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Today was day #2 in our emergency search for a new car for Jess. I was supposed to go to work today to prep for my big corporate visit on Tuesday, but this took precedent. We started off this morning around 10:30am, and ended around 8pm this evening. In that time, we searched from Wilkes-Barre to Phillipsburg, NJ. All tolled, we ended up traveling almost 270 miles. And if everything goes to plan, Jess may have a car tomorrow. Where did we find the car she wants to purchase? At a lot about a 90 seconds from our home.

Yeah…I know. But if we hadn’t traveled, there would have been a once in a lifetime opportunity that we would have missed out on. Oh well.

Right now, I’m just relaxing and getting ready to go to bed. I’m probably going to end up working about 12 hours tomorrow, and about 14 hours on Tuesday. Oh joy!

Yesterday was quite frankly, the day from hell. Everything that could go wrong, did in fact go wrong. How bad could it have been you ask? Let’s look at everything that happened before the noon hour. The transmission is Jess’s car blew, I received an unanticipated $200 in extra bills in the mail, I got a court summons for something I thought was settled (to which we finally said ‘fuck it’ and settled it for $$ anyway), Bob came home with a 1 1/2 in hole in his hind quarter, my laptop died, and I had to cancel our hotel room for my birthday weekend due to unforeseen circumstances.

Yeah, that’s a lot. However, being industrious people, we managed to fix quite a few of those issues. By 3pm we had all the bills paid, the court summons was satisfied and settled, we spoke with Jess’s dad about her car and he agreed to help us out with it, Bob is not in pain and not bleeding, so we will see what he looks like on Monday since our vet is closed on the weekend, I fixed my laptop, and we made plans without the need for a hotel room on my birthday weekend. Jess even managed some time in there to go get a ‘feel good’ haircut. But after that horrific morning, we not only needed to get out of the house, but to eat and begin car shopping. So, that’s what we did. We hit up Abe’s Hot Dogs for some delicious LHA action (lips, hooves and assholes — the contents of any good hot dog) and began a task I really loathe — car shopping.

After about 3 1/2 hours of driving around to various car lots, we encountered several cars that Jess liked but really only one that was within our self-imposed price range. Finally getting hungry around 7pm, we decided to get some dinner. We hit up Olive Garden for some good eats, and then went to Target to pick up a birthday present for Jess’s grandfather’s 80th birthday party next Saturday, and some new Halloween decorations. Then on the way home, we decided to stop at Blockbuster and pick up something to make us laugh for the rest of the night. We ended up selecting ‘The Love Guru’ and the new ‘Harold and Kumar’.

Before starting our movie night, we wanted to lighten the mood in the house, so we went upstairs and got all the Halloween decorations out. Forgetting what we had purchased last year on clearance, we were surprised with all the cool stuff that was in our Halloween storage tub. We even found the costumes we bought Loki last year, but being a mere puppy, he refused to wear. Being that he is a year older, not to mention much calmer,we decided to give the whole costume thing another shot. Jess put his spider costume on him and much to our surprise, he loved it! We’ll have to find the little Batman costume we also got him and see if he’ll tolerate that as well. We both agreed we have to dress him up and take Loki trick-or-treating with Kyla and Gavin this year. By the way, I think the most disturbing part of the photo of Spider-Loki is that fact that it’s not Photoshopped. For some reason, his eyes naturally glowed green with Jess’s Blackberry flash. I don’t think the dog is of this world…

After the costume parade and putting up some decorations, we settled down on the couch with Loki and Jess. We made some kettle corn, cuddled under my warm Skull blanket, and laughed our ass of at ‘The Love Guru’. It killed me in inches that I really enjoyed it since it was Jess’s pick and I was convinced it would be stupid. Live and let learn I suppose.

Today, we’re off to day 2 of car shopping. We’re going to finish hitting the local lots and then maybe head south to the Allentown area. Jess’s dad is looking down there as well, and we might try to meet up later in the day and take a look together at some cars. I would really appreciate having someone with me who know more then my very limited knowledge of cars. Why can’t we be shopping for computers or electronics?

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy said on Monday it plans to buy digital music service Napster Inc for $121 million in cash.

The music downloading peer-to-peer pioneer is now owned by the electronics chain we all love to hate.

Napster is now officially dead to me.

With the advent of iTunes 8.0 dropping this past Wednesday, Apple introduced a new feature to its premiere audio program — Genius.

How Genius works is two fold. First, there is a new sidebar on the right called, well, the Genius Sidebar. When you initially setup Genius, iTunes analyzes all the music in your library and uploads that information to the iTunes servers. Then, based on your library’s contents, it will make suggestions in the sidebar of artists you might like based on your listening selection. It will also suggest songs you may be missing from the album you’re currently listening to, and full albums from that artist you don’t have yet. It sounds like the Mini-Store since they are trying to sell you everything they recommend, but it actually provides some pretty good recommendations. For instance, when I listened to Duran Duran, it recommended songs by Tears For Fear, The Human League, David Bowie, INXS and Depeche Mode. I’d say pretty spot on for an alternative 80s band.

Where Genius really shines is in it’s Genius Playlist feature. I’m not sure how they do this, but it’s brilliant. You pick a song in your library, and then you hit the little atom shaped Genius button at the bottom of the sidebar. Genius then goes to work and auto-generates a 25-100 song playlist of songs from your library that iTunes thinks you would like based on your original song selection. In the screen shot above, I started my Genius Playlist with ‘Somewhere I Belong’ by Linkin Park. Sure as shit, it generated a playlist that not only did I enjoy, but would be hard pressed to put together myself. Genius is, well, genius! By far this is my favorite new feature to come along in iTunes since coverflow.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours making some minor, but in my eyes, needed changes on the site. What’s changed you ask? Well now, let me educate you.

First item is a rather minor change that had been bothering me. The last item on the left sidebar is my copyright info. A few weeks ago I added a little ‘Made On A Mac’ image. I didn’t like the way the image was presented, so I redid the image and made it more integrated into that section. Not a big change, but the old way was just bugging me.

Next is something that was really bothering me. Whenever you looked at a post in the archive, you would get the month and day it was posted, but it never showed you the year. To remedy this problem, I added some code that now shows exactly when each post was posted. Not only do you now get the month, day and year, but you also get the exact time now. This makes me much happier.

The last change is a new feature I added. At the bottom of each page, there is a new navigation system. Instead of having simple ‘Next Page’ and ‘Previous Page’ links to navigate, you can physically see on what page you’re are on, and how many there are to go. For instance, currently I have 75 pages of blog posts. This wasn’t a necessary change, but one that I think enhances the site’s usability.

Last night reminded me of Friday nights from about 9 years ago.

Jess asked me while we were on vacation to make a shelf for her in the kitchen for all of her cookbooks. I told her that would not be a problem and I will pick up all the supplies I need on Friday; payday. So I picked everything I needed up after my shift yesterday, went and bought some new work shirts that were on 75% clearance, and headed home to start the shelf project.

Now, for the past few weeks, I’ve had a craving that I haven’t satisfied. Looking outside, it was dark, gloomy, and rainy as all hell. To add to the misery, Jess has her Praxis test first thing on Saturday, which meant she had to study all night. So, being the nice guy that I am, I offered to purchase dinner for us when she came home. Part of this fine off was the fact I was still in the middle of fitting the new shelf into the opening she wanted it in (between 2 cabinets) and I just didn’t feel like cooking. But, my true reason for this act of generosity, was that I would finally be able to to get the fix I had long desired. Without any further hesitation, I opened up my cell phone and ordered a pizza from Angelo’s.

For those of you not from the Wyoming Valley, you probably think we’re all nuts here for going crazy over a tiny little family run pizza shop. Trust me when I say the hype is really worth it.

They were already on a 1 hour wait when I called at 5pm (always a good sign) so I placed my order and we waited. I got done with the shelf about 20 minutes later, and we headed out. I needed to pick up some cash from the ATM, Jess wanted to hit the grocery store, and we also wanted to find her some parking for her test in advance. Once all of that was completed, it was time to pick up the pie of Holiness.

Once I stepped into Angelo’s it was like going back in time. The smells, the sounds, the decor. I freely admit it’s been quite a few years since I have been in there, which is really a shame. I got my pie and a 2 liter of root beer, and was on my way. It was still raining out, so I hurried back to my wife’s car. Once I got into my seat, I set the pizza on my lap. That’s when the smells of Angelo’s started to fill the car. I was instantly taken back to a time when Angelo’s populated all my Friday nights. It was typically Angelo’s for dinner, and the original Playstation for entertainment. I even told my wife that all I needed was an original Playsation and my night would be set.

Once we got home, we wasted no time and dug into the pie. This was the first time my wife had ever had Angelo’s, and after her first bite, she looked at me with an annoyed look.

“Why haven’t you introduced this pizza to me earlier?”

I laughed. She had fallen in love with another pizza place when she first moved up here and from then on out, that’s all she wanted pizza from. I have the feeling that she will be wanting pizza from a different establishment now.

I am in the midst of a little experiment.

On Tuesday night, I realized at about 7pm that I had spent most of my last day of vacation on the computer. Not that this is a bad thing, not an uncommon event in my life, but I had an epiphany. I had spent most of the day refreshing Twitter, and ready social sites. In essence, I had spent my day micro-blogging about doing nothing and reading about what everyone else was doing.

That’s really when it hit me. I didn’t do anything because I was watching, via text, what everyone else was doing all day. To me, this realization made me feel quite pathetic.

So, right then and there, I knew I had to make a change. Looking for the most extreme case of this behavior, I immediately thought of Twitter. Between tweeting and receiving tweets from all my friends, I typically log about a 1,000 text messages a month on my phone. I sat down and did the quick math. Making a typical tweet from my phone cost me about 20 seconds. Reading the average tweet should be about 5 seconds. In an atypical month, about 3/2 of my texts are received, and the remaining 1/3 are sent. That equals about 56 minutes a month reading tweets and almost 2 hours sending tweets from my phone.

No wonder I don’t get things done in the course of my day!

That was a no brainer. I quickly turned off text notifications from Twitter to my cell phone. Once I did that, I honestly felt a littler liberated. Feeling all powerful, I decided to kick it up a notch. I then decided not use Twitter for the next 7 days and see if I become more productive. All I will allow myself is the luxury to check Twitter 3 times a day via my computer at home. So far, I can honestly say I feel more productive, especially at work. It can get quite annoying when you’re trying to work and your pocket keeps vibrating. Even worse than a vibrating pocket is simply ignoring them. By the time I go on lunch, I have a solid 40 tweets from the morning.

Also liberating is the feeling that I need to tweet everything that I am doing. Instead of deciding to go to lunch, stopping, tweeting about it, and then actually going to lunch, I just go to lunch now.

I’ll probably end up going back to Twitter once this experiment is over, but I won’t be the hardcore user I used to be. I’m not even sure I’ll turn cell phone notifications back on. I kind of like not being constantly distracted by my vibrating thigh.