Oddball Update

Well it sure sucked this morning, but things have been looking up, somewhat. Unfortunately, the OMG STUPID ad banners project has only gotten bigger—much bigger—and I’m sorry to say I’m not really dealing with it, because the only way I can keep myself from losing it today is by not even thinking about it. So I’m working on it, but slowly. I need to inject myself with distractions to keep sane.

My lunch hour was good, because I parked on the roof of the parking garage and set up my XM radio car kit. Not permanently set up, just kind laid everything out on the seat and hooked it up to make sure it would work. Boy, does it ever work. It sounds GREAT! The built-in FM modulator is of good quality, but it’s still not good enough. I just don’t dig modulation. So I popped in the old-fashioned cassette adapter, and WOW. Major difference. The sound was twice as loud, for one thing, and so much clearer. But eventually I want to replace my Monsoon tape deck head unit with one that came out of a 2001 or 2002 Trans Am, so I can have a single slot-loading CD player up front and hook the XM radio up to the CD changer port. At that point, yes, I would just disconnect my CD changer. I don’t play CDs in the T/A that often since it never gets driven long distances, and when I do, I don’t tend to disc-hop at all. If I could still pop a CD in the head unit when I want to hear one, but also press the PLAY button to switch to XM, that’d be golden. I’ll look for a decent Monsoon single-CD HU on eBay one of these days. There’s always a few on there.

I love XM’s channel selection. The SkyFi 2 receiver has 30 presets, so I set them all up today. Bank A is ‘70s, ‘80s, Deep Tracks, classic rock, techno and news. Bank B is talk radio, comedy, Sonic Theater and Old Time Radio. Bank C is “adult contemporary” / soft rock stuff, top 40 mishmash and Cinemagic (movie soundtracks). It’s all coming in with a sound quality somewhere between FM and CD, I think. I can easily hear XM’s data compression artifacts—it sounds a bit like a 96kbps MP3—but they don’t bother me too much. Having scads of news channels is cool, including actual live audio feeds from MSNBC, CNN Headline News, Fox News and others. I also set it up to scroll scores for Pistons, Tigers, Lions (blarf) and Red Wings (on hiatus) games on the ticker at the bottom of the screen, since there still aren’t any Florida teams I give a jack about.

It’s 3:30. Come on, I want 5:30. My dad said he and my mom might come along to my grandfather’s new house with me tonight, but they were holding out hope that their friends from Ohio (who have a vacation home down here as well) would be able to meet with them for dinner. They just weren’t sure if their Ohio friends actually got out of Ohio, what with all the airline delays, terrible weather, U.S. Airways acting like a bunch of tards, etc. After I take care of things over at my grandpa’s place, I’m trying to decide what to do next. I figure I could start tackling one big project tonight. I’ve got it narrowed down to “install XM in Trans Am at least semi-permanently,” or “attempt to resurrect Dell 486 and assemble quaint photo-documentary of efforts.”

Anyway, it looks like I won’t be listening to XM radio in the office anytime soon—or ever—so I’m going to have to think of some new audio material to digitize and bring in. Tired of the same old stuff. How about some more Bell and Hwa-Hwa? I know my wife is already planning to pick up some of their latest creations for my birthday, including a karaoke dance remix VCD which would surely result in sheer hilarity if I tried to sing along.

God…STILL MORE fires to put out here at work. All these people are on vacation this week, and I swear to Christ I’m covering for them ALL. I can’t even find a minute to do my own job. I just love holidays.

Categorized as Life