Playing a bit of catch-up here,,, finally editing almost 3 years worth of partial posts to be readable as they were meant to be. I assure you nothing is made up as filler. lol.. this was all intended to be posted as the dates indicate. in a couple weeks, Ill swap it out for 2009, and a few weeks after that 2010. I will then do my VERY best not to let it get so out of hand again :)



12/25/2008

. * . * Merry Christmas * . * .



12/17/2008

Tonight was the entering of the promise land for the 95 SHO. I knew this was coming, and would probably be on my way home from work tonight, so I brought the camera, and while I was on my way home, I kept my eye on it. once close, I pulled off the highway and just drove around on some back roads till the moment happened. would have been nice to make it land in my driveway again, but unless I spent about 2 hours driving around my area, it wasnt going to easilly happen this time. as I did with the 94, I got video of this one rolling over too (about a 20 MEG download), along with a few pictures... Youll have to excuse the Low Coolant light which is always on when the car is running,.. seems to be a stubborn sensor, or a leak I just cant find which isnt actually showing itself.



12/14/2008

first day of snow boarding this past weekend... pretty good for a first time out I guess. took a few good spills, some on purpose (usually as a bail), some not. none as bad as anything horrible Ive done in the back yard on sheets of plastic in the past... I can turn enough to go where I want to go without hitting anyone or anything, and I can stop pretty good facing down, and can stop only about 50% of the time I try to facing up the hill. As for the lift... got on ok, got off ok, but couldnt quite stay standing to slide down the hill once I got off. possibly cause of the side I was on, compounded by thefact that I didnt put a stomp pad on the board cause I didnt want to cover up any of the design.. Ill practice that more next time. mistakes get just a little frustrating as the day wears on and you get more tired and cant get it right not only because youre new at it, but because youre getting too tired.. being a perfectionist, Im way too hard on myself and always expect myself to be able to do things right quickly..

I WILL get good at this.

on the positive side.. got 3 compliments on the board already, lol



12/11/2008

So my girl is in to snowboarding, which means Ill be in to snowboarding.. I have a long history of X-Games like activities like BMXing, huge jumps, crazy stunts, so Im sure Ill enjoy this.. but while Ive done plenty of stand up snow activity on inappropriate objects (cheap plastic sleds, old metal shelves, rolls of insanely slippery plastic...), Ive never actually gone TO the slopes to ski or snowboard. never cared. always had plenty of fun with the hills in my back yard, and also, while in school, anyone I knew who went skiing, was a prick, and I wanted nothing to do with them.. but things change once youve graduated and work and so on... So its time.. I figure with all my history going down a hill on inappropriate onjects, Ill be able to pick it up pretty easilly on proper equipment. Ive been buying the gear Ill need for the past few weeks.. giving some business to the local store, Miller Ski, in warwick.. who was VERY helpful with everything. I got gloves, bindings, goggles, foam sunglasses, and a couple hats.. He showed me some boots I really liked, but he was unable to get them in my size in time for possibly going this coming weekend, so the other day I picked up the boots and some remaining items at Pellican in NJ,.. some thermals (nothing cotton Im told!), snow pants, jacket, and a few maintenance tools for my board....

Board?....

Did you see Board listed in all the items I purchased?....

Well, as it turns out, the board is the first thing I bought... but I didnt just buy any board.. those who know me know I love customizing things with my logo, or images of some of my favorite things...
Enter Revolution Manufacturing in Utah.
I figure Snowboarding is one of those things where its partially about expressing yourself... earlier in the summer I did a search for custom snowboards, and found these guys. over the past month or two, I worked with them to find out which of their boards I should order, and what was needed from me for a graphic should I not use something off their online templates and clipart library. I gotta say.. a 100% scale graphic the size of a snowboard at 300dpi, is quite the large file! I had an idea for my design and with some help from my buddy brokenreality, the MERVERNATION snowboard design was created.

The design started with an image no bigger than 2 inches by 2 inches that I always loved from a coloring books first page. I took a picture of it since that was easier than digging out my scanner, and used GIMP to clean it up, then inkscape to trace it and make it vector, then GIMP again to reshape it to fit the board, and then eventually Corel PhotoPaint and Adobe Photoshop to do all sorts of various work to it. This took care of the main part of the design. the bottom of the board came from a popular design that I cleaned up with some help from brokenreality, and the middle is a very clean version of my logo that came from brokenreality quite some time ago.. I still am not sure why he decided to make a super clean vector version of my logo in the past, but it sure has come in handy. for the back I just wanted a long version of my logo, which again, was able to be made form the vector one.

A little positioning and tilting and I had my basic idea. sent a preview to brokenreality and he added in some drop shadows, and the long green part of my logo as a background, and this brought even more ideas. I met with him a second time to work on this in person and wrap it up, and we created the glowing blue and some shading to the green parts of the long logo, and the thing just popped to life. over the next few days I worked on the image, cleaning up little spots that needed a touch and tweaking some positioning slightly... sent the graphic off to Revolution and a few weeks later......



I couldnt be happier with how this turned out, and for the price of just $460 with a 3 year Warranty (vs $300 for one off a shelf with a 1 year warranty), I would Recommend Revolution Manufacturing to ANYBODY looking to have their own custom snowboard. and they dont just slap a graphic on a blank board. they build each board from scratch for each customer when its ordered.

Now I just gotta learn how to use it..... updates to come :)



12/08/2008

had been wanting to get a mig welder for a while.. picked one up a while back but other than fixing my exhaust, I found no time to make new stuff, and no other broken stuff to fix. finally got a chance to play by fixing a muffler bracket for a friend. used a washer to fix the area where the hole had rusted through. seems to be holding well, and Im getting a little better at it.. course rusty metal isnt the best thing to make great welds on.. Im looking forward to making some of the parts I have ideas for using new metal and seeing how I do.



12/03/2008

Wow... this thing came out REALLY nice :)



11/27/2008

Happy Thanksgiving!



11/25/2008

so Sirius and XM merge, fine.. better content? not so fine.

there are multiple channels of the same type of content, and channels that were original?.. gone.

most important on my list? Boombox. Boombox was Liquid Todds breaks channel. they have "retired" it for reasons they cant seem to explain. we now have Area (insert number here) and BPM which can EASILLY be combined to make room for something else. so now we have a whopping 2 actual electronic stations, both of which are pretty much the same, and the one that was actually different and made the damn service worth having other than Howards channels is now gone.

11/20/2008

Sirius is really disappointing me. clearly someone is on crack.

11/10/2008

11/06/2008, Nine Inch Nails, House of Blues Atlantic City NJ

headed down to my girls house with my friends following and from there we hopped in 1 car and headed down. 1 overpriced dinner and a couple pee stops later we were handing the keys over to the valet parking and checking in to the showboat hotel and casino. the suite was sweet. cool furnature, lights, tv and stereo. sirius included :) first oder of business was tuning in Howard 100. we explored the room, explored the hotel and found something to snack on. a bottle of absinthe was enjoied by all, and a nights sleep was in order for the big small show the next day.

the show was really cool. very minimal, and a lot of variety in song selection. it was like seeing a show from back in the self destruct tour... on a side note, the opening act reminded me a lot of Emerson Lake and Palmer doing "Rondo". anyway, the show was amazing and after it, we headed to this VIP club they gave us free passes to as part of the benefits to this package we purchansed. we hung out there for a while hoping the band might show up, but no such luck. we had actually been there for a half our or so before the show and the band WAS in a roped off section eating dinner. I saw one of the guys, but not Trent. supposedly he was eating steak in the back, unviewable part of the room. lol. we gave up on him coming back and went back to the room, and enjoied some more absinthe and got some room service. not the cheapest way to find food, and certainly not the best quality of some of it.. but any pizza sure can taste ok when youve had enough to drink. lol.. (also another advantage of staying IN the place the show is at.. no driving, heh) the next day was time to head home. but before we did, we walked the boardwalk a little and played some more slots. had some dinner at the rainforest cafe, and went through the ripleys believe it or not museum.. Ive been through the one in myrtle beach a few times and that thing is worth it every time just for that spinning tunnel part. I could stay in there for hours. once all that was dine, we hopping in the car and a few pee stops later, we were home

while we were there, we played some slots and slot variants. I remembered my sister telling me to look for a Mr. Cashman. well, I found one and sinch my finger wasnt doing much for the press of the buttons up till then, I had Ariel hit the button with her little hand.. well while I wasnt having much luck on the other games, this one immediately went in to some sort of win mode and gave me 20 free spins at some multiplier. before I knew it I had 220 something dollars. the thing must have gone in for 15 minutes. my friends and girl were watching by the end, and my 2 friends figured theyd give me their slips of about $7 total that they had left and see if the magic would work again. I had Ariel hit the button and a few spins later I had them up near $60. lol. they were happy and we all chashed out. I think its the first time Ive ever left a casino woth more money than I spent there.

so anyway,.. Nine Inch Nails Atlantic City vacation...

Excellent.

10/29/2008

Damn these USB Flash drives are getting cheap...
Three 16 Gig drives for $77 shipped.

10/03/2008

God Damn!,....
Lasik Rules!

5 years and counting :)

09/22/2008

4 VIP Reserved Seats to Nine Inch Nails at the House of Blues and 2 nights in a suite at the Showboat Hotel and Casino - $1500.

Money well spent?

09/16/2008

I should NOT have to answer this question.

09/05/2008

Quoted from nin.com news feed:

Nine Inch Nails will perform a special club show at the House of Blues in Atlantic City, NJ on 11.06.08. This stripped-down, intimate performance will be a one-off departure from the production-heavy Lights In The Sky arena shows. Watch the performance page for ticketing information.

hmmmmm.....

"This stripped-down, intimate performance will be a one-off departure from the production-heavy Lights In The Sky arena shows."

Another way of saying:

"We arent gonna try bringing the smoke machines to that fuckin place again."

09/04/2008

Google Chrome, pretty impressive....
unless you want to use it on the most stable desktop windows OS MS ever offered, Win2K. god forbid.

Install Google Chrome on Windows 2000:

The following exe copy and reg entry is a trick I found form someone that got this to work with the japaneese version on 2k. it uses a copy of IE's executable and some registry entries to download and install google chrome. Im putting it here changed for english readers and users, and Ive changed a few things to make it easier to use. (the original made the copy iexp.exe which is also a known filename that spyware uses and may get zapped by your anti-whatever programs). due to errors, Ive also found it helpful to have a few updates already installed if you dont already.

- make sure you have the latest Windows Installer, currently 3.1
- make sure you have the latest Service Pack 4 and Rollup package
- obviously having the latest IE you can get for 2K will probably help
- download chrome2k.reg and save it to a directory (or desktop if you must)
- download chrome2k.bat and save it to the same place
- run the batch file

if it all works youll be importing your bookmarks and messing with google chrome in no time. you will see a warning about Windows 2000 not being supported, but it seems to work just fine for not and with any luck google will officially support Win2K by the time the final version is out. I cant imagine why they wouldnt if they expect the widest range of support possible for this project. you can delete the copy of the EXE and blank the Registry entries when done if you want, but they probably wont hurt to have in there, especially if theres going to be more betas to install.

09/03/2008

Better than Myspace or Facebook...

Today nin.com went live with the beginings of this long awaited overhaul and enhancement to the site to merge the spiral and a free nin.com to offer all sorts of features for the fans. what he came out with today is a NIN Social Networking site that is actually really nice. the site is quick (right now) and while it allows you to customize your profile a little, it is not the abombination of the internet that myspace has become. membership is free, and it also incorpoirates the remix site that was launched recently as well. I have a thing or two I should put in there eventually. so far Im impressed. Im still not completely sure about disolving the spiral being a good idea.. but other than that, Trent has really been keeping true to his words about making things better for the people that support his career, and the past couple years have had quite a few treats. I cant wait to see whats next.