I picked up a Motorola H390 Bluetooth headset the other day, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t made in slave labour camp #15 in The PRC. This isn’t a review of the headset itself, but in case you were wondering, is light, non-servicable Li-ion battery lasts long, it fits Asian ear geometry reasonably well, and is acceptably comfortable. It works flawlessly with a Motorola RAZR.
Archive for the 'rant' Category
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Haven’t gotten much riding in this week. I was going to take a spin this afternoon, but the weather threw a monkey wrench in that plan. It was beautifully sunny on the Windward side around ten, but not an hour later, it was dumping in Biblical proportions. This continued through sunset. Oh well. It’s looking like this may continue all weekend.  Kuso!
Today, I saw something I couldn’t quite figure out. It was a dude on a chrome Bianchi fixie, but he was all decked out in matching tighties and jersey, with an expensive helmet, glasses, and clipless elf shoes like some Tour de France team rider or something. He was pimping the racer steez, but he was on a fixie and had a messenger bag. Huh? It was a fixie bike, but it had those behind-the-seat triathlon bottle cages (not the best match for the messenger bag). What? His bullhorn bars were wrapped so thickly with grip tape, they were about as fat as Red Bull cans. Um… Everything about him and his rig was non-sequiter. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had aerobars, but I didn’t look. At least his wheels matched… Continue reading ‘I H8 Fixies’
On a shopping visit this past week to Marukai, spotted something new, a sparkling soda version of one of our fave J soft drinks, Momo no tennensui. We like to call it heavenly peach water because of the ten kanji, but really tennen means natural. We love it because the flavor is of real peach, and it’s not as sweet as your typical soft drink. So when I saw this soda version, I had to grab it. Unfortunately when it came to checkout time, it wouldn’t scan. I guess it was so new it wasn’t in system. After going to the customer service counter, they said it was $3. Ouch. I decided just this one time I needed to try it. The veridct? A refreshing carbonated version of the Momo no Tennensui we love, but at $3 a pop, that’s sticker shock way in excees of the highest vending machines in Japan.
2 out of 4 empty wallet monkeys at this price point, I can’t see them being able to sell much of this if that is the correct price. If it were a reasonable normal price, then it would be 3.5 out of 4.
Chris and I have had a long running, “today I saw a Fixie doing [insert foolish act here],†tirade going for several years now. We gripe about them riding up alongside cars at a traffic signal only to be re-overtaken when the light changes because they can’t sprint off the start with their one gear. We rant about their freakish parts selection, like a carbon spoke wheel on the front but a traditionally laced wheel on the rear because the carbon wheel company doesn’t make a matching rear track version, but the bike owner just has to have those wheels. Most of the time the things that make us laugh are due to their slavish devotion to the fad just for the sake of being different, standing out, thumbing their noses at society, swimming upstream, or simply cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. Then there are those times when they transcend fashion and cross the line into stupidity. I saw something today that pretty much takes the cake for that – chainstay wrap. Huh? What? It’s a fixed-gear, single-speed bike with horizontal dropouts and no derailleur or tensioner. If his chain is so loose that he has chainslap issues, he has much larger issues to worry about! Time to put that bike on the rack and climb on board the short bus, dude!
I rode the ‘cross after work today to get some sprints in. All the bad drivers were out today. Along my training loop, I came face to face with a red Civic in my lane. The grunge-surfer dude was dropping off his granola girlfriend and came around a blind corner in the wrong lane. Seeing me, he made a vain attempt to move back into his lane, then slowly drifted back into my lane and stopped diagonally to let his passenger out, blocking my lane completely and forcing me to go around him in the oncoming lane. Ever heard of driving on your own side of the road? Effing idiot. Moments later after making the turn, I had to dodge a doddering senior lady in her new-ish Volvo who came into my lane far enough to clip the curb with her left front tire in order to make a right turn! I thought they only let the fools out on Friday and Sunday!
D = 19.78 km (12.29-miles), Vavr = 22.2 km/h (13.8-mph), Vmax = 50.0 km/h (30.1-mph), T = 53-minutes
This should go under a category of what the heck have I been doing until now?! I finally purchased and setup an air compressor for the garage a little while back. Bought the bargain 14pc kit with it. This past week used the 1/2″ impact to take off the wheels on the hachibroku. It was almost fun! After a few impacts the lug nuts spun right off, it went by so fast I felt like a racetrack pit crew person. Continue reading ‘To Air is Good’
Well, the PC was quite dead. A RAM and P/S swap borrowed from D could not revive it. So I procured a replacement. A refurb Dell monster. Decent price for a basic core 2 w/2G RAM, 500G HD, DVD drives and a video card. Housed in a monstrous XPS series case with 700W power supply. This monolith has 1/8″ thick aluminum exterior panels and weighs a ton. BTX format, space inside for 4 SATA HDs with its own fan, 4 external accessible 5.25 bays, 2 external 3.5 bays. I harvested the hard drives, DVD burner, card reader from the old machine and installed into the new machine. Powered up, everything pops up fast, and the floor of my room is bathed in a blue glow. There are eights LEDs on the front of the PC, and some on the back that all they do is glow. You can even go into BIOS and configure the color. Sure, it’s cool for dramatic effect, but I can see it being annoying if I leave the machine running at night. Thankfully one of the options is off.
Anyway, so far the machine looks good. Going through the pains of reinstalling software and shuffling files around.
Today marks the last day of the tax break on ethanol-fortified automotive fuels in Hawaii, so along with the price increases due to the jump in crude oil prices, we have to pay an additional $0.12 USD per gallon in State excise tax. Consider also that to this day, not a single drop of ethanol has been produced in the State of Hawaii – all that ethanol going onto E10 is being imported into the state from the mainland USA or from foreign sources! Even when the first proposed plant opens here in a few years out at Campbell, it will be producing ethanol from imported corn. Where’s the logic in that? Good going, Auntie Linda! I hope you all remember this half-baked legacy of hers the next time an election rolls around (she’s done, but her implied successor, Dook, is aiming for the big chair). Her ethanol junket raised the cost of producing automotive fuels, increased our dependence on foreign or imported products, made our cars run bad, and decreased fuel mileage by around 10%. Continue reading ‘Protest Ride’
I just spent one hour waiting for my prescriptions at Long’s. I guess this is what we can expect after the CVS takeover. The “refill-by-phone” interface is better now under CVS, but the system breaks down on the human side of the equation. I still do find it a little difficult to believe that things got so unimaginably busy today that they didn’t have the opportunity to pull my two simple, common prescriptions before the 17:30 ETA that the phone machine quoted me. There is a reason I call the prescription in – so I don’t have to waste an hour of my life sitting in an infecto-pandemic chair. WTF?!
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