Year: 2006

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

New York, New York

The default theme for this blog is called Painted Desert and I like it, but I just can’t leave well enough alone. First I changed the original header image to one with a Miata to better suit me and now I’m working on a little thing to keep it fresh that I hope to get going this weekend for all you Internet Explorer users.

Last Friday I fell in love with a theme called Vistered Little, that is real slick, but choked on IE big time. Well the good news is that Internet Explorer 7 RC1 displays it pretty well, so it has become Donna’s favorite way to read this here gibberish.

My favorite way to view this blog is using a theme called New York, New York. First I kept the white style and replaced the New York skyline background with a Miata collage, but then I saw some one’s dark version of the theme and knew that ws the way to go and I had just the image for the background, the one from the Windows Vista homepage. A quick search of the web led me to the stand alone jpeg. The girl would look kind of stupid in the background of a page called “Life of Brian” and I didn’t have a suitable photo of me I could photoshop in, so lucky for me the same place had a de-girled jpeg too. I’ve spent the last couple hours tweaking the CSS to get it to look great in Firefox 1.5, but I still need to do a little work on single post pages and archives and such. In IE 7 it looks passable, but the post header opacity doesn’t work rendering them too bright white. In IE 6, who knows.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 398

One Cheek Landing

Went on my usual 3-mile rollerblading loop this evening. The middle mile is around the one mile walking track surrounds the city’s recreation center. I enter on one side and at about the 3/4 mark the trail it passes between the parking lot and the main road. Cars come in on one lane and they exit in two more, one for right turns and one for lefts. Cars are supposed to yield to walkers and skaters and almost always do. Today one of them didn’t for me.

As I skated towards the entrance I looked behind me so as not to be ambushed by a car swooping in from the road. I then looked forward and could see a big sedan coming out in the left lane and I slowed a bit to make sure he was stopping. When I saw that he was, I continued forward. Trouble was there was a smaller car coming in the right lane, I noticed late, and the driver didn’t even see me at all. I braked hard and it really wasn’t going to be enough, so I turned hard right into the space between the two cars. My right skate came out from under me, dumping me on my right butt cheek.

I got back to my feet and thanked the guy in the car that stopped and looked over at the one that didn’t, who was sitting at the stop sign before entering the main drag, and gave him the evil eye in his rear view mirror. I think he felt bad and was waiting to see if I was alright before going, but I just skated back on my way with wounded pride and a pain in the butt.

I’m still sore 5 hours later and I’m betting that sucker is going to be purple by tomorrow.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 398

Shopping At Home Depot

Two guys, one old and one young, are pushing their carts around Home Depot when they collide.

The old guy says to the young guy, “Sorry about that. I’m looking for my wife, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

The young guy says, “That’s OK. What a coincidence, I’m looking for my wife too. I can’t find her and I’m getting a little desperate.”

The old guy says, “Well, maybe we can help each other. What does your wife look like?

The young guy says, “Well, she is 27 yrs old, tall, with red hair, blue eyes, long legs, big boobs, and she’s wearing tight white shorts. What does your wife look like?”

The old guy says, “Doesn’t matter — let’s look for yours.”

Guest Judge Anyone?

Voting is well underway in the 2nd Annual “My Favorite Miata Photo” Contest. If you haven’t voted yet please do, polls close this Sunday at noon eastern time. Because that is open to anyone to vote it is more of a popularity contest and it looks like there are photographers with a lot of friends, of the 382 votes so far they have 200 (53.2%) of them.

I was hoping for a more artistic judging on the photos and wasn’t getting it, so seeing as it is my contest I created a separate prize category for some Judge’s Choice awards. I picked my favorite 8 photos and emailed all eight of the photographers and asked them to rate the entries. They should omit their photo and rank the other seven in order from #1-their favorite to #7-their least favorite. I would award a sliding scale to their rankings with more points awarded for first and less points for each successive lower rank.

So far I have received 5 of 8 replies, if any of you would like to be a guest judge to fill in the three vacancies please do. Go to this gallery to see just the eight finalists and email me your rankings from top to bottom. Because you get to rank all 8 I’ll be tossing out the last one. Ballots will be accepted in the order in which they are received. Of course if all three of the official judges eventually reply yours will get tossed out like so many hanging chads.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 396