A fine spring day (or, why my body hurts like h*ll)

Several years ago (probably around 1994) my wealthy older sister picked up a pair of dirt bikes.  One motorcycle was an XR125 and the other was/is an XR200R.  I say 1994 because that is the model year of the XR200R.  One bike (the 125) ended up at my parents house.  The 200 ended up at my brother's house in Colorado.

Several years ago (3 or 4 years ago??) my brother brought the bike to me because all his kids that rode the bike were grown and gone.  And he was sick of the bike taking up room in his garage.  He called me one day and asked me if I wanted it.  "Sure!!  Bring it over."  So he did.  So long story short, I ended up with this fairly decent motorbike.  It had been thrashed by his kids and my brother isn't known for taking care of his stuff.  I eventually got the bike running and last fall I got the clutch replaced.

So a week or so ago I pulled the bike out, dumped the old gas out and changed the oil.  I put new gas in and oil and dang, that thing just runs like the champ.  So one of my neighbors also has a bike.  I think he's got a 450 or something like that.  So we talk.  There is this mountain close by called West Mountain.  BYU has their West Mountain Observatory.  I tell him about the observatory and some radio antennas on top of the mountain.  I tell him about my failed attempt to reach the summit several months ago.  He's always ready for some fun and adventure.  So we decide that today is the day we'll  make our climb up.

I haven't ridden much since I was a kid.  Last year I didn't ride much because the clutch on the bike was marginal and my oldest son toasted it.  But we repaired the clutch and now it runs well.

So we go.  And we go.  And we go.  And we climb.  And we climb.  And we climb.  And we get near to the top of the towers.  Check out some of the photos that I took below:

The picture above is near the top and I'm looking towards the east across the valley.

In the photo above, I'm looking towards the northeast with Provo in the distance.  You can see the southern end of Utah lake.

These are my riding buddies.  Jon was on a Yamaha 4 wheeler.  Brian is on his 450.  The towers (our destination for the day) is in the background.

This is BYU's observatory.  Note:  This is on the west side of the mountain, somewhat behind the mountain.  I assume this location was selected because it is the "dark(er) side" of the mountain.

This is another shot of the valley, this time from the top where all the towers are and looking towards the south east.

I was wearing polarized sunglasses and some of these shots were taken far, far away from my eye (I have a DSLR camera).  I really need to invest in a polarizing filter for my lens.

The total trip time from my house was about 3 to 4 hours.  When I got home, dang, I was sore and stiff.  But it was one heck of a ride It was a total blast.  And I really needed that ride.  I've toyed with the idea of buying another motorcycle or ATV and today cemented the idea.  If all goes well, I'll end up with a Honda FourTrax Rancher 4x4 ATV.  As much as I'd like to go out tomorrow and buy one, that really won't happen any time soon.  So I need to save my spare change and buy one outright or finance a small portion of it and pay cash for the majority of it.  I would actually like to get another bike, but an ATV is more "practical".  I can put a snow plow on the front of it and push snow for people.  And the kids could use it to drag their lawn mowing stuff around from job to job.

I'm hooked.  I'm already planning my next trip up to the towers.

Well, it is late and I'm tired and I'm going to bed.

Welcome to middle age!

I've been telling everyone I see that yesterday I "officially" became middle aged.  So what do I mean by that?  And what set off that comment?

A couple of weeks ago I went to the optometrist to have my eyes examined.  He said that I could probably get away without the use of bifocals for another couple of years.  But I've had problems seeing small print, so I ordered progressives and a pair of sun glasses with a prescription in them.  Yesterday I picked up my new eyes.  Wow.  It is amazing to "see" yet again.  I just hate the period of time needed for your eyes to adjust to a new prescription and so that I can learn to use progressives.

I remember when I was a kid, "old people" had bifocals.  Does that now mean that I'm old?  Compared to someone younger than a teenager, probably so.  Compared to retired people, I'm still young.  Hence, I'm middle aged.  Nice.  I feel like I'm a teenager again without all the goofy hormonal and pubescent changes that occur.

One of the things that I've found is that things that I like doing, I really like doing when I have time to do them.  I have an old Honda dirt bike courtesy of my wealthy sister.  A couple of friends and I are going on a bike/ATV ride up to some radio antennas at the top of a mountain tomorrow.  I'd love to do the journey on my own, but I feel that it would be a lot safer to ride up there with at least one other person.  I haven't spent much time in the seat of a dirt bike lately (I rode an XR75 a lot when I was young), so the companionship is welcome.  I've even looked at possibly picking up another bike or an ATV.  But those machines are expensive and I'm still paying off the excesses of my 20s and 30s.  For now, I'll enjoy what I've got.  Even though I am now, officially "middle-aged".

Seeing into your eyes you see your whole body

It has probably been a good five years since I've had my eyes examined.  I keep getting these "things" (I do not wish to describe what I'm seeing) which are not floaters, so I decide to go to the eye doctor to figure out what's going on.

So last Friday I go in and find out that I'm FAR sighted instead of being near sighted all along.  I don't necessarily have to get bi-focals just quite yet, but I figure, what the heck.  One more thing to whine and complain about.  And the bill for a couple of pairs of glasses made my car mechanic green with envy.

While I was there the optometrist dilated my eyes so that he could blind me and photograph each eye and accompanying retina.  Afterwards he explained that he saw a soft drusen in one of my eyes.  That didn't sound good and his description (it is a piece of cholesterol trapped between the layers of the eye) didn't comfort me either.  I had him write it down (I'm over 40, so I forget things) on a piece of paper and then I ignored it until today.  I'm glad I ignored it over the weekend because it probably would have ruined my weekend.  Here is one of the links that I found about soft drusen:

http://www.agingeye.net/maculardegen/maculardegeninformation.php

Yep.  Soft drusen is a precursor to macular degeneration.  Great.  I'm an IT dude.  I write technical documents.  I depend on my eyes.  What will I do if I go blind?  I can't let this happen to me.

The last 10 year or so, I have not done good things to my body.  Instead of diet and exercise, I've instead parked my butt and eaten.  I'm up to a weight that I am not comfortable admitting.  I hate looking like a near full-term pregnant woman.  My primary care physician told me that your eyes are an indication, the canary in the cage so to speak, of what else is happening in your body.  Great.  I have this piece of cholesterol in my eye.  Where else is this cholesterol parked?  I know that my gall bladder was full of it when it was removed.  Is it in my heart?  Is it in my brain?  Am I going to go blind and then stroke out for the rest of my life and end up dead because of cardiac arrest?  OK, OK, OK......   I'm dooms day, but when stuff comes back that doesn't sound good, then there's a good indication that something's probably up.

Why does a man have to go blind (I'm speaking figuratively here) in order to see?

On New Year's day I thought I was having a heart attack.  Subsequent testing showed that it was my gall bladder.  But one of the things the doctor told me is that I needed to loose 50 pounds.  50 freaking pounds.  Dang, that's a lot of weight.  I've probably lost 5 pounds.  The other 45 will take some time to get rid of.  But I will need to get active and loose the weight.  Or else I may end up blind and dead.

Saturday I bought some salmon at Sam's Club.  I cooked a piece on Saturday and liked it.  Today when I read that link, I had another piece of salmon for lunch.  I'm going to eat healthy from here on out.  50 pounds, here I come!

Home PC upgrade - Part 3

I did not know/realize this would take as long as this has, but I'm nearly complete.  Here is what I've done so far:

I picked up a pair of 1TB (yes, that is one TERABYTE) hard drives and put them into the home PC.  This is a pair of Western Digital Black Caviar drives.  This brings the total disk storage in my PC from 2.75TB to 4TB.  Yes, I have four, 1TB drives in my home PC.  Why so much?  I take photos.  Lots of photos.  Lots of photos in DNG format (which is Adobe's digital negative format, or camera raw).

The most interesting thing about my purchase is the fact that one of the hard drives came with 64MB of cache on the drive itself, instead of the normal 32 MB.  Does it make a difference in speed?  Does the sun rise in the east?  While it does not have a profound effect on performance, it does help increase performance somewhat.  I just wish I would have known that there were two different models in the boxes.  I would have looked for another drive with 64 MB of RAM in it.  (NOTE:  I just looked at the boxes and they only show 32MB of HDD cache installed on the boxes.  However, they have significantly different serial numbers and one is a product of Thailand and the other is a product of Malaysia.)

So, what's next on the upgrade path?

* 4 GB more of RAM.  This will bring the overall system to 8 GB of RAM
* Windows 7 Professional, the 64-bit version

The RAM and OS purchase will probably happen around the same time as I cannot use the extra RAM in Windows XP Professional 32-bit.  The current estimated price will be around $300 total.  Hopefully I can get this all done by June or July.  I plan on keeping my current 1GB drive with XP on it as my backup in case the upgrade goes horribly awry.  I plan on using one of my new 1TB drives that I picked up as my new C:\ drive.  In fact, I'll probably end up using the 1TB drive that has 64 MB of disk cache on it.

So part 4 should be the final upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit.

Nexflix streaming for the Nintendo Wii

Around Christmas 2009 I was contemplating the purchase of another console gaming system.  I came close to pulling the trigger a couple of times, but I never did it.  I was leaning heavily towards the Sony PS3.  Why?  Because it has built-in wireless, a fairly decent sized hard drive and because it has a Blu-Ray player built-in.  In a moment of weakness, I almost purchased an Xbox.  But I didn't do it because no Blu-Ray and, more importantly, no built-in wireless networking.  I could probably handle the lack of Blu-Ray, but the lack of wireless (the add-on adapter was in the $70) pushed me completely away from the platform.  The thing that kept me away from the Sony was the game content.  The PS3 games are mostly adult-only games.  And I really didn't want my kids playing games targeted for adults.  The main reason why I wanted a new console so I could stream Netflix content without the need of having a computer hooked up.  Because I didn't like my options, I opted to just stay with what I have, a Nintendo Wii.

Then a month or two ago I read on Netflix's web site that they were developing a streaming option for the Nintendo Wii.  I got all excited and signed up for my free streaming disk.  (If you aren't familiar with Netflix, they have an option where you can stream some of their content directly to a computer, game console, or supported multi-media or Blu-Ray player.  So you don't have to mail in DVDs and the like to get your movie fix.)  Well, my disk came last week and I just had to try it out.

So I got the disk.  Put it in.  There is an activation number of some sort where you have to tie the number to your account, so you need to get onto your computer, log into Netflix, put the code in and you're done.  This is the most cumbersome part of the whole process.  As soon as your account is setup with that activation number, the Wii automatically refreshes itself and allows you in browse for movies or review your instant queue.  Once I got the Wii activated, I was watching a movie within minutes.  Sweet!!!

The picture quality is good.  The Wii can only do 480p, so you don't get a high def picture.  But the fact that you can browse and stream a video and watch it instantly for a monthly price, that is just incredibly cool and makes up for the fact you can't stream in high def.

My only complaint about Netflix is that not all their movies are available for streaming.  Some moves are DVD or Blu-Ray only and not available for streaming.  That can be annoying.  But they've got like 20,000 movies that are available for streaming, so usually you can find something to watch.  In fact the other day I watched the movie Look who's coming to dinner with my kids.  They thought it was great.  Spencer Tracey gave a great performance at the end with his monologue.  Interesting movie.

Sudden death

I don't know what's going on with items in the Tom household lately, but things have been breaking with an intensity not seen in a long time.  Here is a list (possibly partial list) of things that have died in the last little bit.

• A D-Link DSL modem.  This piece of hardware abruptly died Monday this week.  The modem has been in use between one and two years.  I'm renting a DSL moden from the phone company that I haven't sent back yet.  And boy, I'm glad I still had it.  Because when the D-Link DSL modem croaked, I was back up because I had a spare.  I bought a replacement DSL modem, but I need a back-up/spare before I can send the Actiontec modem back to the phone company.  That may be a while.  In the mean time, the rent is cheaper than the cost of the potential down time.
• A D-Link eight port gigabit switch.  I've had this one for a while and I was surprised that it died.  One day I heard a pop noise, but I didn't realize where it came from.  Everything seemed to work just fine.  Then a day or two later the switch just died.  When I felt the power supply, it was really hot.  So I unplugged it.  I suspect the popping noise came from the power supply and it probably toasted my switch.  I had a port die on the switch several months before it completely died, so it was probably on its last legs.  I suspect I've had this for five or six years.  I had a spare, but since I'm now using my spare, I don't have a backup.  So I need to eventually replace this before I actually need it.
• A Panasonic over the range microwave oven.  Manufactured sometime in 2004.  I think the magnetron (the piece that makes the microwaves) is going out on it.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn't.  The symptoms for nonfunctioning is the oven will run for about 3 seconds and then abruptly stop.  I never loose power.  (I had the loose power problem just over a year with this microwave.  That was an undersized fuse in the thing going out which was replaced for $100.00....)  It will run and stop after just a few seconds.  Bleh!
• An Asus A7V266-E motherboard.  This motherboard was purchased around the time of September 11, 2001 to replace my ancient Pentium (yes, plain Pentium) based system that I put together several years earlier.  This is the first motherboard of my first system that I've ever build.  And since then, I've built all the rest of my computers.  This particular motherboard uses an old 486 style CPU fan to cool the VIA northbridge.  The fan on the northbridge finally puked on me.  I looked for a replacement CPU fan from that fan manufacturer, but because it is so old, they no longer make the CPU fan.....  While this isn't a recent failure, it is a failure nontheless.  And while I'm moaning about failures, I might as well add this one in here.  Yeah, the system is ancient, nearly 9 years old.  But you know what?  It still worked and ran.  And when you are using old hardware for a home PC lab, you'll take just about anything.  Like watching an old friend on life support die.  Painful.  But sometimes you have to literally pull the plug.
• OfficeMax chair.  What the heck?  Why are you adding a chair?  That's not electronic.  Because the chair lasted about a year before giving me problems.  I suffered with it for about four to six months and finally, I had it.  So I went and bought another chair.  This new chair is OK, but it makes my tailbone hurt.  You never win, do you?
• Bosch dish washer:  The motor/pump on this thing went out.  Less than one year old.  And it started acting up six to eight months after we bought it.  The freakin' pump went out!!  What the heck?!?  Thank goodness the unit was still under warranty and we got the pump replaced for free.  But why did that go out after such a short amount of time?

I'm sure I've got more stuff that's died on me, but this is what I can remember.  The thing that ticks me off is that you pay good money for stuff and then it breaks on you.  For example, the microwave.  I think I paid something around $400 for that fine piece of electronicness.  And all I get is six years of service out of it?  And the dishwasher?  Not even a year and the motor/pump goes out.  What's up with that, eh?

The fan on the motherboard.  I see that happening.  I just wish Asus would have used a different method to cool the northbridge than using an electric fan.

The chair.  OK, maybe that's a hint that I'm fat and I should go on a diet.  But the chair should have lasted longer.

The switch and the DSL modem:  Can you say, "No moving parts"?  How this stuff died is beyond my comprehension.  Other than the fact that D-Link used crap parts when they made their equipment; parts that are cheap to keep costs low.  When you make stuff using low end components, you're asking for trouble.  I'm sure D-Link engineers their stuff to get it through the warranty period, but who knows how long beyond that period of time?  I once heard that hard drives are engineered to last three or maybe five years.  After that, they fail.  So make backups of that important information before it is lost.

So what's next?  Well, I suppose that my hot water heater is the next item on the watch list.  My current hot water heater is 9 years old.  I had the thermostat on it replaced on it two years ago because it was leaking gas.  I've been told if you get more than six years out of your hot water heater, you're doing good.  So this one should die any time.

So what caused all this failure?  Was it all just crappy design?  Or was it sun spots?  Or is it the radon gas in my basement?  Who knows what is causing the failures in my house.  Stuff just happens.  Nothing lasts forever.  And it is disappointing to pay good money to have things wear out and die after just a few short years.

When is 50 gallons of hot water not enough?

When you have a teenage son.  I told my son to take a short shower.  To me a short shower is about 10 or 15 minutes.  45 minutes later he wandered out of the shower with the water coming out of the tap luke warm.

Crap.  I've got five other kids that need to get in there and have showers or baths.  And my son sucks every last ounce of hot water out of the system.  Great.

Next time, he may get the water cut off at the five minute mark.

Home PC upgrade - part 2

The home PC upgrade is making progress.  The next item on the shopping list after the CPU and power supply upgrades consisted of a video card upgrade.  I accomplished that two weeks ago.  I put in an ATI based 5770 graphics card with 1GB of RAM on board.  I wanted a 5830 based card, but the graphics chip for that card is relatively new and cards are hard to come by.  So I went with the older 5770.  It isn't too bad.  It is significantly more powerful than the GeForce 7600GT that it replaced.

So have I noticed any differences?  Yes.  My son and I play flight simulator.  We have Microsoft's FSX and also X-plane 9.  With both games, we can crank up the complexity and the video card eats it like a goat will eat grass.

So what's next on the list?  I need the following:

• More RAM
• Two 1TB hard drives to replace the 250GB and 500GB drives in the system
• Windows 7

The drives will probably come next.  The RAM and Windows 7 purchase will be made at approximately the same time.  The computer currently has 4GB of RAM.  I'm going to max it out with 8GB and then get Windows 7 64-bit installed.  Windows XP can't use the addtional 4GB of RAM, but I can use the extra 2TB of disk space.  Eventually one of the new hard drives will be used as the master hard drive for Windows 7.  Western Digital makes a 2TB drive, but that drive is still expensive.  If it drops in price, I'd like that drive to be my main drive.  So I may end up with a 2TB and 1TB drive instead of two 1TB drives.  I currently have two 1TB drives in the system and I love it.  You can never have enough disk space.  And when you do, you just end up using it.

Last night I was thinking to myself, why am I spending so much money on an upgrade?  I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I saw a pretty decent eMachines computer for just under $400.......  It had a multi-core CPU, 6GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive.....  Hmmm....  Why am I doing this?  I guess I like building stuff.  I don't know.  A frustrated Lego builder?  I haven't purchased an assembled computer in probably a dozen years.  All the other computers that I have, I have pieced together myself.  Yup.  I'm a geek.  Pure and simple.

Toyota recall - Part 3

So last week I took the Camry in for a 15,000 mile service.  They had a couple of recalls on the gas pedal thing.  They put the reinforced shims on the gas pedal, they shortened the gas pedal arm (?) about 1/2 an inch, and then they reprogrammed the computer.  The computer reprogram was the brake over-ride so if I have gas and brakes both depressed, the engine would reduce power.

So, any differences after the changes?  The gas pedal still feels the same.  The shortening of the pedal is unnoticeable.  The gas pedal seems a little bit more on the sensitive side.  The car seems a little more peppy to me on the lower end of the RPM scale.  That could be the affects of the shortening of the pedal itself, but that's my perception.  For the brake override, that seems to work.  Before the recall, I put on the gas and the brakes the the engine was still pushing hard.  After the computer reprogram, the engine power will decrease.  Once you release the brake pedal, normal power resumes.  Kinda cool.

Is there a problem with Toyotas?  Honestly, I really don't know.  The runaway Prius story in California makes me wonder what is going on.  And I will be very interested to read about the results of the engineering team's testing.  Newer cars have a black box similar in nature to black boxes in airplanes.  I'm sure that the engineers will extensively review the data from that black box.  I hope that Toyota does the right thing for this guy and fixes his car - brakes and all - for free.  If anything, they should fix it for free for PR reasons.

I'm on my second Toyota.  The cars have been built solidly.  The first car I had was a 2003 Corolla and it was a magnificent car.  My 2009 Camry is a lot like my Corolla was like, except even better. 

With the runaway car issue, I'm mostly concerned about my son and his reaction to a sudden acceleration problem.  My Camry has a five speed manual transmission, something that is extremely rare in a Camry.  We've told him that if he has that problem, to simply put the car into neutral, pull over and turn off the car.  And with the brake override, he could use the brakes to slow things down.  But the Prius should also have a brake override system and it didn't work in the California Prius incident, so who knows.  Best bet, put in the clutch, put it into neutral, pull over and turn off the car.

Will I buy another Toyota?  Probably.  I think the overall quality of Toyota cars is better than the American cars.  And I think Toyota will figure out the root cause of the problem and take care of their customers.  Many of these problems, especially intermittent or rare computer related problems, are quite difficult to troubleshoot and diagnose.  I know because I've worked in tech support for over a decade.  The "easy" problems to solve are the readily duplicate-able problems.  The harder ones to solve are those that are rare and random.  This issue seems to appear in the latter case - rare and random.  Hopefully the Prius in the California incident will provide Toyota the details that they need to fully understand the root cause of the problem.

Gall bladder surgery - 22 days and counting

It has been three weeks since I had my gall bladder removed.  And how am I doing?  My answer is, "Why didn't I do this sooner?"  :-)  Seriously, though, it hasn't been all that bad.  The worst part was the first week.  I wasn't in pain, but I wasn't comfortable.  The second week I felt quite a bit better and this week I'm even better.

So any side effects?  Some.  The bowels can get a little loose at times.  But it hasn't been too bad.  I'm still taking it somewhat easy on the food that I eat.  I've been trying to eat lots of greens (salads and the like) and I've been venturing into some other foods.  So we'll see what happens.

This week I also started to exercise.  I got on the treadmill and went slow.  It was good.  It is amazing how much better you feel once you exercise.  And this is no different.  So life is getting back to "normal".