Month: September 2006

Two Lunch Day

Hogland HouseOur home for the next two nights, the Hogland House B & B built in 1906. Off the back porch we can watch the Whidbey Island Ferry running back and forth across Pugent Sound.

All righty then, it is around 10:30 PM here in Multikeo, WA and that is around 1:30 AM by my Aiken internal clock. Since we landed and picked up the car we have been driving around, back and forth, both on purpose and accidentally, all over north of Seattle. I’ve got lots of stories to tell, but I’m too tuckered out to type them.

You can’t complain about the airline food in steerage on US Air, ’cause there ain’t any (unless you want to pay five dollars for it. Donna and I bought a Quizno’s sub at the terminal for our lunch. We ate it after the movie, about halfway through the flight and approximately noon EDT. When we landed we set our clocks back three hours, so that after about an hour after landing it was 1:00 PM PDT and time for lunch again. We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint and each ordered a slice and a small garden salad.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
Sebring Top Transitions since 09/29/06: 4

Where America’s Day Begins

Wedding DayAt least that is what it said on the license plate, which segues nicely into…Traffic Court, Agana, Guam, September 29, 1976. The large room is filled with scofflaws awaiting the chance to plead their case on why they weren’t really speeding or why they shouldn’t be thrown in jail for driving without a license. The clerk leads 4 nervous young adults in the back doors, past the rows of defendants and their families, past the tables used by the lawyers, down to the low wooden railing in front of the imposing, still empty judge’s bench. The noise level drops a couple notches as the crowd starts to whisper among themselves wondering what is so special about these kids.

The bailiff enters from the right and loudly proclaims, “All rise!” After a few seconds the judge enters in a swirl of black robes from a door right behind his chair, looks out over the courtroom and gruffly says, “Remain standing.” He then gazes down at the 4 trembling youngsters in front of him and asks in a paternal voice, “Is this to be a double ring ceremony?”

After the judge pronounced the couple man and wife, and as they and their witnesses were escorted back out of the courtroom by the clerk, the bailiff could be heard to say, “Be seated, the first case will be…”

Newly married Brian & Donna Bogardus along with Brian’s squadronmate and his wife, Ken & Helen Tiller walked to a park adjacent to the courthouse and cracked open a coconut to celebrate.

Why am I writing this on September 28th you ask, instead of the actual date of my 30th anniversary, I’ll tell you. Guam is literally half way around the world from here and as such is 15 hours ahead of eastern daylight time, so as I write this at nearly 10 PM on the 28th it is already 1 PM in the afternoon on the 29th and we are a couple hours into our 31st year of wedded bliss. Guam, where America’s day begins and Brian and Donna’s marriage began.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 407

Pesky Pole

pes-ky? [pes-kee]
?adjective, -ki?er, -ki?est. Informal.
annoyingly troublesome

The right field foul pole at Fenway Park has been called the Pesky Pole ever since I can remember. With Fenway’s funky configuration in right field and the foul pole being only 302 feet away from home plate, balls hit in that area are definitely annoyingly troublesome to deal with, but according to Red Sox lore that is not why it got that name.

It is named for 40’s Red Sox infielder Johnny Pesky after an ex-Sox pitcher and Club broadcaster, Mel Parnell, supposedly remarked that it seemed as if a number of Pesky’s homers were hit out near the right field foul pole. Johnny was a solid .300 hitter, but didn’t with a lot of power, swatting only 13 homers while with the FRS and only 6 of those came at Fenway Park.

Today is Johnny Pesky’s 87th birthday and the Red Sox will be honoring him tonight by making it official and dedicating “Pesky’s Pole” with a bronze plaque in pre-game ceremonies.

Other famous people born on this date are Samuel Adams, Marvin Lee Aday and Brian Bogardus.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 406

The Cat Is Out Of The Bag

Scott on Piano We had promised to visit Donna’s youngest brother and his wife later this year after the “baby to be named later” was born and hopefully named, but when an etiquettely correct invitation came to the baby shower arrived, a plan was hatched. Forget later, Donna and I would show up at the shower unannounced. The eldest brother and his wife were convinced to join the surprise crew and we almost snagged his other sister too. Well, we cleared it with Beth, the expectant mother, but we still wanted to surprise Scott.

The shower is on Saturday and the four of us were getting into the Seattle area on Friday afternoon, so Plan B called for the surprise to happen at an impromptu anniversary dinner for Scott and his wife Beth at her parents house (their anniversary is tomorrow.)

Things were going along smoothly until Beth was trying to get, Mr. Workaholic, Scott to take off on Friday afternoon to get ready for the anniversary dinner. He finally demanded to know what was going on and not being able to lie to him any more she told him that we were coming up. At first he didn’t believe her. Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

I guess I’ll get back at you the only way I know how, post a baby picture of you for the whole internet to see. That’s you sitting on Donna’s lap playing on the piano in New Orleans.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 404

As The Arteries Clog

My six month cholesterol blood work came out nearly identical to the previous numbers, so we are standing pat. I did notice where last time my HDL was highlighted as low, this time it wasn’t, and the number was the same. The range on this report said between 31 and 75 was OK, whereas the last several have said >59 was desired and <40 constituted a “higher risk.” Different software? Somebody lowered the expectations? The good stuff could be higher and the bad stuff could be lower, but at least the total is well into the normal range. Everything else they checked, including liver function, was smack in the middle of the ranges. Looks like I’ll be taking Tricor and Red Yeast Rice for the rest of my days…

  Chol HDL LDL Trig
Goal <200 >31 <100 30-150
09/21/04 209 24 131 271
01/10/05 176 33 110 167
05/06/05 174 27 108 194
06/17/05 164 31 85 238
07/28/05 177 30 113 169
12/08/05 182 35 120 137
04/06/06 168 37 106 126
09/19/06 167 37 103 135

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down once more, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 404

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)

Went for a “Bike to Breakfast” ride this morning and ended up at the Atlanta Bread Company. Mileage for the ride was somewhere between 10 and 15. I could get a more accurate figure for you, but I’m too lazy to walk all the way out into the garage and look. Besides, do you really care? My right backside from Thursday’s rollerblade crash landing didn’t bother me too much. It is just sore enough to make me put my wallet in the back pocket on the other side. Still no bright purple bruise.

My inability to contact anyone at ssWebHost or HappySupport to cancel my web hosting for mr-miata.com led me to 2CO who actually does the billing for them (I don’t know why I keep saying them, when I’m sure it is one nerdy little guy in a rundown apartment somewhere) and I left a message on their site.

I have tried without success to contact ssWebHost, but I have two open help tickets open since at least 3 weeks ago that have gone unanswered. The credit card used for this reoccurring bill has been canceled after some fraudulent charges were detected. Since they have been unresponsive I have purchased another domain and webhosting with another provider and wish to cancel my services with ssWebHost. My hope is that this will get some one’s attention over there so I can cancel as other methods of communications have not been successful. I have no intention of using their web hosting anymore, but if they would like to sell me the domain, mr-miata.com, that they purchased for me I would gladly pay a fair price for it.

I killed the brian@mr-miata.com email address and emptied out directories on their server. The only things I left behind were the custom 404 page and the index.php file that redirects the dot com address to the dot net one. This way if they close my account and forget about the files it leave behind the cookie crumb trail to the new me. This is what happened with the Barndoor Fan Club site. I canceled there nearly two years ago and my error file is still out there. of course those redirects lead to the soon to be defunct mr-miata.com…

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 400

Wandering DNS Settings

Yesterday the laptop stopped being able to access the internet. Neither IE or Firefox would reliably pull up a webpage. When it was able to connect to some it was slow or it would never show the images. Moving from one part of the house didn’t seem to help much. One time sitting just a couple feet from the router it worked OK.

Today it still didn’t work on the internet. It saw the home network OK and I could FTP to the net just fine. Winamp played shoutcast streams just fine and Google Earth worked fine. I turned off the firewall. I emptied both browsers cache files. I ran Ad-Aware, Ewido Spyware & AVG Anti-virus. I plugged it directly into the router with a Cat5 cable. Still no internet, so I started poking around in the settings.

Under “network Settings” on the Control Panel, I right clicked for properties on Local Area Connection, selected Internet Protocol and clicked on the Properties button. “Use the following DNS server addresses” was selected and they were set to 85.255.xxx.xxx on the laptop while the desktop had “Obtain DNS server address automatically” selected. Changed the setting to automatic, repeated the process for the Wireless Network Connection and we were back in business surfing the web.

I don’t understand all I know about home networking, but how did those settings change? Malicious hackers? I put those addresses in there when I set up the wireless network and something changed Saturday?

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 399