jonocorp

I almost hit the 15 minute mark on the bike ride to work. If it wasn't for the slow light and the old guy walking his bike up the hill, I would have totally made 15 minutes. I'm still shy for my 10 minute goal, though.

It wasn't until this morning where I heard that today is apparently, "Dump the Pump Day." I said, "why the heck not," and rode the bike to work in possibly one of the hottest days of the week.

The Banshee music player for Linux finally hit the 1.0 release. It is a big departure from the early stages of the project. It was a bit ugly early on, and I leaned toward Amarok because of its massive amount of features and nice interface. This Banshee 1.0 release looks great and has some really handy features. Besides podcast support (which it should've had in the first place), my favorite feature is that Banshee can play podcasts while it is being downloaded, so you don't have to wait to listen to your favorite jibber-jabber. The one new add-on to the player that blew my mind is its audio player support. You can drag and drop your media into your Zune, iPod, or whatever and if necessary, your music will automatically, on-the-fly be converted to a format your player supports. Nifty stuff.

I think I'll switch from Amarok to Banshee for a while.

Today I heard an old 'Sunny Day Real Estate' song on the www.littleradio.com streaming radio. It really takes me back. That was a good album.

Happy father's day.

I feel exhausted and half asleep, and it doesn't look like it's going away. The sticky, humid weather isn't going to help, either.

Early on Sunday, I donated a bag of dog food that June won't eat to the North Central Animal Shelter. I was going to give the food to the San Gabriel Animal Shelter, but someone told me that the North Central shelter is holding the most dogs in the area and they need the help most. The place itself is easy to get to, and it looks pretty modern. If only I had the room, I would've gotten this brown dog with one blue eye. In the dark, I imagine that you'd only see one eye staring at you. It would be creepy. Awesome! I'm a sucker for crazy eyes.

Biking to work the second time wasn't nearly as tiring as the first time. A few adjustments to the bike made riding a little more comfortable. I'm starting to map out the route a little better, so maybe I'll hit the 10 minute commute time. Today it took me a little less than 20 minutes this time. My legs aren't Jello right now, so "yippies" all around.

So here's where I turn all 'fanboy' on you all....

Promos for the new Hulk movie show Robert Downey Jr making an appearance as Tony Stark (aka Iron Man). If you saw the Iron Man movie, you could see Captain America's shield sitting on Stark's work bench. There is talk that all these Easter Eggs are to get ready for the Avengers movie which might include the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and possible others. Marvel kinda wants to introduce all the heroes and show that there is a collective Marvel Universe. I think it's pretty neat.

Since the Wolverine origin movie is being filmed as we speak, and it does take place during World War 2, I wonder if good ole Captain America will show his face. My guess is that he'll show up as Steve Rogers, pre-Super-Serum. Bucky, maybe???

The inaugural first bike ride to work happened today. The ride was okay, but also sucked at the same time. It may be due to the fact that I haven't really ridden a bike in many, many years, but I'm sure the commute will get better as soon as I get my bike-legs back. The ride to work from the house was a solid 20 minutes; about 5 to 10 minutes longer than in car. It was at least nice to always be moving most of the time.

I've thought about getting a bike for a while, and I finally got one on Sunday. Although, it isn't the bike (motorcycle) that my friend, The Governor got, but it still got me giddy. What sucks about getting a new bike is all the small accessory crap that goes along with it: Helmet (I didn't get one), lock, a little bag that holds some patches and tools, a pump, and a kickstand. Just that one day I spent almost a third of the cost of the bike, and I'm probably still not done buying crap for it.

If you're a tech geek, or even a minor tech geek like myself, you'll love the TRW Swap Meet held on the last Saturday of the month at the Northrup Grumman parking lot. I get a bit intimidated with all the little ham radio stuff that I have no clue about, but I find all the old out-dated computer stuff hilarious. I saw an old external hard drive that had in big letters on the box, "10 Gigs!" There was a time where that was a big deal, but in the age where you carry almost 5 times that in your pocket with your mp3 player, it's hysterical. I bought an adjustable AC adapter, a battery-less flashlight, a keychain, and a multimeter.

NSFW (unless your place of business is super laid back)

Or go to http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/ for more formats

Ever since I've noticed one of my dad's brake lights burnt out, I've noticed a lot of people on the street are driving with one side burnt out too.

Go ahead, start driving around like you normally do, and you'll probably see a bunch of them. It's almost like every 5-6 cars on the road in my commute are afflicted with a broken bulb. You maybe one of them. How the hell are we supposed to know a bulb that's only seen from the back of the car is out? We don't have eyes in the back of the car.

Why can't we have a little dashboard icon that trips on when a bulb has gone out? Must we get a crappy $50 fix-it ticket from a quota-hungry cop just to replace a $4 bulb? Hell, why can't we have a little icon that tells you your headlights are out, too? The concept, I'd imagine, would work like this; the dash icon would light up when the circuit is broken on the bulb end, and goes through a bypass circuit that trips the icon light. This is a million dollar idea presented here on MY site. It's even time and date stamped. It's no patent, but it is some kind of proof that would probably not hold up in court. Cheers.

Thanks to the interweb, I found an interesting prospect for a car. It was a Lexus SC300 with a stock manual transmission. I'm a sucker for a car that uses its back wheels that I have to shift myself, so I go down to the car lot (only less than 5 miles away!) and check out the car. A test drive and a trip to my mechanic later, our biggest gripe was with a kinda big but not-too-small rust spot on the corner of the windshield, and a almost failing temperature panel.

I hate rust, and that level of rust is a pain because it's more work to get out.

My mechanic tells me that the temperature panel, since it was electronic, is expensive to fix replace. And once that goes out, the whole temperature stuff goes out with it 98% of the time.

Is it silly to think of getting another car when I don't know where to put it?

This is a slight hold-over from the previous Blogger blog, but a great improvement over the Web 1.0 style of blogging I was doing (or lack of) in the past few months.

My back hurts and I'm tired, so this is what this site will look like for a short time (hopefully).