9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I give you a dead ipod. Dead as dead can be. No click of death, just a sad icon on the screen. Hard resets, diagnostics and disk mode resets are all futile.

So what do you do? Pay the $100 diagnostic fee, plus the $100 part replacement, plus shipping?

Hell no! You crack it and fix it your damn self. I used a putty knife… and my fingers. I found that if you stick the knife in at the corners, the case is easy to split apart from the metal backing.

And we have guts! I disconnected the hard drive, reattached the cable.

And we have life!

To bad my wife already bought me a 5th Gen black iPod. Oh darn! And it is teeeeeeeeny.

Well now I have an ipod to load linux on! Geek out!

Ok. Not really.

Close enough, though. Jess and I went and test drove a handful of vehicles over the weekend and think we decided on the Scion xB.

The Toaster. The Box.

Whatever. It drives nice, has a ton of room and we could afford it. So I put in the order yesterday.

With an aftermarket sunroof that covers most of that huge box. It should be a nice ride.

And the best part?

No monthly payments. That is very nice indeed.

Having a home theater PC on a TV that can handle it is very nice indeed.

Hitting iTunes, or even Winamp, radio on the system is great. The sound gets piped to my reciever over fiber, and the video hits the TV at 1920×1080 resolution. The visualization stuff with winamp (the pretty pictures that move with the sound) looks awesome and on a decent sound system, even internet radio sounds great.

Surfing the net from the couch is kind of neat too. I was surfing some car sites, looking at the new models and the like for our upcoming car shopping, and having a 3D model of the car on your big screen is a great way to look at vehicles.

But the real kicker is actual HDTV. The Kansas City Chiefs game was cool to watch.

And I hate football.

It is like being mesmerized by the very blades of grass, hypnotized by the depth and clarity of the field and the players, even the audience in the stands. You just start to fall into it and an hour later, you snap alert with instant clarity and realize that you have been drooling all over your remote.

Ok, not really. But dang. Every channel should be in HD. The movies on my HTPC look awesome. I have an program that processes the DVDs to output to the size of the screen, cleaning up defects and the like at the same time. Makes the Sony upconverting DVD player my wife uses pale in comparison. And I thought it looked good on my old gen1 hdtv.

Its like I am a kid at christmas. My name is Ralphie and I just received my official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time!

Hopefully I won’t shoot my eye out.

And the summer movie season sucked.

I had such high hopes too.  Pirates 3, Superman, X3, Cars, etc… a multitude of just, eh, ok, films.

Did anyone else notice?  Just how the season has fizzed along, but nothing really stands out?

I have read that Talledega Nights (the new Will Ferrell movie) is more of the same.  Good.  Quotable.  Funny.  But not a total delivery.

And so the season closes.  Snap crackle pop.

Nothing really stands out for the Holidays either.  The new 007 movie and some other stuff, but nothing huge.  Hopefully 2007 will be different.

Harry Potter 5 & 6. Spiderman 3.  Pirates 3.

…And hopefully something that is not a sequel.  Just a thought.

I have been thinking about fitness a lot lately. Sustainable fitness. Cause I am getting fatter and not any younger. The battle of the bulge has commenced. Because I have failed to much in the past, I am trying my hardest to find the smart way of working out, and not the stupid method that every fitness magazine wants you to believe. I do not want to work out 2 hours a day just to fit the American beauty standard that we all love and hate equally. Love a model’s look, but hate the image, because we will never look like that.

So, what do I mean by sustainable fitness?

Well let’s go over the all too common scenario…

You are gaining some weight, don’t look to hot without your t-shirt (or with it either), you feel dumpy and slow, are always kind of moping about, getting sick more often, lack energy after work, etc. You know deep down that you are either starting to die from from a terminal disease or you are just not living a healthy life.

So you take charge. You go to the gym and get a membership, you buy more fruit and veggies than some local markets have in stock and you pledge to change your ways.

Then three weeks later you find yourself on the couch, eating a huge bowl of ice cream for dinner, and feeling even worse for trying. Not to mention guilty for your failure to yourself. That little voice inside is bawling hysterically between bites of ice cream.

Now some people tend to rationalize all that away. Like “I am sick so I can’t work out.” “Or I can’t stop eating these foods.” Or “It is too expensive.” Or “I only need to work out for my vacation.” Or the big favorite of rationalization, “I have no time.”

Really? Why are the most successful people on this planet also the healthiest? It is not because they have money to afford it, or time, or patience. It is because they have established good habits. And dammit, I want to be one of those people.

So I am going to make a list of habits, ideas and stuff and see what can drive me to the next level of sustainable health. Maybe it will help someone out there too. You never know.

Suggestions are always welcome!