Archived News starting from 05-10-2008 and earlier
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Tomtom
passed this to me at work today and I couldn't stop laughing. It's a pretty accurate timeline of a relationship, and something we all aspire to follow. I just hope I have a few more years before pregtember.

After telling Lisa we could leave early for Cleveland if she got the yard mowed, I now have physical proof
she mowed the yard at least once in her life. She managed to do the entire backyard and half of the front before finally pooping out and resorting back to watching television, her default functional mode. Takeaways from her experience include "this mower fucking sucks" and "the cord is such a pain in the ass" and a sore thumb from compensating for the bad safety switch connection on the mower. Unfortunately my motorcycle battery decided to die today as well. Despite her recent physical exertion, she was still able to drive to Rite Aid (as far as I had been able to make it) and deliver me an emergency battery pack to limp my motorcycle the rest of the way home. That's why today is Super Lisa day! After all the excitement she was too tired to leave for Cleveland, but I did promise her a new motorcycle battery and a new cordless mower to help her out on next Super Lisa day.
With Whineyho debating on purchasing an
HDMI capable Xbox 360 to replace his
component only version, the time was ripe
for me to generate multi-megabyte photos comparing Component and HDMI video outputs. Using his 60" Sanyo 1080p DLP TV, we hooked up his Component Xbox and my HDMI Xbox and logged out of our Xbox Live accounts (to get the generic dashboard screens). Below is the results which was definitely less than spectacular. The only noticeable difference between the two is the HDMI was slightly brighter, and 2 inches from the TV you could see analog noise on the component, which was impossible to tell even a foot away from the screen.
The day after completing the test,
EternalOne mentioned motion comparison would have been a better idea, and he's right, but I'm too lazy to do it over so I'll leave that for someone with more time than me. As for the still scenes, we couldn't tell any appreciable difference.
After the
initial report on Captain George's Ice Cream and Middle Eastern Restaurant,
Duane and I decided to make a follow up visit today. It looked
just as freaky on the outside as I had remembered, but the
inside was more
strange than freaky. The strangest by far was a
waterfall on the
porch. They have a $7.95 special which yielded a lot of really good mediterranean food. So much so we didn't even have room for ice cream. I've downgraded my rating from pedophilic to strange with really good food. We spent the remainder of the lunch hour listening to a really bad KITT GPS voice and making pirate jokes involving sexual innuendos.

The
Detroit SCCA Season Opener was today and aside from a sunburn that left me looking like a racoon it went quite well. Thanks to
Stavos and
Lisa I have just enough
vanity photos of my car to last me to the
next event. Results aren't yet posted, but while I'm sure I placed close to last (if not dead last) in my class, I managed to reduce my time each run as I slowly remembered how to negotiate turns properly again. The typical boredom between heats was alleviated by first Lisa then Stavos who both came to visit making the day go by alot quicker. Now that I worked out the cobwebs I'm ready to move up to second to last.
UPDATE:Results
finally posted, looks like I didn't do as well as I'd hoped. Also
more photos with cars other than mine.
Stavos, Tammy and
Lisa began the transformation from barn to high tech computer gaming facility in preparation for the
Barn LAN. After Transformation, and a short delay involving my failure to bridge wireless and wired networks, a low turnout proved to only slightly reduce the level of nerd-joy. However, a BBQ and Quake III shenanigans boosted it back up to acceptable levels.
My bicycle helmet wound up next to Dan on our way to Best Buy today, which gave him an idea for a dare. Once the dare was given, I was clear to
engage in
shenanigans with him and
Tigerbomb at the expense of Best Buy employees and customers. Tigerbomb noticed the soulless employees had no reaction to the spectacle, or perhaps I just wasn't all that strange to them, but the customers made every effort to avoid eye contact at all times. At checkout I stood uncomfortably close to Tiger which silenced the cashier who had no idea that I knew him. I could almost hear the cashier panicking about what the guy in the bicycle helmet was going to do next.

After hearing about how Speedway or Citgo gas stations have crappy gas one too many times, I decided to rant about how gas gets from incoming crude oil tankers to the gas pump. I found a
great article describing the process, which confirms all gas to all Michigan stations flow out of the same pipeline. The only differences are what additives each company adds to the gas before it gets to your tank. Stations that only put the minimum detergent additives required by law into their gas are still feeding you the exact same base gasoline that every other station provides. So while your fuel system may not be cleaned as well by lower cost gasolines, your engine is still running on the same fuel no matter where you fill up. Adding a $10 fuel cleaner bottle once a month will get you the same end result as high additive gas for possibly less cost. This shouldn't be confused with
octane of course, which is dictated by your vehicle. Putting 93 octane in a car that requires 87 is just wasting money (and gas) as your engine won't be able to take advantage of the higher compression the higher octane allows for. With that my rant is complete.

Wondering what do to on the first 80° day of the year in Michigan? Have your wife wash your car in her bikini of course! Sorry, no closeups, that was reserved exclusively for me.

With the announced
retirement of phpBB 2.0, I decided it was time to upgrade
the forums to the new 3.0 version. This new version has built-in protection against spambots and a bunch of other cool features that
Stavos will most certainly exploit. You can also blame him for the crappy appearance until he gets a better theme uploaded and applied.
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