Jared’s Blog

I decided to try to grow a beard. Why? Hank is on vacation this week and he informed me on Saturday that he was planning on growing a “vacation beard.” I figured we could turn it into a competition. Give me some good beard growing techniques.

I’ve completely gotten into Digg.com lately. One of the coolest features it supprots is blog posting. Basically I click a link and the Digg news story gets posted here. Cool huh!? This news story explains a little bit about how the site works.

Just a quick guide to digg.com. I did this because I was showing this site to friends and I hated explaining myself over and over.

read more | digg story

A band I found out about maybe 2 weeks ago, Bullet For My Valentine, has been making frequent plays on both my iPod and my home computer. They’re out of Wales from the same area as Lostprophets and Funeral For A Friend. I think I need to move to this place just for the music scene. I can’t wait to hear a full length by these guys. I don’t know about Just Another Star though. They seemed to have ripped off Killswitch Engage in Rose of Sharyn.

Another band I’ve been checking out a lot lately is Divide the Day. They’re kind of pop punk and kind screamo. I think they’re cool. All I really know about them is that Decoy had an ad running for them.

Summer reccomendations:
A Day To Remember - And Their Name Was Treason
Amber Pacific - The Possibility and the Promise
Darkest Hour - Undoing Ruin

The other day I go out to my garage and find that at some point overnight my front left tire went flat. Great! Luckily I was off that day and didn’t really have anything to do. Anyways, I got the spare and the jack out and then grabbed the manual. The first step was to get the hub cab off. It was nice of Dodge to provide me with a suitable pry bar (AKA jack handle). It was not nice of Dodge to attach so well my hub cap which took 15 min of prying to get off. After that it was pretty much straight forward. NOPE! I spent another 10 minutes trying to figure out if what I was looking at was the jack spot on the rocker panels.

At this point I digress. First of all I figure if I was going to be doing this I might as well whip out my enormously handy iPod and listen to some tunes. It was really the only thing that saved me. By the time I got 1 or 2 of the lugnuts off, I was sweatting like crazy. Stuffed in a garage and it’s 94 damn degrees out. It was probably 175 degrees in the garage.

Finally, I got the spare on. At this point a bit of panic set in realizing it’s 7PM on a Sunday. No car place is going to be open to get this fixed right now. It bugged me the rest of the night. Things turned out ok though. I made it to work ok the next day. I still haven’t gotten it fixed yet because I work until 8:15 at night and I don’t usually get up before 10. Tomorrow morning, I intend to get up a bit early and see about getting it fixed.

Man, sometimes cars can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes I wish I didn’t even have one. There are worse things in the world though.

Yep, I joined the fanatical masses today. I am now the owner of a 60GB iPod Photo. I can easily fit all the music I currently have on it and if I did a bit of picking and choosing, I’m sure I’d narrow things down to about half of what I’m using now (about 30GB). I think I’ve dreamt of this day; that’s how bad I wanted one. It only took 3+ damn hours to transfer everything. I want to know why my top of the line iPod didn’t come with a dock or at least a firewire cable. I guess Apple needed to knock a few bucks off the price. I always thought they charged too much for these little bastards. I guess maybe that’s an answer.

Now that I’ve got the thing, I want to start doing all the cool stuff iPod owners do. Like podcasts. I’ve already checked out iPodder.org which is cool, but I’m more looking for some good reccommendations. I just found “This Week in Tech” which is the brainchild a bunch of former Screen Savers cast members. I’ll surely be adding that to my subscriptions when I get home.

I’m also in the market for some accessories. I’ve got an iTrip already and frankly, I was not impressed. I have yet to get a good solid signal in my car (which is what it’s intended for). And even playing with it in my house, it wasn’t anything spectacular. I placed it right on top of my stereo and I still was getting some interference. I imagine the results would be better if I was in a less populated area. Surely up in Virginia there’s more dead air to use. One of these days I plan on buying the KCA-i420 for my car deck which will let me connect my pod directly to the deck for controls AND charging. I figure it’d be worth it even if it was only a physical connection to the deck. But it also displays track information. Not to mention it charges the pod so I don’t have to worry about running out of juice on long road trips. I’m not sure if I missed this a few months back, but I was under the impression that Alpine was the only audio company to do this (besides BMW which integrates it into the car). Apparently, this is not the case. I found adapters for a number of different decks online.

Another accessory that is on my list is a cover or case. Don’t want that pristine white plastic or polished aluminum getting any scratches. To tell the truth, I don’t all that much care if the case is scratched, but I do care about the screen and getting junk in the ports.

By the way, Aaron is the coolest guy and Decoymusic.com is the coolest site. Go there now and register for the forums. Read some reviews, comment on some features, make it your site.

Well, if you haven’t noticed. I’ve been down for quite some time. To make a long story short, I’m no longer self-hosting. That’s right I bought a host, so no more downtime.

Lately, I’ve had the chance to attend two weddings. Andy and Amanda are now offically hitched and my college friend Nick just go married to his girl Nicole. Craziness! I feel like I’m getting behind. I haven’t had a serious girlfriend for years and right now I don’t really care if I get married anytime soon. Seems like when I was young this was always right about the time people got married and started a family. I still come home from work every day and think about what video games I’m going to play or where I’m partying that night. I can’t imagine having a wife let a lone a kid. So my friends, I beg you, quit getting married. You’re making me feel old damn it!