So yesterday was Jen and mine’s 2 year anniversary. we’ve been together just about 5 years now, but as husband and wife, 2.

These 2 years have FLOWN by. Seriously. I can still remember walking around Hawaii on our honeymoon almost like it was yesterday!

To my lovely wife, thanks for being so awesome. I couldnt write how much you rule w/o having to sit here for 10 hours listing all the ways why. You should know by now how much you mean to me. Sometimes I’m not the best at showing it, but I love you MADLY!!!

Just think at where we are from just even our last anniversary. One year older, new house, new jobs/locations, diff car, etc.

2 years down, 48 to go? (oh man, I’ll be 80 and drooling!)

Love you baby! Happy Anniversary

So I had hoped this would be a relaxing weekend w/ all the travel I’ve been doing over the past 2 weeks or so. Apparantly I was wrong.

Errands saturday, family party sunday, yardwork and golfing monday. Ah well, maybe this week we can relax? Yeah wrong. We have not 1, but two different graduations to go to. Fun fun.

I guess there will be time to sleep when I’m dead?

At least the grill got to make an appearance this weekend. It’s been too windy and wet recently, and it was nice to get a calm sunny day for once. Mmm, steak and potatoes!

last week we FINALLY got paid for our airbag system part that we had replaced over 6 weeks ago

bout f’in time

The story starts at my truck needed some work. Tires/brakes/tune-up, etc. So Jen had a thought of instead of dumping all the $ into that, lets just look at something different. She had found a used Mercedes Benz at a local dealers website. I thought nothing of it really. As we went to the town at which this dealer is at to do some shopping, sure enough, that dealer is having a *HUGE* tent sale at the local mall we were going to. Sure enough, we pull up at the mall, and BAM, that Mercedes is probably 75 yards from us in the parking lot. Jen eyes it, long story short, we now are +1 Mercedes, -1 Trailblazer. I had thoughts against it only because I know if this thing breaks, it’s gonna be crazy expensive to fix

So about a week or two ago, Jen comes home “there is a maintenance light on the dash LCD” A call to the dealer “yeah, bring it in” Appointment is made, car is checked out, 3 things wrong. Ok, no biggy, we were smart and bought the extended warranty (seriously, used expensive car… hell yeah I’m getting a warranty)

Anyway, service manager says, you need this part, covered, that part, covered, oh, and um… this SRS system part… weird, not covered by your warranty, but if you dont get it and get in an accident, no airbag deployment, so of course we have to get it. My fears of that expensive part came to reality. Oh yeah, and did I mention, the part w/ labor… oh, $1800!!! So yeah, I flipped, but safety first, its ok’d. So remembering that we bought this bumper to bumper basically everything is covered warranty, we get home and look at it. Sure enough, GOLD PLUS warranty covers ALL safety items, airbags (and all parts of that system) seatbelts, etc. I call the 800# on the warranty document, get a rep, he says “well nope, you have the GOLD warranty, doesnt cover safety equip” Of course I have the warranty in front of me… no, it says GOLD PLUS. this goes on and on till finally he says call your dealer and get this straightened out and then I can help. So come Monday, Jen calls the dealer, the guy that had done all this warranty write-up is mysteriously no longer w/ this dealer 6 months later. Hmmm. So, the new finance guy says he needs some time to go through the paperwork, we’ll call you back. Get this, the old finance guy realized he marked GOLD PLUS on the contract (which he said we were getting), checked GOLD, initialed it, but NEVER CALLED US TO TELL US OF THE CHANGE, so in our eyes, our stuff is covered.  Now the new finance guy asks “he never called you to tell  you that?” nope. I think you see where this is going. Imagine we dont get the SRS system fixed because its too expensive since the dealer said our warranty doesnt cover it. Now imagine one of us gets hurt because of that, and we bring said warranty to a lawyer saying it shows GOLD PLUS, they wouldnt pay to fix it, and that they made changes to a legal contract w/o notifying us. I’m thinking you’re seeing the legal issues that the dealer are facing at this point. SOOOOOO, the dealer is going to honor our GOLD PLUS contract, now containing support for the SRS system, and is going to get us refunded from the warranty company. We’ll see how that goes. Never hurts to make some phone calls, and DEFINITELY doesnt hurt to read your warranties. We just got $2500 worth of repairs made in a weekend, and the warranty has already paid for itself, thats if this goes through.

This being said, thats a reminder to remember to read all contracts/warranties, as well as keeping them in a safe place in case something like this comes up.

At work at 6:45 on a Saturday. Ouch

Ah well. Maybe I can convince somebody to show me how to drive a fork-lift or something to make the day pass???

Well at least I can rock out

[Listening to: Leper Messiah - Metallica]

After having been burned by more than my fair share of .dot version upgrades to my applications, you would think I would have learned my lesson by now. For instance, I have a really interesting wireless network setup at home using two Linksys routers using WDS (wireless distribution system). I needed this because when building my house, I forgot to take into account Vonage needs a land line (Ok, not in all cases now..) to plug in to my homes phone wiring. An oversight because we couldnt figure out where to put the 3 lines we’re given by the builder, and I didnt want to pay $100/line extra since we’d be using cordless phones anyways. So the only land line remotely near my home office is in my bedroom, 30+ feet away. Instead of being ghetto and snaking phone cord along baseboards or fishing them through walls, I KNEW there had to be a wireless solution. Two Linksys wireless routers running DD-WRT did the trick, yet I digress…blah blah blah

So after the initial research and purchase of a second router, I undertook this as a ‘its 10:00 at night, I’m bored, lets see what I can do w/ this shit’ type attitude, I took all my research and a bit of help from Harper, and got everything working. Vonage box is in the bedroom hooked to wireless router 2 and my land line, internet connection is on router 1 in the home office. At first this was sketchy at best, but after some tweaks, the sound quality isnt half bad. But, I was receiving some TX wireless transmit errors on both routers. Tried tweaking some more setttings, more research, nothing. Now I get to my point…. I go to dd-wrt’s site "ooh, new beta release. lets try that, they may have fixed the issue by now" So here I go….

First I somehow thought of actually taking a backup configuration of BOTH routers (which in the end saved my ass). Upgrade to router 1, flash to mini version .24, then standard version .24, wow, router is lookin’ good. Some new features, etc…. alright, lets try router 2. Its remote, and I felt gutsy tonight, so I flashed it remotely. Take my backup, start flashing w/ new firmware, and BAM *UPDATE FAILED* hmm, weird, did the same process, wtf happened. I reboot it, it comes back. Big sigh of relief right??? then *blip* it disappears off my network… hmm, reboot again, comes back, *blip* gone again. You see the pattern right? Now the cursing starts…. OK, I’ll just roll back… Well, great idea if the router would respond for more than 10 seconds. Ok, so now I’m pissed. I walk over to the bedroom, grab the router, bring it back to my office, plug it directly into my other router, ping… respond… sweet…. no response… wait a minute, WTF. Whatever happened, it wont work for more than about 10 secs. So now I am the proud owner of a Linksys brick. 30 mins later I have a tftp utility, reflash it w/ Linksys default firmware, and at least now it stays online. I’m running fine on factory firmware, and I’m hardwired now, lets try this yet again. Reflash with beta version, then *blip* gone. now a big WTFFFFFFFFFFF. Roll back to factory firmware, reflash it w/ the ‘old’ non-beta software, reinstall config that I somehow remembered to save, works like a champ. Put the second router back in the bedroom, wireless TX errors… now gone, Vonage quality is good. So I basically took 10 mins of work, turned it into about 3 hours, all to realize that moving from version .23 SP2 to .24beta, yeah, not worth it.

SO, in retrospect, no more beta for me unless I’m getting paid to beta test. I like dd-wrt so I’ll stick it out, but, I’m not upgrading unless there is compelling evidence to do so!!!

Lesson F’IN learned

Anybody else get a great xmas gift this year?

Jen got me a Sirius satellite radio receiver for my car. I drive a lot these days, and listening to the radio was getting really annoying w/ all the commercials.

It was a totally unexpected gift. I had thought about getting it a few months back when I started having a longer commute, but could never bring myself to *pay* for radio.

But truthfully, it was an awesome gift. I still flip channels like I did w/ FM radio, but only because I’m going from one awesome station to another instead of just flipping to stop listening to commercials.

It’s got everything, 70′s – todays music, any genre, and a few choices for each. Plus, you get sports, talk, weather, traffic, and my favorite so far, comedy. Three comedy channels which i switch back and forth the whole commute.  Nice thing about this receiver, it has a remote, so I dont have to lean over to switch channels. BIG plus, but the bad part is that Sirius puts the name of the song on the LCD screen of the receiver almost like a mp3 tag, and eventually I’m gonna get into an accident looking at what I’m listening to, but that’s the price I’m willing to pay (wait, wtf, no I’m not, my insurance already sucks!)

The receiver also has the ability to record about 10 hrs of audio, as well as MP3 storage/playback, AND, you get a free online subscription to stream their channels to your computer as well. In all making this an AWESOME gift. Now if I could only find the time/patience to install the home antenna, I’d be able to record hours and hours of shows and listen to that instead of having to stream the audio over the Internet.

I was reminded about how much the gift ruled yesterday while driving home. The DJ says “Did somebody you love buy you the gift of Sirius?” Hell yeah they did!

Thanks again baby. GREAT gift!

[Listening to: Tesla - Love Song] .. on channel 23, Hair Nation <3

So I take the same route to work every day. Depending on traffic, I commute 10-12 hrs/week, 100 miles roundtrip. To make it to work on time, I have a window that I normally hit, between 7:00-7:10 am. By doing this, you end up running into the same slow drivers a couple of times a week. I’ve started to compile a list of some of the people I have to dodge weekly. They’ll be identified by how I remember them. First there’s INRI 5, an annoying old lady that doesnt travel over 55 mph (speed limit, 65). I dont think she’s King of the Jews (INRI 5 is  from her plates), but she slows me down at least 2x/week. I’d say I’m going to hell for picking on her, but she already puts me through hell in having to find ways around her. Then there’s the Dave’s Computer Service truck. Dave, I know you’ve been servicing the southland for over 20 years (as it states on your door), but all I can figure is that you’ve been pissing off drivers on I-55 for just as long. You should know better than anyone, if you’re running slowly, add RAM, defrag, do SOMETHING other than sitting in the left lane at 60 mph!

Today I had a new one. A jacked up Ford Excursion. Ok, your truck is already HUGE, why do you feel the need to jack it up another 18″ or so? And seriously, if you’re going to go the the trouble and expense of doing that, at least get rid of the factory tires/rims. GHETTO. But what I’m guessing is, by you jacking up that truck, it’s completely changed your ride. Or at least I hope thats the reason you drifted into my lane this morning nearly wiping me clean off the face of the earth.

I’m dreading the ride home though, cause then you have 3 new groups of people messing up traffic. First you have the blue collar guys that get off work at 2:30-3:00, rush to the bar, and POUND beers for about 2 hours. Then, they’ll get in their work trucks and weave their way through rush hour traffic. Next you have the students. The first thing they do when they get in the car is not put on the seatbelt, but immediately get on the cell phone. I know, you havent talked to your friends in all of 2 hours now and you’re afraid you missed something, so time to call them up and NOT pay attention to driving. Last, but not least, you have the worst group, the minivan moms. There is great disparity in how this group operates, but you know you’re around them when you see the soccer ball stickers on their back window. You either have the 5’1″ moms in the full size Tahoes that cant see over the wheel, but insist in driving as FAST as they can so when they have  to stop fast they nearly throw the young’uns in the back seat watching Barney through the windshield. Then you have group two that has about 8 kids in the back, and they’re too busy arguing, feeding, chatting w/ the kids to realize they’re behind the wheel of a 3000 lb. death machine. Ah, no biggy, they have their seatbelts on…. or DO they? In either event, get the F**K outta my way.

There are others, and you know who you are. I didnt even touch the ‘I was running late this morning and had to put on my makeup on the way’ or the ‘shaving is much easier behind the wheel of a car’ or my favorite ‘Its easy to read the morning paper / book while driving 70mph’ people. I think the best two I’ve seen before. A lady putting on makeup WHILE on the phone, driving 70 MPH! Talent? Stupidity? You decide. But the BEST one ever, watching a guy do a line of coke off a mirror on top of his steering wheel, you win the award dude. What the award is, I dunno, but you totally win it! 

*update* I saw the ghetto Ford Excursion again this morning. This time, photo evidence of it’s ghetto-ness!

[Listening to: Sin - Stone Temple Pilots]

Hmm, Harper turned me on to a new blog client

Maybe with this I’ll start using it again. Thanks to Dannie for reminding me I havent posted in like 7 months. SO I WAS BUSY.. OK?

Especially busting him out of his play chips on Pokerstars. AJ vs AK punk!

[Listening to: Encore - Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse]

So I guess I share my name w/ some other ‘famous’ Mike Comptons.

One is mandolin player, the other, a pro-football player.

The name is where the similiarity ends

Bruce, whoever you are, I can assure you that I’m not going to Paonia, CO for your friends bash