Crashing at Friend's

Saturday was a good, but fairly long day for me. I had gotten up early and went to the hardware store to buy a few things. I spent the next few hours doing yard work (getting ready for spring!) and then went to the Rahr brewery in Fort Worth. My friend is a fellow cheap bastard, and I actually out-cheap-bastarded him by talking him into driving so I didn’t have to pay for gas.

He took me to the brewery and we got there about a ½-hour before last call. We had to suck down the suds pretty quick, but at $7 for three pints of beer and a free glass it was a pretty good deal. We also went and had some nachos afterwards to put a little food in our stomachs. I hadn’t seen my friend in a while and we mostly talked about skiing / snowboarding.

Later, I went over to Grasshoppers to help them out with their network. They fed me some dinner and we had quite a few beverages while playing Xbox Connect with the kids. Good times.

I was getting tired and was ready to go home, but Hopper didn’t feel I was safe to drive. I am not sure I agreed with him, but my rule-of-thumb is that if I am out drinking and someone says they don’t think I should drive I don’t argue. He and his wife made up the couch for me, but I just don’t sleep well at other’s houses. I crashed out for a few hours and finally woke ‘em up at about 7:00am so I could go home (they had my keys and the house alarm was set!).

While one might chose to be upset about the situation I wasn’t. I may have been perfectly find to drive, but I appreciate that someone was looking out for me.

BFR-6 Second Impressions

My friend, Grasshopper, came over last night to jam a bit. He’s just getting into electric guitars so he brought over his new amp (a vox practice amp w/modeling), a new guitar (epiphone les paul), an acoustic amp, some harmonicas and some microphones. We didn’t jam nearly as much as we swapped guitars, played stuff through different amps and just experimented with different combinations of stuff.

I hadn’t played the new axe, yet, so that was one of the first things we did. We plugged it into my normal amp and listened to the humbuckers. We also swapped back and forth between it and the Les Paul. You can definitely hear a difference. I wouldn’t say it’s less “beefy” but it definitely has different tonal characteristics. We also tried the piezo on my normal settings and while it sounded great, you didn’t get that clean, acoustic sound out of it. Next, we plugged it into his acoustic amp and sure enough the piezo shined like a diamond in a goat’s ass. So then I had both amps going just to mess with things. I tell you what – the acoustic range of the guitar is incredible. I can see that I am going to have to start jacking with my rig again to get all the sounds out of it that are possible.

The other thing I noticed about it is that it’s just easy to play. That doesn’t mean I play it well, but it is immediately comfortable and it’s very responsive to anything you do to it. It feels just as comfortable, if not more-so, as my Les Paul that I’ve been playing for longer than I care to admit. I can tell that tuning it is not quite as quick as my ‘Paul since it has a floating bridge, but it still tunes up pretty quick. I even switched to some drop-D tunings and went back and forth without too much effort. Again, not quite as fast as the ‘Paul, but not nothing like the nightmare my old Floyd Rose tremolo was. I can’t quite tell if it stays in tune as well as I want. I had the window open so the room temps were fluctuating and, like I said, I was intentionally jacking with the tuning quite a bit. I’m going to jam on it some more tonight to see how it does.

I did find one thing I don’t like about it. When it’s plugged in I can’t set it on my usual guitar stand or it pinches the cable. If I set it on my tri-stand it’s fine since it sits up a little higher. That’s a pretty minor complaint.

Bought It!! Music Mann Family Reserve BFR-6

Well… I bought that axe I had been checking out. It’s the Ernie Ball Music Man Family Reserve BFR-6. I was really on the fence about this one. It’s a very expensive guitar, but encouragement from my friends helped. One of the things that pushed me over the edge was that everyone was having a President’s Day Weekend sale. I made the mistake of checking out Musician’s Friend last night to see what the price would be with the sale. As it turns out, I couldn’t apply the coupon code so I chatted with a guy and he said to call. I called and they said that Ernie Ball wasn’t participating in the sale, but that they’d do it anyway, but only on the black guitar since everything else was special order. I told him I wanted to think about it and I’d call back.

Since I believe in supporting the local community and businesses, and since one of the sales guys at Guitar Center let me play one about a month ago I headed up there this morning. I got there right after opening so it wasn’t very crowded. The guy I originally worked with wasn’t there so I worked with another guy. I was straight up and told him about my phone call and Musician’s Friend willing to apply the 15% discount because of the sale. I told him that since the first guy let me play I wanted to give G.C. the opportunity to sell me the axe. He said they’d apply the 15% discount, too. So I explained that I also wouldn’t have to pay sales tax from Musician’s Friend – about $200 on a guitar that was now just over $2,500. He spoke to the manager and agreed to sell me the out-the-door-price for a tick over $2,500 (basically what the price would be without tax). This effectively saved me about $700 on the guitar! Sold!!

Three advantages here:
1 – I could pick any color they had in stock for the price. Musician’s Friend would only allow me to apply the discount to the black guitar. This way I had a little more selection. The red one was the only guitar that showed the wood grain all the way through the axe, and that sold me on it. (see pic 04).
2 – Guitar Center has a 30-day return policy. Musician’s Friend is only 10 days after shipment. Not knowing when I’d receive the axe, I might not be able to return it from Musician’s Friend if I was out of town when it came in. This way, I can play it for a bit before making that final decision.
3 – I could take it home today! Not really a big factor in my decision, but it was nice to not have to wait 3 months to get one in my hands.

Everyone up at Guitar Center was great and ironically, though I never show my receipt, I was glad I did. The serial number was wrong on the receipt and they had to fix it. As an extra tid-bit of information this guitar, literally THIS guitar, was the same guitar that Guitar Center used in its photo shoot for their platinum lineup of guitars on the web site. The box even had the labels from the photo shoot on it.

So, this is my 40th bDay present to myself – a tad early. Not sure if I would have bought it without the sale, and encouragement from my friends, but that definitely pushed me over the edge. Will it make me a better guitar player? Absolutely not, but I should get a lot of enjoyment out of it. At least I hope to. I haven’t even played it, yet, since I brought it home. The tubes are warming up as I type….

Crunch Time!

Last night I was involved in a motor vehicle “accident.” There is a dangerous intersection by my house that always has wrecks in or near it. The police told me that they clear a MVH about 4 times a week from there. Mostly people are just impatient and do stupid things. I’m always very cautious when going through that intersection.



Last night at about 5:45pm I was approaching the intersection. I was heading north-bound and a car coming from the opposite direction took a left-hand turn right in front of me. Fortunately, I saw this guy and was all over the brakes. I was able to slow down enough that he escaped without damage. However, what really stunned me was the second car that did the exact same thing. I couldn’t avoid this one and ended up hitting her t-bone style.

When I hit her I immediately looked up at the light and saw it change from green to yellow. As long as the light wasn’t malfunctioning I should have had the right of way. As it turns out, the third car in line to take a left was a police officer. He witnessed the entire event and told me that he couldn’t believe the first guy and was totally shocked at the second car (the one I hit). He also told me that he witnessed the whole thing, you don’t get a better witness than a cop, and not to worry about anything.

My truck was drivable, but I can tell there is some major damage to it. I’m concerned that the crumple zones in the frame are shot. The other car didn’t fare so well and had to be towed off. Fortunately everyone had insurance and nobody was hurt. I’m a little bummed out, though. I won’t say my truck didn’t have a scratch, but for being 10 years old it was in pristine condition. Only has 59,000 miles on it. Used trucks in good shape are worth something. Used trucks that have been wrecked aren’t. We’ll see what happens with the insurance companies.

The Flames were THIS big!!

You might be inclined to think I’m referring to the little gay guy selling sunglasses at the SLC airport, but I’m actually referring to me catching my friend’s snowmobile on fire. Other than one time when we had to ride some snowmobiles for work I’ve never been on a snowmobile. The time for work almost doesn’t even count. We rode them in a pretty flat spot, up a road that just had a tad too much snow for cars and trucks to make it. It was maybe a ½ mile or more to the radio towers we were going to be working on, and then we rode them right back. In actuality this wasn’t a good impression or experience as the sleds were god-knows-how-many years old and wouldn’t hardly start, or run.

Yesterday, however, was a completely different scenario. My friend, Scott is a hard-core sled-head. We had pretty much finished up work for the week and since there was a snow dump in the Wyoming Range about 35 miles west of Pinedale, WY he decided to take off and hit the powder. He invited me along and fortunately for me, my boss gave me a thumbs up to take a day off and have some fun.

We took off about 7:00am and were unloading the sleds by about 9:30am. I had my snowboard gear, and he let me borrow a peeps, helmet and balaclava. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I was pretty stoked. My only prior experience didn’t do much for me, but I knew there was more to it than that.

Scott went over the sled with me and showed me all the basics before we ever even got going. I knew he really wanted to get out there and play, but he was very patient with me. I was riding a Ski-Doo Summit 800cc two-stoke with a 159 track. He was riding a slightly larger sled with a longer track. It was quickly evident that these were NOT the same kinds of sleds I rode to get my work done.

We took off down the trail and I could easily tell that the sleds had a lot more horse power than what I had previously been on. It was really pretty riding down the trail and I could quickly see why people would do trail riding. However, Scott is not a trail rider and the trail was only a means to get to the powder fields.

A little more than ½ way in, he took me into a small clearing with a hill and some trees. He taught me how to work the sled by transferring my weight, standing in different places, etc. I can’t say that I really got the hang of it right away and felt that I was often fighting the sled. It wanted to go left, I wanted to go right and no matter how much I turned the bars it would go left. He had me mimic his lines and body language and that helped a lot though I was still struggling a bit. One thing he did compliment me on was that while I might be fighting the sled a bit, when it was evident that I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted to I would give in and pick a new line to avoid trees and stuff. I probably get some of that from snowboard – sometimes you are at the mercy of mother nature and have to go with it.

We got back on the trail and headed further into the backcountry. When it split he told me that the “big-boys” go off in a particular direction. We, however, took the other fork in the road. The trail got a little more technical and Scott started playing by running up fairly sizeable hills and jumping off the other side. I wasn’t ready for this and kept to the trail knowing he’d come out on the other side. And finally, we were in a huge powder field. The trail kept going off in a different direction, but it was clearly time to play and learn.

While Scott was playing, I was learning. Don’t get me wrong. I was having a blast but it was quickly evident that I didn’t quite have it down. The powder was really sweet. Scott wanted it to be deeper, but we both agreed that it was probably just about perfect for someone to learn in. There was anywhere from 5” to 12” of good fluffy stuff on top of a harder base. At one spot everything funneled into a group of trees. Rather than hit the trees I stopped and had Scott get the sled back to a safer position. I was getting a little frustrated because I still felt that no matter how much weight I had on one side of the sled I still was unable to get it do what I wanted it to. Again, Scott was really patient with me and kept giving me pointers. I stuck the sled once in some powder, but we didn’t have to dig it out or anything. Scott is just better than I am and knows what to do in those situations.

At this point I was just amazed at how hard I was working. If you’ve never been, and never gotten off a trail you might not realize that you never sit down. Ever. For anything. You are always standing up and there is always force being applied to your legs. Then you absorb all the bumps and jump from side to side over the seat to shift your weight around. When you accelerate you have to hang on. Decelerate suddenly and you are doing a “push-up” to keep from slamming into the bars. Your core is also working constantly to keep everything together. Imagine going to the gym and doing pushups, dumbbell curls, squats, dips, and aerobics all at the same time….without much rest.

After we climbed a few hills and played for a while he took me to another spot. I could tell I was starting to become fatigued but was still going for it. And finally, it really started to click. I followed Scott into a field and through some troughs…shift left, shift right, balance the sled on one ski on the side of this hill, then throw everything over and balance it on one ski on the other side for the next hill. I was getting it and I wasn’t fighting the sled. Climb a hill, do a u-turn on a steep embankment, fly down the next hill, side-ways across the next, etc.

But it wasn’t all gravy. I was really struggling to control everything and I was getting more fatigued by the moment. And then just as I thought I was really getting everything down Scott climbed up a hill and waved for me to follow. No problem, I got this. Only…I didn’t. As I went up the hill I started to drift left and was getting off my line. More weight right! More weight right! I was telling myself….so I was on the right leaned way out…and I still went left. Time to bail out! Turned the sled downhill and went for another run at it. I tried about three times, but could never figure out what I was doing wrong. I would watch Scott get on the right of his sled and go straight up the hill. I’d do it and go to the left every time. ARRGGH!!!

So we gave up on that and went to another area called Gun Sight. This was a really beautiful place where a natural split in the mountains looked just like a gun sight. We stopped to rest and get some water. Scott said that while the powder wasn’t deep he’d never seen so much snow cover.



Back on the trail and back through more fields. We came down some really steep spots (well, steep to a noob) and it was a blast! We stopped at a warming hut to eat lunch. I set the parking break and went inside. We didn’t really need to be warmer, I was already drenched in sweat. Thank God for good wicking thermals. As we munched on some food I told Scott that while I hated to sound like a pussy I was really amazed at how fatigued I was getting. He said he wanted to take me to one more spot where we could see the Grand Tetons and then we’d start heading out.

Back on the sleds and about a ½-mile later he tells me to stop while he goes and checks out a hill. While I am watching him climb the hill I start smelling something burning. I look down and there is a little smoke coming from the engine well. I had just turned on the hand warmers and thought it might be related so I switched them off. No help and now I was seeing some flames. For a brief moment I panicked because the flames were right where the huge oil reservoir was. But I quickly contained myself and knew I had to put the fire out. Scott was nowhere to be seen. I jumped off the sled, popped open the engine cover and saw a small fire with 1” to 2” flames. I started throwing snow on it to put the fire out. It took a while and I think I smothered it more than anything. Everything was hot and melted and gooey. Scott finally topped back over the hill and I was waving at him. He thought I was trying to tell him where I was – uh, no. I’m the only man-made thing in the middle of a huge field! But he finally comes back and realizes something was wrong when the engine cover was open and there was snow packed in the compartment.

Well, what had happened was that I put the parking break on when we stopped for lunch. I didn’t take it off when we took off again. Unfortunately, the sled WILL go if you give it enough gas ! The rotor over heated and melted the oil reservoir to the point where it started leaking and the hot oil ignited. We were fortunate that we hadn’t gone further or it could have really been bad.

Upon inspection we realized that it wasn’t that bad, but it was bad enough that when Scott went to start the sled the started handle came off in his hands. We had to manually start the sled back up. Unfortunately, since the oil reservoir was leaking we couldn’t continue on. Scott rode the sled a bit to make sure it was relatively OK and then we switched sleds to head out.

I followed him out and he stopped periodically to make sure there was still some oil in the resivour. Again, these are two-stroke engines and require an oil and gas mixture to run so we couldn’t run it without oil.

We made it out and popped the cover off. It looked like we needed to replace – the oil reservoir, the guide for the pull-cord, a brake line, a water line, a bearing, and some seals. Scott stopped off at the local dealer and I paid for all the parts. I figured it was the least I could do since I set his sled on fire. When we told the dealer what happened he said he heard that quite a few times. I told him he needed to put a “dumb ass” kit together for whenever someone rode off with the parking brake on. Rode off with the break on? You need our dumb-ass kit. It comes with all the parts you need.



I felt horrible, but he laughed it off and said shit happens. He really was very understanding, but he did tell me I had to tell his wife. He invited me over for dinner and we were going to tear all the bad parts off. When I got there, his wife asked me if I had a good time. I told her it was awesome, etc. and then told her I caught her sled on fire. She didn’t believe us at first. She thought we were fucking with her. Then she realized we were serious, but fortunately laughed it off and said shit happens. All in all I felt very fortunate that both of them were so understanding. Scott gave me shit about my “mangina” hurting and perhaps he is right. I’m pretty sore today and my muscles are still very tired.

Scott has some work to do on the sled. I had a great time, and learned a valuable lesson – don’t touch the parking brake on a snowmobile. I also learned that it will really take some time to get good at snowmobiling. I’d like to do it again, but next time I’ll try not to catch someone else’s sled on fire.

Music Man BFR 6 Quickie Review

I was out screwing around on the bike today and decided to go check out the Music Man BFR 6 – this is the John Petrucci Family Reserve model and it’s supposed to be one hell of a nice guitar (better be for the price).



I had to get someone to unlock it off the wall so I could play it. I tried it through a Line-6 All Tube new-fangled whiz-mo amp that I wasn’t familiar with, but got the basics down fairly quick. The first thing that impressed me was the weight of the guitar. It didn’t feel light and cheap like a lot of electric “shredder” guitars and you could instantly see and feel the quality of craftsmanship.

The guitar has two jacks, 2 pickup selectors, and 3 volume pots. It’s a bit intimidating at first, but you can get the hang of it fairly quickly. One thing that was nice is that you can choose to use the peizo by itself (jack a) or use it with the humbuckers (jack-b). If you used jack b, you could further tweak the mix on the back of the guitar but it’s not convenient as you need a small screwdriver. Maybe this is good as a large pot could easily get manipulated. Even if you used it in combination with the humbuckers you could still use a selector switch that was peizo-only, humbuckers only, or a mix of the two. Whether the humbuckers were used with the peizo or not, you also had a three way selector for them – neck, bridge, or both. In other words you could squeeze a whole ton of variety of sounds out of the guitar by just altering what jack you were in and what pickups you wanted to hear. There are even more options with tone control, etc., but I didn’t mess with it much beyond what I just described because I didn’t know you could do that.

The next thing I really focused on was the comfort of the guitar, and it’s quite comfortable. The neck had a very slight relief from the factory and I thought the string height could be a tad more sorted out, but then again I’ve tweaked the hell out of my guitars so the strings are just high enough to not get fret buzz. I then strummed a bit on it with a clean channel on the amp just to get a feel for it. Very nice, very comfortable neck and bridge setup. The floating tremolo is pretty unique and is not even close to my Floyd Rose setup. I have to say I like this one better. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t have a locking nut like I would expect to see on most floating tremolos. Does it stay in tune?

The tuning was just barely off and I wanted to see what would happen if I went to a drop D. This is normally a pretty painful process on a Floyd Rose setup because all the strings will come out of tune if you start jacking with it. This guitar has locking tuners. I wasn’t familiar with these, but quickly realized the error of my ways when I unlocked one of the tuners and the string immediately lost all of its tension. WTF? Upon closer inspection the string had no wrap around the peg other than what was required to obtain the correct pitch. What I figured out, and what I confirmed from the guitar dood was that the locking tuner locks the string onto the peg meaning you don’t have to have a wrap. I’m not 100% sure, but this also may explain why the strings tended to stay in tune better when I dropped the E down to a D. Other than the one string I screwed up, the rest stayed fairly well tuned. The tuning keys themselves felt very solid as if the gearing mechanism was somehow tighter and engineered better than any other tuner I had ever tried (even better than some Grovers). After I got the guitar in a drop-D I changed channels on the amp and played around with some chunky sounds. This is what I wanted to hear – is the guitar “thin” sounding or “thick” sounding? To be honest I thought it was a tad thin, but not by much. Again, I played around with the combination of pickups and while I never got the guitar to sound as “fat” as a Les Paul I was pretty impressed with the sound.

Switching back to the clean channel I tried the peizo only. It was hard for me to say, and perhaps it was the amp, but I didn’t think it sounded as much like an acoustic as I was hoping. Still, it could have just been me not understanding the guitar well enough. I think Steve’s Schecter has a great clean / acoustic sound. Somehow I felt like I was failing to achieve this from the BFR 6. I think I’d really have to hear it on equipment I am more familiar with and then give it a back-to-back with Steve’s axe. Also, this peizo is active and if the battery is dead it doesn’t work.

Back to dirty. Re-tune the guitar so it’s not in a drop-D anymore. Dive the whammy….pull it sharp, whatever. Didn’t seem to effect the tuning of the guitar from what I could tell. I was still dealing with the string that I had jacked up. Guitar Dood came in and asked how I was doing and I showed him the jacked up string. He grabbed another guitar off the wall – same guitar, different finish. Now what I immediately noticed is that this newer one sounded thicker than the other one. I asked Guitar Dood if he could hear it. He said no. Then we went back and forth a few times and he finally said I was right and that he could hear it, but it was subtle. I agreed. It wasn’t much, but this was more the sound I wanted to get out of the axe. We couldn’t figure out why one sounded slightly thicker than the other. If you recall, I said that the guitar had push-pull tone pots that I wasn’t aware of. In retrospect, I would guess that the tone of the first guitar had been slightly tweaked and that the second guitar wasn’t. I don’t have a reasonable explanation beyond that unless the QC from the factory is bad and I seriously doubt that.

Conclusion – this is more guitar than I could ever play. It doesn’t quite get as thick as the Les Paul, but it has a great sound, is almost as thick, and is far more versatile than a Paul is. Fit and finish is top-notch. I find the tremolo system to be one of the best I have ever seen and I like the fact that you can change the tuning fairly quickly without having the whole guitar get out of whack. The biggest problem with it is that it’s $3,000 and while Guitar Dood said they could come down on the price that is still a lot of scratch for a guitar.

Guilt doesn’t care….

…where you are, or what your excuse is. My mom recently had an accident and broke a couple of ribs – I’m not sure what is wrong with my mom, she doesn’t have osteoporosis, but she definitely has some kind of issue with her bones because every time she falls she breaks something. My mom isn’t exactly petite and she has some issues getting around. She always tells me to be careful snowboarding, riding bikes, wakeboarding, whatever…. And I always want to say “you make it one year without breaking something and you can tell me to be careful.”

I was out of town (still am) in Bozeman and was heading to WY. I know she was in the hospital and in a lot of pain, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I felt bad that I couldn’t get by to help out or visit.

The Super Bowl is now over, but you may recall the Visa commercials where the guys are talking about making every Super Bowl. In one commercial in particular one guy is saying how he’s missed weddings, funerals, kids being born, etc. My immediate thought was “what a douchebag.” The guy was bragging because he placed the value of entertainment above his family. Douchebag.

In my case, I had no idea my mom was going to get hurt. Still, I miss out on some things that are important to me because of my work. That’s not to say that work takes precedent over everything else, but we all have to work. Would it really matter that much if I was in town but still couldn’t get away because of my job? After all, a couple of broken ribs is very painful but is not life threatening. The one advantage of being home would be that I could have visited after work.

But, this is my life. This is what I do for a living. I don’t remember ever thinking that I would have a job quite like this – traveling, meeting new people and challenges, etc. It just sort of unfolded that way. So, unlike the douchebag in the Visa commercial I’m not making a conscious decision to not be there when something happens. It’s mostly chance. But even at 30,000ft guilt doesn’t care….

Vacation

As I recently posted, I took a nice vacation over the holidays. I took an even longer vacation from writing on the blog. For those of you who actually read what I post, my apologies. It was necessary, though. One of the reasons I write is not because I think everyone should hear what I have to say. Unlike most of the narcissistic bloggers I really don’t care if you read this or not. I write as an exercise and as a pseudo-diary. It’s a way for me to log my thoughts and ideas. I probably need something closer to twitter, though, mostly because I have so many thoughts and ideas to write on here that I lose track of them.

But as I took my vacation I also became severely disenchanted with everything going on in the world. Even as republicans swept the house I have still been pretty unhappy with the current state of affairs in politics. World events aren’t much better. Even the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords turned into a political ploy by both sides (and no, I don’t care which side started it). And, of course, the sheeple are still in full swing buying whatever the media tells them to. Me, I just had to step back for a bit and just complain to my friends that would raise another glass with me. One day gone, another begins.

Superbowl XVIXXXIWHATEVER – Or How I Spent My Time Watching the Super Bowl

This year, the Super Bowl was hosted at the home of the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, TX. That’s where I live. While on some levels it was kind of exciting that so much hoopla was focused on my home town quite a few of us found it to be a nightmare. Long before fans started showing up the city and the NFL started working on the event by blocking of roads and re-routing traffic. Fortunately, I live south of the stadium and didn’t have to deal with much of that.

Seeing as how I really don’t give a rats ass about football my g/f and I planned to get out of town long before the proverbial shit hit the fan. She almost got caught by the ice storms that hit N. Texas, but fortunately got a flight out and met me in Montana where we spent the day snowboarding and skiing. She had one of her most epic days skiing ever and I had a great time running semi-fresh powder runs.
I invited a few friends to come along, but not only did they not come – I didn’t even get ONE response to my invite. I think I am done inviting them to come do things with us.

Naturally we heard about all the problems the weather was causing back home, but we were very happy to not be there. I was caught in a bit of a bind, though. My brother-in-law is a die-hard Steelers fan, and my neighbor a die-hard Packers fan. I knew one of them would be very happy and one of them very un-happy. Looks like this year my brother-in-law was the un-happy one.

Droid X Phone?

I’ve had a Droid X for a few months now, and so far I really love it. One thing I had some trouble adjusting to was the size of the phone. You don’t really notice in when you are talking on the phone, but you certainly notice it when sticking it in your pocket. The ladies out there that carry a purse probably won’t notice it too much and it’ll be easy to find when digging around in there.

I probably don’t do that much with my phone compared to other people. It’s not linked into a social network like Facebook or some other crap so you know when I’m using the restroom. But what little bit I’ve played with I have really enjoyed. The browser works well enough, albeit somewhat slowly sometimes. I probably use the Angry Birds game and Online Poker apps more than anything. The GPS is pretty good, but not as robust as my Garmin – I understand Garmin may put an app out for the phone which I’d be interested in because that would be one less device to carry around.

Mostly, I use it as a phone and for that it works great. It smokes my old Razr into the ground when it comes to reception. I’ve been pretty impressed with it from that perspective. About the only complaint I have for the phone is that on my old Razr I could feel the buttons and perform functions without having to put my eyes on the phone. Let’s say I wanted to make a call to Bling!. I could flip the phone open, and press the contacts button, and then press 2 a couple of times until I knew it was in the B’s. Then I could briefly look at the phone and scroll to the location by hitting the scroll buttons (this also becomes habitual and you don’t have to look once you do it a few times). One last quick glance to ensure that I have Bling!’s number up and hit the dial button. Through the whole process I barely looked at my phone.

Well, with the new one you can’t do that because you can’t feel any of the buttons. They are just graphic images on the screen. I find it not only slower to look someone up and make a call, but far more dangerous if I am driving or anything that requires my attention.

I’ve tried using the voice command and saying things like “Call Bling!” or “Call *name*” and it always jacks it up and doesn’t even get close causing me more frustration. What I don’t understand is that if you use speech-to-text to enter a text message it nails it 90+% of the time. Same for google search…but ask it to call someone and you can forget it.

But that’s about it. Otherwise a pretty sweet phone.

Happy New Year?

In some ways, I feel like I didn’t do much this year to bring in the New Year. But if I really look back on it, I had a pretty good time. No wild party or anything, but my g/f and I took a week off to get in some runs skiing / boarding up in Montana. I got to see a lot of my friends that I don’t see very often and we had some good runs on the slopes. We even had a big powder day after a dump up on Big Sky. For New Year’s Eve we had a great dinner and played Xbox Connect with some friends before turning into pumpkins shortly before midnight. I think my g/f made it to 12:02 before she was out and I wasn’t far behind her.

Pre-Christmas

Last week I was in WY visiting one of my clients. You might recall reading or hearing something about snowstorms hitting the area. I was in it. No biggie, I’ve done it before. With the exception of the North Western portion of WY, it’s not the prettiest place around.

Let me briefly set the scene. It’s snowing, and has been snowing for a day or so. The Interstate is covered in ice and snow. It’s about 6:15am – I had to leave early since I can only drive a mind-numbingly 40mph down the interstate to get to work. It’s dark, and I’m roughly in the middle of no-where listening to “Boogie Woogie Santa” on a country station since it’s the only one I can get in. And suddenly I thought “What the fuck are you doing?”

Not as in I was doing something wrong that very moment, but how I had all the events of my life suddenly led me to be in that particular place at that particular time listening to “Boogie Woogie Santa” while driving 40mph in a snow storm that early in the morning.

I found it a bit surreal and thought about all the “normal” people that were probably getting up and not dealing with driving in a freaking snow storm to get to work on that particular day. I thought about how I wouldn’t normally be doing that. How I could have done a billion other things or at least had also been getting ready to go to work in Texas (no snow) for my normal 9 to 5 grind.

But that’s my life. Odd places, odd times, in odd predicaments, to do a fairly normal job. I’m not sure there are too many things I’d rather be doing….