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So on Saturday morning, I had to drive my sister in law to the airport in Indianapolis… at four in the morning. It sucks really, because we’re about 30 minutes away from the Fort Wayne airport, but flying out of there always seems to add a good couple hundred bucks to your ticket – so we mainly fly out of Indy.

I only got about three hours’ sleep beforehand, between helping out customers and being glued to Assassin’s Creed – so I drag myself out of  bed, chug down some coffee and set about the trip. On the way back we stopped in at McDonalds, which is never as good an idea as it sounds before you get there. We then stopped in at Lowes to pick up some stuff for the house, before getting home.

I tried desperately to just stay up, but I couldn’t do it. I watched the entire presentation for Google Wave, got some ideas, and then promptly fell asleep at my desk, so I decided to take a nap.

After about two hours, Sabs dragged me out of bed. I was still mostly a zombie, so I sat and finished Assassin’s Creed then we decided it was time for bed. We both slept great, despite the usual midnight blanket arguments, and I woke up feeling most of the way refreshed.

The coffee machine didn’t brew correctly for some reason, so we decided to take our morning walk sans-canine and go pick some up from the gas station. I got a delicious Irish Creme with powdered chocolate that was only missing some whipped cream to be a perfect treat.

Fall is definitely come and almost gone, while today was a gorgeous “fall” day to go for a walk, I’m sure the nice weather won’t last. We’re going to try continue to walk even during the winter (as long as it’s not slick out), and of course we’ll probably go back to walking past treadmills at walmart every time we go shopping.

It’s gotten awful – I think it’s because it’s one of those rooms where you only go for a specific reason, and it’s not a thoroughfare, but it seems like crap just piles up out there.

We’ve got a boatload of tools out there which all need sorting out, and then there’s a bunch of miscellaneous crap. There’s a pile of insulation that needs installing in the attic, and air conditioner filters that we’ll probably never use.

So I think today I’m going to do battle with it. ;D

My friend Ray wanted me to write a blog entry about how awesome he is. It’s true, he is awesome. It’s awesome how he’s angsty all the time – writing the kinds of stuff on his ‘lil myspace that’ll probably come back to bite him in the ass when he goes to get a job at the post office and he fails the employee background check because they think he’ll shoot the place up.

Yup, totally awesome.

A while back we bought a little Oldsmobile, because it would be easier on gas than driving everywhere in our Suburban. That’s all well and good, but, well… The stereo sucks.

The speakers are all shot to hell (I have to replace them), and it’s only got a radio and a cassette player. Sabriena bought one of those tape adapters so she could plug her iPod in, and it works okay but sometimes the tape player keeps wanting to stop and go back the other way.

I haven’t had to mess with anything like this in ages, but it’s most likely the drive belt for the cassette player. I’m hoping it’ll “fix itself” at least well enough to play the damn iPod. I used to have a bunch of belts from back when I used to help Sabriena’s grandpa fixing DVD players, VCRs, Camcorders and suchlike. The belts stretch, so we had a big bag of them and we’d just switch it out for one that was a teeny bit tighter and the unit would start working fine.

Well, I don’t have that big ol’ bag of belts, and it’s so much work getting the stereo out and taking it apart that if I’m going to take my dash apart I might as well just put an aftermarket head unit in so we don’t have to have that crappy adaptor.

I found the movie “The Hangover” the be a pretty good time. Maybe it’s my sick sense of humor, but I had a good chuckle at a few of the jokes that are probably a little tasteless for most but overall I didn’t hate this movie in the least.

Looking at IMDB and other places where people mention this movie, I see one single complaint from most folks: it’s not realistic. Really? You mean a hollywood movie called “The Hangover” isn’t an accurate documentary about Vegas vacations? Perhaps someone should film a movie called “The Hangover”, and have it be nothing but pulsing white light, throbbing sounds, and some kind of subliminal effect to induce nausea?

Of course the idea of stealing a cop car and getting away with it long enough to have the valet bring it to you the next morning is far-fetched, jeeze.

Now on to “Bart Got a Room”. This movie was terrible, and the people who made it should feel bad. I’m actually surprised that it took this long for someone to try make another Napoleon Dynamite (I was expecting a string of cheaply made, crappy movies with “charm” after it came out), and they failed. I never understood why you’d watch Napoleon Dynamite over and over, but it was okay for a chuckle because it was just plain weird.

This movie was boring, trying too hard to be quirky, and wasn’t entertaining or even cute in the least. And maybe I fell asleep and missed part of it, but Jennifer Tilly’s character wasn’t explained at all, and seemed to serve little more purpose than an on-film wet-dream. I don’t think I’d recommend this movie to you unless you wore out your Napoleon Dynamite DVD, then you might enjoy it.

Finally, I’ll throw in a review for “Shoot ‘em Up”. I liked the two main actors in this movie, and someone recommended it to me if you liked Matrix-esque “gunplay” movies. I’ll never listen to that person again, this movie was awful. There were like three sections of gunplay in the entire movie that I found entertaining, most of it was just far-fetched and stupid (again, this is in comparison to “Matrix-esque gunplay movies”).

I’m no prude, but some of the sexual content in this movie was almost disturbing. Going to a hooker that specializes in lactation for men with that “baby need”, so you can feed a newly born infant, that you just ran through the gritty streets with, carrying it in such a way he might as well have been carrying it by it’s leg? Who the hell finds this shit entertaining?

On the whole, “Shoot ‘em Up” plays out like an 8 year old found a box of his dad’s movies that contained really violent movies and one or two pornos, and then he turned around and wrote a script about it. Given the material, the acting is pretty good (though maybe I just really like Paul Giamatti) but this movie isn’t worth your time unless it’s the last DVD on the rack.

We’ve been trying to catch up on bills to have money for toys, but so far no luck. Basically since we have another car now, I want to setup the Suburban to be good for specific tasks – it’s never going to be great on mileage so it might as well be more capable at things where mileage doesn’t matter.

So my plan is to pick up a 3/4 ton or a 1 ton set of axles and do a 4×4 swap. A bunch of people have done it before and I’m probably looking at no more than a few hundred bucks in tertiary parts to do it… most expensive parts will be the axle itself (because I have over-built tastes), getting driveshafts made, and the stuff for crossover steering.

I wish I could afford a decent hid lights kit, because the cut-off of a good HID projector system is just fantastic. The headlights on my truck suck at the moment – they’re all yellowy and faded and aren’t aligned correctly because the adjustment screws are worn out (one points down at the ground so low beam doesn’t have anywhere near the distance it should).

I want to build a cargo rack for it, but I don’t want to do that first because I don’t want it to look redneck silly. Basically my goal is to have it so if we want to go camping somewhere, and can afford the gas, the ‘burban will take us there in comfort – all your shit on the roof means more comfort.

I have a subwoofer, but no amp to drive it – so I took it out for the time being. I have all the crap to build a new box, I just don’t have an amp. So I want to get a modest amp, and then some thick welding wire to run a power distribution block to the back of the truck where I can set everything up (and eventually put a yellow top battery too).

All I need is a winning lottery ticket.

I wish there were some wholesale auctions for PC stuff around here, or some kinda salvage places or something… I really need some new toys to play with. In Australia we had a nice salvage place to get new stuff from where my Dad and I would go a lot.

Then in Sacramento we had the wonderland that is Ali’s Surplus Stuff… his sticker price was always pretty high but he’d usually knock a couple bucks off because I was always buying crap in there. He had all kinds of awesome stuff, from tiny LCD kits to giant refrigerator sized RS232 concentrators.

Then we moved to Indiana, where people seem to think “hey I paid $600 for it two years ago, it’s gotta be worth $300″. Computers don’t work like that man – you plug it in and you can knock a hundred bucks off the value. Half the value for every year you’ve had it. But nope, these hillbillies out here think they have gold.

I’ve been trawling eBay looking for a Catalyst switch, because our old upstairs switch died, so at the moment we’re using one of the old 10BaseT hubs I bought a bunch off of Ali for $3 a piece ages ago. It’s miserable. I can’t copy videos to my PS3 while we’re working, because everything grinds to a halt.

Hopefully sometime in the next month we can afford a little old switch.

In an effort to be at least a tiny bit healthier, my wife and I have for quite some time now taken to walking to the park periodically – Lately we’ve been doing it every morning.

Someone at the park (which is bordered to the north by the Salamonie river) used some bait or caught a fish and just left the carcass on the bank, which our dog has, for three consecutive days now, managed to sneak away from us to roll in.

She reeks, like dead fish. It stinks, I don’t consider myself mystic in any way but I am sensing a bath in her immediate future.

I have a love/hate relationship with my office chair. Back when all I did on my PC was play video games all day (it was a curse, really) I decided that my best angle of attack would be a nice comfy lazy-boy style armchair.

And it was great. In the winter I could throw a blanket over me and the whole mess would keep me reasonably warm. Apart from having my monitor right at the front side of my desk (most folks think it weird), everything worked really well for the most part.

Since I started doing more stuff on the PC that didn’t involve relaxing back with a controller, we decided to get a chair. I have a neato-elito high back office chair that despite being quite cheap is actually really comfortable… except the fact that the bottom of it’s broken. Perhaps I weigh too much for it, and periodically I get off balance and start to topple over, much to Sabriena’s delight.

One day, Sabrienix is going to make us enough money to get completely brand new office furniture, and it’s going to be bliss. My chair’s banged up, my desk is banged up (it’s nearly 6 years old and came all the way with us from California)… about the only thing that’s not banged up is the heavy metal filing cabinet I bash my freakin’ elbow on 8 times a day.

On friday my brother in law and I set off out to the wrecking yard to try find an exhaust for the Olds, because it basically didn’t have one from the catalytic converter back. After peeking under what seemed like a hundred cars, none of which had wheels under them, we finally found one that was off the ground and had a complete exhaust. It wasn’t just complete, it was an almost brand new aftermarket exhaust that someone had put on the car we pulled it off of!

We set about removing it, but I couldn’t free up the bolts behind the cat. We ended up having to leave it, and went back today. I wasn’t going to give up, I wasn’t coming home empty handed again, and most importantly I wasn’t spending another day driving around temporarily deaf from interior resonance/drone from a goddamn V6.

I finally wound up cutting the exhaust off just behind the cat, then grabbed some miscellaneous bits and pieces from the exhaust shop and sleeved the rest of it back together, which slides into my cat and only leaks the tiniest bit. If I can get the car further off the ground I should be able to weld the sleeve into the old flange on the back of the cat and have a perfectly good exhaust.

Because it leaks the tiniest bit at the moment, there’s a very minor raspy noise under acceleration – but oh my god the difference is astounding. The radio is worth listening to. You can drive to the store without once itching your ear. You can hold a conversation.

All for about $35 and a few hours’ work.