Getting my Mustang Home, the Hard Way

On Monday I dropped my Mustang off at Ford to get the fender damage repaired. On Friday morning I got the call that is was fixed and ready for me to pick up. So I had a dilemma. How to retrieve my car. After a few failed phone calls to arrange a ride from my house, I decided just to drive my Toyota to the dealership, drive my Mustang home and then worry about getting the Toyota home later. So I left work at 10:30 and proceeded to do just that. Once back home, I thought the easiest way to get my car back was to ride my bike the 8 miles to Ford and then drive the Toyota home. It was a nice sunny day. After putting air in the tires of my bike that I hadn't ridden in some time, it took me about 25 minutes to bike to Ford, and somehow I made it the whole way without stopping! Most of the lights were green. Once I got back home, I took a quick shower, changed back into my work clothes and returned to work shortly after one. The whole ordeal made for a nice break in my work day, but next time I'll pre-arrange to have someone give me a ride.

Yesterday Was Soooo Boring

I read that yesterday, Jan. 21th, was calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. I don't know if I was depressed, but I was bored out of my mind. After dropping my Mustang off to get the fender repaired (from last Summer's incident), I rode the courtesy van back home and had nothing planned for the rest of the day. So I brewed some coffee and proceeded to try to break a perfectly good computer setup. First, I installed the new MAC OS X Leopard on my Apple. This task did take much of my time, but overall it took almost two hours. The end result was a laptop that still worked, which is always good. I haven't had time to explore the upgrades offered by this new operating system.

My next project was to upgrade my wireless security from WEP to WPA-2. I kept reading how easy WEP as to crack, even with MAC address filtering, so I changed the settings on my wireless router, network camera and Apple computer to WPA-2, and somehow it all worked! My second try to break my computer setup failed. So as to not spend the whole day sitting around the house while it was raining outside, I went to the gym for a quick workout. These holidays where not everyone get the day off just aren't much fun.

So Much For my "Free Day"

I had planned today to be my "free day", meaning I had no specific plans. Somehow I ended up spending three hours cleaning up around my house this morning, including a complete cleaning of the washer and dryer closet area. There was big mess caused by my liquid detergent leaking down onto my dryer and the floor. It wasn't a dirty mess to clean, since it was just soap, but I had to use a putty knife to scrape up globs of detergent. I also cleaned the floor, took all the items off the shelf above, cleaned the shelf, lined it with a shelf liner and put all the various cleaning agents such as Windex and Pledge back up in an orderly arrangement. Then came the carpets and furniture, which got vacuumed and dusted (with Pledge!). Finally, I pulled both cars out of the garage and used the shop vacuum to clean the floors, and I put a few more boxes in the recycling container. Now I just started my 4th load of laundry, returned from the store and am ready for a relaxing nap. If I feel up to it, I might even go to the gym tonight, since tomorrow will be beer drinking and football watching day.

Downtown San Diego Picture From Iron Mt.

As promised, I went for a hike this morning. I was a little worried when I saw the outdoor temperature was a few degrees above freezing, but long pants and a light jacket was enough to keep me warm up the trail to Iron Mountain. Once at the top, I decided to test my new camera's zoom and image stabilization features. This picture of Downtown San Diego was taken at the maximum 10X optical zoom. My hands were shaking so much I was sure it would turn out blurry, but it didn't. You can even see an airplane landing at Lindberg Field. Using Google Earth, I estimated that the airport is 20 miles, as the crow flies, from my location.

Christmas is Over

I finally took down my Christmas decorations tonight, and now my living room walls look so bland and empty. It is no fun putting away the colorful lights and sparkeling tinsel. However, this year I'm going to display my Star Trek ornaments in my Star Trek room, but for now, the lights and ornaments are just laying on my guest bed. A project for the four day weekend I have to look forwards to! Friday I'm going to go on another morning hike and then run some errands. Saturday is a free day, where I can sleep in and take it easy. Sunday is a Chargers football day and on Monday I'll take my Mustang in to get the fender repaired (six months after the damage occurred). Yes, I do plan too much.

Google Earth Map of my Ellie Lane Hike

Using Google Earth, a wonderful program everyone should down load to their computer, I mapped approximately the path I took (the red line) from the trail head to the Iron Mt. junction. As you can see, there are many trails in the area.

Mt. Woodson Burned and Ellie Lane Hike

I work up early today so I could go for a hike and return in time for the early afternoon football game. My plan was to hike Mt. Woodson, however, I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the booth at the entrance to Lake Poway was gone, and assumably burned in the fire last October. I parked my car and walked to the beginning of the trail and there was a sign saying "Trail closed Ahead". So after wandering around confused for a few minutes, I asked the woman working the snack shop about the trail, and she said all the trails were closed. I had no idea that all of Mt. Woodson had burned. There was no brush visible at all from the lake. What a shame. That was a nice hike and it might be some time before they re-open the trails. So I got back in my car and drove up to good old Iron Mt.


There were a ton of cars parked along 67, but I found a spot right next to the gate. As I started hiking up, I could see the trail was very crowded. So I decided to take the alternate path up, the Ellie Lane Trail. I had never taken this path before, so I wasn't sure how to get there. There were several trails leading off the path that connects Iron Mt. trail to the Ellie Lane trail. I passed a woman walking two dogs and she asked me the same question I was going to ask her, "Which is the path to take?".

At the next fork, I veered right, because that trail looked like it went the way up. Then I encountered another trail junction, and then another. Every so often there was a sign indicating the direction to Ellie Lane, but no signs indicating how to get to Iron Mt. The trails I hiked went up a hill, down a very steep path into a valley, then up and across a small creek, where I finally made it to a trail at the crest where there were at least some other hikers. From there the trail winds back down to the junction at the midway point of the Iron Mt. trail. I had been hiking for 90 minutes at this point, and I still had 1.5 miles to the summit. The entire hike took over three hours (I took the short way back down), and my legs are hating me right now. So in return for their effort, I'll watch football for the next six hours sitting in my Lay-z-boy.

Panasonic BL-C131A Network Camera

One of the Christmas gifts I bought myself was a new wireless network camera. Why would I need a network camera? For two reasons. Reason one: For fun. Reason two: When I had to evacuate my house during the fires last October, it would have been nice to have had this camera up and running so I could remotely monitor my home. The Panasonic BL-C131A camera can be placed anywhere inside my condo (not for outdoor use, however, it can be placed to look out a window) and the pictures are transmitted to my wireless router. Then they can be viewed from any Internet connection. In fact, the camera can stream 640x480 at 30 frames per second in MJPEG or MPEG-4 format, plus sound. It can also be remotely controlled, with the ability to move the camera up, down, right and left. I have set up an account so people can log in and view the camera, and have limited controls (I'm not giving this address to the whole world for privacy reasons, and besides, there is nothing to watch except me sitting here scratching my nose).

The good: it works as advertised. The bad: the picture quality is not very good, the zoom is digital only, you need Active-X to control the camera, so on an Apple you can view the video, but can't control the camera or hear audio (unless you have Parallels and run Windows on your Mac). The biggest problem is the camera keeps loosing connection with the router, requiring a reset of the camera. This can only be done from my computer here at home, or once a day automatically, which I have it set to do. Now to be fair, I don't think this is the camera's problem. My wireless router, a D-Link WBR-2310, which I wrote a review of last year, tends to "hang-up" briefly during the day. If it does, the network camera loses connection. I have read of other people having problems with this wireless router, and one person suggested lowering the MTU, which is described in detail here. I did this and it does not seem to help. At this point I don't know what to do. Out of all the reviews I read about wireless network cameras, this Panasonic had the best reviews, and all reviews I read about wireless routers complained about them hanging up. So, I'll figure something out.


Added on 02/14/2008: Recently, the camera has been loosing its wireless connection with my router. The light on the camera blinks orange. Sometimes it fixes itself, other times I unplug it for a few seconds and the problem stops. I don't know if this problem is with the camera or my router. I did recently change my wireless encryption from WEP to WPA-2, which caused no problems with the camera at the time.

***** Updated on 01/20/2009: I finally bought a new router. Read about it here. Hopefully this will fix my problem with the camera locking-up.

New Futurama Action Figures

The last of the presents I bought myself after Christmas arrived today. These action figures are produced by Toynami, a company that I have no other figures from. The first two figures in the new line of Futurama action figures are Fry and Dr. Zoidberg. Now that the show has new episodes coming out, at least on DVD only for now, I guess they thought it was a good time to revive the line. The boxes are heavier than I expected, meaning I might have to display them on a shelf.

The Fry figure looks almost identical to the one produced by MAC (Moore Action Collectibles)several years ago, which I guess it should since Fry looks the same in every episode. Dr. Zoidberg was never produced by MAC, but the designers at Toynami did a good job on his likeness too. The next figures to be released are Zapp, Leela, Bender and Kif. I guess if you get them all, each box has a part to build Robot Devil. That might temp me to open the boxes!

Beer and Beef at Turf Supper Club

Out of six photos taken of me, this was the best one. Nothing more fun than grilling your own sirloin patty while drinking a Guinness. Yes, I wore the wrong shirt, but it still works on an overall beer theme.

Deep Space Nine Series 1

These Star Trek: Deep Space Nine action figures were produced by Art Asylum and Diamond Select Toys. I'm surprised they are making new DS9 figures since the show has been off the air for almost eight years, but that didn't stop me from buying them. I have DS9 figures from the Playmates collection, but this line includes the first Ezri Dax I have ever seen. Overall, I'd say the designers did a good job. The faces look realistic and the heads are in good proportion to the bodies.

Battlestar Galactica Six Figures

Well, I gone and done it again. I started collecting a new line of action figures: Battlestar Galactica. Now before you say, "Don't you have enough already?" I didn't buy every one available, just the two Six characters. I didn't like the other figures, which were Hot Dog and Apollo.

This red dress Six will complement by red dress Glory nicely. I think that the sculpts for both of these Six figures are very realistic, much better than some of the recent Buffy offerings.

Stay tuned, I have more action figures on the way!

New Years Day 2008

I am getting old. I went to bed last night at 9PM and slept in until 8AM New Years Day. I didn't even try to stay up until midnight. I decided to stay home for New Years Eve and then spend the day with relatives that I don't see very often. I showed my aunt, uncle and cousin my action figure collection and they were impressed. My aunt and uncle gave me a Star Trek figure, still in the box, and it was one I didn't have! What luck! The photo above was taken at my brother's house and may become another famous "couch" photo. The afternoon was topped off with food and beer at Oggi's (followed by a nap while watching college football bowl games.)