Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Warmth, please!?!

For the last three months I've been a lazy mofo. The weather in WI sucks!!! I just want it to get warm so I can ride my bike and work on my car. Knowhutimean?

I've probably gained a good 10-15lbs this winter and I really want to work it off. I'm too cheap/poor to get a gym membership, and the only two form of exercise that I like are swimming and biking. Considering that there are no free heated pools nearby, I haven't been doing anything.

My parent's have a nice exercise bike and treadmill, but I haven't been able to force myself to do either on a regular basis. They are soo damn boring!!! I've tried reading and watching TV but it still sucks. Also, my parent's get on my nerves pretty quick. I've had my own place for about 5 years now. Spending even a couple hours a day at their house sucks. Don't get me wrong, I come from a loving family. It's kinda like a family get together during a holidays. A few hours with family every few months is fine. Any more than that and things can get ugly.

So I'm left with riding my bike. When it's cold, windy, and rainy out, bicycle riding is no fun. But when it's warm out, I actually look forward to coming home and getting some exercise. I like to strap on my headphones and just let the scenery fly by while listening to kickass tunes.

I can't imagine what it would be like to lose 40-50lbs. Right now I'm at 265ish. Yeah, ouch. I think that my target weight is 190 (for a 6' guy). I REALLY can't imagine what it would be like loosing 75lbs. Geez, that would be the difference between carrying around a full size bag of rock salt. Give that a try for a 10 minutes. Now imagine what I feel like after working all day, carrying around 75lbs of extra weight.

Hey, I might even gain back some self-esteem and ask some hottie out. ...for the first time in waay too long...

Mother Nature, give me some love!

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Seventy friggin' Eight!

The new pope is a whopping 78 years old. I realize that this day in age, life expectancy has gone up quite a bit. He might have, what, 10 good years before he gets sick. What sense does that make? I realize that this process of picking a pope has been going on for a pretty long time. How about an age limit?

I don't mean to piss anyone off with this post. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Why not put a 60 year cap on the candidates? Do you really gain that much more knowledge after that point? If someone enters preisthood at 22, that is 38 YEARS of studying the same thing. The bible has around 1,300 pages. 38 years is 13,870 days. If you read at a leisurely pace of 20 pages a day, you could cover the bible 213 times. (I know I'm making this WAY too technical)

I wouldn't trust a 78 year old President. Heck, I wouldn't even trust a 78 year old relative to drive me to work.

You may still be learning things after 60, but people have a tendency to get set in their ways. The current world starts to drift away. You start to live in the past. Current issues and especially technology become confusing.

This is by no means bashing the Catholic faith. I consider myself a religious person and was brought up Lutheran. I think lots of things about the Catholic faith are pretty weird. You have your ways and I have mine. Everybody's happy.

Friday, April 15, 2005

A quickie with lotion

NJ got this from Scoot and I can't get the damn song out of my head. You've gotta check it out...

Lotion Video

You need Apple Quicktime in order to watch it.

The lipsync is perfect. I wish I new who made the song. It's really good!

(If you've never seen "The Silence of the Lambs", you won't get it.)

No Books, Just Mags

OK. Blogger ate my last three attempts. I got pissed and decided to play around with my profile. I noticed that I never had filled out the "favorite Books" section. That prompted this post. BTW, I'm authoring in WordPad from now on. Anywho...

I don't read books, just magazines. I think that the last book that I voluntarily read was in 7th grade. It was a cool sci-fi series called "The Stainless Steel Rat." The series was about a future super criminal. Very cool. By "voluntarily" I mean that it was the last book that I wasn't forced to read.

It's not that I have an aversion to books or anything. I just feel like I'm wasting time if I'm sitting still and doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. Even when I'm watching TV, I'll be reading at the same time or working at my computer (like now). I also like to be on the bleeding edge of current technology. My two favorite Mags are Sound & Vision and MaximumPC. The are both very well written and I learn something from each of them everytime.

Books are also painfully outdated. Heck, even the computer mags that I read have a difficult time keeping up with the current news. For instant news, I like to check out HardOCP, Arstechnica, and Tom's Hardware.

Actually, I have read a couple of books recently, but not "real" books. They were both on how to design and build a turbocharger system for my car. Is it wrong for me to not read "real" books? I hope not. I'm just extremely technical.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Good audio.

I miss my car stereo. I took my amps and my subs out a few months ago in order to make a custom trunk floor and re-locate my car battery. Between moving and other delays, it is still at my parent's house. Today not having my stereo was really killing me. As I've said in past posts, I love music. I love it when I hear something that makes the hair on the back of my neck and cheeks stand on end.

I built my car stereo for sound quality. I have more power feeding my door speakers than my subs. When other people hear my car stereo, they are amazed by how good it sounds even outside of the car. I have spent hours tweaking it until it sounded absolutely perfect. This included getting rid of various squeaks and buzzing.

This brings me to why I chose this topic for today. As I was filling up at the local gas station some moron pulls up next to my with their stereo BLASTING. It was soo horribly distorted, I don't understand how they could listen to it. I don't care how much you like the song...WHY!?! Are you trying to impress someone with evil sounds? Ladies, is hip-hop that is barely recognizable appealing? I don't get it.

I'm also confused as to why people buy iPods for over $300. You are only getting a measly 20GB hard drive. It does look cute and stylish, but $300 worth of style? Heck, a 100GB drive costs $200. I'm sure that apple is making at least $200 profit on each one of the iPods.

Then people go over to iTunes and spend $1 per song. WHY!?! Do you realize that you are getting a horribly compressed version of the song? You also aren't getting a hard copy of the song or the cover art. The other thing that I can't believe is that people are paying for music on iTunes that they already have. WHY!?!?!?!?! Get off you ass and learn how to make some high quality MP3s. I'll even give you the FREE tools...

Exact Audio Copy (the program)

LAME (the encoder)

EAC will run pretty well with the default settings. This is a true Power User's program. I've got mine set up to rip the CD, compress it, add a MP3 tag, and dump it into a specific directory named after the CD. It even ejects it when it's done.

I wanted to post some screenshots to help any newbies on setup but it looks like my image hosting site is broken. Doh!

Personally, I can't listen to poorly compressed low-bitrate MP3s. After a couple of hours I get physically sick of listening to them. It's not sick to my stomach or anything but it a weird tension. It's difficult to explain.

Even if you can't afford a pricey home or car stereo, save up and buy some good headphones. A pair of Sennheiser HD555's will run you about $150. They are worth every cent.

Get a good pair of headphones, plug them into your CD player, and turn off any EQ and bass boost crap. You will be amazed by the things that you've never heard before.

...puts on trusty HD455's and plays some Moby...ahhhhhh...


BTW, my subs are acoustic suspension NOT bandpass. Why in the world would you want to magnify something that is already painfully resonant? I could see maybe a 5th order bandpass to extend the subs range but who has that kind of space. (yeah I'm a geek, gearhead, and an audiophile)