rebelpeon.com

Back in Action

Wow, so that was a long downtime, eh? Basically, what happened was my IP changed, and the software that’s supposed to auto update my DNS nameservers didn’t really do it’s job. But in all honestly, that may have been my fault, since it was complaining about not being able to log in with the credentials supplied.

Now that every thing’s back up an running, I’ve got a lot to talk about. Hopefully I’ll have some time to actually do it.

Edit:
Oh yeah, and that may not sound like it should’ve taken over a week to fix, but I’m essentially living up in Chicago now. So when something breaks in Champaign, it takes a bit to get down and fix it.

Bling Bling

Last night Erin and I were watching some Adult Swim, when we saw the most hilarious commercial. At first, both of us thought it was a joke, like what the Geico commercials are. But, it turns out, it was no joke.

The product in the commercial was called “Bling it On”. Essentially, all it was, was the holographic metallic stickers from the 80’s. It was incredibly funny though, especially when the woman playing the mom interjected that even mom’s can use some extra bling.

I don’t think they actually gave a price for this special product, but I’m sure if you ran down to your nearest hobby store, you could DIY.

Update:
To see a video of said commercial, please view the comments, since Bree was able to find it and link to it for us.

PT Party

Friday, after work I met Erin, Bree, and some of their friends at Ballydoyle’s. They had had a stressful week at school and wanted to have a good time. I got there a little bit before 7 and Erin and two others showed up at 7. Then Bree and Eric showed up around 7:30. A few more of their friends showed up around 8:30, and then we left around 11-11:30 (their stuff is actually the individuals at the bottom, and wasn’t that much). It’s not good when the waitress says, “It’s quite a lot!” as she hands you the tab. As you can see from the receipt (don’t mind the marked out entries, that’s just me figuring out what’s been paid back), the damage was steep, but a good time was had.

Bike Rack

Now that I’m actually using my bike, I want a better way of hauling it (and Erin’s) around. Currently she has a trunk mount one, but, well, it sucks. If it didn’t scratch the crap out of her car, I’d be half way tempted to slap it on mine and then we could take my car, but alas…

Plus, I’m getting some extra money from the University for my vacation days. Nothing like a little extra cash to burn a hole in your pocket. Anyways, I’m looking at getting a Thule rack from ORS Racks Direct. They have the best price by far (20% off MSRP), free shipping until tomorrow, and no tax (man I love the internet). Anyways, I need some help from my fellow readers. I need to know which is better, an upright mount, or a fork mount? I can see how each one would have it’s benefits, plus there’s the fact that having the upright mounts increase the price by $38 (more for the actual mount, plus I need 2 more lock cylinders).

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and the sooner the better, since the deals seem to end tomorrow.

New Job

Much like Travis, I too have a new job. I start up in Chicago on Monday. For the time being, I’ll be crashing on people’s couches until I can find my own place. Who’s looking for a roommate for a downtown apt?

PIO Mode

I bought a DVD burner recently, and that has been my primary burner in my new Dell machine. However, just the other day, I realized it doesn’t have the ability to burn from cue files. This, unfortunately, is a problem, since that’s how I backup all my CDs with flac. Thankfully, my trusty old LiteOn 52x burner that I got for like $20 after rebate does.

So, I throw in the LiteOn in addition to the DVD burner, and start burning. However, during the burn process my computer starts acting very slow. Thankfully, I know that the problem is that the burner is in PIO Mode. Usually, this is an easy fix; you just go into device manager, and then hit up the disk controller and change the pull down from PIO Mode Only to DMA Mode if Available under advanced settings. I do this, restart, and STILL in PIO Mode.

Now, I know that this LiteOn works in DMA mode, because that’s the way it used to be in my old machine. So I check out google, and one of the first links I get to talks about enabling the drives in BIOS. It also mentions seeing if there are events in the logs about it timing out in DMA mode. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, so BIOS here we come.

Now, this seems a bit odd. I mean, if it’s not enabled in BIOS, how the hell can Windows even see the drive at all? Well, I figure it’s worth a shot. I head into BIOS, and sure enough it’s disabled. I enable it, boot back into Windows, and low and behold, works like a charm. This may also explain why the DVD burner was having such a hard time while the CDROM drive the machine came with was plugged in too.

I guess you do learn something new every day.

Lottery

Damn, none of the $168 million is coming my way. This is very unfortunate.

Edit: Apparantly I wasn’t the only one not to win the $168 mill, since the Friday drawing is now up to $205 mill.

Public Restrooms

What is with the people that don’t flush the toliets? I mean, do these people not flush at home? If so, why do they feel the need not to in public? If not, good god that’s gross.

America’s Growing Threat

This weekend, while my rear-end was recovering, Erin and I needed to kill some time so we visited the mall up in Oak Lawn (wow that website sucks). Neither of us are really “mall people”, but there is a movie theater there, so we thought we’d see if anything decent was playing. Turns out there wasn’t, so we needed to waste time some other way. Now, the rest of this entry isn’t meant to bash these people, but more of an observation of what we saw. Some people may get upset with what I’m about to say, I can’t help that other than inform them that they shouldn’t read what follows.

Both Erin and I like to people watch. It’s interesting to see what kinds of people are around us and just to watch them go about their days. Having a camera to photograph these moments is also fun, but alas, no camera this time. So, this time, Erin and I decided to play a game of sorts. Both of us are quite disturbed by the growing trend of obesity in America. Be it from fast food lifestyles or just plain laziness, the trend is getting quite disgusting.

For those of you who know me, know that I’m quite skinny, but that’s because I work at it by doing things I enjoy. I’m usually do some sort of physical activity (for more than an hour) five or six times a week. I also don’t eat fast food, nor drink high caloric beverages (soda, choco-moca drinks, etc) multiple times a day. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t eat high fat foods and instead only eat nasty health foods. Erin also is a skinny person. She also is active (though not as much as I am), and eats well. She is also in school to become a physical therapist, so she sees this all the time. Yes, we both have biased views on the subject, but at the same time, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.

Our game was to see what kind of ratio we would get by seeing if people were overweight. This was in no way a scientific study. To begin with, we were watching people at the mall. The mall is not known for people that are highly athletic. Also, we were just judging people on how they appeared with their clothing on. Granted, we did give many people the benefit of the doubt when it wasn’t obvious. Also, do you include old (>65)? For our “study” we didn’t. We also tested two different areas of the mall to see if it made a difference (as far as we could tell, we didn’t include the same people twice).

Our findings came back with a staggering >60% of the people we saw were overweight. This is being generous too, if Erin was reporting our findings, she would’ve said around 75%. Now, from my rough calculations, I’d say of those, more than 50% were “grossly” overweight. One case in point was a woman in a motorized wheelchair. Erin asked me if I thought the weight was due to the motorized wheelchair (broke a hip or something and couldn’t walk), or if the wheelchair was due to the weight. Other observations seem to point out that this is not gender, race, class, or age specific either.

What really saddens me is that it’s not age specific. It’s the largely overweight kids that scare me. These kids aren’t doing it to themselves as the older adults are. The parents are effectively killing them off by influencing their food decisions and activities (or lack thereof).

Many people will complain that it is genetics that causes them to be this way. I throw a large BS in their direction, because if that were true, then why the sudden upturn; why isn’t the rest of the world experiencing this same problem? I think it more comes down to the fact that as American’s we have become lazy, and with the proliferation of junk food (and it being easier to obtain than non-junk food), we, as a nation, have just let go.

In my mind it’s disgusting what people have let themselves go to. However, it’s not only disgusting, but incredibly bad for them in the long term. Just the added weight on their joints will wreak havoc later one, let alone what their blood vessels look like. It’s not just average-joe that’s overweight either. It’s the medical doctors, the ones that should be setting the examples for average-joe, that are just as bad. And don’t even get me started on the “American fix” to this problem: Gastric Bypass Surgery.

It would be interesting to further this “study” some more, at various other places. I think it would also be beneficial to actually keep more scientific tally, than just yes, no. Maybe we can move down to Michigan Ave sometime soon and try it again.

O’er the Hills and Through the Mud

Talk about another great weather weekend. So far, two in a row. I hope this trend continues. Anyways, this weekend was another first of the summer months: Mountain Biking. I brought up my bike to Chicago this weekend and on Saturday we went to the Forest Preserve District, and visited the Palos trails. The main trails used for running, horseback riding, biking, etc, were nice and easy. However, as soon as you got off the main paths, it quickly went to mud (at least the one we jumped on). We were actually out there for quite some time, especially since it was the first time this year.

We started on the blue trail near Bullfrog lake, then met up with the green, then orange, then yellow. We took the yellow trail to the brown, and not having any idea where we were (nor how far we were from anything, headed back. All of these trails were wide trails, no single track, so the it wasn’t that much excitement. However, on the way back, we jumped on the dark green trail by Joe’s Pond. This was a single track, and about 50 feet into it, it got pretty muddy. On the map, they don’t show it going past the road, but in fact it does, and with the meandering stream down there, it went from muddy, to, “holy crap, are there ANY dry spots?” and “That creek is kind of intimidating with the rocks and stuff.” Needless to say when we came out at Pioneer Woods, we were covered.

It was an awesome time though. Too bad my ass took the blunt of it, and it’s incredibly sore now. But, my bike didn’t attack me like Erin’s did. She has metal pedals, and both of the back sides of her ankles are hacked up pretty well. Thankfully, I came out relatively unscathed.

I hope next weekend is just as nice, because I could definitely handle doing that again. In fact, I left my bike up with her, so it’s all set. Granted, it’s more to do with the fact we thought we were going to go riding again on Sunday, and never actually got around to cleaning them off.