Rants

Started Early

Started on my New Year’s resolution early. Tonight I watched a show called Overhaulin’. It had two things going for it that made me want to watch it, because I’m a cyclist (barely) it had Uber bike racer Lance Armstrong and as a car guy it had the muscle car icon called GTO (bonus points because it is a convertible.)

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but what I got was an hour long commercial for Foose Wheels, Clarion, Kicker, Something Parts Group, So & So’s Suspension, etc. Take a season’s worth of This Old House, cut out all the really interesting segments on how to do things, apply it to cars, add pretty boy & girl “hosts”, toss in the arbitrary deadline and ta-da, entertainment for people who want something great while not having to do anything hard (or at all) to get it.

New Year’s Resolution

I’ve started work on what my New Year’s Resolution for 2005 is going to be. My first instinct is to pick something doable, but that got me in about 15 pounds of trouble a couple years back when I vowed to eat more and exercise less. So I think maybe I’ll shoot for something hard to do, like watch more television. How can that be hard you ask? Easy, I will not watch any reality shows (as much as I am intrigued by the Gilligan’s Island one.) I’m not interested in and CSI show. Ditto it’s imitators. No Law & Orders. The only sport I’m remotely interested in is baseball, so there won’t be any of that until April. I’d watch MTV if there was any M in it. VH1 is as bad, as it has become the network of “The 100 Most Insipid Music Related Countdown Shows.” About the only thing left is MXC on Spike and it isn’t on but a few times a week. But considering I only watch West Wing on Wednesday nights now…

Forced Night Off

Did you miss me? I missed you?

About 3:30 yesterday afternoon mr-miata.net disappeared off the face internet. Not only me, but everyone connected with me on whatever server that failed. The web site of my hosting service was long gone. When that happens I flash back to the ThatHostingCompany fiasco of April 2002. I can just feel it in my bones that they have gone under and taken my internet life with them. After several hours of absolutely nothing, by 7:00:00 pm I knew they were working on coming up from the depths. The hosting web site was back up, I still had no web sites, but I could see the files when I FTP’d in. This morning when I got up everything was back to normal. Whew.

Wizmark

In the 80’s we had posters above the urinals of the Swedish Bikini Team to get us to drink a particular brand of beer. How quaint. Flash-forward into the 21st century, I give you Wizmark.

“Hey, buddy, after you finish up here, you ought to have room for a couple more ice-cold bottles of Duff.”

AEIOUY

One free 8 x 10, autographed, glossy photo of me to the first person who answers this question correctly. Name a word in the english language has all 6 vowels in it? The vowels must be in their correct alphabetical order: a-e-i-o-u-y. Constanants can be as many as needed or anywhere in the word.

Hat Update

I got my haircut on Tuesday afternoon and I had to take in the strap a touch to keep it from blowing off while driving with the top down.

I’ll be wearing it to work tomorrow. Ever since we went to all casual, all the time, I’ve really missed dressing down on Friday’s. So in an effort to recapture that end of the week frivolity, I’ve taken to wearing a baseball cap in on Fridays. I used to rotate hats and try to color coordinate with whatever shirt I was wearing that day, but now I think I’ll just be wearing the Red Sox World Series Champions (man, I like the way that looks) hat all the time. For a brief irrational moment on Monday when I got the hat, I thought that maybe I would wear it every day from now on, until it disintegrated into the consistency of the that stuff you get from your dryer’s lint filter, but decided against it.

It’s Here!

My new favorite hat showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. Whatever contraption they use to assemble them or the form used for quality assurance or the head of the guy who packs them in a box must be the same size as my head, because I put it on, and it fit perfectly. I’m going to wear it to work tomorrow.

I have to show it to my manager the Yankee fan. 🙂 Back when the Sox won the series, I went back into his office and told him that when I ordered my Boston Red Sox World Series Champion hat they sent me a Yankees ALCS runner-up hat for free and did he want it. That’s when I gave him this:

Yankee's Hat

I couldn’t find a brown paper bag, so I snagged some images off the ‘net, plotted this out and taped it together. He was a good sport about it because he put it on for a second or two before tossing it aside.