Welcome!

About to start fixing my cars — both my white mustang and my blue (ha!) one. Don’t know what’s exactly wrong with either one, but I’ve a pretty good guess, so here’s to hoping!

Every now and then, I peruse FreeRepublic’s boards, just to take a look at what the “enemy” is thinking — what I see sometimes scares me.

Pray for President Bush - Day 2753

I got a flat tire going home on Friday of last week (well, it was more like I had a tire explode on me…), and had to put on my little wimpy space-saver spare in a parking lot. (It was a church parking lot, too!)

So, I get online and order up some tires real quick from TireRack.com, get ‘em shipped to my house, and wait until today to put them on my rims — I just take the rims off the car and bring them up to the tire shop directly, since I hate anyone else driving my car.

Well, they were real busy there, so the guy just told me to leave my rims and the new tires there, and I could come back in about an hour and pick them up. Well, I come back and they’re not done with them yet, so I wait around for about another hour or so (it’s a Saturday, so they were real busy, and I overheard the manager guy saying he had someone quit just that morning), and then the guy tells me to pull my car around so he can give me the the newly mounted tires.

Well, to make a long story short, he didn’t make me pay anything! Yay! Said he felt bad that it took so long — it’s not a tiny gesture, either, since it’s like $40 to mount two tires at this particular place (they do a good job, usually).

I won’t say what the guy’s name was, so he won’t get in trouble or anything, but it makes me feel good to know that there’s still people like that around — lets me know that I can bring my car there in the future and not feel bad about it. Repeat business, and all that.

BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

If you can, try and give this a read — see if you can get the message.

It’s not bandwidth that Comcast is trying to protect, it’s the flow of information — that’s why they’ve gone after Bittorrent, now that Bittorrent is a media provider, too.

And it shall be mine eventually. Seriously, you could ping away like Annie Oakley with this thing, considering the fact that you’re firing shotgun shells.

And I’m happy.

If you haven’t visited “Rifftrax”:http://rifftrax.com before, check it out!

It’s the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 doing their thing again — they’re not in space, and the two guys who did the voices of Crow and Tom Servo are just playing as themselves, now (trademarks and all that), but let me tell ya; they’re just as funny now as they ever were. They were obviously the writers and well as the actors back on MST3K, and it shows.

How their stuff works now: you get set up at Rifftrax.com, and you buy an MP3 audio track directly from them (they’re usually about 3-4 bucks). Then, you sync it up and play it along while you’re watching the movie (don’t worry, it’s easy) — just play it on anything you want: an MP3 player, your stereo system (Nina and I played it on her laptop).

And, let me tell you… they haven’t lost it, not one bit. I swear to God, I thought my sides were going to split open at times.

I don’t mind paying them the three or four bucks to download it, either — this is the world of “new” media I’ve been telling people about, and I don’t mind helping it out.

If you’re using Ubuntu on your laptop, do the following:

Go to “*System > Administration > Services*” in your menubar, and then enable “*Hard disk tuning*”.

Then (and this is just a bit more complex, but not very), type “*Alt + F2*” to bring up your “*Run Application*” dialog box, and type in “*sudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf*”.

Then, scroll all the way to the bottom, and type in:

/dev/sda {
apm = 254
}

Save the file and then restart your computer. That is all.

[ "Source":https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695 ]

Almost 50 years ago, a man who was running for President of the US gave a speech about how he wouldn’t let his religious beliefs affect—in any way—his functioning as president:

!http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2007/POLITICS/12/06/romney.speech/art.kennedy.jfk.jpg!
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

“_John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960_”:http://www.beliefnet.com/story/40/story_4080.html

!http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2007/POLITICS/12/06/romney.speech/art.romney.speech2.pool.jpg!
Today we have presidential candidates saying things like “Freedom requires religion” and that “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

Yeah… and what if you’re an atheist? What if you want to have nothing to do with religion at all?

Guess there’s no place for you in this country, eh?

Sleep sleep sleep.

Drive drive drive.

…

Eat eat eat.

Do you realize that for the past year and a half I’ve had two peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches every day for lunch?

What the hell is that doing to my system? Probably nothing. It’s very bland food, so it’s probably not having an effect one way or the other — kinda like if I ate rice or jello every day for years as well.

I eat it because it’s cheap and it doesn’t go bad. (I don’t know how the people that I work with can eat out every day for like $10 a pop. That’s like $50 a week. $200 a _month_. Just on their lunches. In a month, for my lunches, I spend about $20.)

Walk walk walk.

I walk about a mile every day just walking between where I work and where I park my car.

Climb climb climb.

I climb up eight floors worth of stairs because I don’t like elevators. The people really cram into them in the morning. Also, it’s good exercise, though during the summers it can get a bit hot walking up them.

Stare stare stare.

I stare at a computer screen almost 10 hours a day. Thank god it’s an LCD screen or else my eyes would be shot by now.

Read read read.

I read a lot at work, conicidentally enough, to give my eyes a break from the screen.

Earn earn earn.

And then I get paid and it’s all worth it.

Bills bills bills.

And then I wonder where all the money went.