guapacha.com

(2 updates in one day, aren’t you all lucky!)

I’m loving my iPod, already have 15Gb of music on it but I’m not having any joy with the music delivery system, aka the headphones. I’ve never been able to get the ‘inside your ear’ style to stay in my ears so I bought some that clip on to the top of the ear but after an hour or two they start to hurt. So now I’m back to the regular ‘sit on your head’ type, and will see how those work for me.

Song of the day: Emma Bunton Crickets Sing For Anamaria

Everyone is aware of the heat that one endures in the desert during the summer months, but many people don’t realise that we also get some nasty winds that pick up the dust and create little blizzards. Of course, Saturday I had my MINI detailed so last night the winds were fierce and down by Imperial Airport there were patches where you could not see more than a few feet where the dust was being blown across the road. I’m glad I was only driving by and not trying to land there. So today the MINI has a nice film of dust on it; still looks good though.

Another interesting thing about desert life is that when its hot outside the water in the toilet bowl gets hot. When you sit down to do your business, sometimes you get a real warm blast of air up between your legs. And not a lotta people know that.

I love extreme weather so I am a little envious of the people in Florida, Louisiana etc anticipating the arrival of Hurrican Ivan. Saw some neat pictures of high seas this morning as the outer bands of the hurrican were approaching. Of course I can do without the destruction and risk of death associated with these things but before I die I want to get close to a hurricane, some tornadoes and, the ultimate, a tsunami.

I like fast food and staying in hotels for work means I am eating a lot of it – so much for the weight loss I achieved earlier this year. Anyway, here are the totally undisputable – I dare you! – champions of fast food:

Best Burger: Burger King Angus Burger
Best Fries: Burger King
Honourable Mention: Wendys
DisHonourable Mention: Jack In the Box for introducing natural cut fries
Best Chicken Burger: Wendys
Best Chicken Nuggets: Jack In the Box
Best Salads:Burger King Fire-Grilled Salads
Best People-Watching:Carl’s Jr

Every month in the AOPA magazine there are reports of cities, counties whatever wanting to put houses and schools next to airports or, amazingly, under the approach path to airports. In the latest magazine plans are discussed for Oxnard, Riverside and Miami to name just three. Apart from the obvious safety issues, who wants to go to school next to busy airport noise? Same with homes, if you don’t love aviation why would you buy a house next to an airport? Now, in many cases the developers or city officials hope that once moved in they will complain and get the airport closed (“no I had no idea there would be airport noise when I bought this house next to the runway”) which most of the time is impossible as any airport that has accepted federal funds is obliged to keep the airport open for 25 years.

Oct 12th 2004: At the request of my employer, this article was deleted.

Ok, so I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that more and more ‘gentlemen’ are not flushing the urinal after use. I think it must be 50-50 right now as to whether there will be a nice clean bowl when I go into the bathroom or a stinking yellow fluid to look down on. Its the office, its public restrooms at the beach, the freeway, restaurants, everywhere. Has our society become so selfish and lazy that we can’t even flush the freaking toilet after ourselves now??

Sitting in my hotel last week I watched a lot of Olympics which surprised me as in 2000 I found the US TV coverage of the games to be unpleasant and distasteful: no coverage of foreign athletes and way over the top hyping of even the most unqualified US contender. This time around it seems better, sure we don’t get to see events that aren’t contested by a strong US athlete and if a foreigner beats an America we often don’t see them for more than a split second, but I am enjoying the games this time around. Now if they would only show a British athlete…. but, I know, you blink in an early round and you’ve missed them.

In case anyone is wondering about my PC woes, I have everything working but the performance of the 3.2G P4 chip is sorry to say the least. I’ve learned that the people at ChipsAndMemory are clueless morons and I will never buy from them again. During the install my digital vidcam decided it didn’t want to talk the firewire any more which is a major pain since the 8mm film transfer relies on it. Canon vidcams are notorious (I have since found out) for not working with firewire cards. Odd thing is that it was working on my old machine fine before I built the new one; now it won’t work in either machine. I have other firewire devices that are working so its definitely an issue with the Canon camera.

So no updates this past week due to the fact that I started a new job in San Diego and didn’t bring the URL to the post page with me! But yes I am finally back to work not much to do in my first week but once they discovered I was a Perl person they had me fixing Perl programs – seems that no matter what I get hired to do at any company, I end up writing Perl.

Oct 12 2004: At the request of my employer, I have removed all references to the names and places of my employment from this article.

Found out about this cool service today on the MINI forum I read. At PhotoStamps you can upload any picture you want and they will send you real bona fide stamps with that picture on. It works out around 75c for a first class stamp but would make a great item for mailing special cards etc.

Update: The site doesn’t appear to work in Firefox 🙁