Archived News starting from 11-05-2011 and earlier
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One of the many pleasures of living in a northern climate is the annual leaf pickup required to keep grass from suffocating and landscape rocks from turning a deep brown. This year, however, I had the
assistance of baby which made the task entertaining. Between fits of giggling and attempts to eat the leaves, she commented on how unnecessary this task is south of Georgia, and that we might consider moving to that area if we truly loved her. I made sure she understood the reason we don't live there is because Lisa loves her parents more than her, and if I had my druthers we'd be living in sunny Florida selling beach rental equipment by the ocean. Satisfied, she let out a celebratory fart.
After 12 years of reliable operation, my
Cougar finally found itself in a completely immovable state. Only 15 minutes after informing my carpool I planned to drive the Cougar through the winter, all transmission shifter operation ceased. A firm believer in the personality of inanimate objects, I'm convinced the Cougar simply did not want to drive in the snow. A quick check of the cables under the shifter and visual confirmation of movement on the top of the transmission was all I needed to call the
tow truck while TomTom stood watch as
rape guard. Three days later, with a $900 estimate I told the dealership where to shove it and
towed it home with the obligatory bumper destruction that always accompanies my tow-dolly adventures. Further inspection revealed the problem to be inside the transmission, which means the Cougar gets its usual
winter slumber as I wait for warmer weather to properly fix it.
With last years
all time low trick-or-treater turnout it was decided we would visit the Kelleys for Halloweeen this year. Unfortunately, Lisa decided to play gender identity confusion and dressed herself and Lila as
Pooh and Christopher Robin. This frightened away approximately half the normal amount of visitors the Kelley house typically receives, proving transgender equality still has a long way to go in this enlightened society.
The depths to which automated bots will go to get SEO keywords placed has reached a new low today. While viewing my
site stats I noticed the join_success page on my ancient
Cougar Club site had fairly high traffic. Upon further inspection, I found
over 200 new accounts all generated by some bot. Unfortunately for the bot, none of my registration fields were compatible with linking to anything, so all the processing cycles were for nothing. Whoever developed it must have just took a stab in the dark at fieldnames and sent it on its merry way. I guess this is the future we all knew was coming, but instead of legitimate machine intelligence we just get spam bots.
After several long months of anticipation, a
teaser preview at E3, an
alpha and a
beta, Battlefield 3 is finally here. At 12:10 today I obtained my pre-order from Best Buy and played till 4:00am with some pretty good random people. After initially picking up a kit that was actually worse than mine it was clear this was launch day, and surprisingly the servers worked. The decision between PC and Xbox version was easy for me as 60% of my friends are Xbox exclusive. While the graphics suck compared to PC I stopped noticing after my evening of full squad domination. I can see a good chunk of my life
disappearing to this game.
Today marks the 4th day of
Occupy Detroit, an entertaining group of 100 people (or less) who decided to march from the spirit of Detroit statue to Grand Circus Park. I find them entertaining not because they have
outrageous demands, but because I'm stuck working here and they are easily the most interesting thing happening in the city. Today we toured the tent city which was disappointingly empty aside from a few people banging on a plastic bucket and someone spouting off about aliens. We were accosted by a homeless person, but he had no political agenda to push and nobody else approached us during our visit. Disappointed, we returned to have a red wings player serve us donuts.
Over 8 years ago I caved in and bought a
multimedia head unit for my
Cougar. At the time, it was exciting enough to watch DVD movies and store a whopping (at the time) 8.5GB dual layer DVD of MP3s. Little did I know it would lead me down the path of
mobile Xbox and
mobile rock band to elevate my nerd status significantly. However, in the age of cheap 64GB USB flash drives, blu-ray movies, streaming radio stations and WP7 gaming its cutting edge feel has worn off. Fortunately nobody told eBay this, and it's currently
fetching over $150 with 2 days to go. The
nav system saw me through 21,000 miles of fun, and provided proof a Cougar can indeed reach 130mph. While the
stock radio has warped me back to 1999 and doesn't even play MP3s, I can take comfort in the fact that this time next year I'll be crusing in my new Focus ST.
After
replacing my lamp in my projector, I noticed the 1/4 life bulb was angled at 45 degrees from center (as compared to the new one).
Further inspection revealed the bulb itself was in perfect condition, but the metal mount had bubbled it into the angle.
Furious, and anxious for a rage target, I began searching in vain for a class action lawsuit or other such manufacturing defect complaint site. Fortunately
one of the results explained mercury vapor lamp technology and I was quickly lulled into a wikipedia coma. My injustice forgotten, I humbly swapped lamps
and am finally back in the 120" 1080p club, $125 poorer.
iOS 5 released today, and
Enorym and the
Senator were in full fanboy mode. As one of two WP7 fanboys, it was my duty to refute any claims of superiority despite a complete lack of compare points. The wars began with a
smackdown from Enorym, followed by my
response. Then enorym
talked to himself and I
went hands free, after which the war devolved into unrelated baseless claims of superiority. While each side will claim victory, the only conclusive result is that fanboys rule. Oh and Joseph (the other WP7 fanboy) chimed in about 3 hours later with nothing significant to add.
With much pomp and circumstance, I upgraded to 120 inches of Epson HC 8100 1080p goodness
almost 2 years ago. Now, only 1120 hours into the life of the lamp, my Battlefield games have a new challenge of perpetual twilight. Currently the highest brightness setting for the projector gives an image that is almost passable, but it's clear death has come 3,000 hours early for my lamp. After checking the warranty, my lamp has indeed expired and I'm left with a $200 repair, or in the case of my cheap self a
$125 knockoff eBay version. We'll see if the knockoff ends up beating the OEM's 1,000 life, I doubt it can do any worse.
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One of the many pleasures of living in a northern climate is the annual leaf pickup required to keep grass from suffocating and landscape rocks from turning a deep brown. This year, however, I had the assistance of baby which made the task entertaining. Between fits of giggling and attempts to eat the leaves, she commented on how unnecessary this task is south of Georgia, and that we might consider moving to that area if we truly loved her. I made sure she understood the reason we don't live there is because Lisa loves her parents more than her, and if I had my druthers we'd be living in sunny Florida selling beach rental equipment by the ocean. Satisfied, she let out a celebratory fart.
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