Month: May 2007

Monday Wrap

I should have saved my Sunday Addendum for tonight’s post.

Yesterday I was all hyped up about Neflix’s Instant Watch deal, today not so much. There is a limited amount of movies available this way and you can forget about any new releases. Turns out it is more like subscribing to a second tier “premium” cable channel, but you get to pick what and when to watch not them. Here is a random row of four movies from the Action & Adventure category:
1) Flight of the Phoenix – 1965, starring Jimmy Stewart
2) Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter – 2001, starring who knows
3) Any Which Way You Can – 1980, starring Clint Eastwood
4) Daylight – 1996, starring Sylvester Stallone

Row three of the CD collection has been burned finishing up with Green Day. Next Row starts with Griffith, Nanci. So far, 292 folders containing 2,122 occupying 7.89 Gigabytes of hard drive space.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 148

Sunday Addendum

We had breakfast out at the Atlanta Bread Company before doing our weekly grocery shopping. Whole grain Bagel toasted w/ Cream Cheese for her and a toasted Apple Spice Bagel for him. Water to drink for both.

Meal Cost: $2.67
Tip: None
Spent Today: $2.67
Year to Date: $946.17

I’m thinking they didn’t charge for the cream cheese because that total sounds kind of cheap.

Donna made some of her famous Chocolate Chip Cookies for a meeting I have at work today. I of course had the sample them to make sure they were up to par. Ten cookies later I allowed that they were.

No way I could have worked off all the cookie calories consumed earlier, but a 14 mile tandem bike ride helped.

We stayed up way too late last night to watch “Living With Cancer” on the Discovery Channel. We both wanted to see it, but didn’t realize it was three hours long and didn’t go off until 11:00 PM. It was an interesting show, but most of it was not new to me. The first 45 minutes or so we covered the Lance Armstrong story (we were after all on the Discovery Channel) and who doesn’t know about him, a good portion of the second hour was on Leroy Sievers, who’s blog, My Cancer, I’ve been reading since he started it last year. The third hour was new, a live town meeting thing with an audience of cancer doctors, nurses, survivors and advocates. This was a little more interesting because it was unscripted. I’m sure they will rerun the show, and it is worth a look, but who knows when.

Nochnoi Dozor

AKA: Night Watch. I watched this movie today on the lap top because I knew Donna would want to have nothing to do with it. Now that I’m done, I’m not so sure I should have had anything to do with it either. At least I didn’t have to walk out to my mailbox to get it.

Blockbuster has got their own mail-it-to-your-house DVD rental program. They are now touting that you can return the mailed disc to the store and get a new movie without that long wait of a couple days. Well, Netflix has upped the ante, I now don’t even have to go the store. I can just click and watch. I’ve known it was coming, just not when, a couple months ago Netflix announced that you would be able to watch any of their movies on demand from the internet. How many movies you can watch this way depends on which plan you are signed up for.

What it amounts to, is for every dollar in membership fee you get 1 hour of movie time. I’m a One at a Time Unlimited for $9.99, so I can watch 10 hours worth of video per month. Your minutes don’t rollover, so it is use it or lose it. Night Watch cost me 1:49:19 leaving a little more than 8 hours and 10 minutes to use before my month ends on the 14th.

I have toyed with the thought of wirelessly piping Radio Paradise to the living room stereo from the desktop, but never really followed through because the TV is in the living room and almost all the time that there is a person in there they are watching TV not listening to music. Plus it is not real cheap to do. But now that such a system might be used for piping TV to the TV room, we’ll see.

I wonder what my cable company thinks about me using their internet service to, in essence, avoid using their pay-per-view or premium movie channels?

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 147

Flickr!

So late, I’m well past being fashionable. I’m pathetically late. I signed up for a Flickr account.

I’ve started by loading some of the Post Office photos and I got a little less than half uploaded today.

I really like the mapping feature, but it is for all your photos, so maybe I’ll just keep this account limited to SC Post Offices… Explore Brian the Red’s geotagged photos on a Map

Turns out that this thing (Flickr!) is so popular that there is a group set up for just about every type of photograph, including one for pictures of Post Offices. There are 135 members with 1304 photos in the group.

I’ve even added a little Flickr! thing in the sidebar.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 146

Blogger’s Night Off

Took this picture on my way in the door to work today:

Huh?

The security guard didn’t try and stop me.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, down once more, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 144

Champagne Edition

Practically every year since 1992 the folks at Mazda have released a special edition Miata. Usually unique in color and loaded with extras. Some of these are particularly sought after, especially the 1993 Limited Edition black with red interior and the 1999 10th Anniversary models. For 2007 there has been an SE in Japan and England, but not the US. It is similar in color to my car, but more like the 2000SE with a dark purple exterior and light beige interior.

The Japanese market is lucky enough to get a lot of other stuff that we don’t get over here. The best is something called Web Tune where you can order your car online after customizing it with all kinds of goodies that you can’t get here.

I found an image of a Mazdaspeed MzTuned Roadster on the web somewhere and it has been my PC’s wallpaper for a while. The car is in silver and it is kind of boring, so during a dull moment today I played around coloring it. They have made Miatas in a bunch of colors including a plethora of blues, several reds, a bunch of greens, most primary colors, including three shades of white, but they have never offered any kind of beige. I think this color I call Champagne would look pretty good on a Miata. Maybe it will be next year’s special edition color?

Tonight was the May meeting of the MMC, but at the last meeting they though it would be a good idea to meet at 7:00PM. This is later than Donna and I like to eat so we stopped on the way home from work and picked up our usual 14″ pie at Ferrando’s.

Meal Cost: $15.83
Tip: None
Spent Today: $15.83
Year to Date: $943.50

I think they have adjusted the crust to something thinner than they used to do, it was still good pizza, but slightly different. We ate 2 pieces each finishing half the pie. The second half is earmarked for Saturday lunch.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 140

Dull Day in the Life

The most exciting thing that happened today was I finally, nearly 3 weeks after the fact, completed all the captions of the 48 photos in the Northeast Trip 2007 gallery.

The second most exciting thing is I’ve completed my second shelf of CD burning with Deep Purple’s Made in Japan disc. If Lynyrd Skynyrd ‘s Free Bird is considered the Redneck’s National Anthem, Smoke on the Water is definitely the Stoner’s.

We ended up at the grand hotel
It was empty cold and bare
But with the rolling truck stones thing just outside
Making our music there
With a few red lights and a few old beds
We make a place to sweat
No matter what we get out of this
I know well never forget
Smoke on the water, fire in the sky

Fifteen hundred fifty-five files in 207 directories taking up 5.66 gigabytes.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 138