Hurricane Ike

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

The bits and pieces of Hurricane Ike blew through the Dayton area on Sunday afternoon knocking out power and throwing full-grown trees around like matchsticks. There were wind gusts of up to 75 mph throughout the area and this went on for hours and hours. About 225,000 people are still without power.

I have been powerless since Sunday at 1pm EDT. Other than that, I have come through unscathed. My house in fine, no damage to any of my trees. Mother and father's house, next door, is undamaged as well. There are, though, vast quantities of leaves in both our yards.

I have a few pictures which I will post as soon as power comes back on. They say it may be the weekend before that happens, though.

My relatively boring life has just increased its boredom factor by 10x. I've been turning in early every night. Sleeping with the windows open has been quite refreshing; thankfully the weather has been really nice and the evenings unusually cool.

No one in Ohio expects a hurricane.

Another Pointless Victory

Fig. 1: Screen capture of my record Solitaire score.

I play Solitaire way too much. It is pretty much a mindless game that can be easily worked in while waiting for something, to alleviate boredom or whatever. It is an interesting game because each deal results in a different combination of luck and skill required to complete the game. A lot of the time it works out that you can't place any of the cards you flip, like the one that I played right before the one shown, above.

In the one shown above, I got a bonus of 8,022 for completing the game in 84 seconds (the fastest I've ever played) for a total score of 9,029. This is the highest score I have ever achieved, handily beating my previous record being 8,222 in 93 seconds on Tuesday, August 26, 2008.

Just to be sure, the parameters of the game are standard scoring, three-card flip, and I right-click to move valid cards to the upper-right completion piles. I do not use the SHIFT-CTRL-ALT cheat, because that is cheating!

Pointless Victories

I was aggravated today at work and decided to play a few hands of Solitaire on my computer rather than deal with dumb things and people. In one game I played, I beat it in 93 seconds for an end score of 8,222.

It is these pointless, stupid little victories that can make life kinda sweet and calm the nerves.

New Blog Template

I was bored and started futzing around with the Blogger templates and created one based on one of my favorite artists, Piet Mondrian. I use this style on my personal webpage as well and I have grown to like it very much.

It is easier to make a Mondrian-esque webpage with tables than the way Blogger does its layout with DIVs, but it did not turn out too bad once I got used to what-does-what in the Blogger XML template.

Anyhow, enjoy!

Random Stuff...

Snow
The snow from my last post is almost completely gone. There are a few piles of filthy, black snow lying around in the shadows of buildings. However, with the warmer temps...it was 63° yesterday...they won't last long. It is supposed to be in the 50's today with rain, which will further beat down the remaining slush.

Time
What is the deal with this daylight savings crap? Now when I get up in the morning, it is dark! At 7 am! I don't know why we even bother changing the clocks. It seems to me that it would be better just to shift all our zones forward from standard time by 30 minutes and be done with it for good. You know, split the difference. But, who am I?

Car
On two of the coldest days last week I awoke to my car not able to start. You want to talk about being ticked off! I've never had a problem with my car ever, so I thought this quite unusual. I got new tires weekend before last and it figures that would be the first day this all started. They checked out the alternator and battery and said both were good, but that there could be a flaw in the battery that only showed up when cold. After the last time I had to jump it...by driving my mother's car around my house through my backyard to get to the front of my car...I went and bought a new battery. Haven't had any problems since...knock on wood.

Water Heater
OK, I spent some of my tax refund on a new water heater. The happiness was short lived as I discovered in my research that I have to have a special flue dedicated just to the tankless heater! I was intending to vent it up through the existing chimney with some of the special stainless-steel "type III" vent tubing, but you can't do that. The county would not approve a permit for a new heater installed in that manner. So much for lower gas bills.

I sent it back and should get the refund soon. Then I will go out and buy a regular gas water heater. They are quite a bit more efficient these days than my existing 25 year old heater, so the gas bills should still be lower. And I intend on getting a fitted insulating blanket to make it even more energy efficient. I tell you, it is always something!

Cancer Update
I am holding steady around 200 lbs., which is very nice. I actually had to move my seat in my car up a little bit because I was so far away from the wheel. I have long legs anyhow, so I can't be too close to begin with, but I feel so small in such a large car. That's OK by me!

I am now on passive monitoring, which means I will have a CAT scan and checkups every three months for about a year. Then I will be looked at every six months for about five years. And I will have a PET scan about once every year, too. So, things are looking up!

Films
I don't usually recommend films to people because I have such an eclectic taste, but my friend Chris turned me on to one lately that is one of the best I've ever seen. It is called Hot Fuzz. I initially thought it was a porno, but it isn't. It is about a British cop in London that is so good at his job his colleagues decide to have rid of him an promote him to sergeant and ship him out into the countryside. It gets better from there, with lots of twists and turns, conspiracies and a good bit of comedy. It is pretty gory on occasion, but I have to say it is one of the best cop movies of all time. You must see it!

British entertainment is so much better than our American crap.

Springtime?

It is, right at this very second, 64° in Dayton. It is a beautiful sunny day. I didn't think springtime would ever come. For the first time this year I did not have to warm up my car before leaving for work...I just got in and went.

Alas, this is a cruel joke by good ol' mother nature...it is about 15 minutes away from pouring down rain. Then it is supposed to turn cold and snow on Tuesday.

Typical Ohio weather...hang around a second, it'll change.

Network

A person on a board I'm on asked what my home network was like. So, here it is...

Fig. 1: Network Rack

This is my network rack where all the network connection in my house land.

On the left side is the electrical box that my dad and I installed when we rewired the house.

On the right side is the coaxial connections for (top to bottom) DVB Satellite for free-to-air weird international programming, a splitter for over-the-air TV reception and a splitter for DirecTV satellite. Just slightly to the left of that is a "66-block" for telephone connections.

In the rack, from top to bottom are a Cisco 2924XL fast ethernet switch with a fiber-optic interface. Below that is the patch panel where all the network connections go. They are then patched in with "shorties" to the switch.

Below that is my router. It is a Cisco 3640 multi-slot router. In it I have a network module that has an ADSL adapter to interface to my DSL service, a fiber optic network module and a VPN concentrator module for encryption acceleration (for when I enable VPN connections back into my network, one of these days). Below that is a computer running linux and Asterisk which serves as my phone switch, receiving incoming and processing outgoing calls and is the signaling server for my Cisco IP phones.

The router connects to the switch by a fiber optic cable.

The router runs Cisco IOS 12.3 for IP networking, with active firewall, software. I have the firewall heavily restricted so pretty much nothing gets through except that which I want. It also features active packet scanning to check for and reject garbage and malformed packets.

Up and to the right, the gray box is a Cisco 1231g wireless access point. I have an antenna on the roof pointing to my parents' house, so they can get on the net, and an antenna in the ceiling in my hallway for my needs.

I have business-class DSL service with a block of 8 fixed IP addresses, and connect at 6 megabits down, 608 kilobits up. This is, unfortunately, the fastest DSL available right now.

So much for progress.

Nothing to Say

I don't have anything to say in this blog entry. I've been really busy with a number of really annoying things at work and have been really aggravated by my boss because of a number of nit-picky little stupid problems and the micromanagement of a number of my projects.

Last week Chris played the movie "Hostel" on his laptop for some background noise while working. He, unfortunately, called me over to watch some of the more "choice" parts.

What an incredibly disturbing and disgusting movie.

If you have not seen this movie, good. Don't. It is about a number of young adults that travel to the former eastern bloc and stay at inexpensive hostels. These people are seduced, drugged and taken to a strange post-apocalypse-looking industrial building. Here they are brutally mutilated and killed. They are killed by people who have paid to kill. Generic Europeans are $10,000, Russians are $15,000 and Americans are $25,000. I won't go into too much detail, but one of the group manages to escape, gets revenge by killing his "owner" and, eventually, the evil seductresses, and leaves by train.

Movies such as this don't really bother me. At least they didn't used to bother me. Perhaps it was just this movie. It disturbed me to the core. I had nightmares about it for a few nights afterward. Very creepy and nasty, that.

Chris really used to love movies from the horror genre, especially horribly unpleasant movies such as "Hostel". He has, however, (in his own words) "become a puss" since having kids. He also favored apocalypse-types movies like "Dawn of the Dead" but they now no longer hold any appeal to him. This, as near as we can figure, is due to the "no hope" factor. Now that he has kids, he cannot fathom them not being able to grow up happy and healthy with hope for a good future. It's funny how having kids can change a person.

Generally when I am working (or trying to) I will put on my iPod and listen to some music. Depending on what I am doing, I can get into a pretty good groove and manage to get something done. That is, unless the phone starts ringing. And it does. A lot. With the usual stupid problems.

Anyhow, I cannot wait for the weekend. I have made sure that I won't be available for anyone but myself. I have some nagging projects to work on here at home, rearranging furniture, some much needed cleaning and the like. I also have a bunch of stuff to list on eBay to try to reclaim some space in my house!

Blogging

This is my first blog post. I never thought that I would be doing this. I mean, who would want to ready anything that I have to say...or anything that ANYONE would want to say?

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading a number of blogs. Some have been great, such as the blog of Shari in "My So-Called Japanese Life" (link on the lower right). This blog truly opened my eyes as to how interesting a blog can be. You get a glimpse into someone else's life, how they live, what they do and more. It truly delivers an experience of what it is like to be someone else.

I am sitting here watching "Robin Hood" on the BBC and trying to figure out what I would say in a blog. Actually, I have been thinking about it for days now. Is my life interesting enough for a blog? I really say no, but I have had so many good thoughts that I couldn't help but try. I am certain that I won't blog every day like the truly dedicated...I don't have THAT much to say, but if I can give you just a glimpse into my wholly uninteresting life, then I will have succeeded.

So, enjoy. Or not.