Nerf-Coated World

May 31, 2003

Sport Clips... are they any good?

I don't frankly care if they're sporty. I just want a good cheap haircut, which, sadly, I haven't yet found in Austin. This after living here on and off for eight years.

Pro-Cuts? Terrible. Supercuts? Not great. The Goodall Wooten (voted Best of Austin, year after year, somehow)? Hit or miss.

So the search continues... Will report later on the results.

UPDATE: The verdict is in: YES. I went to Sport Clips this fine a.m. and got a great haircut. Nice and clean; evenly done. Total cost, including tip: $17.

And, check this out: I was sitting outside later this afternoon near campus, and a nineteen-year-old girl passed by and said, "Damn, you're cute!" Heh. I think I'll get my hair cut every day.

Posted by Matt at 10:43 AM

199.6

Do you know how great it feels to look down at the scale and see that?

It's just incredible. I weighed between 170 and 180 in college. And then I started the Sedentary Lifestyle© -- which I would not, in fact, recommend -- and the weight just piled on. 190... 200... It got as high as 237. And it all conveniently collected in the places you don't want it to collect: the gut and the ass. Because then it just starts to hurt looking in the mirror.

Ah, what a glorious day. Efforts: paying off.

Posted by Matt at 10:32 AM

Lookie Here!

It's a whole new blog! Freaking-fun-tastic.

I'm fully aware that it's not much to look at... yet. I'll be working on the new style this week. And I'll be going through the old entries to sort 'em and put 'em into categories. So quit yer whining!

Fun feature you might enjoy: comments. Yes, you too can comment on my entries now, even if you aren't priveleged like Bob or Bryan or Ian and have your own blog to do it in. I say let's get the party started. Make some noise, masses.

More stuff on the way. Jeez, I've got a long list of computer-related, web-related stuff just coming down the pike. So brace yourselves, buckos.

Posted by Matt at 7:30 AM

May 30, 2003

Where's my damn package?

One more little detail that bolsters the case for privatizing the postal service: tracking. Even if you slashed its cost to ten cents a package, it would still be a rip-off. It befuddles me why anyone in their right mind would bother even laying down half a buck for this ridiculous waste of a "service".

Let me explain. No, let me let the USPS itself explain just how useless they are. I shall illustrate by way of a simple comparison.

Tracking a package with UPS, you get this:

But UPS is an exception, surely. Not ALL major, nationwide private companies do this... well, no, actually they do. Here's a recent AirEx package that was sent to me:

Well, let's see what the brilliant, bumbling geniuses at the USPS came up with for tracking:

You entered 9101 1052 8094 0201 0634 28

The U.S. Postal Service was electronically notified by the shipper or shipping partner on May 27, 2003 to expect your package for mailing. Status is updated every evening. Please check again later.

This is the same organization that somehow thinks that it's necessary to install flat-panel displays behind its service [sic] counter... to give you handy flash animation-style ads about the latest stamps that are on sale from the Marilyn Monroe collection or the greatest events of the 70's. Someone tell me how this is an efficient use of our money. Someone tell me why you need stadium-style Diamond-vision billboards indoors, in a post office to advertise stamps for the love of god. Explain to me how even if they sell a couple thousand of packages of these 37-cent stamps that they'll even be able to pay that thing off.

Ah... but that's what you get when you give an organization billions of dollars and no accountability to the real-life, real-world market, with real people who need real results, at the lowest possible cost. UPS and FedEx and AirEx do it... if you want to know why the postal service [sic] can't, there you go.

Posted by Matt at 9:44 AM

May 29, 2003

Got my pocket picked

Wow. So I'm looking through my old bank statements, looking for a particular purchase from about a year ago. And I come across two withdrawals, from ATM's. One for $60, the next for $400. No biggie, right... Well, no. The ATM's were in some little town in central Pennsylvania. Too late to do anything about it now.

So if you can't tell, I missed getting some of the good habits instilled in me, whenever that was.

Posted by Matt at 2:13 PM

Music files and such

Previous theory regarding ripping music to my hard drive: Balance quality with file size. In practical terms, this means going with WMA files at a 128K bitrate. What does that mean? Well, to my ear, I can't tell the difference on most songs. The bass is full, the trebles are smooth; basically the song is essentially duplicated with very little loss of quality from the original track. You get a minute's worth of music for less than a megabyte, too, which is a major plus (and it makes calculating disk space real easy).

Current, changed theory: Record the music at the highest bitrate possible because hey, I've got the room to do it. If you bump your bitrate up to 192K for a WMA file, you only add about 0.4 megabytes for every minute of music, and you end up with quality that seems to be totally indistinguishable from the original track. Figure four megs for every three minutes of music; the math is still pretty easy to figure out.

So, let's do the math for my Nomad jukebox (actual hard drive space: 19GB):

19000MB / (4MB / 3 minutes) = 14250 minutes of music

14250 minutes / ~55 minutes per album = 260 albums.

Why the change in theory? A piddly little audiophilic gripe. On a particular track by none other than my favorite musical artist of the last six years, one Mr. Ben Folds, some of the cool background effects got scrambled. By scrambled, I mean: they sounded digitized and very reminiscent of the Moog sound effects from a Styx album. It sounded like what all the sci-fi screenwriters of the fifties thought "The Future" and "Outer Space" would sound like. Does it ruin the song? Of course it does. So back to the original point of all that math, I've got the space on the damn thing -- which, if you remember, only cost me, net, about $5 -- so it's time to stop living like a miser.

As one Mr. Bob Collins once said:
<insidejoke>
"Get the good gas, this time. Don't skimp like usual."
</insidejoke>

Posted by Matt at 9:41 AM

Things to be happy about

Things to be happy about today:

• I'm getting credit card applications again. Which means my credit is getting better after I wrecked it two years ago.

Posted by Matt at 9:23 AM

An aircar in every garage?

How freaking cool would that be? I mean, if this happens, that could, like, make the Oughts* everything I thought they'd be when I was six!

Quick! We need someone to sound off! An expert in the technology who can also provide some well-reasoned insight into the regulatory environment that could make this a possibility! To the blog-pod, Bryan!

(* Oughts: This decade. Please use this term frequently, as it would be just plain awesome to sit on a porch in fifty years, and have things to say like "Well, I remember back in ought-five, that was the year that the house burned down, it was." It's an investment in your own crotchity future! Use the term liberally -- make it stick!)

Posted by Matt at 9:03 AM

May 27, 2003

Whew. Okay, well most of

Whew.

Okay, well most of the nastiness that defined last week has subsided. Suffice to say, it was exhausting. Physically, I still haven't fully recovered; my body-clock is still flipped to the polar opposite of normal (and I also have a really nasty pulled muscle in my shoulder for some reason).

One unexpected effect brought by the fallout is that I'm suddenly thinking very constructively. Which, I can't understate, is a very positive thing. It didn't happen the last time. Not in any significant way. Which may be part of why it was so difficult -- if you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, man, it sure makes that tunnel seem endless. So the onset of constructive thinking is a sign of good things to come. I've got a glimpse of something I haven't had in a long time: I'm starting to think about the future again in a positive light.

Sure, for a lot of people this is ingrained into their psyche. Not so much for me. Kirsten once observed: "You don't look much past your headlights when you drive, do you?" Part of the reason why I get lost a lot, I guess.

But more importantly, it's back to another old issue that has resurfaced yet again: It is hard to plan for the future when you aren't confident enough in your abilities to trust your own planning. If your goal is, say, to go to L.A. and be an actor, if all you can think about is how the faculty at your drama school didn't think highly of you, and therefore, why should anyone in L.A.? -- you can't plan for the future. The key to a better life is knowing that the future absolutely can be better than the past and the present, but if you don't believe it, you won't be able to make it happen.

Which is a significant change in mindset, and one that it's going to take me a long time to break the pattern of. These are things I believed in my heart a long time ago -- a time when I definitely did know who I was and what I wanted -- and I've got to get back into that way of thinking.

Well, enough rambling on about this for now.

Posted by Matt at 8:00 PM

May 24, 2003

I'm gettin' the urge to

I'm gettin' the urge to take off. Just go.

Posted by Matt at 4:27 AM

May 21, 2003

Wow. I just spent the

Wow.

I just spent the better part of an hour writing a great post, and it was sometime in that span that my internet stopped working. Thus, I press the Post button, and voila: no more post.

Well, suffice it to say, it was a doozy. It's too bad; I'd really have liked it to stick around. I won't attempt to rewrite what I wrote because there's no way it could be as good as the one I wrote before, and the subject matter deserves the best possible treatment.

I will throw this tidbit in: I shot a 127 on the golf course yesterday. This in my second round of golf ever. Which ain't half bad. Especially since I shot a 146 my first time out. That was definitely the highlight of a day that hit all over the chart.

Posted by Matt at 4:05 PM

May 13, 2003

Hey folks. It's been a

Hey folks.

It's been a rough few days over here, so the posting has been pretty light. I'm following my creed of "don't share it unless it adds value to someone", so I won't post about it.

Strangely, my schedule is rather full lately, so I've been running around doing all sorts of things that need to be done. The day flew by today. Still more on the plate tomorrow.

That's it for now. Be back when there's something worth sharing.

Posted by Matt at 1:12 AM

May 8, 2003

Here's a great little poetry

Here's a great little poetry generator. It turns web pages into, you guessed it: poetry. The results are a little hit-or-miss, but every now and then, you get a gem like this one:

Bryan K. Baskin,
Dedicated to pay for what we had:
ice on the damn job.
with pieces coming from their actuarial data,
or...

New license.
a great lesson to teach oral
and say to me:
know. all types.

It just a sense of elasticity
theory is government, be treated

This means that fall: No shootings.

Posted by Matt at 12:14 PM

May 3, 2003

In blogging news, I made

In blogging news, I made a decision yesterday that will surely make you crazy with glee.

I've decided to expand this blog. I thought it would be a good place to keep a record of various things, such as my Body-for-LIFE progress, my reviews of things (such as the Nomad Zen jukebox thingy), and other assorted things. It'll have multiple pages and sections and everything. No, I'm not making any claims that there is a dire need for one more monkey typing away at his keyboard, adding one more unsolicited record and point-of-view on life. But I think it would be fun just for my own sake. I'm at the beginning of a new phase of my life, and I think it would be great to keep track of it. And being online makes it important somehow.

So, keep your fingers crossed, your appetite whetted.

Posted by Matt at 5:36 PM

Holy Roman Empire, Batman! This

Holy Roman Empire, Batman! This is nuts.

Posted by Matt at 5:31 PM

May 2, 2003

My Tetris Auction is performing

My Tetris Auction is performing way beyond what I'd hoped. I paid $220 for it; it's currently going for $255, and there are still three days left. I may turn a tidy profit.

It's because I write decent descriptions.

Posted by Matt at 12:24 PM

Hah! Got my new Nomad

Hah! Got my new Nomad Zen yesterday. Still haven't tried it out due to the overwhelming cascade of busy-work I had to do yesterday, but it looks cool, it feels cool in my hand, and I'm very excited about it. I can't wait to burn my CD's to WMA now.

I thought I'd pass along a little bit o' experience for you, though. I'd read recently that amazon.com likes to play with its prices. For example, if you go one day to buy a certain DVD, it might be $24.99. But if you go later that day, it might be $21.99. The prices fluctuate, based on what seems to be a number of factors, depending on what time of day you go, and, oddly, what browser you might be using (the prices amazon gives in Netscape can be several dollars off from the ones it gives to Explorer, even at the same time, from the same computer). The best guess, I read, was that this was some sort of ongoing marketing experiment to try to find the optimal level of pricing, to maximize profit.

Such was the case with my Zen jukebox thingy. The first time I went: $349.99, with a $50 rebate. Two days later, $299.99, no rebate, and thus, really no net change. Not a big deal yet. But then I went back on Thursday of last week, and the price is $267.99. Well, I snatched it up. I had a $20 gift certificate -- and they didn't charge tax or shipping -- so the grand total was $247.99. This was huge. Since I'm selling the old iPod to sort of "trade up" to this guy, I may end up turning a profit -- which is beyond what I was expecting.

But then I went back later that afternoon: the price was $299.99. So it paid to take advantage. So every now and then, the sometimes obsessive price-checking and comparing that I do pays off. This time, to the tune of about $33, which is nice, because every little bit counts.

Posted by Matt at 12:23 PM

Build your own South Park character. Why not?

September 2009

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