WANTED: One wife for two or three days per week, may include one evening every now and then. Duties will include general straightening up after 32 year old single male, helping him shop for clothes, cooking, keeping his calendar, reminding him of proper etiquette, nagging, and generally keeping him from being a lazy bastard. Marital obligations not necessary but encouraged, so is use of French Maid outfit. Will definitely not be needed Sundays during Fall and Winter. Bail money, if necessary, will be reimbursed. Compensation includes leftovers and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Like most single men my age, I’m a lump of clay ready for a woman to mold and shape and glaze and kiln fire so that I can become a beautiful decoration on someone’s arm that they can show off to their friends as if to say, “Look what I did…I took this typical male who had no real social skills or culture and I molded him and made him into a wonderful boyfriend.  Aren’t you jealous of my skills?”  And because no lump of clay can really take care of himself, there are times that I wish I had a wife around to help me through the awkward part of growing up (mainly the years of 18-80).

Continue reading…

With the end of Monday Night Football on ABC also comes the end of my Yahoo! Fantasy Football league for the season.

My team (The Wombats) went 11-3-0 for the regular season, and while that was a tie with one other team, I went into the playoffs seeded number one due to the fact that I had scored 34 more fantasy points than they did.  It seems a bit odd that they would leave it to points as the first tie breaker, but I’m glad they did since the second place team beat me twice during the season.

Continue reading…

Well, for now.  Even though the union voted to end the strike and go back to work while negotiations continued, there is no guarantee that they won’t strike again at the next negotiation impasse.  In fact, whatever happened yesterday did not address the main sticking point that is being reported as the main cause of the strike.

My commute was not really affected on the strike days.  But there was definitely more people traffic and it was clearly evident on the walk home when I would hit 3rd, 2nd and 1st Avenue.  In fact, I tried to stay on Park Avenue as long as possible because not a lot of people were walking there, and they have nice wide sidewalks with no stores that have sidewalk sections (Lexington is a bitch!).

The biggest advantage of the end of the strike for me will be not having to listen to co-workers complain about their commute.

So I tired all sorts of ways to make the new DVD player work with the old DAV-C700 and produce 5.1 surround sound, but alas, I failed.  So I did the only thing I could do…I bought a new receiver and speakers.

I got a Sony STR-DE598 which is a 6.1 receiver.  I also got a JBL 5.1 speaker set with powered 8” subwoofer.  It took about two hours to set everything up, and to fix it once I realized I wired the left and right speakers incorrectly (oops).  Then for the big test.  Playing a DVD that has a clearly defined 5.1 soundtrack.

For testing, I used the U2 Go Home concert DVD because I knew it had regular stereo, Dolby Digital, and DTS soundtracks, and because I knew you could clearly hear the difference between them.  I put it in the player, set the receiver to DVD input and auto sound (it will figure out the correct coding by the signal input), and hit play.

Continue reading…

So I made it through day #1 of the NYC transit strike.  Since I don’t take mass transit to or from work, it didn’t really affect me that much.  There was definitely more people traffic on the streets, and a lot of them don’t really know how to walk to work.  I mean is it too much to ask for people to walk in straight lines?

Looks like my DVD player is on the fritz.

It started about two months ago.  Whenever I would start to play a DVD, squiggly lines would fill the screen.  They would last about 2 minutes at first, then over time they would last 5 minutes, then 8, then 15, and finally, over the last week, they would just stay around the whole movie.  They are really, really distracting.  Imagine watching the beautiful images of March of the Penguins with blue squiggly lines all over the place.

Continue reading…

I use a program called TreeSize Pro at work to show me how a directory is being used.  It’s really useful when I ask a user to clean up their home drive and they come back and say, “I need everything that’s in there and it’s all work related!”.  After using the program and showing them that 90% of the space is taken up by MP3 and MPEG files, they generally change their tune (no pun intended).

I found a program for my Mac that’s even better.  Disk Inventory X inventories your hard drive and shows you a map that shows you relative file sizes and sort of groups them based on the type and location of the files.  Using it’s map, I was able to clean up about 15GB of unneeded data in about 5 minutes (damn GarageBand loops!).

I’m not sure why, but I really like that Mastercard commercial where Peyton Manning is cheering and asking for autographs of people doing their regular jobs.  I like the part where he stands outside a restaurant and cheers the employees going home, and then is so happy when one of them throws him their apron.

However, my favorite part of the commercial, and they don’t show it every time, is after the Mastercard logo, at the very end of the commercial, Peyton hands a loaf of bread to a supermarket employee and says, “Could you sign this for my little brother”.  Priceless.