The Bed Arrives

Little Kat and Momoko had picked out a new extra long bed for Little Kat. I ordered it around a month and a half ago. It got delivered yesterday. I opted for curbside delivery because the delivery cost was already expensive. I had the delivery boys wheel the bed into the carport.

When Little Kat came home, we cut the bed off the palette it come on. Then I brought out the old bed prototype that I built. Little Kat and I practiced one more time how we were going to bring the bed upstairs. It was a tight fit. Having the mock bed prototype gave us the edge we needed.

Little Kat bravely volunteered to be the guy on the bottom pushing the bed up the stairs. We got it past the trickiest part of the stairs. Once we got it into his room, we pulled off the protective plastic and cardboard wrap. Doh! Turns out we brought it into his room backwards. Took us a while to move it back out the room, down the hall, and into a bigger room to flip around.

Now the only remaining task is to buy Little Kat an extra long matress. Little Kat and Momoko went to my favorite matress store to check out mattresses. Little Kat came up with a short list of four matresses he liked. I went back to the store to check out his top choice. The salesman was not willing to work out a good deal for me to purchase the bed. Next step is to find another salesman.

Toothbrush Trouble

My dentist told me to start using a different toothbrush around a year ago. This one had longer bristles on the end. I had to special order replacements from Amazon. The brush is easy enough to use. The problem is that it has a weird shaped handle. The thing did not fit in our standard tooth brush holder.

Momoko bought a free standing toothbrush holder. It seemed to be made to fit wide handle brushes like my own. It was a good purchase, until the problems started popping up. The holder is essentially a big cup with custom holder in the top to hold toothbrushes. The problem is that the water sits in the bottom of the cup.

Sitting water is a recipe for disaster. The bottom of this cup started looking like a petri dish. Yeah I could bleach the thing out. But with the standing water, the nasty moldy bottom kept coming back. This got old really quick. I bought a new standard toothbrush holder to experiment with.

The project got put on hold for a long time. Eventually I got back to it. Used a pair of pliers and a long screwdriver to widen the mouth of the holes that hold the toothbrushes. What do you know? It worked. I mounted the modified holder on the bathroom wall. Now we should be good to go.

Router Rollover

Some time ago, Little Kat complained about the Internet speeds he was receiving. He proposed that we replace our wireless router. The new router cost about $50. I figured that would be a good investment. Unfortunately, I did not determine the true costs of the upgrade. Turns out Little Kat did not know how to set up all our printers to work with the new router.

This caused Momoko to not be able to print from her study. After over a month of Little Kat failing, I had to step in. Spent a few hours getting the first printer working with the new router. Then last night I spent a few more hours getting the other two printers working with the new router.

Now this work was not just switching the printers over to a new secure router. I also had to make sure Little Kat could print and scan from his new Windows 8 laptop. If I would have known it would take this long and this much of my time for the router upgrade, I would have halted it.

In the future, I need to ask a whole lot more questions when the kids get some great ideas. The main question should be to figure out how much of my time will be required to clean up whatever messes they get us in. Lesson learned.

Stick Shift

I have been spending the last few weekend with Kit Kat. She has been driving my manual transmission Saturn Vue in the local elementary school parking lot. Things have been looking good. She can get it into first gear from a stopped position, even when the car is on an include. She can get the car moving backwards. She can shift between first and second gears.

Last time I pushed Kit Kat to learn automatic transmission rapidly, she had an adverse reaction. That resulted in Momoko having to take over the instruction. This time around I am trying to be a little more patient and gentle. However we cannot drive in the parking lot forever. There is only so fast we can go and so many gears we can get into.

Today I had Kit Kat try to drive over to her friend's house with the manual transmission. There was one steep hill to start the car on. There was also a relatively major road where she needed to get into third gear for higher speeds. She nevered stalled. There was one point where she tried to get it from third to second gear. She missed the gear and was stuck in neutral. We made it though.

I am hoping now that the initial drive in traffic is over, we can proceed on the roads instead of a parking lot. Things are more hectic with a manual transmission. But that is the point. Once you can drive a manual in traffic, you can drive it anywhere. The goal is to have Kit Kat be proficient with the stick shift before she leaves the house for a college dorn in less than one year.

Job Satisfaction

I like eating lunch at Roy Rogers. However so does everyone else. I need to get there early in order to get a seat in the place. My work often keeps me busy until late in the lunch hour. So I have to find food somewhere else. When that happens, I head over to Jerry's subs and pizza.

Jerry's is usually pretty empty. I think that is because the food is expensive. I bring a coupon along almost every day. And my meal still runs me $9.00. Sure I get fries and a drink. This is still quite a steep cost. The good news is that there are always many tables to sit at.

Today as I parked my car, I saw the delivery guy heading out towards the road. He was waving at me to say hi. He was leading a new guy out to stand on the street. The new guy's goal was to drum up business for lunch. The poor guy had to wear a Jerry's sub-to-go box as a costume. Oh man that was bad. It did seem to bring in a few extra customers.

There are a lot of stressful parts to my job. I got to deal with crazy managers. Then there are some slackers on my team. Often times the customer is not happy because of some software problems. The list goes on.

I get paid a lot of money to write computer software. The programming part is very fun. The paycheck is even more fun. I get to work from home. Seeing the poor Jerry's advertising guy reminded me that I got it made doing computer programming for a living.

Postal Problem

We have a lot of vehicles in the family. Momoko owns two. I own three. This is one vehicle for every member of the family, plus a truck for the occasional haul. You can imagine it gets pretty hectic when friends with cars come to visit.

This is one of the reasons that I widened our driveway. It is three cars wide in the back, and two cars wide where it meets the street. We can park a lot of cars in the driveway. However we only park four cars in there. The truck can stay in the back blocked in. But the other cars need to come and go.

That leaves one car left over that I park in the street. Our US Mail carrier has been trying to talk me into moving that last car into the driveway too. Sheesh. These rural Postal workers have it good. They drive up to all the mailboxes. Not like the old days in the city where the Postal carriers would walk from house to house.

This week I got a note from my carrier. She said that unless I moved my car into my driveway, she would not deliver my mail. I got out and measured over 15 feet from my car to my mailbox. Plenty of room to drive up and drop the mail off right from her vehicle. What kind of craziness is this? Time to talk with the Postmaster of my city.

New Router Project

Little Kat complained that our Internet speeds were slow. He said the cause was that we opened up our wireless router to anyone. I told him to put a password on the network access. He could not. Then he proposed I buy an expensive new router.

I looked at the specs of the new router. They were impressive. But they were overkill. I only pay for a certain low bandwidth from our Internet Service Provider (ISP). Higher speed access to our router will only get jammed up in the pipe to the ISP. I did agree to buy a new cheaper router that Little Kat could lock down.

The router came quick. Little Kat added encryption that required a password. That way nobody could use the wireless connections without knowing the secret password. Next step was to update all the devices in the house to use the new router. Easier said than done.

I gave Little Kat the CD-ROM that came with Momoko's laser printer. He tried and tried but could not get it to work with the new router. Momoko was inconvenienced because now she could not print to her printer. I told Little Kat that he needed to get that printer to work before messing up any of the other printers.

Eventually Momoko could not take it any more. So I had to help Little Kat. We reset the settings on the Momoko's printer to factory defaults. We were able to verify that you could print to it if you connected your computer to it directly. None of the normal install programs allowed us to set up the wireless access.

We decided to connect the printer directly to the new router with a cable. Then I used an optional utility from the manufacturer to spy on the printer network settings. I also tried a back door I knew about, and we got lucky. We were able to set up the printer using a browser.

Had to figure out things such as the printers internal password. We also needed to recall what the security settings for our new router were. But now we can print wirelessly to Momoko's printer using the new router. Next I plan to let Little Kat set up the other printers in the house. Hopefully we can then move all the other devices over to the new router, and retire the old router.

The Call to Work

I have been working on a large project at work. Somebody messed up and set the schedule too short. I brought the issue up. The resolution was that I was going to get another guy to help me with the task. That guy is quitting the company today. So I have been hustling to try to get the project done on time.

Another group on my project had been asking for help. They were trying to test out some software that the guy who is quitting wrote. They were having major problems. I told them I was behind schedule, and could not help them unless my due date was shifted.

I got a manager on the phone. He told me this other team's work was priority. He said I could have more time on my large task. That's all I needed to hear. I figured out their problem and went back to my own job. Then this other team encountered more problems. I told them the same thing as before - I did not have time to help.

So I called up the manager and asked whether I should continue to help this other team. He gave me the go ahead. Yesterday after leaving work, I got a call from the manager. He was wondering how long it would take to resolve their latest problem. I said a couple days. He told me they needed it done in one day to meet their deadliness.

Nomrally I do not work hard to meet a deadline unless I was consulted in the first place to set the schedule. But sometimes you need to be a bit flexible. I told the manager that I would come in early today to try to get things accelerated. I start work at 4am, cut some corners, and got the team rolling again.

I do work early or late from time to time. But when I do, I don't work overtime. I just leave early as well. Therefore at lunch time today, I am declaring it the weekend for me.

Exam Time

I stayed up late last night. Watched a bunch of Breaking Bad espisodes. Wrote some code to practice for my college class midterm exam. This morning I woke up early. Had to be ready for my handymen to come by to work on the house. They replaced two windows upstairs. I have identified those windows as our escape routes if there is a fire in the house and we need to escape by window.

I ordered casement style window replacements. These are where the window is the size of the opening, and the whole window hinges out leaving the full window space open to climb out. During the day I had a number of people at work asking for help. I gave them some time, but I needed to work on my own task. The guy I am working with is leaving the company this week. I need to complete his work and mine. Not sure if I will make it on time.

My plan was to eat a small lunch, then grab an early dinner before going to class this afternoon. Had an Italian sub for lunch. Maybe I should have skilled the oil on the sub. My stomach did not feel well near the end of work. I left work an hour early to lay down a bit. The family was worried I would oversleep and miss my exam.

I set an alarm to be safe. I turned on the wrong alarm on my clock though. Luckily I did not oversleep. My midterm exam had two parts. I finished the first part in no time. The test was auto-graded. Got a 100% on that one. It boosted my confidence. Then we had to write a couple programs for the second part of the exam. Ha ha. The instructor just chose exercises from our textbook. I do all the exercises on my own. Easy A.

Got My Desk

Little Kat comes down to my study every day after school to do his homework. This seems to be the only way to make sure homework gets done on time. The problem is that he took over the table upon which I had my home computers. I got one main computer that I do most of my work on. I also have an older Windows 8 computer that I write apps on. With Little Kat in my study, I had nowhere to put my laptops.

I thought I found a solution a few weeks back. Was shopping for a new chair for Little Kat's room. I spotted a nice L-shapred desk for cheap in the office store. Unfortunately it was sold out. Not just in the store. The thing wasn't even available for order. Just this weekend I saw the desk on super sale again. Woo hoo.

Today I decided to drive my truck to lunch. Kit Kat's morning class got cancelled. So I had to move her car out of the way to drive my truck out of the driveway. Had a cold cut sub to eat for lunch. Afterwards I went to the office store. Sure enough, they had one of my desks in the back warehouse. It was priced really low.

I backed the truck up and got myself a desk. I was not able to connect the two sides of the desk to form an "L" shape. There is not enough room in my study for that and the table Little Kat uses for his homework. That's okay. My L-shapred desk is just in two pieces. Each piece holds one of my home laptops. I am good to go.

More Breaking Bad

I have been binge watching Breaking Bad episodes. Season one went by too quick. I guess it was a half of a season. It only had 6 or 7 episode. Season two had around 12 episodes. I just finished watching Season three.

Near the end of the season three shows, I realized that I had seen some of these episodes before. Guess I must have been switching channels late night and ended up on the AMC channel. Of course I had no idea what the show was about when I jumped right into a season three episode. Now I have the whole back story.

This series just keeps getting better and better. Got two more seasons to go to get to the series finale. I believe all the episodes are available on Netflix, where I download and watch them. My bro advised me to check out the Vampire Diaries next. Good stuff.

Phone Switch

My bro is an Android phone owner. Well actually he was an Android phone owner. He somehow lost his phone last week. It was a Galazy Samsung one. That is one of the more popular Android phones. That was too bad. I think it was his first really good smart phone. I figured he would just replace it with another Samsung Galaxy.

Today my bro came over to watch some movies with me. He told me he bought an iPhone 5c. He got one in white. He showed it to me. I have seen a lot of iPhones before. So I was not that excited. My brother said he had trouble downloading the YouTube app. I guess that is the killer app for the iPhone.

My brother then started trying to download the YouTube app to his phone. He was walking around trying to multitask, attempting some kind of app install. That is not like him. He told me a couple times that he would have to go back to the store where he got the phone to help get the app installed.

Then I figured out what this show was about. I asked my bro if he needed assistance getting YouTube installed. He jumped up and screamed yes. Again, this is not like my bro at all. He normally never gets excited. We spent some time getting him a Gmail account for email. You need an email account to get an Apple account. Weird huh? Then we had to set up and verify his new Apple account.

We struggled for a bit. But I have learned to keep at it until you get the job done. We got the app installed after about 20 minutes. The rest of the apps should be easy to install now that he is set up. My bro played some test video on the phone to be sure YouTube worked. It looked sharp.

The main take away from today was that my bro is not like the family in my household. In my house, everyone is taught to ask for what you want. Otherwise you don't. My bro just does not have that style of communication down yet. A shame. But I guess that means I need to listen more carefully and ask questions to drive the conversation he is trying to have.

Truck Repairs

Last week I had my mechanic check out my newly acquired Saturn Vue SUV. When I went to pick it up, I dropped off my pickup truck. Had my mechanic change the oil. Also asked him to look into fixing my air conditioning. It turned out it needed more freon. Unfortunately, it uses an old uncommon type of freon. My mechanic said next year I should get the A/C switched over to use the modern freon type.

As soon as I got my pickup truck from the mechanic, I drove it over to the tire store. The front passenger tire was always low on air. I figured it must be a leak. I asked the tire guys to patch it. An hour or so later, I got a call from the tire guys. They said the tire was rotted and could not be fixed. They also said all the other tires were rotted as well and should be replaced. I told them no thank you.

The tire guys gave me a long list of items they thought needed maintenance on the truck: front rotors worked, bearings repacked, idle arm repaired, air filter replacement, preventative maintenance flush of fluids, and a serpentine belt replacement. I thanked them for the info. But I said I was not ready for any of that work. I asked if I owed them anything since they could not patch my tire. I got put on hold.

The tire guy came back on the phone and said my tire was low because it had a nail in it. Turns out they could patch the tire after all. Crooks. Hey. I had my truck there. So I decided I would let the crooks patch the tire. The moral of the story is to say no to the upsell. Then even some unscrupulous mechanics might agree to only perform the minimal maintenance you request.

Breaking Bad

I have been hearing a lot about this cable TV show called Breaking Bad. I guess the hoopla was because the series finale recently showed on air. The show had been going on for five seasons I think. The basic premise is that a chemistry teacher goes into the crystal meth business. What's the big deal?

Today I watched the first episode of season 1. Now I think I have a taste of what the draw is. The crystal meth business is just the backdrop. This seems to be the story about a meek chemistry teacher who comes out of his shell.

I have a good feeling about this series. It almost reminds me of The Sopranos. The lead actor seems strong. The story also seems superior. I am anxious to find out what more this chemistry teacher can show me. Not about drug manufacturing, but about being a bad ass.

Party Time

Little Kat hosted a party at our house this weekend. The format of the party was his friends coming over to play our video game consoles. It also doubled as a birthday party for Little Kat. I had previously worked with Little Kat to order some party platters from the supermarket.

Around 45 minutes before the party, I went to the supermarket. I had requested that the platters be ready early. When I got them, the contents were cold. The deli lady told me they came that way and were to be served cold. WTF? We had items like mozarella sticks and jalpeno poppers. Those things need to be warm.

I called Little Kat and told him to heat up the over. When I got home, we piled the platter contents onto some baking sheets and stuck the contents in the oven. I had to run to pick up Little Kat's best friend from his house as he could not arrange a ride.

Luckily the snacks turned out good once warmed. Unfortunately I needed to give Kit Kat a ride to her friend's down. Kit Kat hates driving on her friend's campus. I volunteered to take her there. I like when Kit Kat spends time on campus at a real university.

By the time I got back home, I found the kids playing all our consoles. I thought they would play XBox 360 and Wii. Turns out they also loved the Playstation 2 with out retro games. I took a nap before having to drive Little Kat's friend home after the party. Actually I sat in the passenger seat as Little Kat drove him home. This was a party well done.

Low on Energy

Recently I have been tired a lot. Maybe it is because I am studying hard every night for my college class. But it might be more than that. I thought I needed a vacation. There is no time for that right now. I am hot on a project at work that lasts at least one more month. What is a tired cat to do?

Well I tried going to bed early. I got a good night's sleep. However it did not cure my sluggishness. Today I tried hitting the exercise equipment. Earlier this year I was exercising a lot. Then I got real busy with my Windows 8 app development projects. Exercise got cancelled. Ouch.

Today I did the normal routine. Five minutes each on the treadmill, elliptical, and stationary bike. In between those workouts, I did some curls with Little Kat's barbell. Now I will see how this affects me. I should try to get back on the exercise routine. Strange that you might get more energy by working out. You would think a workout would make you more tired.

Birthday Surprise

Little Kat came home as usual today. He came down to my study for homework. When I got off the phone with my work, I wished him a happy birthday. Soon after, Kit Kat came home. She told me to keep Little Kat at bay because she was wrapping his gift. That was not a problem. He was with me until quitting time.

Turns out Kit Kat had wrapped a mega roll of bubble wrap for Little Kat. Me I had purchased a custom card for him a long time ago. It had pictures of him and I from long ago. I also wrapped a token gift. It was some military game for an old console. I told Little Kat that his real gift was some party platters I am buying him for his party this weekend. Little Kat thought that was not a good gift, since Momoko was requiring him to have the party. Ha. Imagine that. Ungrateful, especially given the trouble I had to go through to order these platters.

The big hit so far was Momoko's gift to Little Kat. She gave him a card that said his gift was delayed due to government shutdown. WTF right? The card instructed Little Kat to go upstairs and take a look at Momoko's computer screen for a picture of his intended gift. This was a ruse. There was no picture up there. Only instructions to locate his real gift. Momoko purchased a new laptop for Little Kat. He had been asking for one. He also needed once since his is getting broke down. This made Little Kat very excited.

One of the funny ploys this birthday was when Little Kat needed cash for his trip to the Renaissance Faire. Momoko made him call grandma to see if he could get an advance on his gift if it was monetary. Now grandma planned to get Little Kat a gift card of some sorts. However since Little Kat needed cash, he got cash instead. And it came early. It worked out good. He bought a wooden sword with the proceeds. I was impressed at how heavy the small sword weighed.

Failure Scare

I have been keeping an eye on my fuel gauge in my newly acquired Saturn Vue SUV. The thing seemed to be below half a tank. Today is seemed to hover at a quarter tank. I figured I better fill the thing up.

Went to my local gas station. Pay for $20 worth of gas. You get a discount for paying cash. Almost as soon as I started fueling up, the gas cut off. What? I tried squeezing the pump to force more gas in. I had only put in a gallon or so.

Eventually the gas overflowed out of the side of the gas opening. Ouch. I went home and contemplated what to do. I called up the dealership and asked if this was covered under warranty. Usually they are pretty lean on used car warranties. But I just bought this thing!

I scheduled a service visit next week. That was the first available time. At least they let you drop off your car at your convenience. They have a night drop system. I was still peeved that I had to put the car in the shop so soon. I had flashbacks of the Volkswagen Beetle.

On the way to school, I set up a trip meter to measure how far I had travelled since my last tank fill up. On the way to school, something must have been working overtime in my mind. I determined that I had been looking at the oil pressure gauge by mistake. The fuel gauge is over on the right, and it correctly shows a full tank. Whew.

Now with that scare out of the way, it is time to schedule some manual transmission practice with Kit Kat.

Home Networking

The family thought it would be best to put a password on our wireless router. Otherwise anybody can use our Internet. The family thinks this slows us down as other people are leeching onto our Internet access. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are not. I told the family it would be fine by me to put on the password.

The problem was that we have an old wireless router. The software to control it does not work on any of our computers. Little Kat thought we should buy a newer and more modern wireless router. He came with a printout of a bandwidth anaylsis he got online. To him, this proved that the wireless router was the problem.

This made for a good engineering case study. I drew some pictures. Showed the devices in our house, our wireless router, our cable mode, the cable, and the cable company. Then I showed Little Kat what bandwidth rate we were paying our Internet Service Provider for. I also showed him the documentation for the wireless router. It was educational.

The bottleneck is surely not the wireless router. However I did purchase a new router that works with all modern operating systems. Now Little Kat is working to get that new router working. He tells me he thinks it is much faster. We are going to teach this cat some network analysis some day.