“Do it.”

My best friend Edwin Rivera III and I used to play together in Jazz band when we were in college back in 2004-2005.  Since I dropped out of college, I tapered off playing bass, life got in the way and what was once a passionate hobby turned into a dust collection in the corner.  I sold my amp and nicer Fender bass as I needed the cash, I did keep my lesser bass and first amp so I could play if I so desired.  For the past year or so, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting back into it, nothing professionally or anything, but just for the love of music…to fill that void I’ve been noticing since I essentially gave it all up a few years ago.

So, about 3 weekends ago, my friend posts on Facebook that he wants to do a cover video with a bassist.  I don’t know if he had me in mind specifically and used this as a ploy to get me back into it, or if he was open to any bassist he knew.  He lives in Nashville and has access to tons of great musicians.  He had already had it in mind to cover a Coheed and Cambria song, a band which I introduced him to, as he introduced me to Dream Theater.  He wanted to do Here We Are, Juggernaut (HWAJ), a song from their latest album, Year of the Black Rainbow.  A song I love.  I hadn’t taken the time to learn it before, but frankly, the bass I had owned was in poor shape, the amp sounded terrible, playing wasn’t fun and it was difficult because of my gear.

So, I was looking to get a new neck for my bass as I had ripped the frets out like an idiot years ago in Jazz Band to look like I was Jaco Pastorius to get that fretless sound without paying for a new guitar (at the time, I had a nice fretted bass to use, so it wasn’t that bad then).  The action had to be set high so the strings wouldn’t buzz, but that made playing with my left hand to finger the notes, difficult to say the least.  I hated playing it, which is why I think I stopped playing often.  My tax return had came in and I had some cash to spend on it if I really wanted to.  So, I went looking with some real limits and found a good deal on a new, but scratch and dent Schecter Stiletto Custom-4.  Nice bass, nice action, hardware and is easy on the eyes.  Found a good amp online and made it happen.

I probably spent more than I should’ve, but I noticed myself shutting the door, donning a pair of headphones and playing for hours on end in my room.  Very reminiscent of my days in high school when I did the exact same thing.  Which I enjoyed then dearly, not that different now.  I feel I did the right thing, I hope this lasts.

Cover video for Here We Are, Juggernaut. Can’t embed it here, some crap about Sony Music.

I had been looking into getting a car for some time now, been looking at Nissans mostly.  Out of the 3 previous vehicles, 2 of them were Nissans, both fun to drive.  I’ve owned a 1986 300ZX, a 2004 Sentra SER Spec V and a 2007 Chevy Silverado, in that order.  I was looking at maybe another Sentra Spec V (one of the newer models), a 350Z or the new Nissan Juke.  The Juke was fun to drive, but out of my price range.  The Z was in the price range, but getting hard to find the right one.  The Sentra was about the same thing, but last on the list of cars I’d want.  The top two were the Juke and the Z, with the Juke not being an option, the likely choice was the Z.

The local dealer had the Red 2006 350Z, base model, 6 Speed transmission with decent mileage and price.  No frills, but still more than I wanted.  The lack of cruise control is made up for by the car’s ability to just be driven.  Some will find the ride a little rough, the transmission notchy and the engine noisy.  If you don’t like it, get out of my car.  I love the gear box, it goes for days.  The noise, lets me know something is happening, more than your little Prius.  That stiff ride?  Try taking corners while downshifting into 4th and pushing the RPMs north of 4K into the 5K range while watching the speedometer climb past 70 while you swing around a 35mph corner.  Do that and try not to smile.  You can’t.

The sentimental value.  That shift knob was in my old Sentra and I kept it when I traded in the Spec V.  Then there’s the fact that this isn’t my first Z car.  My very first car was a 1986 Nissan 300ZX.  I thought I was the epitome of cool.  It was indeed a  sexy ride.  However, it wasn’t as reliable as it could be and I needed something that didn’t require any work as I was progressing into management with my job at the time.  When I bought the Sentra and traded in the ZX, I vowed to either own another ’86 ZX or get a newer Z car.  The latter is the best option for me.  I’m in love with a machine, she’ll take care of me as long as I take care of her.  It’s not just a car.

Some things won’t be understood, but you don’t have to.  All I have to do is push the gas pedal and it’s instant grin city.  If you ever get the chance to enjoy something like this, please do.  Savor it, and do all you can to make it last.  You can apply that little mantra to most anything that gives you some satisfaction.

OK, was, spelled W A S.  It can be typed by your left ring finger, pinky and ring finger again, same hand, 3 short quick strokes.  Was, spelled W U Z is typed with your left ring finger, right index and left pinky.  Mind you that you have to hit one of the most seldom used keys on your keyboards, the Z.  You’re still typing 3 letters, you’re having to go for 2 oddball (in relation to proper spelling) letters to make it work.  In the process you come off looking like your 15 rather an adult and you save no time or characters.  Also, for the record, it doesn’t make you look cool.  That’s when it’s typed on a full keyboard, particularly a computer/laptop sized one.  I understand that a phone QWERTY keyboard is a tad different, you have to tap your thumb 3 times in a .’. style pattern…as a generation that brags about speed, I figure this would be particularly easy to accomplish….what with Rock Band for the iPhone and all, tapping repetitive patters would be a cinch!

I can understand abbreviations in text messages when the typist is using a T-9 keyboard (the one with the letters spread out over the 1-9 keys).  If you have a full QWERTY or even a Software keyboard, and your not saving characters for a Twitter post, please, for the sake of the English language, post full words.  My own mother does this and every text I get (she uses a Droid Eris with a soft-keyboard) from her are is spelled ‘r’ and you is spelled ‘u’.  Thankfully, some phones are looking to save us from our bad habits formed from the T9 generation.  Example, the Palm Pre/Pixi WebOS phones.  They take common abbreviations and spell the words out, whether you want it to or not.  With WebOS 2.0, you can even add or edit this list of shortcut words.  You know, so when you have to type words like Fluoroelastomer on a small QWERTY keyboard for a living, you can make it easier.

If I have offended any 15 year olds who do type was as wuz and are cool doing so, please accept my sincerest apologies.

My blog posts are rarely intended to be taken seriously, this one however is both honest and a tiny bit serious.  I do wish adults with real world jobs (where some sort of higher learning is applied) especially, would use proper English, and maybe some decent grammar.

I'm going to definitely partake of some Jack Daniels tonight. I got some brain cells that need to be culled.—
Josh Hearne (@joshhearne) November 05, 2010

Works!

These last couple months have been exciting to me, even if they seem lackluster to others.  I visited Tennessee again in September, met some great people and helped support Chiari Research by walking and raising some money.  I celebrated a year of relatively symptom free living from Chiari on the 21st this month.  I also started a new support group on Facebook for local Chiari patients recently.  In the tech/geek side of my life, I’ve been using the iPhone 4 (yep, jumped ship) and got a new laptop in recent months (HP/Win7).

I had been talking with a friend of mine who runs Zipperhead Productions and he was going to walk in the Conquer Chiari Walk Across America 2010 fundraiser.  Yearly, in September (Chiari Awareness Month), the Conquer Chiari folks setup sites across the country and at the same time, we collectively walk to raise awareness for our disorder.  I went to Nashville to meet David and my other TN friends, while on the 18th we drove over to Knoxville where the walk for TN was held.  David, our friend who introduced us: Hali and I all went together and walked.  We were a bit disappointed in that we only walked one lap around a park, but it was good to meet all the other CM patients I did.  Really opened my eyes to what others are going through with this condition.  Tennessee was fun as it always has been, even if it was a short trip.

On the 21st of this month I celebrated my one year anniversary for my decompression of my skull to treat my Chiari Malformation symptoms.  I’m very happy to say that I’ve spent the most of this year not battling headaches.  In fact, I’ve been able to buy only a couple bottles of Advil, where as before I’d buy one a month essentially.  My scar isn’t going to go away, it’s pretty obvious something happened, and yet, no one asks me about it.  It’s the one thing I like about how blatant it is, how much of a conversation starter it could be, but no one asks about it.

I started a group on Facebook, check out the link for it up above this post.  It’s mainly for people with Chiari or parents of children with Chiari that are local to me so I can better organize trips for walks, meet and greets with other groups or do fundraisers for awareness.  Right now it’s still a new and small group, but I hope it grows to more participating members soon.

Now for the tech part of the post, you non nerds feel free to hit the “X” button if you’d like, you won’t hurt my feelings.  I got the new iPhone 4, I was a Verizon customer for a few months, but after struggling with no signal at my house in Lufkin (which is supposed to get good signal) they declared my line to be in a poor area, but they weren’t going to do anything about it.  Meaning, I could just walk away without any ETF.  I found $200 to foot the iPhone 4 and did it.  Sold my Palm Pre Plus and HTC Droid Eris on eBay along with my netbook and that covered all my costs to switch.  Very happy with the decision.  Solid hardware, gorgeous display, fluid UI (except notifications) ok multitasking.  The bonus?  Being able to make/receive calls in my home.

Loving my new laptop too, HP dv7-4070us model, Windows 7 is a night and day experience from my dealings with Vista.  I love it so much I repartitioned my desktop for pure Linux Ubuntu 10.10 duty this week.  Sadly, I never use my desktop anymore, I’ve moved my 23″ monitor to work so I can use the widescreen format for better seeing/using my spreadsheets.  If you’ve got a computer with Vista, you need to do yourself a favor and get Windows 7 already, that or a new Mac…both are solid.

Until next time, will include some new stuff then….guns!

The iPhone 4 undoubtedly is affected by the “Antenna-gate” issue.  He has 3 bars at his desk, I held it up by the cable plastic while charging it this morning and touched ‘the spot’.  Dropped to 1 bar and when I released it said “Searching…”.  Other than that, and the lack of true multitasking (see what WebOS and Palm has done on that front), I really like it and think Apple did a good job.  The phone still gets good reception in the office, which is a metal building.  GSM doesn’t get through the walls very well, just part of it.  One of the coolest features is the screen, it’s just ridiculously crisp and clear.  Can’t see a pixel at all, it’s crazy.  The upgraded camera and video functions are a much needed update to bring it up a good notch or two.  Tap to focus during a video recording and bam, HD upclose recording.  I was 2 inches away from text on a drawing and it was crystal clear.  Sadly, I’m on Verizon for another year atleast and the Verizon iPhone rumors are only rumors, take it all with a grain of salt.  If it did come to Verizon, I might consider it but the coverage with them has been ok at best.  I have a dead spot on the way to/from work and a friend of mine has a house just outside of the coverage zone that kills my phone’s battery in 2-3 hours easy.

As for the iPad, you can’t really judge one until you see and get to really use one.  I was impressed.  I have a PC and a netbook at the house and use my iPod Touch for a lot of things in between.  It’s just easy to pull out the iPod, unlock, open and ultimately use.  When they first came out I wasn’t very sold on them, I was hesitant to even try one, let alone find one locally.  Well, I set it up, played with the extremely intuitive email app.  The browser (Safari) is what it is, a browser, but much more fully fledged rather than what you see in an iPhone or any mobile device.  Of course though, it lacks Flash.  For me I really don’t use Flash except on YouTube.  I tried the HTML5 testing but it wasn’t up to what the Flash player could do.  That said, there is a mobile version of YouTube you can try which is very touch screen friendly and there’s always the YouTube app.

My grandfather has about 3250 pictures on his desktop, they all got synced.  They’re fairly well organized, and browsing them on the iPad is a cinch.  The photos are very well integrated into the other Apple apps, like Pages.  He bought that app ($9.99) and we made a simple document and just played with it.  I probably made that document in about 1/2 the time it would’ve taken me on a PC to do the same thing.  I then emailed it to myself as a .doc file, viewed it on my phone (Palm Pre+) and then again in MS Word on my PC.  It looked like it should, it has options to email the attachment as a .doc or .pdf and another file type specific to Apple’s Pages app, the name escapes me.  I really want to see what Apple’s Numbers can do since my main focus at work is in MS Excel.  Tomorrow I’m going to email him our letterhead image for our company so he can use it for professional styled emails that he can just type into and then send in a matter of minutes no matter where he is.

There’s much more to the iPad than just what I’ve described, but for the things I do on a computer normally, it does them very well.  I’m really giving thought to getting one, I wish it had a camera, but then again, I’m not very hopeful that Apple will bring one to market in the 2nd year.  The iPhone was there for 2 years before they brought a simple task like Cut/Copy/Paste to the OS.  Took them 3 years to bring in multitasking and a front facing camera.  It’s something I want, but won’t be getting one anytime soon, I’ll be looking to get one probably about the time they roll a new generation of them out.  I wonder what they’ll improve in the next go around.  I wonder how well they post to WordPress via the website or an app.

Today I finally got to go see Inception.  My buddy Chris and I went and there was only about 6 other people in the theater.  I was expecting 20+ for a 430 showing on a Sunday.  I used to work in the theaters and know how they normally operate.

Initial thoughts, it’s got a great premise, the story is very thought provoking, and I did enjoy it.  That said, I don’t believe it has what it takes to be the Best Film everyone keeps claiming it to be.  The stunt work was great, the plot was unlike anything else.  Acting was good from a great cast.  In comparison to past Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, this is close, but no cigar.

Some of the film was predictable, I don’t like movies that are.  It wasn’t terribly predictable, don’t get me wrong, I was guessing at some parts, but there were times where you’re like “yup, I saw that coming….”.  If nothing else really kicks some butt at the box office; this does, in fact, have potential to be up there among the top stuff.  It’s still a little early to be judging that though.

It’s worth the price of admission if you do want to see it, otherwise, I say wait and rent it.  It may or may not be loaded with Behind The Scenes footage.

So I was getting groceries just now, not much, I live alone and only buy what I need to get me through the week.  100% of the time I am well within the 20 items or less ‘limit’ for the express checkout lanes.

Today however, a group of ‘individuals’ are in front of me checking out.  The have 2 carts and what looked to be 2 different groups of shoppers out of the 4 of them.  This was the shortest line of the 3 open, one was closing down and had the light off, but people apparently don’t look up at the lights anymore to see who’s lane is still accepting customers.  The folks in question in my line however divided up the goods amongst them to make what would’ve been an easy trip down one of the other lanes, a difficult for everyone else trip down the express lanes.  I wait for what seemed to be an eternity, but was probably only 6-8 minutes and finally they’re done.  All the while conversing with the cashier, during and even after while I was starting to check out.

I put my few items on the counter and proceed to put the couple bags I had back in the cart.  Put some money on a gas card, paid and left.  I get my groceries in my truck and start to get out of the parking lot when a truck starts pulling out on the car in front of me.  Big black F150 crew cab, big rims….I immediately thought about the group that was in front of me.  They finally finish cutting off the person in front of me and we get going again.  I head over to the gas station and guess who again, same black F150 gets stupid and cuts me off to get a gas lane….problem was, her tank was on the wrong side of where she was parking.  She stops short and I just continue around to another pump.  I start pumping gas and as I’m finishing one of the women from before comes back to the same truck and has a pack of cigarettes in hand.  Really?   It’s just too darned inconvenient to just buy groceries in the lane that sells cigarettes?  How some people feel they have such entitlement these days is beyond me.

I long for the day when people give up greed and selfishness and willingly give a helping hand.  Right now all society seems to do is put me in a foul mood.  A world without greed, something of a fairy tale in my mind, it’ll be a long time coming before that happens I’m afraid.

Also, know how it’s the more common to be in a wreck 2 miles from home?  I live about that far from the Walmart nearby.  I must be due for a wreck because bad drivers are crawling out of the woodwork lately.