Not Necessarily Interesting News

Driving home from the tax preparers office after work I had a little accident. Ok, a bit more than little. I was driving north on Research approaching McNeil when a guy in a big panel van towing a trailer decided to make an illegal left turn in front of me. I plowed into the side of his van doing about 40MPH. I tried to turn with him to keep from hitting him to no avail. As we rounded the corner, he seemed to gun his engine as if to try to run. Doing this only caused his trailer to run up the side of my Defender and lock itself to me. He was going no where with 5,000lbs of Land Rover with its brakes locked attached to his tail. My son was riding with me and got to watch the trailer climb the side of the truck inches from his face. Needless to say he was a bit freaked out as was his mother who was following us home in her car. She got to witness the whole thing.

The damage is quite extensive. The right front wing is toast as is the rear. Every light on that side is broken. The heater was punctured by his trailer. Three tires are messed up, one by puncture and two by front end misalignment. Brush bar and bumper are a write-off. Plus whatever else I haven’t noticed. It’s not a total loss but it’ll cost his insurance good. If his insurance isn’t bogus that is. The paper he had had no policy number on it. The cops got all his info for me to pass onto my insurance company. Let them fight for the money to fix it.

I have no idea what it’s going to cost or what I’ll do without it while it’s getting repaired. Matching 10 year old faded paint will be tough. The whole thing might need to be repainted. I might go for a nice Land Rover G4 Orange.

More pics of the wreck scene and damage can be seen here.

*sigh*

I was doing my regular cleaning and maintenance of our 55 gallon fishtank in our living room this evening when I had a boo-boo. I cleaned out our Fluval(the worst part of the whole job) and replaced its media(carbon, peat, and the like). I was then going to play a little on the computer but decided tonite was the night to clean the glass too. Here was where my mistake lay.

Since it’s a glass tank it’s usually an easy job to clean the hard algae that a brush won’t clear, just use a razor blade. This is also why I prefer glass to acrylic. As I was cleaning the tank I barely bumped the center support and I heard a large *CRACK*. ‘Oh, shit, what was that.’ The plastic center support had broken. The tank is 10 years old and the plastic was brittle, I guess, and it didn’t take but a slight bump to snap it. This caused the front and back glass of the tank to bow out dramatically. They bowed out almost an inch. Damn close to the breaking point of the glass. Now I had a two 3 foot wide panes of glass bowing out badly and creaking in protest. I couldn’t get the ends close enough to join them back together somehow. I wouldn’t try anyways for fear of losing the whole tank and 20 or so fish at the same time. Some of those fish are 8 years old. We lost a 10″ Bala Shark last week that was that old and I think it was the first time I was ever really upset at the loss of a fish.

Luckily a close friend of mine was cleaning out his garage last week and gave me an old 45 gallon corner tank he no longer wanted. We had been looking for a tank for our bedroom so I said I’d take it. I cleaned it out this past weekend and we moved it into our bedroom where it sat empty while we decided what kinds of fish we were going to try. Luckily it was sitting there empty and waiting for some fish because it was about to get some. The whole family sprang into action grabbing buckets and pitchers to do a quick move of 50 gallons of water and about 100 lbs of sand at 10 o’cock at night. Not fun.

We got everything moved and the fish seem to be doing alright. It’s been several years since we’ve had a tank in our bedroom and as I sit here watching them explore their new digs I wonder why we waited so long.

The moral of this story is: ‘Hard work pays off eventually. Laziness pays off right now.’ If I’d have been lazy and played on the computer I wouldn’t have made more work for myself.

: Upside Down from the concert “Play Everywhere For Everyone Austin, TX 03-10-04” by Barenaked Ladies

We went to the Barenaked Ladies concert last night. They put on a great show. I’ve been waiting to see them for at least 10 years. They were playing in San Francisco when we lived there but I couldn’t convince my wife to go see a ‘great new band named the Barenaked Ladies’. We missed a chance to see them playing in a small club out there. They’ve been rained out twice in the last 8 years here in Austin making it impossible to see them play here. Yes, I snuck a few crappy phonecam shots of the concert. Sadly, that one is the best.

Last night we finally got our chance to see them in concert. They played for about two hours doing about 25 songs. Ed had some monitor problems and had to switch earphones after the first song then he did a great rap about it. In the middle of the concert they had a little acoustic session which started off with the theme to the Roadrunner cartoon. They also did ‘One Week’ acoustically. For their song ‘Shopping’ they had a great little shopping cart ballet on stage. They ended the night with ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran which was interesting.

: Am I Awake by They Might be Giants

Today was my son’s big pinecar derby with the Cub Scouts. Over the past 2 weeks we put a lot of time into his car. He wanted a Ford GT-40. First thing we had to do was make sure the axles were straight. With a micrometer we found the axle slots that came precut were out of straight by about 8 degrees. That won’t do. We borrowed a friend’s drill press and drilled some new axle holes that also give the benefit of lowering the car. When drilling we made sure that the axles have a slight downward droop. This way only the outer rim of the wheels touch the track lowering friction. We also drilled one front axle hole about 1/64″ higher than the rest. This way it rides on 3 wheels instead of 4, again to lower rolling friction. After this I cut out the rough shape and he did most of the sanding. He got to use the electric sander which he thought was cool. Once things were nice and smooth he got to use the spray paint after a lot of begging by him to let him do it. A nice glossy red was the color. Add some Black Widow stickers he picked out and the body was done.
(Read on …)

Tonite we went to the Central Texas Geocachers Awards. It was held at GattiTown in Oak Hill. Not my first choice but the kids loved it. The awards were for the best geocaches in the Austin area. They were voted on by locals. There were awards for best camouflaged, best themed, best multi-cache, and so on. About 15 awards in all.

One of my caches,The Rock That Rolls, won two awards. The first was for the ‘Most Innovate Cache’. The second award was the biggie. I won the Best All Around Geocache of 2003. Of the 400 or so geocaches around Austin mine was voted the favorite. I was surprised at that one. It’s a cool geocache but I never thought that it’d get as popular as it has gotten. People can be rabid about it, almost fighting for the chance to be the next finder. For the top honor I was given a small ‘Oscar’ of my own and the even cooler Golden Ammo Can award. A very well painted gold ammo box. I’m trying to decide if I’ll hide it or pass it on to next year’s winner.

Now I have to top the Rock this year to win next year. 🙂

I got a shiny new toy a couple of weeks ago. It’s a Sony Ericsson T616. I picked it out mostly for its Bluetooth capabilites. I didn’t really care about the camera that’s built-in. I thought I’d use it as a modem so I could get wireless Internet access for just the cost of minutes. Should be no big deal to set it up. My iBook saw it and iSync works perfectly. I can also use Romeo to control iTunes and such.

When I tried to use it as a modem was where the problems started. It setup easily using the guide I found at this site. Once setup I tried to dial out. The iBook would access the phone and dial the phone then drop with a ‘No carrier detected’ error message. I tried all different kinds of changes to get it to dial with no luck. I Googled extensively and found a pointer to a page deep inside ATT’s website that says they have disabled CSD(Circuit Switched Data) access. Cingular and others support this. It’s built into most phones. It appears ATT wants you to use their mMode crap at a cost of 2 cents a kilobyte to access the Net. Um, no. I don’t think so folks. Oh, yeah for $13 you can get a whopping 4MB of data transfer a month with 1 cent a KB after that. I can do 4MB in a day easy…Also disabling CSD kills any ability to use the phone as a wireless fax machine too. Another feature I thought would be useful.

So, now the question is: I’m still within my first 30 days of service with ATT and can cancel without penalty. Should I cancel and switch to a more sane provider or do I wait for the Cingular/ATT merger to finish hoping that Cingular carries over the CSD service to former ATT customers? *sigh*

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

We picked up a new dog this week. Her name is Speckles. She’s a 6 year old Catahoula Mix. We think the other part of her is Pointer but we aren’t sure. We finally got to a point where we were ready for a second dog in the house after the loss of our 14 year old Golden Retriever, Beemer, last year.

I have never seen a dog that is more into playing fetch than this one. She will go non-stop from morning until night. She’s already become protective of the family and will bark when the doorbell rings or someone knocks on the front door. She is far from vicious though. Speckles is about the same size as our Black Lab, Jack. She’s a bit taller but not built as solidly. She’s tall and lanky like a runner. She seems like she’ll be a good fit for our family.

We got her from a Catahoula Rescue organization. Catahoulas are great dogs. Their full breed name is the Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog. Their coats are usually mottled greys, whites, and blacks. Spots are not uncommon nor are two different colored eyes. They were left behind in the Louisiana swamps by Spanish explorers in the 1500s and adapted to the life of running around in and hunting in the swamps. Speckles was abandoned by her former owner at a dog kennel a year ago and had lived there ever since. That’s no life for a dog.

: Maybe Katie(acoustic) from the album “Everything To Everyone” by Barenaked Ladies

A coworker of mine, John, and I have been working on a cool little script in our off time.

We really love looking at the 3D images put out by NASA of Mars taken by their Mars Exploratory Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The problem is that NASA only releases about one decent 3D image every few days. Not nearly enough for our tastes. I was grabbing the raw left and right images taken by cams and then using a tool to make them into anaglyphs(those pictures you use the blue and red glasses to see in 3D). This is a long process as you need to find two images taken of the same thing at the same time, one by each of the left and right lens of a given camera. Not a hard process, just labor intensive.

John and I thought there had to be a way to do this automagically. I started to think about how I would go about doing it after work last week. While I was doing a bit of research on the subject and trying to decide wether to do it in perl or something else I got an email from John saying he had finished the rough image download code. I looked at it and it seemed to work a charm. It goes to the MER page and will get all the matching left/right images for any given day. I played with it a bit and got it integrated into anaglyph software and we were almost there. I hacked on it some more so it would log images it had already downloaded and not attempt to re-download them to save bandwidth. I threw an automatic thumbnail generating script in the mix to generate and catalog the images by Sols so we could find any image we were looking for easily.

There are still a few bugs with the code that we are trying to work through but the basic functionality is there. The biggest one we have is that left and right images are not always taken at exactly the same time and we are matching on timestamps. We think we are close to solving this nagging problem and once we do our image catalog could triple or quadruple. Once we get it solved I’ll give details on how we got around it.

Well, I’ve talked enough about it. Break out your red-blue glasses and give it a try.

: Dirty Pool from the album “Texas Flood” by Stevie Ray Vaughan And Double Trouble

My wife, Shannon, ran in the Motorola Marathon yesterday. She finished in just over 5 hours, solidly in the middle of the pack. I think she did very well considering she had health problems that caused her to miss nearly a month of training right at the height of it. Before the marathon she had only made it to 14 miles before foot problems sidelined her. We followed her progress and cheered her on at several points during the run. We caught her at miles 13, 16, 17, 19, and 22. We made it across town just in time to see her finish the race. She is sore as all hell today. I’ve been getting a sick joy at helping her stretch out and massaging her muscles. 🙂

I went to bed around 1 this morning. It was about 32 degrees with a light mist falling. They said there was a chance of snow but I didn’t think anything of it. Usually when they say that in Central Texas nothing happens.

I woke up with an urgent need so I got out of bed. While standing there doing my business I noticed it seemed to be awfully light outside. I figured it was getting close to morning so I looked at the clock. 2:30? huh? Looked out the window and everything was white. It had snowed about 2 inches in an hour-and-a-half and was still falling. I woke up Shannon and my son to watch it snow. When we got up this morning around 7 we had about 3 inches of fresh powder on the ground to play with. It was so powdery that snowballs were hard to keep together. This was the first ‘real’ snow our son had ever seen. Yeah, we’ve had dustings and icestorms about once a year but this was real honest to goodness snow. Enough to really play in and make his first snowangel. Our dog, Jack, loves snow and ice. He had a blast running around, playing fetch, and eating the snow.

After a bit of playing I threw the tow strap in the Defender and went out looking for some extra cash. Unfortunately it is a Saturday so traffic was really light and no one had managed to get themselves stuck in a ditch as usually happens when things freeze around here. Bummer. I could have used some pocket money. Just when I go to rely on the stupidity of Austin drivers they let me down.