In a recent commercial from for the Falcon XR8 Ute, Ford has created a manly man’s dream world. The paper delivery isn’t a newspaper, but a burrito, a group of men chase after a beer truck called "Mr. Frothy", most of the stores in the town have large signs that read "Tools". Oh, and the theater is running "BEER: The Musical". I’d watch that. 🙂 Click here to read more and watch the video.
Author: ryan
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Tech supporter, and Independance Day
Happy "intellectually-challenged people burn shit up and kill people" day. Ugh.
I played tech support / web nerd for some friends earlier this week. On Monday I helped my friend Jenn get an old laptop onto her home WiFi connection so she could stream music to her basement. She paid me plenty with beer and some BBQ’d meat though, so it was far from a chore. On Tuesday I met Snooks at Kennedy School and helped him sort out his troubles with his new hosting service (mis-configured DNS entries for the domain name) and helped him get WordPress (the blog software I use) installed and set up. I then did some basic training on how things work, how to tweak the themes, etc. I also had too much beer, since the following day (4th of July) off, so by the end I’m sure I wasn’t much help.
On Wednesday Kelly and I slept in a bit, and then I got up and took care of some computer tasks and sipped on coffee for a bit. Later we ran to the local grocery store and then went to a nearby friends BBQ. Had a good time, though I was pretty tired from the heat. It was about 90 degrees here, and I tend to get tired and cranky when it’s warmer than 75. Had a good time though, there was a sprinkler running, which I stood in frequently to keep cool, and later we were treated to many many large and very illegal fireworks from nearby houses. Some were quite impressive (those that start with the telltale thump, and then a very loud bang as bits of magnesium, carbon, phosphorus, and other elements spread out in large colorful bursts. While on one hand I enjoy them, the other hand recognizes why these large fireworks (and even smaller cousins, bottlerockets) are illegal here… so much can go wrong, especially when it’s been so hot and dry. I at one point ran home and watered the lawn for a while to be extra careful, just in case a random bit of burning material landed in my dry lawn. Anyway, I ate too much delicious food, and then came home to watch a bit of TV before going to bed to start the work day. Well, because of the holiday, the morons were out lighting firecrackers until well past 1am (I think I finally fell asleep somewhere around 2am). Urgh. Stupid 4th of July. 🙂
I’ve managed to ignore the blog for almost 2 weeks. Damn. I’m a slacker! Here’s a quick-ish recap:
A week ago Thursday I met up with my brother and Ghost Dog at the Goose Hollow Inn for some beer and food on the patio. Had a good time, and of course had the reuben sandwich! It was good to go back, it’d been several months.
Last weekend was a "no plans" weekend. Kelly had a big nasty paper due, so I kept myself busy and out of her way by doing a lot of yard work, and getting caught up on some of the movies Kelly had seen but not sent back yet.
During last week I was out a lot; with Snooks at Kennedy School, with my brother at the Moon & Sixpence, and then the Goose again on Friday with Jen and Jason (who we’d not seen in quite a while). After dinner we went to Multnomah Village to see their new condo and meet their new kitten Tiki. Had a great night out, and it was good to see J & J. Need to do it again soon.
Yesterday was pretty busy. In the early afternoon Kelly and I had a BBQ to go to for some friends expecting a ‘little one’ in about two months time. We had a fun time (I ate way too much, but I couldn’t let those poor, lonely looking hamburgers go to waste :)). Then, we rushed home and ran down the street to catch a bus. Destination: Rose & Thistle. Ghost Dog celebrated a birthday last week, and had a bunch of people join him for some food, drinks, and later darts, to celebrate. Had a great time (even though my darts skills are poor, and Snooks, who wasn’t wearing his glasses, kicked my ass).
Today I got out and did a bunch of yard work, and did some much needed waqtering. I’m very tired now, and am soon going to attempt to watch a movie without falling asleep on the sofa.
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Just in time (apparently)
Today we had some tech (and apparently sales… keep reading) folks come out from Comcast to fix some cable troubles. Our ancient, old-school analog cable has been having troubles with some channels. It’s not a new problem, it just took Kelly and I a long time to finally call Comcast about it. Channels 2 through 13 were having some ghosting issues, and two other higher channels had insanely low audio volumes, to a point where we’d have to crank up the receiver and then remember to turn it down before changing channels again.
The Comcast techs hooked up this nifty box that both played video / audio from the cable, as well as analyzed the frequency strengths, etc. I heard it for myself, apparently there was nothing wrong with the signal. It could have been the old VCR we had our cable run through to change channels. Dunno. However, the helpful fella started talking to me about digital cable, their PVR units, and even how I could get things working with my MythTV box upstairs (that for years I’d been using to record shows with, later burning them to DVD, sans commercials, for later viewing). After some brief consideration, I decided to go ahead and upgrade… mainly because for a year, we don’t really pay anything different than we have been paying. While I feel it was definately an upsell, I don’t feel cheated. I’ve been wanting digital for a while. I wanted the handy guide for navigating channels. I definately wanted a PVR hooked up to my TV directly for a change. The extra channels are nice and all, though I’m not too concerned about most of them (though now we have BBC America, and for 6 months free, HBO). Neat-o! Guess I’ll see in a year what I want to keep and what I don’t. Chances are I’ll get so used to the extra features that I’ll drop the premium bits (HBO) and keep the PVR & extra digital channels, and just pay the extra $10 a month or whatever it comes down to. Either that, or we’ll get our use out of it and drop it. Time will tell.
Here’s the part that makes this all kismet-like. I just read that the free channel guide my MythTV computer uses to get it’s channel data, is dropping it’s free service as of September 1st of this year. Apparently there has been some abuse of their free XML data (likely that the data was being stolen and re-sold). This could mean that in three months, unless something else crops up, MythTV boxes will become a lot less useful. This makes me very sad, and perhaps the company (Zap2It Labs) will offer some kind of paid subscription service (like you pay for with any other PVR service anyway), but for now, it makes my cable upgrade a timely one.
Today I went no further than a half-mile from my house, and it was nice. After last weekend’s running around it was good to just anchor down a bit.
Since Kelly had class all day, I had intended to sleep in late, but by 9am I got up and decided to have a full day. I fixed myself some coffee, had some cereal, and then spent some quality time with my new toy (the MacBook Pro). After a couple hours playing / tinkering / learning (and paying bills online, urgh) I set out to do some yardwork. This was at around 11am. Just as I was about to go outside, it started pouring down rain. Oh well, more play time! About an hour later the sun emerged again, so I got all ready to get outside and… rain again. Hrm. Ok, more geeking out. Finally, at around 2pm I decided I needed to do something productive, so I did a bit of grocery shopping at the local grocery store. After getting home and looking at the ominous clouds I decided not to bother going out and mowing my lawn, and instead decided to wash the car. This may sound foolhardy, but think about it… the rain helps wash the soap off! 🙂 However, I got the car washed, dried, and into the garage before any further showers. Kelly got back from class shortly after I finished washing the car, but needed some ‘decompress’ time, so I decided to detail the car pretty heavily (vacuum, wiped down all the vinyl & plastics, cleaned the windows inside and out, etc). After about three and a half hours of all that car cleaning nonsense (resulting in a super clean car) I got cleaned up and Kelly and I went out for some dinner.
We decided to walk to the Concordia Ale House (still within the half-mile range mentioned above), which we hadn’t been to in quite a while. I was very happy to see they were pouring the Terminal Gravity ESG (Extra-Special Golden), a delicious, light, summer-y golden ale. I also had a pint of Hales ‘Dublin Stout’, which was really good (creamy, not overly strong or bitter, somewhat remarkable for a Northwest stout). We also had some really good food… I had a turkey melt (with jack cheese and bacon, mmm), and Kelly had a tomato, pesto, cheese sandwich. We both had a nice relaxing time out, and then walked home. Good day. Feeling refreshed, though a little sore. Surprising what 3+ hours of car cleaning will do. 🙂