Pedro B

I’m a big Star Trek fan (yeah, all the ladies love that about me) and I also like the Star Wars series of films.  I saw this short video today and almost pooped myself I was so amazed.  Love the idea, and I love the fist bump the two stormtroopers give each other at the end.

For thos who don’t want to bother with the video (what’s wrong with you!) it’s basically the Star Ship enterprise, looks like from the original series, kind of hovering over the San Fransisco bay.  The camera pans up and you see the FREAKIN DEATH STAR from Star Wars.  Then the Death Star fires on the Enterprise!

Not sure which award show has a Really-Freakin-Cool-Short-Video category but I’m sure this would win.

One of my passions is car mods.  Specifically, lowriders.  Most of my passions take a back seat to my job and my family and modifying vehicles is no different.  I always make sure everything at work is ok and everything on the homefront is ok before I get involved in any kind of vehicle projects.

Last week I was looking for an extra vehicle for the family because my sister Shirley moved back to Minnesota with me and my parents and she would need a vehicle to get to and from work.  My search was for a smaller car in the range of around two grand.  Just something for her to get around in.

When ever I look for vehicles I always keep an eye out for a two wheel drive, short bed, regular cab, white Chevy Silverado that was built before 1999.  Too specific?  Yes, that’s why I never find it and I just keep my money and move on.  While doing my search this time I ran across this ad on Craigslist:

Craigslist Ad

Oooooh.  I was looking for a $2000 small car for my sister.  But I found what is basically the truck of my dreams.  I say that to people and they look at me like I’m crazy.  Why would anybody lust over this truck?  If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand, but I’ll try.  I need it two be a two wheel drive because you can’t lower a four wheel drive.  I want a short bed because long beds look ugly.  And I want a regular cab because I’ve had extended cab pick-ups before.  And I want it to be white because I love GM’s pearl white color.  And I want it to be pre-1999 because I’m not a fan of the newer model Chevy pick-ups.

I couldn’t help myself.  I called the guy and asked if he’d take four grand for it.  He said to come drive it and we would talk it over.  I drove it and fell in love!  This is the exact truck I’ve been looking for and it is up for sale, in good shape, no rust, no dents, problem-free motor.  And he took my offer of four g’s.

White Silverado

Isn’t she pretty?  I didn’t need to spend four grand but I did need this truck.  I’ve been using it as my daily driver all week and can’t believe how well it drives.  I am completely enamored by this vehicle.  I have big plans for this Silverado over the next couple of years.  I want to have an air ride installed for starters.  I also want to put some nice wheels on it.  I think about a year from now it should look something like this:

Lowered Silverado

Mmmmm.  I can’t wait.  You can see the progression of this truck at BaggedRides.  I will try and keep udpates of all the mods I make to it there.  It’s one of my affiliate BANS sites.

I have two other trucks besides this one.  A few years back I bought a Chevy Silverado that is setup more for Minnesota.  It’s a four wheel drive, extended cab, short bed.  It’s a solid daily driver and is nice because I can have a few passengers with me too.  And it’s got a nice towing package for hauling around a boat to one of our ten thousand lakes.

Gray Silverado

But for the most part it’s rather bland. I can’t lower it. I don’t want it to look different from the outside because I don’t want anybody messing with it or trying to steal it. I even have a stereo system installed in it but I set it up so that you can’t tell from the outside. When the rear seat is down all you see is a rear seat.

Rear Seat

Don’t mind the crumbs on the floor.  I let somebody borrow my truck and they let their kids eat crackers in it!  I damn near went apoplectic.  There’s a Holiday gas station near my house that has free vacuums.  Consider it done.

So I set a system up in this truck just for me to see and hear while I’m driving.  I can’t really play my music loud at home because other people live there and the neighbors get upset.  But I can play it loud in my truck doing 60mph up highway 100.

Sub and Amps

That’s in the Gray Silverado with the seat up.  It’s got two Kicker Solobaric subwoofers, four Alpine speakers in the doors, and a pair of Alpine amplifiers powering the speakers.  It also has a Stinger 1 Farad capacitor so that it doesn’t kill my battery/alternator.  It’s not the first setup I’ve put in a vehicle, or even the loudest, but it is my favorite.  I had the box you see in the picture custom made so that it looks like it’s part of the truck and blends in very nicely.  People and would-be-thieves can’t see it from the outside.

So I started out looking for a daily driver for Shirley to get to and from work with and instead bought yet another truck.  Oh well.  She can use my Chevy S-10 for now.

S-10

I like to consider myself fairly savvy as far as gadgets and technology is concerned.  It takes a lot to impress me and I rarely find something that makes me say “Wow!”

Google Voice did just that.  I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Grand Central was purchased by Google.  Recently Google decided to transfer/upgrade Grand Central accounts to Google Voice, another one of those Google services that is still in Beta mode and not quite available to the masses.

Let me give you a quick run down.  Google Voice lets you have a telephone number.  They call it a “number for life.”  So you give that number out to people rather than your actual phone numbers.  You can login to your Voice account and change a bunch of settings, such as where phone calls to that number go, whether or not they go to a screening service first, maybe some callers are on a safe list and go straight through.  I have had this set up for a couple of years now and it comes in handy.  All of my whois info for my domain names have that number.  I give it to pretty much everyone.  It all used to be at Grand Central before.  So when someone calls that number, based on my settings, they are either directed to a screening which asks them to say their name or they go straight go my phone.  If they are screened first, I get a call asking if I want to talk to this person, send them straight to voicemail (and I can listen in on the voicemail, and have the option to answer during the voicemail) or ignore the call.

All of these options were available before Google even acquired Grand Central.  Google being Google has taken things a step further.  They have integrated this service with my Google account and now I have my contacts from my email address mixed with my Google Voice account. And I don’t have to login to Grand Central to access my account.  I access it along with my email and other Google services I use, such as Google Reader.  I tell you there are plenty of reasons to fear Google but damn they make it difficult to not use!  Yeah I’m a junky as far as Google is concerned.

Along with the upgrades I just mentioned, there were a few I hadn’t really paid attentiopn to.  Today I got a phone call from somebody trying to sell me something.  I let it go straight to voicemail as usual.  I didn’t even bother listening to the message.  These voicemails get emailed to me and I can listen to them on my blackberry if I want or listen to them on my computer later on. 

So after the call I got an email on my phone from Google Voice, just like I used to with Grand Central.  When I opened the email I was FREAKIN’ AMAZED.  The email message didn’t just have a “play” option to listen to the voicemail, it TRANSLATED the voicemail to TEXT and displayed that text in the message of the email!  Just like that I knew what the message was and deleted the email.  And I was stunned.

So obviously it’s beneficial for Google to translate this message to text for me.  With text in the email Google can now serve ads that are relevant to me while I am reading my email.  If it was just a message that said “play” and didn’t have anything about the actual message the ads would be meaningless to me.  Kind of like the same problem Youtube is having with Video.  So Google has invested probably like a million dollars, or something crazy, to be able to translate my voicemail messages I get from Google Voice into text.  And I love it.

Another feature they have added is the ability to send and receive text messages from my Google Voice phone number.  Insane!  Now there is no reason why I shouldn’t give this number out rather than my real cell phone number.  Am I just another pawn in Googles grand scheme to take over the world and own us all?  I just might be but man it’s hard not to love their services.

I’ve mentioned my Blackberry Storm a few times in my other posts.  It happened to be released right around the time my T-Mobile contract was going to expire so I decided to buy the Storm and switch to Verizon.  I didn’t have much choice since the Storm is exclusive to Verizon.  It’s not like I wasn’t happy with T-Mobile though.

When I did sit down with the Best Buy rep to discuss my monthly plan I was told that Verizon does not have a plan with less than 400 anytime minutes, which is more than I talk on my cell phone a month.  So my monthly payment turned out to be higher with Verizon wireless than what I was expecting but I went ahead and did it anyway.

I’ve been using the service about three months now and just yesterday a representative with Verizon called my cell phone and told me I was paying them to much money.  I believe a “WTF” is in order here.  Why would they call me to tell me that they want to lower my bill?  I mean that is absolutely awesome customer service but I was shocked!  I can’t think of a time when someone that was billing me monthly for a service called me to LOWER my bill.

So basically the Best Buy rep lied to me and Verizon does have a plan with less than 400 minutes a month and now I am paying less money.  If this is how Verizon wireless does business everytime I deal with them from now on, then they have a customer for life.

I have a really old three character aol screen name.  For some reason, three character screen names are desirable to teenage kids that sit at their computers all day and want to be “hackers.”  They try to find different ways to steal screen names that they want using “spoof” pages, or phishing attacks.  Why do they want them?  Because they are mentally incapable of rational thought, but that is for a different blog post entirely.

Because I have this screen name I get these phishing attacks pretty often and I get to see a lot of the new phishing schemes that scam artists use.  Recently my inbox at this email address has been filling up with lots of what appears to be spam.  Lots of spam at the same time and from different “companies.”  Most email services have a button or text to click when you want to report an email as spam but these messages had that in the body of the email.  When I clicked the link to report as spam, I was taken to a page asking me for my login info.  I checked out the url and sure enough, it was a spoof page.

This is a fairly new tactic for acquiring my personal information that I have not seen or heard of before.  Basically, “Phishers” are disguising phishing attempts with spam mail, which is annoying enough.  So when someone tries to take steps to keep from recieving messages from that sender, they are instead giving their login information to scam artists.

The lesson is to always check a URL before typing in your personal information into a a web page!  Hackers are always looking for new ways to get us to give up our personal information.

I’m in the process of transfering ALL of my websites to a new hosting service and it is incredibly lame.  Hostgator wouldn’t do it for me since I’m transfering from one Hostgator account to another Hostgator account.  Ugh!!  So I’m taking a break right now.  Maybe I’ll take an extended break.

I very seriously hope I never have to do anything this excruciating again.  I had dedicated hosting that I was splitting the cost with someone else but the dude is getting out of his sites.  Which left a pretty hefty cost for yours truly to pony up and I just can’t justify the cost.  So I’m downgrading my hosting service and am now moving like fifty freakin’ websites over to this new hosting plan and it is LAME.

Most of my sites are Build a Niche Store sites, so I’m only transferring the database and theme of each of those.  But quite a few of them are WordPress sites also, and a few of those have a BANS store in a directory.  Messy stuff.  I’m seriously considering getting a server at home and putting it in the basement or something.  My bro is a geek so he could set that stuff up for me real nice and neat, then my only concern would be the cost of a business internet service.  I would want like five IP addresses and they would have to be static IP addresses.  Comcast would want a pretty penny for that but at least everything would be in-house.  That would be awesome-ness.  Check out the cheap CHEAP pc components Tiger direct is offering for some of the latest PC hardware coming out.  No I’m not getting an affiliate commission for that link, it’s just really cheap!

I’m trying to look on the bright side of things with this transfer.  Mark over at The Niche Store Builder recently wrote a few articles about Spring Cleaning for websites.  He talked about WordPress installs, Domain names, and webhosting accounts.  With the transfers I’m making I have to do all those things!  While it is lame it does let me make sure everything I have is everything I need.  The rest can be garbage.

Diego Sanchez Is One of My Favorite MMA Fighters…  But he is very close to psycho.  Diego Sanchez recently fought at UFC 95 in the main event against Joe Stevenson.

Diego Sanchez is known as one of the more intense human beings involved in Mixed Martial Arts and I for one very much enjoy his bouts.  He goes balls to the wall in every fight, even when he loses.  In fact, in his first loss against Josh Koscheck, Diego went the full three rounds and lost a decision to Koscheck in that fight.  After the fight had ended it was discovered that Diego had a severe staph infection!

In his latest fight, against Stevenson, Diego came out yelling “Yes!” with the beat of the song he decided to play for his entrance.  It just furhter solidified his “weirdness” as a UFC fighter.  Diego is weird and he probably knows it.  But maybe it would be better if he keeps his odd pre-fight rituals to himself for the publics sake.  I mean for everyone else at least, I don’t mind it.

Mountain Dew

Some people do the coffee thing.  I don’t like coffee.  Coffee gives me stomach issues, though some people may like to have that problem (to much information Rosie!) 

So I do Mountain Dew.  I love Mountain Dew!  I try not to drink to much because I know it’s not exactly the best thing for my to be drinking.  But it gets me going in the morning and it helps me stay up when I need to get in a few more blog posts.  Which reminds me I need to get in a few more blog posts…

Alex Rodriguez

Lame, lame, lame.  It’s tough for me to understand the steroid thing.  It’s such a negative thing in the eyes of the public but athletes still do it!  I can’t understand that.

So Alex Rodriguez, along with 103 other Major League Baseball players, tested positive for steroids in 2003.  That is also the year he won the MVP award.  This is all over ESPN right now and will be everywhere for a long time.  What’s so lame about this is that Alex Rodriguez is considered one of the best Pro Baseball players of all time and he is in the prime of his athletic career right now.

I know this whole steroid thing in baseball is super played out.  It seems every time we get a baseball player breaking records they are then connected to steroid use shortly after (e.g. Mark Mcguire, Barry Bonds) but that is what made Alex Rodriguez so cool.  He is all around a great baseball player (not just hitter.)  You just kind of like the idea that someone of his ability was doing it the right way.

Of course he still has to answer to this before we can judge him.  But it’s not like he can say the test was wrong.  It was an anonymous test that 103 other players failed.  The test results should not have gone public but the fact is it did and, as far as I am concerned, we can go ahead and get that asterisk next to his records.