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You may have seen in the news lately, that a doctor was killed up near Lion’s Head.  According to the article here, he was found along an isolated road in Bruce County.  What they failed to mention that it is near my parents place, about 2 - 3 miles away from their house.  I believe it is the first murder to happen in that area, which is classified as a “quiet, isolated rural area”.  It seems rather shocking to hear about that so close to home.

Here is a direct Kristin quote regarding a recipe she is making tonight.  “It will be interesting to see what it tastes like when we actually follow the directions.”  I will post the update once we have actually eaten it.

Just as an update, it actually did taste better when the directions were followed. It isn’t likely a behaviour Kristin will keep, but it is interesting to see these things happen every once in a while.

It’s been a while since I posted something to my blog, so here is a bunch of updates.

• Kristin’s father Ken has been in the hospital a couple times in the past week, due to bad medication interactions.  He had a rapid heartbeat, and they needed to slow it down, once by stopping his heart, and restarting it with the paddles, and the other time with just drugs.  He is ok now, now that they have the medications sorted out, but I think he is going to miss the cute nurses he was flirting with in the hospital.  But I would recommend that if you are going to have heart trouble, the St. Mary’s Hospital in Kitchener, and Southlake Hospital in Newmarket were quite good.
• As Kristin mentioned earlier, I bought yet another Xbox 360 for the kitchen to use as a media center extender.  I found the user experience on the xbmc to be a bit trying.  It didn’t have a working resume for dvr-ms files, so if I stop watching a show part way in, I could not start off where I stopped previously.  This was somewhat annoying.  Also, I could not get a 30 second skip to work with dvr-ms files, which made commercial skipping difficult.  So I demoted the hacked xbox to the basement, and replaced it with the cheapest xbox 360 bundle I could get my hands on.  It was funny at futureshop to explain to the salesperson that I was buying an xbox and wasn’t going to play games with it.  He was quite perplexed even after I explained the media center concept to him. 
• Friday at work we have a potluck lunch, and played some Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.  It is a fun game, but I need lots of practice.  I seem to not have a lot of co-ordination to hit buttons with my left hand to keep up to some of the songs being played.  Brenda was able to kick my a$$ a couple times when we played, but it was cool to try to play One on easy.
• Yesterday (Dec 22nd) we were to visit family in Lucknow for Christmas.  It was a pretty good time, with lots of food, and too many sweets to handle.  Some of the highlights of the day were playing some games with family members, and catching up with them.
• Kristin and I exchanged our Christmas gifts last night due to our holiday schedule.  Since we were supposed to be busy tonight, and are leaving tomorrow, we opened them early.  I got a leather jacket, which Kristin got in size extra galoot and we went to exchange it today.  After looking around, we got a different style jacket, which we both thought looks better.  Also, she got me a Ryobi tool set, which came with 9 different tools and two 18V batteries.  Now that she got the tools, I suspect there will be a honey-do list coming shortly thereafter.
• Tomorrow Kristin and I head up to Lion’s Head to have Christmas morning with my family, before heading back to Cambridge to have Christmas dinner with Kristin’s family.  After Christmas day is over, I won’t want to see turkey for at least a few days if not longer.

Recently, I foolishly decided to update my media center pc to vista.  The good news is that it works well now, the bad news is it took me a while to get there.  I stared off by upgrading my original media center pc to vista.  It was not officially supported by dell, however the vista readiness evaluator provided by dell indicated that it was acceptable aside from the video card.  Since I do not use the pc for actual tv watching, I considered that acceptable.

The upgrade went pretty well, I was able to install the new os, get media center setup pretty easily and connect the extenders to it and tell it which recordings I was interested in.  It was only when I went to watch tv via an extender that I started to run into problems.  The responsiveness of the remote was quite slow, and skipping commercials seemed to have a long lag between the button press, and the actual commercial skip.  I fired up the performance monitor on the pc sitting in the basement, and determined that the cpu would spike every time the commercial skip button was pressed.  After googling for such an event, and talking to Pete, the suggestion was that I set flow control to on and cap my network speed at 100 full duplex.  Unfortunately changing these settings didn’t seem to make a difference and I was still in the bad books with Kristin for f’n with the TV.

Anyways, after a week of fruitless debugging / performance testing I was unable to get the pc to respond in a timely fashion.  So the solution to the problem was to swap my 2.66 Ghz pc with my 3.2 Ghz Duo Core desktop PC and use it as the media center pc which was actually supported by Dell to run vista.  It is much more responsive, and works quite well so far but seems to be a bit of overkill for recording and streaming TV.  However, commercial removal and burning tv shows to DVD seem to work quite fast now!

You may know that Kristin isn’t one to take the best care of her car.  She has taken it down a snowmobile trail, rarely changes the oil without me bugging her for a couple months, and has had it in two accidents in the past year.  The area of concern for me at least these days is that her tires are getting worn down, and she should have a new set.  Recently, I asked her how her car handles in the rain.  Her reply was a bit concerning, since it was something like “I refuse to answer, based upon the fact that you won’t want to hear it.”  This makes me think it may be a good time for new tires for her car (since they are the same ones she has had for the past 5 years).  Being the good fiancee that I am, I have priced out a nice set of Nokian WR tires for her car at a decent price (120 per tire).  However, she isn’t really willing to spend the money on the tires, claiming she could buy at least 5 pairs of boots for that price, and she is quite willing to leave her existing tires on the car, or try to find a pair of cheap used ones somewhere.  Her justification is that she is only going to keep the car for another 2 - 3 years then sell it, potentially to one of her nieces.  However, if she is going to sell the car to her nieces, it would be a good idea to give them a safe set of tires.

I have looked on facebook, and ebay so far, and I have not found anything in her tire size, but I would feel more comfortable getting her a good set of tires, especially the way she drives (yes I am aware I am going to catch hell for this comment).

Anyway, if anyone has a decent used set of in the size 195/70R/14, please let me know.  Otherwise, I will keep bugging her to spend the cash on a good set of tires which will last her the rest of the life of the car, and hopefully for one of her nieces.

I’ve been using Microsoft Money for a while now to keep track of where I spend money.  Lately, I have been having issues with importing data from my PC Financial Mastercard account, where only a subset of transactions would import correctly.  Since it works fine with my other accounts, I posed the question to PC Financial why it would’t work, using their online tool.  Below is the interaction I have had with them so far.

My inquiry:

status: INQUIRY ACCEPTED

category: Statement Inquiry

priority: moderate

date of inquiry: 22/10/2007

date submitted: 10/22/2007 08:44:12 PM

your message:
 export to ms money 2006 does not work correctly. Only a subset of transactions are imported for each month. Any ideas why?

Their Response:

CUSTOMER SERVICE: 10/24/2007 07:02 AM

Thank you for inquiry, Please refer to the Microsoft website for technical help with your downloads, at http://support.microsoft.com/. You may need to disable any pop-up blockers. You should also clear the temporary internet files/cache and history. If you are still experiencing issues with your download please contact your computer manufacturer or internet technical support. Please feel free to contact us anytime you have questions or concerns. Sincerely, <name of support rep removed> President’s Choice Financial MasterCard

Also, the ticket has been closed, so I can’t even follow up on the issue with them to explain their miss-understanding of my question.  I have since opened a new request referencing the old request, hoping that instead of getting the stock answer above, I will get someone to answer the question intelligently.

This spring, once the snow melted off the deck I built last summer, I noticed something disturbing.  The stain which I painstakingly applied last summer was peeling like a mufo.  I contacted the stain manufacture cabot stains and asked what would be happening and how to fix it.  They sent me a survey, and asked from some tape pulls.  It took me a while to fill in the survey, mainly because it got lost under a bunch of papers on my desk.

Once I found the survey, and started to fill it out, I was even more disturbed when the tape pull pulled off a 6 inch strip of stain.  I send the survey and the samples off to Cabot in the middle of July.  I finally heard back from them mid September after many phone calls and voice mails.  They claimed it wasn’t the fault of their stain, the wood wasn’t prepared correctly even though I followed their directions.  However, they valued my business and decided to give me a bunch of free stain which I have yet to receive.

With the summer running out, I decided to start fix up the deck this weekend.  I spent part of Saturday washing down the deck as per their instructions to remove the old stain.  I was quite surprised when have the stain on the deck peeled off, leaving a hell of a mess.  Sunday, I had to smooth out all the spots to remove any of the dead wood fibers.  Since it was quite a bit, I didn’t relish the thought of doing it by hand, and I didn’t think the finishing sander I have was up for the task.  I ended up renting a large deck sander from Home Depot for the afternoon to clean it up.  There was stain left on the deck where it stuck properly and I was told to just rough it up a bit and I could stain over.

It took a while, but the sander did a pretty good job of smoothing out the spots.  Sunday night, I applied the first coat of stain just before dark, using the left over stain from last year.  Tonight, I didn’t think I had enough to do a second coat, so I picked up another gallon of the SPF-48 stain at a local store.  They said, they had quite a few problems with the stain, and it not one of their recommended ones.  They did say thought that the Cabot Australian Timber Oil was an excellent oil based stain.  Unfortunately at this point, I was stuck with the SPF48 stain that I had already used last year.  At the moment, the deck looks good, and hopefully the stain will last.  If not, I may have to sand the entire thing down again.

This past weekend was Diana Martin’s and Andy Clipsham’s wedding in Barrie.  The weekend started off on Friday night with a dinner at the charcoal steak house, paid for a gift certificate given for my trip to New York. Free steak never tasted so good.  However, it was during that dinner that I remembered that my suit pants didn’t fit so well at a wedding the weekend prior.  A steak dinner wasn’t going to help that situation.  It was too late Friday evening to go looking for a new pair of dress pants, so we put it off to the next morning.

The next morning, we were on a bit of tight schedule, I had to find new pants, we wanted to go to the Yorkdale mall and Ikea on our way to Barrie.  We of course had to get to the hotel before the wedding, and get changed and be waiting for the shuttle at 3:20 for a 4:00 wedding.  At 9:30 we walk into the Moores store at Bridgeport and Weber, my suit in hand.  We asked if there was any way we could match the suit jacket to a new pair of dress pants.  However, since the suit is pin striped, there was no way to easily match it.  Instead, I got a new black suit which fit better.  However, I was a bit of a dumbass, and forgot to pack my tie, and my dress shirt and I ended up getting a new shirt and tie.  Moores had excellent service, and they had the pants hemmed and the suit ready to go in about a half hour, which rocked.  I am planning on sending them a gift basket to show my appreciation.  I would highly recommend them, even if you aren’t in a hurry.

Next we were off to Yorkdale mall for some quick shopping.  Have I stated before, that with Kristin, there is no such thing as quick shopping?  She likes to hit all her favourite stores while she was there.  Unfortunately, when it comes to shopping, if I don’t have a purpose in mind (or a handy electronics store or home depot), I end up getting impatient and end up walking aimlessly from one store to another.  Unfortunately, since our safety margin of time was running out, we had to skip Ikea on the way up the Barrie.

We ended up getting to Barrie on time, got checked into our room at 2:30 and changed into our dress clothes.  Kristin looked awesome as usual, and I was wearing a suit that clearly looked like it came off the rack. The wedding was well done, and I had a good time.  I caught up with quite a few university friends at the wedding, and believe it or not I even danced.  It was good to see Andy and Diana as well.  It had been a while since they moved to San Jose over a year ago, and I do a horrible job at keeping in touch.

At the wedding, there were a few ideas that we plan on stealing.  The first idea was shuttle bus back and forth from the hotels, so people don’t have to drive.  The other one was to have it all in one location, so people do not have to wait between the wedding, dinner and reception.  Also, Diana and Andy left a gift bag at the hotel with water (for hangovers), some candy, gum and kleenex.  We thought that was a nice touch, and plan on shamelessly stealing the idea.

The Sunday afterwards, we had some time to kill in Barrie, since we had a BBQ to attend at 4:00 in Alliston.  We decided to make up for missing Ikea on Saturday, and drove back down to the Ikea in Vaughn and the Vaughn Mills mall.  I spent some time in the Bass Pro shop, looking at some of the hunting stuff, while Kristin wandered the mall.  After she was done in the mall, we went to Ikea to return a coffee table that Kristin picked up a few weeks prior, which was damaged.  We picked up a few things there, and headed back up to Alliston to the bbq.  There we met up with quite a few of Kristin’s high school friends.  To Kristin’s delight, a lot of babies were there, which should satisfy her maternal instincts for a while (hopefully).  Otherwise, I may have to re-iterate the point that I have a large head!

We ended up making it home after a very long and exhausting weekend at 10:00 pm on Sunday night.

For those of you interest in the Kristin’s car saga, she arrived home last night safely.  The car “seems” to be ok so far, but we still need to get it checked out by a mechanic.  Maybe all the off-roading got rid of some of those pesky rattles.  That is a step above her current fix, which is she turns up the radio to block it out.

As stated in my previous post, I was in Ottawa until later last night.  I got home at 10:00 to an empty house.  Kristin was going to a friends cottage up north, and had left from a company golf tournament in Newmarket around 5:00.  I did a few things around the house, until I got tired at 11:30.  I planned to head home to my parents to visit them and bring mom her new computer.  That’s right, my mother is entering the Internet era.  However, this plan changed this morning at 6:30, when Kristin called home.  I had just gotten back into bed after getting a glass of water, when the phone ran.  I looked at the call display and saw it was G Warden and it was a 705 number.  I was about to ignore it, when I remembered that Kristin’s friend’s last name is Warden.  I answered the phone, and heard an unfamiliar voice say “Hi Honey”.  Kristin is sick, and is slowly losing her voice, and I didn’t recognize it over the phone. 

Since it was 6:30 in the morning, and I know Kristin likes her sleep (sleeping is where she is a Viking) I knew something was wrong.  She said that she took the cavalier off-roading last night, and the first thing that popped into my head was that everyone got drunk and decided to go bombing around in the Cavalier.

Fortunately, that was not the case, Kristin got a bit lost last night, and took the car down a snowmobile trail.  Since her navigation skills are not so great, I believed her.  During her adventure, the car managed to bottom out quite a few times, and managed to get caught over a washed out culvert.  Apparently, they had to unload the car to get off the culvert.  When I heard this, I had visions of all kinds of vital components under the car having holes punched in them, such as the oil pan, transmission, brake lines etc.  One of the guys up there checked out the car later this morning, and said it seemed to be ok, the brakes work, the oil light is not on etc.  However, I am waiting for a phone call tomorrow from Kristin saying she is stranded on the side of the road with a seized engine, or her transmission in pieces.  She plans on leaving early tomorrow, to make sure she is driving back during daylight hours in case there is an issue with the car.

Needless to say, I am going to make sure she gets the car checked out when she makes it back.