this is real customer service

Better make an appointment. I hope they can squeeze you in. Tax season will be upon us soon!

2012 for dummies

One scientist put it a good way: My calendar stops at Dec 31. does that mean that's the end of the world? no

The other thing people dont realize is that the way the mayans calculated their very overly-complex calendar, Dec 21, 2012 just happens to coincide with 999999999 in their calculations. The mayans didnt say that's the end of the world... that's just as far as they wanted to calculate then go out for cappuccino and scones.

I'm paraphrasing here.

a plea for help

The economy is still kicking me in the teeth... HARD. Xmas is going to be the leanest ever. I'm struggling to get over 20 hours a week. I had to replace the 13 year old water heater this week and that hurt a lot, but it wasn't something I was willing to skimp on. If it wasn't for my savings, I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage. If there are any more emergencies I will have to talk to the bank about a hardship case. Maybe I should stand out by the interstate off-ramp with a sign begging for money.

I am desperate. please help me. I'm not too proud to beg.

big bang theory

I've recently discovered CBS' The Big Bang Theory I remember when it was first announced in the Fall lineup a couple years ago and I liked the premise. I never watched it on TV because I just knew that it was going to get pulled off the air for being too cerebral. I didn't want to get too attached to the show only to have it cancelled a few episodes in. The fact that the main characters are dorky physicists with poor social skills was my first clue that it wouldn't be on the air too long (see also Futurama). The jokes are almost all very smart - How many TV shows can make 3 Schrodinger's Cat jokes in 2 episodes and still be funny? Well the show starts its 3rd season soon. Whoda thunk it?

I really love the show because I can relate in a huge way to all 4 of the main characters. Obviously most of their quirks are exaggerated for TV, but those quirks are based on reality.

- Sheldon is the alpha geek & former child prodigy. He was treated differently as a child and he doesn't have a clue about the real world. Sarcasm is lost on him. Accuracy in everything is important to him.

- Howard is a hornball. Plain & simple. He has no idea how to woo the ladies but he keeps trying because, statistically, he's bound to score at some point.

- Raj literally can't speak to pretty girls unless he's drunk.

- Leonard may be awkward but he has a slight grasp on reality - sometimes more so than his buddies. He has the hots for his attractive "normal" neighbor across the hall. He tries hard to get on her good side but ends up being the "nice guy" far more times than should be allowed.

yeah I can relate to these guys. :-(

deep thoughts...

... By Jack Handey:

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

In reality, my dad's medical plan consisted of Pepto Bismol and 'walk it off' treatments. Somehow I survived. Hyperextending my knee: walk it off. Falling off a poorly constructed bicycle ramp onto my chest and most likely cracking a rib or two: walk it off. Vomiting and high fever: Pepto and go to school. Urinary tract infection: Pepto. That's pretty much it. There was a period of time when we were dirt poor and had no insurance whatsoever, but there were times when at least an X-ray would have been prudent.

more of the same

Things are still very difficult for me in Knoxville. The job hours seem to be getting fewer and fewer which means a smaller paycheck. The job search for even part time work has resulted in nada. Pretty soon I won't be able to afford to stay here and I won't be able to afford to move.

i can coast for a bit now

The SummerJam VW show was this past weekend and I won 1st place in the Under Construction class. Even though I didn't enter the show to win anything, it was still nice to get recognition from my peers for all my work.

I still have to wait for the carpet kit and tweak a few things here and there, but essentially the body is done. I still have to plan out an engine and save up some money to go toward that. I SOOOOO want to get it back on the road again! But I will have to take my time since money is the biggest factor now.

mad dash to the show

Well it's been a couple months since I set my goal of getting my Bug ready for the upcoming VW show in Knoxville. I am *ALMOST* ready. I'm still waiting on several parts that have been backordered. I'm having to formulate a Plan B in case the parts don't arrive in time. The part that sucks the most is that I am totally alone in this. I don't have any local friends or family who can help. My wife is a lump of flesh at this point and can't help me with even the smallest things without complaining.

I've put out a plea for help from the VW club and have gotten a few responses, so I'm looking forward to them helping me this coming weekend. In the meantime, I'm waiting for the aforementioned backordered parts as well as my bumpers to come back from the chrome shop. The bumpers should be finished by the 17th and I'm planning on picking them up on that date.

I have 2 weeks to go...

a goal for myself

I've been making progress on my Bug recently.  I've decided that I'm going to try to get some of the loose ends tied up and then enter the car in a Bug show in July in the "Under Construction" class.  I've been getting some good feedback on how it looks now and it's motivated me. I think the car show sets an interim goal or milestone that I can work toward. It'll make me feel better about the progress I'm making and maybe it'll kick start me into finally finishing it soon.  The main barrier to finishing it ASAP is the lack of money. :(

I ain't too proud to beg 

catching up

Well last week my step-mother died. She's who pretty much raised me from a toddler to about 9 years old when she and my dad divorced. I drove down to Florida to be with my dad and my brother.  She had been ill for quite some time so it wasn't totally unexpected, but as I learned from the death of my own mother, just because you expect it, that doesn't make it any easier to take.

Now I'm back in Knoxville trying to get caught up on work that I missed. Yesterday I had a full 16 hour day driving to a client's office 2 hours away and replacing a dying XServe and transferring all the files and services to the new server. What made it especially bad was that I had just driven 9 hours back to Knoxville on Saturday and had only sunday to rest and get out of bed at 4:30 am monday morning for a 2 hour drive.

ugh

Arlington National Cemetery

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Originally uploaded by mcclint

When we went on our honeymoon in 2007, we went to Washington, DC because neither of us had been there. One of the first things we did as tourists was to go to the Arlington National Cemetery. We have a weird curiosity about cemeteries. We like to see the different kinds of headstones and other grave markers in really old civilian cemeteries. Sometimes we try to think of the stories behind family plots with dates of death that are all very close together. This was definitely different. Nearly all the gravestones were the same. Nearly all the stories were the same. Neither one of us knows anyone who is buried here. Neither of us knew anyone who fought and/or died in a war. But it was still a very emotional thing for both of us. You'll just have to go see it for yourself if you've never been. And it is different seeing it in person than on TV or in movies - trust me. When we left there and planned the rest of our visit in DC, we wanted to go see the Vietnam War memorial, but we decided we couldn't do it that same day. It would have been too much for us. Toward the end of our visit we decided we still couldn't do it. It would have been way too much sadness for us to handle during our honeymoon. It's not that the Arlington visit was a downer. We were glad we went. There's just so much you can handle in one visit.
When we do go back to DC (one of these days) we've decided that we will definitely go see the Vietnam memorial.

lacie sucks

For the past year and a half, we've encountered many large capacity (500GB+) LaCie external hard drives suffer from power supply failures at various client locations. At first we thought one or two bad units is to be expected. Then we thought maybe there were some storms or other power events in the area that may have zapped some power supplies. Then, as more of these things died, we began to think there was a bad production run on these LaCie power supplies. At this point LaCie tech support began to blame APC Battery backups. They told me that if a LaCie power supply is plugged into an APC brand UPS, the power supply would eventually die. There was no further explanation other than it would happen. This sounded suspicious to me since 1) not all the dead power supplies were plugged into APC units 2) we have many other devices - large & small - plugged into APC battery backups of various models and absolutely none of those devices have had any problems at all.

 The other day we had yet another power supply die. This time I contact APC to see if there is any possibility of any truth to the allegations made by LaCie.  Yes and no. Here is what APC said:

A BackUPS will provide stepped approximation sine wave as output when it is on battery, few electronic equipment will not with stand with this type of output as they require pure sine wave AC current as input, which may lead to the issue as you have mentioned. This can be resolved by using higher end model UPS like Smart UPS which provide sine wave as their output.

I called tech support and got further clarification on this. They said that the only kinds of devices that would complain about a stepped sine wave power input would be devices that are sensitive to the frequency of the incoming power such as medical devices or even high end video editing equipment and maybe even some super-high-end server equipment... certainly not a consumer-grade external hard drive. AND remember to take in the fact that this step sine wave only happens when it is running on battery power. AND EVEN THEN, we ARE using SmartUPS units at a couple locations that have experienced LaCie failures!! AND many of these drives have died outside of any known power events like a blackout or power surge from a storm in the area.

I threw the ball back in LaCie's court and here is what they finally said: 

The problem with APC/UPS backup systems is that they are generally designed to support much larger devices than our drives; such as entire computer systems. As a result the power variance that they consider to be "acceptable" can often still be enough to cause damage to our power supply units. In many cases, having a unit like this on the same electrical circuit as the drives can cause problems, even if the LaCie drive is not plugged directly into the APC system.

So now LaCie says that as long as there is an APC battery backup hooked up in your building and you just happen to be on the same circuit as that UPS, you're gonna have a LaCie power supply failure!!

I realize that I'm not an Electrical Engineer and we never got that deep into electrical circuits in my Physics classes in college, but this smells fishy to me. If there was something that caused THIS much trouble and had the potential of zapping an entire circuit in a building just by being plugged in, wouldn't this device have been blocked by Underwriter Laboratories before being released for sale on the market?  

Out of all the electronic devices we use or encounter on a daily basis, LaCie is the ONLY one that can't handle "normal" power variations.  HP inkjet printers hold up well. Maxtor external drives work well. Macs, PCs, speakers, stereos, routers, cable modems, LCD panels, scanners, iPod chargers, DVD players... they all hold up just fine when plugged into APC battery backups.  I will never purchase LaCie drives again and I'd recommend you don't either.

gonna get worse before it gets better

  The other day I got word that 2 of our biggest and oldest clients have started laying people off and asked to cut back on our services.  This couldn't have hit at a worse time for us. We're slowly trying to get out of the massive debt we found ourselves in and we started going to a Dave Ramsey class. For me, the Dave Ramsey class is mostly review and confirmation that I've always managed my finances wisely. Some of it is new info for me like different ways of handling the budget. It's not that I've done things wrong but I think my way works best for me alone. For a married couple, modifications have to be made.   I really hope a lot of this sinks in for Deb. 

 Because of the client layoffs and cutbacks, my hours are cut back and my paycheck is smaller.  Deb's work is getting on to all the underwriters to do something to raise revenue, but they are having a hard time doing that when the truckers and trucking companies they underwrite are going out of business. You can't get blood from a turnip!

This is all getting very scary. It's going to be harder to get out of our debt when we're faced with possible layoffs ourselves.

i'm not sure what to make of this

I went to the doctor and they poked and prodded and ran some tests and gave me a prescription for some prilosec (non-OTC).  I heard back from the doctor a few days later and they said all my tests came back negative. I want to curl up in the fetal position some times and just sleep until all this shit just passes over. I'm tired of being the one who has to shoulder all this. 

can life get any worse?

Now I think I have an ulcer. I've got the symptoms. CRAP! Now I gotta go to a doctor.