I bought a roll-around air conditioner today and it barely fits between my desk and my bed. In fact, the bed covers up some of the air vents which could be a very bad thing indeed. It’s a 9,000 BTU Frigidaire, whatever that means. It should make lots of noise and, if I’m lucky, will cool down the room the next couple of days when it’s supposed to be in the 90’s. The receipt was stamped with a “no return” notice. I guess people pull the “SuperBowl trick” and buy the things when it’s hot and try to return them when it cools off. It also doubles as a dehumidifier so it has other uses.

I finally had to clean up the room I mentioned several days ago. What a mess that was. I think I can throw away some of my phone bills from 2000, but I figured I’d better do everything a little bit at a time. Mostly I moved everything around but I ended up with a two-foot stack of paper recycling.

And fortunately I was finished before my brother-in-law arrived.

Holly Reinhorn is a girl I went to grade school with who many of us had a crush on. Her dad was a dentist and she was one of the “rich kids” from the hill. She was also a grade-A beeyotch and I have confirmation that she didn’t get any better in high school. (I went to a different gearhead high school instead of my neighborhood high school so I heard this recently from one of her classmates.) It’s 27 years after I last saw her and I really couldn’t care what she’s up to. Probably shuttling her kids to Multnomah Arayan Athletic Club. (The MAC Club is a ritzy exclusive-membership “athletic” club in town.)

Well, my buddy Bill is now an internet bazillionaire and we both grew up as “not-so-rich” kids in the neighborhood. He still wants to find some of the rich kids and rub their noses in his success. And one of the people he wants to do this to is our old classmate Holly Reinhorn. He just told me that there’s a “Holiday Reinhorn” in town who is an author, doing a reading at Powell’s books. I read the blurb in The Oregonian on “Holiday” and it’s the life story of “Holly.” On the Powell’s Books web site it says she’s a promising young writer. She’s my age and 41 isn’t exactly young.

OK, so that’s the only real interesting thing from today. I tried to hit the gym today but on the way home from work I found some uneven concrete and fell on my ass. I also sprained my ankle. I hobbled homeward until I was ten or so blocks away and that’s when I saw Bill and he gave me a ride home and told me about Holiday. While I still don’t care what happened to her, I’m not going to read her book (I’m reading Harry Potter as soon as I get my hands on it) and I hope I never hear her augmented moniker again because it’s sticking an unwanted Madonna tune in my head.

I guess this is the punishment I get for calling kids I grew up with by their old grade school names, like Billy and Tommy and Nicky. (They’re Bill and Tom and Nick now, I guess.)

Yeah, I know I’m not supposed to run the most current code unless I’m willing to put up with some breakage, but usually there’s someone around willing to give you a hand with fixing things. Not so much with WordPress. You’d figure they’d want more guinea pigs for QA reasons, but I dunno. And they’re using Subversion, which is also kind of ass. And by ass, I mean there isn’t any documentation.

So yesterday I made it to the gym and they were trying to clean out the lost-and-found. They had a bucket with about a dozen sets of keys. And not just single keys or locker keys, but car keys on rings with the alarm remote and house keys. How in the hell do you forget your keys at the gym? Do you some how break into your car, hot-wire it, get home, and then throw a brick through a window to get inside? I mean, just getting to the parking lot and not having your car keys should give a person a big clue that they forgot something. There was also a cell phone, and they threw out about 20 locks. One of those locks was mine, probably, but I already bought a replacement.

Did I mention my brother-in-law is coming to interview for a teaching job? He’s going to stay in the “computer room” which, in the distant past, was my sister’s bedroom in my parents’ house. Can I point out the DISTANT PAST part to my sister? Yeah, a 41-year-old guy should have moved out a while ago, but I’m here taking care of my elderly parents. Asian son and all. Anyway, in the 35 years we’ve lived here, NO ONE HAS BOUGHT ME A CHEST OF DRAWERS. I should do that for myself. I do have a chest of drawers, but it’s for a baby.I would need two drawers just for my underwear, for example, and my shirts would probably fit 6 to a drawer.

So I use the spare bed for my clothes. Stacks and stacks of clothes. Here’s a picture:

I have to find a place to stash all that so my brother-in-law can sleep there. He’s also kicking me out of my TV & computer space.

So, anyway, that’s about it for now. I missed posting yesterday because I was drinking cocktails and chatting with friends (and apparently they read my nonsense) so here it is, two days worth of crapola in one!

For the past couple of months I’ve been trying to finish a keyboard keyer kit. What a keyboard keyer does is let you plug in an old PC keyboard in and get Morse code out. It’s a geeky ham radio thing and most hams use paddles where one side sends dots and the other side sends dashes:

Anyway, the keyboard keyer attaches to one of these three LCD displays:

You can see the keyer in the top right corner. Well, I need a cable to go from the LCD display to the keyer. I’ve been waiting for MONTHS for my friend Greg to bring the cable he made for me, but he keeps forgetting it at work. MONTHS! So I finally went to Norvac, the only electronic parts dealer in the Silicon Forest, to buy:

1. 10-pin housings (the black rectangular things in the lower right),
2. 14-pin housings,
3. 10-wire cable, and
4. a crimping tool.

What they sold me was:

1. 10-pin housings
2. 18-pin housings,
3. 9-wire cable, and
4. a crimping tool.

Now 18-pin housings can be made into 14-pin housings with a pocket knife. They’re just plastic and the lower two in the picture are the pieces after I cut one apart. But you can’t add a wire to a 9-wire cable (it’s that rainbow-colored ribbon sticking out from under the lower right LCD display.)

I don’t know how Norvac can screw up everything I buy from them, but they do. The pre-made cables are all wrong, they sell me the wrong parts, etc. They are just clowns.

It’s a good thing that I got an email from Col. Noh Dae-Jung telling me I can make a sizable percentage of his $30,000,000 bank transfer and can manage his overseas properties as well! I’m rich! Now to switch my car insurance to Geico!

So my internet connection has been up and down a couple times lately. Once on Saturday evening and once tonight. I found out that Saturday they were replacing a router. Tonight was, unfortunately, a mystery to all involved.

So I dragged around work today and it warmed right up in the afternoon making it hot at the gym. So I dragged around there as well. I think I have a bunch of things to take care of, but I just watched TV and got a call about how screwed up my internet connection was (and, more importantly, the connection to my sister’s blog). It should be up now!

Today was antenna day at Greg’s. I thought I’d get to sit out the tower climbing part, but I ended up standing around at 70 feet off the ground. I was just the ‘helper’ so most of the time up there I just stood around. The harness cut into my shoulder and hips, and my boots weren’t stiff enough to comfortably stand on the rungs of tower. And for some reason Greg didn’t have everything ready, though he tried pretty hard. He didn’t have the equipment ready to get the antenna up to the top of the tower and I had to call one of the neighbors to borrow parts. On top of all that, it was raining off and on.

Well, it was actually pretty fun hanging around with friends all day and nobody got hurt (possible when climbing towers). We’re going to have to go up and down the tower a few more times (and by we I think I may have to do some of it myself) but it should be finished by the end of the summer anyway.

Spent the day prepping for tomorrow, when we put up Greg’s antennas. And my internet connection appears to be acting up, so I don’t feel like typing much in case it goes down again. More later.

This morning, about 6-ish, I was woken up by radios. I could tell it was some sort of 2-way radio noise and I thought it might have been a cab company or some sort of trucking company. After I finally got up and took a shower, I went outside to see some neighbors standing around on a street corner across the schoolyard. There was a painter with his truck in front of our house, so I thought I’d ask him what was up since it might have been him making the noise. As I approached him, I noticed he was on a cell phone and he was pretty quiet, so it probably wasn’t him. Also, there were a lot of helicopters overhead. The painter pointed down at the corner and said something about the cops. I realized it wasn’t neighbors standing on the corner, it was cops standing by the SERT equipment van, and an unmarked police car was blocking that intersection.

About a block away, there was a standoff between cops and a guy who broke into his grandmother’s house. kgw.com says, “Man arrested after drug-induced tirade, PDX standoff.” (I’d post the link but there’s registration required.) About 7:30, after people were up, they fired some smoke grenades into the house and got the intruder out.

And that’s why I could have used a nap this afternoon. That and the weather changing to nice and rainy and cool.

Made it to the gym, and got to see the new episode of Monk! I’m such a geek.

I FORGOT!

I mean, here really isn’t anything interesting going on, besides new episodes of The Inside on Fox and Teen Titans but even though The Inside is getting better, there’s really nothing much there.

Today I suppose there was even less interesting stuff going on. I found out that the neighbors are also upset about the kids who are out by the park at night, making all sorts of noise and disturbing our sleep. In a neighborhood where the houses are $500k+, you’d figure there would be more support from the police, and perhaps better behaved kids, but I think rich kids are the worst. And rich people are nuts.

See what I mean?

Also, I think I’m getting carpal tunnel and I’m not sure why.

Never try and you can never fail. I would elaborate, but I can’t.

By the way:

Of course, it’s 4th of July and I live across from a school yard so they’re going to be setting crap off for a while longer. This is one of the nights of the year where I’m sure to be sleeping with earplugs and a pillow over my head. (New Years being the other night.) Every time I think they’re finished, someone else pulls something bigger out. It’s almost midnight now and a car full of about 20 kids drove up. They got out more fireworks and a gallon of rum. We’ll see if it ever gets quiet.

Went to the gym and it was actually more crowded than a Friday afternoon. So today was all about watching the Monk marathon or the Twilight Zone marathon, or some other TV when I should have been out in the sunlight. But the sun was too bright and hot for this Oregonian. We needed some drizzle.

I forgot one of the most important parts about my run. I haven’t been running for about a year and so I was rummaging around looking for running shorts. The shorts I wear to the gym are all running shorts, but I only have enough pairs to last a week and don’t want to run out. So, dug around the mess that I have instead of a real chest of drawers and put on the first pair of running shorts I found. Unfortunately, the rubber had gone bad in the waistband. I tried holding them up with a safety pin, but after getting two houses away, I knew it was time to come back and find another solution.

So, not only did my run end up pathetic, it started out pathetic as well.