The one evening I wouldn’t mind having a bus driver that was in a rush to get the run over with, I get the total opposite. Waits at a stop if he’s early until the scheduled arrival time, then, for the last 20 blocks or so has gone no faster than 8 miles an hour, despite the nearly total absence of any traffic ahead of us. Bus 983 seems to be in decent condition, so it’s definitely the driver.
On top of that, after sitting at one stop for two minutes, he wouldn’t open the door for a kid that ran up just as he closed the doors.
So the morning commute began well enough. The first bus that showed up is the one I got on. Uneventful ride to the subway station. Then the wait began, and the heat kicked in. Closest approximation to the conditions on the platform would probably be walking into a bathroom (that didn’t have a vent fan) about 10 minutes after someone else took a nice hot shower. Not quite like a steam room, but not exactly the cool crisp air one would hope to inhale in a room lined with tile. The difference between that bathroom and the subway platform is that eventually the former would cool down, while the latter just stayed that way. I suppose it could have been worse, since it wasn’t raining. Not a lot of things as unpleasant as being damp then having to stand in a hot humid room with little to no ventilation.
So about 10 minutes pass during the wait for a 2 or 5 train. The 5 shows up, which is ok since it cuts a couple of minutes off the trip between Franklin and Atlantic avenues. I get off at Nevins to wait for a 2 or 3, and it’s more like stepping into that bathroom I mentioned, only 5 minutes earlier. Mercifully, a 3 train showed up a couple of minutes later, and the wait on the 1 train at 42nd street was very short and noticeably less humid.
Headed home around 8:45pm, caught the F train at 50th street. Not by coincidence, the 50th street station inspired the title of this entry. This is that bathroom again, only this time the person’s still taking a shower. If you’ve ever spilled soup or sauce or something else that consistency on yourself, but it wasn’t really hot anymore, that’s pretty close to it.
And then I had to wait for 3 or 4 B35 Limiteds to come and go before a regular B35 showed up. Uneventful, not crowded, but it started raining just before my stop. My mini umbrella works just well enough to keep me dry from the bus stop to the front door.
So one night in April, I’m headed home from work, and for some reason took the 1 from West 50th St to the 2 at 42nd street Times Square, thinking perhaps the passengers on the 2 would be decent polite folk instead of the usual dregs of humanity they typically are. Wrong again. Old, young, doesn’t matter; they’ll do everything but knock you down to get that seat before you do.
But before that, I had to wait for that train to actually show up. In the interim, I noticed and surreptitiously snapped a picture of this young dude. I do not now how he managed to get his very, very green jumpsuit to match his headphones (or vice versa), but he did just that. Seems like a lot of effort to coordinate just get on a train. Perhaps he’s part of a dance troupe and was on his way to join up with his crew, who no doubt were clad in similarly matching jumpsuit/headphone combos.
Just kidding. Went to an orthopedist, who took some x-rays of my shoulder, looked at ‘em, then attempted to unscrew my arm. That last bit was actually a range of motion test. Apparently with a hand on my back, my arm can in fact articulate like an action figure. Remove the hand though, and it just doesn’t bend that way.
So while there is a bone spur in my shoulder, it’s up top and very small. Doc # 2 thinks I managed to tear something in my shoulder, though he was as baffled as I am at how I managed to do so and have no memory of doing anything that could cause such an injury. Maybe some figurative backstabbing manifested itself? I dunno.
Anyway, doc said no surgery, or PT was needed. He have me a cortisone injection in the back, and said it would hurt more before it felt better, but not right away. HE WAS NOT LYING.
Holy the next two days were like I had an arrow stuck in my back.
But after that, the pain in the arm receded, and for the most part has been reduced to some aching and occasional stiffness. Just as well, since the Oxycodone kind of stopped working after the first couple of days, and was not helping me sleep at all. My earlier post suggested it did, but apparently that was food poisoning and fatigue from trying not to move and aggravate the nerve. I have since learned that Demerol might have been the better choice, as it’s stronger and supposed to help you sleep. Just as well though, as I’d like to hold off using that stuff until/unless there’s something major like surgery involved.
While I do know I’d like to be in love with a woman, I honestly have to wonder if this might be overdoing it.
Still I like the use of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine”.
Need MRI, but think its calcification or bone spur. MRI pending approval.
“til then on oxycodone. Codeine, advil, and aleve didn’t help the pain. They knew it was bad when I kept asking when the codeine was supposed to start working.
Oxycodone helping with sleep, but during day you get 2 hours lucid, then sleep or it gets all… loopy, but arm still hurts some.
Loopy phase kicking in now. Telltale is you get cold really fast all of a sudden.
So I bought a new cell phone, and ditched Sprint for AT&T.
What did I buy you ask?
Yeah, I know. It's a Blackberry. The irony is not lost on me.
I bought it through Newegg for $0.
They had a special where the phone was free with a 2 year contract. Much easier than dealing with the rebate AT&T was offering.
So far it’s been pretty good, although it did force me to upgrade my wireless network setup at home.
“Say what now?” you ask? Yeah. It seems that my old Netgear WG602 AP simply will not accept a MAC address that starts with F into the approved MAC list. Works fine with MAC filtering off and encryption on or with all of it off, but I wanted the MAC encryption as well. The Mk I version of the WG602 that I have seems to be the only one afflicted with the issue, as subsequent revisions seem to work fine. Yay. So I went off in search of a new AP, which revealed that AP’s are still egregiously over priced compared to the cost of a wireless router. I’ve stayed away from the latter because I don’t like the single point of failure.
However, my old RP614 (v1) router has been showing signs of it’s age recently, and I’d been wanting to get a unit with Gigabit Ethernet anyway to go with my home LAN. Finding a wired only gigabit router wasn’t really going well (at least in the price range I wanted to be in), so I dug deeper.
What I wound up with is the Netgear WNDR3700, which has proved pretty nice so far. I didn’t know it at the time it had been included in a CPU Magazine Networking roundup. (I’ll add links to the reviews that helped me decide later.)
I’ll put the WG602 back into service as a secondary AP to get better 802.11b/g coverage in the house, as it still works fine outside the odd MAC address issue.
While it still works, the battery life and coverage on my venerable Sony CM-Z100 Cell phone make it pretty much useless to actually take anywhere. Plus, for some reason call forwarding is disabled on my plan.
So I checked the Sprint website to make sure I’m not in contract or anything…
“Sprint Subscriber Agreement: Expired on 06/12/1999″
Yeah, looks like I’m clear on the contract thing.
Oh, here’s ye olde cell phone, BTW:
Yes, I've had it for 10 years...
So now the questions are what to replace it with and on which carrier.
T-Mobile’s out right off the bat. They don’t work indoors.
Verizon’s a possibility, but I don’t care for their nickel & dime pricing for everything. Their Wireless broadband is good, but their phone selection and feature lockdown practices are a huge turnoff.
AT&T I’m familiar with, but their 3G network is abysmal where I work, and their wireless broadband is good but not cheap.
Sticking with Sprint is an option, but their phone selection’s also pretty bad, and they’re also pretty bad in terms of locking down/out features on phones. Their coverage at my job is not very good either, despite being CDMA like Verizon. It’s all about the cell towers, I suppose.
Complicating issues somewhat is the main reason I’ve held onto the old phone for so long. The form factor. The Z100 fits in my hand, pocket, backpack and the little pouch on my cue holder just about perfectly. I want to get something that fits as well if not better. I also love the scroll wheel on it, which has been superseded by trackballs, buttons and scroll pads, none of which I’ve found to be very good on the phones I’ve tried.
As you can tell, I’m very picky about what I want from a cell phone.
Flip phones are out. I just don’t like them – never have, although that one they tried making look like the Star Trek:TOS communicator was a cool idea that came too soon.
Candy bar phones are closer to what I want but too narrow and long.
Don’t particularly want a slider phone either. I’ve played with a few, but they don’t go far enough.
Ironically, the only things that come close for me are Blackberries. The Curve, and to a lesser extent the Bold.
The ironic part is that I hate… no, I despise the always reachable concept that the Blackberry embodies all too well.
It’s contributed in the worst way to the idea that being reachable 24/7 is a good idea for people.
It isn’t; it just allows businesses to squeeze more work out of their employees, often without compensation. Not that all businesses would abuse their employees loyalties like that, but the temptation to milk productivity for no monetary cost has to be a powerful one, and a practice one could all to easily fall into.
Downtime is critical, possibly moreso than ever now that it’s so easy to just keep working until you can’t focus or fall asleep.
But enough ranting about bad business practices, I need a new cell phone.
Goal was to setup a remote access system that would make it easier for a team working there to be connected to the home office.
Had to get about a dozen laptops and 4 printers and a multifunction device online and working, along with the 2 devices that handled the connections. Pretty simple in theory, and the original plan had me leaving on the October 5th, since the multifunction device wasn’t slated to arrive until the 2nd, giving me enough time to setup and test everything. Initial setup went ok, and I spent the 1st couple of days getting the laptops current on Windows Updates, and generally testing out the connection.
Then the multifunction arrived, at least the printer section did, a day early. It was covered in toner, as the box appears to have been rolled across the country. Thanks, FedEx Ground! Called the home office, and after convincing them that cleaning the thing was not an option, they acquired and had a new device sent out for delivery on Monday. So I’ve basically got a day to get that up assuming everything goes well, then fly back to NY. As you may have guessed, that didn’t happen.
To spare you the long version, (and it is long), if you’re ever going on a trip, and are debating whether or not to take an item with you that you probably won’t need, but if you do it’s the only thing that will help, take that item.
The day the replacement multifunction arrived, the internet connection went batshit insane. Had I followed my initial instinct and taken the network testing device with me, I may have been able to help fix the issue a day or two sooner, but in the end it took until Thursday to resolve. While that was going on I was able to work with people back in the home office and discern that the multifunction device had old firmware that was preventing the custom functions we load from working, and get that resolved.
With everything working as designed, I finally came home on Saturday.
Can’t complain too much since it did turn out to be a week of basically light duty while staying in a posh hotel for free.
Oh, I did get to see the Blue angels buzzing the city at very low levels for a couple of days. Even before 9/11 that wouldn’t have gone over well in New York, and there’s no way they’d get to do it these days, despite how freaking cool it is. Blast our horribly busy air corridor.
I also got to see part of the Love Day Parade. This was good and bad at the same time. Good in that there were a large number of attractive women wearing lots of spandex, and more often than not not very much at all. Bad in that nearly everyone in the parade was doing the same thing. That includes men and women of various ages and levels of physical conditioning in varying (occasionally excessive) states of undress.
Now, I’m not the finest example of fitness out there by any stretch of the imagination. However, I don’t go prancing down the street mostly naked dancing to club music, although the Love Day Parade is probably the one an only place I could get away with it without people throwing clothes at me.
Bambi. Yeah, the deer from the book and Disney movie and the source of many cases of childhood trauma. I imagine Ted Nugent has a looping clip of Bambi’s mother being shot as his screen saver, but that’s not the random thought.
It’s the name Bambi.
In the book and the film, it’s very clearly defined that Bambi is a male deer. In other words, Bambi’s a dude.
Now, perhaps it’s some twisted outgrowth from the Disney movie, or just some odd coincidence, but the name Bambi is, with only our dear little deer as the lone exception, is an exclusively female name.
Bambi is about as female a name as it gets; it’s right up there with Dolly, Elvira, Misty, or Jane.
So why would you name a male deer Bambi?
The one reason I can come up with that doesn’t involve some weird plot by Siegmund Salzmann (aka Felix Salten) to intentionally screw with people’s notions of gender and names, is that it’s short for Bambino, which is baby in Italian.
That would work fine as a explanation, except that the Author was Hungarian and raised in Austria, and the book was originally written in German.
It seems like a very “Boy Named Sue” kind of deal to me.
If a boy were named Bambi today, I suspect he would either wind up overcompensating for it until the courts granted his request for a legal name change to Agammenon or some other unequivocally male name, or they’d be the gayest person ever – that guy that even other gay people refer to as the most gay person they’ve ever met. Picture someone that would embarass Big Gay Al from South Park.
Yeah, that gay.
All joking aside, one does wonder how Bambi got his name.
Gotta be a comedy sketch there, maybe Bambi’s father cheating on his wife with a deer named Bambi, then blurting out her name when his son was foaled and being forced to run with it. Maybe she was standing in the background and he saw her or something.
It’s a Raccoon. A freakin’ Raccoon!
Ok. It’s after midnight, I’m looking out the front window of the house and noticed what I thought was a stray cat sniffing around the neighbors garbage. Then it moved more into the light and I realized that it was in fact a Raccoon. In the middle of Brooklyn. It headed up my driveway and disappeared into the darkness before I could get outside with a camera. Yes, I know, chasing a Raccoon in the dark is not smart, so I didn’t go after it. I did want to get a picture of it though, since I don’t think anyone in this neighborhood has ever seen a live raccoon in person. I know I haven’t in not quite 30 years of living here.
Update: Apparently, I’ve simply been lucky or unlucky enough to have never seen a Raccoon in Brooklyn before. They’re everywhere.
As it turns out, New York City has the highest concentration of the little masked bandits in the state. Suck it, Cheektowanga!
A neighbor has also seen the Racoon (assuming it’s just the one) as well, so I wasn’t having some late night hallucination.
Yay, vestige of sanity, eh?
No signs of the critter since then.
Not at all pleasant, but it is what it is.
No point in going further with it, as it’d just be a waste of time and energy, not to mention serving no useful purpose.
In other, non-emotionally numbing news, I’ve headed back underground.
Due to the inclement weather (rapid snow followed by frigid cold) I took the Bus/Subway combo into work yesterday, and the Subway today (seeing as there were no buses and standing to wait for one… well it was just too damned cold for that). Yesterday the streets were a mess around here as usual, and I really didn’t feel up to dealing with all the people who have no idea how to drive on snow and ice. Same thing today, and probably tomorrow, maybe Thursday & Friday as well. Monday wasn’t terrible, although the lack of a non-limited bus on the way home was annoying. Not as annoying as discovering I’d power walked 10 blocks to get home in time to watch House in HD (new TV), only to find a double episode of 24, a show I don’t watch and have never warmed up to.
Today was less pleasant, what with having to hoof it to the train, then wait forever for the 1 train at Times Square, which turned out to affect a good number of my coworkers as well. The ride home was uneventful, the playlist was good and long enough to last all the way home with tracks to spare, even with the walk from the subway to the house.
Yesterday I also made a decision that could turn out really well, or be the worst clusterfuck of a mistake I’ve made in a good long time. Not going to go into details about it just yet, though.
Check back in a few weeks to see if it’s going OK, or if I’m updating my resume and cursing excessively about what an idiotic mistake it was.
The only expectation I’m trying to take into this is that it’ll be different, which I feel like I desperately need.
To hope for the best… I’d like to, but at the moment, hope’s something people delude themselves with to stave off the inevitable letdown.
Aaaand that’s as close as I want to get to being this dude today, so I’ll end this here.
Ok. The TV”s installed, most everything’s hooked up the way I want, and yeah, it’s nice.
Still have tthe HTPC hooked up via VGA, although I will compare it to an HDMI connection when I switch the video card from an HD3850 to an HD4850 this weekend most likely. (That swap is mainly because the 4850 has a controlable fan, whle the 3850 does not, and it spins up audibly at times.)
From this distance ( about 8 feet) it all looks fine, and 1000 times better than the old set via Component or S-Video did.
Also got the correct cable for my PS2 (yes, PS2. I only bought it to play Gran Toursimo 4), and a cordless controller. Once I build a foldable bracket I’ll try out my G25 with it, since what I’ve read online suggests it should work.
I may need to get a new roof antenna though, since I can’t seem to tune in some of the local stations HD channels, like NBC, WPIX (I’ve lost track of what network that is) and WLIW. CBS, FOX, ABC and WWOR (My 9 or whateve it’s called these days all come in fine in HD, as do a couple other stations. This is fine for now because the first half of the NASCAR season is on Fox, albeit in 720p, and I can watch House in High Def. House is basically the only show I watch on Network TV besides auto racing, so House in HD is a big deal. I relate to the character a lot, which might be a bad thing, but I don’t care. My mother said he reminds her of me, but worse, but she just can’t watch the show without thinking of Wooster & Jeeves. For me, Peter Laurie is such an awesome actor I have no such trouble. But back to the TV. Before the new set, I did not know that the actress that plays 13 has a very small scar on her right cheek. Now I can see it quite easily. Not distracting at all, unlike her eyes which I supsect would burn me if she turned her gaze upon me for too long.
I had DirecTV add the HD package, but despite their insistance that it should work, I don’t see HD from the box I have, so I’ll be picking up the HD box soon, and maybe moving the current box to another room. They also seem to think my current single LNB dish should suffice, but I think they’re wrong about that too. We’ll see.
Still no sign of FIOS in these parts. Damne Verizon cherry picking neighborhoods.
Ok. I wasn’t planning on doing it until next month, but the pricing and free shipping from Newegg were enough to get me to go ahead and do it today.
Bought myself a 46″ HDTV. Samsung LN46A650 to be exact. I was gonna get the 550, but the 650 was only a couple hundred more, and adds an additional HDMI connection.
Now I’ve got to move my 36″ Sony WEGA.
Not that I’m unhappy about getting a new HD set, just that the WEGA is a CRT and weighs about 230 pounds. It took two guys to get it in here, and I’ve only moved it once since then – moving it off of our old coffee table onto the stand I built for it. Not looking forward to that part. Good news is the new set weighs in at about 60 pounds.
The stand will house the new set, but the WEGA will for now, go into a corner, then eventually to the basement, one day to be joined by a pool table. ONE DAY!!!
Anyway, now I’ll have an actual VGA connection to my HTPC rather than using component, which should make reading text much easier.
Also, the HTPC’s limited to 1024*768 on the WEGA, but will do 1920*1080, so I’ll have much more screen real estate.
Of course now I’ll need to change a few other things to maximize the usage of the set.
Switch out the DirecTV box and Dish for the HD version.
Make a new Ethernet cable to connect the TV to the network –
Get an HDMI cable to connect that to the TV.
Adjust the cabling to my other peripherals – DVD/VCR combo, PlayStation2, SNES, & NES (yeah, those aren’t typos).
For about 4, maybe 5 years now, I’ve been looking for a way to fix the approximately 70 or so playlists I’d created before I reorganized my the folder I keep my ripped MP3′s in. Initially, I’d just had folders for each artist, with all their songs lumped into their respective folder. I also wasn’t using id2 or id3 tags either, so that quickly gets messy once you get past a few hundred CD’s. I’ve got closer to 700 now I think, nearly all of which are now ripped into folders for the artist, then the album with id2 and id3 tags. But I still had all those old (some really good) playlists to deal with. The shorter ones were not hard, but it quickly became clear this was a task better done by sofware.
Problem was, nobody seemed to make one.
I was one sad panda.
Yesterday I half heartedly updated another m3u manually, then decided to try looking again.
Apparently, my earlier search-fu was weak.
Enter listFix() a java based utility that does exactly what I need.
I’ve only used it for about 10 minutes, but it’s doing what I want, with minimal interaction from me.
If it handled batches of playlists, I’d be damned happy. Actually it might do that, but it’s 3:20am and I need sleep.
Little update to this one.
I’ve finished fixing my playlists, save for one egregiously convoluted one titled Long Play, which will take longer.
Whatever you celebrate, even if it’s just getting the day off from work, have a happy and safe one.
To anyone stuck somewhere they really don’t want to be but feel they have to be, hang in there! Hopefully you’ll get out and get back home soon, unharmed.
Oh, and that goes for all the troops stationed overseas, too. You at least get paid (not nearly enough) to get shot at and yelled at by people who don’t really want you there, but you are missing the joys of inlaws, crowded malls, lousy winter weather, and the lamest yule log shows in recent memory.
Seriously.
WPIX isn’t even showing it until 9am, and then only for 4 hours. That station in Chicago (WGN) is running the audio for “It’s a wonderful life,” and other “classic radio shows” as the soundtrack for it’s Yule Log show. The log doesn’t even look warm and inviting. I thought it was bad back in 2000 or 2001 when I had to watch Yule Log on the web because I was working. Now you can download it to your iPod. Sometimes technology goes too far.
And if you think I’m just grousing, think again. It made the news.
Anyway, a Happy Christmahanakwanzaka to you and yours, and you Festivus people stay off the roads. We know you’re all drunk.
As you know I prefer Halloween, but Christmas isn’t too bad, plus it’s 7 days after my birthday. One of these years I will have a party that spans that week.
So I reassembled an older machine of mine, with a new(ish) AGP video card (Radeon HD3650 for the curious), and 2GB of RAM.
I’ve installed XP SP3 on it, and was pondering browsers. Now that Google Chrome is an official release I may as well try it out, but that in an of itself is not insane.
So, I’ve decided to install Firefox, Safari, and Chrome along with IE6, but not IE7 since IE7 is a bucket full of uncustomizable failure, inadequacy, and blind paranoia. Aso, no Opera, since I just don’t like Opera. It works in ways that fail to make me go “F*ck yeah, Seaking!” or nod in sage (or even grudging) agreement. Perhaps once I get VMWare up and running on another machine I’ll try it, but for now, the for browsers of the apocalyse will be IE6, Firefox 3, Safari 3.21, and Chrome. I’ve got a set of bookmarks I’ll import into each; no formal testing, just seeing how pages I frequent look in each.
the next two days were like I had an arrow stuck in my back.
You at least get paid (not nearly enough) to get shot at and yelled at by people who don’t really want you there, but you are missing the joys of inlaws, crowded malls, lousy winter weather, and the lamest yule log shows in recent memory.