Category: Uncategorized

Or you may end up with caffienated pancakes.

From time to time I’m asked to do all sorts of tasks related to my ability of making electronic devices perform as advertised. Tonight it was setting up a DSL connection for an older friend of mine and teaching her next door neighbor how to use her new her new combination DVD/VCR.

She had the VCR part down, she knew how to work the buttons and make the tape play, but the DVD was a little foreign to her. I showed her how to put the DVD into the player, I showed to navigate the menus with the direction and enter buttons. She seemed very anxious about whether or not she’d be able to remember all that I’d shown her. She made me show her again, slower this time, and then she did it own her own. We watched the first few minutes of Seabiscuit, and then she got up and asked one more thing. “Can you help me play this?”

She got up from the couch and went over to the closet. She reached into a box and pulled out two jewel cases containing a DVD rip of “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”

Five minutes of successful DVD watching, and she’s already pirating movies. This is Jack Valenti’s worst nightmare. And it happened tonight.

This is a test of flickr.

This is a picture taken from my new phone and posted to this blog via the same phone.

A picture I took yesterday morning outside of Castle Grabar. It made me laugh out loud.

I present to you, the AbbyCam. Or what my dog does while I’m gone. I can’t promise this is going to be up every day, and I certainly promise that it won’t be up 24/7. I’m not excited about having a camera in my living room unless it provides me with a steady stream of income.

Tonight my neighbors stopped by to celebrate their liberation from weekend guests, family, and visitors. I offered up beer and leftovers, and then we decided to order pizza. Amy did the calling, she used my cell phone…the conversation went like this:

Amy: I just noticed that the coupon is expired, is this OK?

Pizza Guy: Are you in C4?

Amy: Yes.

Pizza Guy: Oh yeah, it’s fine.

I really don’t order enough pizza to have a pizza rep, but at least they consider me to be a good tipper.

Today I supervised the the first improvement to Castle Grabyar on my watch–and it involved a crane. When I bought the place last December I knew what to expect in terms of the quality (or lack thereof) of the HVAC system. The compressor was only five years old, but it was undersized. The condenser coil was about twenty years old and leaked coolant. All of this added up to the system freezing up if it was asked to cool more than about five degrees difference from the outside temperature. Not too fun when it’s 95 degrees outside.

The new system is 25% bigger, 75% more efficient, and cost 250% more than I really wanted to spend. But that extra cost included the crane, and I wouldn’t give that up for the world.