Sunbathing with a friend.

I don't really have anything today.. because basically I am in just a giant funk.

When I was a kid I remember a period in California where a high pressure ridge just sat on top of the state for what seemed like an eternity. They eventually turned off all the fountains. You could only water your lawn on designated days. I remember being very affected by it even as a child.

Today, I think I am downright depressed about it. It sounds like such a rediculous thing. But I had planned to spend this winter doing nothing after working for 15 months on nonstop projects. This was suppose to be the winter of naps. I mean.. I still can, but you just can't feel good about it with the sun shining every single f-ing day. It was downright exasting getting our old house from this:




To this:



This:



To this:



And a ton of stuff in between. That bamboo floor was a bitch, and we had to lay it twice because we had a water damage incident from a top floor window that decided to leak.

I just feel like I can't re-charge my batteries before project season comes around in about two months - so today I just fell into a big funk. Everything is dead due to the unusual deep freeze period we had, and since we had that intense heat wave this summer everything feels like it is going to spontaneously combust. I think we've had 2 weeks of rain in 10 months, and it is really taking a toll on me. My brain really needs a change of season.

I'm Titled Out.

Blogger tag.

I know most people are hesitant to play blogger tag. I am no exception. We all love our little anonymous world don't we? Plus - I don't really find anything about myself especially interesting. Since Evil HR Lady tagged me - and my blog is a little eclectic - I thought I would screw you guys up a bit more by revealing 5 things you didn't know about me. All the people I read have already been tagged - so I'm not passing it on.

1. When I was 7 and other kids were wanting to be firemen and ballerina's - I wanted to be a drug dealer when I grew up. Yep... thats right. By the time I was mid-adolescent it was a veterinarian until working for one, and then realized with my short attention span that computers were going to be the only thing that would keep me entertained enough to spend a lifetime at it. Just goes to show you never know how life is going to turn out.

2. I have crazy food crushes. I will be into something - and that is all I will want to eat, then I'm over it, and wont want it again for years. For example on my honeymoon I was in a crab crush. So - the whole week I had crab. Then I wouldn't touch it again for three years. Right now I am into Pho. Thankfully I have a husband who is insanely understanding.

3. I still have a baby tooth and I fully expect compounded interest from the tooth fairy when/if I loose it.

4. I used to be a chronic lottery player until my husband made a joke that I would have better odds in the stock market. He was right. We started out putting the same amount of money I would play on the lotto into the stock market.

This is why sometimes I will make friendly bets with other bloggers. I hope you all don't think I am going to forget about them.

My husband and I constantly bet for real money. No I don't think I have a problem - though occasionally I question it when I try to make random bets with strangers. And no - when I was in Vegas I didn't gamble once.

5. I never quite understand why people like me. I know it sounds weird and lame. I think it is because I think most people have friends with a common theme. All of my friends are like polar opposites. So I have a hard time trying to figure out what it is that people see. And yes... everything needs figuring out.

I'm not an auto blog.

Okay - for like 2 seconds after CES I thought I was a closet gear-head. Well, the feminine version. I feel a little sheepish to say it - but I almost had more fun in the car area than in the tech area. But you have to understand I see technology all the time. This is why I found myself at a car show today. And it turns out that I am not a gear-head. I was only attracted to the cars at CES because they were full of technology. Whew! Thats a relief. I was starting to fear for my chromosomes. So you probably won't see any more posts about cars. Unless some show with concept cars filled with monitors comes around.

And it turns out that what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas because I was a walking typhoid carrier today. I'm living on cough strips.

They did have one interesting concept car. This was the front:



This was the back. Yeah.. I know.. you can't tell if its coming or going. That's what everyone said.



This car was kinda interesting too.





Then it was mostly just ordinary cars and a couple of these. Pretty boring really. You see at least a few of these a month around here.

Todays Hall of Shame.

Did I miss some memo? Because last I knew the fast lane wasn't for camping out - it was for going faster than the rest of traffic, and passing people who were not.







Yeah - this guy wasn't annoying me. But who has a purple on purple porsche?

More about CES.

I don't know why - but every time I fly I get a cold. I'm pretty sure when the airlines hand you a ticket, it includes a virus. So I am pretty slow in posting my stuff from CES. Plus - it's a little challenging to post anything that a few hundred thousand people haven't already covered.

One of the things I thought was interesting was XM had a HUGE booth. I would say they probably had a hundred people working it. I found one banner that had a Serius logo and one small display.



Everywhere you turned XM had some kind of display or was handing out these bags.



And if you felt you needed a monitor in the wheel-well of your big ass truck you were pretty much covered there too.

Oh - and the smokers in Vegas were out of this world. It wasn't an accident I got a shot of a guy smoking. Even though I grew up with smokers and dated some of them, I found it pretty over-whelming.



This was one of the more usless items I saw - because everything now has to have a monitor in it. Just in-case granny doesn't have a flat panel monitor in her sewing room.



Samsung bum-rushed me for trying to take pictures of their blu-ray display, and threaten to take away my "film". Clearly security was being farmed out to people from the last century. Still freaked me out.



No one was as agressive as Samsung about it.. but there were a few booths that didn't want any pictures taken. I still don't f-ing get it because if I wanted to be a bitch - I could have just tele-photo'ed in from one or two isles over. I sort of thought companies went to these things for exposure... but what do I know.

This company gave a gender based sales pitch. My husband and I didn't realize it until we talked about it later. My husband got the "it's for lonely men in Japan" sales pitch. I got the same one as Gizmodo.

But they did have this interesting 3D .... well... I'm not sure what you would call it. But it was interesting. The planes were flying around the city.

If your neighbors don't piss you off now....

The first thing I have to say is that the people who work in Vegas rock. Oddly it was a little like living in Pleasant-ville. The barista's at CES who had to endure a crushing endless line at Starbucks. The many cab drivers, and servers. Even the traffic police wished people a pleasant day. At all the venues - everyone was just really pleasant despite the several hundred thousand visitors. And most importantly the really impressive way that the airport got people in and out.

Now lets see some stuff.

I am going to start out with the easy stuff because well... its easy. I never in a million years thought I would be posting the following images. I can appreciate a nice looking car - but I was really surprised by my reaction to this area. One car after another that was just so pimped out. All I could do was laugh and say "holly shit - thats crazy".

It started out with the audio set-up in this hummer that litterally vibrated the walls.



I kept trying to get to the Sony booth and every time I would turn a corner there would be these crazy pimped up cars.

This blog closed until CES.

Try as a might I just can't seem to spit out any entries.

I have a lot to say - but between the excitement of going to CES, and having to talk to all my women friends - my brain is just grid-locked.

Don't get me wrong....my female friends rock - but the holidays make it so you have to talk to all of them in a very condensed time frame. After a few 3 hour conversations - I start to understand why men just want us to shut the hell up. I'm not 15 anymore.. and I have shit to do.

So unless anything super interesting or short comes up I won't be making entries... just come back next week.

Playing Laser Tag with the Moon.

What we loved, hated, and wished we loved - 2006.

This is the time of year when we review how products held up for the year. It is super easy to get excited about a new toy - but much less easy to be excited after a year of use. This is how things worked out for us.

First lets start with the things we love.

1. Weaknees. Hands down - the best customer support on the planet.



Way back here I was crying and bitching like a little girl about our Series 3 Tivo. Weaknees had a fix 3 weeks after I made that entry.

We paid to ship the box back to them. Weaknees sent us an email saying it was on its way back to our doorstep before I knew the machine had arrived at their support department. They turned the machine around with the upgrade in 1 day.

The drive is now completely quiet. The fix far surpassed our expectations.

2. The 2006 Pontiac Solstice.



Driving this car is like being one of the prettiest girls at every party. Even the drivers of more expensive exotic sports cars will turn to look when you drive down the road. You get so much attention - it actually freaked me out for a while to drive it.

People are more courteous to you, even while in bumper to bumper traffic. Driving the car is only half of why this was a great purchase. The buying experience is the other half.

Back in the spring these were pretty hard to find. There was about a 10% mark-up because of this. I started calling every Pontiac dealer-ship in Silicon Valley, and happened upon Lehmers Pontiac in Concord Ca. The dealer-ship quoted me a price over the phone. Because they were charging well under the 10% mark-up we went down that night.

They handed us the keys and let us take it for a drive. We were already sold at the point.. we just needed to make sure the car would comfortably fit someone who was tall. A very fun car - but the most impressive part of the experience is when we went to sign all the paperwork - the price was exactly the same as we were quoted. They didn't try to sell us anything extra. It was hands down the best car buying experience I've ever had. Dare I say.. even pleasant. We didn't even walk out with that feeling most people get from buying a car - screwed. The service department is equally impressive.

3. Fisher Paykel "Dish Drawer" dishwasher.



When I first saw these things I hated them. I thought there were a needlessly up-scale product. What caused us to buy one was the idea that you can run a load in each drawer independently. And I can not enphasize enough how useful that feature is.

4. Amazon.com & Amazon Prime

Often Amazon has items at our doorstep within 24 hours. Sometimes I think they ship products to us even before we realize we want them.

5. American Power Conversion UPS.

You can read about our experience here. We were so happy with the product we bought two more of them.

6. Pacific Laser Systems laser meter.



Lets face it.. everything can be made better with lasers - but if you do any remodeling you just have to get one of these.

7. On-Star.

We wound up using the system 3 times this year. Late this summer when a girl wound up rolling her car a couple of cars in front of my husband. When I hit that dog - here. And once for a road hazard.

I never in a million years thought we use ever use the system when he bought it.. but it really is worth the monthly fee to not have to search for emergency numbers in the middle of a crisis.

The feature that makes us even happier is the On-Star/Verizon partnership that enables us to use the hands free car-phone to link with the Verizon service. The car phone never cuts out like our normal Verizon cell phone service. Traveling the same span of road the cell phone will cut out on average 2 times. The car phone - never.

Next up - things we wished we loved.

Another Comcast Rant.

I swear to you - Comcast will not rest until they have you resent every experience you have with them.

Listen.. one of the few - and I stress FEW - good features Comcast Cable had going for them was the ability to watch trailers for movies. I have purchased a lot of movies I would have never chosen to buy if I hadn't been given the choice of watching a trailer.

With so much media choice I forget what a movie is about by the time I get around to viewing it. Yes.. I'm ADD to the hilt.

So this week - while wanting to figure out if we wanted to buy a movie - we were greeted with this new gem.




You can not turn it off. And it is really f-ing annoying.

I can only guess they did this because the menu system for buying movies through Comcast is really cumbersome. So.. why fix that? Just make it so your customers have a hard time trying to actually view the preview. Oh.. or make it even better by letting this fuck-tard talk about 2 minutes before letting you see a 1 minute clip.

All for the sake of vanity.

Okay... I'll admit it. I was pretty blessed in the acne department. As a kid I rarely had blemishes. As an adult I occasionally get a blemish or two. They always come in these weird spots that hurt like hell. Like the corner of your lip or right on the tip of your nose. But with new technology why should I even suffer with those?

So when I got this little Zeno device which was suppose to rid me of these fall-backs to adolescence I was super skeptical. After all - blemishes are a way of life. You just suck it up and pretend you don't think everyone is looking at the giant zit on your nose. Which they are.

So far I'm loving this thing. It turns you into a pimple monkey. Searching your whole body for even the slightest blemish to target. I almost can't wait to get acne so I can play with the device. It has a super great ipod-ish sleek design.

It does take 2 minutes per application. But what else are teenagers going to do when they are sitting at home without a date from pizza face?

Lasers - lasers - lasers.

Lets face it... you can get us to buy anything if it has lasers in it. Lasers are the geek equivalent of a disco ball.



I haven't actually done much more than turn the thing on... but I do have to give some feedback so far on the company I-Tech.

When I started looking at these things before Christmas, I couldn't find them in stock anywhere but from the company web-site- which I have to say put me off just a tad.

The web order form was a little well... low tech looking. I couldn't get through on the phone the first time I tried. So I e-mailed the company. A gentleman named Eyal responded within a few hours. I was still unsure if I was just throwing money away, but I took the chance and placed the order after being told they were expecting an order from Israel, and we would have our shiny new toy by Christmas. Honestly.. I had low expectations... I never thought it would come before the holiday.

They delivered almost a week early. I like companies who respond to customers quickly, and ship on time. I will post a review a little later on. I already notice there is some dependency on how you hold your hands. The keyboard is not as responsive to the way I type vs. my husband. We can't figure out why yet.

Merry Over-achieving Christmas!

Turns out I have a little sugar fetish. Not just any sugar.. but the large crystallized colored kind. Normally when I make Cherry Pie I just put some jumble of of red and purple. It comes out very pop-tart-ish. I don't know why but these sugars keep their shape and don't melt all over the place. So it gives the top an interesting crunchy quality.

So when I was in the store last.. I thought "maybe I'll just pick up another color", but they had this whole rack which made me go crazy and say -fuck it- and I got all the colors. This was the end result. My husband is a co-conspirator.

Living with E. Cuniculi in Rabbits.

This entry is really for search engine purposes. My regular eclectic readers should probably just pass this entry by.

It is always so crazy how life snaps you awake. And maybe it wouldn't have meant anything except it happened a year ago this week. It was the last thing on my mind. I'm just going to the vet to pick up eye lube for Jane. But there it is...in our file.. a printout.

You see about a month ago we had a titer retest on our bunny Fudge who had previously tested positive for E. Cuniculi. This - the 4th test - was negative. This was surprising, considering this was not thought to happen. One of the staff had done some research and placed this printout in our file for us. But oddly - I went in today. A year after we learned about this disease by a fatality. Our girl Amber. She tested E. Cuniculi titer positive at .1803. High positive. Before this, we knew nothing about it.

I told myself when I could - I would make an entry for those searching for information about having rabbits who have positive titers for E. Cuniculi. Mostly because there is come debate about what happens to rabbits who are infected.

We immediately set to get everyone tested. We thought because they all live within 25 feet of another there might be other losses. At the time we thought any testing positive would meet the same fate as Amber. What we found out was pretty interesting.

Amber - who tested the highest was 1.803. She was 3 years old.

Willow - tested at 1.083. We thought he might not live since he was very high. Even thought he was the healthiest bunny we had/have.

Jane - Willows' mate tested at 0.536

Fudge - who was housed next to them tested at 0.436

Paisley - housed the furthest away tested at 0.284

Kirby - housed 2nd to closest, tested Negative 0.139

We were amazed that a house full of positives would produce a single negative. Kirby. It also made trying to figure out how we became infected hard. We had gotten Kirby in the middle of the pack. Those before and after her were possitive.

There was much discussion about re-testing with our vet. Since there has been very little positive information about treating for this illness, we collectively decided that now we have a base titer count we will wait and see. If anyone shows signs of anything - we will retest.

Willow was the obvious one to watch. His count is very high. He is going on 9 years, and is perfectly healthy. At this point, one could cautiously hope he will die from old age rather than E. Cuniculi. We don't know when he was infected.

Jane also seemed greatest as risk. She and Willow lived together. This was about the time her Glaucoma acted up. We also thought it was E. Cuniculi related and that she might perish. The eye turned out to be Primary Glaucoma, and she has also been very healthy now that they eye has stabilized for right now.

Fudge seemed in the grey area, but he has had more health problems - so has been tested 4 times. Positive 0.436, negligible, undetermined once, then Negative. He is also about 9 years old.

Who knows how this will turn out, but it is interesting just with our own small control group.

To learn about E. Cuniculi (Encephalitozoon Cuniculi) go here, here and here.

Laundry Room Project

Another project we are trying to get finished is our laundry room. Some may remember we had to kick our contractors off the job earlier in the year here. So we are putting the cabinets up ourselves.

My husband and I took a little while to figure out what cabinets we wanted. A lot of our projects spend a lot of time in design. This is the rendering my husband did.



This is where we are at right now.



And I managed to find a before picture. One thing we are really bad at is taking before pictures. This is from the very first day we viewed the house, and the room really was that yellow.



The only hold-up?

Since we aren't contractors and can be slightly impulsive we sometimes run into roadblocks right when we get to them. It started out we were only going to set the larger cabinets, but that made the room look out of proportion. So we set out to the cabinet warehouse to buy what we thought was a standard 12inch cabinet addition. Of course... nothing we ever want comes in the sizes we want, so we wound up with 14 inch.



We get one up and notice we didn't account for that outlet. Now we have an add on project or ripping the wall open and rotating that outlet. But...it is way better than having to bitch about having someone else do it. I am pretty done with contractors for the year.

Links to other tile projects here.

Data closet.

Well... nothing has been pissing me off this week.

Got my cards in the mail last night. Which is a project I of course hate. When I got to one of those boxes they have on the street a gentleman was dropping off his cards also. He said he had just come from the post office and the boxes there were full. This was late night. When he went to shove his cards in the street box, this one was completely full too. So I crammed mine in there being really glad I don't send checks to anyone.

I'm mostly on technology reviewing hiatus until after the holidays. I don't want to spoil any fun surprises for my husband. I will be doing a best and worst of the year update.

So.. I'm just going to tell you what we have been working on. This weekend we made more progress on our data closet. In the beginning this seemed like a really simple project to do. But finding wire the was not only strong enough to hold tower machines - which will be on the bottom shelf - was not easy. Also, finding wire that would fit the general size of the closet without some wacky modification was much harder than it seems. Only one company we found - The shelvingsource.com had our size and they shipped it to us in 2 days (kudos to them) after I had a bitchfest here. So hopefully by next weekend my Alienware machine will have a permanent home.

I know you are saying "just stick in a shelf for f's sake". Well.. that would be the easy thing to do. We don't work that way. Also that is a big dust black-hole. The wire shelf method makes it much easier to keep the dust from collecting around the machines, and you don't have to move everything to dust.

I can't wait to sell this house and hear the feedback from our realtor when a prospective buyer wonders why the hell there are so many GFI power outlets in a bedroom closet.