School's out!

Ok, I finally finished all my classes this week and even got all my grades posted on friday. Two A's and a B. Not too shabby in my opinion. The B was in my trigonometry class, the hardest math I've EVER taken. I swear the teacher started talkin' in a foreign language for a bunch of the stuff. Stuff like radians, theta, omega, and some other crap I've never heard of. But I pulled off a B and I'm happy with that. Now the funny part; I obviously managed an A in my art class and here is the good part. Out of 17 people in my art class, only 5 other people besides me actually completed the course. Now to me, that speaks volumes about how insane this teacher was.

On another note, progress is finally being made on my car. I decided to go with a new transmission and hopefully when the old one gets swapped out I can sell it on ebay and cover some of the cost of the labor for replacing it. As far as transmission choice, I settled on a the "world class" T5. It is almost as heavy duty as the transmission thats in there now and it has a bigger overdrive so maybe I'll get a few more feet per gallon. Now, hopefully in a week or 2 I will finally get the Mustang back.

Holidays

Well, thanksgiving is over and Christmas is closing in. I am now without a car since a bearing my transmission (i think) has decided to be noisy. So noisy in fact, that it is louder than my exhaust. That is loud. I took it to one dude and he says its "on its last leg" and want to replace it. I asked about rebuild and he just kinda talks like its just easier to replace whole transmission. It aint cheaper though! It'll be around 1500 bucks to put a decent replacement in there that would actually hold up to a 5.0's torque, and I want my Tremec rebuilt but can't seem to find a shop that will quote me a price up front. They gotta open it up first and check it out. Nice. I'd try to rebuild it myself, but I don't have the tools or time and not necessarily all the mechanical knowledge. In the meantime, Becky and I are carpooling. I guess it save a little gas. She says we can afford to fix it next year, which of course is just around the corner :)
Plus next year, I will finally get a motorcycle. Well since I've been wanting one for about a few years now and actually got my endorsement and took a motorcycle safety courses. The course was one of Becky's stipulations toward me getting a motorbike and I seriously had no problem with that. It was a really useful course in my opinion. Now, I just hope to find be a CBR600RR for cheap next year...

I hate art... continued

Ok, portion of the current art project I am working on now requires me to mix 2 different paint colors using colors specified by my instructor to make a different color. In this case, I'm starting with orange and blue. I told my instructor early on I'm red/green color blind. This class is online, so I have to email my work to her. She obviously blew me out of the water on my first try. I reminded her that I was colorblind, since I didn't expect her to remember. She then replies with comment in her email : "I am a little concerned because you knew this was a COLOR and design course and your condition with your color blindness. However, we do have to make this work."

HOLY SHIT! That was harsh.
I couldn't even reply to that because I was so pissed me off. I got Becky to reply for me since I would of gotten in trouble if I had replied and I'm not going to ruin my college career over this crazy bitch. Becky reminded me that the course catalog and syllabus says nothing about mixing paint colors.
We have been trying for about 8 hours to get the paint the color she wants with no luck so far. I hope we can get this shit this weekend. I will need more beer!

Next Blog>>

This post is more or less pointing out a feature of blogger.com. At the top right corner of the page, there is a button that says Next Blog. A few weeks ago I was feeling adventurous/bored and decided to start clicking the next blog link. There is some interesting stuff going on here. Some pages are just normal everyday folks starting out a new blog like me. Then there some pro looking pages that basically have no content and just some flashy graphics, big deal. Then there are blogs from folks in other countries. Just tonite, I click the link and got a whole page in Russian. Whoa, they lost me real quick on that one. I didn't know this blogger thing was that widespread; ignorant me. I've found blogs in a bunch of languages. There's all kinds of crazy talk up here. Another cool thing is if you don't like the next blog, just hit backspace and try the link again for another random blog.

trick or treat

Still feeling the sugar rush! Evan went trick or treating for the first time last night. It's probably been close to 20 years since I've been. Man, that make me feel old. Evan was funny, the other kids wearing costumes freaked the poor kid out. At one house, someone answered the door wearing a mask and Evan just about ran like hell. We managed to keep him in front of the door long enough to get some candy. We just walked around the neighborhood and still had a good time. We even had a unexpected visitor on the way home. We noticed somebody parked in front of our house and some guy standing in front of our door waiting... Turns out it was a pizza delivery guy. Thing is, we didn't order any pizza. I reckon this guy was high because he was looking for Templeton drive and we live on Wilkshire. He didn't know where the hell he was. I'm glad that wasn't our pizza, we would of had to wait a long time for it.

my isp..

SuddenLink, formerly Cox has decided to make things difficult for us cox subscribers. They are doing away with the cox web hosting as of today and I think email will follow very shortly. It only really affects me since I have my profile pic hosted by cox. Well, now its bye bye to members.cox.net. Thats basically it for me, I moved over to my old geocities site that I created back in the old days, 1999 that is. Becky on the other hand is gonna get the email shaft, I think. I tried to stick to a free webmail that won't go away any time soon for my online ordering and other mostly important crap. Too many internet companies get gobbled up by other internet companies. To name a few, Cox got eaten by SuddenLink, Geocities by Yahoo, and the latest and greatest Youtube by Google. As long as Excite doesn't go under, I should be good for a while. Its the email I use on my resume :)

School - I HATE ART CLASS!

So last December I finally got my AAS in Information System: Network Administration and Support (long title isn't it?) and well, it hasn't done anything for me. At where I work they could care less about my degree and the IT market in the Greenville area is pretty saturated. So Becky convinced me to go to ECU and put my 2 year towards a bachelors degree and well damn, I actually had 64 credit hours that transferred. So this semester I wound up taking 3 classes: trigonemetry, health, and an art class. Trig is OK, I'm not real good at math but got a B on first test, so I think I will survive. The health and art classes are online. Health is pretty easy; read some stuff, do some fill in the blanks, post some stuff on a discussion board, and take some quizzes, done.
The art class is insane, Becky keeps telling me its for NON-art majors. Could of fooled me. This woman that teaches it is crazy. I have to do 4 projects and for the first 2 I've done it has taken at least 6-8 hours to finish one; to someone who works full time and has a kid, thats alot of damn time. I figured out when I was real young that I wasn't artistic at all and this class just kills my appreciation for art. I told the teacher pretty early that I'm color blind, so hopefully she'll cut me some slack in the end. But damn, I think this is the class that I have dreaded working on the most....

ubuntu, kubuntu, schmubuntu

I think I spent part of thursday night, most of friday evening, and too much time saturday getting ubuntu installed on my computer. I suspect a flaky dvd burner drive. I painted it black when i got my coolermaster case last year and I guess it didnt like it. I also think for some reason ubuntu doesnt like my nvidia raid 0 setup and constantly complains about some i/o buffer error crap. The live cd would never boot for me and the new cd's dont include an old style installer anymore, that requires the "alternate install cd". Nice. I finally broke down and burned a dvd iso I had recently downloaded onto a dvdr and that one seemed to of worked for me. It seems if ubuntu was one of those "easy" linux distros, they would make installing the ati video driver easy. That took way too much tweaking. Ati has been lacking in the linux support. But anyways, got Gnome up and running. I can always install KDE later as I see fit. XGL still eludes me.
Here's a screenshot from my 19" widescreen in all its glory.
Suprisingly the only icon on the desktop is our external 250 gig usb hard drive to keep all them pics that Becky keeps taking. We thought it would be best since even now cdr's have a lifespan of about 3-5 years and this is so much more quicker and convenient, and its good for backing stuff up.

Mountains

Ok, time to play catch up.
For the weekend we went to the NC mountains. In particular, Grandfather mountain and Tweetsie railroad. Evan had a blast at the railroad since he loves trains, I got to be a mile high, and Becky got to take half a bazillion pictures. It turned out to be a pretty good family trip. The motel we stayed at even had wireless. I'm actually suprised the didn't use the default password for the router too, I checked. My most memorable part of the trip was when Evan & I were waiting to ride the go-carts at Tweetsie railroad and Evan tells me "No daddy, you can't drive. You too big." Who am I to argue with a 3 year old kid, geesh.

Punkin'!

Today we decided to take Evan to get a pumpkin for Halloween. We went to a place called Briley's farm, where coincidentally Evan went to for a week earlier this summer for 'montessori on the farm'. I think I saw colors of pumpkins that I've never seen before. They had green, brown and white pumpkins; the green pumpkins were crazy, they looked like giant green apples.

They had some cool animals there to check out too, like rabbits, a peacock, a turkey, chickens, a donkey, and a llama to name a few. Plus there was a pony there that Evan rode during his week there and as soon as he saw it he says "want to ride horse!" Sorry Evan, not today. The donkey was kinda cool, I aint never seen a donkey rolling around on the ground before. I missed the chance to take that picture and of course I only had my phone for these shots. Just doesnt have the quality of a 6 megapixel Canon for some reason, but gets the job done in a pinch.

Point and click

Ok. I'm an admitted computer junkie. I've never really tried to push it on Evan though. Yesterday, Becky got Evan to go the Sesame Street website and play some of the games. Later that evening she left to go shopping and Evan asks me "want play game". Of course I said ok, so Evan immediately grabs Becky's laptop and trys to open it. I managed to find a game where you help Elmo in a chicken suit count eggs by clicking on them; when you count them all, Elmo sings some song. Evan impressed me with his trackpad skills. I managed to snap this shot with my phone while he was in action. Go Evan, 1337!

A day late

I'm impressing myself for posting this many times, I just can't seem to post stuff the same day while its still fresh in my mind.
At any rate, Sunday was the perfect day to avoid homework! Since I'm taking 4 classes @ ECU, I really should of been doing schoolwork instead of goofing off most of the day.
I did manage to get my last spark plug installed without breaking it and put my new ditributor cap and rotor. The highlight of my day was riding the pocketbike. Becky help document it with a few pics, I'll put up the 2 best ones.

A mostly good Saturday

Ok, today I got to put my spark plugs in. All went well until the second one when I was trying to put the new one in. While turning my wrench, I heard the plug click. I immediately thought, shit! a spark plug is not supposed to make that sound. So I uncranked it out to check it out and yep, I cracked the ceramic on the plug. Whoops, at least these things are less than 2 bucks a piece, so not that big a deal. Only problem is that no store in town carries these in stock. So I went to the store where I bought them and ordered one more. I figured while I was there, I'd make it worth the trip and get a distributer cap and rotor. Whats an extra 19 bucks to do a decent tune up? So tomorrow around 1:30, I'll hopefully be putting my last new plug in and new cap and rotor.

On a happier note, today I was determined to take Evan's pocket bike out for a joyride at about 7 at nite. A 3 year old with a gas powered pocket bike makes no sense, except it's a fun to ride for me. I actually got it to start on 2 pulls and I take a lap around the neighborhood. I then decided, OK lemme drive around Brooke Valley. This is a very affluent neighborhood with very expensive houses and I'm buzzin around on a little yellow pocket bike and to my amazement poeple were smiling and waving at me! I was hauling ass down those streets too, since rich people get nice smooth roads and all. It was fun, I didnt want to wear out my welcome so I only went thru brooke valley once since it was getting dark and all. Got a bunch of gas left in the tank, so maybe I'll buzz around some more tomorrow!

cycling

Ok, on Tuesday we all went to toys r us to buy Evan a couple board games so he would watch less tv. While in the store, we went to the bikes and I pulled one out for evan to try out. He started riding it all over the bike section, so we dicide to get him one. We figured we could walk while Evan would ride, boy were we wrong. I had to jog to keep with the kid and this is just a little bike with training wheels. I got my exercise that night jogging along with Evan around the block for what seemed about a mile.

Tuesday's Sunday

I was going to log something on sunday, but got lazy and didn't. We actually went to a little park a short ways from our house. Evan had fun, Becky took a few pics, and I sat on a big ass purple t-rex. I got pictures to prove it. I had to post this shot of Evan and me on the swing set. Not much else to say except that I thinks its a cool shot.

maintenance

I FINALLY got my oil changed today. I got this car, oh almost 3 months ago and of course there was no next oil change due sticker anywhere on this thing. I'm pretty sure the Mustang was long overdue. But phew, its amazing how little things can make a difference. I had kinda taken note of where the oil pressure gauge was pointing and since the oil change, it is alot higher (thats a good thing). On, my ride home I figured I'd stop at advance auto and pick up a set of spark plugs for a half ass tune up. I prefer NGK plugs and of course this store didnt stock them, but they'll be here tomorrow. So I paid the dude a whopping 16 bucks and I got a easy project for next weekend. I decided to post a pic of my filthy engine with its slick Cobra intake manifold.

Where is my raise going?

Ok. So I was walking through the parking lot at where I work the other day and I notice that the owners' parking spots were occupied. I just had to put my razr to work and take a picture of what I saw, a black 2007 escalade, a very newish yukon denali, and another 2007 escalade in not to copy the other owner, white. This is were my raise is going. Since the combined total of those three vehicles is about 160 grand. I am just a little irritated.

catalytic converters

Finally took the cats off the Mustang today. Only 11 more months to enjoy a catalytic converterless Mustang. Boy, was that factory pipe heavy. I want to add some more parts. I've found a set of underdrive pullies for 50 bucks, just haven't gotten around to ordering them. Also, I want a new throttle body, but they kind of pricey.