Lewies Blog

On Monday, my cable company showed up and replaced my digital cable box with a DVR (digital video recorder). There are a few features that I have used that I like. First, I can change the colors of my TV listings. Woohoo! Second, it has a picture-in-picture mode so that I can channel surf during commercials and see when my show comes back on. I can also pause any channel that I’m watching and even rewind. How cool is that?

The most amazing feature is of course, the ability to record TV shows. OK, so a normal VCR can do this. However, I don’t have to set timers or make sure that the TV is on a certain channel. I don’t have to hunt for VCR tapes (which I usually just buy new ones at the store anyway).

I simply just surf the TV listings and find the show that I want to record. I press the record button and it asks me a few questions. I can just record that show, or record the whole series. I found this useful on Wednesday when I was up too late to watch the rest of Lawnmower Man 2. I just set it up to record and turned everything off. Also I missed the Sci-Fi Friday night lineup tonight. I’ve slept rite through it! However, my trusty DVR recorded all of the shows that I wanted to watch.

Now I just have to figure out how to delete the shows that I had already watched.

Web services can be such a pain sometimes. Imagine this - someone gives you a WSDL file and says that you must build a client to interact with it. It sounds simple enough, because that is the whole purpose of a WSDL. You can simply emulate a web-service to test your client with and have them talk back and forth.

The problem came when I got hold of an existing client that interacts with that web service and pointed it over to my emulation of the web service. For an entire week I had been debugging my web service mucking around with name spaces, SOAP requests, SOAP headers, SOAP responses, XPath queries, XML serialization of objects, and just about everything else under the sun.

Dealing with existing web services are painful if you don’t have something to test them against. There are just too many unknowns. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have an existing client to test out my emulated service. The easiest part was actually setting up the security using WSE to require certificates for authentication.

A few of you may know of my podcast of Dreams called DreamyAudio. It isn’t updated often, as I have to remember my dreams before I record anything. Sometimes I remember many at one time. Other times I’m just lazy to upload them to my computer from my digital voice recorder and they just set for a few weeks.

My dream from this evening was about my therapist that I visited today. It went something like this …

I saw a giant and he was guarding a gate door. In order to get through, I had to present him with a trinket of some kind. I took a sword, held it strait out so that the blade was perpendicular with the ground. As it vibrated, I swung it back and forth to cut very thick grass. I found a comb and a silver necklace. I held them up and the giant smiled but said that neither item was what he wanted. I noticed other people were also in the field looking for what he needed, but they didn’t have the advantage of using a vibrating sword.

The therapist is the giant who keeps wanting me to answer the same question over and over again. I just simply can’t find the answer he is looking for no matter how much I think about it. The comb and necklace represent some of my answers. The cutting of thick grass is me digging through my mind looking for something that is very hard to find.

So I started looking up some things in my Little Giant Encyclopedia of Dream Symbols that I got last year when I went to a meeting with the cat vacuum society. I found parts of each definition that seems to apply most to my dream.

Sword: Frequent symbol for intellectual work since the sword separates and, therefore, leads us to make decisions.
Giant: An archetypal symbol of an overpowering father figure.
Comb: Vanity.
Jewelry: Well-being. Honor or vanity. Also implies that an inner Treasure has been discovered. Also a desire for acceptance and affection.
Grass: Grass that is too high and growing wild means unrealistic ideas.
Gate: A symbol of transition and a suggestion that something new is coming.

I got a lot of service today. First my heating was fixed, and then the cable guy comes with my digital video recorder (DVR). As soon as he walked in the door, he just stared at my little TV and said that digital cable wouldn’t help me. The only thing he was supposed to add was DVR capability. I already had digital cable.

I explained that the old TV was decommissioned and that I was in the process of getting a digital TV and that this was a temporary solution. I did ask if he had a degaussing ring, but unfortunately he did not. Today’s TV guys have computer hardware and gadgets to check and replace things. They can’t actually repair anything.

He set me up and recorded down the IP address of the box. He said I could record sixty hours of regular TV and about fifteen hours of HDTV. I got a quick rundown of how to setup the box once I get a digital television. He also showed me how I just navigate through the existing TV listings that I was used to and just press the record button. I saw that there are two options - record show and record all. Nice. Simple.

Two weeks ago, my wife and I had some heating oil delivered for our empty tank. A technician came out to get everything working again. Once the heater was up and running he inspected the area and switched off the heater and saved our lives.

The cause was rust. A lot of it had put some holes through the elbows of our flu pipes and would have filled the house with carbon monoxide. We had someone scheduled to come out on Wednesday. I worked from home today so I could see my therapist in the middle of the day. As soon as I came home, Steve was at the door with a nice smile on his face.

He was just going to replace the cap on the chimney today and come back on Wednesday. A half hour later Angel tells me that he is doing the whole job. He vacuumed all the suit out, removed the pipes, put in new ones, cleaned up the rust on the heater itself, and gave it a tune-up.

I can sleep easy now knowing that I can turn the heat on. It’s been some pretty cold nights and it isn’t even winter yet. The job came to a total of $226.65

There was also a bunch of this stuff on there too:

Smoke: -
Pump Pressure: -
CO2: 10.00
Temp: 52 degrees
Draft: .003
Efficiency: 80%

Leonard Splaine
13300 Occoquan Road
Woodbridge, VA 22191
(703) 494-2885 / (703) 494-5422

I woke up early yesterday morning and headed on over to Wal-Mart to get my flu shot. I arrived five minutes early and there was only one person in line ahead of me. I filled out and signed a form with all of my information and consent and handed twenty six dollars over to the first woman. I then got in the second line and waited to be stuck with a needle.

It wasn’t bad at all. The needle went in and out in no time. The worst part of it was having all of that fluid under my skin slowly being absorbed. I could feel it for the entire day. When I was young, I hated needles. They were painful. Today needles are not painful at all. I don’t know if the tips got smaller, or my nerves expanded out more.

I am very happy that I got the shot. They gave them out where I work, but as soon as I got in, they were already out. Last year I was sick on the day of flu shots. I get very sick every year from the flu - guaranteed. I am decommissioned for about two weeks and feel like I’m on the verge of death. The last time I got a flu shot was in 1999, and I don’t remember getting sick that year.

I had discovered a free MMPORPG game called Project Entropia. Recently I got paid in real life, so I was able to sink a few dollars into my Project Entropia account to get access to some PED’s. I got some armor and also invested in a home of my own. I found that the cheapest apartment was about 175 PED ($17.50 US Dollars).

There were a few estates going for 50,000 PED ($5,000 US) as well. It sounds crazy to invest that much money into something that isn’t real. Last year someone purchased “Treasure Island” for what I think was $26,500 US. He finally broke even this month and lowered the taxes on his land. The most recent purchase in the game was $100,000 US for a space station. That seems to be going around in the news often.

I ran for a few hours to get to my apartment. Angel was a little impressed with how large the world is. I just keep thinking of Star Wars. It had very large planets as well with odd fauna and plant-life. I eventually did arrive. I found that I lived in a high-rise duplex. There are four of them grouped together.

The apartment is a bit dark inside, but it is bigger then I had expected. It even had a balcony with a view of one of the other duplexes.

It’s going to cost me 10 PED ($1 US) per month for upkeep. If I don’t pay, then I’m simply locked out of the apartment until I do pay. I’ve got to do something eventually about furnishing the house.

Since a teleporter is nearby, getting back to the house is no problem at all now. If anyone is ever in the area, you can come and visit sometime. I have set it to be open to the public.

Omegatron Beta Complex, 12C
Position: 10534.5, 10835.5 (Amethera)

If you are interested in the game, I can help mentor you. Just create a free account and download the software. Game play is free and purchasing PED’s is optional. In fact, you can cash out any PED’s that you earn into real-world money.

I started to thaw some dough last night. Angel noticed that it started to rise in our refrigerator when she woke up. A quick call to mom and she was finishing what I had started. She took it out, put it into bread pans, and let it rise an inch just above the top of the pans. Then came the cooking.

I came home and saw two nice loaves of bread. It was so tempting to dig in but I waited for Angel to wake up. She woke up a little later from her nap and was surprised that I hadn’t tried any. It seems that she didn’t eat any either because she was waiting for me to come home. True love …

Anyhow, I’m really happy. Angel got all the steps done pretty well. The last time she tried this was a little over two years ago and we literally had an explosion. Here is an old post that I had on my old news application.

The Dough Incident
8/20/2003 4:54:31 AM

Some people are lucky enough not to run into the cooking troubles my wife has. Some are unfortunate as well, for they miss out on the fun of discovering new and crazy scenarios that someone would not usually run into.

Tonight, I decided to make some hot chocolate before I went to sleep. On top of the microwave was a bag of bread dough. What was interesting was that the bag looked like it was full of air and foam latex was coming out of it in a large bubble. After a second take, I pieced together what had happened. Apparently, my wife and sister in-law let the bread dough set out all day. They were going to make sausage bread, but there was not enough sausage in the house. Rather then make loaves of bread with what they had, they let it set and forgot about it.

I went downstairs to the lounge to ask the girls what they were going to do with it. They ran up and laughed about it. Angel grabbed the dough with her hands and threw it away. She was worried that I was upset and it may have been expensive. I mentioned it was only expensive given our current financial situation, but that I was expecting to get some extra money the next day in my bank account.

Well, it is time to sleep.

I put in an order for some scripts at wal-mart and had to wait 30 minutes. During that time, I aimlessly wandered through the store with nothing to do. During my walkabout, I came across a small puzzle game called Sudoku (??). It looked like a magic square that you had to fill in.

I like logic games and it was only five bucks. Suddenly my super powers of frugality’s kicked in. I took a picture of the box with my camera phone and decided to look it up on the internet when I got home. I was in luck. There are many sites covering Sudoku. I found one called Web Sudoku. It took a while for me to figure out, but here are the basic rules:

• You can only use numbers 1 through 9
• You can only use each number once within each 3×3 grid within the 9×9 grid.
• You can only use each number once in each vertical column of the entire 9×9 grid.
• You can only use each number once in each horizontal row of the entire 9×9 grid.

So I went ahead and tried my luck. I got off to a slow start the first time just trying to figure out what I had to do. I finished in 30 minutes. I thought I did OK until I saw that the average time for an easy puzzle was about seven minutes. I figured I could do better since I got through the first OK. Wrong! It took me even longer. Somewhere I mixed up some numbers in my strategy and had to backtrack.

This game is a little addicting. It’s as if the game is a cross between minesweeper, magic squares, and crossword puzzles. Along the way, you could click a button that would tell you if something doesn’t add up and highlights the row, column, or section in red. It’s a little addicting, so make sure you don’t have anything to do before you start.

Bandit is progressing well and he is at that stage where everything he does is cute. The world around him grabs his attention with every little thing that he sees. Tonight he saw the cursor on my screen move around. I giggled a few times just watching him chase it and started playing with him. It’s interesting to think that I am using a mouse to play with him.