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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Moving Day!

So last weekend I had the joy of moving from my old apartment (#6) to a new one across the courtyard (#5) and while moving sucks fat elephant balls it was a really good chance to give my toys the one on one dusting they have deserved for well over 3 years. The end result being a few alright photos of a decent pile of kaiju. The actual pile is about 2.5 laundry baskets worth of toys.

bucket-o-joy bocket-o-joy

the pile the pile

in the pile in the pile

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

Managing Custom Post Types, Oh My!

I was extremely stoked to hear that wordpress 3.0 was bringing custom content post types into the mix. Which I guess were supported in 2.9 but I never really knew that, go figure. Anyways upon updating I was confused. Where is this custom post type management area I asked. Everything looked the same.

Upon googling the topic I soon realized it was not as easy as I imagined. While it was as easy as pasting some code from a tutorial. I really had no idea what I was pasting. So I gave it a few weeks and searched again and I found something helpful.

I found two plugins (not modules… drupal heh) that pretty much made it as painless as I imagined it being.

The first is the Custom Post Type UI plugin. It does just as the title would indicate: provides you with a UI for creating and managing your custom post types. It also provides a way for you to create and manage taxonomies for your custom post types.

The second is the Simple Custom Post Type Archives plugin. Now after I created a custom post type with the greatest of ease with the above plugin. When you create a custom post type (ie: albums) each album post would have the url: blah.com/albums/album-title. Naturally I thought if I went to blah.com/albums I would get a list of all the album post types. I was wrong and was left ponder how I would go about listing these of on a page in an aggregated fashion like a category page. I tried a few things and failed. After some searching around I found this plugin. It literally just does that. It makes so when you go to blah.com/albums you will get a list of all the album post types. Just install, enable and boom! It was that easy.

I wanted to get a tad bit fancy so I created a type.php which is the equivalent of category.php. It worked for me because I have only one custom post type but I think you can get more control if you use type-album.php (album being the name of your custom post type)

With all that said you may notice there is now an audio link in the main navigation and there is no longer an audio category. That’s right. The albums are all their own custom post type. So I guess kudos to wordpress, great work as always.

Nom Nom Toys

I still lurk around toy forums and stuff. From time to time I see some toys that make me wanna break bread.

These particular ones are Real Head minis. I have a few Real Head regular sized figures that I like so it’s really been a matter of time till something I really, really like came out. Maybe two years ago or so Real Head took off and started making many, many more sculpts. Creating good guys and bad guys, giant sizes, cats, minis, super minis. They just expanded and just began dropping way too much shit for me to even bother trying to keep up with. It also in turn made any of the original Real Head figures before this growth spurt worth quite a bit of coin.

Anywhoo these figures are sweet and I want them. They look kinda evil except for the last one which I just like because it looks odd.

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.

Teaserville

Here’s some teasers from my new and still in progress work for the upcoming Rubber Buns and Liquor show on Saturday May 22nd at La Purga on 30th. I’m really happy with the new stuff and having a deadline has sort of pushed me to actually finish something so all in all it has been good so far. As is normal I am cramming tons of shit into the last week before the show while working a 9 to 5 so we will see how the finished results will fare.

Teaser 01 Teaser 02 Teaser 03

My First Flying Coffin

I have always liked Flying Coffin but I have never seen any size small for the stuff I dig. Today they re-stocked some cool shirts and I was actually able to grab a small! I’m actually kind of happy it took this long because it’s a pretty ill shirt and it’s a good way to start off. I know you know you want one too.

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Holy Crap!

So I guess over the past I dunno 10 years or so I’ve used the same paypal account to fuel my toy buying and other random online purchases and I received and email today from paypal informing me that I’m $587.04 away from the sending limit of $10,000!

I find it totally disturbing that I have spent 10 grand on stuff that I don’t even remember buying on paypal (that doesn’t even include crap I’ve paid for without paypal!). I mean what the hell I could buy an okay used car for that kinda scratch or like 8 really awesome bikes or a crazy obnoxious wedding… so many things. I do have a lot of toys though.