rob was here.

of the year. I just took a few minutes to scroll through the many, many posts that I have made on this blog over the last 12 months. Blogs are really a convienient way to remind and refresh yourself of your own lifes twists and turns.

My year-end recap of my most interesting posts, regarding things that happened to me, captured by the miracle of the internet:

My First Poker Game (02/23/05)

Finished University (04/20/05)

Iron Ring + Gradweek (04/23/05)

Destination: Cuba (05/08/05)

Convocation (05/29/05)

Employment (06/19/05)

Owning a Car (07/19/05)

Gamecube Modding Adventure (08/22/05)

Pearl Jam at Mile One (09/25/05)

These are my most notable posts out of the several, several dozen I've made this year. Most of which are nerdy tech posts.. :) Looking back it was a very successful and fun year! I hope 2006 will continue to offer me some new flavours of life too.

I have an idea. But before i jump in, lets get up to speed. If you watch much music on t.v at all, you will have probably seen the show Pimp My Ride. This is the show where they, well, pimp somebody's ride to give it the $5000 paint job and interior xboxes and fish tanks required to make the vehicle road worthy again. Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration; as many of the people who get their car decked out certain seem to need it. But needless to say, much of the car upgrades are purely aesthetic. I guess that's what the "pimping" of the car means, although I always though pimping involved brokering prostitutes. Ah well.

It's funny that much music felt that this show didn't satisfy the niche of the adoring public who want to watch cars get "pimped", and as such they are creating their own version of the show.. I forget the name of it, but I saw a commercial for it.

Anyways, now that the background is out of the way, lets get to the root of my idea. The whole thing started earlier today when, as driving, I noticed that my car was really, really rattly. I don't think rattly is a word, so basically I mean the creation of soundwaves via unwanted vibrations. Here are some examples of soundwaves for your own interest:



Now, my car has always had a rattle here and there, but now there seems to be a SERIOUS rattle on the bottom of the car.. I took a freshman look (as in I don't know what I'm looking for), and noted that my muffler seems intact and well attached to the car. So it's probably not the muffler. It's something that's not a muffler... Perhaps.

Now my idea. Everyone seems to have rattles in their car that are totally incurable.. They are the type of thing you bring in to get fixed at a garage, but of course, it won't rattle when you're trying to show someone that it's there. God Damn it!

So, Imagine a show where some guy goes around fixing peoples annoying car rattles. Oh man, I'd certainly be so game for that. That's the crux of the idea, nothing fancy really. You could probably fix a lot of peoples rattles for a fraction of the cost of the platinum plated fish tank they'd install into some chaps trunk.


rattle

a tip-of-the-hat goes to an old school-yard chum reid, who has put a lot of work into documenting his europe backpacking trip via his blog.

He has recently put up a lot of euro-pictures (added to past posts).. It makes for some interesting reading and picture... looking.

(i especially liked the beatles cover shot)

check it out.

I just went to quiznos and had a black angus steak sub for the first time ever. It was excellent. My new favourite sub.

Back to work. Argh.

This past week I completely low-level formatted my work and home computers. I figured the old "nuke-and-rebuild" strategy was as good as any in an attempt to lessen myself of the many unused programs and glitches that have popped up over the last year.

I went a different strategy at work, and installed a linux distro. This is replacing Windows 2000, which I can honestly say, won't be missed. The linux distro I have choosen to use at work is Fedora Core 4, and I must say, i'm impressed overall with how things are going with it.. Within a day I had all my favourite apps installed and I was programming away. Special thanks to Jeremy for sharing insight regarding a few terminal commands now and then. Overall, the Fedora package comes with everything you need in terms of office and basic desktop needs (firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, etc).. I'm primarily using Gnome as my window manager. This is new to me as I've only ever used KDE in the past. I must say, Gnome makes for a pretty sleek desktop platform compared to Windows. Everyone's wondering why my computer looks so unique and spazzy.

At home, I just cleaned my drives and reinstalled Windows XP, followed by the most recent versions of all the software I use. I also have World of Warcraft sitting on my desk, but I've yet to install it. Maybe tonight.

Some notable mentions of software which I have decided not to install, for the first time in many, many years are:

• Microsoft Office - Now replaced by OpenOffice. I've been using OpenOffice exclusively for over a year now anyway for writing reports or using spreadsheets and what not. Check it out, it's free.
  
• Winamp - Replaced by iTunes. I actually like the look of winamp better, but iTunes is great for out-of-the-box iPod integration and what not.

Now, i'm pretty sure you're saying "Wait a minute, shouldn't you be working now?" And my answer to you is... oh crap! you're right! cya!