I love Craig's List

You know you've reached a certain age when you get excited about a vacuum cleaner. I just got a Dyson DC07 Animal off of Craig's List for $100 cash. It's not so much that "Yay! I just bought a vacuum!" as "Yay! I just bought a $500 vacuum for $100!". The guy that sold it to me only owned it for three months, used it like three times, was moving clear across the country, and was selling everything he owned rather haul it across country (something about owning a house here and a house there).

For the most part, the Dyson lives up to almost all of the hype. We vacuumed the entire house with the old vacuum, then went back over it with the Dyson. We filled the Dyson's canister up... three times. Pretty impressive/nasty ;)

And for no particular reason, I give you the Benny Lava video

Did it again

Well, I did it again: I changed jobs. My first day was April 14th as a "Senior Web Developer". I don't reveal company or people's names on this public blog, but as far as the company goes they're a downtown interactive marketing company that has been around since 2001 (with offices in several other U.S. cities). They were recently acquired by an international (also several U.S. offices with a major R&D location in India) software company. My primary focus will be implementing an existing web content management system and transitioning to a newer more robust system over the next several months. I've only been there a week and find myself overwhelmed with the workload, and that honestly makes the days fly by which is always nice.

As far as other stuff I went skeet and trap shooting for the first time a couple weeks ago. The trap shooting was awesome... the skeet shooting not so much. I definately need to upgrade from a pump action shotgun if I start going more often though.

I just don't learn...

Deja vu! I'm just a glutton for punishment: I paid $12 to go to the Cleveland Auto Show today. This year it was hyped as "the largest auto show in North America". There was hardly an exotic car to be found. I didn't see a single Bentley, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Lambourgini, or Ferarri. Maybe I just missed one or two buried in a corner somewhere. Not only were there no exotics, but the manufacturers didn't even bother to bring any cool or interesting concept cars. Cars you've seen a million times that are now hybrids don't count as concept cars. I wanna see crazy go-cart-esque shapes or solar panel arrays or something from the Jetsons.

Cleveland has dealerships for every domestic brand plus the more expensive stuff: Jaguar, Mercedes, Land Rover, Porche, Audi, Infiniti. What is the point of this show? At least at the dealership I wouldn't have to fight Ma and Pa Kettle and their kin just to see what the dashboard looks like.

The one thing I did notice at the various booths is that gas economy on alot of high end cars sucks. Several DOHC V6 Jags and Infiniti's I looked at got something like 21HWY/17CTY MPG. Really? Seriously? My 4000lb, 7 year old, 4 liter V8 gets 19MPG on average.

p.s. I took a single picture of the only car I considered worth it - a Lotus (pictured to the right).

Suuuuuuuuup?

I know it's a long time since my last post because I forgot the password to get in and add this post. Yep... that long. What's happened since October? Let's just make a list:

• Xena tore her ACL and needed ~$1400 in surgery
• Christmas - Got an XBOX 360 and new upscaling DVD burner/player. Put up a tree for the first time ever.
• Didn't get to go to Canada because between my house and my car, I managed to end up flat broke this year - and the exchange rate (lack thereof) sucks
• Got woken up by Xena at 1:30AM a week ago to find 4 Parma police cars and 6 cops wandering around the yard (never did find out why). The picture of Xena to the right is because she's my hero for actually waking us up to alert us of "intruders" in the yard.
• I volunteered myself into some side programming work

It's 2:20AM and that's all I'm gonna write, but the Christmas colors in the banner had to go.

New Site Home (kinda)

Thanks to a junked server from my employer this site is now hosted on actual server hardware with a server operating system (Windows Server 2003 Standard). It's only a dual P3-700 with 2GB of memory, but if you're reading this, then it's obviously getting the job done. It also doubles as a great BitTorrent server ;)

I have dumped Verizon after having been with them off and on for ten years. When it comes to handsets they just flat out suck. Rumors of cool new handsets abound, then every other craptastic carrier (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) ends up getting the handsest first. My "new every two" came up in June and Verizon didn't have a single new Windows Mobile phone out. I waited for these losers until a week ago, and finally jumped to Alltel with a PPC6800 phone. So far the customer service, signal, and pricing is great... so SEEYA Verizon.

Waste of Cleveland

I hit up the Taste of Cleveland today. If this "festival" or whatever it is supposed to be represents the diversity within our city, then we sorely lack it. There were multiple pizza places, a few bakeries, a handful of BBQ places, and one or two culturally diverse places: New Orleans style, Japanese, German, Indian (as in India, not Native American). We had some food from Schnitzel House (schnitzel sandwich), an Italian place (a 12oz bowl of pasta), and a bakery (Canoli and Strawberry Cream dessert), plus two sodas. The food was alright, but nothing spectacular or unique. The worst part was it was a complete rip off for barely two "meals": $6 parking, $10 in entrance fees, and $30 in food tickets. I don't know why I keep going back to this thing every year.

Since my last post I've gotten a couple new geek toys. My shiny new Toshiba X205-S9349 as my primary PC and a Logitech Harmony 890 Universal Remote (thanks to my awesome girlfriend!). I love the laptop, but as far as Vista vs XP my advice on Vista is: don't bother. Even if you can get Vista to work 100% with all of your existing software and hardware, the only technological advancement it has over XP is Direct X 10, and right now there aren't any really mind blowing DX10 games out (but they're coming...).

Corky

So things ended up not working out at my job after a year. Life goes on. In some ways it's a blessing in disguise, because I will now be employed by a former co-worker's company. I actually turned down an offer from another area company to take this position... I feel it was the right choice.

In my spare time (re: boredom) I've picked up interest in my Sony PSP again and modded it to the latest "open firmware" so that it can play NES/SNES/Genesis/PS1 and a slew of other ROMS on it. When I'm not mashing away at Mike Tyson's Punchout on the PSP, I've taken a liking to watching The Sopranos. However, after A&E jacked up their scheduling of the reruns, I've taken to ganking all the episodes off of tvtorrents.com. I love that freaking site. It's like having Tivo... without having Tivo. Any episode of most any show past or present can be downloaded on a whim. I've gone back and caught Southpark or Family Guy episodes that I missed on air. As Tony the Tiger would say... they're greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat!