Tastes Like Chicken

We finally got around to installing the new shower pan in the bathroom. As you can see in the pictures below, I put some new studs in the wall to support the glass shower wall and door. I also put in plywood on the three shower walls to make a tighter fit for the pan, and to also put some more support behind the cementboard and tile.

I ended up making it too tight of a fit though, and we couldn't fit the pan in there, so I had to cut off a lower portion of the plywood and then fit it back in after the fact.

The shower pan is sitting on top of 50 pounds of mortar so keep it from flexing when you walk in the shower. You can also see the rubber liner I put under the mortar to keep it from seeping through the post and beam subfloor.

I will say that even after drilling pilot holes to attach the pan to the studs, the acrylic pan was very fragile, and if you look closely, you'll see at least three spots where i cracked the flange of the pan driving the screws too tightly. I don't expect this to be a big deal since those cracks will be covered with liner and cement board before we put the tiles on.

Screwing in the drain was a little bit of a pain, but I gooped all sorts of plumber's putty on the threads and on the surface between the upper drain and the pan, so I think it is all pretty solid.

Next step is to line and cementboard the walls.

This morning I heard Opie & Anthony talking about Earth Day, and I started thinking about it, and I decided that it sucks. It has been put in place by hippies to make themselves feel better and really doesn't do crap to help the planet. So wanted to shed light on these four environmental killers that won't be discussed by liberal media on Earth Day:

1. Schoolbuses. When I was a kid, I walked a few blocks to a bus stop and got on with a bunch of kids. One stop, one start. When I see a stupid soccer mom waving at her neighbor that is putting a kid on the bus two houses down, and there are two separate stops there, I get livid. Not only are you killing the gas mileage on the bus, but you are killing the mileage of the 800 cars behind the bus. I'm sure that's not being discussed in the Earth Day media masturb, er, sorry, I mean coverage.
2. The New York Yankees. Building the new Yankee stadium is tearing our planet apart. Construction has forced the destruction of natural parklands that have been replaced with artificial ones (and even some are even located on garage tops). That is stupid. Additionally I heard that when Jeter and A-Rod make love they throw their used condoms on the floor and all that latex is hurting our environment.
3. Small town government. The dummies running my town won't let me drill a well in my backyard because they claim it will hurt the pond that is behind my house. Seems like my well would be much less of a problem than all the lawn chemicals being spilled into it (and most of the other residential ponds in America). And I wouldn't be supporting the infrastructure for overpriced community water supply.
4. Southwest Airlines. A report from NAASWA (National Association Against Southwest Airlines) said that the lack of seat assigments on flights have been responsible for the deaths of at least 15 endangered gray wolves last year alone. So when you fly Southwest, you are killing a puppy. (I threw that one in for all the douchebags that have been sending me comments about my Southwest Airlines Sucks post. Ha ha – Southwest still sucks, and if that makes you angry enough to send a comment trying to convince me otherwise, then I win. And you kill puppies.)

So if my wife is reading this, in celebration of Earth Day I think we should go buy a new Aga which has six big fat natural gas burners, hot enough to be seen from space. And while we're out, lets buy a rally car. Then we can drive home really fast and I can make some money dinner. Seriously. Both of those things need to get done. Soon.

"Working at the Ballpark" by Tom Jones was published earlier this month. It is available at Amazon.com and other bookstores.

Tom had contacted me a few months back about including one of my Doug Mirabelli photos in the book, and I was more than happy to be included. My photo is on Page 131 of the book, and can be seen at my Flickr account. Tom autographed a copy for me and I received it a couple of days ago.

I haven't gotten around to actually reading the book yet (that's on my list as soon as my spring semester is over), but here's the description from Amazon.

For everyone who ever dreamed of making their love of baseball into their vocation, Working at the Ballpark will provide a view at their lives that might have been, with interviews with more than 50 people who make a living in major league baseball. Each is asked the same questions: What is your job? How did you get into this line of work? What does this job mean to you? From peanut vendors and equipment managers to general managers and star players, from John Guilfoy, who sells sausages at Fenway, to Chris Hanson, who plays "Bernie Brewer" in Milwaukee, to Omar Vizquel, who anchors the infield at AT&T Park, this is an insider's perspective on the enormous scope of the game.

I'm just writing this as a reminder to myself so next time I don't have to spend all day Googling for the one message board post out on the web that addresses this issue.

Evidently RXVT doesn't handle unicode all that well. I am using RXVT on my cygwin / Windows box to SSH to a remote Fedora box where I'm doing some software development. GCC is returning compile errors that have single quotes, but those single quotes are unicode, and so they originally looked like this – ‘

Now before you jump down my throat, yes, I know there is rxvt-unicode out there, but I honestly didn't feel like seeing if it would work on cygwin and taking the time to install it, so I found out you can just export the following environment variable in your shell to fix this up.

LANG=en_US

Now quotes look like quotes. Problem solved.

I remember the first time I listened to the Don & Mike Show was while stuck in traffic on Rt. 50 in Fairfax on my way to some grad school classes at GMU.

I also remember the first and only time I called the show. I was working in a building in downtown DC and a bunch of disabled people in wheelchairs were protesting some government agency in one of the floors above us. They all showed up and chained their wheelchairs together in front of the doors and parking garages so we couldn't leave. So I called Don & Mike to complain. This was before the ban on people calling with breaking news. I like to think I had something to do with the ban being put in place. In any event, it was cool to talk to them once.

I listened constantly for the few years we lived down there, and as my wife will attest, I was pretty bitter about having to give up the show (and WJFK in general) when we moved out west. Whenever we'd visit friends down there over holidays I'd end up listening to WJFK even in reruns. And oh thank God to whoever decided to podcast radio shows, because for the last year or so I've been able to listen even though we live up north now.

I just finished listening to the final show, still in traffic on the way to grad school, though in a different state, and only a few days late on the iPod. It stinks that the show is over because it always reminded me of the fun I had living in DC. Oh well, not much we can do about that.

So Don, Good day to you sir.

And Mike – keep the podcasts coming – you're up next.

We managed to get the rough plumbing done. The next step is to finish prepping the shower walls (with plywood and rubber) for the shower base installation. That will be all sorts of mortar-mixing fun. After that we can patch up the walls and start tiling…

I read this article today on CNN.com and it really pissed me off:
'Big black dog syndrome' leaves them homeless

Seriously, if you are that much of a pussy that a dog scares you simply because it is big and black, then just get the hell out of here and go live in a submarine or somewhere else that is not here.

I am going to make it a point to only adopt big black dogs and I am going to train them to notice when you get scared and cross the street so they can follow you home and take a big steaming dump on your front steps.

For once, Al Sharpton should do something useful with himself and go out and do his song and dance supporting big black dogs.

Last night I ended up pulling off a shutout in our last game of the season. File that under "getting the job done when it counts" or "standing up like a man under pressure", but regardless, I feel good about myself today. There were no botches in the last few minutes, and , though I certainly wouldn't claim to have played perfectly, the fundamentals were there and I covered the mistakes that needed covering. And I had a lot of help from a very shorthanded bunch of guys in front of me that got the job done. It was one of the best games they've played in front of me, and it would not have been a shutout without them.

Which is why I feel justified today in calling the Memphis Tigers the biggest bunch of pansy-ass choking losers I've ever seen. One of only two NCAA basketball games this year that mattered to me, the other being the CAA championship, the only one that I actually had something of value riding on – and they choke. Bastards.

How hard is it for an NCAA player to make free throws? Seriously? You do this every single stupid day of your wasted lives and you can't sink free throws when it counts. I've seen Aborigine kids in barefeet in Australia who could sink free throws better than you.

Your mothers should be ashamed of you. I hope you enjoy your careers as drive-thru specialists at your local In-N-Out Burger, because that's about as much pressure as you wastes of skin can handle. Or seriously – don't punish the good people at In-N-Out Burger – just put your head in a toilet and have somebody hold it down until it all fades to black.

The 2007-2008 Memphis Tigers Men's Basketball Team is composed of a bunch of failures. You suck and you are pussies undeserving of any respect as men or athletes. Don't listen to the nonsense about how it is great that you came in second, because that's a bunch of crap. You couldn't get it done when it counted, and for that, you should be ashamed of yourselves. The rest of the world is laughing at your expense. As Ricky Bobby's Dad once said – "If you ain't first, you're last."

So after almost 10 years, I am saying goodbye to DirecTV. Last weekend, my HR10-250 DirecTiVo's hard drive finally died. And since DirecTV and TiVo no longer work together on the High-Def stuff, I had to drop DirecTV. I just love the TiVo interface too much. So for any dummies at DirecTV who might happen to read this, you lost a long time customer because you tried to push your own inferior DVR on the world.

I went out and bought a TiVo HD at Best Buy, and all things considered, the whole switch over was much easier than I had expected. I bought the box on Friday and the Comcast guy was out to my house with a multistream CableCard on Sunday. I made the appointment by walking into the Hudson, MA Comcast office. They were very friendly and took great notes for my appointment request – specifically my request for an M-Card. The install was painless – I think they have finally educated some techs on how to do these installs.

There was one glitch. After the tech had left and I was surfing around, I noticed that certain HD channels weren't coming in. They were spread out, but all were HD (things like Discovery, SciFi, Animal Planet, Fox Sports New England). I tried calling support and they did the whole init, hit, refresh thing on the card, but no luck. So another Comcast tech came out on Monday. After finally convincing the guy that the problem wasn't the cable card, we reached the conclusion that it was an RF problem. And of course, his first guess what that it was something wrong with my own wiring job in the house. So after I showed him that the problem still occured when we hooked up right to where the coax entered the house I managed to convince him to go outside and check the street. Turns out that the guy who installed my interent hookup four years ago installed a low-pass filter on the line in the street (obstensibly to keep me from stealing cable). So that was cutting out all those HD channels that were above a certain frequency. Thirty seconds later, filter removed, all the channels came in and they are working like a champ.

So other than the dummy tech from Monday who wouldn't listen to his customer (because tech's think all customers are stupid) spending 2 hours to do what should have taken 2 minutes, things have gone well and I am happy to be watching NESN in HD on my TiVo.

Moral – If you're missing a block of channels – check for filters everywhere between the street and your box.

I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed about the bill…