Saturday, Nov 17

Today we went to Nymeyer's at Tanglewood to get my daughter some larger riding gloves. This was my first time at the store. The person working at the store asked where my daughter rode. When I said Greenwood Acres, he knew the name of the owner, and the type of gloves we needed. I was impressed. We got some really nice gloves.

Next we went by Petco to get a replacement aquarium light. I’m running a 48" florescent over my saltwater tank. The light is not made to go over the open water, and yesterday it quit working. I expected it would eventually. But what I didn’t expect was that the external ballast was burning hot and smelled bad. I have learned it isn’t safe to install aquarium lights incorrectly.

A replacement light was more than I expected at Petco, so if I figure I’ll try to upgrade to a nicer light by buying somewhere else. Right now I’m trying to get one off Ebay.

We also picked up a FURminator from Petco. The video at the store showed a ridiculous amount of hair being brushed off cats and dogs. I thought that had to be faked, there was no way a comb could be that effective. We got one anyway, and I tried it. Well, we DID get that much hair off. When the hair came off it was electro-statically charged, so it stuck to everything. The cat, me, chairs, walls, whatever. Perhaps a little water mist would help cut that down.

We got the Christmas lights up on the house, as the weather was really good today.

Monday I'm supposed to take delivery of a new Esky Lama V4 rc helicopter. This is my birthday present from my family. I had a hard time finding one. The cheapest stores are actually overseas, and it isn't easy to tell they are not in the U.S. until it comes time to get a shipping quote. The first U.S. place I tried was out of stock. I am trying a dealer on Ebay. According to the tracking code it arrived in Des Moines Friday, but won't get delivered until Monday.

New gadgets

Today I upgraded my DirecTV receiver to an H20 model, along with a dish upgrade. This was supposed to give me 70+ HDTV channels, but I only had the ones I got with my old receiver. After a short time with customer service, I was up and running. Kudos to their customer service on this call.

I also ordered an RC helicopter from hobby-lobby. I got the following e-mail:

You have been sent 0 package(s) via the tracking number(s) is/are . If the number of packages is zero 0 then the item(s) is/are on back order and will be shipped when it is available.

"If the number is zero, it is on backorder?" Come on, can't you go through the effort of an 'if' statement and just tell me it is on back order? It is also rather confusing to read, "tracking number(s) is/are ." Ugh, must have been a very lazy programmer.

Building your own balloon

Because I had someone recently ask me about balloon building, I thought I'd point out the best place for discussion is the balloon-makers mailing list:
Balloon-makers@taleos.com
http://lists.taleos.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/balloon-makers
...now if I could just get my sewing maching working.