Day 1984

Today didn't exactly go as planned. I didn't get my car back from the shop because, after the wheel was repaired, the paint shop didn't match the color of the other three wheels. It has to go back to the paint shop for a new, and hopefully more accurate, powder coating. The U-verse service technician didn't arrive as promised either. I waited and waited and finally the guy showed up around 4:30 PM. He was supposed to arrive at 1 PM. Since Dot is hard of hearing, she didn't notice when the technician knocked on the door. Several minutes later she saw him in the living room and barked so hard that she pooped on the carpet. This is why you don't want to get an old dog too excited. Barking and pooping often happen simultaneously.

It turns out that the U-verse problem wasn't the router, the TV receiver, the WiFi hub, or anything else in the house. The entire line that runs down the alley has gone bad and needs to be replaced. My technician said that they needed a different type of technician to fix the wire, so I've got a new service appointment for tomorrow. U-verse service is still down. Oddly, even though U-verse is down, Roku, Hulu, Chromecast, and the pet cam, which all connect to the same IP network still work. In many ways losing U-verse is no great loss. Telemarketers are the only people who call on the land line. Roku and Hulu a pretty good alternative to U-verse TV. And my little T-Mobile 4G hotspot is even faster than U-verse Internet service. I wonder why I even bother with U-verse.

Since I was stuck in the house for most of the day waiting for the U-verse technician to arrive, I had lots of time to work on various Internet projects. I added some online forms to one client's site and had enough time left over to finish my first real mobile site. The site looked pretty good, so I went ahead and launched it. Hopefully the client will like what I've done. If they don't, I built in a back-door that will let me revert to the old site very quickly if needed. Working this way is so much faster than trying to schedule a meeting to present something. I don't mind changing things if I've gotten something wrong. It's easy to get feedback from clients if a site is live and almost impossible if they're just speculating about something that doesn't even exist yet.

It looks like the rain is going to continue through the weekend. According to the long-range forecast on my phone, the rain will continue forever. The app looks ahead two weeks and there is a little thunderstorm icon on every single day. It's rained so relentlessly that I'm actually starting to adapt to it. I've rigged up a pump on the roof that will remove about 80% of the water with me needing to be up there. This won't keep the roof dry, but it will significantly reduce the weight of the standing water and make it easier for me to sweep off the remaining water when the rain quits. I'm becoming adapt at finding dry intervals to walk the dogs too. Even the rainiest days have little gaps between the storms.

Supposedly my car will be finished tomorrow and U-verse service will be restored. I kind of doubt that either of those things will happen. The only thing I'm sure of is that the dogs will get two walks and we'll all enjoy a good breakfast

Rosco is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1723

Today didn't go well. I took my phone to the Apple store to get the battery replaced. The person I talked to at the Genius Bar was nice enough and told me that they'd have my phone fixed in a hour. That seemed fair enough, so I used the hour to drive up to my watchmaker and pick up my watch. Neither of us could remember how to set the old Tissot T-Touch, so I took the watch and told the watchmaker that I'd look up the instructions on Google. Unfortunately, I left some of the packaging for the watch up at the watchmaker's studio, so I'll have to make a second trip up there to retrieve it, assuming that it hasn't been thrown away already.

When I returned to the Apple store, they powered up my phone and showed me that it still worked. I was good to go. Unfortunately, I should have tried the Home Button on the bottom of the phone before I left the store. When I got home, I discovered that this all important button doesn't work anymore. Without the Home Button, the phone is fairly worthless. I looked up "non-functional iPhone Home Button" on Google and discovered that this button is frequently rendered inoperable when technicians try to pry out the battery. Located near the battery are several very small chips and jumpers that control the operation of the home button and power switch. If these components are broken or sheared off while changing the battery, you will need an entirely new logic board. Now I've got to go back to the Apple store and convince them to give me a new phone. Given the miniscule size of the components that are probably broken, it is doubtful that something like this can be fixed. I should have just kept the old battery. The phone was working fine, but lure of a free new battery was just too strong.

Dot's incontinence seems worse on odd numbered days. There is no rhyme or reason to this, but she seems to alternate between good and bad days. This makes no sense to me. Dot eats and drinks the same things every day. She should be getting progressively better in some sort of measurable way, but so far, the progress she's making seems pretty random. At some point we're going to have to decide whether to put Dot on medication. She doesn't even realize she is peeing in her sleep, but we certainly do.

I dread going back to the Apple store tomorrow. I had to wait a long time today, and it will probably be the same tomorrow. Why didn't they notice this problem before they handed the phone back to me? It's always something, isn't it. On my way out of the shopping mall I stopped at the new Tesla store that just opened. You can't buy a car there, but you can look at one. It was the first time I'd actually seen a Tesla in person. What a cool car. There's one small problem though. The thing runs on 8000 small Lithium Ion batteries. Just imagine when those things start going bad. A Tesla with faulty batteries will make my iPhone problems seem like nothing.

Domino is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1318

Just before the appliance repairman was scheduled to arrive this morning, I got a call from the technician asking me if I really wanted him to come to the house. "Garbage disposals can't be repaired," he said. "They can only be replaced." "Can you just replace it then," I asked. "Only if the plumbing connections exactly match those on your old unit," the technician told me. "Well, what if it's just an electrical problem," I asked. "You'll have to call an electrician," said the technician. I canceled the appointment and called a plumber instead. It was apparent that this guy was going to come out to the house, charge me for a $75 service call and end up telling me he couldn't fix anything. Now, I've got to go through this whole charade again tomorrow with the plumber. Maybe I'll get lucky though. I did call a good plumber.

Since the appliance repairman didn't come today after all, there was little point in spending the entire day writing. I finished two articles with short deadlines and went to the gym instead. Some people must go to the gym every single day. No matter when I go, there are a few folks who always seem to be there. They are usually working out on the same machines too. Since I don't go at any particular time, I find this strange. It's almost as if these guys live at the place.

Dot seemed tired on her morning walk. Usually she is perky and energetic on these early walks, but she seemed lethargic today. Maybe she was sore from yesterday's water therapy session. I guess that would make sense. I'm certainly sore the next day after a workout. I didn't want to push her too hard, so we turned around and came home much earlier than we usually do.

I had an animal rescue meeting after dinner this evening. When the meeting was over, my car was hard to start. Hopefully this was just because it was so hot outside, or because the car was at an angle on a hill. I'm afraid the starter motor might be starting to go out though. That's about the only expensive thing I still haven't replaced. We'll see how the Defender starts tomorrow. If I have to wait for the plumber a long time, I might not be going anywhere anyway.

I'd hate to miss my regular restaurant outing tomorrow morning, but I'd hate even more to go much longer without a working garbage disposal. To keep the sink from clogging, I have to fish little bits of food out of the disposal every time I rinse the plates off after a meal. Even though the machine is completely turned off, I don't trust it. I certainly don't want the disposal to mysteriously come back to life with my hand is inside it.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1266

I had another one of my periodic meetings with my financial adviser today. The guy is a technical analyst and it's taken me a while to come around to his disciplined point of view. After four years, I'm finally starting to become a believer. I used to pick strong, well run companies without paying much attention to the technicians. I pretty much ignored support and resistance levels and didn't know a moving average from a Bollinger band. The world has become too volatile to just pick a good company and forget about it, unfortunately. Companies rapidly go in and out of fashion, just like everything else these days. Just about only consistent thing left is that history still tends to repeat itself. The cyclic and somewhat repetitive nature of history is the basis for most technical analysis. People like my financial adviser look at past performance and try to make an educated guess about the future.

The flaw in this type of thinking is that nobody can really predict the future. Even though history does tend to repeat itself, it can also throw you a curve and totally surprise everyone. I have discovered that technical analysts like my financial adviser aren't right all the time, but they do seem to be right more than half the time. Since I was wrong about Apple and I was wrong about the natural gas industry, I'm going to give technical analysis a little more respect in the future.

When my meeting was over, I returned to the office and began to edit and color correct the image files I shot in Las Vegas. This can be a long and tedious process when you have over 500 images to process. Although I seldom get paid to do this, I almost always color correct my image files before sending them to the client. At the Couture Show, I was shooting in an environment where your subject might be lit by a combination of ambient, incandescent, fluorescent, and mercury vapor light all at the same time. It is often hard to color correct these types of shots, because when you balance one of the lighting sources, you often throw one of the others off even further. I do my best to color correct the faces or whatever is the center of interest and let the rest of the image fall where it may. It's a slow process and not surprisingly, I didn't get finished today.

I heard the roofers up on the roof today, but didn't have time to go see what they were doing. After they left for the day, it was unclear whether they did anything at all. The roof is still a long way from being finished and I'm beginning to wonder how long this is going to take. I'm fairly certain that the roof will be finished before the road crew finishes re-paving the road in front of my house. Nothing moves slower than road construction.

I need to get Dot back on schedule with her acupuncture therapy. We had to skip one session while I was out of town and she lost another session due to bad weather. Since the acupuncture treatments seem to be showing some positive results, it's time to get things back on schedule. When I went up to visit with my financial adviser this afternoon, I noticed that there was an acupuncturist right next door to his office. Maybe I ought to start seeing this guy whenever I have a financial review. Acupuncture is supposed to be great for relieving stress and talking about money is always stressful for me.

Freckles is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1121

Days like this you simply endure. The rain started late last night and never stopped. It's still raining. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that the roof did leak again. The leak wasn't that bad this time, but it was enough to make a mess. The dogs were true to form too. They insisted on going out, and then as soon as they realized what the weather was like, they wanted to come back inside again. We all got soaked on our walks, because even though Dot and Dash hate the rain, they still insist on pooping at their regular place, over a mile away. While we were walking, I noticed that the lake was getting pretty wet too. One of the piers was almost completely under water.

I thought I might have time to clear the water off the roof during a brief lull in the storm, but before I was even halfway finished, the rain started again in earnest and erased all my hard work. Some of you have wondered why I don't just go out and get a new roof. Well, it's not as easy as you think. The house is fifty years old and has settled in several places. As a result, water on the roof puddles into ponds, instead of draining off the edge like it is supposed to. It is not enough to simply put on a new roof. All the plywood decking under the roof must be leveled and replaced with a new decking that has a slight pitch so the water will drain properly. This is called an "engineered" roof and it is quite expensive. I've learned that roofers don't want to do carpentry work. I've also learned that general contractors, who could help find the proper carpenters, don't want to hire good roofers in the first place, so they can keep more money for themselves. Worst of all, the few commercial roofers who are experienced at covering large flat spaces don't even want to give me a bid. I don't have a large flat space. I have a very small flat space and they don't think it is worth their time.

In between drying off wet dogs and positioning buckets over dripping spots in the ceiling, I wrote watch articles. This didn't seem very glamorous either. I keep thinking that real watch writers get invited to polo matches in Argentina and fly around the world going to watch conventions. I can't imagine that the other watch writers spend most of their time cleaning mud off of two Dalmatians.

The Macintosh repair guy called today and told me he could fix my Lombard laptop. He seemed real excited about the old Lombard and called it a collectors item. This wasn't all that surprising to me. Just about everything I have is a collectors item to somebody. I have very good taste. I'm just not very practical. So here I sit, listening to water drip into plastic buckets as I tell a technician to go ahead and fix an aging laptop that I will probably never even use.

Mack is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 995

Well, today was a complete waste. I waited and waited and waited for the U-verse guy. When I finally lost my patience and was about to give up completely, I get an automated call from AT&T. "Your technician has been delayed," the message said. No shit! It would have been nice if they told me this about five hours earlier. I waited a couple of hours longer and the technician finally shows up. He can't find anything wrong. This isn't surprising, since there wasn't anything wrong today. The problem is intermittent. "You know there is a problem," I told the technician, "because AT&T always does a line check before they will dispatch a service technician. The technician agreed and kept looking around. When he got to the modem, he asked "Did you add these line filters?" "No," I said. "The last technician added them." "Well, he shouldn't have," the technician says. "This modem has built-in line filters."

This is so typical. I think Obama learned to blame everything on George Bush from service technicians. They always blame any problem on the previous service technician. Don't these guys ever have staff meetings so they can get on the same page? The last guy thought the line filters were real important. This guy just tells me that the last guy was an idiot. I guess time will tell. Everything is working now, but it's only been a few hours.

Dot is probably going to have relapse of her bronchitis after barking at the service technician for several hours. I just can't get her to stop. She apparently doesn't want anyone in the house except for Janet and me. Usually, this isn't a problem. I lead a pretty solitary existence. Often, we go for months between visitors.

Dot and I skipped training class tonight because Dot is still coughing a bit and if she does have kennel cough, she might be contagious. Janet took Dash to the class, while Dot stayed behind to help me with the blog. I'll be curious to see if Dash is any more obedient with Janet than he is with me. If I were a betting men, I'd bet against seeing any dramatic changes. Dash learned all the commands years ago. He's just stubborn.

Allie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 963

The heat is relentless. Since today was one of my two official weekly "watering days," I turned on the sprinklers before breakfast this morning. I gave the yard a good soak, but within a few hours it was bone dry again. It's going to be an uphill battle keeping the remaining vegetation  alive for the rest of the Summer. Lack of rain isn't the only problem the yard is facing either. Yesterday, I noticed a huge flock of small birds descend on the back yard and begin carefully pecking at something. At first I though the birds were eating bugs, but then I noticed that they were eating seeds. They were eating all the Rye grass seed I had sowed just one day earlier! No wonder I'm having trouble filling in the dead spots in the St. Augustine grass. The birds are eating all the seeds before they even have a chance to sprout.  Why couldn't the birds have gone after all the spiders in the yard? We have enough spiders to feed a small army of hungry birds.

When I was grocery shopping today, I couldn't resist picking up a 12-pack of Shiner beer. Yeah, I know. I can't drink any more. Although it was tempting, I didn't crack open a cold one when I got home. I just put the beer away for a special occasion. The times when I'm in a genuinely celebratory mood are so few and far between that I figure the occasional alcohol purchase couldn't possibly hurt my health. With the way things have been going lately, that little cache of beer should last me till Christmas.

Yesterday's U-verse repair seems to be working. The broadband signal hasn't gone down once since the technician installed the new gateway. Now, the only problem I have with AT&T is that they keep taking away my favorite channels and replacing them with programming that I wouldn't watch if you paid me. We've lost three or four channels already and just a few days ago, we lost another. When I tuned in today to watch one of my favorite shows, I was greeted by another Spanish language channel instead of the program I wanted to watch. Jeez, how many Spanish language channels do you need AT&T?  I would think 25 of these ridiculous channels would be enough. Maybe I just don't fit the demographic profile of the customer that U-verse is looking for. Oh, well. We could always switch back to Time Warner Cable I guess. It would certainly be easy enough. The cable guys didn't even bother to take down their wires when we switched services.

Tomorrow is dog park day. The grass up at the dog park is still nice and green. It's nice and green because the city doesn't think it needs to follow the same watering rules it imposes on everyone else. The dog park looks like it gets watered every day.

Pebbles is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 962

The U-verse repairman came out to the house today. We've been having problems with losing the broadband signal lately. The phones, the TV, and the Internet would go dead at random times during the day and then return after about five minutes when the modem went through an automatic re-boot cycle. This wouldn't have been a big deal if it happened once a month, but it was happening up to ten times a day. At any rate, this was like any other repair day. The dogs barked like crazy while the repair technician tried to isolate the problem. The dogs were so loud that I eventually asked the repairman if he minded if I let them out of the office, so they could see who was in the house. The guy said he had big dogs himself and didn't mind.  Dot calmed down as soon as she had a chance to smell the repair technician, but Dash though I'd brought him a  playmate. Dash was totally friendly, but I eventually had to pen him up again, because he wouldn't leave the repairman alone.

Eventually, the technician completed his inspection and said that I needed a different type of 2Wire gateway, because the house was too far from the AT&T switch for the original modem to function reliably. When I asked why the previous technician installed a faulty modem in the first place, I didn't really get a good answer. I got the impression though that the original modem was probably the only thing that the previous technician had in the truck at the time.  When today's technician left, he said that my network was running 40% faster than it was when he arrived. Maybe so. It certainly doesn't seem all that fast right now however. Hopefully, this repair will last longer than the last one, which failed in less than a month.

I felt like I had stomach flu all day. Janet said it was probably because I ate rotten food in the refrigerator again. How was I to know?  I guess crab meat spread on top of a portobello mushroom cap won't stay fresh for a week in the frig.  The leftovers certainly didn't smell bad, but I'll be the first to admit that my sense of smell isn't so good. My lack of a good olfactory system does come in handy at times. Especially when the dogs fart in bed at night.

I'm glad the weekend is here. I live for the weekends these days. It's not that anything all that exciting happens on weekends, but it is nice to get a brief reprieve from the world of arbitrary deadlines and dumb questions. I got the weekend started with some tasty pancakes and a three rashers of bacon this morning. Unfortunately, stomach was less than impressed. I think it was still trying to deal with the bad crab I fed it yesterday.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 903

It was unnaturally quiet this morning. Dash was at the vet, getting his teeth cleaned. The television and the Internet were silent, because my U-verse account was still offline. Breakfast went quickly because there wasn't an old episode of Top Gear or Dr. Who to watch on TV. Even Dot went back to sleep, because there was no Dash for her to boss around. I thought I'd get a lot done with no distractions, but I was wrong. It was too quiet.

The unusual silence didn't last long. Around 10:30 AM, there was a knock on the door that got Dot barking again. It was the U-verse technician. He didn't think the problem was in the house, but he wanted to check anyway. Dot definitely did think there was a problem in the house. There was a stranger inside. I kept telling the technician that she wouldn't bite, but I don't think he believed me. As expected, the problem wasn't in the house, so the technician packed up his tools and left to trace the problem to its source. About two hours later he returned. He said somebody had disconnected my line at a junction box while they were connecting another customer. Some things never change I guess. This used to happen frequently when I had my plain old twisted pair phone line.

Like most problems, the U-verse outage turned out to be simple human error. I don't think my car problems are caused by human error, however. Things break on this car even when it's sitting in the driveway. Granted, the Defender is old and has quite a few miles on it, but I still wish it were more reliable. Once, I looked at a printout of all the things that had gone wrong with the car at the dealership and the document looked like a book. There were literally hundreds of things that had broken of gone wrong over the years. I'm still loyal to the Defender though. Parts are easy to obtain. The car is fun to drive. Best of all, I can fit a large dog crate in the back.

When I went to pick up Dash around 4 PM, I noticed he was walking a bit funny. I asked the vet what was wrong, and she said he was probably a little sore. Since he went in for a dental procedure, I was wondering why he was sore at the other end. The vet said they put the anesthesia and heartbeat monitors up his butt, so that his mouth would be unobstructed. Whoa!  I sure hope they don't start doing that when I go to the dentist.

Scooby is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day