Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The Perfect Insult, by Sir Duke.

Sir Duke, I hopoe you don't mind me putting this on here, it was just too funny to keep to myself.
Well last night (to cap off an already strange evening) we were hit by a heavy storm. I tried watching it for awhile but the wind kept soaking me. After it was over I wandered out of the house to see how badly the area was flooded, it was quite impressive (though the water drops quickly).

While I was checking out the water a neighborhood group of kids came walking by, (I won't get into parents letting their kids outside when the whole area is under flash flood warnings). This general group of guys seemed to be aged 8-12 years of age. We have some new children in the area, a girl who's about five years old trailed by her brother whom looks about a year younger.

As the older boys came up I noticed the younger children leaving their house and running over. The little girl was wearing a polka dotted outfit. Of course the oldest boy in the crowd yells to her, 'You look like a clown'. You could see this made the little girl angry. She marched up to the group and stepped in front of the boy and said 'I do not look like a clown'. After a little more thought she said, 'all girls dress this way'. Then with an angry scowl on her face she said...

'EXCEPT YOUR MOTHER'...

I'm sure the poor boy will end up in therapy, to go up against a 5 year old and lose that bad.. It didn't help that everyone within hearing distance burst out laughing. I'm going to keep an eye on that little girl, I have a feeling she'll be fun to watch.


Thanks.

If you need to call me, Danny has the number you can reach me at.

See post below for explanation.

That 70's Day

Let's see, it's been and interesting and fun couple of days for me, relearned to live in the days before internet and cell phones. For a day at least.
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The last couple of days my internet has been sporadically going on and off. I got the new modem and it worked for a day or so and then went kaput again. So I called Comcast, again, and scheduled an appointment for today for them to come out and look at it, sometime between 8am and noon. At 10 the internet comes back on, and I'm thinking "Great! Now the cable guy is going to get here and it's going to be working fine." He gets here about 45 minutes later and the cable is still working, so he starts checking it. He checks it out back, let's out a whistle and tells me that the decibels (or something like that) are supposed to run between -5 and +5, and will tend to cut out completely at -15. I was running at -14.4. He also told me that the ratio of errors-to-bits should be 1 in a billion, I was running at 1 in a thousand. He opened up the little box on the back of the house, removed some capacitor looking thing, hooked up his gizmo again, and let out another whistle. Bad capacitor thing, bad, bad capacitor thing. The cable is running at about +9 without it. Now that that is all replaced I'm still running above the +5 mark at the modem, which is very good. Now I've got one foot back in the new millineum.
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Yesterday I was at school starting to set up my classroom. Got there just in time to go out to lunch with the whole gang and then came back to work on my new room. It's summer, nobody is supposed to be in the building, so when I ran upstairs to get some stuff from my techie room, I left the door open. With my personal and my school cell phone sitting on my desk. I was supposed to meet Adele at 3:45 to go see the Simpson's Movie (two thumbs up) and at 3:30 I start packing up to leave. Um, where's the cell phones? Nowhere. In a panic I heaqd down to the office, borrow Tessa's cell phone and start calling mine. Some kid, my guess was 9 or so, answers, mumbles some stuff and hangs up. Great. Call the other phone. Same thing. Double Great. By now it's almost 4:00 and I don't even know Adele's number to call her and tell her what's going on. First things first, I call Qwest to cancel my phone, they were incredibly helpful, they even called South Salt Lake Police to make the report, and let me know how to claim my phone with their insurance and get a new one. Then I have to call Verizon to let get my school number shut down. Now it's almost 4:30 and I just know Adele is all pissed off at me for standing her up. So I look up her parent's number in the phone book, call her mom, get her cell number and then call her. She's not mad at all, she figured something like this had happpend when she called my number and got a 9 year old, who just mumbled something and hung up. First time she called she thought I might have been at Danny's house and either Josh or Dylan had been messing with the phone, but after the third time she figured I would have gotten it from them by then. Well, the phone company is sending me a new phone, it'll get here within 3 days. Until then I'm using one of the counselors cell phones.
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So, I got a reminder of what it was like before the days of cell phones and the internet. Nobody (except Danny, because his cell was the one number I could remember) could call me, I didn't have to come home and check my e-mails, and blogging was completely out of the question. Hmmmm, actually it wasn't that bad of a day........

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Happy Birthday Madison

I know I'm a few days late, and I'm sorry. But I know you're all getting together tonight for a party, so I hope you have a great one. Unfortunately I'm at work, so I'm gonna miss it. Love ya.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

When good modems go bad.....

Well, if you have been wondering about why the site (not L'Adunata, but the mother site srossi.net) has been on and off for the last 3 days, it's because of a bad modem. I called them up and told them the internet wasn't working, they did some troubleshooting (unplug, replug, turn computer off, restart computer and a bunch of stuff on their end) and finally decided it was one of two things : the modem or the cables. Since I replaced the modem just a year or so ago, they decided it had to be the cables, so they scheduled a maintenance person to come out sometime between 8am and noon today. Except that on Friday morning the internet was working fine, so I called them back and cancelled the appointment. I figured if it was something wrong with the cables, it wouldn't be so on-again, off-again like it had been for the last 3 days, and so it must be the modem. I also figured that if it were the modem, it might have to do with being down in the damp basement. So this morning when I woke up and found the internet down again, I went to Comcast, got a new modem, went to Comp USA and got the stuff to move the modem upstairs (and 2GB of RAM for this computer), came home, set it all up and voila - it's working. Hopefully for more than a couple of days. Well, running your own web page server in the basement may not be the most reliable, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for the space I use....have a great weekend