Not Necessarily Interesting News

Last month, we changed banks and thus checking accounts. We went through the whole fun business of letting everyone that might care know. We went online to pay our credit card bills a week before their due date. I had run them up buying parts for the Defender and were were going to pay them off with the money from insurance. My wife changed our checking info at their respective websites and then paid the bills online. Both of the credit card companies then decided to try to debit the old bank account. CitiBank and Capitol One both did the same dumb-ass thing. I called them both to try to straighten things out.

CitiBank’s head was so far up its ass that I got nowhere in 6 calls over a weeks time. They charged two $29 bounced check fees. Bounces that occurred because they tried to take money from the wrong account. They also charged a $35 late fee because they couldn’t get money from a closed account and instead of notifying us they tried again a few days later, after the due date. Oh, and because of this bullshit they decided we were all of a sudden a ‘bad’ customer and jacked our rate from like 4.9% to 27.99%. You have got to be shitting me. I got them to reverse one whole $29 charge. I told them that’s the last money they’ll make off me, I hope it was worth it. Idiots.

CapOne wasn’t much better. One bounced check fee and a late fee. *sigh* I did get them to reverse those charges after the rep agreed that it was their mistake. This was how things are supposed to work.

I ended up transferring the small balance from the CitiBank card to the CapOne while still on the phone with them and then I called up CitiBank to cancel the card. I told the rep I need to cancel the card. He got some info and said the account is closed. That’s it. He didn’t ask why. No attempt to keep a 15 year customer who never missed a payment and had maybe one late payment in all that time. I asked him if the company wanted to know why. He said I could tell him if I wanted to. I said ‘Why bother? You’re the only one that’ll hear it and that won’t help make change in a company’s stupidity.’

I know we rarely use the cards because we try to pay cash for everything but, still, doesn’t 15 years as a customer count for anything? We only keep our cards around for emergencies and convenience, like online ordering. If you can’t pay cash for it, you probably don’t need it.

: Down To The River To Pray from the album “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” by Allison Krauss

I put in about 8 hours on the Defender today. I got the complete right wing done and the left outer panel replaced. I had to make two separate trips the the hardware store for parts. I also had to make several unplanned modifications to the panels to get them to fit but now they look great. It goes out for paint this week. I was planning on changing colors but have decided to stay with the green for now. I’ll have everything forward of the windscreen redone. The paint on the hood is faded after 10 years of Texas summers. Once I got the fenders done I did a test fit of the new ARB brush guard. That thing is massive. It’s a _lot_ bigger than I thought. I’ll have to do some drilling on the frame for it but it’ll look great once the winch is mounted and it’s ready for action.

: Ace of Base Mix from the album “Alice in Winterland Concert” by Barenaked Ladies

I started serious deconstruction of Shurfoot last night. As you can see in the pic I’d already removed the complete right wing and was getting ready to work on the left. It was/is a pain in the ass. There was some damage to mounting holes not visible from the outside which took a bit of ‘persuasion’ to come loose. I’m also finding the replacement sheet metal needs some pretty extensive modifications to make them fit. They are UK spec body panels that I am installing on a NAS(North American Spec) vehicle. The Brits don’t get the external rollcage we’ ve got and their lights seem to be a bit different. It’s nothing a Dremel and time isn’t fixing tough. 🙂 I hope to have it back together by Monday so it can go in for paint, then I can finally finish the project.

My son is in Boy Scout Day Camp this week. Well, it’s also been raining all week. We got our normal early afternoon ‘Rescue your kid from the rain’ call today so I headed out to Emma Long Park to retrieve him. I was headed down Loop360 towards 2222. It was raining so I’m expecting the unexpected from all the idiots on the road. What I wasn’t expecting was the terrain to fight back. As I was passing through one of the cuts where the road passes through a hill a small landslide started. Rocks the size of shoeboxes and bigger fell across the road and right into my path. I tried to stop but only managed to put my wife’s Mustang into a sideways slide, or as my wife says, ‘I got all slideways’. I don’t know how but I managed to pass over/through the moving landscape without hitting any of the suspension and bodywork eating rocks. I got it straightened out and kept on going while everyone behind me stopped. Now there was a good reason to be driving the Defender in town and I was in the ‘Stang. Figures.

It must have looked like a damn good bit of driving to the person behind me. Don’t tell them I was just along for the ride.

: Free Fallin’ from the album “Playback Boxed Set: Disc 3” by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

Good pick there iTunes.

Our son is going to day camp this week. They’re doing all the normal things, swimming, crafts, waterguns, etc. My wife was dropping off our son this morning when she was pulled aside and asked if we’d ever had him tested for ADD. WTF? He’s a boy! You take a normal boy and drop him in an overstimulated environment like camp and he’s gonna seem wild. He might seem a bit rambunctious compared to the kids in a Ritalin induced stupor, but he is not a bad kid. I was way more, shall we say, spirited at his age than he ever is and nobody ever suggested drugging me or any of my playmates. He finds something he likes and pulling him away is a chore, like getting him to walk away from the Xbox on those rare times we let him play. If he finds something tedious and boring, he’s gonna tell you. I encourage him to speak his mind and ask why. This may not be fun when you’re trying to teach him multiplication tables but you just find a different way to teach him. Along those lines, I had him help me hang a picture a week or so ago and I turned it into a learning experience. I showed him that just to hang a picture in the right spot I needed addition, subtraction, and division. I had him do the problems for me and he got into it. Sit him down and try to drill it into him and it isn’t happening.

How did our parents and all the parents going back into eternity ever manage without drugging their kids?

: AM Radio from the album “Songs From An Amercian Movie” by Everclear

Had a couple hours of free time last night so I decided to finally upgrade the linux server at home. It was running SuSE 8.0Pro so it was a bit behind the times and I was looking for some new functionality and I thought upgrading the whole box to SuSE 9.1Pro would be easier then upgrading just the bits I wanted. Boy was I wrong. I started the upgrade around 8pm. I gave up about 5am and went to bed with a partially functioning server. It was at least receiving mail, its most important function.

The part that was giving the most trouble was Apache2 and PHP. SuSE in their infinite wisdom decided to disable mysql access from PHP in 9.1. WTF? I’ll bring that up the next time I see a SuSE developer walking around work. After about 5 hours of wrestling and searching I gave up and removed all the Apache2 and PHP rpms and compiled Apache 1.3 and PHP from scratch. Now it works as it should. I know I should never trust rpms and real men use gentoo. I just want shit to work. I don’t want to spend days compiling and tweaking just to get the basics running.

: Dance of the Hours from the album “Cartoon Classics” by Panchielli

Got an email out of the blue last night. It was from an author who had asked permission to use one of my photos for the cover of a book he was writing. I had completely forgotten about it. He was needing my address to send me a copy of the book per our agreement. The book is about the Sutton-Taylor Feud in Dewitt County, TX in the 1860s-70s. The title of the book is DeWitt County, Texas: The Bloody Years by Willis Gathright. I’ve had other photos used for things like soda bottles and websites, but this is the first I’ve had published in/on a book. Really cool!

: Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps from the album “Fashion Nugget” by Cake

My wife just called, the trucking company just delivered a box the size of a coffin to our house. That’ll be the ARB Brush Bar for Shurfoot. The single most expensive piece of the rebuilding project. She said she can’t even budge the box lying on the garage floor. It weighs in around 150lbs. Nice and beefy in case another idiot tries to rearrange my sheet metal. I’m glad I got the heavy-duty springs up front to take the weight of it and the winch which should arrive anyday. Between the two of them I’ll be hanging over 200lbs off the front of my Defender.

: 99 Red Balloons by Gold Finger

I was driving to work this morning and was cut off by two cell-phone talking idiots. I then got stuck behind another on 183 doing 50MPH in the fast lane. WTF? To that stupid bitch on the phone in the red Acura: How many people have to come up on your bumper and then whip out and around you before you get the hint? I gave her the evil-eye as I passed and she looked me right at me with her dumb cow-eyes and kept on talking. I swear the bigger and nicer I make my truck the bigger a target it becomes. I think I’m just gonna plow into the next SUV-driving, cell-phone talking, soccer sticker in the window with Britney’s name on it, Starbuck’s drinking, moomie that cuts me off. I could use the money.

I know they’re illegal in the US but I think Shurfoot needs a cell-phone jammer. A 100 foot ‘circle-of-peace’ around it would make driving so much nicer. Drive within 50′ of me and *BOOM* there goes your call. Pull the fuck over if you need to make a call. I heard a news story a few months ago about an idiot on the phone with a friend when she wrecked her car and killed herself. Her friend on the other end got to hear the whole thing. I about laughed my ass off.

Yes, I have a cell phone but it’s there for my convenience, not whoever is on the other end. They can wait until I get where I’m going. If I feel they’re important enough, I’ll call them back.

: In the Shelter from the album “Changes in Latitudes – Changes in Attitudes” by Jimmy Buffett

We had lots of plans for Memorial Day. Things that had to get done around the house, etc. In the morning we took the new RC truck to the local track and ran it for a bit. After banging it around a bit we stopped at the hobby store for some bits and then decided to go to the lake with all the other idiots.

We called up the marina and said we’d be out at 12:30. The boat belongs to my parents and they keep it at a marina in dry storage. You call up the marina at least an hour before you want to go out and they pull it out of the rack and drop it in the water ready to go. A pretty good arrangement if you ask me. The boat is a 22′ SeaDoo Islandia. It’s a jetboat that’s a blast to drive.

All I can say is that it was damn hot out on the lake today. All we wanted to do was get into a cove and get in the water. We pulled in to Little Devil’s Cove and hopped in. The water temp is about perfect. Devil’s Cove is _the_ place to be to party on Lake Travis and a bit busy for my tastes. Little Pirate’s is less so. While we were there a LifeFlight helicopter flew back in to Devil’s Cove, proving that it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, then it’s fucking hilarious. We hung out for a couple hours and headed in when it looked like some thunderstorms were trying to build. Dropping off the boat is as easy as picking it up. You pull in, turn it off, grab your stuff, and leave. They handle the rest. This is so much easier than trailering it.

: Mozart forever, always – Piano Concertos, Violin Concertos & Sonatas; String Quartets, Quintets, Trios & Duos