All this technology is supposed to make our lives better.  I use the phone all the time at work.  It definitely saves time when I can call a guy already at Lowe’s and say, “Oh yeah, bring me another 5 lb box of screws too.”  And cell phones are a blessing in emergencies.  A few weeks ago when Dad was going to the hospital with chest pains and a buddy of mine called me before Ma even had a chance to.  It’s not an absolute necessity, but it’s very nice to have a lot of time.

Lately I’ve become all too aware of how frustrated I’ve become with having a cell phone.  It’s nothing personal against anyone I know and I don’t want any of you to have second thoughts about calling me anytime you want.  I’m just getting disenchanted with always being able to be reached out and touched, constantly connected to the whole wired world.

I always consider just getting rid of my phone when I start having problems with it.  I bought a slightly nicer phone than usual last time.  It’s a flip phone with a full color screen.  It plays MP3s and videos.  It does internet, takes pictures and can use a memory card.  The best part was that in places like my apartment where there’s no cell service, it can use the wireless internet signal instead.  That was the major selling point.

It’s given me about a year of decent service.  Most of the time I cause physical damage to a phone long before the circuits are ready to die.  This time it’s going from the inside out.  The hinge and the buttons are like new.  Even most of the paint is still intact.  I can’t say why it’s messing up.  It’s been in the humidity and the dust and the heat and the cold, everywhere I’ve been.  I think that plays a major role in the malfunction of the electronics I own.

A couple weeks ago it stopped wanting to switch from cell service to wifi when I came inside.  I called T-Mobile about the problem and they told me to call them from a different phone.  If I had a phone that worked, why would I have been calling them?  Fast forward to a couple days ago.  It started blinking and the menus and text entry is working slower than usual.  Not good.

I weighed my options and decided against getting a new phone through the insurance plan I was carrying.  Coverage with T-Mobile has never been quite what I needed.  Customer service has always been friendly but never particularly helpful.  The phone only held up half as long as it should have.  That’s enough.  I’m out.

Most everybody I know has gone to Verizon.  The prices are significantly more than the other carriers, but I think I’ve finally proven to myself that when it comes to a cell phone, you get what you pay for.  I was able to get a decent discount through work as well.  Verizon phones seem to have coverage everywhere short of maybe a faraday cage.

What I’m really sold on though is the fact that you can get a phone built to military specifications.  It’s actually certified to be in the dust and sun, dropped, shaken, rained on and submerged in water.  If that doesn’t sound like something I need, I don’t know what does.  The phone is called the Boulder.  You can check it out at casiogzone.com/boulder Mine should be here Tuesday.  If you can’t get in touch with me before then, you know why.  After then, we shouldn’t have any problems.

I had totally forgotten about posting these. Warped Tour was July 15th so it’s been well over a month now, but I know my friends would still like to see the pictures and get their stuff they left in my backpack. Here’s the pictures. You can get your stuff if you buy me a beer in Olde Towne.

There were lots of vendors with tents giving away cool free stuff.

Unfortunately, the tents were near the stages but the beer was next to the bathrooms on the other side of the venue. By the time you got a beer and walked to a stage, it was either time to go take a piss or time to go get another beer. So I saw like 3 bands perform. All day. At a music festival.

Since we did a lot of walking, we saw lots of interesting things and lots of strange-looking people.

The beer was cheap and the servers were happy, which are both lies. A music festival in the middle of a Tuesday doesn’t really fit into the schedule of the average working adult, so at least the lines were short.

I learned that even though there was a massive age difference between me and my friends and most of the other people at the show, we still shared a lot of the same ideals.

If you had a beer once you got close to the tents and the stages, you had to go in time out. I bet we stood there for a couple hours throughout the day.

This Hare Krishna guy wanted to trade a book for a donation. I told him I wanted a free copy of the book that, if I enjoyed, I would make a donation. It didn’t work that way and he took the book away from me. You know how some movie trailers show all the good parts and the rest of the film is just garbage? That’s how his sell on the book was. I ended up finding the copy of the stupid book. So I went back and got a picture with him and told him I got the copy from “the other guy”, which somehow made sense at the time. I did actually skim through the book. I think it’s the only book I’ve ever actually thrown away. The whole thing reads like a book report on the ideas of all the great philosophers. The problem I had with it was that the Hare Krishna try to play off the words of people like Socrates as their own. Was that too heavy for this story of a fun and illustrated day of inebriation and music? Sorry…

Apparently I rescued Katy Perry from a nice day.

And yeah, there were some bands there or something.

This ramp was about four times as long as it was tall, which made it safe for the kids and boring to watch.

One of the few bands I saw any of was this awesome punk trio called Tat. Sort of a Distillers/Bouncing Souls sound. Good stuff if you like punk. Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/tat “Pessimist” is my favorite track on their MySpizzle.

Somewhere around the second beer, me and Ray ran into Jon, Aaron, Woody and girlie. (Sorry, I’m bad with names.)

Who doesn’t like giant bear people?

Woody and Jon entered a trivia contest held by a New Jersey douche bag.

I couldn’t help but think this was the modern iteration of Punky Brewster.

Woody played guitar and drums while Jon yelled a lot.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we all felt like this.

Jon got some jailbait to help him put on a temporary tattoo.

I bumped into Elvis.

Ray met the fat kid from Superbad.

Ray liked the dude with a keytar covering Bob Marley songs.

Somehow the camera captured how everything was looking to us by the time it got dark.

On the way out the CDs were $5 but the hugs were free.

My sister and her boyfriend landed today in Miami for a vacation.  Something else landed nearby, which I’m sure you’ve seen on the news.  I’m no geography wiz so I employed the help of the National Hurricane Center and Google Maps.

I’m sleepy, so this image sucks, but you get it.

Somehow they lucked out and the worst is projected to miss them.  According to one chart, they have a 40% change of catching some 40 mph winds, but that shouldn’t be too bad at all.  I would think pretty much anything in FL that was going to blow away in that little bit of wind would have done so a long time ago.

I’ve had Sirius for probably 4 or 5 years now.  Within that period I also had XM for a month and hated it.  I’ve stuck with Sirius and loved every minute of it.  Between Neil and I, I would say we’ve sold a dozen people or more on the service.  It truly has something for everyone.  Initially I was very disappointed to hear that the two wanted to merge.  I though prices would go up from reduced competition.  I thought the play lists would become a Clear Channel knock-off like XM more commercial.  Actually, these things will still probably happen, but there’s not all bad news coming out of this:

Among the conditions that both companies had already accepted were à la carte programming that would give consumers flexibility in which channels they pay for, the permission for any electronics company to develop devices that would receive the service and a price freeze for three years.

Shares in both companies rose on Wednesday in anticipation of approval. XM rose 94 cents, or 10.3 percent, to close at $10.04. Sirius closed at $2.68, up 30 cents, or 12.6 percent.

Customized programming and better numbers from both companies is definitely something I can get behind.  We can only hope that the à la carte programming is a huge success and cable and satellite television providers follow suit.  Source.

I’ve had Libertarian ideas before I even knew that’s what they were.  When I was in high school, it made me sick to walk through a metal detector and have my backpack rummaged through.  My backpack was my own personal property.  To have every student that walked through the door presumed guilty of having some type of drugs or weapons was an insult. I’m not going to go overboard with trying to convince you to read this book. All I will say is that if you ever plan to vote for a president in the US, you need to do so only after reading this book.

My eyes have been opened even further upon reading this short book.  It is surprisingly light reading, even given it’s subject matter, but Dr. Paul is still manages to drive home the importance of his ideals of less government and more liberty.  I’ll end with a few excerpts.

“Every election cycle we are treated to candidates who promise us “change,” and 2008 has been no different.  But in the American political lexicon, “change” always means more of the same:  more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.”

“…Every four years we are treated to the same tired, predictable routine:  two candidates with few disagreements on fundamentals pretend they represent dramatically different philosophies of government.”

“[The] mainstream media…focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion.  This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines…and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans.  Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic.  Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”

“Early on in my presidential campaign, people began describing my message and agenda as a “revolution.”  In a way, it is, albeit a peaceful one.  In a country with a political debate as restricted as ours, it is revolutionary to ask whether we need troops in 130 countries and whether the non-interventionist foreign policy recommended by our Founding Fathers might not be better.  Is it revolutionary to ask whether the accumulation of more and more power in Washington has been good for us.  It is revolutionary to ask fundamental questions about privacy, police-state measures, taxation, social policy, and countless other matters.”

I have wasps.  <3

The good news:  I got off work, went to Hampton to pick up my Scrambler.   It runs like new!  All it took was a new battery, some fuel stabilizer and what was it?  Oh yeah, the pros at All Out Cycles basically ripped out the gas tank, fuel lines and carburetor and scrubbed the dirt and trash off them all.  I can’t believe I’ve finally got it fixed!  I am just as excited today as when I got it new.

The bad news:  After I got back from picking up my Scrambler, I got tied up in a bunch of stuff at my parents’ place.  Between moving some appliances with Dad, eating dinner, helping Ma with the kittens, trying to fix the touch lamp said kittens broke and so on…I just got home and took a shower.  So yeah, tonight is not the night and tomorrow isn’t looking great either unless you wanna tag in to go help Dad set poles for a lean-to.

I will give you another teaser pic.  Here’s me with a cool Hare Krishna guy.  He tried to get me to make a donation to a group I knew nothing about in exchange for a book I didn’t know if I’d like.  After bartering for a bit he decided we didn’t have a deal but on the next trip to the bathroom I scored one somebody left by the sink.  When I passed by him again I asked him if I could put his picture on my web site after I lied to him about how I got a copy of the book.  He said yes and asked what the site was.  When I told him Kevin108.com he got really excited.  He said 108 was a very spiritual number and showed me the significance in the book.  Free book, neat story…I thought that was pretty cool.

Was a long, fun, strange day.  I have a lot of pictures but I didn’t get home until late last night and I was way too drunk to mess with them then.  I’ll try to have them up later this afternoon.

As a teaser, here’s the first pic of the day:

Katy Perry being interviewed by Mike and Bob

I didn’t realize Google Street View had caught up to the smaller places like where I live.  I thought it was still just big cities.  My friend Cass pointed out that my car is in the shot of our place.  Pretty neat!

Some asshole threw a bottle through a window downstairs sometime last night.  This neighborhood has been quiet for two years and ever since school got out, all kinds of stuff has gone on.  Time to go call the cops and clean up.

Update: when I went downstairs to clean up, I ran into two of the neighbors.  I managed to get the story from last night that led up to the hole in our building.

The guy I share a balcony with was outside last night with a friend having a beer on the balcony.  They heard a commotion.  Some guy that lives across the street was beating up his girlfriend in front of their building.  My neighbor yelled at him to leave the girl alone.  The guy across the street, in less than civilized language, told my neighbor to mind his own business and threatened to set our building on fire.

The jerk across the street stopped beating the girl long enough to go inside and get a bottle of Bacardi.  My neighbor was already on the phone with the cops when the asshole tossed the bottle at him.  It fell short of the balcony but still went through the window on the first floor.  The guy across the street, of course, managed to disappear between then and when the cops showed up.

Earlier this evening the police finally called me back to take a report.  I spoke with two people.  The first lady sounded like it was her first day on the job and seemed to really have no idea what she was doing.  The second lady was an officer who was short and to the point but wanted every bit of MY information down to my social security number, which I declined to provide her.  I don’t see how any of that was particularly necessary.  It made me feel like a suspect instead of a responsible neighbor and it only served to make me reluctant to ever file such a report again.