Cognitive Dissonance

This is my first test of the blogging software on my new hackintosh Dell 9 Mini. So far it works pretty sweet. It has one of those 80% sized keyboards, but since I don;t touch type, that doesn’t matter too much, although a few of the keys are in the wrong place. But everything else works great.

2 gigs ram, 16 Gig SSD drive, wireless, and the screen is really bright. I have been looking for a better travel and blogging laptop than the old toshibas that I was using. I do wish that Microsoft would make Live Writer for the Mac, it is a great blogging writer, but MarsEdit is pretty dang good.

It has flickr integration now, as soon as I remember my login for flickr I should try it out. Built-in webcam works great, as do the mic and speakers. Haven’t tried the SD reader, but it is supposed to be fully supported.

Overall, pretty cool for under $200 on ebay.

One of the things that I knew would happen when we purchased a boat was that my father-in-law would get excited. He likes to fish. Loves it, in fact. So he was thrilled to hear that we would be able to fish together. Just one catch – they live in Moscow, Russia.

And he’s afraid to fly.

Well, the fish got the better of him, and they are on their way. Arriving this Saturday, in fact, and that meant I needed to finish up the spring cleaning and tuneup.

Mind you, I haven’t tuned an engine since high school, and this boat is new to me, so it was a bit of an adventure. Swapping out the plugs and points wasn’t too bad. Cap and rotor were easy, as was the condenser. Plug wires are simple, so all that is left is adjusting the timing.

Naturally, the batteries are dead. Fine. I fire up the charger and wait overnight. No dice. two days later still no dice, the batteries are finished. I am lucky that there is a sale right now, and I only need to replace ALL FOUR!

Getting the batteries is easy, but removing the old ones is insane. I’m pretty tall, and the engine room is pretty small. Figuring out how to get four batteries out, without spilling acid on myself, then getting four back in, and reconnecting everything took just four quick hours.

Once in place, the engines fired up nicely. I had painted the timing stud white, so it shone under the strobe lamp. The tuned engine was only a little off, and once dialed in, sounded fantastic.

Now I just have to convince my father in law not to bring his poles and hooks as carry-on items.

One of the things that is so great about working with the Bikini Football stuff, and TWBFL in general (especially now that they recruited me to work on the web site) is that I never have to worry about having something to do. Getting my free time swamped with work might be a bummer, but since it largely involves hanging out with hot models in tank tops and bikinis, I think I will manage.

Yesterday’s project was the TWBFL Pro Shop. Looking at the site, the store that was currently setup made little sense, So I got the OK, and started setting up a Cafepress storefront to do basic shirts and stuff. I figured it would take an hour or two.

Five hours later, after chasing down all the Photoshop files, cleaning them up into hi-res PNG format, adding a "TM" to the corner, setting up all the products, sections, and that, I was done. Gah.

Just in time to head downtown to do some photography.

Yulia was leading the group in a dance thing at the Last Supper club, so they had a practice to start, and I got some photos of them doing just that. Sasha was running music for the practice, and the girls looked really good. We finished everything by around 10:00pm, and Sasha and I headed home, while the girls headed to the club to do the "Meet and Greet".

At least I’m not bored.

So I picked up the Jimi Hendrix pack for Guitar Hero yesterday, and had Sasha try out a few of the songs. One of the things that I like about this game is that it introduces her to music that she doesn’t hear on the radio all the time. I thought that since she is taking guitar lessons as well, hearing some music from Jimi would be an interesting addition.

She was impressed. first off, the on-screen character singing the songs looks like Jimi, the pack has If 6 was 9, Little Wing, Fire, and if you do those well, Purple Haze as an encore. She nailed them all and got the encore. She was a bit bummed to find out that Hendrix died young. I didn’t tell her that he is buried in Renton next to her great-grandfather. We can save that bit of trivia for another day.

Well, I have been hanging onto the www.hancheroff.com domain for some time, and it’s been pretty broken. I finally got around to fixing it mostly on the weekend, so it points to something. I also have a bunch of my photos up there, I have been using the Mac Gallery for some stuff, but I think the new Web Journal pages from Aperture look better, so I will try those for a bit.

In any case, check them out.