Hi-Def Dilemma

I have been contemplating the purchase of an HDTV for a while now, but one thing that has been holding me back is that my cable provider did not offer NESN HD - and if I can't watch the Red Sox in High-Def, then why bother? But I was perusing my cable company's website and discovered that this year they ARE offering NESN in HDTV. Furthermore, I discovered that my current package already INCLUDES HDTV basic programming (a $5.95 value!). This means that by hooking up my regular TV to this service, I am effectively WASTING $5.95 a month. Therefore it stands to reason that the only responsible thing to do is to go out and buy an HDTV immediately.

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Skippy Car update

I was walking behind the skippy car tonight and thought I saw something weird. Upon closer inpsection I discovered that my bumper is coming loose. Oops.

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Adventures with a skippy car.

Those of you who were laughing at me as I pulled out of the Church parking lot on Sunday will enjoy this story. As you may know, my car recently developed an exhaust problem. As with all exhaust problems I first noticed that it sounded a little bit louder than normal. But I decided to wait for it to get worse before I bothered to fix it.

It started to get louder - but still I waited.

It got to the point where it was really loud when I was accelerating but not too bad if the car was merely maintaining speed or coasting. So I waited for it to get worse.

One day I made the mistake of accelerating as I was driving past a cop. He pulled me over and told me to get it fixed. I told him I was planning to get it fixed that weekend. And I was. Honest. But it was cold that weekend, and the football playoffs were on, and I just didn't have time. So I waited some more.

Ever since then, I just made sure I did not accelerate as I passed that cop and everything was fine. Then this weekend, I noticed that it was worse. It was loud all the time - and there was a distinct rattling when I would go over bumps. When I looked at the back of the car, the tailpipe was definitely in an odd position. The kids in my back seat asked me why their voices sounded funny when they talked. But still I waited.

Then on Tuesday, it finally got worse. I was driving down I-95 when I hit a bump in the road. There was a bang and a rattle and then the distinct metallic sound of metal being dragged on asphalt. Crap. I decided it would be a bad thing to leave a muffler in the middle of a highway like I did with the playpen incident so I pulled into the slow lane and waited until I had a good opportunity to pull off the road. The day before I watched a special report on TV about people on the side of highways getting hit by traffic, so I wasn't about to just pull on to the shoulder. I was about 2 miles from the Hampton tolls and I knew there would be a little parking area right there. How much worse could it get in two miles, right?

So anyway, there I am cruising down 95 dragging a muffler and it starts making a worse sound - it now sounds like it is bouncing up and down between the road and my undercarriage. I am positive by now that this means my muffler is hanging by a string and any moment now is going to go flying into the car behind me (who, by the way, was tailgating) Desperate to avoid this, I reduced my speed drastically. This only serves to cause the car behind me to start tailgating me even closer. (By the way, how stupid are you - if the car in front of you is dragging/bouncing a piece of metal exhust, and it is clear that it could let loose any moment, wouldn't it be a good idea to BACK OFF? Or for that matter, go around! It's a four-lane freakin' highway!!!!)

As I approached the toll booth, I started to breath a sigh of relief. I was only a couple of hundred yards away from the little parking lot where I could pull over and fix it. (well, "fix" may not be the right word). But then - just as I'm about to go through the tollbooth, I hit a bump. The front edge of my muffler caught the lip of that bump and stood up almost vertical, LIFTING THE BACK END OF MY CAR OFF THE GROUND!!! Then it started making the most horrific sound you can imagine - so loud it completely drowned out my Radio. The whole time the guy at the tollbooth is giving me really strange looks. I was able to get the car over to the parking lot fearing the worst. When I got out I found that my muffler was completely wedged vertical between the bumper and the ground, with the muffler supporting a great deal of the car's weight. That awful sound was the sound of me gouging a pretty nice little "scratch" into the pavement. It was wedged so tight that I started getting out the car jack in order to lift the car up and free the muffler. But then I realized there was so much junk in my trunk that it would take way too long, so I just started kicking the muffler. After a few really good kicks, I finally knocked it loose - along with a fair amount of paint from my bumper. I was able to completely remove the muffler and put it in my trunk.

I guess that NOW it is finally bad enough to fix. A cop will usually let you off the hook with a warning for the broken exhaust, but I don't think they will be quite as understanding if they find out the muffler has been completely removed.

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The Accidental criminal

After flying to California for a recent business trip, I reached into one of the pockets of my backpack and pulled out a TOY HAND GRENADE. I'm not sure which one of my kids was trying to get me arrested, nor am I sure how I managed to get through highly trained and extremely competent security in Boston with a realistic looking toy explosive (specifically banned by the TSA), but I decided not to press my luck twice and threw it away while I was out there. It also gives me an excuse to post this amusing picture I found.

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Not Clear on the Concept

If you drive a Nissan Xterra, Ford Explorer, Expedition, Excurcsion, Chevy Suburban, etc... your car does NOT belong in the parking spot marked "compact". Just because your car technically still fits between the lines with the doors closed does not mean you should park there.

Also, a note to soccer moms everywhere - the "mini" in the word minivan does not qualify you as a compact car either.

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Memo to Jet Blue

I recently flew on your aircraft and for the most part really enjoyed the experience. Having 30+ channels of DirectTV available at every seat was really nice (even if 29 of the were carrying non-stop Anna Nicole coverage for the whole flight). However, I was watching "Revenge of the Nerds" on my screen only to realize at the last moment that it was the unedited version. So there I was surrounded by many other people, when all of a sudden there was a full-frontal view of a woman on my screen completely naked head-to-toe!!! To say the least, it was really uncomfortable. I can only imagine what the people around me must have thought - or the (female) flight attendant who chose that moment to offer me something to drink. There were also young children on the plane, fortunately none were in my row. In the future, you might want to keep your offerings to PG13.

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Jack Bauer Show

For the first time in my life, I had to watch the Jack Bauer show last night complete with commercials. It was a decidedly unpleasant experience. I hope I never have to do that again. Pretty good episode though. Although I prefer when Jack has to do "improvised" torture instead of the IV-medicine kind.

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Not all bad

Ok, so I had to take a last minute trip to California, leave my wife and kids behind for a week and watch the SuperBowl on 5" airplane screen, but today I am looking at the bright side - the Bright, Sunny, 65-degree side..... Hope you guys are staying warm today. I'll think of you when I hit the pool later.

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aaaarrrgh!

No offence to gagknee. but in my experience most IT people are idiots. Well, maybe not - but the talented ones all get promoted pretty quickly to Network Administrators and managers leaving the idiots to run the helpdesk.

I found out yesterday that I have to go to California next week, so I requested a laptop for my trip. The guy gave me two choices:

- the standard laptop which is nice, but too big to fit on an airplane tray easily, but that doesn't really matter because the battery only lasts about an hour, so it's not that useful on a 6 hour flight anyway.

- a brand new "small" laptop - which fits on the tray, and a battery life of close to 4 hours. He assured me that I would be able to watch DVDs with it on the plane, so I took the small one.

I waited until last night to open up the case - at which time I discovered that it was too small and didn't even HAVE a DVD drive. And then, when I had resigned myself to no DVD drive, I plugged it in and discovered that the battery didn't even work!!! it won't charge, and the laptop only runs when plugged in - which defeated the whole purpose of having the small one in the first place!!!!!!

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