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HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

More to come later…

I don’t really feel like updating this, but I figure I should, since I’m not doing much of anything else. Just a heads up, project dancepad for DDR was a success. And now on to other things…

Christmas in “Quin-tuckey,” aka Quincy (Colleen’s home), was a good time. We left on Wednesday since the University was nice enough to give us the full day off (we were originally only supposed to have a half day). Since no one was going to be intown, we also took the cat. Nothing like listening to a cat for a few hours in the car. Always a good time. Anyways, we went to midnight mass with Colleen’s mom (Colleen fell asleep, tsk tsk tsk) and then celebrated Christmas at her mom’s house on the 25th. Later that afternoon we went over to her dad’s and had Christmas too. Nothing like meeting more strange family members ;). We went and saw “Cheaper by the Dozen” with her dad that night. It was a decent movie, but according to Colleen, “Nothing like the book.” Colleen and her brother Mick had pictures taken the next day (yesterday) and then we came home.

Later that evening, we went to see “LotR:Return of the King.” Wow, go see it. Talk about a great movie. It’s amazing though, how after watching/owning both the extended versions of the first 2, you start to pick up on where they’ve cut stuff out. Like when the eagles /hawks first appear. One of the characters sounds as if they know where the heck they came from. However, as an audience member, we have no clue. I know they’ll be something added about that in the extended version. Also, when Gandalf and the crew meet up with Pippen and Merry on the flood plains, if you hadn’t seen the extended version you wouldn’t know that they found the food and weed to smoke. Such a great movie though. I can’t wait till the extended version of the third one comes out. I can only anticipate 4 hours of goodness.

Oh yeah, and on the stick of movies, I really am beginning to hate all the commercials they put before hand. Thankfully, I noticed that the previews actually start at the advertised starting time of the movie. So, in order to avoid most of them, just get into the theater at the correct time. Oh, and don’t even get me started on those lovely MPAA commercials with the stage hands, etc about piracy. Maybe if they’d pay the actors/actresses less than 75% of the movie’s spenditures, maybe there wouldn’t be such a problem. Hell, if I were a movie producer, I’d go back to High School economics and learn that Net Profit = Total Gross – Spenditures. If I were to pay the actors/actresses 50% less, that’s more $$ in my pocket. Woh, now, there I go making sense again…

Well, apparantly I’m not updating my blog according to some people *ahem* Nick *ahem*. I guess it’s not ok for me to update, but not for others. Sorry about the crappy uptime of the site. My recommendation to all of you, never buy anything from U.S. Robotics, not matter how good the deal may be. You won’t get all of your rebates (if any apply) AND you’ll get some pos equipment. I swear, if I don’t have to manually restart this router from them every day, it’s a good day. Now, on to the real news…

I went home last weekend (19th through the 21st) to celebrate xmas with the fam, since I’m going home with Colleen over xmas. It was a good time. I took Friday off and headed up Thursday afternoon. Friday I finished up my holiday shopping, Saturday some relatives came over, and then Sunday I worked on my car a bit. Man, I wish I had a garage to tinker on the car in. Being out in a parking lot with slush and wind takes all the fun right out of everything. I finally got my cd player/radio working correctly in my car. For the last 6 months or so it kept flicking on and off while I’m driving down the road. Talk about annoying, you’re listening to a song, and all the sudden it turns off. However, sometimes the radio didn’t turn all the way off, it just flicked off, then came right back on. VERY annoying. Needless to say, I had done everything but play with the cd player (it’s a 10-disc player), and nothing seemed to have fixed it.

To preface this next part, I suppose you should know about my special 10-disc player and truck. Well, most people either have a car with a 10-disc (can stick it in the trunk), or have an extended cab or someplace to put it. Well, needless to say, in my stock, bare-bones, no-frills truck, there was (at the time) one place to put it…behind the seat. Talk about a pain in the rear. Everytime I wanted to change cd’s, I’d have to scoot the seat up, then tilt the seat forward, change the cd’s, then tilt and scoot the seat back. Yeah, that just wasn’t gonna do. Of course, engineering Aaron got hard at work fixing this problem. So, since my car has nothing but the basics (well, it had A/C, but then again, it didn’t have a radio, nor speakers when I got it), there was only 1 airbag (driver side) because the passenger airbag was optional. Nothing like putting a price on passenger safety ;). Well, that instead of sealing up that area where the airbag would be, they just didn’t put anything in it. Well, after screwing around a little bit, I found that you could actually pull the part of the dashboard off where the airbag would be. No screws were holding it in or anything. Talk about the ultimate place to stick a stash. Well, needless to say the compartment wasn’t deep enough for the 10-disc to fit. However, the only thing behind the compartment was the duct for the passenger side heater. Not like I have that many passengers anyways! So one weekend while I lived down in TN, I started hacking away at the duct and let me tell you fiberglass is one of THE WORST things to work with with simple tools (no injection molding or anything). Talk about itchy. I swear I had that crap on me for weeks. Anyways, I slowly whittled my way into the duct, and well, the 10-disc fits in there like a glove! You actually can’t just pull it straight out. You have to lift one side, and pull on just that one side to get it free, then the otherside (it is then attached to the frame, so it’s not gonna go flying out). Well, by giving it such a tight fit, the cables are the ones that are sacrificed. There’s sort of a support ridge running through the inside of the duct, and it is just above where the cable connect. Needless to say the cables do about a 90 degree turn RIGHT away.

Well, since this was the only part of the puzzle I had left on the radio mystery, I decided to rip it out, redo the cables, then stick her back in. Now, the real bitch of this problem was that when the car was just sitting, I could listen to the radio just fine without it turning on and off. That means, I’d have to rip it apart, and put it all back together to test the stupid thing. So, I unplugged the wires, replugged them back in, readjusted the angle that the wire was being fed to (made the wires go behind the cdplayer instead of on the side), reseated it, and then refastended it. Well, let me tell you how much better the 5.5 hour drive is with music, as opposed to without (damn thing didn’t work the whole way up to Detroit). Also, I was stuck in a traffic jam on 94 (they had closed the interstate because of an accident or something) for a good 30-45 minutes. I would’ve gone insane if I would’ve been forced to sit there in silence the whole time.

Well, NICK, I hope that helps your rebelpeon.com fix 😉