Project: Rich

I was up at the butt crap of dawn on Saturday and Sunday to go riding up on Angeles Crest Highway. Went about 50 miles in before I hit the "road closed" signs. Here's a gallery of pics taken with my camera phone. Next time I'll bring my normal camera to get better images.

I've been in a shitty mood the last couple of weeks. It's all because of work of course. Probably the reason I've neglected this site for a while. I was also getting over food poisoning followed up by a flu last week. Needless to say, my Labor Day weekend was pretty mellow. What I am looking forward to is fall. Only a couple more weeks until it's officially here. I'll keep my head up for that.I had myself a decent little DVD Tuesday. Picked up Lost: Season 1. Never seen a single episode but everyone talks so highly of it. Got through 4 episodes last night and I have to tell ya, I'm hook. Pretty damn good stuff there. Also picked up Nip/Tuck: Season 2. That is, by far, my favorite show currently on TV. It just grabs ya and doesn't let go. Season 3 starts Sept 20th.Finally, I picked up Crash. This is, hands down, the best film of the year for me. Makes sense too if you think about it. Last year my favorite movies were We Don't Live Here Anymore, Closer, Garden State, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I like flicks about the complexities of human relationships and Crash is very much about this. Set in Los Angeles and drenched with stereotypes, Crash attempts to explore the good and bad in all of us. It shows what could happen when humanity collides into itself with results ranging from violent to heroic to down right heartbreaking. It hits you were it counts and leaves a mark for you to dwell on for a while. There is no better flick you will see this year and I already can't wait to get back home and watch it again.Alright, not much of an update, but I figure I'd make it known I'm still alive.

I'm home sick today. It feels like a cold mixed in with a delayed hangover from Saturday night. Started feeling it all yesterday evening and I couldn't get to sleep. I need to learn the meaning of the word moderation when drinking. I'm sure it didn't help this cold at all.

I ordered the Mighty Mouse from Apple last week. Ever since, I've been reading review after review about how much people don't like it. I've been sitting here hoping that it's just not as bad as everyone is saying it is. Well it came today and I've been playing with it for the last couple of hours now. My thoughts? The Mighty Mouse is damn near close to the absolute worst mouse I have ever used. It's incredibly light and, therefore, feels completely cheap in your hand. I am having major problems having the mouse recognize a secondary click from me. It usually acts like a normal click. The side buttons are extremely too far forward and you have to adjust your hand position on the mouse just to use them. As cool as the track ball in the middle sounds, it's completely inconsistent with track speed and sometimes wont even engage at all until a second roll. Lastly, can someone tell me why driver software for this stinky piece of poo is taking up about 140MB? That just seems a little ridiculous to me. The only good thing I can say about the thing is that it's pretty and matches a lot of other Apple peripherals. Big fuckin' deal! Apple, this is, like, what? Strike 50 for mice? Save the absolutely insulting fee of $50 you would spend on the Mighty Mouse and go get yourself a Logitech MX 518 gaming-grade mouse.

I picked up a 60GB iPod today. Simply outgrew my old one. This would be my third iPod since the original one was introduced. Now that you know the reason for moving on from the second iPod, you can go back and read about the fate of my first iPod. I still use that dead iPod screen as my buddy icon to this day.

My general rule with any mouse is the more buttons, the better. With the introduction of the Mighty Mouse, Apple has finally gotten off their ass and created a mouse that I might actually consider using. And leave it to Apple to overprice a simple mouse. $49.00? Seems like it should be closer to $29.00. I'll still pick one up today and see if it's worth using, but I'm still thinking you can't get any better than a high-end Logitech mouse for my money. Oh well. The price for early adoption.

Can you believe it's August already? This year is flying by. I had me a pretty chill weekend. Huntington Beach on Saturday. Out riding my bike all day Sunday. It was a nice (and inexpensive) change of pace from the two weekends before. Well, everything on the site is changed over now. Working on a new layout, but it's not going up for a while. I updated my Creative Commons license from the 1.0 version to the 2.5. Also added my MySpace profile into the links section. That site isn't as bad as I thought it was at the beginning of the year. Go click on it and be my friend. Please!I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Friday. Easily one of the worst flicks I've seen all year. Tim Burton is 0-2 as far as remakes go. I'm a fan, but he needs to stick to creating original ideas instead of fucking up other people's ideas. Oh well. He'll redeem himself and this mess of a movie will be forgotten when I see Corpse Bride later this year.

As you can see, everything is pretty screwed up right now on my site. No worries. I should have it back to normal by the end of the weekend. I'm got a crap load of things to re-link. The bottom line is my site is now located at www.projectrich.com so please go there for all new content. I have all the redirects turned on from my old site to move people here and hopefully everyone will find their way. Good luck to us all...

I really liked Arizona when I first started visiting years ago, but I think that was only because my friend was still in college and there were blondes everywhere. Now I just hate it more and more after every visit. We probably couldn't have picked a worse time to go than last weekend either. It was about 120 degrees and it was raining some of the time. Raining in 120 degree weather? WTF?! Wet from sweat and water. It was pretty disgusting. We stayed indoors 95% of the time. That other 5% involved a hike that only lasted about a half an hour before we realized how stupid we were. Anyway, I put up the gallery from the trip so check it out.

It's been damn hot these last couple of days. Down near Long Beach where I work has been ok. The valley where I live, though, has been getting up towards 105. I guess summer finally decided to hit SoCal. I'll be in Phoenix all weekend and it's gonna be ten times worse than over here. It's a dry heat though so you wont feel it when you die.Comic Con was cool. Ended up spending a lot less than I thought I would. The one thing I've noticed over the years is the amount of hot girls there. 10 years ago it was just us male dorks. Now it's hotties everywhere. People are starting to understand that it's a lot more than comics and that's a good thing. I don't think I'm ever gonna do a Saturday and Sunday trip again. There were just too many people there to enjoy it on Saturday. Next year a Sunday day trip should be just fine.You know how last week I talked about how much of a mess at work I am? It got so bad yesterday that I took a half a day off. My head hurt. My chest hurt. I couldn't breathe. I just wasn't able to function. It sucked. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope the week gets better.

On the good side of things today, the NHL and NHLPA expectedly announced the hockey lockout was over. I've been going into withdrawals without my hockey. Some of the proposed rule changes sound lame, but I'm still ready to watch. Bring it.

Looks like this weekend is gonna be a "dorking out" kind of weekend. Comic Con is here. Don't let the name fool you. This is a lot more than the largest comic book convention in the world. It's a complete spectacle that's a lot like E3 (but not as dark or loud) and will definitely be a blast for fans and non-fans alike. It's gonna be a nice break from all the crap happening at work. Help me take my mind off of stuff I just shouldn't be thinking about.I'm a complete mess right now at work. I hope I'm hiding it ok. Can't think. Can't focus on anything but the wrong things. I'm a complete spaz. Making mistakes only a 3rd grader should make. Not just at work either. I notice it in the car and at home a lot too. Basically anytime I'm by myself. Just not paying attention when I should be. My eyes are open but sometimes I just don't see anything. I'm breaking down for sure and right now I can't see any ground to break my fall anytime soon. Jeez, I hope I'm hiding it ok.The weekend can't come soon enough.

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Hello? I've been hearing people tell me 27 is a life changing age. I'm not exactly sure how that is, but I have a feeling it may be true. There's a psychological letdown at age 27 because by then your too old to be a rock star, a movie star, a professional athlete, a motorcycle racer, and so on, and so on. Top that off with some of the other shitty events happening in and around my life and you got yourself a pretty good birthday weekend. So what did I do? The highlights are all x-rated and it wouldn't be right to kiss and tell. All of the other part involve touring several different places to live next. These next couple of month are sure to be rocky for me. I'm sure to share a lot more about it in the near future. By the way, almost ready to move everything over to the new website, Project: Rich.

I've been looking for a new hosting plan for a while now. I usually go with CIhost for anything I do. On a recommendation from a friend, I decided to purchase from someone else. The price and specs are right on paper. Let's hope real world use is right also. The special they're having right now makes it worth trying out. Why do I need a new plan? Well besides the fact that my current one is way too expensive, I'm also transitioning my site to a new name with new content. I know I've said this a couple of times, but I'm not kidding this time. Umm, really. I'll keep posting here until I get everything up on the other servers.

I caught War Of The Worlds last night. I've been saying Tom Cruise just can't make a bad movie (especially an action movie) and that's still true after watching this flick. Just know you're going in for the eye candy and that's it, though. The slow parts expose too many character flaws, but when the action is on, it's really on. The ships were cool. The aliens were cool. All of the effects were cool. I highly recommend you catch this intense and scary rendition of the original. You'll definitely jump out of your seat a couple of times.They also played the King Kong trailer right before the flick. Wow! I mean really. Wow! This one is definitely going to be a midnight showing film.

BBC News has an animated guide on the Deep Impact mission set to climax on July 4th. If you don't know what the mission is about, definitely check it out. Pretty insane.

It's official. After those first 15 years of my life being hard core Roman Catholic (that included a crap load of boy scout and alter boy years) and another decade to get over that bull crap, I can finally claim I'm agnostic. I could've probably claimed it a couple of years ago, but I'm making today the official day. I made my declaration in an AIM chat earlier.

Hope this works. If I followed the documentation correctly, I should have gotten podcasts to work with Radio. Fingers crossed.

Howard Dean is on The Daily Show right now. I dig this guy. He may be a little over the top at times, but I think it's just adds to his authentisity.