Maybe it’s because I don’t go with my wife to Church on Sunday’s (even though it’s not my religion). Maybe it’s because it’s April. I don’t know. All I know is the past three Sundays have been expensive.

Sunday March 28th.

First my wife gets a flat tire. I’m not with her at the time, I’m buying her a new Bluetooth hands free @ Best Buy. We call AAA, they come out to help fix her tire. They go for the spare – woops, it’s not there! Just Great! Oh wait, all 4 tires need replacing. Luckily Pep Boys is across the street. We have the AAA guy fill the flat so it will last long enough to get to Pep Boys. We get over there and it’s 15 minutes before closing, we have all 4 kids with us and they are hungry. It will take 30-45 min to replace all 4 tires. Here is where the fun really starts.

Just as I’m walking outside to tell my wife to go ahead and get dinner, the mechanic comes out and says “Come with me, I need to show you something”. Great, what now? He takes to my wife’s Sienna and shows me that both her rear and front breaks are gone. Not 1mm, or .5mm; gone, baby, gone.

Final tally: $800+ just for the car.

Sunday April 4th

The day starts out sane. It’s Easter, we head to Church with my wife’s parents, then come home and have Easter dinner. I turned on the dishwasher before we left because I knew we’d need the room later in the day. The day goes just fine. At the end of the day, I go to turn on the dishwasher. I push the usual “Normal Wash” button. Nothing starts. I open and close the dishwasher in case it wasn’t closed properly. No Sale. Still doesn’t start. I try different modes. No go. Great…..

On Monday I call the repair guy who fixed our Washer in the garage a few months back. He comes over tinkers with the dishwasher and says: “It’s the PC Board. It seems to have a crack somewhere in it. It will sometimes start depending on if you have it in the right position. It will cost you $350 to replace it plus installation.” Great….

My wife and I decide to instead buy a new one. Why spend $350 on a broken dishwasher that also needs new baskets which is another $200 ($100/each – are you kidding me?!?!). So we go out and buy a new KitchenAid dishwasher whose baskets will not deteriorate because they are Nylon instead of plastic.

Final Tally: $900+ (add $45 to the Repair guy for coming out)

Sunday April 11th.

I intentionally stayed home to avoid going out and having something break. I figured that if I A) didn’t leave the house and B) didn’t have the in-laws over I should be safe. I thought wrong.

First, my computer has been randomly shutting down for the past week. I thought it was because my infant daughter or someone else keeps accidentally hitting the power button. Well, today It shut down on me without warning. After some research and installing Speed Fan it turns out that the computer is running 2x as hot as it should be. Both the CPU and GPU are showing extremely high levels. I crack open the case just to find that the back fan is not working and the CPU fan seems to be a generic Intel fan that just may not be powerful enough for the Dual Core. Great….

So to add insult to injury, while I’m running Speed Fan and moving some web sites to another ISP in the evening, the internet connection goes down. Here I think it’s Time Warner screwing me again with their crappy service.

Today, Monday the 12th, my wife calls me and tells me that the connection is still having problems and our phone is not working. Since our phone service is through Vonage and requires a “reliable” internet connection she was upset because she couldn’t use the house phone. Luckily, when the line is down, all incoming calls get routed to her cell phone. But now I’m wondering what’s really going on.

When I got home, ate dinner, and put the kids to bed, I finally sat down to see what was going on. I ran through tests on Speedtest.net, PingTest.net, and SpeakEasy speed test. What I found was that I was dropping packets like no tomorrow. Great…

I get into my trusty CMD.exe mode and start doing tracert and ping requests to see what’s going on. Pings come back as high as 3000+ ms and as low as 200ms. What’s interesting is that the tracert first hop, my router is showing 200ms response times. This seems oddly high. I run ping -t against my router and sure enough. It’s the culprit! What the heck?! I’ve restarted both the router and modem three times and no luck, same results. Looks like it’s time to get a new router.

Final Tally:
– Cooling system for computer – TBD
– New router with Vonage support – TBD.

Next Sunday

Not only will I stay home next Sunday, but I may just stay in bed and not touch anything! Sunday’s are costing me too much!!!!!!!

Looks like a few days ago GMail Notifier for Firefox 3.5.3 stopped working in terms of auto login. The author has made a patch available and is still working on the 0.6 edition (release date not yet available).

You can download the patch from here:

http://longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/releases/gmanager0575b2.xpi

Forum where the topic is being discussed:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=332634&start=2475

Marking the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. nuclear meltdown – Los Angeles Times.

Better question is have they cleaned up the area yet? Is it safe for the thousands of people that live in the Chatsworth, Santa Susana, West Hills, and Simi Valley area’s surrounding the site?

Jellyfish.com notified it’s users today via email that they will be shutting down their Smackshopping portal  effective Feb 16th. With the rise in popularity of Swoopo.com looks like Smackshopping has lost it’s appeal. I always wondered how Jellyfish could maintain a user base on anything other than their once a day contests.

Here is the official notice:

Dear SmackShopping User,

Thank you for using SmackShopping and participating in the SmackShopping community over the past few years. Regrettably, we are closing down the site effective February 16, 2009. SmackShows, chats and other interactive SmackShopping services will be discontinued at this point. However, you will be able to redeem any coins you have accrued for 90 days (until May 15, 2009). At the end of 90 days the site will be brought down completely.

Please do not reply to this email, but if you have any questions, please contact us at questions@smackshopping.com.

Sincerely,
SmackShopping Team

“Sometimes you got to get knocked down in order to get knocked up again” -  by Dylan on the state of the U.S. Economy.

So much for a robust telephone (land and cell) infrustructure. 5.8 Earthquake hits, I’m 29 miles West of it at the office and I can’t get through to my family at home. Tried the regular phone line at the office… negative. Tried my cell phone with T-Mobile and no luck. Even tried the company issues Sprint Blackberry… no service.

L.A. Times is reporting that state officials are asking the public to not use the phone so that emergency calls can get through. Typical government statements. Our infrastructure sucks, so don’t use it. When will we fix it? By the next earthquake, maybe, if funds are available, if companies expand their infrastructure by spending lots of money and going into the red, etc. Chances of it happening? – none.

Glad to see that in times of emergency we can rely on our infrustructure to do absolutely nothing for us. Maybe I should go back to CB and HAM radio.

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If you really want to know who I am then there are multiple ways you can get at my information without me having to post it all here. I am active in using web 2.0 sites and trying to develop web sites for my employers and/or myself that are integrated with various web 2.0 services and sites.