right on bro!

I bought a bunch of stuff from Axshop.com. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re known for selling ridiculously cheap gadgets, most of which are cheap crap from Asia. It is, however, totally fun to browse their store to see all of the crap they have. They’ve also got one of the lowest ratings on resellerratings.com - lots of people are pissed off at them for taking forever to receive their orders.

Well, after waiting for three weeks, I finally got my order. Two items totally rule:

Drive-Alert Electronic Nap-Zapper Anti-Drowsy Alarm - This is one of the funniest products I’ve ever seen. You turn it on, and attach it to your ear. It’s got some sort of sensor where if you tip the device more than 30 degrees (i.e. you are falling asleep), a loud, annoying BEEP goes off right in your ear (i.e. to keep you awake). I don’t think I’d ever use it but it was totally worth the price just for the laughs.

Retractable iPod Nano/Mini/4G HotSync USB-Data-Cable - This is the most useful product out of the bunch - to keep my iPod charged wherever there’s a computer around (at work). I keep it in my bag all of the time, just in case. It’s flimsy but it totally works. I saw this for sale at CompUSA for $14.

I also got a cheap set of earbuds with a microphone attached to it for Skype calls (sounds crappy but it works), and a mini camera tripod (haven’t tried it yet since I hardly use my camera these days).

Verdict on Axshop: Have fun looking at all of the cheap crap they sell, order about $20 worth of crap, and be prepared to wait a long time to receive it. And if you don’t ever receive it….well, it’s only $20.

On Sunday, I watched the DVD of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. I already saw it when it was in the theater, but ever since Sunday, I have been obsessed with the first three songs from the St. Anger album.

Yeah, they’re not really good songs - it sounds like (especially “St. Anger”) they just copied and pasted a bunch of stuff in ProTools for seven minutes per song.

But goddamn if it doesn’t sound raw as fuck, and that’s more than enough to get by.

Today was a really crappy day at work…lots of miscommunication and stuff not going well.

As it turns out, there’s scientific proof for it being a bad day.

Tonight’s episode of 24, however, kicked ass.

I finally got to fixing my dead desktop PC. My brother sent me a CPU and motherboard he wasn’t using, so now I’m rocking an Athlon 2600+ (Barton core) with an nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard. It’s snappier than my old one (janky old Fry’s Electronics Athlon/mobo combo), and I think I might try a little bit of overclocking since these Bartons apparently have a rep for good overclock ability.

I generally like tinkering with PCs - ever since my Uncle Martin took me to a hamshack in Flushing, New York to purchase a Seagate 20MB (that’s megabytes, not gigabytes) hard disk to replace the one we had in the family PC, back in the late ’80s I think. And last year I ended up doing a lot of research to make this desktop pretty quiet, so I was pretty annoyed that it had died.

Well, this time around it was pretty agonizing, because I had just reformatted this machine about 10 months ago, and I hate doing things twice when there’s no increasing ROI. It wasn’t so much installing the hardware as it was installing Windows, and then spending another 40 minutes watching it download and install security patches.

Anyway, I’m back up and running and have re-installed most of the major apps. Almost an entire day blown fixing my PC, so I can do the exact same things I did before the PC died. Nice work.

So after a bit of a wait from Netflix, I finally got a hold of the Guided By Voices “Electrifying Conclusion” DVD - footage from their final show last New Year’s, before the band broke up. While I’m not a really huge GBV fan, I did get to see them once (at the House of Blues at Disneyland, of all places), and they were, in Robert Pollard’s own words, “the greatest bar band in the world.” They’re the only band I’ve ever seen who started off sloppy and got progressively better as they drank more on stage. Well, I’m over a year late, but goodbye, Guided by Voices, and thanks for the great songs.

Did you know that if you commute to your job for an hour and a half each way, you are effectively spending one month out of every year driving your car? Zow.

Tip for owners of the 2005 Toyota Prius with the “premium” JBL 7.1 sound system: Disconnect the center speaker. You will notice an immediate improvement in both the stereo field and clarity. You won’t have the 7.1, but the sound system won’t suck anymore.

The center speaker is located on the dashboard, above the LCD display. Just take a butter knife or similarly flat tool and pop the grill off. Lift the grill out (the speaker is attached) and you’ll see a white plug that’s the connection to the speaker wires. Depress the two tabs on the side of the plug that’s connected to the wires (it’s a more brilliant white than the speaker plug), and disconnect. That’s it.

I was looking into buying aftermarket speakers, and then I read about this on PriusChat.com. I think I’ll chill with this for now. It’s not a total earth-shattering improvement but it’s much, much better.

And speaking of cars, why did gas go up 50 cents a gallon over the past three weeks? I paid $2.09 on my last fillup, and I just saw $2.59 on the way home. It’s a conspiracy.

My brain is fried. I’ve been coding all week. Even though I’m a designer, I’ll do the HTML templating work (Template Tookit) to leave the developer to write real code. They probably pay me too much to be doing HTML templating, but it’s a good break from whatever else it is I do all day, and I like getting in the weeds on this kind of stuff.

I’m still really liking Template Toolkit. Not only is it fun to make up directives, it’s good for a laugh when somebody says “turn on the dumper” and somebody else says, “Dumper.dump!” Yup.

Anyway, we’re close to finishing a beta version of what I’m working on at work. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news…hot on the heels of my laptop dying, my desktop PC died as well. Technology has not been good to me over the past couple of months.

A reminder that the second season of Battlestar Galactica resumes tonight.

Other TV shows of note:

Gotta go back to work tomorrow, weak.

It’s been raining like a MF here, and I discovered we have a couple of leaks in the kitchen. Nothing got damaged, I don’t think.

Been watching Regul re-play Halo 2 on the Xbox 360. I like watching Regul play video games. It’s just him - I generally hate watching other people play. I guess it’s because Regul is particularly good at gaming, and he seems to have great intuition when it comes to picking things up, so it’s not boring. It’s better than watching TV sometimes.

Gotta go back to work tomorrow, weak.