Biked about 15 miles today, looking for Geocaches. Had to quit when the battery on my cell phone died. Took a few pictures.
Went Geocaching yesterday too. We did 8 or 9 of them during a hike. Had Mexican food and saw Knowing, which was a really bizarre movie.
Today I plugged my phone into my laptop to sync some music and decided to delete/move some of the pictures while it was hooked up. Here’s a few of my favorite grainy pictures. This first one is a smoke shop in Corvallis that I was walking by earlier this month.
Here’s my downstairs bathroom light fixture containing red green and blue lights. Only the blue light is more like a black light, so that throws the whole idea of turning RBG into white light out the window. But it still makes cool effects when you’re peeing.
The kids and I were driving in Corvallis and noticed identical shoes coming out of both windows. Look closely and you’ll see there’s feet out the other back window too, but his shoes don’t match. I don’t think the driver had his feet up, but it’s hard to see him.
Here’s a personalized plate we found at Albertsons. I’m wondering if the wife got it for him during a bitter divorce.
This one I took this one a couple days ago in Salem. I asked the guy getting in if I could snap a picture and he said sure and got out of the way for me. He was, as you’d expect, pretty weird.
I didn’t do much this weekend. The kids weren’t around, so I went to Salem to do some shopping and returning. Yesterday I vacuumed the house. Man, that was exciting. I had to dump the vacuum bin 5 times! On Saturday I got up at 5am to do a phone mob, which I turned into a PLA Radio yesterday. I only lasted 90 minutes into it, then went back to bed for a couple more hours. I watched Step Brothers which I didn’t expect much from but ended up LOLing at a lot. I also watched an old 70’s movie called Paper Moon which was really good. Oh yeah, Payton was here for a few hours on Saturday morning and we watched Stephen King’s Christine together. I hadn’t seen it in at least 10 years and it was fun to watch again. Payton liked it too. Geez, I watch too many movies.
A guy from an online “radio” station called Party 934 contacted me a few weeks ago about doing a weekly show on their station. He said I can do pretty much anything I want so I said sure and I’m doing an hour per week. They’re licensed to play actual music and insist that I play at least 4 songs per hour. He says it’s a terrestrial station too and goes out on 102.5 FM in the Hudson Valley in New York. I’m feeling a little skeptical on that part, though, since I can’t find any records on that and last week when I did the show I couldn’t get anyone to call in. It is the middle of the night there, though. From 2am to 3am.
I’m calling it The Phone Show since I’m sure whatever I do with the show will somehow involve phones. I set up a couple computers so that I can take calls on the air with it too, which seems to be working fairly well. (Thanks, Darin Abernathy, for helping me test!) And they gave me a really neat program made for broadcasting online stations. I guess tonight will be the first official show, since I’ve actually announced it on here and on phonelosers.org now. I haven’t prepared a bit for it and I have no idea what I’m going to do on it. It can be listened to on party934.com Monday nights from 11pm PST to midnight. Which is 2am to 3am Tuesday mornings EST. What a horrible time to do a show! The official page for it is www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow but there’s nothing on there yet.
I really want to see this movie. It looks so beautifully weird and interesting. I remember that head janitor guy from Rat Race. I’ve watched the trailer 3 times now. I can’t wait to see this one. It’s in my Netflix queue.
Speaking of movies, we saw Mall Cop this weekend. Despite a lot of very obvious plot holes that even my kids were spotting, it was a fun movie and we really enjoyed it. I was surprised at what a clean movie it was. I expected the usual dose of bad language, fart jokes and general raunchiness for this type of movie, but there was none of that. It was unexpected. My mouth is still in pain from the crazy amount of butter salt we put on the popcorn. (We always bring our own.)
I discovered a new comic today that I really like. It’s called Being Five and it kind of reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. Both me and Payton read every single one of them from the blog today. Here’s a sample:
Can anyone tell me why xkcd is so incredibly awesome? Each comic is greater than the last and today’s is my new favorite.
Lately I’ve been listening to a podcast called Welcome to Mars which is actually a 12 part radio series that some guy produced for some station. Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.
Subscribe to that podcast here. I’ve only got a couple more episodes to listen to. I still listen to lots of podcasts, but I’m too lazy to post names or links to any of them. I need to update my list in the sidebar.
On Saturday I went on a hike with some people, which included finding a few Geocaches. One was in a tree, about 12 feet up, so you had to climb it to retrieve the logbook. I was happy that Holly did that so I didn’t have to. Another one was inaccessible because of overgrown thorns and brush. And the 3rd was the coolest Geocache I’ve ever seen. You had to pop the cap off of an aluminum fence post, then pull on a bolt that was stuck in the side of it. The bolt was attached to a long piece of wire, which pulled a pole up through the post, knocking the cache out of the top. It was like something you’d see in the Goonies. I took a video of it and I’ll post that on here later if it doesn’t suck.
Today I spent most of my day in Portland. I ate a lot of Pez. Caught up with some really old friends on Myspace.
The New York Sun reports that the price of gasoline in the US will soon be in line with what Europeans pay. Translating this price into dollars and cents at the gas pump, one of our forecasters, the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, sees gas rising to $7-$8 a gallon. The other, a commodities tracker at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., Sean Brodrick, projects a range of $8 to $10 a gallon. –from here
While it sucks that gas costs so much and this is seriously screwing up my recreational travel, I think this is exciting news. Insane gas prices like that sure would give the U.S. a much-needed shakeup. We’ll finally be forced to find alternatives to everything. As much as I love owning a car, I would love to have an excuse to get rid of it. Maybe some of the awesome stuff that I always read on ecogeek.org will actually start happening. Maybe middle class people will have to start riding the bus. It’ll be anarchy! The prices are going to suck but I’m positive that good things are going to come out of it.
In more important news…
Last week I bought a new cell phone. It’s a Blackberry 8830 and it rocks. It’s got the best web browsing capabilities of any cell phone I’ve ever owned, it tethers internet to my laptop and it easily syncs all of my Outlook data to it. Plus it does really cool things with Google Maps and GPS. There’s even a geocaching program I can buy for it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t have a camera. I was able to sell my old LG phone for more than half of the cost of this phone. And since this phone is a replacement for my Pocket PC, I’m selling that too. In the end, I’ll be making almost $100 from buying this new phone.
Listened to a couple episodes of a podcast tonight called Public Nuisance Radio which isn’t the best show ever, but it introduced me to a new song I like. It’s by a band called The Vandals and the song is called My Girlfriend’s Dead. It’s in their playlist so go listen to it. It seems like all my favorite podcasts have really slowed down or quit lately. I need to find some new ones to listen to. At least the first one I tried gave me some new music, even if I’m not crazy about the show.
Yesterday the kids and I bought a couple pumpkins and they carved them. The one on the left is Emily’s and the one on the right is Payton’s. I was surprised to hear that they’d never done this before. I don’t know why I never got them pumpkins before, I guess I just never thought of it. I think it’s been more than 10 years since I carved one. In fact, I think the last time was when Sylvia and I stole a giant one from a pumpkin stand, not realizing that carrying it 2 miles to my parents house on foot would be really hard. Part of the time we made a sling out of our jackets and carried it between us.
My cat climbs on everything. He climbed up the side of one of my shirts to get to the top of my closet in that picture. It’s annoying. I’m really torn on the issue of declawing him. But I’m starting to think it’ll have to be done soon. I thought that I wouldn’t care before since I don’t ever intend to own any nice furniture that he would scratch up. But I can’t have him destroying my shirts.
I throw him out of my office 3 or 4 times a day and shut the door to keep him out. He loves to go behind my desk and chew on wires. He’s also chewed on the plants a little and once spilled a little dirt on my laptop. It’d sure suck to have the whole plant come crashing down on the laptop keyboard. So I have to lock him out of my room when I leave. This evening he was playing behind the desk and stepped on the main power supply to everything, shutting off my desktop. Not that I was using it, but I wanted to kill him. Tonight I put my large collection of Priority Mail boxes to good use and fenced him out of the area with the wires:
The boxes were the perfect height, and I was able to use the sticky strip on the top of them to stick them to the desk so they don’t fall over. We’ll see how long this lasts. Right now he’s laying on my lap, purring. Normally I would have thrown him out of the room by now so this is looking good.
I guess his name is Charcoal since that’s what the kids are insisting on.
Right now I’m listening to Episode 7 of Haxor Radio. It’s probably one of the most informative shows I’ve ever heard, covering radio shack policies and a bunch of cell phone stuff that’s interesting to me. Plus they hax0r MY Radio Shack account info. Go listen to their shows.
The Delta Park Project played another one of my voicemails. It’s here:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/deltapark/DPP-2007-01-09.mp3
Scroll to 22:35 to hear me talk about wanting to adopt lots of African babies to impress my favorite actress with.
I got 11th place in a photoshop contest, revamped the commenting system on phonelosers.org (for the 3rd time in a year now, this time completely in PHP), revamped Old People Are Funny and added some forums to it (some podcast plans to feature it on their show sometime this week), released another Big Beef Bueno, got #2 in Mahjong, and then #1. I didn’t even play much today, I just happened to have a couple of good games.
Also, Delta Park Project played another of my voicemails. It’s on the last 20 seconds of this show. But the show is a “best of” show and both of my other 2 voicemails are also thrown into that show. So apparently I’ve done some of the best parts of a show that’s up to it’s 83rd episode.
Emily was on the Twisted Pickle show this morning for her promo. Click here to listen and forward to about 4 minutes 25 seconds.
I was going to do a promo for Corby but Emily won’t let me cause she doesn’t want the competition. So I made one for Nate and Di instead.
Oddly enough, the very morning after Emily submitted her promo last week, I got this email from Corby:
Sup Brad, how are things? Just got a great submission
for my recently posted contest but I think they
sent it to the wrong address. I think this actually
goes to you…
Attached was a promo for PLA radio which can be heard on this page. It’s the #5 promo by Evan.
In other news, yesterday was really exciting because I installed a ceiling fan in my office.
Open up this mp3 file and then fast forward about 12 minute into the show. You’ll hear Nate and Di drive into a parking lot, find an unlocked car, both jump into the front seats and smoke an entire joint. This stunt alone has made me a fan of theirs for life. Though, they do lose points for not hiding out in the parking lot afterwards and taking pictures/video of the confused motorist.