Misc

Anything about everything and somethings about nothing. If it doesn’t have it’s own category it’s going to be here.

Post Turkey Reflections & Ubuntu

First off, a big thank you to Conor & Lu, his awesome family and Bob & Des. I would like to think I’m too cool for thanksgiving but I can’t lie, I was slightly bummed that again I did nothing for thanksgiving with my own family because my mother and brother were both working. So it was really nice to get my mind off the that and get some turkey in me while sharing laughs with good people. Um… not once but twice yo! It was a nice long weekend with mucho good foods (yum!)

When I wasn’t eating I was getting to know my new Samsung net book. I recently had the urge to fiddle with linux so I installed ubuntu on the net book and rid myself of windows xp and I must say I am impressed. Once I am fully comfortable with linux and all it’s ups and downs I would even entertain the possibility of becoming a linux only household with a crappy pc around in case of emergency. Yeah it’s like that.

Why so impressed? First off, it is really easy to install: download ubuntu, make a usb installer, reboot with usb drive plugged in, test it out and install. That’s it! I will admit I was a bit frazzled watching windows xp go bye bye, hoping it went smoothly and that I wouldn’t be stuck with a bricked net book I just purchased. But it was fine and in a few minutes I was rockin and rollin in ubuntu figuring stuff out. Second reason is it works. It actually works, I thought I’d be hacking it to bits to get it how I like but right out of the box it works well enough for any seasoned mac or pc user to find his or her way around. And the most important reason I was so impressed was that it’s FREE! By free I mean free, zero dollars for a product that is in my opinion as good if not better than windows or mac (depending on your needs). There is something way gratifying about knowing that I’m running a computer that will in no way give any money to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. It is also gratifying to know that I am using a product that is put together by people who are working on it out of love for the technology and not for the money (sort of, I’m sure most of em have other paying gigs). That isn’t to say the good folks at windows and mac don’t love their jobs, just not enough to do it for donations.

So yeah, nothing but good things to say (okay, okay a few uber nerdy gripes but I’ll be okay) I will cover my particular net book model, ubuntu version and gripes in a later post in case anyone is heading down the same path.

That time of the year

When I try not to  say what I am actually thinking out loud. I’ve been conditioned to care but I am unlearning it a little more every year. We should be thankful for every day and every one of life’s mis-givings. I would also like to give thanks to all the laughs and the ability to look left when everyone else is looking right.

And with that I will post the annual creature slapping turkey and I will commence watching the parade and getting faded.

Have a Creature Turkey Day!

Better late than never

It feels like last weekend but it’s been two weekends since the opening festival for beer week. We came, we drank… we drove home drunk (I know, I know!) Anyways overall lots of good beers here in SD, a ton of IPA’s haha. I left with my palette in a frenzy and would’ve prolly been able to find decent flavors in a dog turd. Hop Juice and Beached Whale were my two favorite IPA’s. Everything else got lost on the way to my belly. My flannel also got a few compliments and Phill’s had $3 pulled pork sammies. All in all good times but you already know this because it happened two weeks ago 🙂

View set on flickr

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Belly is full of…

So I decided to try a new danky beer every day last week but I fucked up and had the same beer on monday and tuesday.

With that said monday and tuesday’s bottles were Pliny the Elder. All I will say is this beer is good and if you see one drink it up asap and enjoy life.

Seeing as that was so good I decided to try something else from the russian river family and gave the damnation ale a try. I assumed it was good because it has a cork and the title ends in “tion” haha. And christ was I right! I don’t really know how to describe it but it feels alive. Like I am drinking micro organisms. The foam itself is a specimen as it never fully dissolves and trails around the glass. And these get better with age in the bottle.

Thursday I had a stone vertical epic 10.10.10 which was super dank. Slight carbonation and fruity notes make this beer almost champagne like. It also had a marshy smell and feels a little less alive than the damnation ale. Super good stuffs. This guy can also be stored away and aged.

On friday I brought home one of each. Then on saturday I picked up a ruination ipa and a racer 5 ipa, both were yummy. I also picked up a few other goodies for another day. I am pretty stoked for beer week next week, should be blast. I am also pretty stoked on beers that get nookier over time, I can horde like a muh fugg.

My Apologies

I am aware that it is 2010 and anybody remotely interested in this is prolly subscribing via their prefered rss reader so it is really no big deal but this blog be dyin a slow, slow one. I like to think of it as preparing for hibernation. Right now my blog has not shaved for almost two months, it has a gnarly neck beard and has replaced water with beer. It is going to sleep till about february so it is really letting go and gaining a few (for the sake of being warm tough!)

I dunno I am just lazy I guess. I always thought if I had a cool phone I would blog allllll day. But it’s the same as it ever was. My life simply is not that exciting and I’m not complaining… well sorta… I friggin miss riding to work (wah!) Once the weather settles down I will figure out a route to my new work. Until then I think I will do the neck beard and beer thing.

Vintage General Electric Kitchen Stuffs

I helped my friend Jim move yesterday to this cool little spot that is sort of in the hood. It’s a nice little one bedroom apartment. I walked into the kitchen and almost yacked to the high levels of cute radiating from the stove and oven area. I don’t know dick about vintage kitchenware but the old GE kitchen is pretty bad ass.

The kitchen has pink tiles, pink stove top and a pink oven. The oven is pretty rad, you look at it an immediately know it’s some old shit and has more character than most people encountered on a day to day basis. It also has a clock/timer/countdown style interface that no longer works (it was prolly the tits back in 1950)

The stove is electric (has no flame but the rings that get red hot) and is by far the coolest part of the whole kitchen. It features clicky analog blender style buttons to control heat levels rather than knobs. Each burner has six buttons and when any button other than off is pressed down the GE logo lights up red!

Last but not least there is a non-functioning blender built right into the counter top. It is a silver panel with one hole for the blender to go into and a big ass knob you turn. Again this must’ve been tits back in the fifties. I wish it still worked, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to get it back in working order if one were so inclined.

There are also a few other cool things I didn’t take photos of. The doorbell being one of them. It has a short but wide button and when pressed it clicks in and rings upon release. The ring is similar to that of an old game show bell and I think it is actually a bell being struck by a tiny hammer upon releasing the button. We must’ve pressed it twenty times to figure out where it was coming from and when we saw the little metal box in the hallway we realized it was also a vintage doorbell.

The bathroom also had some cool stuffs including a doorless medicine cabinet of sorts built into the wall across from the toilet to house your toilet paper, some magazines, misc. bottles and a hand towel. Then next to that low hanging wall unit is a similar style hamper built into the wall. It has a door on top to drop in your dirty clothes and door at the bottom to pull them all out come laundry time. I’m torn as it is very functional but oddly clunky, maybe more for the kids who have a hard time tossing their dirty clothes in the hamper.

It’s really cool to see old relics of past eras still in working condition in some slightly hood apartment in San Diego. It makes me wonder how many more gems like that are scattered all throughout the various neighborhoods in SD.

Samsung Vibrant – One Week Later

Well a little over a week has gone by and I must say I’m pretty happy with this phone. The screen and camera are pretty stellar. And it caters very well to needing to be connected to the internet at all times. At first I was reading around and a lot of people were bitching about battery life, gps, facebook syncing, foursquare and other various conditional bugs and weirdness. Naturally I assumed the same would be true about my phone but alas I’m all good.

My first gripe was the battery life. I was trippin out because I would use the phone from 7am to about 5:30pm on a full charge and the battery would be dead. This was of course with a magic moving background that reacts to touch, wifi, both gps modes, and gmail/twitter updates every five minutes. Upon reading around I figured the problem was the amount of shit I was needlessly running and not something wrong with the phone or its battery. It took me a second to realize my phone is basically a tiny laptop, in the sense that if I walked around with an unplugged laptop and worked it from 7 to 5 the battery would also probably be dead.

I fixed it by opening the browser on the phone and doing a google image search for “black.png”. From there I downloaded the smallest and blackest from the results. I read this on some blog (I read too many and didn’t bookmark, sorry I cannot properly credit the person, but THANK YOU!) and it also mentioned that the super awesome screen on the phone uses no battery when generating black (f-ing genius!) So by setting the black.png as the background my battery life became noticeably longer. I also changed the update settings on my gmail and twitter and set them to fifteen minutes instead of five minutes. I also keep the wifi and gps services turned off unless I need them, that way they aren’t needlessly searching for signal. I also read that any vibrating is using the battery up, I assume more so than silent or a regular ringtone since there was no mention of ringtones doing damage. I left all the cool vibrating shit on though because I enjoy the way it feels when I type haha. But I know I can kill it when the wow factor wears off if I want to milk the crap out of my battery life. To finish it all up I downloaded this task killer app that let’s you kill running apps that I run every now and then but not too often or I’ll waste my battery haha. My battery life on a full charge is now like 1.5 days 🙂

Another gripe was that it came with a bunch of pre-installed apps that you cannot delete with out “rooting” your phone. Which is making yourself the super admin of the phone which is awesome if you’re a semi-smart human but you risk deleting important shit and turning the phone to a paper weight. I had to download a few more apps but from there on it was all gravy. I deleted all the random crap but kept the Avatar movie cuz it’s friggin ridiculous. It is kind of lame that they make you basically void your warranty to remove apps you will never ever use… seriously who is playing Sims 3 on their phone??? That is some scary shit.

Other than that my gps is good enough, foursquare is kind of crazy sometimes and I still can’t sync with facebook but I will live without fb updating itself every 15 minutes. Oh and the wordpress app loads all your images at the top of the post for some reason (luh-haaaaaaaaaaaame). Android OS is pretty bad ass though and I am considering getting a book on it. The camera is pretty good too. T-mobiles network isn’t too terrible. I thought it would be worse because I never had a data plan and wasn’t too sure what to expect but I’m happy for now.

Labor Day Woot

All in all it was a fairly memorable holiday weekend. The Cono-Lu came down too, which is always a good thing.

I kicked it off with buying a new phone. After going thru two tmobile dash phones and relying on a beat up razor I use as a back up phone I decided it was time to up my phone game.

I wont lie I really would like an iphone but I dont even own a mac so changing mobile service providers just to own one seems silly. So I went with what for now seemed like the next best thing- the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant (It’s not an iphone)

It’s pretty nice and I really dig the android os. It’s kind of weird to always be connected to the internet.

Next highlight was the slaying of the San Diego bay. Conor and I were dropped off in coronado and rode down the strand and up past chula and nasty city before cutting thru down town and landing back at my place in city heights. 30 or so miles, felt great.

And Lu found me a sweet watch for $15.00 and the rest was history. It’s like time travel. A timex makes me feel like I’m eight years old! It is huge and has indiglo and I set it up to beep every hour 🙂

This is also my first post using the wordpress app for android.

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New Tires!

These fyxation tires are so effin pink! I sorta forgot because it had been so long. They are freakishly pink, like a toxic crusader. They are so bright I don’t even want to expose them to the sun because I know as soon as they see the sun they will begin a slow fade out too a chewed gum shade of pink. I remember when I got my first set of these tires I got various compliments from people in cars and random children who like pink (ewwww).

fyxation tires

Actual Pain – Destroyer Denim Vest

I am now the best dressed chicken in town! After staring at this thing for what felt like forever I finally pulled the trigger when the actual pain store had a 35% off sale. I’m a cheap fuxxor, what can I say.

The shoulders are a tad bit “renegade” but they will be fine once worn in.

actual pain destroyer denim vest actual pain destroyer denim vest

Rebel 8 Bidness

I splurged a tiny bit and got some Rebel 8 stuff, first time. A shirt, beanie and wallet. They cool, I’m happy… done deal. GET SOME!

The shirt is a Rebel 8 x Actual Pain collaboration, it’s kinda girly and not that interesting but I liked it for some reason. I liked it even more when I realized it’s a discharge ink shirt! All about that discharge printing. It also states you are not worthy on the back of the shirt which is like extra double plus radical points.

The beanie is a plain black beanie with white embroidered 8 on it. Fits nicely and the old lady says it makes me look like a different person, which after almost 11 years is a good thing. Hiyo!

Last but not least the wallet is pretty spectacular. Whatever printing method they used is proper. It looks beat as funk and it is really soft. Rebel 8 website states it’s 100% vegan leather (??) The white ink is rubbed off of all the textured spots of the leather and then an additional treatment is given that cracks it all up (I assume). It looks like you could easily pick it off, but I haven’t had any come off yet. It also sports a little riveted hole for easy clipping to my chain wallet. The card slots actually work and may actually use it. I’m currently rocking the billfold which is the wallet worlds equivalent of freeballin (which I also rock on the daily)

Xty & Chris go to Sonic!

So last night we got nuked and drove to the Sonic in Santee (it was seriously like 15 minutes away!) The watermelon slush ruled, and the burger was the stuff heart attacks are made of. It was pretty good, maybe cuz we ate it in the parking lot. On the way home I stopped by a porn store and bought a ten pack of Ez-Whips… from a guy who totally smelt like three days of unshowered spanking. Whip its are weird, they never change and make me think of death.

friday

In other news my bicycle, the Wildwood Flower is sporting a new look for the season with some riser bars and black Oury grips. I also bought some new pink fyxation tires for her b-day, which is my b-day (Yay us!). It’s like a completely different bicycle. It is much more upright now, and it takes me a little longer to get to work when I use them in comparison to the bullhorn bars (bullhorns = me go fast) These riser bars make it easier to do normal stuff like jumping up a curb or riding around on a dirt trail making the bike even more functional. I will post a pic soon. I’m hoping I can swing a set of fyxation grips in the same pink color as the tires in a little bit. But I’m happy with the Oury’s for now. Blah blah blah I still need a helmet.