Conveniently Misplaced

Every notice how sometimes the more you know about someone, the less you really wish you’d known about them? There’s something about me, where people just tell me stuff. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s just like “why in the world am I hearing this?”. And hearing it is one thing, because depending on the person and what’s happening it may be no big deal, in which case I really wouldn’t mind it.

Then there’s the other case. When you’re privy to something or multiple somethings that are going on at one time. Then when something happens like that and you know what’s up. So all of a sudden…you’re involved in something that you really don’t need to be involved in. Then you hear lots of bullshit from lots of people about something that you seriously don’t need to be involved in, yet it’s almost as though you’re in so deep that you’re just as bad as whatever else is going on.

Because it’s nothing good, otherwise everyone would know about it. It’s always some underground, scandalous shit that nobody needed to even make happen, let alone talk about.

So if you’re reading this, don’t assume it’s about you. The stories are all too entertaining and I truely truely enjoy it. But just dont get me involved. Otherwise, less is more.

Here’s something interesting. For those of us that build computers, we often find people getting a machine that is serious overkill for what they need. When someone says they’re buying a computer, the single biggest reasons I hear are because they want to

• Surf the Internet
• Listen to Music
• Send Email
• Type Documents

So what’s the point in having a computer that runs 450w can could easily calculate quantum physics if all you want to do is myspace and type papers? On top of that, the average computer costs $750 still. So what do we do?

Enter Zonbu, if there’s a computer that comes extremely close to a household appliance like a dish washer or fridge, this is it. It’s specs aren’t stunning. But the machine itself has a lot of promise. It’s only $100 if you buy a 2 year $13 a month plan for data backup (and since it only has 4gb of local storage, you might as well) or $250 without the backup plan. Still not a bad deal on that front.

It comes with a version of Debian Linux that is somewhat pimped out to look like WindowsVista (I can see Zonbu having it’s day in court over this one). Specs, while not impressive, will serve the consumer nicely. Without things like Norton Internet Security or random email viruses to slow the system, this thing should (at least in theory) run just as good in 3 years as it does now without any hiccups in performance. Non-impressive but interesting stats are as follows:

• x86 CPU (The website lists it as “intel-like”. Wouldn’t surprise me if Via was behind this one)
• 512mb of RAM
• 4gigs of internal flash memory storage (I’m assuming this includes the OS partition as well, but who knows)
•  Graphics that will get you by, support for up to 1400 x 1050 screen res and the 16 million colours we all know and love.
• Inputs for USB, CompactFlash, 10/100 cat5, PS/2, and audio in / out.

It also comes fully loaded with applications and drivers, allowing you to rock out with your iPod, work your suit and tie skills with open office, or plug in your digital camera and upload the day’s fun to to flickr. There’s even games like Solitaire and FreeCiv.

It’s also low powered, environmentally friendly, and if it breaks within 3 years, they’ll send you a new one.  How many other computer companies will do that?

It won’t do Photoshop, but it looks like Zonbu might be able to find a home among budget conscious people or organizations needing cheap terminals. Check it out at zonbu.com.

I picked up 2 albums this past week that I’ve been listening to. The first one is Blacktop Mourning’s freshman release “No Regret”, which I’ve been looking forward too for a while now. It’s the first album release from Adam Duritz’s label Tyranasourus Records and it’s a pretty solid one. It doesn’t make you say “OMG I love it”, but it has a lot of good music on it and there’s some catchy tracks. Max’s guitar playing isn’t featured as much as I’d like but it’s there at times when it needs to be. His lyrics need to come along, but the guy’s only 18. He’ll get better with it, so i’m very much looking forward to their 2nd release already just because I know it’ll keep getting better. Very much worth the pick up.

The 2nd album came in limited edition colored vinyl, and it’s Omar Rodriguez Lopez’s solo side project album “Sie Dice Bisone, No Buffalo”. For those who don’t know, Omar is the guy from the Mars Volta, and this album does not disappoint at all. It’s a mix of insturmental and vocal pieces, and for someone who claims to know nothing of music theory, Omar is pushing a lot of things to the limits. The result is an awesome experimental/psychedelic album that will sounds more like The Mars Volta meets Frank Zappa. It’s beautiful. Not out on CD yet, but will be later this month. Pick it up when it hits, because this one’s easily one of the best I’ve heard for this year.

House update: the inspection went well, no surprises. We’re moving forward and once the appraisal is said and done with the house will be ours. I’m uber excited

So for all of those of you who have been asking about why I ended up in court yesterday or why I have to go to trial, here it goes…

On April 1st, 2007 Craig, Kayte, and I went to go see a man named Steve who was selling a 1988 Cadillac Brougham. The car’s craigslist ad cought my eye and I wanted to check it out. So I called him on March 31st and he said Sunday the 1st would be better. So that’s what we did, went out there and looked at it on the 1st. I took the car for a drive and loved it, and decided to purchase it. I didn’t know in advance that I would be purchasing this car, but after driving it, I couldn’t not buy it.

So we take care of the formalities, he signs and dates the title, I give him a mixture of cash and a check, and since Kayte was already late for work, off we went. The plan was to get the car from JMJ Motors (keep in mind that Steve works for JMJ Motors, but as a car painter. He does not sell cars and this car was not purchased from a dealer, just from a guy who works for a dealer) on 24 mile and Van Dyke and get it to Craig’s house in Mount Clemens where we could work on it (standard tune up and such).

As soon as we cross the road into Sterling Heights I get pulled over. “What’s this for? Why would they pull me over?” I exclaimed, only to have Craig answer me “Well, probably because you don’t have a license plate”. Apparently in the time between when we had taken the test drive (it had a plate then) and when I went to the ATM to get out some cash, it was removed. They neglected to mention this to me, or I would have taken the plate off my Jimmy before driving it home (then put the plate back on the Jimmy when I went to retreive it later)

So for about a half hour we sit there with our hands on the dash/backseat while the cop tries to trick me into “admitting” that I stole this car. Things like “Where’s your sales receipt” and “why was the dealer open on a Sunday”. So either he didn’t comprehend what I was saying or he was just being a total dick about it. Could be either or. After calling in 2 more cars for backup and hearing them laugh and tell jokes for a while, i’m written a ticket for driving with no plates or insurance. Which is a misdemeanor and mandatory court. Fantastic. So now we’re all pissed off, Kayte’s hungry and late for work, and I’m ready to kill someone.

So I get the car to Craig’s and call my brother to take me up and get the Jimmy. For the time being all is OK and I figure this all can be relatively painless. The next day (April 2nd) I have my dad put the new Cadillac in his name and get insurance transfered. So within 24 hours it’s all transferred, dealt with, and legal. No problems at this point and at that time the car becomes my primary source of transportation.

On April 3rd, I go back and see Steve and he writes me up saying something a long the lines of “Yes I sold him this car”. So that’s all well and good. A few weeks later, I get a few notices telling me when my date is for my pre-trial Arraignment: May 15th at 1:30. It also tells me what I’m charged with: 1 misdemeanor count of driving without registration and 1 misdemeanor count of driving with no insurance. In that time between when I got the notices and I went to court, I did my homework. First thing I did was look into the Michigan registration law for newly purchased vehicles. This is what the Michigan Vehicle Code, Section 216 section l has to say on the matter:

For 3 days immediately following the date of a properly assigned title or signed lease agreement from any person other than a vehicle dealer, a registration need not be obtained for a vehicle driven or moved upon the highway for the sole purpose of transporting the vehicle in the most direct route from the place of purchase or lease to a place of storage if the driver has in his or her possession the assigned title showing the date of sale or lease agreement showing the date of the lease.

So score one for me. No crime was committed on the registration front. However, the Statue on driving without insurance is a little more tricky and where I may run into problems. It basically says if you drive in michigan without insurance it’s up to a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Not fun. But we’ll see what happens at court…

So May 15th rolls around. I’m at the court at 1:15 where I’m told to have a seat and a city attourney will be with me. I have all my documents in my briefcase and I wait around for all this to go into action. Some time around 2:30 I’m called back. The prosecutor says she can give me a deal if I plead guilty to both counts. Up to $500 for each offense, no points, and she’ll be nice enough to recommend no jail time. Fuck that. I’d already known that at least 1 thing I was being charged with was nothing, so there was no way I was going to be railroaded into up to $1000 in fines. Despite the fact that the security guards thought I was an attourney, this woman apparently thought I was born yesterday. She said my options were only to admit guilt today or get a court appointed attourney, get my own, or represent myself at trial. To be on the safe side, I told her I wanted a city appointled lawyer. At least until I call my lawyer and see what he thinks about all this.

So I fill out the paperwork and hand it over to the girl at the counter, i’m told that my name will be called to the appropriate courtroom soon. Then after a few minutes i’m called to go before the honerable Judge Maceroni. It’s quick and painless. He tells me that he will grant my request for legal counsel and that I will receive my trial date in the mail sometime soon. I head back out to the desk to tell them that there’s a week I will be out of town, so make sure my trial isn’t set for those dates. They are happy to oblige. I also ask about getting my own attourney and if that will be a problem if I requested a court appointed one, i’m told everything will be fine as far as that goes.

At this point, I call my lawyer. Who is also Craig’s uncle and he says I can go meet him at his Mount Clemens office. So off I go. Craig’s already there by the time I get there and the rain in The Clem is pouring. I sit down with Rick and explain the situation. Not going to go into details here, but I’ll have my own representation at the trial. We chat for abit about the usual stuff, DNS servers and the importation of egyptian furnature and whatnot. Then off we go. I get a 6 pack of Sam Adams Cherry Wheat and mellow out at Craigs before I had to go to my brother’s honors convication.

I call my folks so they’re privy to the situation. A shred of light shines out of this vastly suck-ass day. The people have accepted our offer on the house! Now we just have to go through the appraisal, inspection, and of course (most importantly), the Mortgage process which I may or may not be a part of. So that’s exciting, but there’s so very much on my mind right now it’s unreal.

And now you’re all up to speed on the situation. Email john at cruzweb dot net with any questions or just call the cell.

Proved that he can stand up to anybody with facts and evidence (like the 911 commission report) against anybody who is still trying to deceive the American people. Bravo, congressman. If you missed it, here’s the defining moment of last nights debate.

More later.

Yes, this is probably the weirdest blog title I’ve come up with. But it’s all for purpose and reason. On Thursday me and my parents trolled on down to Century 21 to officially put in our offer for the house we want to get. After all that was done I realized that if I trucked it, I could make it from 17 and Garfield to Michigan Avenue and Telegraph in Dearborn in time for the Death Skin Razors set. And I haven’t *really* pushed my car to see what it can do yet, so I figured I’d go for it. I’ll tell you guys, nothing’s sweeter than going 90 and seeing the “Level Ride” light come on.

So I get there, throw on a decent shirt, and they break it down as usual . After the set, me Jimmy and Nate went over to Dunkin’ Donuts for…well, dinner. They get their stuff and take a seat and I’m standing there when this girl walks in. I had seen her out in the parking lot, sitting in some dude’s car labeled as some kind of “transportation service”. There was a rather frightening-looking black dude behind the wheel and she was in the back.

So they serve her while I’m waiting and I notice (now that she’s right next to me) that she has 2 purses. A purse, and a large bag looking thing containing other small purses/bags. It’s also at this time that I start to sniff the air. I pull out my trusty sidekick and type Jimmy the simple message “She smells like Camel Lights and Astroglide“. Just because that’s one of those things that you can’t simply just say. So it had to be txted. So once I got my order we sat there and watched this bird lickity lickity on the cone. A kodak moment, more pics on my flickr. But this one has Jimmy in it so that makes it all the more hilarious.

Friday was cool, Dave invited me and Tom to go play poker. I took him up on the offer and I’m glad I did. Won the first game and ended up leaving with more cash than I came with, so it was all good as far as I was concerned. Me and Dave got a chance to talk and catch up. And we all made fun of TJ all night, good stuff.

Saturday I caved and got a Dunlop Cry Baby Classic from Guitar Center.

Why you ask? Because, it’s sweet for one. And 2, it’s even sweeter when you run a mic’d also sax through it. Once I get the technique down, it’s going to be so badass. It already sounds amazing, I can’t wait till I’m really good at it. For those of you saying “WTF?”, yes, it’s rare to see a sax run through a wah-wah pedal. But it’s not entirely unprecedented. Go listen to Zappa’s piece “Chunga’s Revenge” and hear some crazy electric sax with wah pedal madness. It’s such a cool sound, I can’t believe more people don’t use it.

Saturday morning my brother called me on over and showed me the myspace profiles of some people I used to know back in the day, the Siewert brothers. The 2 younger ones….yah. They got me a little worried now. So I went on up to Fritz’s Pub in the Clem to talk to Nick, who was one of my best friends in elementary school. I figured I’d find him there as he is the kitchen manager dude. So we talked for a bit and caught up. Then Darin my old boss and neighbor called me up to see if I wanted to come over for a beer and some fire action. So I said sure. He showed me Erik’s new guitar, an old Elvis style Gibson acoustic, insured for something like $2600. It has an amazing tone and the body style is just…awesome. Just that. Awesome. It was fun to play, so I played a bit for them. Julie offered me a smore, but I told her I couldn’t eat and play at the same time, so I had her feed it to me :p it was great. I don’t get to hang out with them like I used to because, well, I don’t work for them any more. So it was cool.

Then it was on to the Saturday night bowling stuff (the only real weirdness of this was that I showed up in a MCHS t-shirt and Ireland hoodie. Kate showed up in a MCHS hoodie and an Ireland t-shirt. She figured we’re just sweet like that, and I was in no position to disagree). I can tell you all this, your own bowling shoes make a world of difference. So nice to have real control, and whatnot. Once I got the hang of them I started getting a little more consistant with my game. Since I haven’t played in a month it took some work to find a groove. But I used my poker winnings to get in this game, so it all worked out great in the end for me.

In other news, Craig has cut his hair. No further comment on that at this time.

Ooh, 1 more thing. Thanks to all my homies in Deutschland, you are the #2 country visiting here. So muchas thanks to you. Same to all my Twitter peoples who continue to drive traffic this way, you guys all rock.

Well, here now. I’ve been meaning to blog it up, it’s just been so hard to find the time with all the stuff that’s been happening in my life.

It all really got rolling last Friday at work. Which was, for the most part, extremely slow and boring except for the end, where we noticed a possum was leering outside the door and snarling at our customers. He later proceeded to the back fence where he sat for a while. After trying to get police or animal control to come out with no avail (after all, the police station is only 4 blocks away). So Mark and Matt decided it was time to deal with it themselves. So there’s now some rather amusing pictures of the creature, along with its capture and captivity on my flickr account. They managed to beat the thing off the fence and trap it in a trashcan. No idea what happened after that as at that point it was pretty much cleanup and go home time.

Saturday was also pretty sweet, me and Craig went down to Mexicantown for Cinco De Mayo. Always a site to see with the abundance of Mexican flags, good food, and Corona reps passing out blinking lighted necklaces to their patrons. Since we were in the neighborhood, I also stopped by to see my Grampa, which was also cool as I don’t see him very often.

Today is the last day of my php course, and I’m pretty sure my project is done. It’s a pseudo craigslist thing. Not too sophisticated, but still took a while to get done because of my busy schedule. No matter, hopefully i”ll ace the course and move on tomorrow to more java enterprise portal funtastic experiences.

Next, hopefully we will be moving in to The Clem! I’ve convinced my parents that there’s a house that would be perfect for us. We’ve put in an offer, talking to banks and tomorrow the 3 of us are going to see century 21 to really try to get the ball rolling. It’s very exciting. Right in downtown and right in the vecinity of all my friends. Craig and Kate would be down the street. Jim would be a few streets down. And Abby would be right across the weird street triangle thing. It would be so fantastic. Especially if my brother lives on campus next year, then I would have the whole upstairs to myself. Square footage wise, its about 3 times the size of the current house. It would be so sweet. I may have to co-sign for it, which could get messy for numerous reasons. But it would be very incredible.

I have to sign up for more classes on monday. I have 10 classes left for my degree, and since I would take 3 a quarter, Im thinking of taking a course in the summer this year. But I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to decide what I want to do. The C++ one is the only one that I’m really worried about. I have that, and maybe 2 other tech courses left then i’m done with that (completely trained for my degree. w00t!).

We’ll see how this all develops.

It is American custom to declare war on something when we don’t like it. The War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Poverty, etc. We can’t just fight something, or even disagree with it. We must go to war with it.

So today, I plan on continuing that by going to war myself. Today, I am going to war on my glasses.  Glasses, if you are reading this, this is why I have declared war on you:

• You cause glare. Especially while looking at computer screens (8+ hours of my day) or in a high contrast environment (like the movies)
• Your screw keeps coming out, requiring constant maintenance.
• You are always in danger of being knocked off and destroyed during sports, the mosh pit, spontaneous sex, etc.
• You leave those awful red marks on my nose
• You tint instantly to block the sunlight, but take a half hour to adjust back.
• I can not wear sunglasses because of you.
• You scratch too easily, even if you are “scratch  resistant”.

You have been helping me see for a long time, but your time is up. Within months, it’s contact time. I’ve had enough.  War is declared, and I will win.

So for those who don’t know, my job is the admin of Signs365.com. I wrote the whole thing, full e-commerce app with admin panel. Today, I did a check on how many lines of code this thing is. Here’s the final verdict:

Admin Panel: 7,544 lines
Main Website: 10,257 lines

Grand Total:  17801

That’s pretty insane for a single person project. I can’t believe it when I look at it.

In other news, my time at home has been building this classifieds ads app, which is due in 1 week. That will be all of my time right there.

More to come later.