FRIDAY!!

-Well we made it. I slept in and did not go in to work until 4:30. Good news is that I got out at 1:00 so it is all good.
-Iowa made FARK again. This one is funny. Guy robs a sack-of-suds store and leaves his jacket behind. The jacket had his w-2 form in the pocket with all his info.

-HERE is further proof that our leader is too stupid to be allowed to answer questions. They should do like they did at the end of the election and tell him not to say anything that was not written down for him.

winston.nextel.sprint....

Used to be the Winston cup for decades. Then all of a sudden it was NEXTEL cup. That took a couple years to get used to. Then right when you do, NEXTEL and SPRINT merge and so now has the totally stupid name of "Sprint Cup". That would not be stupid if they raced SPRINT cars. But I wonder what it will be next year.
The last quarter Sprint/NEXTEL lost about 30 billion dollars. BTW that is more then the company is worth. Great merger there, guys.

We lost Boyd Coddington yesterday. That sucks.

I have been following the story of Unique Performance's self distruction. They got a lot of press for the cars they were building in TX. They were so restored that Caroll Shelby issued them a new VIN. Top quality-high dollar replicas of the Eleanor mustang from the (crappy) version of Gone in 60 seconds. JALOPNIK had a follow up on it and I found it funny and ironic. It was ironic that Unique was getting hit with 25 felony charges-one of which was title washing. Title washing was what the original Gone in 60' was all about. The funny part of the article was that JALOPNIK, a website devoted to all things cars, would use the term "VIN number".
.........to possibly replace valid VIN numbers

More snow tonight. Imagine that. One of the other assistant mangers already called me tonight and said he can't be there so it looks like I will be in tomorrow at 4:00 a.m. *ack* At least it will be Friday.

And finally.. This had to hurt.

wed.

Buddy Miles. RIP.

Tuesday

I don't know if you know about the whole DIEBOLD voting machine thing, but it is quite amusing. It is amusing because we dealt with that company at work and they were a joke. The technician they sent to troubleshoot the hardware said that "we need to unsolder this transistor". Well, it was not a transistor, but a resistor and the fact that they flew this guy in to Iowa to fix anything scared me. It only got worse from there.
Anyhow, somebody figured out that they could write a virus and put it on one voting machine and it would send it across the network to rig all of the machines. DOH! So DIEBOLD sent them a machine to test it on. Then somebody noticed on their own website it shows a picture of the key that opens EVERY Diebold machine. So somebody went to Home Depot and made a key based on the photo that DIEBOLD provided the world. It worked.
Anyhow, that all leads up to this funny piece from the Onion

THIS PLACE has great prices on HDMI, TV mounts, and stuff like that.

Monday

Last week was crazy. I went in to work today and there were no fires to put out and so I came home to relax. Here is our Honda Civic Si (ours is black though) shortened.

This just in: Employee at Riverside Casino (just south of us) was fired because he kept requesting a prostitute. DOH.

Sunday

HERE is some pretty cool art. Look around the site.

I have been working on a wooden urn for somebody at work. A woman at work asked me if I could help out. She has a friend whose husband died and she did not have the money to buy a nice urn for him. I have not met her, and never will, but thought it would be nice to do. He was younger then me by a couple of years and left a 5 year old son behind as well. I had a guy at work cut out the letters on a 4/4 oak board and then made the box from it. I had some heavy felt from covering a pooltable and put that on the inside part of the bottom plate. The lid has a rabbet around the edge so it just sits on there. I was happy with the results and I hope she likes it.

Friday! (finally)

If not for the internet, I never would have seen this.

Wow. This is a huge record collection. Really went cheap if you think about it.

HERE is a pretty interesting site: It lets you type in a zip code and get all the info on that region. You can also compare several zips if you so desire.

Somebody got their hands on a production Optimus Maximus keyboard. Here is a video of the setup.

HERE is one big-ass fish. Daing!

Here is a guitar solo. Or 2.


Here is another guy with too many guitars.

And here is that dude from Medadeth thrashing it up :-) He has several videos posted and it is refreshing to see what a range of style he has.

Iowa City

Iowa City made it onto FARK today. That is rarely a good thing. This is no exception.
I heard yesterday that Iowa City has gotten over 53 inches of snow this winter. As I look out the window I see that it is.. wait for it...... Snowing. We gotta' be running out of that stuff by now.

-HERE is a great site. If you go to it, plan to spend several hours there.

-HERE is a site that I will use tomorrow. I have not tried it yet, but I guess you type in your cell phone number and it rings so you can find it. But tomorrow when I am on a computer in the office, I will ring the phone next to the other computer when somebody is there. Then I will hang up on them. I will keep doing this over and over. It really does not take much to amuse me.

Bill O'reilly is a total moron

I guess that is not big news. Today's dumb as hell comment to come out of his hate filled face was stupid even for him.
"That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."
Now, I know that in context he was making the statement to try to make it look like he was being fair. This unknown lady was on the phone saying her un-named friend said that Obama was an angry woman. So Bill was trying to make it look like they were a real news show and questioned the credibility of the account WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN PUT ON THE AIR IN THE FIRST PLACE. But in trying to look fair, he said that he was not going to lynch a black woman. Unless there was evidence she was indeed an angry woman, then he would bring the beer and a rope.
What a dumb ass.

short cars.

I have been having (too much) fun taking photos of cars and shortening them up in Photoshop. Here are some of them : http://picasaweb.google.com/brent319/PhotoshoppedCars

HERE is a HDR site with lots of REALLY cool photos. Might have to figure out how to do some of these.

HERE is the very coolest motion capture technology out right now. Really impressive capture even if it were not in real time. The non-realtime stuff is just amazing.

Mondays suck

DIY has a pretty nice site. I have not had time to check all of it out, but in the woodworking section there are videos by David Marks. That is worth the price of admission right there.

The GTM supercar looks like a pretty hot little kit car. The numbers are pretty impressive. I would build one except I don't have the time. Or money. Or tools. Or skills. Otherwise.. I would have one.

Saturday

HERE is a pretty cool website. Lots of stuff to look through. Kind of interesting if you click on the one link to find out what song was number one when you were born, married, etc...

HERE is a clever little time waster of a game.

If you have not seen the video of the cop in with his gay little cop golf cart and fat ass shorts being a tough guy on the 14 year old skater yet.. well here it is. It turns out that he was caught on tape in another altercation. This time he was protecting the streets from a guy with a r/c truck under a shoebox. The guy wanted to see what people would do if a box on the sidewalk moved. Good thing this guy was there to shop him! HERE is that video. What a dork.

Spent some time scrunching up cars today.
Here is a new challenger.... A hemi, I presume.

FRIDAY!!!

So I was thinking last night.. Here is what somebody needs to do: Make kit cars that fit onto Cooper Mini frames and have them be scrunched up versions of real cars. Here is a photoshop mock-up I did of what a Viper would look like. But also think classic muscle cars of the years '69 and '70. How cool would that be?

Thursday

Break.com had video of a bad R/C TAKE off and a bad R/C LANDING.

Tuesday

Here is the biggest moron you will see all day.

So you ever been doing a studio recording, and thought the guy singing with the headphones sounds like an idiot? Well if not, here is what it is like. David Lee Roth's vocal track from Runnin' With the Devil. (make sure you hear the last 30 seconds or so). I guess that was an out-take. Here is a re-mix using a better take. SOURCE

day off

Last night I was at work and about ready to close down when there was a crashing noise in the ceiling. I lifted a tile and found that the 2" main pipe for our fire suppression system had frozen solid and blown a big ass chunk of cast iron off of a elbow. So the 1" drops must be frozen also. DOH. Called security and they got in the firemen from coralville to shut off the pressure to that zone. That could have been a big mess. We had one break a few years ago and it sprays black crappy water all over the place. And this was right above our cash registers.
-Those nutty guys at Google. They have 1.56 kazillion photos in stock and need to label them. So they turn it into a game and let people do it for them. You are hooked up with a random guest and you are both shown a photo. You start typing in key words and you get points for the ones you match. They get tags for their photos. How great is that? HERE IT IS

-Here is a new lense from Adobe. Pretty funky.

impressive..

This is impressive. Guy playing Mario's theme on an 11 string bass.

Mario Theme On An 11 String Guitar - Watch more free videos

how fitting

So Microsoft puts out a special Zune for Valentines day so that you can tell the special one in your life that , "I love you so much. Just not enough to get you a real iPod". But in a twist that is so fitting for Microsoft, they will not have it out in time for Valentine's day.

EDIT: Wow. I am really at a loss here. It seems like Microsoft is really trying to make things right when they screw up these days. My XBOX got the RROD yesterday and so it is fried. I looked on the internet and it seems that they put aside one billion dollars to fix units (about 1/3 of them have this issue) at no charge to the customer. They will also give me a free month on Xbox Live since it will take about 3-4 weeks to get it fixed. Now with this mix up with the zune, it seems that they are shipping the zunes, but will refund the money to the person who is getting them late. This is from a letter to a customer who ordered the zune the first day it was offered:
Our goal is to provide a smooth customer experience for ordering, customization, and delivery. We sincerely apologize for not meeting that goal in this specific case. We will be refunding the entire amount of your order, which you should be able to see on your credit/debit card within 7-10 days. We hope you love your Zune and that you will accept our sincere apology.
I really really really hate to say this, but it seems like M$ is doing a better job customer relations then Apple when they make mistakes. I hope that Apple notices this. Now don't get me wrong. I would never trade my iPod for a Zune. I would not own an Xbox 360 except I won it with a pepsi cap. It is a fun console, but it is also just another example of Microsoft screwing up and making crap. We are on XBox live and the servers always crash in the middle of matches. They are supposed to be fixing that and have offered a free game download to make up for it. So I guess Microsoft should be better at fixing strained relationships with their customers since they screw up about everything they do. But I hope Apple will take notice of this.

-Here is a great flash animation. I think this is a re-make

cripes.

We got about another foot of snow yesterday. That should just about be enough. It was drifted about 3 feet deep at the bottom of the driveway and I was really not looking forward to shoveling it. My neighbor Scott came by with his blade and made short work of it. Damn it is nice to have good folks around.
I was leaving yesterday and the neighbors on the other side had gotten their car stuck in the drive. So I grabbed a shovel and we got them out. Shortly after that I found myself driving by my old neighborhood and thought I would stop in and say hi to the Kim's across the street. When I came around the corner an woman had gotten stuck in the road sideways. I could have made it by, but stopped since I had a shovel in the back. I got her dug out and was ready to push when a couple decided to drive right behind her and they got stuck. So we all dug them out. Then when they were free, they just kept going. What ass-hats. When I was driving home I saw a eagle (or falcon?) chomping on a bunny. Here is a photo I took.
Anyhow...
-If you have been arrested 101 times in your life, you are probably never really going to amount to much.
-This is just TOO DAMN FUNNY. Look at THIS NEWSPAPER and see if you catch something odd. I will save you some time. It is not in the text, but the pictures.
-This is also funny. Go to Google's home page and type in "find chuck norris" and then hit the i'm feeling lucky button. Enjoy.

So this legislator wants to make it illegal to feed obese people in restaurants. It would be stupid even if it were just to apply to fast food, but from what I have read around the web, it applies to all food joints. WTF?
Lets see.. start with smokers. Then work your way to the fatties. Finally .. persecution of ugly people. That will be next year.

Sat

If you get a grill from the landfill and want to take it home and you have a motorcycle and very little common sense, this is how you do it.


HERE is a really strange story for you.

Friday

Sick: The guy that hit and killed a kid on his bike has dropped the lawsuite against the parents for damage to his car. READ