Author: rbcp

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Rent and Moving

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Looks like on Thursday morning, I will be signing the papers and I can move into the new place. Some guy off Craigslist is going to help me with the heavy furniture. We should be completely moved into the new place by Sunday. Woo!

I was talking to Spessa earlier today about the increased cost of rent and I came up with the following excuses on why the increased rent isn’t a big deal:

  • I’ll be saving $13.00 per month on garbage pickup since it’s free there.
  • I’ll be saving $20.00 per month on doing my laundry at a laundromat, once I spend about $150 for a used washer and dryer.
  • I’ll be saving $41.00 per month by canceling my gym membership, once I buy an elliptical machine for a couple hundred bucks. (My current apartment is too small for one.)
  • Decreased power bill since I won’t be running a dehumidifier every other day.
  • My car will be paid for in just 4 more months! That’s $210.00 I won’t be paying anymore! Yeah, I know this has nothing to do with moving, but it’s still a good excuse for increased rent.

Here’s a big one, and I didn’t realize it until I joked about it to Spessa…I will save a few hundred bucks per year by not living next door to Warren the meth addict. That guy has actually cost me a lot of money. Here’s my damage estimate, from 2 years of living next to Warren…

  • $55.00 – bike I bought from Target stolen
  • $250.00 – car window smashed
  • $150.00 – car stereo stolen (from car theft)
  • $44.00 – cool 3,000,000 candlepower flashlight stolen (from car theft)
  • $40.00 – replacement bike I bought at a yard sale stolen (it’s a good thing I didn’t buy nice bikes)
  • $10.00 – lock to gate cut with bolt cutters to steal this bike
  • $15.00 – lock and chain on bike/bike rack cut to steal this bike

At various points during all this, I decide to beef up security for 2 reasons. One is that I really do like this apartment because it’s nice and it’s very cheap. And two, because it would be cheaper to periodically blow money on increasing security than it would to spend another $100 – $300 per month on rent. Here’s the increased security breakdown…

  • $60.00 – Motion controlled security lights in the back. There was NO light back there before, so I had to do some rewiring in the hallway, installed a new switch, etc. So $60 is about what I paid for all those materials.
  • $100.00 – Alarm system. With as many out of town trips as I take, an alarm system that could call me while I’m away seemed like a great idea. I think it also worked as a deterrent for Warren because he heard the door chime whenever it was opened and he was outside. And a few times I forgot to enter my code when I came home, so the alarm went off and I’m positive they had to hear that. Just from him knowing the alarm was there might have saved me from a break in.
  • $50.00 – new motion sensor lights. The old ones stopped working correctly so I had to replace them. Guess that’s what I get for buying the cheapest ones they had.
  • $30.00 – locking doorknobs for inside doors. I liked to keep my office locked when I was gone for more than a few hours. My hope was that anyone breaking into the house might not bother with the locked doors.
  • $30.00 – Miscellaneous security items. Such as window locks for the sliding windows, an extra lock on the back door, a new padlock for the gate since they cut the old one.
  • $100.00 – cameras. I set one up on the back patio area. The other I was going to point out the window at my car, but I never got around to it.
  • $40.00 – USB to video, to hook the camera into.
  • $50.00 – Security software – this is a neat piece of software that can handle up to a few dozen cameras. Whenever it detects motion, it starts snapping pictures and saving them in the computer and uploading them to brad-carter.com. Plus it was updating a single image of the patio area every 1 minute. It could also email any detected motion to me or send a text to my phone about movement. I loved messing with that software.

So, assuming that I’m not forgetting anything, the total Warren has cost me is approximately $1024.00. That is a LOT of money that I spent during this past two years! It comes to $42.60 per month. That’s how much I pay to live next to this guy. And there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s responsible for the issues I’ve had with theft. It’s either him or its his friends. Not to mention the peace of mind that I haven’t had because of him. I’d love to buy a new car stereo (another Warren-related cost once I finally do it) but I can’t because if I do, there’s the risk of his posse breaking into my car again. I’ve had to deal with shitty local radio stations every time I get into the car because of him. I was going to skip getting the kids bikes for Christmas this year because they’d probably just get stolen since these people are cutting the locks. I can do that now! (I guess in this case, Warren would have saved me about $100.) And vacations are a little worrisome, knowing that Warren probably realizes that I’m out of town and he might decide to break in. It’d be so easy for him to break into my place without getting caught.

So I’ve got some serious plans for Warren, which I don’t think I should rant about in my journal. But I will have at least $1024.00 of fun with him. I just hope he doesn’t die from his addiction before I finish with him. Warren, prepare for a much more interesting life.

Moving

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By the end of December I will live in a new place! I’ve been looking at apartments all year and I really started looking hard this week. It looked like I was going to move into the New Heritage apartments in mid-January. But yesterday I paid rent and I asked if they had any 3 bedroom places available. She showed me one that looked really great. I went home and looked in up on Google maps (aerial view) and it looked awesome from the sky. I called up and made an appointment to see it.

Today I met Dale there and he showed it to me. He seemed really intent on “selling” it to me, pointing out every good feature he could come up with. He didn’t have to, though, because the place was really great. It has a completely modern kitchen, giant living room, giant bedrooms, a walk-in closet for me, 1.5 baths, a back patio, a garage, and washer and dryer hookups. I haven’t had a garage since Ohio in 1997! And it sure would be nice to do laundry at home again. I’m really excited about the whole thing. It’s on a dead-end street too. I can finally get a new car stereo without worrying about Warren’s friends busting out my car window. And I can buy a bike again!

I badmouthed the hell out of Warren to Dale. Dale was surprised that he was even living there since he wasn’t supposed to be. I told him about my car being broken into, my two bikes, the locks being cut with bolt cutters, and the attempted break-in to my back door. Dale says he’s going to kick them all out. Which he’s been saying since my very first day there so I don’t believe him. But it’s nice to know that he’s hating those people. I just hope Warren doesn’t figure out that I said anything before I move out.

I immediately drove to the rental office, filled out the paperwork and put down a deposit. They have to clean the carpets and then it’s mine. I put in my 30 days notice for this place so I guess I’ll have a few weeks to get everything cleaned up around here. I started moving everything out of Emily’s room tonight and I’m getting the screw holes all patched up in there. I’m going to try and do a lot of work on everything this weekend. Her rooms is almost completely emptied already. Guess I’ll start on Payton’s next. I need to find someone to help me move all the heavy furniture. Craigslist?

The Mist

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Cat in the christmas tree

The cat is really enjoying the Christmas tree so far. He’s been climbing all over it for hours now.

Kids and I went to the movies today. Saw The Mist and then Enchanted. They say they liked The Mist better. It was a great movie, but wow, what a messed up ending. (The only part of the book they changed. The book didn’t really even have an ending.)

A couple months ago I signed up for a magazine subscription to help Emily with some school thing she was doing. I got a 24 month subscription to Wired for a good price. Today I got the magazine and read through it all. The only problem is that I’d already read almost all of the stories in it during this past month. Since I subscribe to dozens of blogs, reading a tech magazine is pretty pointless for me. It sucks wading through all those ads too. I might just transfer the subscription to someone who wants it.

Suicidal Cat

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The cat is up there playing, biting on the wood and running back and forth. Any second now he’s going to fall off.

This morning I fixed myself a healthy breakfast of cornflakes, covered with as much sugar as possible. I went in my room to eat and shut my door so the cat wouldn’t try to steal any. When I came back out 10 minutes later, I could hear the cat meowing frantically. I finally found him inside the fridge. Good thing he didn’t sneak in there right before I left the house for the day. That’d be such a bummer to find a dead cat in the fridge.

Things I’ve Found on Cassettes

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Been importing tapes into the computer all week and I’m almost done with the non-prank call stuff. Most of it was music, pretty much all stuff I’d recorded in the 80’s and early 90’s. But there was plenty of non-music, non-prank call stuff. Such as…


  • Calling Dino Allsman and impersonating the IRS to find out where he works. Then on the next part of the tape we were pranking him and he was yelling at us. The quality probably the worse I’ve ever done. In some parts it blanks out completely. I’d forgotten I’d done the IRS call, but I guess that’s how I found out where he worked.
  • Bit of audio from the TV shows Soap and then I Love Lucy. Not sure why I had these, but I might of had something to do with me recording and archiving TV commercials all the time. Wonder what happened to all my TV commercial tapes. I bet there’s still plenty of old audio tapes at my parents house that used to belong to me. Oh yeah, the theme song from the Ewoks Saturday morning cartoon was in there too.
  • Red box tones. My original red boxing tape that was made from recording the tones from a pay phone. So much toll fraud was committed with that tape.
  • All the radio station IDs in between songs from radio stations in a lot of the cities I’d lived in. Those were interesting to hear. I recorded a lot of them while driving in my car – I’d cut out a giant chunk of my dashboard in the early 90’s and installed a dual-cassette deck stereo into it. The kind of stereo that belongs in a house. It worked great too. Any time I liked a song I heard while I was driving, I just hit the record button. Also entertaining were the DJs introducing some of the horrible music from the 80’s and 90’s.
  • Internet parody songs – at some point in the late 90’s I decided that it’d be a good idea to transfer a bunch of the internet parody songs that I’d collected onto cassette tape. Because, you know, the internet is just a fad and cassette tape is forever! I guess the reason was because I was running out of hard drive space and didn’t have a CD burner at the time.
  • Me and Sara (girl next door) playing Double Dribble on my NES and talking about things like Geraldo’s nose getting broken on TV, messing with people on the CB radio, prank calling the dean of boys, “did you record Freddy’s Nightmares on TV?”, putting Ozzy Osbourne’s picture on a dart board, Randee of the Redwoods for president.
  • Talking to El Jefe on the phone, prank calling Mr. Hack and lots of other random places. I entered in a lot of stolen credit card numbers throughout it all to make the calls. Guess I should throw that tape away instead of giving it to Goodwill.
  • Me prank calling some car lot in Albany. I yelled at some guy named Bernie and I have no idea who he is or why I was pranking him. Yeah, I know I said this is the non-prank call stuff and it is! Sort of. None of it was labeled as being prank calls. Most of the tapes weren’t labeled at all.
  • My brother practicing his saxophone.
  • Me listening to “I Just Called To Say I Love You” and playing along with it on my electric piano.
  • Quite a few long stretches of silence, but in the background you’d occasionally hear people in my family talking or things crashing around.
  • Me and Tracy (some girl from work at Eastgate Cinema) copying Def Leppard tapes using high speed dubbing. Geez, remember high speed dubbing??
  • House music from Eastgate Cinema. All the hits from artists like Lionel Richie, etc. For some reason I stole their muzak tape.
  • Me prank calling What’s Your Bid in the 80’s and then a bunch of other radio shows. The What’s Your Bid stuff is pretty rapid – we probably got about 15 calls in there. On some other radio show I asked the host “What if C.A.T. really spelled dog?” On another I said I was a telephone-to-telephone salesman and tried to offer him something for free before he hung up on me and called me strange.
  • A lot of stuff between me and this girl I used to babysit in 1986 named Christy. A lot of us is drowned out by loud music (we were dancing to Power of Love and the Neutron Dance), but in one part we’re using my TRS-80 and its speech card to input data to make prank calls to Dominos Pizza. I’d written a program that said all the important pizza-ordering phrases once you put in your name, address and phone number.
  • Me and Sara (girl next door again) walking all over our block, talking about our parents and the neighbors, telling jokes and singing songs loudly. A few times we saw cop cars and yelled “COPS!” and ran. We used to get chased by them all the time, just for running.

There was plenty of random weird stuff too. Like some live play that was recorded. A few tapes of church music and concerts. I’m sure some of my parents old stuff got mixed in there with mine. There was a tape of 1920’s-sounding music which wasn’t mine but I liked it so I converted it. Now all I’ve got left to do is my prank call tapes. There’s about 20 of them. Instead of giving them to Goodwill, I think I’m going to start up a new PLA contest for somebody to win all my prank tapes and CDs. Assuming that somebody will actually want a bunch of prank call audio tapes.

RIP, Cassettes! Hopefully the Goodwill will find you a nice, new home…

Importing Tapes

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[11:31] Brad: this stupid Metro PCS lady reads me the address on an account. and she says “833 South Valley Doctor.”
[11:31] Spessa: you’re not serious
[11:31] brad_the_carter: and she sounds american. so it’s not a language barrier. she actually thinks Dr. on the end of an address stands for Doctor.
[11:32] Brad: so i had her spell out the address for me. and she spelled D R. and i said “i thought you said it was doctor on the end.” and she says no, it’s just the abbreviation for doctor.
[11:33] Brad: so i clued her in that dr. meant drive. and she says “oh!” and does a stupid laugh.
[11:33] Spessa: i guess they’re hiring 2nd graders for that job these days

She didn’t know that GA stood for Georgia either. I asked her what state and she says, “I dunno. It just says G A on here.”

My ripping is out of control. I’ve got DVDs ripping on my laptop and cassette tapes ripping on the big computer. Right now I’m ripping the Electric Dreams movie soundtrack. I’ve only got about 5 real audio music cassette tapes that I never converted to CD or mp3. Then I’ve got about 20 audio cassettes of various prank call groups, given to me in trade back in the days before everyone owned CD burners. And then a few dozen of my old mix tapes with things on them that its unlikely I’d ever find them on bittorrent. Plus a few tapes of friends and I doing wacky things.

Today I bought a dual cassette deck from Goodwill for $20. If I get all my ripping done within the 15 day return period, I can return it for store credit. I guess it would have made more sense to buy a $100 cassette deck from Target and just return it after 30 days for cash. I’m sure I can get these all ripped within a week, though. Then I can finally throw away the rest of my cassettes.

Blackberry

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Last weekend I traded in my Blackberry 8830 for a Blackberry 8310. It’s even better with better GPS and a camera. I also switched to AT&T. I spent over an hour standing in the Verizon store to return my old one, then another hour in a Cingular store to buy the new one. And it was $75 cheaper! It was pretty amazing how many account names, numbers and passwords I heard thrown around just by hanging out near the counter for 2 hours. The lady at the Verizon Wireless store yelled my number and password into the phone in front of two different sets of customers. So if anyone needs account names and passwords from any wireless carrier, just hang out around the counter on a busy day.

Been selling tons of DVDs. More than $300 on them so far. And today I finished transferring them all to my hard drives. It’s nice being rid of them all. Netflix is working out really well too.

Emily had a friend spend the night last night. Today we went Geocaching. Ended up going on a long walk that took us to a cemetery that we just happened to be looking for earlier. So we found another geocache there. Supper at Wendy’s yesterday. It’s been a pretty full weekend so far. Oh yeah, had teacher meetings yesterday and the kids haven’t had school for 2 days. I’m hoping to find some good haunted houses or maybe a maze to go to this weekend.

Pumpkins, Cat, Podcasts

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Last week I bought a new cell phone. It’s a Blackberry 8830 and it rocks. It’s got the best web browsing capabilities of any cell phone I’ve ever owned, it tethers internet to my laptop and it easily syncs all of my Outlook data to it. Plus it does really cool things with Google Maps and GPS. There’s even a geocaching program I can buy for it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t have a camera. I was able to sell my old LG phone for more than half of the cost of this phone. And since this phone is a replacement for my Pocket PC, I’m selling that too. In the end, I’ll be making almost $100 from buying this new phone.

Listened to a couple episodes of a podcast tonight called Public Nuisance Radio which isn’t the best show ever, but it introduced me to a new song I like. It’s by a band called The Vandals and the song is called My Girlfriend’s Dead. It’s in their playlist so go listen to it. It seems like all my favorite podcasts have really slowed down or quit lately. I need to find some new ones to listen to. At least the first one I tried gave me some new music, even if I’m not crazy about the show.

Yesterday the kids and I bought a couple pumpkins and they carved them. The one on the left is Emily’s and the one on the right is Payton’s. I was surprised to hear that they’d never done this before. I don’t know why I never got them pumpkins before, I guess I just never thought of it. I think it’s been more than 10 years since I carved one. In fact, I think the last time was when Sylvia and I stole a giant one from a pumpkin stand, not realizing that carrying it 2 miles to my parents house on foot would be really hard. Part of the time we made a sling out of our jackets and carried it between us.

My cat climbs on everything. He climbed up the side of one of my shirts to get to the top of my closet in that picture. It’s annoying. I’m really torn on the issue of declawing him. But I’m starting to think it’ll have to be done soon. I thought that I wouldn’t care before since I don’t ever intend to own any nice furniture that he would scratch up. But I can’t have him destroying my shirts.

I throw him out of my office 3 or 4 times a day and shut the door to keep him out. He loves to go behind my desk and chew on wires. He’s also chewed on the plants a little and once spilled a little dirt on my laptop. It’d sure suck to have the whole plant come crashing down on the laptop keyboard. So I have to lock him out of my room when I leave. This evening he was playing behind the desk and stepped on the main power supply to everything, shutting off my desktop. Not that I was using it, but I wanted to kill him. Tonight I put my large collection of Priority Mail boxes to good use and fenced him out of the area with the wires:

The boxes were the perfect height, and I was able to use the sticky strip on the top of them to stick them to the desk so they don’t fall over. We’ll see how long this lasts. Right now he’s laying on my lap, purring. Normally I would have thrown him out of the room by now so this is looking good.

I guess his name is Charcoal since that’s what the kids are insisting on.

Right now I’m listening to Episode 7 of Haxor Radio. It’s probably one of the most informative shows I’ve ever heard, covering radio shack policies and a bunch of cell phone stuff that’s interesting to me. Plus they hax0r MY Radio Shack account info. Go listen to their shows.

Selling my DVDs

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Around 2000 or 2001, I decided that owning CDs was pointless and sold them all on Ebay. I no longer own any audio CDs and have kept my collection in digital form ever since then. I’ve moved from an mp3 CD player in my car, to an mp3 discman, a few miscellaneous handheld mp3 players and finally to my 30 gig Ipod. I think it was a pretty good call since audio CDs are pretty much dead for a lot of people. And I think DVDs are going the same way. To be replaced by Blu-ray or HD DVD? Nah, screw those formats too. DVDs in all forms are on the way out. They’ll all disappear much quicker than VHS did. That’s my prediction and I’m sticking to it.

With the cable companies offering more and more on demand every day, actually owning your movies is becoming pointless. Why spend $15.00 to own one when you can see it on demand? Getting an account on Netflix for $5.00/month makes owning DVDs stupid. Even McDonald’s is renting DVDs for $1.00/night now. Competition like this will force Blockbuster to keep lowering their rental prices. The networks are starting to let people watch/download their primetime TV shows online for free. Doesn’t Netflix even let you watch your rentals online now? Not to mention the ease in which anyone can download any of this stuff for free on bittorrent.

But the one thing that really sold me on ridding myself of DVDs is my Xbox 360. It lets me mp4ize my entire video collection and watch it all from the TV. I hooked a 500 gig external hard drive to it, which fits everything I own onto it. A few clicks of the remote plays any of it. And it’s easy enough for the kids to use too. I love that thing. And since Ipods also play the mpeg-4 format, I can easily transfer any of it to my Ipod for vacations. Apple TV does the same thing if you want to be more legit about buying online movies to watch on TV, even though the files are locked down and it’s a little pricey now. But the prices will come down and the DRM will disappear and/or become reasonable eventually.

Anyway, now that I’ve slammed the DVD format for 3 paragraphs, I expect everyone to visit my Amazon store page to buy the DVDs I’m selling. Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/index.html/104-8363450-8480721?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A3EFPXZUK73XP2

There’s only 45 up right now, but by the time I finish entering the rest of them there should be over 100 of them. There’s some good stuff up there, if you’re into those old, antiquated DVD things.

Speaking of that, Amazon has a really nice system for selling things. There are no up front costs like Ebay has. And the total time to list each item is just a minute or two.

NEXT MORNING EDIT: Woo, Finding Nemo sold! That’s like $2.00 I made! I need to go buy a bunch of DVD shipping envelopes today. I put my two school books up from last year too. The one I paid about $90 for last year is going to sell for $30 and the one I paid about $40 for I’ll be lucky if I get $5.00 for it. I only kept the books because I hoped they might be used again this year for a similar class. But no. I tried to sell the $90 book back to the book store the other day and they offered me $15. I told them I’d just sell it on Amazon. I thought I’d get a little more than $30 for it though. Never buy books from the student book store again.

My desktop computer rips DVDs in about 2 hours and my laptop rips them in usually under an hour. It’ll probably take a few weeks, but I plan to rip them all. I need more computers.

Nellie McKay

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Last year some random horrible podcast I was listening to played a song called Sari by Nellie McKay. Since then I’ve been hooked on her music. I kept listening to that horrible podcast for months, hoping they’d introduce me to some other great artist, but they never did. Last night Molly and I went to see her live in Portland. It’s probably the best small concert I’ve ever been to. It was a pretty small place (The Aladdin theater) and we were fairly close to the stage. Nellie’s hilarious and threw all kinds of bizarre commentary and jokes in between her songs. She seemed high the whole time.

Nellie McKay on YouTube

The official Nellie McKay site

A Nellie McKay fan site

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