If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49.00 left.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214.00 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg.

A recent study found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study found Americans drink, on the average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year. That means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon.

Thanks Krista!

It was a little wet out there from the recent rain but there’s been a TON of work done since I was last there two years ago.  The huge mud hole at the first open area had about 8″ of water.  I have never just ridden across it except back in 05 when we had a summer drought.  There were several new trails as well.  All but a couple of the old tank traps were filled in.  Being able to assume that you weren’t riding into a bottomless pit made for a much more relaxing day.

There was a decent crowd for a Sunday.  More people showed up later on in the day, I guess as they got out of church.  On the way out, we stopped at Farm Fresh in Smithfield to get some water.  I had a t-shirt from Askew Cycles and Ray had a Fox Racing shirt on.  The cashier asked if we were going to Slade’s and said that her parents were going out there with a new Arctic Cat.  They showed up about halfway through our day with a brand new black AC with the double seat, windshield - a full on Cadillac ATV.  They had a blast with it.

Ray and I each got high centered once right at the end of the day.  It took longer to unwind the tow rope than it did to get unstuck.  Ray took a section of trail just a little too slow and got stuck in some ruts.  We could have just pulled the bike out by hand but we were trying to avoid filling our boots with water.  That lasted for about 10 minutes - until I got stuck at the water crossing all the way to the back and right of where you ride in.  Just my luck, as soon as I got stuck and called Ray over, a snake started swimming over to me.  I jumped to solid ground then we chased the snake away and finished pulling me out.

Just as we got to the truck the rain started.  About the time we loaded up and got out of the driveway, it stopped.  I spent some time last night washing all my riding gear at my parents’ place.  I’ll go scrub down the Scrambler one night this week.  All in all, it was another great day of riding.

At the BK Lounge getting breakfast

A mud shot I sent Shannon

I don’t know how long it’s been there or how I’ve failed to hear about it in all the years I’ve played, worked and lived here, but I visited the Olde Towne Coffee-House last night and heard some awesome acoustic music and some cool stories.  It’s a small, laid back place and I think it would be a lot of fun to just go hang out and listen to some people play.  There’s live music every Friday with a $5 cover (so I will never be there on Friday) and every Saturday is open mic night.  They have a really iffy web site at portsmouthcoffee.com and an equally laid out MySpace page at myspace.com/openmic600

I think this illustrates Mike’s thought process perfectly.

Source.

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.