Category Archives: Life

Snow

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Seems as though it were just yesterday that I was talking about the leaves changing color the all the wonderful things about Fall and here we are with snow. It’s not sticking to the ground, but that’s not far away. I still haven’t found a pair of gloves for the season as the gloves that I usually buy are no where to be found. I still have to make sure the kids have enough gloves and hats for the season as well, even though they probably won’t wear them.

I can’t even get them to wear shoes outside when it’s 50 degrees outside.

I remember when Will said “it’s Wal-Mart”, and that has really become a fitting motto for a place that just stops carrying gloves that I’ve bought there for years.

I still have to buy a shovel, because I had a really hard time shoveling the driveway last year when the snow piled up. The cheap shovel in the shed just isn’t going to cut it this year.

I should make sure I have an ice scrapper in my trunk. You should to.

I have this plastic stuff to put over some windows and one door so that the heat doesn’t escape as readily as it normally would.

Really though I’m just glad that we are almost half way through November before I’m talking about snow. There have been years where I would have been having this discussion in the middle of October.

When Things Break

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I might have been having some trouble getting the time I wanted in the demo for Mirror’s Edge, which if you haven’t already I suggest you check this game out. The end result is that a controller might have received the brunt of this frustration with the game.

I have several broken controllers in my basement. Jo and I bought them a while ago in order to take the cases and see if we could dye, paint, or do something to change the color on a more permanent basis. I believe the final verdict was no – everything eventually rubs off. What I am left with though is a plethora of parts to cannibalize in cases like this where I need to fix something.

This was basically the first time I soldered anything. I watched Jo do the LED’s when we were changing LED’s on controllers, which was a huge success, but I only helped a little. This was different. This was a piece of hardware held on to the board by about a dozen points.

I went to a local store and bought about $20 in supplies. I needed solder, wick (which is basically this braided copper wire that is supposed to take solder off boards), a vacuum gun (you push the handle in and it sucks the solder off the board when you press the button), and a solder gun holder, since I just had the really cheap one that came with my solder gun.

That accomplished I set about my task. I started to remove the piece that broke. I put on another piece from another controller. Everything went slowly and I sort of learned how to do certain things. Put the controller back together, and sure enough the piece that I took was broken. It’s the right analog stick, so it controls in FPS games which way you look, and this piece wants to look up.

Back to the basement I take another piece from another controller, and this time it went a little faster. I was starting to get the hang of taking pieces off boards. I put the controller back together, brought it upstairs, and this time it was a success. The controller is working perfectly now. I’m glad it was that piece and not my solder job or something else, because I wouldn’t have known where to begin checking the solder.

I feel very accomplished today.

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Fall

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It’s that time of the year again when the leaves change color, land in my yard, and I have to rake them all up and put them on the tree lawn so the city can pick them up.

It’s the time of the year when I have to turn on the heat, and the house is nice and toasty when we wake up in the morning.

We will be turning the clocks back soon and the kids are going to be getting their report cards. Time to start asking the kids what they want to be for Halloween. I always put that off till the last minute. Only two more months till Christmas.

Lawnmower

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Tuesday Derek came over to take a look at the lawnmower, because it stopped working. The problem is that oil is coming out of the front and it won’t start. I had to borrow the neighbors to get the yard done. There were a few things to try.

First he noticed that there was a screw or something missing from the front of the lawn mower, and that’s why the oil was coming out. Trip to Home Depot and they don’t sell the oil screws for lawn mowers, and matter of fact newer models don’t even have that, but they sell a screw that is the right size to go in there.

Came home and it still wouldn’t start. Took off the float, because Derek said that occasionally this part will get stuck, and I was having the symptom of the lawnmower starting and then stopping immediately again. No luck it wasn’t stuck.

Pulled the handle a few more times, and pressed the pump, and played with the air filter. Nothing ended up working, so I’m not sure what else there is to do with it. Sell it as broken. At least I learned something about lawnmowers.

Another Bike Ride

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I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.

This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.

The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.

The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.

I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.

We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.

I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.

Learning GPS Programs

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I had mentioned some time ago that I wanted to learn how to use MyMotion and TrackMe in order to have a tracklog of the bike trips that I’ve been taking. Well there really isn’t a better time to learn how these programs work than when you are taking a drive some place.

I’ll start with the most frustrating, which is TrackMe. It’s the better looking of the two programs, but that isn’t really an issue if it’s so much work. The first thing is that it seems that you have to check a lot of options inside the preferences/tools otherwise all you are really doing is reporting back to a server where you are. His server. Where you can log in and see where you are. That’s neat, I’ll give him that, but that’s not really at all what I wanted, so after a lot of trial and error I finally managed to check the correct boxes and have a tracklog.

Then the problem was saving it. That seems like it would be really easy, I mean you load up the program and hit the “play” button, and then you press “stop” and everything in between is the program recording your position at predetermined intervals, but no it is actually pretty daunting a task to save the file.

First you have to navigate through menu’s, but you have to play “pick the right icon”, since there are several icons that aren’t really intuitive at all. The design choice was really “less words more icons” and I don’t think that works very well when you are trying to learn to navigate the interface for a new program. Then you have to go through more menu’s to find where you can load “existing” and then save it. This is the file that I was eventually able to make, and honestly if you put me on the spot I can’t say that I know how to go through all the steps again to make that.

Next on to MyMotion. MyMotion is ugly, but it works. I was tracking by altitude in this tracklog, so when you look at it the line is solid red, because apparently I never changed altitude. I could be wrong about the red line, but looking at the tools and preferences it’s the impression that I get. I’ve removed that and have it logging by speed, so hopefully the next time I have a tracklog to share you will see the multicolored lines that represent how fast I was going.

The only real problem I had with MyMotion is that the track line actually stopped two points short of where I stopped. I don’t know what that means, but I fixed it. I was driving, so I’m not sure if it’s a bit more accurate on a bike or something. We will have to see.

Luigi’s

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Luigi’s is a local Akron place that you have to go to at least once. It’s a great Italian place that has been in Akron for almost 60 years, which I know, because there was a newspaper article at the table we sat at that said that Luigi’s had been around for 36 years, and the article was dated 1985. Most of the other tables have Funky Winkerbean comics, since apparently the animator for that newspaper comic strip is a local guy who has a Luigi’s in his comic strip that is supposed to be the same.

Renee had never been there, so it was nice to have a chance to take her there. You can’t do it too often, because even though it’s great to go there it’s a bit pricey. She enjoyed the food and so did I. They have these little touches that make the place so good. Like the parmesan cheese is really shredded parmesan cheese, not that dry powder stuff. They have the red pepper shakers. The food is just incredible. Get the cheese on the salad. It’s not good for you, but it’s so good.

What is even more bizarre about this place is that I used to live right down the street from it and I never even knew about the place until Leonard took me there one night. It’s weird how much of Akron I missed out on the first time I lived in Akron.

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Inner City Dogs

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I think as long as I’ve lived and no matter where I have lived there have always been stray dogs wandering about that occasionally end up in your yard. Typically I would say that this is a rare and very much uninvited event, because dogs carry disease, could bite you, and can even damage your property. Having been in Akron for two years now I have seen my fair share of stray dogs.

We had one dog that followed Patty home. She asked if she could keep it, and I said no. Later we found out that the dog belonged to a family a few houses down. The dog came loose again a few times. They were really horrible at taking care of the dog and eventually sold it to some other family.

We had another dog that was down the street for the longest time and when the kids would walk that way to see any of their friends the dog would run up to them and sort of block their path. They were afraid of that dog, so that was rather unpleasant. I never personally saw the dog, and when I’d walk with the kids it never came out.

There was one dog that used to pace up and down the street. There have been several dogs that stopped traffic crossing the street. This all brings us to this dog. This dog apparently wandered into our backyard and wouldn’t leave. He apparently tried getting inside and kept everyone trapped inside the house for a while. I was sleeping so I didn’t take this picture or see any of this.

Grandma called the police who showed up and tried coaxing the dog into the car. My Grandma kept calling this dog a pit bull. I don’t know if it is or not, but it doesn’t look like it. I don’t know that much about dogs though. The owner drove past just in time to claim his dog and so this story has sort of a happy ending. I hope he takes better care of his dog this time.

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Patty’s Room 2.0

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The carpet was going to need to be pulled out of her room anyway, so this was going to happen one way or another. I’m really thankful Renee was here to help. She did an amazing amount of work on it, and honestly I don’t believe that if left up to me the project would have been done today.

All the carpet got pulled up, the cleaning supplies were purchased and used, and a mat was bought for the middle of the room just so it’s not all wood. Honestly the wood underneath that mat is a bit stained and weird looking, so the mat is really a necessity.

The television has been replaced as well. She isn’t here, because she is at her Mom’s this weekend, so as soon as she comes home she is going to find all this.

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