Author: rbcp

I like pie!

Geez…

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I just called the utilities in Illinois to get by month-by-month totals for 2005 taxes. My electric bill was insane last year. $382 in July?? $358 in September??

Electric:
——–
Jan – $275.22
Feb – $236.58
Mar – $177.09
Apr – $297.86
May – $200.61
Jun – $296.66
Jul – $382.84
Aug – $213.71
Sep – $358.06
Oct – $83.18
Nov – $163.58
Dec – $115.56
——-
TOTAL $2800.95

Illinois Water:
————–
Jan – $22.46
Feb – $25.10
Mar – $19.82
Apr – $17.18
May – $19.82
Jun – $17.18
Jul – $22.46
Aug – $22.46
Sep – $19.82
Oct – $19.82
Nov – $14.54
Dec – $14.54
——
TOTAL $235.20

I’m suddenly so grateful that I’ve moved into this nice little apartment where my electric bill is averaging $50 per month and my water is paid by the rental company. My electric will go up a little in the summer here because of central air. But there’s no way it’ll end up at the levels I was at before. Guess it pays to not heat and cool 3 levels of house. (The basement wasn’t by choice, the air ducts just leaked all over the place down there.)

SE Stark

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Had some time to kill in Portland today so I decided to take a stroll through my old hood. I pulled into the 7-Eleven I used to work at and I arrived just as the Indian clerk ran up to the door and kicked a black girl in the ass as she walked out the door, while ranting something unintelligible to her. She laughed it off and kept walking. He stormed back to the counter to continue helping the line of customers, cursing the girl the whole time. Quite amusing. And man, that neighborhood has gone to shit.

Podcasts, pictures

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Picked up the kids from school, hung around the house for awhile, then rode bikes to the park. I’ve been trying to teach Payton to ride a bike for the past few weeks and he’s getting better. Today he had his first crash, right into a wall. It’s my fault. No crying or anything, though, he just got up and walked the rest of the way to the park. Stayed there for over an hour. Emily and I rode around the block a few times while Payton played with friends. Every time we leave the park, this cat a few blocks away greets us and we pet it for 5 or 10 minutes. It’s Payton’s favorite part about leaving. Today it was there again, as always.

Tonight we did homework, watched Sliders and ate macaroni. The kids are both addicted to the old TV show Sliders these past few weeks. I think I mentioned that in a previous journal entry. All they want to do is watch it. I downloaded all 5 seasons recently so I have them all. They’ll sit and watch 3 or 4 45 minute episodes in a row if I let them. Payton tells me about Sliders dreams he’s had at night and I’ve noticed him naming his lego men after Sliders characters when playing. They’ve been jumping all over the place, watching all the episodes from the different seasons. They’ve probably watched at least 2 full seasons by this point, but completely at random.

Not a whole lot else going on with my life lately. I bought a bike at Target last week but haven’t ridden much by myself yet. Emily and I went around the block a lot over the weekend, though. Been filling up my free time working on podcasts, listening to podcasts and working on the new forums and getting the web site back in full operation since the move to a new server. The new server rules. Everything works, my email forwards properly now, all the PHP works, it’s fast, I have normal access logs again. I wish I’d done this years ago.

I’m really addicted to the podcasting thing still. I’m really enjoying making my shows and listening to others. I can’t believe I’ve already put out 6 episodes in just 2 months with very little effort. Well, okay, 5. You can’t really count the email episode. I’m also spending lots of time finding new podcasts to listen to. I’m completely losing touch with music because of them. Jammie asked if I’d heard the new Eminem song the other day and I had no idea what she was talking about. I need to download that album.

Speaking of podcasts and music…everyone must listen to Re Your Brains RIGHT NOW. I’ve let several people hear this today and everyone loves it. Especially Payton. I’ve probably played it 20 times today. Jonathan Coulton’s website has lots of music on it, but that one’s definitely my favorite.

I haven’t done a dump of my camera phone lately. So here it is…

Me trying to appear even more nerdier than usual in my thrift store shirt a few weeks ago. I was trying to find an address awhile back and found this pond where you could feed fish.
When my ignition stopped working last month, I left my car in McDonald’s parking lot over night. When I came back the next morning, this was on my window. While waiting for the locksmith to arrive, I wrote this on the bottom of it, planning to stick it on their delivery door. But since the manager actually came out and talked to me a short while later, I didn’t.
Drug the kids to the laundrymat with me last week, but since they had tables there we turned it into a pizza party. Snapped this picture earlier today, attempting to give Jammie a little encouragement for her speech in class.
Payton rock climbing at the park today. Emily riding my new bike at the park today.

Richard Smith

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Richard Smith died last night. That sucks. He used to be my dad’s best friend but they had some ridiculous falling out years ago. But me and him stayed friends, sorta. I’ve known him all my life. When I was a teen, he’s the guy I’d call to come and pick me up when I had car trouble. And he always answered all my computer questions and gave me tons of free pirated software. I remember him coming by and picking me up once at 2 in the morning with my parents not knowing. In the late 90’s I started seeing a lot of him again and we worked on computer stuff together. He got me some job with Ray Grimley which I never got paid for because Richard ran off to Ohio for some contract job. That’s the last I saw of him. He’d been back in the Alton area for a few years but I’d never seen him. He had a stroke a few weeks ago, then they found that he had lung cancer in both lungs. He was a heavy smoker. Even though I haven’t seen him in 6 years and I probably never would have seen him again, I’ll miss him. He was 58.

Yahoo Groups spammer

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I run a few Yahoo Groups and one of them is this Prank Calls group. The other day an email comes through it with the subject line of “Profit Opportunity!” and the email contains lots of graphics and links about all the money you can make with PayPal. Occasionally spam slips through. So I log into the group, delete the email and ban the person responsible. Then today I get this email:


From: Ronnie Vinston rcaprix@yahoo.com
Subject: membership
To: prank_calls-owner@yahoogroups.com

I am having trouble logging in to your group. Was I removed from this group because of the email I sent to all the members. It was only an email that I recieved from someone else about an opportunity to make money through paypal. I thought it would be a good idea to share this with other people. I really wanted to join this group because I like listening to prank calls, not to sell items to members. I hope you would reconsider. Thank you.

I’m not going to bother replying. I just think it’s kinda funny. Usually it’s not members who spam their own groups – it’s people who sign up with intentions of spamming groups until they are kicked off.

My favorite podcasts

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I’ve been a real podcast whore since about January. It’s pretty much all I listen to lately. I barely even listen to music anymore, although I’m sure all this is just a phase. Here’s a few links to podcasts that I’ve been on or pissed off or whatever…

RBPC Show Episode #9 There’s a whole story behind this one which was lost when the RBPC Show forums crashed last month. And I sure don’t feel like going into it right now. But it has to do with their forum members accusing me of cheating on my Podcastalley votes. If you fast forward to 4 minutes and 25 seconds, you’ll hear them spend a minute talking about what a cheater I am.

RBPC Show Episode #10 Fast forward to 4 minutes and you’ll hear an angry voicemail message from me. I don’t do angry too good, though. I think Pez thanks me on the end of this one too. Click here for more RBPC Show episodes.

Lazy Radio Episode 2.11 About seven minutes and 40 seconds into this show, Melissa & John play Relay Operators in Love on their show and talk about how immature and mean relay pranking is. Here is more Lazy Radio for you.

BellCore Radio Episode #21 P(?)NYB(?)Y strains to convince listeners that PLA Radio isn’t that bad. Listen to more BellCore Radio. If there’s an RSS feed for this show, I sure can’t find it. P(?)NYB(?)Y, make a feed!

PLA Radio Goddammit, if you’re reading this journal you better be listening to PLA Radio or YOU’RE NOT MY FRIEND.

Ignition fixed

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Hung out with the kids at Fred Meyer for 30 minutes this morning, then walked them to school. Then walked an hour back to where my car sat at McDonald’s to wait for a locksmith. (Thanks, Nobody Likes Onions, for keeping me entertained for the walk.) Yesterday Jammie sent me a few links related to ignition problems which ended up giving me some good advice and information. In the end, I saved $140 by having a locksmith come to McDonalds and fix it for me, rather than taking it to the dealership. I couldn’t fix it myself since the lock had to be drilled out.

From reading some forums last night, I found out that the ignition locking up in a Ford Focus is very common. Some people claimed they had to replace their ignition every year or two. Others said that the locksmith or dealership would tell them that they usually replace several Ford Focus ignitions per week. The locksmith I talked to today said the same thing. The Ford Focus and the Contour, they get them all the time.

The cool part is this – the guy drilled my lock out and then noticed he was out of the tumbler whatever sets for my car. He said we could go by the dealership and ask them for one. Or he could just not put tumblers in it at all. Since the tumblers are the part that’s always failing (causing some Focus owners to replace their locks yearly) I can never have this problem again! Plus I can start my car with a flathead screwdriver instead of a key! Well, the key has to be there since there’s a chip in it and the car won’t start without it. But that seems secure enough. Why even have tumblers in there if you have the microchip?? So I saved an extra $60 on all the tumbler stuff, making my total $110. Not bad at all.

Complaints

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My day has been annoying so far. My key decided to stop turning in the ignition so easily this morning so my car is stranded at McDonalds. The kids and I had stopped there for breakfast and ended up having to take a cab to school. To take a cab across town and back is FOURTEEN DOLLARS! Seven bucks each way. Total driving time was 15 – 20 minutes for the cab. That’s a lot of money for a 20 minute drive.

Later this evening I’m going to go buy some graphite and spray that in the lock, hoping it’ll make the key turn. The key isn’t stuck in the ignition, it just won’t turn. It did the same thing last week but I was able to eventually make it work. This time it’s really stuck. Won’t budge at all. All I can think to do is either the graphite thing or maybe drag a paper clip across the tumblers, hoping to shake the problematic one loose.

At least I can replace the ignition myself if I really need to. Maybe I’ll just put a couple switches in it’s place to save myself a couple hundred bucks. I did that for a neighbor of mine a couple years ago. He didn’t want to spend $250 for a new ignition, so we spent about $20 on wires and 2 switches. One switch turned on the car’s electrical stuff. The 2nd was a momentary contact switch which started the car up. It ruled.

My other car problem I’ve been having for over a month now. The car’s idle isn’t sounding too good. A forum I checked says I need to replace the PCV valve which is easy enough. I’ve just been too lazy to get around to it. I hate hate hate hate hate cars. If I didn’t have kids I would sell my car in a second. My obsessive record keeping shows that I spent $5,250.99 on my car last year. That includes car payments, gas, oil changes, insurance, etc. This year I’ve already spent $703.02 on my car. Cars are evil and I hate them.

In less complainy news, phonelosers.org is moved to a new server and I’m really liking it so far. I set up a community thing on it which includes forums, calendar, messaging, etc. It also tells me how many people are on the website at any given time, which is cool. I’m going to use the member system mainly for commenting on all the various pages. It should hopefully work like my existing comment system, with the option of logging in to comment.

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