Rants

Was I The First To Run It?

At the end of our street in this subdivision there is a stop sign. The road you come to, Two Notch Road, is a through street. It is 1/4 mile away and parallel to a big thoroughfare so sometime we get a lot of traffic traveling on this cross street. And because it is considered a “shortcut” when the bigger road gets busy, speed limits don’t apply, it is posted at 30 mph, but please don’t let that slow you down. In the past 2 years 2 motorcyclists have been killed right near our intersection (1 t-boned a car turning left in front of him and the other just lost control) because they were traveling at a high rate of speed. For the past 10 days or so we have had one of those radar things the cops use that flashes your speed at you on Two Notch near our intersection. We use that road to go to and from work every day so it has been fun to see how accurate it thinks my speedometer is.

Today on the way home the radar thingie was reading the usual 34 (I routinely travel at +5 and the Miata’s speedo was right on 35,) but right before it was a sign proclaiming “One Lane Road Ahead.” As I approached the intersection I noticed to the right a SCDOT truck and there were broad white stripes in my lane and another on the other side of the intersection in the other lane. As I made the left into the subdivision my wife and I speculated on what was coming, a light? Or a 4 Way Stop?

Forty-five minutes later as I went for my evening rollerblade I purposely went in that direction to check out the intersection. As I rolled up I noticed under the usual stop sign there was a little addition that said “4 Way.” Sure enough there were stop signs up on Two Notch Road. That didn’t take long to put those up. Or did it? With the new sign, new stripes and the Department of Transportation truck to distract me at a very familiar intersection, were they already up and I missed them? Was I the first to these new stop signs?

NASCAR Pizza

I’m not a fan of NASCAR, I believe until proven otherwise that NASCAR is to auto racing what the WWF is to wrestling. I’m not a fan Domino’s Pizza either preferring Papa John’s when I’m just to lazy to travel the 3 miles to a local pizzeria. But the two of them make a fine commercial, I just love the way the “pit crew” hop over the couch to “set” the table, nicely done folks.

I found a place where somebody hates this commercial, it is amazingly enough on a forum entitled, “Commercials I Hate.”

Men Are Such Beasts

Today we got all 4 of the Netflix movies in the mail due to the weekend before last’s movie marathon. So tonight we watched one of them, Playing Mona Lisa. Funny movie but the main attraction for me was watching Alicia Witt.

What is it about us men that makes us terrible that way? I am sitting on the couch enjoying a movie with the one I love, but I am thinking about being with Alicia. If you know the answer let me know.

Zone Alarm

Though I was going to have to reformat the PC this evening. I rebooted and when it came back up everything was really slow and whenever I tried to open an explorer window or the control panel, nothing would happen, then it would lock up. Rebooted in safe mode and even that seemed to take forever. When it finally did come up I copied all my files to the 2nd hard drive incase something bad was happening. I exported the run tree of the registry and then deleted all the keys pertaining to programs. I cleaned out the start up folder and rebooted regular. Tried to open an explorer window and it was still crapola. I then realized that Zone Alarm was running. It must have been started somewhere that I missed. As soon as I shut it down the explorer window popped up. I got on the net unprotected and went to TrendMicro and ran their free online virus scan just to be sure it wasn’t something besides ZoneAlarm. They gave me a clean bill of health. Next I uninstalled ZA and then reinstalled it. Same thing. So I uninstalled it again and pruned the registry of anything with Zone Alarm or Zone Labs in it. Downloaded and installed Sygate Personal Firewall.

Damn This Is Daunting

I’ve been using AutoCAD in my work since 1987. I am comfortable doing stuff in it, matter of fact, before we got networked and Microsoft Office I used to do a lot of stuff in ACAD that it really wasn’t designed to do. I am by no means an all around expert, 3D is a foreign language to me, but when anyone at work has a question, I’m the go to guy. Well now I know how they feel when they face with the myriad commands of AutoCAD and overall complexity of the program, I just installed Adobe Illustrator. I need to redo the Barndoor Fan Club logo and design something new for some T-shirts and it helps the screen printer (and saves me money) if I can give him an Illustrator file.

I’ve bought a 3 inch thick book on using the program, but boy howdy, it’s got a lot of commands with strange names and nothing works like I think it should. I imported an AutoCAD drawing and the text stuff came through OK, but I need to fill something and it won’t cooperate. I have figured out the object is a compound path, but I need to turn it into a plain path to fill it. Back to the book.

Tickets To The Masters

Tickets to the 4 day Masters tournament are handed down from generation to generation. They have closed the waiting list to get on the waiting list. That is not say they are impossible to get. For a price nearly anything can be had.

My wife and I don’t golf and are not really into following it as fans. We used to go to one of the practice rounds each year in the early 90s, because it was like $5 to get in and you just walked up to the gates on the day and in you went. It would be like living in Indianapolis and never going to the 500, so we went. The course is better looking in person than it is on TV and during practice the golfers are loose and having fun, you could take pictures and get autographs. Always thinking how cool it would be to go to the actual tournament.

Somewhere around 1995 they made a decision to limit even the practice round tickets. Can’t blame them the place was getting too crowded and the crowd was getting boisterous and the traffic jams outside the gates were getting really troublesome. The first couple of years after they instituted the lottery we got tickets, but since then we have been shut out. It seems like the tickets are going to all out-of-towners that come to Augusta and spend big bucks on hotels and meals. Of course the officials claim that it is a fair lottery, but too many of the locals who used to go are getting shut out too. Urban legends have cropped up of getting distant relations to apply for the practice round tickets and then pass along to the locals so they can go.

Tonight my across the street neighbor called and asked if we wanted a couple of tickets to go see the Masters tomorrow. We turned him down. We have nearly all our vacation for the year either taken or scheduled. Plus it is going to be raining and low 50s. If the weather was going to be sunny and 75 we might have burned one of the last two free vacation days we have left free. I wonder if our neighbor will think of us next year or was this our one and only shot at this.

It’s Been Like 3 Years & I Still Miss It

Sunday night isn’t the same with out the X-files. The only thing that is remotely worth watching is “Inside The Actors Studio” with James Lipton. This week I skipped it because it was a rerun of Richard Gere, but next week is a must watch because John Travolta will be on. On a somewhat related note, I could have sworn I saw Mr. Lipton as a court sketch artist this morning in “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” on the Fox Movie Channel. He is not credited with that role on IMDB or on the Bravo site’s biography of him.