The Fun Dumpster

Chronicle

TrailLeadr — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:35:55 GMT

Who saw this movie?
Being too cheap to go to the movies we watched at home on one of the "on demand" channels.

I have to say I guess I was expecting more from this movie. It didn't really disappoint, but I just wasn't sure what all to expect either. I guess I know the ultimate outcome, after all it was kind of inevitable.

Daycare murders

TrailLeadr — Sun, 20 May 2012 12:14:14 GMT

Peter, whatever happened with Kim De Gelder? Does Belgium have a death sentence?
I remember it hitting national news, but never heard any more about whether he was institutionalized or is serving time in prison...etc.

McDonalds is serving gold

TrailLeadr — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:32:52 GMT

I know most of you probably can't really relate, since you probably don't frequent the golden arches all that often. Having a child, it's sometimes seems like a requirement to stop at Mickey D's on occasion. I've noticed over the last few years that they're getting exceptionally stingy with the nugget sauce.

By comparison I stopped by Toxic Hell (Taco Bell) today and asked for a little of each sauce and they gave me about 10 of each. If you went to McD's and asked for a little of each you'd probably get 1 of each or maybe 2 of each, and they'd probably be reluctant to even give that.

My son loves to have his nuggets swimming in sauce. My daughter did too when she was younger. I've actually been told that they would have to charge me for extra sauce if I needed more than 4 of the same kind. Really?! You can't spare the sauce, is it really that expensive? I'm betting I could go on Alibaba.com and find some 3rd world supplier who would gladly make the pouches for $1.00 per 3 dozen.

Oh, look at that. a 3 second search turned up this:
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/28...our_Sauce.html
You negotiate on price, but I'm sure it's negligible when you get right down to the "per piece cost".

They put a Dollar menu in place and then raise the price.
They don't even offer a dollar menu at all McD's. I found this out at a highway reststop. The burger usually cost $1.00, it was $3.65. I know rest stops are usually more expensive (captive audience and all.) but this wasn't even subtle.
They have self serve ketchup. It's unlimited, but their nugget sauce is apparently on short supply.

Anyway, I have nothing more to say on this. Just wanted to complain about the ridiculousness of how stingy they are with something so cheap. I guess what really gets me is that the employees actually look at you and make faces like you're being greedy.

you kids and your fancy Vid'ja cards

TrailLeadr — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:38:54 GMT

OK Jamie, so here's the thing. I finally have a decent computer that will perform well (I think) for years to come.
I have a 6 core AMD Phenom II 1045T(bottom rung 6 core phenom II) and my main board has 4gb and supports up to 32gb, plus it supports ATI Crossfire.
So I currently have plenty of room to upgrade if needed.

The only thing holding it back now is the video card.
Right now I have a cheapie Radeon card with 1gb mem. It performs ok, but I really want to get a couple crossfire compatible radeons.
I'm looking at ATI 5750 HD. It's both crossfire ready and eyefinity ready, and offer excellent bang for the buck. (Should I ever have someone give me wall of monitors, it would be damn cool to just plug them all in and immerse myself in video goodness.)

On average I'm seeing the 5750 for about $100 each, and I'm impatient, I want crossfire straight away. Not get one, wait a month get another.....

New Egg has 5750's for about $63 each I think, but they're open box. Reviews on this card are hit or miss due to noisy or unreliable fans. I can replace a fan easy enough. I'm wondering if you think it's worth the trouble to save about $37 each card.

My concern is that these open box cards might be the RMA'ed cards that other customer's had trouble with. I don't have an issue with a box that got crushed as long as they stand behind the product, but I don't want someone else's problem card.

What'cha think?

Curb appeal take 2

Cableguy — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:27:05 GMT

So last year I left off with the garden. I just filled it back in with all the construction waste, shitty soil and topped it off with red wood chips.
Through wifely pressures obviously this was an issue to be resolved ASAP
So after yanking 1 yard of garbage out and and getting a yard of triple mix (the truck wasn't happy about that) several trips to the POE, Lowes and garden store (yea me)

Sore arms and back, but it's getting there now annuals go on sale this week. I'll fill in the blank spots and flower pots.

Carroll Shelby is no more

Davandy — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:20:05 GMT

Carroll Hall Shelby, the Texan who created the famous Shelby Cobra and uncounted other high-performance machines that turned the auto world on its ear, and made it a whole lot more fun for 50 years, died in Dallas Thursday night at age 89. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia.

Shelby, who affected the aw-shucks demeanor of the chicken farmer he once was, said, "I never made a damn dime until I started doing what I wanted."

What he wanted was, if you will, power for the people, automotively speaking.

"I love horsepower," he said more than once.

Beyond just his efforts in the small world of hot-rodding, Shelby influenced how Detroit automakers thought about high-performance, and he proved that hard work and bit of guile can make a hero.

But to achieve that, he had to jump from chicken-raising � his fowl all died of a disease one year � and into full-time auto racing, which he'd been doing on the side, in the 1950s. He was a success � at first continuing to wear the work overalls that he did as a farmer � and parlayed that reputation into a foothold as a car builder.

The litany of significant cars he created is long, running from the original 1962 AC Cobra � small British sports car with a big (for the times) Ford engine � through a sojourn at Chrysler and a stint with GM via a failed Oldsmobile-powered car, back to Ford. He was involved with development of Ford's GT 500 Mustang, the 2013 version of which is certified as the most-powerful regular-production car in the world.

His love affair put him into the orbit of industry giants of the time, as he more and more successfully showed car companies that powerful engines in lightweight cars was a viable and roadworthy combination on which he and they could make a lot of money.

He became good friends with Lee Iacocca who was president at Ford Motor when Shelby began as a car builder. The relationship continue when Iacocca moved to Chrysler.

Iacocca serendipitously happened upon on a small dinner in a Los Angeles restaurant some years back, intended as an intimate schmooze between Shelby and a journalist. Iacocca plopped down at the table and he and Shelby started telling stories.

Among them, how the two began their relationship.

Iacocca said Shelby was pestering him for money to build the original Cobra, and was so persistent that "I finally gave him the money to get him out of my office."

Much later, in 2010, Shelby was facing two challenging phenomena: Mortality, and the changing nature of the go-fast auto business. At the time, he was taking 25 pills a day, tooling around in a motorized wheelchair and talking about passing the torch at Shelby American, the company he set up to build small numbers of exciting cars, as well as parts.

He noted that extracting the most performance from an engine had become an exercise in computer programming, not tinkering. "I don't have the power to fight all the problems that I used to anymore," he said at the time.

"I've had a good run. I've built a lot of things that work and a lot of things that didn't work." He estimates that of the 165 car projects he tried over his lifetime, seven or eight turned a profit. Big enough, it seems, to keep the enterprise rolling.

His was a bold approach to car crafting that was too in-your-face for mainline car companies to conjure in-house. They let him come up with wild machines under their sponsorship, then refined them into cars the automakers could sell as high-performance halos.

Along the way he came up with a recipe for a mean bowl of chili, sufficiently infamous to spark an annual beat-this chili cookoff in Texas, and later even ventured into fashion timepieces.

He began his car building with subterfuge. Hoping to give the impression he was producing a lot of the original 1962 Cobras, he kept repainting the two he had built so car magazines would show them in a variety of colors.

And he had to fend off another giant, his eventual friend Robert E. Petersen, founder of Motor Trend and Hot Rod magazines, for the affections of a woman.

Petersen saw himself as merely taking advantage of an opportunity. Shelby recalled it as a work of infamy: "He'd tell her, 'You don't want to go around with a chicken farmer. And he'll lose (races), anyway'."

Rumors began circulating about a health problem when the affable auto man failed to appear as scheduled at the New York auto show in early April to promote his latest creations, the 950-horsepower Shelby 1000 and the 1,100-hp Shelby 1000 S/C.

Shelby published an update on his Facebook page in late April to say, in the vein of Mark Twain's "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," that he had been hospitalized for pneumonia, but was "resting comfortably with family and working on getting better."

kickstarter

TrailLeadr — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:26:04 GMT

So, I'm seeing a lot about kickstarter these days. I think we should start a fund to get Peter and his family out of Belgium and over to Canada. Think anyone would support it?

Weird or What?

Cableguy — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:58:57 GMT

Conspiracy theorists unite!

Another new note from Canada

tbplus10 — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:45:43 GMT

New Canadian $20 Bill Too Provocative for Some

If there was ever a need to confirm how badly U.S. currency needs a makeover, this is it. Our neighbors to the north just introduced a new $20 bill in Ottawa, and the redesign has garnered a bit of controversy.

The bill features Queen Elizabeth II, who is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee this year, on the front of the note. The back pays tribute to the sacrifices of Canadian men and women in military conflicts with an image of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. (Watch the Bank of Canada's video introducing the new bill and the significance of Vimy here.)

However, some people have called elements of the bill "pornographic," while others have noted a resemblance to the Twin Towers that used to stand in lower Manhattan.

The main reason for issuing a new $20 is to prevent counterfeiting threats, said the bank. The new polymer notes are also cheaper and have a smaller environmental footprint. (An image of the back of the $20 note is below.)

Images of 9/11?

The bank hired a research firm to hold focus groups with Canadians to get their opinion on the new currency. They found that not only did most Canadians not know of the Vimy Memorial's existence, but that some of those surveyed said the monument reminded them of New York's World Trade Center that was attacked and destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, according to an internal report cited in a CTV article.

The memorial, in Vimy, France, commemorates the Battle of Vimy Ridge and honors those who fought and died in the WWI in France and have no known grave. One focus group respondent was critical of the banknote's war imagery given the "climate domestically and around the world" -- as well as Canada's reputation as a peacekeeper. Perhaps a symbol of peace would be better, the participant suggested, according to the report.

This isn't the first time a new product or campaign called to mind the Twin Towers. Earlier this year, the poster for season 5 of "Mad Men," which showed a single figure tumbling as if through the air against a stark white background, evoked for some the gruesome images of Sept. 11 victims jumping to their deaths. And last December, a Dutch architecture firm got flack for its design of apartment towers in South Korea, named "The Cloud" that many thought were reminiscent of the World Trade Center buildings exploding.

Naked Women

The part of the memorial apparently causing some Canadians to blush is a depiction of some of the most senior figures, a group of women � sans clothes � known as the chorus. One person said the naked woman is going to "offend someone." Here's a close-up of the provocative image, depicting the Vimy figures:

Julie Girard, a spokeswoman for the Bank of Canada's currency department, said a lot of time and thought went into all the banknotes' makeover. Additionally, she pointed out that the monument was unveiled in 1936. What's more, the bank conducted focus groups near the beginning of the five-year redesign process, asking the Canadian public what they wanted to see on their new currency. They "gave us the idea for Vimy," Girard says. The bank uses specific criteria to decide what themes will be depicted on the new notes; it must be something distinctly Canadian and something Canadians will be proud of.

For instance, the new $100 banknote celebrates Canadian medical innovations, and references the discovery of insulin and the cardiac pacemaker, both of which were done by Canadians.

"A lot of people don't know the pacemaker was invented in Canada," Girard says.

The $20 notes will go into circulation in November. The remaining bank notes in the series, the $5 and $10, will be issued by the end of 2013. The specific designs and detailed images of these notes will not be released until their official unveiling dates, the bank said.

Hey Jaime their not as expensive as the $50 ya mind sending Patric and I a few samples?

Bank of America Offers Principal Reductions to 200,000 Homeowners

tbplus10 — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:06:57 GMT

So maybe I'm wrong here but to me this is just plain wrong, the borrower signed the contract and has the responsibility to pay back the amount they owe plus agreed upon interest. Whatever wrongs were done by Bank of America did not break a contract between the borrower and Bank of America, the borrower broke that contract when they quit paying their payment. This is the whole problem and why we have the debt issue we have, when someone borrows money they need to be held accountable, Bank of America wont take a write down as a loss on 2012 profits, someone is gonna have to make that money up and it'll probably be a combination of some sort of U.S. Goverment tax program and more fee's and higher interest rates for the honest people paying their payments like their supposed to.
My home loan was sold to BofA when Country Wide took a dive, I screamed a blue streak because I've had bad dealings in the mid 80's with BofA on a car loan that I ended up taking them to court over and won a settlement on.
With my home loan they finally released us to another lender a few months back, my new lender has been great, they offered me an interest reduction the second month they had our loan and ended up following through and dropping 2 points on the loan.
Please feel free to tell me if I'm in the wrong here, but if your house isnt worth today what you owe on it how does that become the banks problem, they dont guarrantee home values they just lend you the money to buy it under an agreement.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-o...omeowners.html

Bank of America Offers Principal Reductions to 200,000 Homeowners

A select group of struggling mortgage borrowers are about to get an offer that sounds too good to be true. Executives at Bank of America say they will begin mailing 200,000 letters offering certain customers mortgage principal reduction.

�If people get these things and toss them, they won�t be eligible,� says Ron Sturzenegger, the Bank of America executive charged with providing solutions to borrowers in need of mortgage assistance.

But the offer is real, and eligible borrowers could get as much as $150,000 knocked off the balance of their mortgages. It is all part of the $25 billion settlement reached this year between federal and state agencies and the nation�s five largest mortgage servicers over fraudulent foreclosure document processing (so-called �robo-signing�).

Bank of America (BAC), in a deal with state attorneys general and the U.S. Department of Justice, committed $11 billion to mortgage principal reduction, but executives say they will go beyond that if enough borrowers respond to their offer. Five thousand borrowers have already received a collective $700 million in principal reduction through a pilot program for those already in a modification negotiation. The 200,000 borrowers being targeted now may have already exhausted modification options or may have yet to contact the lender.

Executives say borrowers receiving the letters are eligible, but they still have to prove they qualify. In order to be eligible, a borrower must be 60 days late on the mortgage payment as of Jan. 31, 2012. The borrower has to owe more on the mortgage than the home is currently worth, commonly known as being �underwater� on the mortgage, and the borrower�s loan must either be owned by Bank of America or serviced by Bank of America for an investor who is allowing the modifications.

In order to qualify for the modification, the borrower must answer the letter with full documentation of income, showing that under the terms of the modification they can still make the monthly payment. A borrower with no income would therefore not qualify. A borrower�s current monthly payment must be more than 25 percent of gross income, and the borrower must show they are unable to afford that.

�If you can afford to make your monthly payment and are choosing not to, you will not get this principal modification,� says Sturzenegger.

If the borrower qualifies, Bank of America will bring the monthly mortgage payment down to 25 percent of the borrower�s gross income. That could mean principal forgiveness well over $100,000, as there is no limit to the amount of the mortgage. If enough borrowers respond, it could cost Bank of America far more than it committed to in the settlement.

�Yes, we have the capability to go well beyond the $11 billion,� adds Sturzenegger.

Bank executives say that before choosing which borrowers will get the offer, they performed a net present value test on each loan, making sure that the principal reduction modification would net Bank of America or the investor who owns the loan more than foreclosing on the home. �It has to be fair to the investor as well,� says Sturzenegger.

Not all of the 200,000 borrowers who receive the letters are expected to respond. Executives say there is a level of fatigue among delinquent borrowers who have already received several notices or who may have gone through a failed modification process already. Some borrowers simply don�t want to stay in their homes, while others may think the offer is a scam.

�They have been contacted by a lot of other people, and this offer may appear too good to be true,� says Sturzenegger.

That�s why Bank of America is sending the letters by certified mail and trying to make the language as simple as possible. A sample letter obtained by CNBC shows a bring red box in the top corner labeled, �IMPORTANT� and simple language stating, �Qualifying customers may reduce their monthly payment by an average of 35 percent.�

Some 6,500 letters should be arriving in mailboxes across the country this week, with a wave of new letters going out every week until the end of the summer, when all 200,000 should have been mailed. Bank of America is staggering the mailings in order to handle the expected response. The bank has staffed up to handle the task, with 50,000 employees manning servicing desks, but the process will clearly take a lot of time. That�s why Bank of America has suspended any foreclosure actions against these 200,000 borrowers until the process is complete.

There are currently 5.59 million U.S. loans that are either delinquent or in the foreclosure process, according to Lender Processing Services. Bank of America services one million of those loans, but many of them are owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their regulator, Edward DeMarco of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has yet to agree to principal reduction in loan modifications, despite harsh criticism from some lawmakers on Capitol Hill and increasing pressure from the White House.

Nice shot at Canada from Europe

Cableguy — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:52:16 GMT

Ya well bring it on Canada is taking the 2012 IIHF World Hockey Championships
Body checking a moose...is that the best you have.

When upgrades go bad

tbplus10 — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:13:56 GMT

Today the wife and I had a rare day off together, thought I'd take her to the local flea market (were getting low on flea's).
Found a vendor selling the exact tonneau cover I wanted for the truck, Tonneau brand Tri Fold model, for $250 which was $75 cheaper than the next closest price.
Another vendor had billet brake light covers.
A third one had vinal covers in silver for the front and rear bow ties.
And the fourth vendor had a new folding antenna mount and antenna connectors I needed to finish installing my remote CB.
So after shopping around for a couple hours, and finding a very rare Thin Lizzy CD I've been looking for we went home and the wife started house work while I set about washing the truck then putting the new parts on.
The wash job went ok I got all the dead bugs off but should've taken note while in the middle of the job a bird flew over and pooped on the hood right after I rinsed it off.
Next I ran out of tire shine spray with 1 tire left unfinished.
Then while I was putting the billett brake light cover on I discovered they hadnt included new longer screws and the factory screws were to short, after finding longer screws in my parts bin I decided to put the new vinal bow tie covers on only to find out they dont want to stick and peel off faster than I put them on, so I started on the tonneau cover only to find out they had given me the wrong one, they gave me one for a standard cab with the 6' bed, and finally as I was finishing the install on the CB I leaned the front seat back and somehow sliced the antenna cable in two. SO I picked up all my tools put them in the garage and decided I'll play on the computer a while.

Sierra's gold medal performance

Cableguy — Sun, 06 May 2012 03:04:19 GMT

Sierra now 7 has a knack for the performing arts too.
Like a swan she launched herself from couch to chair missed and banged her head on the basement pole.
I did gave her a final score of 9.5 for form and technique, the aerial 360 with the quarter twist was quite the spectical and the final landing is where the talent came in...

Now the reward sadly is 4 staples....
Tim would have been proud of the wee gaffer

Jaime?

tbplus10 — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:23:31 GMT

Jaime just wondering do you speak French?
I remember as a kid during the 70's my father would take us to Vancouver Island every September to fish for Salmon, the Locals around Campbell River, Vancouver Island always ranted about Ontario and Quebec and the "French speakers" there.
In 79 we spent a month in Manitoba and Ontario traveling to as many different lakes as we could, we went as far East as Sault Ste Marie but never managed to meet many people that spoke French.
I was looking forward to meeting all the French speaking people so the trip was a little bit of a let down.
On subsequent trips as an adult the only places I ever got to were Victoria, BC, Alberta, And Gander Newfoundland.

1960 Peterbilt Hotrod Truck called Piss'd Off Pete

Davandy — Sat, 05 May 2012 20:47:10 GMT

YouTube Video
ERROR: If you can see this, then YouTube is down or you don't have Flash installed.