes just to tear it off right little by little. Of course, you have to tear it right, because if you don’t, YOU VOID THE CHECK from it being torn.

Blah.

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It’s contagious

8/6/2005

I was feeling a bit down today mostly due to extreme boredom. I worked on one of my web sites for a lil’ bit, did some eBay stuff, surfed around a few web sites, et cetera.

Small side note from my site surfing: Just Another Scene appears to be dead as a doorknob. I checked it out and more than half of the web site links for bands are either dead or nonexistent. Kinda sad. The copyright notice stops @ 2003.

Later on I went to Putnam for a coffee at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. There was one thing I definitely noticed - there’s a lot of bored people around town. Kids were sitting on stoops, some people were just wandering around and… well, you get the idea.

This actually put a smile in my mind, because “…at least I’m not the only one who’s bored.”

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Link of the moment

8/7/2005

Even though it’s on the Technorati Top 100, this site definitely gets my vote. This is one of the best web sites I’ve ever seen. It’s very rare when you can get a web site that completely and totally depicts raw emotion in a way that’s so well done. This wins a link on my links page (easily).

PostSecret

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I want me one of those

8/7/2005

Some wicked cool electronic drumming here: Drummin’ Pud. The audio is a little too hot, but it shows that these electric kits really have come along.

If I ever pick up the sticks (which is quite possible,) I’m definitely going for the electric kit.

This also reminds me that I really should put up a video someday of me guitar’ing around.

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Garmin i3 update

8/10/2005

I preordered a StreetPilot i3 from GPSExplorer.com back in late July. It’s now August 10th and I still haven’t received the unit yet. I have called GPSExplorer several times asking when I should expect to receive my new i3. Last Friday, one of their service reps told me I’d get it “…probably by next week.” On Monday, another one of their service reps told me “…about a week and a half from now.”

The only factoid that’s remained constant each time I called GPSExplorer is that they were waiting on Garmin, and that’s why I didn’t have my i3 yet, so I decided to e-mail Garmin directly being that this was a supplier-to-vendor issue, and this is what I wrote:

Hello. This is a question concerning the estimated ship time for the Garmin StreePilot i3’s to vendors. I have recently preordered a Garmin StreetPilot i3 from GPSExplorer.com for $400.00, which they said on their own web site would be available in August. On every inquiry I make to them concerning when I will get my i3, they keep stating that Garmin (you guys) haven’t shipped out the i3’s for one reason or another. All I want to know is whether Garmin has started shipments of the i3’s to vendors or not (particularly to GPSExplorer.com), and if not, when?

That was Tuesday. I got an e-mail from Garmin today:

Thank you for contacting GARMIN International. We have not started shipping the newly announced Street Pilot i3 to our dealers at this time. We do plan to start shipping the Street Pilot’s sometime in August. We do not have a specific shipping announcement date at this time. The only information that I can give to you as well is that we will start shipping sometime this month. Please watch our website we will make a public announcement when the product begins shipping to dealers.

While I appreciate the fact that Garmin did actually respond to tell me what’s up, I’m sort of bummed out that I don’t have a more definitive answer. Does this mean the i3 will be sent out this week? Next week? End of the month?

I see the bright side of this - I did get an answer from the manufacturer themselves, and they were timely with their answer. It might have not been the best answer in the world, but at least I got a response.

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One hundred things

8/10/2005

Who knew there was so much stuff to know about me anyway?

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Here comes the wave

8/11/2005

A sign my site is officially “popular”: Today I received my first wave of trackback spam since using this site. Fortunately it didn’t go too deep because my site is configured to automatically close trackbacks after five days, but it still sucked. I may just remove trackbacks altogether because no one ever uses them. This will also keep my database nice’n'tidy as well.

On a tech geek note, I’m considering moving my database back over to MySQL. I’ve been using the Berkeley db since that whole cPanel upgrade disaster and have been very reluctant to switch back to ‘SQL. I believe it’s now safe to give it a go and will try it tonight, but not before backing up my entire site. ;-)

– edit –

On second thought, nah. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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House update

8/12/2005

As part of the agreement of the sale of the house, the septic system needed some work done to it. The estimate for repair work noted earlier had a bit of sticker shock to it.

Yesterday the septic guy (with assistant) came and did what he needed to do. When he was done, the bill was a lot less than the estimate (whew!). All that needed to be done was to replace a few pipes. The tank was fine and the fields were in great shape too.

I was sort of nervous when they had to dig up a part of the yard (near the edge) for the new pipes, but the guys patched up what they dug up really nicely when they were finished. The ground is level as it was when they started and they did a great job.

One more hurdle cleared. :-)

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