I just got this from a Linwood Block Club member. It makes me want to buy a gun but I think I am going to settle for some more high tech things like a tazer. I would have no moral qualms with killing people who attempted to touch my electronics.

FYI, our house near West Ferry was burgled yesterday morning.

Our wonderful neighbor Nick scared them off and called the police, but not before they managed to steal some valuables (laptops, digital camera, couple of old cell phones, some jewellery...). Basically anything with recognizable value they could shove into backpacks.

The two thieves he saw were young black boys, wearing hoodies. They were probably PRE-TEENS. They pried open a back ground floor window using a tire iron, and then crawled inside.

There may have been others, because they pulled out just about every drawer in the house and dumped the contents. And they didn't have long in there. I left around 8:30 and Nick saw them about 10 am. They ran east towards Main Street.

So watch your back windows. Ours had the usual sash lock plus an additional sliding security lock (slides into the path of the window so it won't slide up very far). They applied enough force to break the sash lock out of the sash, popped the stops part way out, and then push the sash off its track around the security slider. I suspect they still only got in because they were so small.

Crazy that they we pre-teens, its just like that avanadalism last week at the Massachusetts avenue project. Do you think adults train these children or they do it on their own accord?

The other day I was at buffalo General again getting my post surgery checkup. My doctors appointment was at 8am and the doctor showed up just around 10am. I was really happy after waking up at 7am for nothing.

The one good thing is that I got these great pics of the city out the windows in the different rooms.

Carlton house looks so out of place on the medical campus. I wonder if they are going to knock it down and build a big building in its footprint.


Downtown Buffalo actually looks bigish.


Here is the whole of downtown


In the back left you can see the windmills on the waterfront.


Here they are up close making power.


I took this one in the direction of my house but all you can see is the roof. In the way back on the right is a city, is it Toronto?


Here is a close up of that corner, what do you think, Toronto?


It is amazing the clarity and distance I can get with my tiny point and shoot nikon s7c. The new s series is even better. I think the s700 is like 12MP point and shoot. Here is a review but it is minus wifi. Mine has wifi for emailing the pics, which I never use so I guess it doesn't matter.

The s600 is a point and shoot 10MP and it is only $236 on amazon right now That is so crazy cheap for something so powerful. I fyou are looking for a digital camera I would grab it. It is one of the ones ashton is promoting, lol. Look they even bought the URL ashtoncoolpix.com

Last night I was talking with (e:hodown) while locked out of my car at Wegman's and she told me that the world was coming to an end and we would be waiting in bread lines soon enough. The indicator was that vine ripened tomatoes were $7.99/lb in NYC. Well my friends BUffalo is in fact way cheap, because check these prices out $1.99 for vine ripened and $3.99 for organic.
Vine ripened


Organic


On a side note, this is the color of golden oak for future reference.

I never drive. Seriously, once a month I drive, if that. Tonight I was feeling especially angry about my lack of sand paper for my sander. I had a project I wanted to work on that required it. I stormed off to the store to buy sandpaper and forgot to write down the type if sander.

I was so angry by the time I got their that I just bought a whole new sander and every flavor of sandpaper to match. I am finally going to finish that fireplace in my office. One thing led to another as it always does at home depot and now I have all the supplies, except for one I surely forgot that will inevitably lead to another trip to home depot.

So I was feeling good about driving and drove to Wegman's too as I wanted more lamb chops and locked the keys in the car, which is what I am solving now, argh. I hate cars.

Wow, no one cares about this besides me prob but finally, after so much criticism and so much time, Apple released Java SE 6 version 1.6 for mac leopard. I have waited so long for this. I used all the betas and the develop preview and someone's hacked version. It is so great to see all the java VMs on the same page now.

So, we went on the private Linwood Home tour for all the people who's homes were on the tour. I am totally amazed at how simple in design my house is compared to the other ones. I mean I still love it and honestly, I don't need 10 bedrooms but still it was amazing to see how the real rich folk lived. I don't understand how they managed with such big houses. I never need more than one dining room.

We also learned so much about our former neighbor and everything makes so much sense now.

We met a lot of cool people and I really got along well with many of them. We saw so many interesting home remodeling projects. I am excited at the possibilities for our house if we put a lot of money into it. Almost all of the people were really nice and it was great to see the dedication that many people had to keeping their houses in order.

I most definately can't stand the guys from the Junior League show house - The Silverthorne Mansion. They are the utmost pretentious people I have ever met. Maybe they are just sick of showing people around their house. Also neither one is a retired Naval officer like the show house pamphlet said. They say the junior league made it up. (e:matthew) says I am jealous, I am really not.

Today we went down to the Erie County Electronics Recycling program at the Central Park Plaza to drop off our old electronics that were slated for the dump.

I had such a crazy junk yard's worth of electronics and computers left from the previous owner of the house. Okay, some of it was my own too. I was able to fill up two industrial size contract bags with electronics such as game controllers for systems retired, ram chips, disk drives, CD drives, DVD drives, wires, CPUs, GPSs (yes plural - I had way too many GPSs) Then we packed the rest of the car with 5 computers and 3 additional mother boards, a DVD player and more general electronic shit.

I think the original total retail value of all parts we recycled was somewhere around $25,000 - which is now worth about $400 if I had meticulously picked through everything and sold the good parts but who has time for that. Iw ould have been a serious endeavour taking months, lots of photography, lots of ebay drama, and lots of time at the post office.

Instead, I put it all on the train to happy recycle land and hope that someone else can enjoy it along the way. It is amazing how much electronics devalue, more than anything else.

This IBM server was insane It was here when we moved in. I think, the guy that lived here before ran a site that had a 3D version of Allentown on it. You could walk through and they sold ads I think. It was called neoworld . There is still alink to it on Allenstreet.com It apparently went the way of the dinosaur.


If you don't believe me that it was old and wrothless, just check out the made in england sticker. Have you ever even seen electronics Made in England?


Unfortunately, the server did not have the horsepower to do anything I needed it for and required too much electricity, used scarce parts and generally weighed about a ton. Needless to say, it was like 1/1,000,000 of the computing power of the tiny, energy efficient 1U rack mount that is currently running estrip.

Here are all the things packed up and ready to go.




We also brought (e:lilho)'s old Sony trinitron monitor. That was the last CRT in my life. It feels weird to not even have one. There were thousands of them there.


At the recycling place, you drive up and your car gets in line. I could not believe how many people there were. We waited over 1/2 hour. It was so ironic to see all the people in fancy SUV's with the engine running for 1/2 hour in order to recycle.

When you get to the end, some giant bulky dudes open the doors and trunk and just offload everything. They couldn't seem to handle the IBM server and really fucked up our car door. I can't even imagine if I was someone who really cared about that kind of shit. There would have been a serious throwdown, in which they would have kicked my ass, lol - these dudes arms were liek the size of my waste. They asked us if we were okay with it. What was I going to say. No kid get your supervisor to sew it back up?


In the end they forgot one giant bag of stuff. We went back, drove around everyone and gave it to some coast guard guy at the end and explained the situation. People were beeping and yelling about us cutting. We did not cut, they forgot shit and fucked up our car.

On a totally separate note, the other day we went to an estate sale. i think I mentioned it. It was so weird to go through all of someone else's stuff. (e:matthew) liked the furniture so much that we ended up spending like $1000 for a living room set after talking them down from $1450. I think that it was worth it because they said, after we left some guy offered $2000.


If you come to the Linwood Home Tour tomorrow you can see it. Our first floor looks so different now.

So I finally decided to offload the pics from my camera and found some from the night I got the appendix out. That afternoon, my stomach started to really hurt - right where my appendix is - I chalked it up to Crohn's as no one ever believe me when I sy my appendix is going to explode.. I started to broom off the porch which made it hurt even more. I decided to sit down.



After many hours of puking - till about 6am I think, I ended up in the ER. I have no idea what time it was when I was sitting here with my mom. Was it at night or in the morning? I think I was having this appendix problem for a lot of hours before anything was done. However, seeing as I had an allergy to delaudid, they put my on benedryl - which put me in space. Wow, I look unhappy at that point.


Even in my almost dead, totally drugged up state , I managed to squeeze in this pic of my mom and I in the emergency room. I seem much happier that my mom was there.

The mayor and city officials announced the formation of the Erie Basin Committee. Buffalo Rising ... On May 24th we're opening the beach for everything but swimming."

I hope that a couple of volley ball nets are added to the budget... and some grills, and a shelter or two in case it rains, and some sightseeing viewfinders, and some bike racks, and some fire pits... looks like Erie Basin Marina is going to be the place to be this summer.

Is this really going to make any difference? I guess if you are a Volleyball enthusiast it would be nice but isn't the point of a beach to have swimming. If you can't have swimming then why bother pretending to have a beach when it is really just a park.

I guess the problem with all the water around the city is that it is too polluted. That is why the beaches that do exist like Wendt and Bennett are closed most of the summer anyways. I remember one day when (e:mike), (e:terry), (e:matthew) and I headed over to Bennett on a not closed day. It was so nice to get to swim near home. (e:paul,31201) Look how crappy my cell pics were back then. I think it was the sidekick 1 and that was before we have comments on the blogs. Its weird to have so many with no comments from 2003-2005.

The most ridiculous medical device I have ever seen is this incentive spirometer that I received at Buffalo General the other day while getting my appendix out. It basically gives you visual feedback by lifting a marble when you breathe deeply.



Who can't just be taught to breathe deeply, not to mention that it creates a stream air which tastes exceptionally vinyl flavored - can that be healthy? I mean I understand why breathing deeply is important to healing faster and clearing the anesthetic from your lungs, but does everyone need one of these really durable plastic toys.

::Download Flash Video::

I got a hold of a preview of the Linwood Home Tour 2008 booklet and the estrip ad looks good on the front page.


At Royallite on Sheridan today, they had a test for energy efficiency and light bulbs. I was amazed at the difference.


Target on the blvd in the Best Buy plaza near the 290 is huge now. They have a whole giant grocery store inside with a lot of products. They also redid the cafe section and even have organic mac and cheese as an option.


Linens and Things has the craziest crap. Check out this beer hammer for those times you need to open a beer and you need a hammer.


Seriously, does anyone need a Nana Saver. Surely, no one needs a nana saver but I bet someone has a fetish for one.


Remember, tomorrow is electronics recycling day at Central Park plaza. I have about a ton of electronics to recycle. Sadly, I cannot lift anything so (e:Terry) had to do it all. I feel bad for him, some of the computer stuff is huge that we inherited from the previous owner.