Archived News starting from 05-19-2008 and earlier
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With the opening of the new Sonic 2 days away, I decided it was time to make another visit and confirm the date first hand. When I arrived, the crew was in the parking lot
practicing their roller skating and the now completed building was sporting the
brand new sign stating the opening date of May 21st @ 6am. Needless to say I'll be there at 6am to get my Sonic breakfast, and again at lunch for my Sonic lunch, followed by my Sonic dinner, followed the next day by my Sonic bowel movement. Once the Southgate Sonic opens, it's back to the countdown for one that's less than 30 minutes away from me.
Friday nights tree pulling adventure at my neighbors house, attended by
the Kelleys and celebrated with firework mortars, had me all hot and bothered to pull more trees. So today I decided to finally end the tortured life of my front yard maple and evergreen. The evergreen went easy, but the maple actually managed to snap my 2500lb kevlar tow rope. After fixing the break with a redneck approved knot, I was finally able to defeat it with my transfer case in 4x4 Low. Once it was out I could see the tree was more root than tree. How such a crappy tree can get such a powerful root system I'll never know. Having satisfied my tree-pulling needs for the day, the Kelleys returned for an evening of Lisa hopped up on pain killers, and a round of
3D Minigolf, a comedy combination yet to be equalled.
At 4:50pm today, Lisa discovered her left rear tire on her Jeep had gone flat. I was contacted and recommended she drive back to her work and wait. Thanks to my
recently installed nav I arrived shortly thereafter to find a screw stuck in her tire (we're still debating whether the screw originated from my garage) and took note of the time as I informed her several gang members were on their way to assault her so she better get it changed quick. After locating the user manual, she
got the spare,
jacked up the truck,
swapped the tire, and
put everything away in less than an hour, and only got
a little dirty. The perceived threat of assault and her keen intellect combined with the user manual found the solution with time to spare (I decided it would take an hour for her attackers to lock on). Now that she can drive a manual transmission, build a web site, change oil and now change a tire, her princess complex is well on the way to dissipation.
As you can see on the
Gnomecam, I had a 2 hour GPS navigation install odyssey from 6pm - 8pm today. The odyssey began with my
DDX-7015 head unit which accepts a
KNA-V2100 navigation system. The $800 MSRP had prevented me from adding it on, especially since my laptop does GPS just fine thank you, but a used one on eBay for an affordable price made me change my mind. After making all the connections for my test run I was rewarded with absolutely no change in available modes for my head unit. After taking my frustration out on Lisa and making her cry, I decided to try various settings and discovered I needed to change the video source. Just like that the nav was
working properly. I still need to find a place to hide the
nav unit itself, but the end result of an integrated navigation with no exposed power cords, wires or extra monitors is very hot. I even hooked up my illumination signal and it's smart enough to switch to "night mode" when I turn on the headlights. The only downside being the included map disk is 6 years old, so if anyone has a KNA-MP215 map disc just laying around unused, let me know.
After
Stavos decided to
show off his
Road Runner Turbo bandwidth I finally got Lisa to let me upgrade as well. After asking me what it was and having the answer "It's Turbo!" given 3 times she finally gave up and said "whatever" which was my green light for the new
turbofast internets. While I don't get the cool waste gate and blow off noises, and my upload is actually slower than Stavos', at least I can tout my faster download speed in the continuing battle of the nerds. Not surprisingly I can't actually get 15Mbps from any one site, but this web site is noticeable faster (technically 4 times faster) than before. That means you can download
Lisa,
Morlock,
Excelcier,
Enorym,
Cougays,
Canadian Cougays, and
Detroit Cougays faster than you ever wanted to.
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.
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