guapacha.com

When I first came to the US I opened accounts with NetBank, Inc, an online-only bank that had great checking and savings rates. I’ve been with them ever since though this year I opened an account with a local bank just to make deposits and withdrawals easier and cheaper. Recently I got a letter from ING saying that they my accounts with NetBank were being moved to them, and I figured that it was a takeover/buyout. But doing a little research today I discovered that they actually went bankrupt in October and all the insured funds were taken over by ING. There were $109M of uninsured funds for which the FDIC were paying out 50%; for once I am glad I don’t have $100k in the bank. ING look pretty good (love the orange) but I might move what paltry funds I have somewhere else anyway.

Last weekend I developed a spot on my leg which turned into a boil/abscess of some kind. The position is such that its painful to sit, stand and you damn well better not touch it. Some hot compresses had failed to relieve the pressure but had turned it into a bloody mess so today Teri persuaded me to go to the ER. Now I hate doctors but I figured that I clearly needed antibiotics and best to start sooner rather than later.

A very nice blonde doctor (or physician of some kind) did her best to make the draining as painless as possible but I won’t pretend that it didn’t hurt like a sonofabitch. And the water she used for irrigating the wound was very cold and kept running down my bum which was actually kind of nice in a perverse way.

Afterwards I had to wait 20 minutes for my discharge papers, spent the time exchanging jokes some off-roaders who were there for a torn hand. Then some more came in, all laughing about their injuries as well: I hadn’t realised that the ER was such a fun place to hang out.

I have to go back tomorrow to get the result of the blood culture (MSRA anyone?) and have them inspect the pads they put in the abscess. It is not going to be fun – they taped gauze over the wound with a lot of tape. I have quite hairy legs, even the lady doctor said they “will have fun getting this off”.

at your annual Company meeting, two employees are chosen to sing a karaoke We’re Not Gonna Take It and Dee Snider comes out from nowhere and takes the stage with them.

Now I didn’t know the guy was still alive!

And seeing him all glam’ed out, I’m still not sure.

er, because I never mentioned it.

• I had a great time in Alaska, on land and at sea (I did post pics to my flickr account though)
• I got a vasectomy (no pics of that!!)
• I got promoted at work (though only to the grade that I should have been hired in at)
• My US citizenship interview has been rescheduled for 11/26 (anyone know the name of the President??)
• My mandolin arrived and has been tuned and awaiting my fingers on it’s strings (ok, I did blog this elsewhere)

For reasons that matter not, I had to capture some Hi8 video this week using my Macbook Pro, rather than the PC that I have dedicated to such things. I hooked the Hi8 cam to my digital converter box (the excellent Datavideo DAC-100) and then firewire’d it to the Mac. The plan was to capture using iMovie and then create a DVD image in iDVD, neither of which I had used before.

When the DAC-100 can’t convert the analog signal (due to noise or whatever) it doesn’t send anything to the computer which is usually no big deal but iMovie absolutely did not like this: it seems that periods of silence on the wire are taken to mean the camera has disconnected. So it would keep stopping, and occasionally tell me that the camera wasn’t even connected any more. I tried different things for a couple of days and was about to give up when I discovered….. Vidi.

Not only is Vidi free, but it totally works like a capture program should. Silence on the wire? Ok, nothing gets put in the DV file. Need to chunk the output in 2Gb files? No problem! Some tapes that iMovie just wouldn’t capture for more than a few minutes were an absolute breeze using Vidi. I hit record on the Mac, play on the cam and 2 hrs later I had 26Gb of gorgeous converted video. I encourage you to check it out.

Well, almost. So I had emailed Amazon to ask why my Leopard shipment hadn’t been picked up by UPS. They responded saying that they didn’t know why the tracker was wrong because UPS had picked it up and it was on it’s way, and they promised to follow up.

Tuesday night, the tracker still shows the order waiting to be picked up but Teri confirmed that a package from Amazon had actually arrived so all was good. However, last night I got an email from Amazon saying that they regretted that the package appeared to be lost and they want to know if I want an immediate refund or a rush re-shipment of my order.

So…… morally bankrupt Paul says ooh, get a refund and enjoy a free copy, but I will of course do the right thing and tell them I did get my stuff after all.

This weekend both my Macs, and my Macbook from work, will be crazy busy making DVDs for da side biz so I probably won’t get around to doing any installs until next week.

Update: Amazon tells me that the tracker is wrong, according to their mole at UPS, the item is right now out on the truck for delivery.

My copy of Leopard is supposed to arrive today but according to UPS they haven’t even picked it up yet, they have only received notice that there is a package to deliver. Maybe it is in the mail and their tracking system is hosed so I’ll wait until tomorrow to ask them wtf is going on.

Oh, my mandolin arrived last night but it will be Friday before I get to see it.

Talking of Macs, here’s a good deal on a 24″ iMac 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 1GB RAM for $1300. Wish I had some money to replace the Mac Mini.

• During the Cedar Fire 4 years ago we got a day of smoky air, brown and smelly but so far we’ve had none of that with these fires, which seems kind of odd. Maybe with the winds shifted it will come out way? Not that I am complaining if it does not.
• Wednesday night we got a flat tyre (on the Camry) on the outskirts of Westmorland and while waiting for AAA we could see what looked like a huge flare up in the fires over the mountains to the west. We looked 10 minutes later and it was gone. Very odd.
• Not being a smoker I don’t understand the addiction but it beats me how with all the bad air in San Diego during the week I saw plenty of people still lighting up. Yeah, we’re being told the air is unhealthy (or unhealthful as ABC news was saying), full of smoke, but a ciggy still hits the spot.

I’m still in San Diego though will leave for home in a short while, my office has now been closed for the rest of the week. It’s somewhat surreal to be part of this disaster and at the same time not to be. Other than a smoky coloured haze and some light ash falling from the sky you would not know that there are/were fires just a few miles away. I’ve read complaints of difficulty breathing but I’ve noticed no such symptom here. Even walking around the zoo yesterday, I felt nothing.

Was at Montgomery Field yesterday hoping to see the City helicopter at work but it was absent. While there, a convoy of military police humvees arrived and organised into missions. Many of them rookies, I think, as they had to be reminded to not leave their guns in the vehicles when they went to the latrine.

Still no fire-fighting birds in the air and that is amazing. Three San Diego congressmen had to spend hours on the phone with the head of CalFire to persuade him to allow military helicopters to help. Wtf?! Why isn’t the guy asking for everyone with a Cessna and a bucket to take to the sky (ok, slight exaggeration)? News 8’s special investigator says it is because there are private contractor buddies who CalFire wants to do the aerial drops – there are profits to be made, even when people are losing their homes. Unbelievable.

Introducing a new site in the guapacha.com family – thewailingcat.us. This site will document my journey from mandolin noob to Grand Ole Opry headliner (my objections to country music notwithstanding). I’ll post my progress, throw in a few samples of my, er, playing, gonna be huge.