Planetspork

While vacationing over the last 2 weeks, I ran into some guys at a skatepark in Longmont, Co. I took some pics and was supposed to have them on by Thursday. Here it is Friday afternoon and I’m just now posting them.. I am a slacker. Enjoy.

This one didn’t turn out.. Sorry man.

So I was granted access to Apple Motion and Final Cut Pro. They are some dandy tools. I spent a few minutes playing with Motion and and some old logos.. The movie sucks. Whatever. Choke on it.

If you’ve ever been to South Dakota there are two things that you might remember. The first is how cold it is. The second is how straight and boring the roads are. Having said that, it was really no surprise to glance over at the speedometer of car I was in and see it approaching 95 or so. I mean.. we’re going straight.. there’s *nothing* around.. with the exception of the very nice police officer that saw us.

I really did feel bad for Travis as the officer approached the car. But my feelings of compassion flew out the window once I realized I had my camera in tow. So I too, hopped out of the car and snapped a couple of pics in the car with his new friend Officer Ticketmaster.

The ticket wasn’t apparently that much money, because 30 minutes later I looked over at the speedometer and we hadn’t really free motorola razr ringtones | free mosquito ringtones | free mobile ringtones | alltel cell free phone ringtones | info personal polyphonic remember ringtones | caller ringtones | free mobile phone ringtones | kyocera ringtones | free phone ringtones | download polyphonic ringtonesкомпютри втора употреба | download nokia ringtones | cell phone ringtones and wallpaper | motorola q ringtones | make your own free ringtones | download free samsung ringtones | 24 ctu free ringtones | motorola tracfone ringtones | cingular download free ringtones | funny ringtones | download free cricket ringtones | slowed down all that much.

Yeah.. South Dakota. So what? I “get” to go to all kinds of neat places because of my job. Good fun. This week, I was in Pierre. I will say that I was there for less than 24 hours so I didn’t have a chance to fully take in all the glory and beauty that is Pierre, South Dakota. However, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference were I to have extended my stay since it was about -20 degrees outside. I would have been holed up in my hotel room. Ick.

Well what do we have here? Yes. It’s a capital building. Tall, majestic and frozen. It was about -20′.

Believe it or not, this is the Pierre Airport Terminal. Not the commuter terminal where the private jets fly in or anything like that. It’s the whole terminal. It was about -20′ here.

If you click on the larger image, you’ll see every flight coming into and out of Pierre. The fact that it fits on just 1 photo says volumes. Honestly though, I rather liked this. The planes that make the trip are 19 seat Beechcrafts, so there’s zero wait to get through security.

And this fine specimen is the 19 seat Beechcraft I mentioned earlier. A truly remarkable aircraft. Only 1 person gets a middle seat, everyone else gets both a window and an aisle. I’m still not used to walking across the tarmac to get to the plane. It was about -20′ as we boarded the plane.

The other very nice feature in the Beechcraft is the complete absence of any kind of barrier between the passengers and the pilots. I’m always worried what the pilots are doing in the front of the larger aircrafts.. Like how would we know if they get the plane off the ground and then start doing tequila shots to pass the time?

In this plane, you see it all. I witnessed the co-pilot act as the flight attendant (Sit down, no food, no water, no bathroom so I hope you went before you got on. See you when we get there.) and I was able to witness them catching up on some light reading mid flight. I guess flying sucks for pilots, too.

It was a great place to visit, but I’m glad to be home. When the temperature in your refrigerator is a full 50 degrees warmer than it is outside, something has gone horribly wrong.

Over the weekend, I was in Iowa. This trip was markedly different than most of my trips to Iowa. This time, I was there for pleasure. Weird, I know.. Like what’s fun in Iowa? Well, skiing. Not *great* skiing, but skiing none the less. Bad skiing is like bad pizza and bad sex… still better than broccoli and a bad porn magazine. I digress..

On the way home, we were immersed in a snow storm that slowed our movement to about 25 MPH. People should have been going that fast, however, many could not. We saw so many people in the ditch, I felt compelled to bust out my camera and snap photos of each one. Tons of fun…

Anyway, I’m bored of typing already and haven’t really gotten to the point of this post. Today, I’m proud (eh…) to announce the release of Return from Iowa. It’s a great movie highlighting 30 minutes of driving between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. If you’re a Naked Raygun fan, you’ll get an extra bonus. If you ARE Naked Raygun (or Jeff Pezzati) and you’re annoyed that I used your tune, let me know and I’ll throw the whole thing in a pile and light it on fire.

Without further ado, please enjoy. It’s all kinds of good.

Joy to the cows.

Couple of things about me that you may or may not know:

1) I’m married with kids
2) I’ve had a vasectomy.

Why would I start a post this way? If you’re not clever enough to figure it out so far, read on and it’ll be clear.

This April Fools Day started as many Sunday’s start for us. Nothing to note out of the ordinary until about 8pm when my wife and I were putting the kids in bed. My wife looks at me and says, “I need to talk to you.” ANY man in the world knows that NOTHING good will follow.

My thoughts were circling around the “What did I do now…” question as I walked into our room and sat down on the bed. She looked at me and didn’t say a word. From beside the pillow, she reveals a pregnancy test. This alone is enough to strike terror, but couple it with point #2 from above and you can start to see some additional concerns.

She says, “We’re pregnant.” And as I stare at this pregnancy test that clearly indicates a “+” for pregnant, I wonder how in the world this possibly could happen.

I stammer around a little bit and mention that she’s going to need to get her tubes tied in addition to the vastecomy “touch up”. She looks flatly at me and says, “That’s understandable.. If this weren’t an April Fools Day joke, I’d go ahead and do that”

Yes. Wife: 1 Brent: 0

The immediate followup question: So who’s actually pregnant? Some lady at my brother in law’s office.

On an unrelated topic: New people on my list to get even with are my brother in law, sister in law, mother in law and my wife. Not that this joke wasn’t somewhat deserved, but no good deed should go unpunished.

Recently, I got into a conversation about people I’ve worked with in the past. This inevitably led to a discussion of Vab Goel which got me thinking about the vabsterdance site. “Vabsterdance?”, you say? Rather than explain it, just have a look.

Pinewood Derby has been the glory race for cub scouts since the 50’s and maybe longer (I didn’t research this, so whatever). My son was of age to participate this year and won best design for his “shark” car. He was very excited about it. While this is interesting, it’s not the main point of the story.

The same day that my son came home with a trophy, his cousin called me and asked for help in finishing his car. His dad isn’t ‘good with tools’. I invited him over and we began. After sketching the design on the side of the car, I broke out the jigsaw and trimmed off a piece of the car. I then turned the car to take off another piece, the saw slipped and I bumped my index finger.

I won’t lie; it hurt. Bad. So as I stood their clutching my finger, I look up and see my newphew mildly amused and not entirely sure why I had stopped. I look over at my brother-in-law to a stunned/shocked look. I went inside and applied some first aid, rinsed it off and went back to working on the car. We finished the car the best we could and they eventually went home. Fast foward two hours.

My wife arrives at the house after having her cell phone stolen at a “Sesame Street Live” show (probably a funnier story..) and decides immediately after seeing my finger that I need stitches. I’m irritated at this point since the bleeding at pretty well stopped and I wasn’t excited about sitting around in the emergency room for 2 hours only to have it followed up by some overworked doctor poking me repeatedly with needles. Not to mention they probably have to remove my finger nail to get the stitches in. Long story short, the doctor looks at it and says, “We can’t stitch that. Keep it clean and don’t mess with it. It’ll be fine”. Two hours, $50 and a bandaid later I’m on my way home.

Oh, and before I forget.. here’s the pic of my finger the day after.

I’m sitting in the office still in awe of my newest technology acquisition. It’s silver, it’s sleek, it’s faster than the IBM T41 that was so impressive a mere 3 years ago. This is, without question, the best technology purchase I’ve ever made. Tada! It’s the MacBookPro!
By now, you probably thinking that I’m either a Mac apologist or a simpleton easily impressed with shiny objects. You’d be right; shiny things fascinate me. After having a PC laptop for the past 10 years, I feel that I have enough relevant experience to make a few comments. One, windows sucks. I’ve tried folks, really, I have. For 10 years I used it. I lived through the pain that was Windows 95, Windows 98. Heck, I even upgraded to NT workstation when it came out. Better, but not great (certainly better than MacOS at the time). I’ve been an XP user since it came out. The problems change, but it still kinda sucks. Anyway.. enough of that and on to the *real* reason I’m writing this.

My friends all had Mac Powerbooks and incessantly droned on and on about how nifty the “Mac Experience” was. I was intrigued, so I talked myself into trying the Mac Mini (since I wasn’t excited about throwing $3000 into what would be an experiment, at best). I went to the Apple store just up the street and once I entered the door, I realized this was not going to be an ordinary PC purchase.

The place was packed. I mean PACKED. Why so many people were at the Apple store in the middle of the day on a Tuesday still has me confused. At any rate, I approached the clerk and said, “I’d like to buy a Mac Mini”. She disappears into the back room and comes back with box so small that I thought she was kidding. I give her my credit card and then head home, wondering how they could have packed $600 worth of computer into a box my shoes would not fit into.

It was very weird being able to shuffle in the door with a new computer in hand, but not having to ask my wife for help with the door. But not as weird as the next part.. I went into my office, turned off my PC and plugged in my Mac. I pushed the power button and the cutesy Apple logo appeared on the screen. Two minutes later I had my video camera plugged into the thing and was ripping video from in. Within 10 minutes, I was cutting scenes and rearranging my timeline. “Brent, what about getting the video software and patching win media 9 and updating the video drivers?” It just worked. Up until today, that had been the single best experience I had ever had with a computer (PC or Mac).

Today, however, marks a new era for me. Today, I am completely PC free. Enter MacBookPro Core2 Duo. The more I use this, the more impressed I am. First off, it’s fast. WAY fast. I can’t even stand the though of turning on the IBM any longer.

Secondly, it’s way cool. The IBM was nice. Black, very professional looking, but a bit stingy on ‘neat’ stuff. It’s like the difference between having a Tivo and not. Until you have one, you have no idea how cool it is. TV by itself is pretty sweet, but throw a Tivo on top and Pu-lease; there’s no comparision. The backlit keyboard, light sensitive display, magnetic power connector, quick boot times, sleep mode that actually WORKS consistently all quickly made me realize how in the dark ages I had been.

I hooked up the IBM to the network for the last time and migrated my files. So long, IBM. It’s been a good 10 years.