No, I didn't get a new car yet; they gave it to me as a loaner when Heather's car went into the shop. I peaked at the window sticker sitting in the glove box. $45,000. Let that sink in a little bit for a second. A4. 2.0T (211hp turbo charged 4 cylinder). In all fairness it's optioned heavy with, 'Audi Driver Select' which is short for dynamic shocks, and a Bang Olufsen stereo. But, pachow that's a lot of coin for an A4. No sports package, no s-line package, no six cylinder (not that their normal six is worth paying for anyway). Sadly, you can also get a 335i (300hp twin turbo six cylinder) with the premium package and cold weather package for roughly the same price as the A4. I'm not positive the BMW comes with as many doo-dads, and it's not a brand new design, but 211hp against 300hp? Of course, if you want all wheel drive, you'd have to pony up to the 335xi which run a couple grand more. And in all fairness, the 2.0T has plenty of torque ... but the BMW has 300ft/lb. ...

I use to f*cking love this movie when I was a teenager. Watched it again for the first time in forever last night, how disappointing. Underneath, it's still a great movie. But wow, the effects are so awful that it kills it; totally doesn't hold up. And while there are a lot of good actors, some of the, um, performances, are a little, way, over the top. And the pacing is so plodding compared to what we're used to that I just about fell asleep.

Not that I watch much TV; this adds a forth season pass to my TiVo. F1 doesn't really count as a show though. That leaves Battlestar Galactica, which has jumped the shark a couple of times now but I'll stick it out to the bitter end just to see how they wrap up. And Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is spotty at best. But I absolutely can't stand reality TV so this is kind of all I have. At some point last summer, Heather and Logan were out of town and I was home working on the house. I was getting ready to start an all day trim caulking project (all the cold weather split most of my joints this winter, so I'll be redoing it all over again soon), that I still haven't painted, and I needed something for background noise. Turned past USAHD, and the Burn Notice intro was playing and it caught my eye. So I sat down and watched part of the episode and kind of kept it on in the background. Ended up being a Burn Notice marathon leading up to the season finale so I left it ...

Take a look up in the address bar. No more unsightly /index.php/2008/12/15/post-name up there anymore. Just sweet, sweet /%category%/%postname%/. Super easy if I were smart and ran Apache instead of IIS. Maybe one day I'll get around to moving my home server from windows to some flavor of linux. Who am I kidding, I've got a family, a job and mortgage ... no way I'll ever bother. So, I've known about isapi rewrite filters for a long time but just kind of never bothered. And back when I first looked, the only big option was Helicon's asapi rewrite which, unfortunately, the free lite version has too many limitations for what I wanted to do (not run rewrites on all of my websites). But this time around, when I just looked on a whim, I get Ionic's IIRF which is free and runs on individual sites. To setup I used this guy's tutorial because it was the easiest to read. Not that there's anything hard here, I just like really really easy when the kid is running around and the wife is asking me about Christmas decorations. In case the link goes away here's ...

It came down to the last corner of the last lap. And fittingly, he won the championship by one point where he lost it last year by one point. Cynics won't help being able to believe it was orchestrated. Timo Glock, who'd chosen to stay out on dries when everybody else dove in for wets, clawed up to forth putting Hamilton in sixth behind Vettel. Lewis, not able to put any moves on Vettel in the closing laps appeared to lose the championship to Massa. Massa and Ferrari were celebrating on Massa's victory lap. And then, out of nowhere, on the very last corner of the last lap Glock wobbled on the increasingly wet track letting Vettel and Hamilton by, giving Lewis the fifth place finish he needed to go one point up on Massa. Sadly, it was the most exciting event of the entire race. Another season over. I won't see another race until the baby is born.

I know I said I was leasing this one to force myself to keep it for more than a year. But I don't think that's going to happen. I'm trying to use the soft car market to get out of my C300. Hopefully I can work it so that the low interest rates for CPO Audi's and the low auction prices on lease returns will absorb my substantial negative equity. I'm still trying to find out how, mathmatically, leasing works because for what I'm paying per month and what the residual is I shouldn't be this far behind. My guess is that if I kept it another year I'd be in better shape, but I don't think I can put up with it that long. While I'm waiting for stuff at work I figured I'd compile a list of pros and cons. And just so that I'm not being pessimistic I'll put my likes first. But I've come to the conclusion that this is a 20k car with 15k worth of badges. Likes Suspension. Although it's gotten a little brittle with the colder weather and/or mileage it's still very comfortable for the cornering performance it delivers. Handling. ...

What a novel fking idea! MTV puts some music videos online; now if they'd just put them back on TV like it says in their name then it'd all be good. Strangely most of the top picked videos right now are 80's stuff. Are us old codgers the only ones that watch music videos now? I tried to pick the absolute lamest video in history to embed. C+C Music Factory |MTV Music

There's a perfectly good tut on lifehacker but I wanted to copy it here so that 6mo down the road, when I want to do this again, I don't have to worry about the link being dead. [edit: actually I like this one from tuaw.com better.] There are reports that the rename trick has been squashed, but I haven't verified. So this is the GarageBand way. Which also means it's Mac only ... which is fine, this is for me so I have a guide on how to do it next time. And I have a Mac. So fire up iTunes and GarageBand, find the song you want to turn into a ringtone (this is of course assuming that what you want as a ringtone is already in iTunes) and drag it from iTunes into GarageBand. If it's not in iTunes, just open the file in GarageBand right? Now that the file is in itunes click on the Cycle Region button which activates the region loop tool (images stolen from LifeHacker) Now adjust the region to the section of the song you want; it has to be < 40sec and I've found that sometimes GarageBand complained and wouldn't export ...

I needed a place to drop iPhone wallpapers so that I can grab them without having to put them in iPhoto. Probably going to be updating this post for awhile with more wallpaper as a I make/find them. [update] I'll probably just end up setting up an iPhoto album/event just for wallpapers, but I'll still leave this here and update it anyway.

I'd previously messed around with iWphone plugin and wasn't very satisfied. Today I was monkeying around and googled up iphone wordpress plugins and hit on WPtouch. It's way cooler looking than iWPhone but it still needs some tweaking. Need to do: padding around images; images that are floated cause some funkiness with text add some cooler looking icons for stuff (wonder if it'll auto format the round corners and such like the iphone does? ... highly doubt it) check out how it's resizing large images ... see if I can take advantage of that for all images that ended up being easy ... just using 'max-width' ... duh. obviously the qt embed plugin doesn't work with it so see what I can do hiding those fix previous/next links on single post page if the next link title is wraps and then pushes everything down [update] I can't figure this one out, the template is floating the next link left and floating the previous link right, no problems there ... I text-aligned left and right to help readability but for some reason the right arrow still pushes text above it there's a huge gap between displaying the # of comments and the comment form; can't figure ...

At the store we couldn't decide between this one and the Samsung LN37A550 because they looked so similar. But then the completely unhelpful Video Only sales guy finally checked stock (after talking to him for 20min about the damn thing) and found out he didn't have any, so that made the decision for us. Video Only still has better prices than the big box stores (every model was exactly $100 less than the sale price at BB and CC, so they must watch their ads closely) and when we've bought stuff before they negotiated prices. This yahoo sales guy refused to budge on the prices for anything. He never once answered a question, never recommended one unit over another. All he did was parrot what was on the product tag. Kind of annoyed that we had to give him the sale; wondering if VO has moved away from commissions for their people. The TV is stunning. I also bought a blu-ray player for downstairs and we popped in Ratatouille and were blown away. Later, I ran upstairs to watch a blu-ray on my older DLP and it couldn't compare. So much for ...

I woke up early Friday morning because I had to get Logan out the door before the house cleaner showed up, and I sat in my chair pondering if I should click that upgrade button. Last time I upgraded (was it 2.0.2?) it took upwards of 40min, and then got stuck in a restore loop where it kept asking me to restore the same backup over and over. Which finally resulted in my having to do a full wipe and restore. Luckily, then, I had the time. This time I didn't. With Apple's recent track record of botched rollouts I felt like I was rolling the dice. To my surprise, I walked away to go shower and get Logan ready, came back a few minutes later and it was all done. No restore loop. Everything synced up correctly. Hey, it worked! 3G reception, whether it's real or just messing with the signal display, more closely matches my old samsung blackjack. Haven't had a dropped call, or one that couldn't be initiated, yet. Contact list is snappy. I don't have reboot the phone every 24hrs. No app crashes. No app ...

Found this site for album art. Limited scope compared to amazon.com or walmart.com, but what is here is high quality only. Found a few images here that I couldn't pull from itunes store and the amazon images were small and crappy so I thought I better mark it down for future reference.