Another Generic Blog

The drugs my dad is taking is working, his prostate cancer has reduced in the past 6 months. Unfortunately he’ll have to be on the drugs for the rest of his life, but now he knows he still has a long life ahead of him and the side effects aren’t that bad (he just has no testostrone now). Also, my brother-in-law’s treatment for his cancer is going as well as can be expected. He’s only halfway though it now, but he’s doing good and should make it through just fine and when he does the cancer should be completely gone. Looks like our family is finally winning the battle against cancer.

In other news, I just had the whole family over to my place on mothers day. Everyone was amazed at the toys I had, the projector for a tv so I have a 100+'’ tv and my arcade cabinet. The kids (my niece and nephew) especially loved them, we played one of their dvds and they couldn’t believe that everyone in the movie was lifesize. The also sat for hours at my arcade machine, they’re too young to really play anything, but they banged on the controls and loved watching the games on the screen, especially pole position partly because you can crash the car. What really makes me glad about that is it confirms that I have a great idea for a christmas present for them, I’m going to make a 1/2 size arcade cabinet and use an old computer to power it. I wasn’t sure if they would like playing the games, but now I know they will. I’m keeping this a secret from everyone in my family, but no one in my family reads this (in fact I don’t think anyone reads this) so I know I’m safe in putting this info here.

Also, I just bought a new toy off ebay, a Quasicon arcade joystick. Since I know absolutely no one will have any idea what that is, heres a link to a review of it: http://www.retroblast.com/reviews/quasicade_3.html Your probably wondering why I would buy this when I already have an arcade joystick, well the reason is because this is nothing like the one I built and I actually could not build one like this, this control panel is unique because all of the joysticks and buttons are analog. I can only play a few playstation games with my current control panel because most new games require analog controls, and this is the only arcade control panel available with both analog buttons and joysticks. I’m going to use these controls as the basis for another arcade cabinet, one designed soley to play console games one. I’ll put my playstation into and I’ll probably buy a used Gamecube and put it in there as well. It should be a lot of fun to play games on.

Well, its been a few months since I made my last substantial post, seems like I would be posting more since I haven’t had a whole lot to do lately. Work has been pretty slow lately, making just enough to pay the bills, which is pretty much the norm this time of year in my business. Things usually start getting busy sometime in April, so I’ll probably only have a few more weeks before things take off again.

Now for the bad news. My dads prostate cancer is back, theres now nothing they can do to treat it, all they can do is slow it down. Hopefully the drugs will slow it down enough that he will still live another 20-30 years, but theres no way to know. Also, my brother-in-law’s cancer has also returned, luckily they do have a way to treat it, but its risky. He’s currently getting extreme chemotheorapy, which is basically chemo non-stop for a week, then off it for a few weeks, then back on it and living in a plastic bubble for a week. It will completely kill his immune system, they will then do a bone marrow transplant to get his immune system going again. Basically he’ll be going through hell for the next few months, far worse then his first treatment of chemo a few months back.

In other news, the construction of my house is still being delayed. It was supposed to be finished by the end of this month, but now I’ll be lucky if its finished by the end of the year. Its annoying, but as long as housing prices continue to increase, I don’t mind too much. The price I’m paying for the house is already set, so by the time its finished it should be worth close to $150,000 more then I’m paying for it.

Now, what about me? What have I been up to? Well…not a whole lot. In fact not much at all. I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the torque video game engine and am starting work on a game using it. I haven’t gotten much done on it yet, but I’m learning a lot as I go. Also, I should be getting my full appraisers license any day now, it takes up to 3 months from the day they receive your application and its been 2 months and 3 weeks, so I should get it sometime this week. As for my woodworking, well I drew up some various plans for a jukebox and a dining room table, but put both projects on hold for one reason or another. I did build a custom end table/entertainment center to hold my projector, dvd player, receiver, and tivo. I also moved the tv out of the living room and am now using the projector as my tv. It worked out extremely well and I quite happy with the results. I’m not sure if I’ll go ahead with the dining room table next because it will be a huge undertaking and very expensive. Needless to say, I’m not making a normal dining room table, it will be very custom and something you will not be able to buy in any store, I’ll get into details after I actually begin working on it. I think I’m going to wait until work picks up and I have a steady flow of funds coming in before I start it. I’m thinking of making a nice headboard for my bed next, one with a couple shelves and drawers built into it. Maybe I’ll start designing that tommorrow.

I think I’ve rambled on long enough. I really should start posting as the news comes in so that I don’t have to write a book each time I finally do post. Hopefully I’ll learn my lesson before too long. I’ll leave you with a picture of my custom end table, the sides also fold down for easy access which you can see in the rest of the pictures here.

Top Gear is probably the best car show on TV and someone made a list of all the Top Gear videos available on the web. My favorite would have to be “Destoying a Toyota Truck”

http://www.tunertrader.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=516

Just the other day I had a ton of odd occurances on the road. So I’m leaving my apartment complex and decide to take a back way out which leads through a large parking lot which has a 4 way stopsign in the middle of. I pull up to the stop sign and notice a baby carriage rolling across the intersection out of control. With the angle it was going I was able to see that it was empty, must most people couldn’t see that and started freaking out. People came running from every direction to try and grab the stroller and a car even drove up to it real fast and had someone jump out to grab it. I looked in the direction the stroller came from and there was a woman putting a baby in a car oblivious to whats going on in the intersection.

On that same day I was comming up to a red-light and a car in the lane to the left of me suddenly served in front of the car in front of me, who was barely able to stop in time. I assumed the guy suddenly realized he wanted to make a right turn, but just before the light turns green he puts in car in reverse and goes back into the lane he was just in. As soon as the light turns green he jumps out into the the lane to his left, which is the lane for opposing traffic, and starts pacing the car who was in front of him. The car he was next to then slams on his brakes and makes a sharp left turn to get away from the crazy guy, but the guy in the wrong lane wanted to follow him and also served to the left. Unfortunately for him he was already past the turn and was stuck blocking all lanes of oncoming traffic, luckily there was no oncoming traffic at the time. He then circles around and cuts across all the lanes and immediately takes a right turn out of my sight. I was just glad he was away from me.

You know that same day, and this will give you an idea of the kind of day it was, I saw a group of 3 or 4 motocross bikes coming down the road, and every one of them was wearing the same exact thing. It wasn’t until they got a little closer that I realized they were all cops and had one of those police suburbans following closely behind them. I’ve never seen cops on off-road motorcycles wearing all white fully enclosed motorcross style helmets, it was wierd. But if that wasn’t odd enough I saw the same group of cops, or maybe another patrol of similar setup, on the opposite side of town. I have no idea what they were doing or why they were driving around town on off-road bikes, it was just an odd day.

Just the other day, it wasn’t the same day, but I did have a cool water sandwich on a sunday-go-to-meeting bun….I mean I was driving down the highway, traffic was light and I wasn’t in a hurry so I was going around 70 in a 65 zone in the middle lane. I noticed a camero starting to pass me in the fast lane (the lane immediately to my left) but didn’t really think anything about it. He moved about 1/2 car length in front of me, but I never really looked his way and was just minding my own business…until he turned on the police lights on top of his car. I immediately slowed down to 65, he turned his lights off and drove on. I guess he was just telling me “Hey, theres a cop here moron, go the speed limit.” I knew there were Highway patrol cameros, but holy crap are they hard to spot. The light bar on top of their car is so tiny that from a distance you couldn’t tell it apart from an empty ski rack. I guess I just need to keep an eye out for cameros now just as I do crown vici’s, luckily this cop was either a cool cop or in too much of a hurry to worry about me.

If anyone actually reads my site you may be wondering whats with that extremely long post detailing my arcade cabinet. Well, I wanted to make a seperate page integrated into my website (meaning same header, footer, etc.), but I don’t seem to have permissions set correctly so my blog editing software wasn’t able to create the new page and I just don’t care enough to figure it out. I figured creating it as a post and then just linking directly to that post is the same as creating a seperate page for it, so thats what I did. The link to page will now forever be over in my links list over there –>

Yesterday I had an appointment in a pretty crappy neighborhood (the last house I appraised near there the owner of the house was telling me how they found a dead body in the alley behind their house earlier that week) and the real estate agents listing on the house said it was a “major fixer upper.” I find the street the house is on and am reading the numbers on the houses, I see number 11775 (I’m looking for 11809), after that theres 2 more houses without numbers, then the street dead ends into a freeway. I figure it has to be one of those two houses, probably the house on the corner. Now this house was the crappiest house I’ve ever seen (reminded me of the Munsters house, but with huge piles of junk on the lawn and a car on blocks in the driveway) and I figure it matches the description of “major fixer upper” so I go and knock on the door. A guy obviously on drugs answers the door and I ask if this is house “11809.” He says”Ya I think so, the owners over there go talk to him.” I step inside and there are people passed out everywhere, probably 10 people in the living room alone, I walk over to the owner and again ask “Is this house number 11809.” He says it is and asks why I’m here. I say I was hired to appraise this house and he asks “who hired you?” Obviously he had no idea what I was talking about so I say “You are selling your house right?” He says “No”. So I once again ask “Is this house number 11809?” He responses “809? no this is 789″ I apologize for the trouble and get the hell out of there. I head back to my car and double check the maps to make sure I didn’t miss something. Apparently the street that runs parallel to that street has the same name and the numbers continue over there, I’ve never seen anything like it.

I haven’t decided if this house was stranger then the bodybuilder/obsessed Cher fan house I appraised a while back, but its definately up there. At least my job lets me meet unusual people

Well its been a crazy few weeks. Monday morning of last week I get a call from the office, apparently the computer had completely locked up and wouldn’t boot anymore (theres only two of us that work there and I do almost all my work from home, so theres only one computer in the office). It is extremely bad for this computer to be down because without it we can’t do business, but I couldn’t get to it right away because I already had appointments set for the whole day. I didn’t get to start working on it until around 5pm. I worked on it until around 1 am and figured out the problem was over heating. Apparently the case and cpu fans had died causing the temperature in the case to be around 135+ and the cpu running around 155+, I’m surprised it was able to boot at all. Apparently the heat caused the hardrive to malfunction and corrupt some essential windows files so I was forced to reinstall everything using a big ass fan blowing directly on it on high to keep it cool. The next day I head out early to the local computer store, pick up a number of fans, rounded ide and floppy cables, and a new power supply (power supplies are the most common thing to go bad on a computer so I figured I’d just cover all my bases by getting one). I get everything installed and it boots up fine, so I decide to bring it back to the office (I worked on it from home, the office is across town) and set it up.
I get back to the office and start setting up the computer, last of all plug in the power cable. Before I turn the computer on I start to smell something burning. I’m thinking WTF is burning, it shouldn’t be the computer because its not even turned on yet, suddenly I hear a loud pop and then see smoke pouring out the back of the power supply. I still have no idea wtf was wrong with that thing, but I ended up taking it out and getting a refund, they only had the same crappy brand of power supplies in the store so I figured I’d just use the old one I took out since it probably wasn’t the cause of the problem. I hook everything back up, and finally turn the computer on and this time it works fine. I installed motherboard monitor on it to make sure it doesn’t get too hot inside again. By this time its already 2pm and I haven’t had lunch yet, so most of my day was gone.
I decided it would be a good idea to check all the fans on my comps to make sure they’re all working and I find the cpu fan on my gaming computer wasn’y working(I have a gaming computer and a work computer at home, it makes sure I don’t do something stupid mess up my work computer) so I decided to order a new one and just not use that computer until it came. I recieved the new heatsink on friday and I have to say this is the first time I’ve ever been really impressed with a heatsink just by looking at it. I got a Thermaltake Venus 12 and it’s not only a huge heatsink, but it comes with 2 fan control knobs (one for floppy bay and one in the back of the computer) and a temperature sensor that will adjust the speed according to hot hot it is, you can only install one at a time, but its very cool to have to many options. Anyways, I’m pulling out my old heatsink and the cpu pulls out with it. I bought this as a cpu/mobo combo so it came with the heatsink already installed so someone else did a crappy job of installing it. Luckily the cpu looks fine, I reinstall it and the new heatsink and turn the computer on….next thing I see is “hard drive error” “raid configuration corrupted, in order to boot we must erase the raid setup” or something like that (I have 2 hard drives set in raid 0). So I turn the computer off, take everything apart and put it back together. Everything seems to be installed fine, but I kept getting the same error. I figured out that somehow pulling out the cpu reset the bios and for some reason it couldn’t see the raid configuration, so I bite the bullet and erase the raid losing everything on my harddrive. So for the second time this week I stay up late installing windows and other random software on a computer. Luckily I had most of my stuff backed up either on my other computer, this web site, or my Ipod, so I didn’t lose too much.

I’m happy to say every computer is now working great and will hopefully continue to do so for a long time.

I’ve been trying to think of whats happened in the past month or so that is worth posting about, but there really isn’t much to say. Work has started slowing down a bit, but it always does toward the end of the year. We’ve secured a contract to appraise every house in a large new housing project, which we’re supposed to start working on next month, so that should make sure I still have plenty of work during the slow time. The only other event worth mentioning is that we’ve (me and my friends from college) just told someone they’re no longer invited Buccaneer Days. He’s gone every year and every year he’s caused problems. We’re just so tired of it that we just don’t want him to come anymore. It wasn’t a decision we came to lightly, but if things didn’t change after 3 years, we’d be stupid to think they’d ever change. Anyways, he now knows that we don’t want him to return and he knows why, so hopefully thats the end of that.

Other then that I’ve pretty much been spending my free time working on, or playing on, my arcade cabinet. As I said before its almost done, which means I’ll need to come up with something new. I’m pretty sure I’m eventually going to build a foosball table, but I think I’m going to wait until I move into my new house (about 6 months away) before I start any more major wood working projects. Maybe I’ll start programming again, finally make the game I’ve been thinking about making for years. I’m sure I’ll come up with something to do.

On the first Saturday in October theres a party called Buccaneer Days on Catalina island, I like to think of it as Marti Gras with pirates. In the small town of Two Harbors on the island (by small I mean theres 1 store, 1 hotel, 1 restraunt) on this one day everyone dresses up as pirates, and by everyone I mean the several hundred people who pile into this small town along with all the locals, and everyone gets incredibly drunk. They’re trying to tone it down and make it more of a family gathering, but it will always just be a crazy mess of drunk pirates. This year we brought with us 4 types of rum, 3 types of vodka, and 3 types of beer, needless to say we come prepared. Me and my friends from college have been having an annual “reunion” here for the past three years and its always been a hell of a lot of fun. The challenge is to stay drunk all day long (we usually start drinking around 10am) without passing out or getting seriously injured, and then sleep all night on a small boat thats is rocking back and forth without throwing up, most people lose this challenge

Heres my favorite picture:

You can see the rest of the pictures here if you want http://www.atomic-train.com/images/BuccaneerDays/2005/

Well I got my first speeding ticket in over 5 years. I was doing 70 in a 55 construction zone (even though the construction didn’t begin for another mile or so), I actually got lucky because I was going 80, but as I came around the corner I saw the cop sitting there, so I slammed on my brakes. Obviously I didn’t spot the cop soon enough, but it could have been worse.

Other then that things have been pretty uneventful for me, mainly just dealing with stupid people. If I havent mentioned it before, I’m a real estate appraiser, which basically means I go look at peoples houses and figure out how much their worth. Well, I had a nice collection of morons this week. First were the number of real estate agents who want me to break the law (and possibly lose my license) and not only send them copies of the appraisal, but to change minor details on it like who is buying the house (apparently one buyer dropped out and they didn’t want to the appraisal to go to waste)…thats a little more then a minor detail and since once I finish the appraisal and send it off to the bank, it belongs to the bank and I’m not allowed to discuss anything about it to anyone except the bank. The real estate agents know this, at least I hope they do since its part of their job to know that, but they still act like I’m a complete asshole because I won’t send them a copy or do major changes on it. This happens every few weeks, but it never gets less annoying. Also this week I had the brilliant person who didn’t realize I had to look in every room in the house and doesn’t have a key for the master bedroom (this happens every few months), which means I have to set another appointment with him to come back just to look at the one room, which he’ll hopefully have a key for next time. One room may seem pointless since I saw the rest of the house, but once you see a house that looks perfectly fine except one room as no drywall or flooring you realize you have to look in every room, otherwise your open to a lawsuit. In this job they say its not if you get sued, its when, so you need to always make sure your ass if covered.

I also bought season 1 of the show Lost. I didn’t see it when it first aired, but a lot of people told me it was great, so I decided to pick it up and watch it before season 2 starts. I’m about 1/2 way through and its pretty good, not the greatest show ever, but definately worth watching.