My Wet Coast Life

Tick, tick, tick...I open my eyes. As they come into focus, the alarm clock glows a LED numbers at me, 4:28AM. Tick, tick, tick....what the hell was ticking?? As my brain starts to boot up, possibilities of what it is are quickly eliminated until it clicks. I forgot to leave my Swatch Irony watch outside my room. Crap. This watch I have had since it was released in the early '90's and it has one of the loudest movements of any of my watches. You can hear it a room away if it is quiet. I usually leave it in our kitchen or bathroom due to the loud ticking's disruptive nature on sleep. In a quiet room, it can start driving you nuts with the tick, tick, tick to the point it feels like time itself is slowing down. On top of that, there is no real way to silence it. The problem with the watch is Swatch decided to encase the movement completely in stainless steel so the only servicing that can be done is to change the battery or polish the plastic-like crystal to smooth out any scratches. Waking up early to this ticking did not help my internal clock as it now clicked in my brain I was awake so I should get up. D'oh!

With nothing really exciting happening so far this weekend such as saving the universe from alien invaders or winning the lottery. I feel like some random topics with some useful and useless knowledge thrown in. This way you can say you've learned something new this weekend based on the mundane stuff that did happen so far to me indirectly educating you by reading this article. Hopefully you do learn something, no matter how trivial it may be. Also, because it is the weekend, I've also decided to combine the 2 days worth of posts into 1. Why would I do that? I was caught up making a Lego 4X4 house that can be driven around. It was awesome.

Follow up:

So let's kick it off with the Swatch Irony series. This is a neat concept from Swatch where they encase the movement in solid stainless steel. This reduces points for moisture, a major enemy to a watch's movement, to get in. The major drawback to this design is if this watch breaks, there is very little that can be done to fix it. Most people would just throw it away and buy another Swatch watch as they are inexpensive compared to potential repair costs. They also cost a lot less than other higher end brands that would warrant repair over replacement. But that comes down to perspective on what is expensive and what do you need it for. I own a watch that is over $1000 and love it and plan to create a family heirloom to be passed down. There are people with watches in the multiple thousands to hundreds of thousands range. But at the other end of the scale is the person that is content with the $10 mall watch booth watch. That is fine, in the end, they all tell time. But you get what you pay for and the $10 ones tend to not last as long or be as durable. They also tend to be made of a base metal which I react to allergically. Some people are shocked when they found out my watch was so much but once I show them why it is worth the extra $$$, most tend to see the it can be worth the investment compared to how many you will replace over a lifetime. The next one I have eyed is a couple thousand dollars. TO me it is worth it and I will get it when the time is right.

The high end watches are works of art to some, including me. If you have ever seen a Tourbillon movement or a skeleton movement, you may think the same and willing to spend the money. Look at it from this perspective, a watch is machine which runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and can run for decades or centuries if properly taken care of. What other device do you know that can last that long with so little maintenance? Pretty impressive for such a small device if you ask me. Like people do for cars, cigars, whiskys and wines, people collect watches. They treasure them, showcase them, wear them, pass them down through the family. Now this takes me back to my Swatch. This watch has survived thick and thin and been all over the world with me. It survived when I got hit by a car in Africa. It has gone hiking, cliff jumping, surfing, downhill biking and so much more and still survived any bails I put my body through. I've replaced the strap twice and the second time switching from a leather strap to metal strap. Other than the every year or two battery replacement, this watch has had no issues and coming up to 20 years. I hope to pass it on to my son with the rest of my collection.

Since being laid off, I have yet to be able to sleep in. Now one thing that may possibly be contributing is my body has, easiest way to explain it, some oddities. Or maybe superhuman powers...muha, ha, ha, ha...ok, fine. Oddities it is. This could be natural, the fact I am a twin, maybe caused by one of the various injuries I have put my body through or just a strange occurrence, I don't know. These include my body acting like a human barometer and able to detect the weather and predict it based on the pain location and severity. Lower back pain is rain; middle of the back is wind; between the shoulder blades is snow. Heavy rain makes the knees go and hands swell and within 30 minutes of rain or snow fall, my hands will appear as if I just dunked them in water and start pruning. My weather predictions I would say are correct about 9 out of 10 times. Crappy thing is the body notification system doesn't understand sleep and living on the wet coast, this tends to be at least one cause for my minimal sleep. At least this "feature" has proving beneficial sometimes when going out and the weatherman says it will be one thing and my body saying something different and being right.

I also have the ability to generate a lot of heat as well as not be bothered by high temperatures. I can get it to the point I can place my hand on a surface and you can see the steam vapors forming and the outline of my hand after I remove it. Yup, I am odd. Only reason I can come up with is my lack of insulation (i can turn sideways and disappear) and my veins being close to the surface. This allows me to put off more heat and keep cooler in hotter temperatures. But I am not a scientist so it is only a guess. I could easily be wrong. Another oddity I have and may play into hearing the watch's loud ticks is I tend to hear certain audio frequencies others do not. Now whether this is damage caused from too much loud music back in the day or as my wife puts it, "the male gene of selective hearing", I am unsure. I like my music, I like it loud and able to feel the bass and get the feeling of being right where the artist was playing. My home sound system can attest to this and if I could, I would have it loud all the time. Unfortunately, my wife thinks otherwise. If I go outside, I can hear the electrical hum of the transformers and at one point, we had a mouse in our house. We got the electronic devices to deter them humanely. It got to the point I had to unplug them as the noise they were producing was giving me a headache yet no one else in my house or who visited could hear it. Maybe with my time off, I can look into these oddities further as I assume there are others out there that deal with the same effects and may have solutions for reducing it other than moving to a warm, dry place. Yet again, I wouldn't say no to moving to a warmer climate.

As for this weekend, I decided to put a halt to the job hunting and focus on finishing my website and hanging out with the family. My wife decided to try and get some Christmas shopping in and my son and I decided to hang back and play some Lego instead. This year, my son understands Christmas more and is looking forward to opening his gifts. What he doesn't fully understand is the waiting aspect. But yet again, he is only 3, so patience and waiting skills are still being developed. When my wife got home, my son didn't realize that those presents are not for today and he has to wait. He was not happy with this. So to make up for it, my wife and son went back out to allow my son to get something for me. I wasn't gonna say no to that. The problem is a 3 year old cannot keep a secret to good nor can they contain a surprise. Within 5 minutes of them returning, my wife went down stairs to grab some of the Christmas decorations. My son took this opportunity to come up to me and whisper "Psstt...dad. You like dinosaurs?". I replied "Yes, of course I do". My son replied "Well that's too bad cause mom and I got you a radio controlled ORANGE MONSTER TRUCK! VROOOM! Now don't tell mom, okay?" and walks away. Trying to contain my laughter, I tried to explain to him what a surprise is and what it means to keep a secret but he quickly replied "But now that you know what you are getting, it is not a surprise and that means we can open it now and play with it." The kid has a point.

So to distract him from the gifts, we got out the the multiple boxes housing the temporary Christmas interior extreme make over amenities. Time to transform the house and x-mas-fy it. First task was to find all the lights and see if they work. Luckily all the light still worked and none were tangled. Win. I pulled out our fake tree and spent the next 20 minutes pulling apart each branch and trying to "fluff it up" mean while getting a question a minute of "What's this?", "What does this do?", "Why are we putting that up?". After making it through question period and finishing the tree assembly, the end result wasn't too bad. My son decided to participate at this point instead of question everything, and help with putting up the decorations. The nice thing about his size is he was able to get under the tree, like a mechanics goes under a car, and hook the ornaments up. He was also able to easily get behind the tree to the less accessible spots. A handy little helper he is.

We were able to get the lights finished and about 80% of the ornaments up before running out of hangers for the ornaments. We are also out of paper clips so we cannot make new ones. We decided to put a hold on the decorations at that point until we get more paper clips. My son and I flipped back to some Lego construction. Hopefully, we will finish the decorating today.

Now one thing that has ticked me off, and would fit under the "what grinds my gears" category occurred in the last couple days is with Microsoft and Xbox Live. We recently signed up for Netflix. All I can say is if you like documentaries, older movies or have kids, $7.99 a month is well worth what you can access. Netflix gives you the ability to either stream it over your PC or connect it to a Wii, Playstation 3 or Xbox 360. Now for us, we own a Wii and Xbox 360. Drawback is my modem and router are downstairs and Wii and 360 are upstairs. Luckily, the Wii comes with a built-in WiFi so it wasn't hard setting that up.

But as for my Xbox 360, I have put off connecting it to the internet to get Xbox Live for a while now purely because the amount of time I play the 360 didn't warrant the cost of spending $60-$90 for the wireless adapter and another $60 year just to play online. I have PC games that do not cost me to play online and am content with that for now in regards to online play. It would be nice to have Xbox Live Gold but not a necessity of life for me. Because I rent, I didn't want to fish a bunch of CAT-5 cable through the house and drill holes in the wall knowing it will need to be undone if and when we move. This option would probably end up costing a similar amount to the wireless adapter so I would be better off just buying the adapter and being done with it. An alternate option was bridging the wifi and network card on my laptop but that makes for an expensive, power wasting connection, so once again, not really feasible. I could have gotten a Powerline style adapter like D-Link's but cost is now same or more than the 360 adapter. So our options were laptop or Wii to use Netflix in our living room at no additional charge. I'm okay with that for now...

But wait, I am a tech and there is the interweb full of useful and useless information. Someone must have posted a solution to this that will not cost me anything but time. After a bit of researching, I found out I can hack the firmware of one of my wireless routers and turn it into a wireless bridge using DD-WRT. This will allow me to setup the hacked router in my living room and it will connect via wifi to the router downstairs. This will both boost my wifi range and strength in the house and give me 4 Ethernet ports in my living room and will require no cables or drilling as well. The 360 comes with an Ethernet port so problem solved. After about 1 hour in all for hacking the firmware on the router and configuring the 360, I was now on Xbox Live. They give you a Xbox Live Silver account which allows you to download demos and videos but it doesn't allow online gaming. I was okay with that for now. For being a green noob on Xbox Live, they offered me 1 month of Xbox Live Gold for free. Sure, free is good and no credit card required. This way I did not need to add a reminder to contact them to cancel before the time is up as it can be a very arduous task for some. Calling them appears only viable option.

Now that my gold account is active, I went on to install Netflix and proceeded to start watching. No issues so far and watching Netflix was for the most part OK. I did find I lost connectivity to Netflix often using the 360 where as I could always connect via Wii or Laptop. Well, my one month expired for Xbox Live Gold on Thursday but could care less. I've played a bit of online games but other than that, so no need to go out and get a 1 year subscription. I am unemployed now and don't need an extra expense until I gain employment again. I decided to go and see what documentaries were available on my 360 only to find out I cannot access Netflix without having a Xbox Live Gold account. WTF Microsoft?? Are you that cheap that you cannot offer that as a free service like Wii and Playstation does? You kindly allow me to access your pay-to-play Zune network and download large game demos but do you allow your end users to stream Netflix for free? Hell no. I went to the Netflix site and there is was, to view Netlfix on a 360 a Xbox Live Gold account is required. I never noticed as I already had my gold account setup before installing Netflix. Well Microsoft, this is just another reason why I am in the process of moving away from anything Microsoft makes and going open source. I am already paying for internet and Netflix, why not offer it as an accommodation to your customers like Wii and Playstation? But I guess that is where the internet is going, gotta charge for everything and Microsoft wants to be at the forefront, leading that charge. Other guess is they route it through the Live servers so Gold account is required to compensate the increased bandwidth Live servers are seeing where as Wii and PS3 may direct connect to Netflix avoiding that extra hop. But just a guess and not gonna bother looking into it at this point in time.

Even this week, talk on the net about possible additional charges included Comcast charging a fee to a internet Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider due to Netflix. Level 3 Communications, a CDN central partner with Netflix, accused Comcast of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage. This was based on a Level 3 Communications press release. Comcast's blog responded explaining what Level 3 is trying to do and why there was charges, which makes sense from Comcast's point of view. I can only assume this is a start to an ugly battle over who pays for the internet. This could easily lead to possibly higher internet fees to end users until the internet backbones can accommodate this additional traffic in streaming services and figure out who is paying who for what. I guess now could be a cost saving time to call your ISP and see if you can lock into a price for the next year or two assuming in the end, all ISP's will raise the price for the recent increase in HD quality streaming media.

Well, enough for now, it appears I have rambled and my son wants to go build a super, mega, off road, fire fighting monster truck...

With Monday approaching and my first full week of unemployment upon me, I leave you with this quote, which is just one of many motivations to me finding a new job.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

- Calvin Coolidge