Author: rbcp

For a lot of this year I’ve had trouble deciding if I should move or not. My primary reason for wanting to move is the thefts. Two bikes, a smashed car window, and my car stereo missing since I’ve lived here. That’s a lot of thefts for just under 2 years. This is a nice neighborhood and I love this apartment. It’s perfect, it has central air, and it’s really cheap. I like pretty much everything about it. The neighborhood is nice and quiet. The neighbors across the street are old and nice and bring me stuff. Warren and the others next door are insane, but they’re not bad neighbors. They’re not loud and I don’t really have any problems with them. This is assuming that Warren isn’t responsible for my thefts, of course.

Warren used to have a lot of people coming and going at all hours. He’s clearly a drug user. His father and sister (who both live over there) seem okay though. All kinds of his friends used to park next to my car and I bet one of them looked in and saw my car stereo, so they smashed my window one night. I’m sure I wrote about all this back when it happened. Warren is definitely a suspect in the thefts. But who knows, maybe it’s just completely random.

The thing that bugs me about the most recent bike theft is that I had the gate padlocked and the bike locked to the bike rack. They cut the padlock and the bike lock. Someone is walking around the neighborhood with bolt cutters. Or it could just be the people that Warren had visiting for the week prior to that. Them and their vans disappeared after that happened. That’s a pretty bold move, chopping locks off of things. How long before they decide to break into my house?

If I move, I’ll definitely pay more rent. This place is really cheap and is technically 3 bedrooms. Everything else I find that will work is $600 – $900. So at the very least, I’d pay an extra $100/month to move. But probably more than that. My reasoning for staying is this – I could instead blow an extra $100/month on beefing up security around here.

I have a pretty good alarm system that I installed, I think last year. It will call my cell phone if the alarm is tripped. It’s only hooked to the back door, but I could put it on the front too if I wanted to. Its wireless sensors are crappy, so I have to use the wired sensors. But it works perfectly with the wired sensors. I also put motion sensor security lights outside. I upgraded them last week since the old cheap ones weren’t being very reliable. I also installed a plug inside on the opposite side of the security lights that only turns on when motion is detected and the lights turn on. I bought a toddler toy from Goodwill the other day that I’m going to plug into it. So whenever the lights are tripped, I’m going to be asked questions about the alphabet for about 60 seconds before it turns itself off. I really love this part of my home security. It’s so weird and ghetto. I bet nobody else in the world has something like this.

Yesterday at Home Depot I picked up a security camera that I’m going to aim into the patio area. Eventually I’d like to get another one and aim it at the car. Today I checked online and found some kick ass security camera software for $29.00. It emails and/or text messages you pictures when it senses motion. Plus you can log in and check it remotely. I’m really gonna love that. I also bought a hotel-like door lock for the back door and window security bolts for all the windows in the house.

I know it seems like I’m being way too paranoid about breakins. But this all seems way cheaper than moving. And it makes me feel a lot better about leaving the house, considering that last theft. Plus it’s fun to do all this. I’m gonna get the camera mounted maybe tomorrow. I’m going to stick it out for a while longer here and see how it works out. Maybe I’ll put a decoy bike out there once I get the camera up, just to see if someone takes it. I don’t even know where else in Albany to move. What if I move to another area and things are even worse?

Oh, another thing about Warren. The past two weeks they’ve stopped locking their gates when they used to keep it locked 24/7. And they’ve got 3 or 4 bikes back there, none of them locked up. Why don’t these bike thieves ever go over there? They did used to have things stolen – people were actually going over the fence to steal things from them. But Warren told me that it was someone he knew stealing from him and he put an end to it. Which is another reason to think that Warren or his friends are responsible for all this.

Saw Superbad on Friday and loved it. Went with Angela, her daugher, and her daughter’s boyfriend. Saturday I worked a lot during the day. Didn’t do much in the evening either, but went on a walk to Taco Bell for supper after dark. On the way back noticed a spotlight in the sky, so I followed it and ended up in downtown Albany. There was live music by an okay band. Apparently there was some kind of fair thing going on all weekend that I didn’t know about.

Picked up some things at Home Depot and spent Sunday installing them. A shelf on top of the shower, a new door latch for the back door and some window security locks. Fifty feet of cat5 cable, stapled along a wall, puts wired internet in the dining room now for the kids’ computers. I had some old USB wireless thing in there before and it was annoying. Oh, and bought a giant closet for Payton’s room which took almost two hours to put together. I love putting furniture together.

Drove to Salem to visit Home Depot and Target. What should have been 20 minutes there ended up being 90 minutes because of a major traffic jam. And then at the end of it, there was no payoff! No car wreck, no semi with vegetables spilled all over the highway, no collapsed bridge, NOTHING. It was such a letdown for that long of a wait. It didn’t seem like 90 minutes to me since I was listening to the Mysterious Universe podcast. Thank God I had my Ipod with me.

Today I worked all day. Emily stayed home, chatting on the internet and playing games all day. This evening I got all my tax stuff together for an appointment tomorrow. Now I’m chatting with Spessa. And writing an entry. Then I’ll click Publish and probably go to bed.

Spessa & family left this afternoon. I don’t think I can possibly express what an insanely good time we’ve had this past week. I can’t even remember what I’ve written about in here so far. But yesterday was a TON of UFO insanity which I’ll be sure to post pictures of eventually. The sky was lit up with multiple colors flying all over the place. It was nuts. Drank too much champagne last night, then prank called hotels until 2am. Walked to downtown and the park with all the kids during the day. They were having some kind of giant basketball tournament which covered several downtown blocks. Had snowcones there, lunch at the hospital.

We drove to Salem yesterday to return some stuff at Lowes. I bought some new security lights there since the motion sensor on my old ones aren’t very reliable. Mr. Spessa spent about 15 minutes riding a handicap cart all over the parking lot and we put PLA stickers all over it. Installed the security lights when we got home – this time I rigged it so that when the lights turn on outside, it also activates a plug inside the house. I can plug anything I want into it, such as a radio or just something to beep and alert me that someone is out there. Oh yeah, my bike was stolen again last week. They actually cut the lock this time!

This evening I’ve been cleaning up the house. Every time I walk through the house I’m exclaiming things like “Goddamn!” and “Holy fucking shit!” My house is so trashed. More trashed than I’ve ever seen it. Garbage is piled into several boxes and bags in the kitchen and on the patio. Stuff is just everywhere. Dishes are everywhere. My office and room are a wreck and so are the kids’ rooms. Balloons, legos, DVDs, papers, sheesh. I did laundry this evening, so at least that’s done. Did some dishes but there are still a lot to do. I’m not saying the Spessas are messy, but having an extra half-dozen people in the house, coupled with me ignoring a lot of housework in favor of just hanging out with them all, sure took its toll on this place.

I skipped Defcon in Vegas this weekend, only to drive to Reno tomorrow. Should be about a 10 hour drive, I think. I wrote in my LJ on Friday that I was packing for Nevada, just to see if it would cause any confusion as to whether or not I was going to Defcon. Murd0c called me on Saturday to let me know that it worked, listing a few people that had been asking him where I was. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to see MARK TWAIN STUFF in Reno. I’m not sure what else is there.

Back in 1992, a friend introduced me to The Jerky Boys. About a year later, The Jerky Boys released their first album. Then they released a bunch of other albums that I don’t care too much for. And the head Jerky Boy does the voice of Mort Goldman on Family Guy. The Jerky Boys were on MTV, had a movie made based around their calls, a video of pranks, a book, and probably a lot of other junk I don’t know about. Their first album was an inspiration to prank callers everywhere, myself included. So I feel sort of cool that the official Jerky Boys Myspace requested me as a friend on my Myspace. Not the PLA Myspace, but mine. So sure, it’s all to promote himself and his new album. But still kind of cool.

My friend Angela and I went to the Stand By Me Celebration in Brownsville, Oregon today. It was about a 30 minute drive from Albany. In the mid 80’s, the movie Stand By Me was filmed in Brownsville. I have no idea why since all of Stephen King’s stories usually take place in Maine. But it was. I’m not a huge fan of the movie and I don’t think I’ve ever read the Stephen King story that it was based off of. I saw the movie once or twice in the 80’s and that was it. But it seemed like it might be fun, so we went.

Brownsville was a nice little town. I think we enjoyed visiting all the shops and museums there more than the actual Stand By Me stuff. The town was packed with people and there was Stand By Me stuff everywhere. Everywhere you looked they were selling Stand By Me memorabilia. There was even Stand By Me water.

We wandered around for a few hours, reading all the things about the movie. Brownsville is really small and I’m sure that movie is the biggest thing that will ever happen there. It seems like even when they’re not having a Stand By Me festival, there’s a lot of Stand By Me stuff everywhere. It was fun to learn about the movie, even if neither of us could remember a whole lot about it. We had lunch inside a bar and grill that was in the movie. There were old cars all over the streets and 50’s music blaring. A few of the cars were the ones used in the movie.

At some point, I got the idea of telling people that we’d seen River Phoenix there, who was one of the 4 stars of the movie. He died in 1993. Then the plan evolved into me wearing a CAST badge and claiming to anyone that asked that I was River Phoenix. So we started looking around for paper to make a fake cast badge. There were other cast members at the event and quite a few that had badges that said EXTRA on them. In the pie eating scene, they used people from the town to be extras. We purchased a Brownsville, Oregon button that would hold my badge on and found some paper that I could draw a badge on. Then Angela suggested that I just go ask for a real badge.

The badges were in clear plastic and looked pretty nice and there was a booth for cast members and extras to get them for free. I could easily claim I was an extra and they wouldn’t know. I chickened out at first, but then went back and asked for a CAST badge. I was going to tell the old man there that I was River Phoenix if he asked, just to see what he’d say. And if he noticed that I wasn’t, I planned to tell him that I was an extra in the pie eating contest. If you’ve never seen the pie eating contest scene, you really should watch it:

Oddly enough, though, the old man didn’t ask who I was in the movie. He just believed that I was a cast member. He was friendly and chatty enough, but he didn’t ask me. I wasn’t expecting an actual Cast badge. This ruled! I said thank you, put it on and quickly walked away.

We didn’t stay for much longer after I received my badge, but I did manage to have a little fun with it. While inside an antique shop, the elderly lady working there noticed my Cast badge and asked who I was. I told her I was River Phoenix, one of the four boys in the movie. Her face lit up and she says, “Ohhh!” She actually seemed a little star struck. We said a few words to each other and I shook her hand, then we left. It’s hilarious to think that she might tell everyone that River Phoenix was in her shop. And that if she finds out that he’s dead, she might think I was a ghost or something.

We were on our way back to the car after that, but stopped to get sno cones. A group of teenage girls were working at the sno cone stand and the one making my sno cone asked who I was. I told her River Phoenix. She pauses, smiles, and says that I’m her hero! I’m being looked at by all these girls and one of them tells an older lady in the back that River Phoenix is buying a sno cone from them. I think I heard one of them mention that he was dead. I knew that my ruse was up then, so I blurt out something along the lines of, “JUST KIDDING!”

They all had a good laugh about it though. I told them that I was actually just an extra in the crowd and I don’t know why they gave me a Cast badge. The girl giving me my sno cone made a big deal about it, saying she wasn’t going to let me buy anything from her. Then she told me that she’d spit in my sno cone and a few other random things. All just kidding around, of course. Geez, I hope she was. I tipped a dollar and we left. Being a star for 20 minutes was fun. It’s probably good that we left before I ended up getting punched in the face.

Reading all the Stand By Me stuff on their website earlier this morning made me decide to download the movie and watch it, since I hadn’t seen it in 20 years. So we got back home and watched it. If we’d stayed there any longer, we could have watched it outdoors AND we could have watched them have a real pie eating contest. But that would mean hanging around there for another 5 or 6 hours, which was just a bit too much Brownsville, Oregon than I wanted.

It was cool to see the movie after visiting all the sites. We recognized every other thing in the movie. We didn’t realize that the interior of the bar was in the movie, so we were able to see about where we our table was. Actually I think the movie camera was in our table’s spot. The bar looked exactly the same in the movie as it did today. More or less. And we recognized cars and other parts of town. It was cool. I have a new appreciation for that movie. But I doubt I’ll ever watch it again.

Click here to view the pictures from today. They’re not the greatest pictures ever, but the Brownsville museum had the coolest collection of old lineman’s tools I’ve ever seen and I got a lot of pictures of those. Plus my cool CAST badge is in there.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention – it was a little creepy how nice everyone in the town was. I mean, it’s nice that people are friendly. I’m just not used to it. Like we’re walking down the sidewalk and some guy with a couple of kids says, “Hi! Welcome to Brownsville!” And a few other people in museums have random conversations with us. I’m just way too anti-social for that kind of interaction. I just checked the population of Brownsville and it looks like it’s under 2,000. So they probably notice who all the out of towners are. For such a tiny population, though, they sure have a nice downtown area.

Woke up around 8am today at the hotel. Walked across the street for breakfast at McDonalds and then called a cab to take us to the train station. Rode the train bus back to Albany and I’ve done pretty much nothing but listen to podcasts and unpack all day. Speaking of podcasts, Nate and Di are back! They did a short show and it was great. I’m really happy that they’re going to start doing shows again. Listened to more than 4 hours of the Mediocre Show and then an episode of Twisted Pickle. I didn’t listen to any podcasts while I was away so I’m really behind on them all.

Also picked up the mail and stopped by the store for bread and milk. The plants are all alive. I thought 3 weeks without water would kill them, but they look fine aside from a little brown on them. My deadbolt was unlatched and my alarm was turned off. I was thinking the landlord may have stopped by, but the gate was padlocked so they couldn’t have come in the back door. Maybe I just forgot to lock the deadbolt. I can’t explain the alarm, though. There’s no way I forgot to set the alarm. Maybe my shitty Radio Shack alarm system just turns itself off after a few weeks. I really need to spend some money on a real alarm system. Maybe the power went out and reset it. But it’s got a battery backup. Argh, I dunno.

Reorganized office stuff to accommodate some new stuff I brought back with me. Had to adjust shelves to make things fit. I can’t wait for my boxes to arrive in the mail, since I mailed all kinds of good stuff back to myself. My factory car stereo is one thing that’s on its way that’ll be nice to have back. Plus a lot of the kids’ toys that probably cost more to mail than they’re actually worth.

I need to buy a cheap cassette deck. I brought back all these cassette tapes that I want to transfer to mp3 and throw away.

A few months ago I discovered a comic strip called xkcd. Their web page describes it as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. It’s immediately become my favorite comic strip ever. Better than The Far Side, better than Dilbert, and better than Calvin and Hobbes. I’ve viewed every single comic strip on their page at least twice. I’ve never liked a comic as much as this one. Here are a few random comics from their site. Hopefully they’ll let me hotlink:

And this image makes a great desktop wallpaper. Everyone go visit xkcd.com right now and view every one of their comics. Then buy their shirts and posters and anything else they’re selling. New comics come out occasionally but don’t seem to be on any kind of a schedule.

I’m on some kind of conference right now with altalp, iball, trevelyn, ethermine and I think phish phreak and maybe a few other people. I can barely understand anyone.

Took my dad’s truck to storage today. My intent for this trip is to donate tons of stuff to the Salvation Army instead of dealing with Craigslist. I already sold all the really valuable stuff and the Salvation Army gives me a receipt for everything I donate, which is good for a giant tax writeoff. I took about 1.5 truck loads. The first load used just about every cubic foot of the truck bed and camper shell. It was packed. The Salvation Army people seemed annoyed that I was giving them extra work to do. Last time they were so thrilled at the stuff I was bringing them. This time I felt like a nuisance.

I gave them a microwave, printer/scanner, rocking chair, toy box, overhead projector, 2 VCRs, a dual cassette deck, boom box, trash cans, probably 4 full boxes of clothes, stuffed animals, a 2-drawer dresser, about 10 – 15 board games (good stuff like Perfection, Clue, checkers, Monopoly, etc), kid bed sheets and quilts, pillows, sleeping bags, my roller blades, the kids roller skates (they wouldn’t fit anymore anyway), 2 radio control 4×4 trucks, 2 sleds, 2 large boxes of hot wheel tracks, a 6 foot ladder, doll house, tons and tons of books.

Aw man, I gave away so many books that I didn’t want to. I’d forgotten what a kickass collection of hacker books I had. I had all these books on the history of the phone companies, 2 or 3 on Kevin Mitnick, another on the Masters of Deception, tons of Unix security books and general programming, probably 50 issues of 2600, and lots of others that I just can’t remember. Lots of other hacker books, though. Oddly enough, I kept all my bank robbery books and donated my hacker books. What does that say about my future? HRRMMMMMMM. Plus tons of kids books. I mean lots and lots of kids books. Stuff I read to the kids from when they were 1 until just a couple of years ago. And it sucks to get rid of those since we have so few in the house in Oregon. At least we get to the library a lot, though. Two or three of the Harry Potter books, lots of comedy books. So many books. Oh yeah, dozens of home improvement books. I had books on all kinds of cool woodworking and remodeling projects. And just general stuff like plumbing and electrical. I’d say a total of 5 large boxes of books. Spessa would be disappointed in me.

Throwing out all my old shirts was slightly less disappointing, but still sucked. I had a lot of weird shirts and a lot of hacker shirts. Defcon, Rubicon, Phreaknic, and even a couple PLA shirts got donated. The original YOU WILL PLA shirt got donated. As in, the very first one from 1996, from the first batch of 6 that were ever printed. I would have kept it and sold it on phonelosers.org, but it was looking pretty terrible. It was white and had pit stains. I was glad to get rid of a lot of those clothes, though. I had way too many shirts. My old closet in my Alton house was too big. Plus I got rid of a lot of clothing that a cousin gave me for Payton that didn’t fit him yet. Clothes that had no wear on them at all.

Later in the evening, the kids and I all went to storage again. I had them sort through a few boxes of stuffed animals and toys. I told them they needed to get rid of most of them and they did a great job with that. We ended up filling 3 large totes full of toys and bringing one back home to take back to Oregon. So I’ve already got a bunch of new stuff to donate on my next trip to Salvation Army. Plus I filled up a suitcase of stuff that I wanted to bring back. Mostly office supplies, picture frames, and some CDs. I’m bringing back my original factory car stereo for my Focus since the one I got for 50 cents at a garage sale is starting to malfunction. I’m probably going to mail a box or two, then bring back the rest in suitcases that I’ll buy from Salvation Army, just like we did during Christmas. I just hope the cab in Portland can fit all our suitcases.

I know I probably said this back in a December entry, but it feels great to get rid of all this stuff. Just to eliminate all this clutter from my life. 20+ years of collecting useless shit and finally being able to rid myself of it. It’s like that old man I met at the Eugene flea market who was selling all the baseball cards and baseball memorabilia that he’d been collecting since he was a boy. He said he wasn’t doing it for the money, but he just had no use for it all and wanted all the crap out of his house. It sucks to lose those cool hacker books, my giant phone collection, and all my electronics and wires. But if I didn’t get rid of it now, I’d just be selling it all at a flea market 30 years from now. I just wish I could have given it to somebody who would want it. Plenty of people on the forums would have loved all that stuff. It’s too bad I didn’t give it all away when I could. My goal from now on is to not accumulate tons of useless shit.

We’re having a good time in Illinois so far. Yesterday we went to the City Museum. I hated myself for forgetting my book. I did a lot of wandering around by myself and a lot of playing games on my cell phone. After the 20th or so visit, I’m really bored with that place. But the kids still have a great time there.

Man, I love my new Dell laptop. It’s so nice to have everything on a laptop that actually works. My old laptop was slow (it was a 1999 or 2000 model that I’d been using since 1999 or 2000) and the battery never worked right. It’s so great having a laptop with everything I own on it. And being able to use it for hours at a time without plugging it in is so new to me. I’ve even got a spare battery for it, so it can go for about 6 hours. It just rules. I hope this one lasts for years.

Worked, drove to Corvallis and wandered around downtown for three hours, got Payton a birthday present, got a couple books from The Book Bin (Mark Twain’s Roughing It and his autobiography), ate at some potato chip deli, got a prepaid cell phone at Fred Meyer for the kids to use (only $14.99, plus a minimum of $40/year to keep it running), went to the Amtrak station and picked up some tickets, hung out at home the rest of the night.

Played that STUPID Desktop Tower Defense game for several hours while I watched movies. I’d say that game has wasted at least a full 24 hours of my life by now. I want to kill murd0c for introducing me to it. Worked on the book a lot, though. And walked to the store for milk. That was my day.

On Monday, the company that owns my apartment dropped off a dehumidifier for me. It’s a nice LG model with a digital display and all kinds of features and options on it. Our hope is that sucking the moisture out of the air will eliminate the occasional giant splotches of mold that occasionally show up in the bedrooms.

I immediately turned it on and let it run all day. I set it at it’s lowest setting, which was 35% humidity. The highest setting is 75%. It ran continuously all day, and after 8 hours I dumped the water out of it. It was about 1.5 gallons of water. That’s a lot of water to be sucking out of the air! The next day it ran all day again, and I dumped another 1.5 gallons into the sink. Yesterday it ran all day and I dumped another 1.5 gallons.

I’ve never used a dehumidifier before, but the amount of water it’s sucking up seems insane. The guy who suggested getting it said it had a large water container in it and I’d probably only have to empty it every few weeks. If I ran it all night too (I don’t because it’s loud) I’m sure it would completely fill the water container inside of it every day.

I’ve been told by a couple people now that my apartment feels damp, kind of like a basement. Probably because my floors are all concrete, instead of being raised off the ground or having a basement like a normal house.

Is 1.5 gallons of water a day normal for a dehumidifier? Anybody know? Anyone know what setting I should have it on? Is 35% too low? I’m hoping it’ll start to slow down after another day or two. It can’t keep sucking more than a gallon of water out of the air forever, can it? What’s bad is that we haven’t had much rain in weeks now. Hardly any at all. So is it going to get even worse once it starts raining nonstop like it usually does?

In other news, the kids and I had a fun week in Idaho. We saw Evan Almighty, went to the lake for a day and did a lot of other random things. And I got a new laptop! After 7 years of using the same old HP, I finally got an upgrade. It’s an Dell Inspiron E1505. It’s got an 80 gig hard drive, 512 megs of RAM, built in wireless, a DVD burner, and two 1.73GHz processors. It came with Ubuntu installed on it but I added Windows XP to it so now it dual boots. I’m waiting about another year to start using Vista since it sucks right now.

It’ll be so nice to have a laptop that I can take out of the house. The battery on my old one kept dying so it doesn’t last more than a couple minutes on the battery. This one lasts about 4 hours on the battery, plus I’ve got a spare battery for it. So 8 hours of laptop for me with no plugging in!