Panasonic DMP-BD45/65/85 1.43 Update

Well, it appears that the software geniuses over at Panasonic have rolled out a special update for Viera Cast customers just in time for Thanksgiving. If you upgrade the firmware in your DVD player from 1.27 to 1.43, you end up without Netflix. Isn't that great!? Just in time for having a house full of kids! SWEET!

I guess I know where all of the wankers from sprint's ION translation team (..ya know, the ones that used to roll out updates on Thursday nights and leave everyone else with a weekend of nightmares) all must have ended up.

Best News...well..in a long time

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2010/09/13/daily32.html

Open Windows

have allowed distant train horns and other neighborhood sounds and a 58 degree breeze to float through the house lately. This is the dreamy time of year here. Before the sweaters come out and the leaves fall.

CP has mastered two wheels after a week of sustained pedaling. We can no longer keep up with her on foot. She can navigate around picnic tables, crooked paths, and sometimes off into the grass. Brakes are still a bit questionable at times, but it'll come soon enough. For now, we're just enjoying the sight of her blasting down a path with a new smooth form of independence.

Neighbors

I hope that the house across the street sells to a family. Rumor has it that the primary contract guy now is a person who used to live in the house. That's great, but he's looking to put renters in it. We keep hoping for good neighbors like the folks who are selling the house, but it's a bit iffy for the home team right now. Good news is that he's low-balling Bank of America...pretty funny. Bank of America is hard enough to deal with on any house deal, so hopefully BoA will drop him and look at the backups.

203K Lead Based Paint

Our lead based paint inspector was just here and I hope that all turns out well. We've got quite a bit of money tied up in paint and when it passes, we look forward to not carrying that debt. Here's a bit of a rundown.

CP's been out playing a bit today and has been enjoying our NetFlix or RedBox forays during the heat of the day. Pretty much the same thing we did in Tucson except that summer and winter seem to close us in the house here.

Our trip to FL was good, but long. CP and my brother's youngest weren't exactly on their best behavior and we only separated them in the back seat on the way home. We should have done that from the start. They're close in age and I guess that always creates tension after 12 days or so. Of course, CP is asserting herself more now than she did a year ago too.

Best Decision Ever

You gotta leave me now
You gotta go along
You gotta chase a dream
One that’s all your own
Before it slips away

When you’re flying high
Take my heart along
I’ll be the harmony
To every lonely song
But you’ll learn to play

When you’re soaring through the air
I’ll be your solid ground
Take every chance you dare
I’ll still be there
When you come back down

Eight years ago, my best friend came back to me. I had watched her leave because she wouldn't have been the same person if she hadn't. She needed to chase things out west and find what was waiting..calling. On June 1st of 2002 we gathered friends and family under the guise of a dinner to celebrate our engagement, and were married after dinner, inside Union Station.

Dashed Again...

..out into the rain to go to the rental place to get a tiller. Only to have my hopes of FINALLY getting my garden tilled dashed by a downpour or two. Holy crap...I don't know how your supposed to get a garden started around here other than covering your plot with a tarp before every rain.

"Get your own damned tiller", you say? Well, the POS tiller that I left in Tucson because it wouldn't go in the truck (because I was hauling a friend's dirt bike back to the midwest)...it would sell for about $95 around here even in poor shape. It's insane! My dad's got two old tillers in AR that I can have, but I have to wait on him to bring them up here. Sure, I've got a trailer and a hitch on the Subie, but it's got a wicked case of Subaru piston slap right now and I don't really want to drive it any further than I can afford the tow bill (flatbed of course because of the awd). Of course, I could get a hitch for the superJetta, but that's almost $500 right there.....

Just. can't. win.

New to Skype

We finally got our camera set up and are really enjoying Skype. The LW was able to talk to her sister out on the east coast and just today I talked with a good friend of mine and his kids out in CA. It's really something to see the person you're talking to and I can't wait for our Tucson peeps and some others in N. Carolina to get hooked up.

We picked up a Logitech 9000 camera from eBay for a little over $50 and it works fine.

House Paint

This past Saturday the guys from K&L Precision Painting finished up the exterior of the house. It looks great and they really did a nice job with the details. They did well with scheduling too considering that they had to work around the rain and crappy weather that we were having when they started the job. We had to get the lead-based paint covered up as part of our 203K loan deal, so it was a bit more expensive than a regular job, but it was worth every cent. We went with Sherwin Williams paint since there's a store here in G-Town and we picked Weathered Shingle for the body and Roycroft Vellum for the trim. Our brick is roughly the same color as Aurora Brown, so we took a guess and it turned out well. The neighbors love it and are happy to see our old house turning around for the better.

52?

WTH? Where's summer already? It's 50 damned 2 degrees outside....in mid-May! It's already in the mid-90s in T-town and I sure wish that I had some of that here right now...just a little...enough to bring the ground temp up just a hair.

Going to start work on the garden in the MIL's yard soon. It's just strips where the sod cutter went to work now and the clay pan is not letting the water go into the ground. Each bed looks like a flooded road right now; it just descends into standing water at the low end of the garden....sheesh.

4th Birthday

CP's party this weekend was a blast. Auntie V. and the LW put together a wonderful scavenger hunt, and put away a bottle of wine in the planning of it. The kids loved it and having to actually do something at the party and it seemed to go over well with all of them. Before the hunt, they colored their own bags with stencils, so they'd have a place for the stash of goodies. My brother came over, brought the neices, and ran the brats on the grill. We hired MJ, the owner of Sister Act Face Painting to come and entertain the kids with her exceptional art work. I had to get ready and scoot just as the candle was being blown out, so that I could put my camera to use at a friend's wedding. A link from shutterfly will be in the inboxes soon...I hope.

Garage Sailing

CP and I just sailed through a garage sale up north of here. We left $120 behind for good measure, but came home with restaurant plates, cups, and bowls, plastic tumblers and bowls (just right for a birthday party), coffee cups, carafes, plastic and silver pitchers, salt and parmesan shakers, and silver and aluminum platters. Did I mention that there were 110 dinner plates in the set? Yeah....we'll have plenty for the first major friendsandfamily_leaveyour keysinthebowl_latenighter at our house...and we won't have to do dishes before breakfast..SCORE!

$120? you say, well it does seem like a lot for a garage sale, but I came home with a butt/car-load of matched sets of things that will serve us, and our friends (can you say loaner party set?) well for years.

CP was nice while her father piled stuff up. The seller is a fellow gardener and VW bus fan from down south of here; he'll be selling later this summer at the Spring Hill Farmers Market.

TV Cold Turkey

Well, we haven't had a tv since moving into the place, so we've been cold turkey with a small portable DVD player and the web to help us along. CP pretty much commandeered the DVD player, so it's off to the web for the LW and I, but it's been good. Tonight they went to see an IMAX 3D movie about training dragons with Uncle Richard and Eli; a good time was had by all.

I got to stay home and enjoy some quiet time. I heard KPR Presents this afternoon as I moved out of one room and passed the living room where the radio was on. A poet was on the radio and I stopped to listen for a minute and was hooked. It was wonderful. Real, easy, rural stories told by, what I considered to be a master within seconds of hearing him speak. I found out after the program that it was Ted Kooser. He evidently read some of his work at the Oread Hotel over in RockChalkJayhawkville not too long ago and I guess this was a recording of some of it. I was bummed to find that we'd missed it. Sometimes I read poetry without sidenotes and it doesn't really connect me with anything or anyone. Mr. Kooser was discussing his poetry and after hearing his thoughts on it, I felt connected to it; as if the grandmother he speaks about in "Dishwater" was my great grandmother. I can almost hear her shoes on that old wood floor in his poem.

I'm thankful that I don't have a TV because I would have surely missed this. My great grandmother was an amazing person. Raising a houseful of kids as a widow in the depression=tough. She always enjoyed my brother and I being around. She got a kick out of seeing how fast we'd dart in to see whether it was sugar cookies or peanut brittle in the dining room. Good stuff, memories and poetry.

Sprint Treo 700P Picture Mail PMLTPM87

I hope that nobody has to go through what I went through yesterday and today to get their picture mail up and running with sprint. We've had this feature for a while, but never used it. Recently I decided it was time that we learn how. We've changed our plan now and will have web access soon, so now's as good a time as any.

Little did I know that we'd get to spend about 4 hours on the phone with 3 different levels of sprint technical support. At first, we had the option blocked, so I got into a chat with Lapri (maybe from the Phillipines) and unblocked web access so that picture mail would work. I tried several times to get pics sent after that and kept getting nothing, so I decided to dive in and call tech support. I was getting the pmltpm87 error.

The first person I got was Armando in Tulsa. He was a great guy and he worked with me for over an hour, but couldn't get anything going, so he handed me off to Tier 2 support. Right off the bat, Jesse at Tier 2 started hammering away with "have you checked to see if the web works?"...my reply: "whuuhhh?....don't you have a ticket in front of you that you can read?". Yeahhhhh...I can see that this person's going to be boatloads of help. She's going to have me completely nuke/reset the phone as I had done with Armando, but still, I'm game. We start to sync the phone with the desktop and it takes a while since my wife runs lotusnotes. She offers to call me back in 15 minutes and gets off of the phone. 40 minutes later, I call Tier 2 and can't speak with Jesse, so I have to go through all of this again with Alessandra, who is nice, but while we're troubleshooting...you guessed it...the phone I'm using drops the damned call. 20 minutes from the Sprint World Vacant Campus and my phone drops the call while I'm sitting at a desk near a window. Alessandra, who has my number....doesn't call back. I call back and can't talk to Alessandra, so now I have to deal with John. He's a nice chap and works with me until we've exhausted just about everything that you can do to one of these phones and decides to kick this one up the chain to the Tier 3/Engineers. He sets me up with a ticket and MJ calls later to get all of the details right before sending it up the chain. Resolution time estimate 51 hours.

It's Tuesday now. At about 830am I got a call from Sean, who I can only assume was in Tulsa. He's a good guy and he's done his homework on the ticket just like I used to do. He's gone through the ticket to see what we've done already, so I don't have to explain..again...what is going on. We troubleshoot some more and then he went in and completely pulled the phone off of the plan, reinstated it, then had me go into the ##PRI# (web side of the phone) and reset it.

Next thing I know...I'm sending pictures to people. Sean's the man!


Things we tried:

Resets
Battery Pulls
Reprovisioning
Depro/Repro from Tier 2 end
##3282# Update Vision
##3282# Restore
Clear Picture Token
##786# Reset
##Unlock Code# Activate
##PRI#

1st Nap

CP is in her freshly-painted purple bedroom napping for the first time in this old/new house. Her bunk bed seems to suit her fine and soon it will be rigged for its full compliment of three mattresses (top, main, & trundle)

The cable guy was here this morning and hooked up the internet service and the LW is down the street loading up the little things. We still have two dressers, some food things, and a mattress to haul before it rains today, but once that's done, we'll be officially living in G-Town.

It's quiet here when the trains aren't passing by. The hum of my worn out power supply fan is all that I can hear in this house.

Pollen covers everything right now. It was so thick on the windshield this morning that I had to use the wipers to see. I got in the Subie (that was left unlocked with the windows down all night without concern) and shut the door, only to be met with a cloud of pollen inside the car.

Green grass and trees that don't need watering are pretty cool.

Oh, The Horror

There's plenty of crying foul today in light of the latest government push to cover some folks with health care. It seems odd to me though that the party of personal responsibility is also the party of telling women what they can't do with their bodies, and the party of giving my tax money to churches. Oh, and lest I forget, they're the party of bomb-the-shit-out-of-the-wrong country....and get stuck up to our nuts there.

A guy I know spoke today of how this was akin to selling our kids' souls down the rabbit hole. I would argue that they were sold down with the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the placation of oil companies tied to Saudi Arabia, and with the appointment of Alito and Roberts to the supreme court. All of the grand decisions made by the collective genious of the last 10 years of government will haunt the grandchildren of our kids just as we're still cleaning up after the decisions of the "greatest generation" with a war of some sort every 15-20 years.

Buying Foreclosures

If anyone wonders what is wrong with the housing market or why that foreclosure on the block won't go away, just ask someone who is trying to buy one. You'll almost certainly hear about appraisal management companies and scared or completely inept appraisers, lenders who couldn't find their ass with a road map, and heaps of FHA/HUD paperwork. The only bright spot on this scene is our realtor, while just as frustrated as we are at the craziness that it take to buy a vacant house that's not in perfect shape, knew what we were in for and told us what to expect. The advice that I can give someone out there who wants to buy a property that isn't perfect is this: get a realtor who has worked in investment property for a while, expect rotten hang-ups with the deal from "da gubment" or their local sub-par lackeys, and be prepared for a long wait.

Import OPML from Crazedlist

Sheesh, I've got to put this here so I'll always be able to access it.

Select feeds for whatever you want

Copy feed info from top window

Paste into notepad document and type in whatever you want to call it and put .opml on the end

Don't save yet! -> make sure that the document type is "All Files".....not "Text Documents"

Now save it to a folder somewhere so that the files won't get lost

For google reader:

Get into google reader and go to Settings->ReaderSettings
select Import/Export and go to your file

it will import it, but it won't sort it - once you have stuff in there, it will automatically take you to the Manage Settings page (which you can get to later by hitting the link below your feeds)

select the feeds that you want to put into a folder and then go over to the right hand side and hit the Change Folders button ->New Folder

now, the feeds will be in a folder that you can select/deselect

the next file import will dump all of the new stuff in with the old, but just hit the Unassigned link at the top of the Manage Selections page and it will pick out all of the new stuff as long as you import one file batch at a time

For Thunderbird:

Get into Manage Subscriptions
Click Import
Move into folders as needed

Tub & Sink Haul

This morning, after CP's trip to the ill-supervised daycare-kid shove-o-rama at open gym time, we piled in the car and headed out to Lexington Missouri to get a claw-foot tub and high back wall mounted sink. Both items were made around the time that the house ( that we're supposed to be getting) was built and the total for the day was $100 and lunch at Zarda. CP just decided that she "had to go" right before the 7 Hwy exit in Blue Springs and she even twisted her dad's arm to go get some bbq for lunch.

We're pretty excited at the thought of putting them in the house and returning it to a more period look/feel. We looked out on the web and found similar things to our recent craigslist finds going for around $2500. We're still hurdling with the FHA paperwork, but hope to be finished soon. 5 months with the in-laws and counting....

Clay Cups and Chocolate

This morning, my little one brought me a tiny pink Hello Kitty card and a box of Russell Stover dark chocolates. What a way to start the day!

I was looking around yesterday at a local store that's within easy walking distance and found a new hand made coffee cup for my LW and a kid-size drinking cup for CP on the seconds rack. I even got to talk to the potter who made both cups while I was in the store. I had been out around town dropping off some of the recycling pile that has continued to dwindle and rebuild since we've been here with the LW's folks.

It's about 20 degrees out with light snow flurries and even some scattered sunlight. Soon we'll be off to Coldsnow so that I can pick up a pen and another writing book/journal. On the way back, we'll stop in at Aunt Harmony's place for a valentines day shindig to sugar the kid up just a bit.

It's about time to replace the hard bound book that I've been using since 2002 to write down things that I don't want to forget or that I want CP to know about when she grows up. My memory is pretty bad and it's amazing to sit down once and a while and go back to see what I was thinking, or what was happening, on a certain day for several years back. I'd advise anyone with kids to do this - treat it as an open letter to your kid, grandkids, and the great grandkids (grandkids who, due to my age, may not ever meet me). The LW and I are amazed at all of the little things that we forget and we always laugh about certain crazy things that CP was doing at different times.

Almost There....

Well, the house, of course didn't appraise well and screwed us yet again. This time, the appraisal came back with a "fair" condition. Now, we didn't know going into this that most lenders around here won't lend on "fair" condition. It has to be "average" or "good"..which is a nice way of saying, "nothing but new for you, pal!".

So, this left the appraisal company almost $400 richer (simultaneously leaving me $400 poorer) and left us on the hunt for another lender. Our realtor knew a chap that works at a local bank that does all of the underwriting in-house and we're working our way through the 203(k) FHA process now. We still hope to close by the 22nd, but there are a lot of hoops that have to be jumped through before then. We're working on getting a list of work to be done on the house, then....wait for it....another appraiser that's FHA 203(k) certified gets to come through and give us an as-is value and an after fix-up value. After we dump another $400. yayyyyy

I really hope that someone in New York, or Matt Taibbi maybe, can dig through and see how much money in kickbacks that Cuomo gets from the big banks/appraisal management companies.

It's been an interesting learning experience and one that has shown us just what a huge mess this country has on its hands with foreclosures. You just about can't buy the foreclosures that aren't in good shape unless you have 20% down or are willing to deal with the FHA 203(k) process.

No More Naps?

I don't know for certain, but I think we may have landed in no-more-nap land. CP doesn't seem to really want to take a nap in the afternoons anymore and it leaves me both happy that she's moving on and sad that I don't get that breather in the afternoons that I sometimes need in order to get *anything* accomplished while it's light outside. We'll see.

So far, the SAHD thing is working out well here. There's plenty to do still and she is really enjoying the workbooks that we picked up from US Toy. They have everything there to homeschool a kid when you can't find a preschool that's worth a damn.

We should be closing on the house down the street soon. On hold for...wait...for...it...an appraisal. Oh, you can probably guess just how pleased that makes me. Screwed by appraiser bastards in Tucson, and now I have to wait on one here! Either way, we'll be in and blowing money on....uh, I mean fixing things in no time. We went to check on home insurance this week and the guy quoted me $1250 a year. Really. It's bad enough that health insurance has almost doubled for us here because you can't throw a rock without hitting a fat bastard with a cigarette hanging out of his/her/its mouth, but now we find out that our home insurance costs have more than doubled. It's got me clickin' my damned heels.

Playing Catch Up

It seems that things have become a bit sloppy on the writing front, not to mention the house cleaning and general tidyness fronts, so I'll try to bring myself up to speed.

The holidays came and went around here with the anticipated level of craziness. Note to self: next year, buy CP cardboard boxes and dress-up clothes. It was as good to see everyone, as it is to be back to a somewhat normal schedule.

A few illnesses have come and gone. CP and the LW were laid up for a while a few weeks ago, but I sidestepped that bout of what we're now affectionately calling the "winter vomiting disorder"......until yesterday. There was no sidestepping yesterday....just trots.

We went to Science City to break in our new membership. CP loves it and we'll be headed back really soon. I don't think that there's anything in the whole place that she can screw up or break, well, except for the bunny. She really seems to like uncovering the bones over near the dinosaurs and it'll be funny to see what she thinks of the real Hughes 500 helicopter upstairs.

We're almost over all of the hurdles for the house down the street. The inspection's done and we're satisfied that it's a workable place to live. The basement isn't pretty, but the house is 90 years old and affordable. Find me another house down the street from grandparents for $650/mo and I'll kiss your ass and give you $10. Cant' wait for my parents to see the basement cracks and old woodwork - my dad will bitch until he's blue in the face. My brother couldn't believe that I was going to live in a house almost the size of his house for half of his mortgage payment.

The big news recently is that I'm back to doing the SAHD gig. It's really hard to find a preschool, or anything really, that isn't somehow affiliated with some skyfairy or another. We chose to avoid those places and took a shot on a "Montessori" in Olathe that turned out to be "Kindassori"...or "Maybessori"....in my book is was just "Ssori". I walked in one day and CP had been put into a room with 4 or 5 other kids who didn't seem like they were very good communicators. I asked the teacher why CP was separated out while the other 15-20 kids that she'd been playing with were in the other room. I was given various answers, ranging from "xxxx made the list of kids", or "I told your wife when you enrolled...", to "those are the 3.5yr olds", but they all seemed like complete bullshit, so we pulled her. It was tough for me not to tell the manager of the place what I thought of her right then and there.

I've hammered out a week of activities for CP and I to do and tomorrow is a Pump It Up day. She loves the place, but really loves it when Eli and Bananabelle show up like they did on Friday. Today was gymnastics class at Debbie Howard's and dance tonight at Gardner Dance. CP has options for every day, but we can fill in with sight words, puzzles and other things when something falls through. There's more stuff for me to do with her here than there was in T-town. We're working on getting one membership a month to different places. January was Science City, next month will be the Gardner Pool (gotta get in early) or WonderScope, and March will be the Zoo. I've been working on getting into a KCDads group here, but I seem to keep missing the play dates.... Eh...can't do it all.

Oh, and in between all of this, we picked up a Chambers 90C stove for the house. It's a white one like the pastel blue stove on the site. My grandmother has cooked on a 90B since my dad was a kid and it's awesome! The over/under griddle/broiler makes the best cinnamon toast ever.

I think that just about wraps it up