i would read that page every day for the next year

I brought in a picture of the stricken Malibu on the back of the tow truck, but everyone expected it to be wrecked or something. Even though it was just a bad battery I still wasn't going anywhere. Philistines.

Since I can't spend money on an iPod or a car, I might buy a digital projector. I did all of five minutes of research and found a good looking one. So tomorrow I may go get it and rack up a million Best Buy reward points and turn my wall into an 80" TV. May as well get an upconverting DVD player while I'm at it. That way when my Project Gemini DVDs show up I'll be ready to rock.

On an unrelated note, there is apparently a Project X at work. I had never heard it before and then heard it twice today. If they wanted to name it something generic and low key, they picked the wrong name. What is Project X?

swing and a miss

I ran across an Apple store in the mall that at least had new iPods out on display. I had been trying to find one and was all set to buy one now that I'd found it.

And then I tried one.

My biggest complaint is that the scroll wheel sucks. It's jerky and not very sensitive and I don't like how the center button is now an 'innie' and bottom line the wheel experience put me off on the whole thing. That was hardly the end of it though. The shape is less rounded than my 4G and I didn't like that. The new anodized aluminum fron panel was also somehow annoying to the touch. On the software side of things, the operating system is so busy making fancy flying graphics that there is a lag when you switch menus rapidly. I also discovered that if you are listening to a song while scrolling through cover art, the song gets drowned out in static. Apple has obviously spent so much time making this a fashion accessory that they forgot that first and foremost it's a damn music player.

I was immensely disappointed. Here I was, one of millions of iPod fans, and I ended up walking out of the Apple store in disgust and into a Best Buy (despite yesterday's bad experience) to check out the competition.

But frankly, there isn't much. It pretty much boiled down to Microsoft's brown brick, the Zune. I played with one for a minute and liked how widescreen videos play sideways, so you can actually see it, but I couldn't actually work out how to get back to the menu. There were seven buttons and none of them did anything remotely menu-ey. So the controls are unfathomable. And that is before the host of other issues such as the crippled WiFi. At the very least I'm going to wait for the next generation so Microsoft can fix what it knows it screwed up. The Zune is a first generation product so I will give them the benefit of the doubt while they hammer things out. In the meantime I am going to have to make do with my iffy battery, floor-dropper 4G iPod.

I also picked up a Consumer Reports new vehicle guide, although it doesn't have any info on the G8. I am kind of cooling on the G6 again. Unless I really like the new G8 I may be holding out for the long term, most likely for a Camaro. So long as the Malibu keeps running.

there's beauty in the breakdown

Today was an adventure day, as much as I didn't want it to be. The company picnic was today. I figured I would hit Best Buy quick to see if the new 5.75G iPods were in and then head straight over to the picnic for lunch.

However, when I came out of Best Buy the Malibu wouldn't start. At all. It was totally dead.

I walked to the nearby gas stations but they were useless, so I had to call a tow truck. It eventually showed up and the guy broke out a battery booster, and after two attempts we got the engine running. However, when he removed the booster the engine died again. Tow Truck Guy declared the alternator broken, so I had him load the Malibu up onto his truck in the middle of the parking lot, causing a bit of commotion.

Tow Truck Guy kindly hauls my sorry ass over to Sears (saw a Ferrari 360 on the way) and dumps me in their repair bay, effectively allowing me to jump the line. After I settle with Tow Truck Guy, Sears Guy runs some more thorough tests and said it was the battery that was bad after all.

I went to pass the time in the waiting room, where a very static-y TV was showing U-O whoop on U-M, a game I didn't think I was going to catch any of. I also read an interesting article in one of the magazines about the roots of GM racing. I had a bag of salty stuff from the vending machine, which combined with the emergency Mt. Dew I had in the car amounted to everything I'd eaten so far today.

At one point Sears Guy came back and said they'd discovered my serpentine belt was badly cracked. I told them the go ahead and fix it and then, since I'd never heard of the damn thing, checked to make sure it wasn't in the same category as headlight fluid. Turns out it does exist, so good catch, Sears Guy.

I wasn't the only one in automotive purgatory. Another guy kept wandering in and out. After he wandered back in I asked him "So what are you in for?" So I talked with him a little bit. Mostly about how we wanted U-M to lose. Same with some of the other Sears Guys who were checking the score. One of them was once a Buckeye, so we were united by our common enemy. I thought the score was 12-7, but when I went to squint at it it looked more like 39-7. At that point the TV says "If you're wondering what the numbers at the top of the screen are, they are 39 and 7." Uncanny.

Eventually the Malibu is repaired and I am freed from automotive purgatory. I pull out of the Sears center and punch in the coordinates for the picnic in my GPS. Of course, following GPS to an unknown location is a tricky thing and I am nearly T-boned en route, but I eventually show up to the park around 4:30. I wander around for a little bit before finding a guy I know from work, who says the picnic has been over for half an hour. He then gives me a short tour, pointing where the tables of ribs and the raffle prizes were, and then shows me where the food was, which is now reduced to trays of baked beans.

So I got hosed. And now I have to spend all Monday explaining why I skipped the picnic.

And no, the new iPods aren't in yet. Lame.

day of the $115

By coincidence I spent $115 today both at work and when I got off work. The work one was buying 600' of Teflon-insulated wire for the Mk. V circuit I've been building. Since I was the one ordering it I got to pick the colors, so I went with gray orange gray. (Bonus points for getting that reference.) For the Mk. IV circuit I got stuck with red and yellow, so it looks like a condiment bar.

When I got off work I went down to Best Buy and got a new car stereo. The old stereo may have been reparable, but I decided $115 installed is not a bad deal. Especially for a stereo that actually has a knob and a front auxiliary jack.

On an unrelated note, as I was coming back from Best Buy I saw an H2 on the road equipped with FLIR on a telescopic mast. I have no idea what that's about but it was kind of cool.

what

As not a hell of a lot is going on this evening, I googled myself, and I actually got a bit of a shock this time. Apparently I've been credited in a powerpoint presentation by a Polish materials engineer. This was in regards to my work on nanostructured copper in Tallahassee. I hardly broke new ground but I guess I do a good job explaining the fundamentals of things.

watching wind scalp the white off the waves

All of the clocks in my apartment are wrong. This is made more annoying by the fact that two of them are atomic and one is internet-updated. The atomic ones are wrong because they are actually just 'atomic' clocks, i.e. they get a radio signal from a real atomic clock. Which never gets picked up in my apartment. Meanwhile the clock in my computer's system tray is supposed to update itself by talking to NIST, but some firewall or other miscommunication issue means it never ever works. To add insult to injury, my car's clock runs fast. Also the CD player broke. I'm fairly certain St. Joseph wasn't even involved this time.

In other news the hard drive transplant has taken so far, and I have a red stapler.

Other news in brief: Apparently the G6 is getting a new variant next year but will be more about looks than getting more power. Bush is an idiot (OFN), this time for suggesting we shouldn't have left Vietnam. The new Katamari demo's framerate makes it feel like the game is being played on fast forward.

swiss time is running out

Best Buy had a ridiculous sale on some different Norton software so I picked it up. Unlike Norton 360, it's what I actually expected from the beginning. Unfortunately, not all of the stupid little 360 plugins got uninstalled. I could occupy myself chasing them all down, or finally getting around to the reformat Freeman so badly needs, but instead I have decided to get a new notebook hard drive with twice the storage space, which isn't even going to cost me $120 because I went to Newegg.

I have also been picking which parts I want in the new computer, and it's kind of amazing how useless Best Buy is in this endeavor. It's not just that their prices are way higher - they don't even have some of the upper tier tech I'm after. They didn't have the 160GB Western Digital notebook hard drive, for example. Fortunately Newegg is a good source and will even store the list of parts for later. So I can see all the parts come to about $1600. I'm going to wait a few paychecks. In the meantime I should be able to occupy myself with Freeman's HDD transplant.

but i was haunted by the idea that i remembered her wrong

I have been saving up a list of things to get on Amazon.com but when I tried to order them I failed miserably. I was going to get a bunch more Tribune daily crossword books but all the old ones I don't have are out of print, and somehow I don't fancy a used one. I was also going to break down and get the final part of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays after several years of wanting it, but it turns out it hasn't been released yet.

never trust robots

Norton 360 is really dumbed down. It won't tell me anything it's been doing. I have to go three or four screens deep just for it to tell me how many files it's been messing with.

Even more annoying is how it demands it be turned on 100%. I like having the firewall and antivirus but the stupid browser plugin crashes IE and all it does is detect phishing scams, which I can do myself because I'm not an idiot. Norton also demands Automatic Updates be turned on, but I prefer doing the updates manually.

if you're not a machine we're in business

I got fed up with Kaspersky and bought Norton 360. Unfortunately Norton has dumbed down their interface a lot since I last upgraded. At least I can find a screen that calls the firewall a firewall instead of 'Anti-Hacker'. The old stuff was better. I only stopped using the old Norton software because Symantec sabotaged it after they realized you could gimmick it to not require renewal for updates.

The most interesting part was installation. I decided to install Norton without first removing Kaspersky so I wouldn't go without a firewall, and also just to see if Norton and Kaspersky would pick a fight with each other. Norton mostly minded its own business, but Kaspersky decided Norton was a trojan.

The security swap has added to my computer's instability, however. Some Norton plugin now crashes IE every time I close it, producing no fewer than 21 popup dialogs about memory read errors. I am putting off a reformat until I build my new machine. That's going to require like $1600 in parts though.

Also among today's spoils are Lego gummis. I couldn't pass that up.

On another note I am annoyed at my cell phone's adaptive text prompts. It learns words if you type them in manually, but it apparently deletes them if they haven't been used in a while. This usually comes up in the context of swear words.