Enter the camera mount. I forgot which brand it is, and it’s in my car in the garage so I’m not about to go look to see. What I can tell you is that it works great and using the camera in my car is quite fun now. For now it’s living inside the car mounted to the windshield. Come summer it will probably spend some time on the left front fender.

So where’s the footage? Patience, I have a master plan. It requires more than just uploading raw video to YouTube. It will also require me to get going on my drum machine and recording programs. Yeah I think you know where I’m heading with this…

I’m driving the Saab and being that this is my first event, I’m rocking the Novice class. So far I’m the only one, which means I’ll win my class haha (and also come in last I suppose). In any case, I can’t wait, even if the Saab is completely stock and probably isn’t the best car for autocross.

So far the majority of other cars signed up are a few Lotus cars and some Miatas. I think there’s a Subie in there too somewhere, and a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head. What I’m getting at is, most of them are completely different from the Saab. So if I know my car is worse than others for the event, why bother?

Here’s the other thing about autocross: the organizers have seemingly put a ton of time into organizing classes for not only each kind of car, but also any mods people make to the cars. So what I’m saying, at the end of the day, I will be able to, for the most part, figure out how my driving skill level matches up with the other drivers, no matter what they show up driving.

If by chance I don’t finish dead last I’ll be pleased. Beating Nate in one of the runs would make the today a complete success (it won’t happen…unless he bashes a bunch of cones for time penalties).

Thanks to a friend telling me about mediafire, I’ve been finding new music every night. The problem? Most music today is worthless. One band that I find interesting is the pop-punk band Set Your Goals. I don’t care if they’re Warped Tour darlings or Best Buy feature artists, I like them. And Matt & Kim’s new album is brilliant…go buy it.

I started a new diet. It’s called “if you don’t eat you can’t gain weight”. It works until I get hungry. I suppose the bigger plus is that I no longer drink soda/pop/soft drinks/whatever you call them. Exception: drinking 7 & 7s at bars/pubs…excellent! I also kind of quit McDonald’s and various other fast food places. Exception: Jimmy John’s…once again excellent!

This summer I started wearing shorts again. This is a good thing especially the past day or two being that it’s about 200 degrees outside.

I’ve been drinking tea quite a bit lately. Stash tea is still the best…which reminds me, I need more Stash Lemon Spice Green Tea; time for another trip to Portland.

I want to play in a band again. For awhile I enjoyed just playing guitar and programming stuff with drum machines because I didn’t need to depend on other people’s schedules to match up to set-up times to play. Now I miss the insanity/hassle of playing gigs. I should do this again…

Stick shift cars make driving more fun. Enough said.

I’ve come to the conclusion that recently cutting my hair/beard was the correct decision. I looked like Zach Galifianakis and Ryan Dunn (R.I.P.) long enough. Plus, it’ll grow back.

That’s all for now. See you next month, if not sooner (I swear I’ll try).

A couple co-workers and I went to a newly re-opened bar to see how the place has changed. We were minding our own business making fun of each other when a girl walked up to us and said to my friend “I noticed you’re wearing a Minnesota Twins shirt” and then said to me “and you’re wearing a Minnesota Wild hat. Are you guys from Minnesota?”

After we told her were weren’t from Minnesota, but were Twins and Wild fans, she said she was from New York and a Yankees fan (ugh seriously? of all the teams…ugh). We then went into a bit of a sports conversation and finally traded names etc etc before she joined her friends at a different table.

It was the next day that I realized if there was the very good possibility that if she didn’t see that Twins shirt and/or Wild hat she wouldn’t have even come up to chat. I then began thinking about how many different types of things I wear. If we had been wearing clothes without sports teams logos, would she still have talked to us? If I wore something different would someone else wanted to talk with me/us?

The problem is that we never know what kind of people we’re going to meet when we walk out the door for the day. When I’m leaving for work or whatever, if I knew I’d later that night meet a girl that loves Saucony shoes, you could bet for sure I’d be wearing those. But, of course, none of us ever know. So what do we do?

Answer for me is to continuing wearing whatever is on top of my pile of clean clothes. I can’t be bothered to think about looking good; I just want to wear something that makes me legal to go out in public a.k.a. not naked.

This isn’t a post about fashion, or “watch what you wear” kind of thing. This is a eureka moment that I had that got me thinking about how many other times people (females) were judging me by what I was wearing at a specific time. By all means, do not use this text as a reason to go out and buy more clothes haha.

All vehicles have pros and cons. Driving one vehicle for years and then switching to a different one, these become painfully obvious right away. Here are a few things that bug me about Saab right now…even though in a couple months I’m sure they won’t bother me at all.

First off, storage space. Moving from an SUV to a car this may seem obvious, but I’m talking about interior room. Saab doesn’t have a center console, whereas Envoy had a huge cubbie where I could stash more things than I ever thought possible (I realized this when cleaning my stuff out of it). Saab has a stash net under the glovebox, and small pockets on the front of the front seats (like a kangaroo I guess), and stashes in the doors. Still need to find a pocket big enough for my sunglasses case and CD cases.

This brings me to 2nd thing, no window tinting. Envoy’s rear windows were nicely tinted. This meant I could load the back seat with a bunch of stuff and no one could see it unless they really tried. I kind of fear storing a box full of CDs on the back seat when anyone that walks past the car can see them in plain view. Where else do I miss tinting? The top of the windshield (windscreen if you’re reading this in the UK). I’m fairly positive most vehicles have tinting along the top of the windshield to help with sun. I never thought I’d miss this, sometimes was even annoyed with it, until driving Saab around during those hours when the sun is coming down. I guess I’ll just be wearing sunglasses alot more.

Next is a feature I just really got used to…a compass in the rear view mirror. I can’t even count how many times that came in handy driving in bigger cities when trying to figure out where I’m going. I’m sure I could pull out my phone and dink around with that, but it was always nice looking up and seeing which way I was going. I guess I’m have to pay more attention to where the sun is now. Booo…

Finally, here’s a feature I’m almost embarrassed to admit I used as much as I did: repeat. Yep, that’s right, I can listen to one song over-and-over for hours on end. One time driving out to Portland, OR I listened to the song “Sound of Settling” by Death Cab For Cutie all the way through WA into the eastern part of OR. Blimey! In Saab I have to hit the back button everytime. It’s already annoying. Speaking of the stereo, who thought that pulling the volume knob out and turning it to adjust the Left/Right balance was a good idea? Driving down a bumpy road, adjusting the volume and boom, suddenly all the sound comes from the right speakers. Hmmm. On the flip side, the Saab has a weird feature that mutes the audio (puts a CD on pause) without turning the stereo off. I can’t think of any reason why this is better than just turning the stereo off, but I’ve been using it lately when I get into spots where I need to concentrate on my shifting abilities.

All in all, Saab is cool. It’s a fun car, and being a hatchback, I can get quite a bit of stuff in the trunk. And who knew having a sunroof would be so fun! Now I just need to name it so I don’t keep calling it “Saab” (Envoy will always be Envoy though).

Now this isn’t a call to designers to go nuts with site updates and redoing entire websites…those throw me off as I get lost on sites that I know exactly where to go.

I think it’s the actual content. Go to a sport website, check the scores, and done. Go to a forum, browse the newest threads/posts, and done. And then I’m lost.

I want to find new content and things to enjoy, but I don’t want to have to think about it before I search for it. I want to find something and then want more. I’m bad at coming up with ideas; I need ideas to find me so I can explore them.

This is the same problem I have with Netflix. At first finding movies I wanted to watch was easy because there was a pile of them I wanted to see. Now, I know there are alot of good movies I haven’t seen and probably don’t know about. But now I’m relying on Netflix to find me movies, and some nights nothing interesting comes up.

And then there are search engines; even searching sites like the one mentioned above. I will have a basic idea of what I want, but if I miss one word it seems I miss out on everything I was looking for.

I’m really hoping sometime I’ll find a way to find interesting things again. I wish it was easier to do.

There are two main problems with bikes…well now that I think of it, lots of problems…but I’ll stick with two. Problem one is I’m lazy. I’m usually lazy because I don’t get enough sleep. I don’t get enough sleep because I stay up all night watching TV and writing gems like this. This, though, can be solved.

I have a nice bike; if anything were to happen to my bike, I’d be crushed. This leads me to the 2nd problem. It would be great to ride my bike to a shop for a quick item or something, but I’m insanely afraid of someone breaking my bike while it’s locked up on the street, or even worse stealing it. This has lead me to the idea of finding a cheap used bike. This way I wouldn’t need to worry (as much) about someone vandalizing it or stealing it. But me being attached to everything I buy (everything has sentimental value) I’d probably be crushed if anything would happen to el cheapo also.

But, this gives me a chance to get a different type of bike…a road bike. I could buy a road bike, convert it to a single speed (or fixie if I dare), and have some fun. How hard can it be to find a used road bike? With the amount of people that sit in front of TVs every chance they get, and everyone’s willingness to drive everywhere, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a cheap bike that isn’t being used, should it?

I do however enjoy watching movies when they come on TV. And for whatever reason, even when I have a DVD of a movie, when it comes on TV I feel obligated to watch it. I also enjoy older movies. I’m not talking silent screen stuff, but, well for example, The Longest Day is one of my favorites.

Now for the weird taste in movies…I’ll start off with a shocker: I think Anchorman isn’t that good. I was excited to watch it when I saw it was going to be on TV. Well, I didn’t last 20 minutes into the movie. Honestly I can’t stand Will Ferrell, who everyone else seems to think is a comedy genius. To me he’s annoying and over-the-top.

While at work I mentioned that I didn’t like Anchorman, and I could only laugh when everyone thought I was joking. Seriously? Is my idea of humor that different? My coworkers then rattled off titles of other “great comedies” and I dismissed all of them as either “bad” or “haven’t seen/no interest in seeing”. Ironically, the majority, if not all, of these titles starred Will Ferrell. Huh.

Two things are still bugging to be looked at though. First is the radio antenna. The Saab has an old style antenna that when you turn the radio on, it goes up. When you turn radio off, it retracts. Well, somethings broken and it doesn’t do that so well. I turn on radio, the first part of antenna goes up and then I just hear a loud “click click click”, but no more antenna extension. Booo…

Sadly, it could be complicated (not really, but for me, yes). I guess what I really mean is it could be a number of different things, and the fixes could include resetting it (or something like that) to replacing the whole thing. I really want to give it a go and see if I can fix it. I suppose it’s not the most risky fix on a vehicle, aye?

The next thing that I’d love to get working correctly is the SID…or Saab Info Display (I think…I forget, it’s not important, is it?). The SID displays all the cool info like gas mileage, trip mileage, etc etc blah blah blah. But apparently, SIDs weren’t built too great and alot of their displays become unreadable…like mine. There are alot of fixes available to try courtesy the internet, but do I dare try one? Getting the thing out of the dash would be victory for me. It’s one of those things that it doesn’t pay to replace with a new one, but if it could start working it would add to the fun.

Did I mention driving Saab is a blast? Here’s the thing: if the Saab is willing to make me happy while I’m driving it, shouldn’t I make the Saab happy by fixing every possible thing (not that it’s a project type car…just those two mishaps). I guess we’ll see…