regularly scheduled programming

Lisa & Jeremy were at the Cerimeles' reception tonight - they had driven down from Oregon and got in late last night. At one point I was showing them how my Oregon driver's license has my name mispelled. Between that and the sticker for my new address smearing I'm going to get a fresh one from the DMV.

Lisa mentioned how she wanted to have Oregon plates but a Washington license, and had her lawyer uncle look into it - apparently Washington doesn't allow it, but Oregon does not technically mind if your license and plates are different states. Well, there goes my incentive to swap the Malibu's plate. In fact, one sad fact I had been prepared to accept was that getting a new car would mean Oregon plates, as I am still exiled out here by the Michigan economy. But here's an alternate strategy: I can fly out to Michigan, get the car there, register it in Michigan, drive it back (thus breaking it in) and the cycle continues. It's not entirely daft - I would then be able to draft the help of family members who have been through the car buying process before. Genius.

Speaking of cars, I have to give up my holiday romance tomorrow as the Impala SS goes back. I think I pretty much disliked it except I became so enamored with the engine I glazed over everything else. I will have to make sure that doesn't happen when getting a new car.

san diego 2.1

Wedding reception is over. Revelries are over - at least for me. My butt is back on a plane for Portland tomorrow morning.

san diego 2.0

I am in San Diego now. Unlike when I was here last it is cloudy and about 60 degrees, so not much of an improvement over Oregon. All my travel plans surprisingly went off with no problems - I even got an Impala SS as a rental car, which is a 303HP V8. It's got less than 8000 miles on it too. More now though - I've already used a third of a tank of $4.05 gas. Saw some cool cars around here - some kind of convertible Bentley coupe getting on the highway, and then a Ferrari F430 Spider on a back road.

The wedding was supposed to take place on the beach proper but apparently it was not low tide as planned, so they ended up doing it on a cliff thing overlooking the beach, which was probably even cooler. It worked out OK except it was kind of hard to hear what was going on, although only three people actually needed to know what was going on. Some helicopters flew overhead at one point which drowned everything out, and then just as they finished the weather started to get nastier so we all broke and made for the restaurant.

and in a moment i am gone

I am trying to load into my GPS the critical places for my friend's wedding in San Diego. It isn't going well. He is getting married on a beach - apparently beaches don't have addresses. I found coordinates on one website but they must have botched it because I put it six miles out in the Pacific.

My new headphones are too good for work. I can't hear a damn thing with them in. I will save those for the plane and break out the backup pair I also got.

j5 industries

I've been using the pseudonym J5 Industries for a couple years now. I picked it because I thought it sounded clever and that nobody else work use it. Well, I'm wrong. I did a Google search and it appears there are a couple of actual companies by that name - one rents generators, another does countertops, and there are some nondescript ones in California. Between them they seem to have taken AIM and Gmail. I've got the Xbox Live account though. And this.

when this is through

I've had my projector set up for my Xbox for a while now. My DVD player is also hooked up but I've never been able to use the upconvert feature. I primarily use component video but the player refused to upconvert except for HDMI, and the correct adapter doesn't seem to exist. I gradually pieced it together with DVI as an intermiediary, but it turned out one of my DVI cables had two more pins than the other so I had to get another adapter. I finally got that and hooked everything up...and it doesn't work. It turns out my DVD player is riddled with copyright protection and refuses to engage the HDMI port unless it gets a handshake from an equally paranoid TV. So now I have to see if I can find an upconvert DVD player without copyright protection.

Traffic was surprisingly stupid today. Going through town I hit every red light except for the ones where I actually wanted to stop - say, to take a picture of the V8 Vantage going the other way. Some cyclist decided it would be a good idea to cut across a busy road instead of waiting for a gap, and I got stuck behind a van with a bumper sticker saying 'SLOW DOWN'. Nobody seemed to know what lane they needed to be in either.

I went to Fry's this weekend for new headphones because my old foldable ones fell apart. I decided to go for the in-ear type, the kind usually blamed for causing hearing damage. I normally hate that type, but that is because I've only tried the hard plastic ones - all the decent sets have silicone padding. Surprisingly, the pair I got has a better frequency response than my old headphones, and since it's in-ear all that sound is pumped directly into my head. I can barely hear myself with them in. It's kind of a pain to get them both in correctly, which isn't helped by the fact that my hearing is very slightly asymmetric. There is still the problem of how to store the damn things without them getting tangled.

homework

I have homework. I have to give a presentation tomorrow about MRB instead of being able to work in MRB and actually do something partially useful. They drag me into these meetings and then wonder why MRB doesn't get done. The presentation is for another of the endless string of Germans that seem to get shipped over here to learn how we are doing things, but I am still whipping some slides up. I hate homework.

I finished the story of GTA IV last week so I went around grabbing a bunch of relatively easy achievements. I started playing a little bit of the multiplayer mode and it is pretty fun. The maps are so huge that you can find yourself well out of the way of the action.

a fabrication of our own

I finished that awful book. The ending was even worse than the body of the book so I pretty much didn't read any of it. They end up failing in the end anyway, which wasn't a surprise because the characters pretty much failed their way through the entire book.

I am now indulging in another awful book, but one with some history - I bought a new copy of the Hardy Boys/Tom Swift crossover book, which when I was a kid I thought was the most awesome book ever.

I only have about 6 story missions left in GTA IV and an hour and a half of game time left to do them in. I have to say this achievement is extremely un-GTA because it emphasizes not screwing around.

but at that time i couldn't see it

My stupid cold dragged itself out much longer than I would have expected, and I'm still working on the last 1%, but I am much better now. Finally having a weekend where I could sleep in helped - unfortunately it is back to the grind tomorrow. San Diego in less than three weeks though, even if my overall plan is still half baked.

I picked up GTA IV and so pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a few days. I have to focus on the storyline now because there is an achievement to beat the story missions in 30 hours, and I do not ever want to play this game all the way through again. It starts off really slow and never seems to open up the same way previous games did. I pretty much forced myself to keep going to open up new areas. The graphics make GTA IV look like it's been taken to a new level but in terms of actual gameplay it's actually been brought way back from where Vice City and San Andreas were - at least in the parts that mattered; we have traded car customization, side businesses and jetpacks for in-world internet spam.

I've not only been playing GTA IV - I also picked up Consider Phlebas, the first book in the 'Culture' sci-fi literary cycle. The setting for the book seems very interesting but the actual events of the book are petty, overdescribed or downright uncalled for. I am finding myself pretty much skimming the book for the parts where they talk about the setting as a whole. Unfortunately this book was described as the best in the series, so it may be downhill from here.

Not much of what I would consider interesting car news lately, although there was the story about the "Return to Vanishing Point" Challenger. The very first preproduction Challenger was rescued from the crusher, painted white and entered in a race under a Vanishing Point theme...unfortunately reality seems to have mirrored art too closely, as the Challenger met a tire wall during a time trial and seems to be out of action. At least for that particular race.

to whom speed means freedom of his soul

For as much as I profess to love cars I really have no interest in motorsport. The epic battle of the C6.R vs the DBR9 is pretty much visible only to the Europeans, and rallying is so dragged out it would be impossible to follow when the events are. NASCAR I just find appalling. My only real fondness for the sport was when I found myself in a restaurant in Government Camp watching a Pontiac GXP.R mix it up with some 911s at Laguna Seca. Unfortunately I don't really know what series that is or when it runs, and I still don't have TV anyway.

I finally decided to board the geek train after everyone else and watch the first season of Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately I watched half of the first episode at 2AM when I was knocked on my ass by a head cold - that really messed me up for the day. The series started off well enough, if depressing - I had no idea of the premise of the show - but it already seems to be dragging down into the same formula. Oh look, they are running out of another critical resource. Another dozen Vipers out of their ostensibly finite supply get blown up to acquire it. And then Baltar gets caught in a wacky awkward position because he has a Cylon in his head. I looked at some later season spoilers and it sounds like some serious retconning happens as well. I don't know if I'm going to pursue this past the first season.