Yesterday my sister found an abandoned baby bird in the parking lot where she works. For whatever reason, she didn’t do anything about it at first, but after discussing it over dessert, we decided we should go back and see if the poor little thing was still there. It was.

It was in pretty sorry shape though. We thought it was dead at first, but it protested loudly when we tried to move it into a box that we’d brought. We made it as comfy as possible, and headed back home, stopping at the drugstore for some supplies (mostly a medicine dropper with which to feed it). We tried giving it some raspberry flavoured water, but it really didn’t seem to like that, so we decided to wait until we got back home.
When we got it home, we transferred it to a bigger box (the bird was bigger than expected), and fed it water and waterlogged cat food, as suggested by a bird rescue website. It ate hungrily for a little while, then got tired, and went to sleep. It was just about bed time at this point anyway, so we put it in a tiny, padded tent that one of our cats used to sleep in, and decided to check on it in the morning.

I was a little worried when I woke up this morning and didn’t hear it squawking for more food, as I’d expected. My fears were confirmed when upon looking in on it, we discovered that the poor little bugger had died at some point during the night. I feel kind of badly about it, but then, dying warm and snuggled in a tent with a full belly is better than dying alone, hungry, and cold in a parking lot, I think. We tried, we did our best.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 10:13 PM EDT

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Well, my dad decided to buy that Mazda. Once I got it up on the hoist, I found that it was in really decent shape overall, and only needed new rear brake rotors for the safety inspection. I also noticed a small rust bubble developing under the paint on the passenger side rocker panel, but that can easily be fixed.

In any case, by doing the safety myself, I saved him $2000 bucks, less the cost of the rotors, which were cheap, and the shop rate for installation and safety inspection (which I get a discount on). It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad for the money.

They’re coming down to sign the papers this weekend, but since my mum doesn’t drive anymore, they have no way to get both it and their van back to the Sault. So, I get to drive it back up north the following weekend, and then get a ride back. I’m looking forward to the trip, for several reasons. I haven’t been on a ‘road trip’ in ages, for one, and for another, cruising 1,000 km in a sportscar sounds like a little slice of heaven.

Posted by Ron as Fire-in-a-can at 7:33 PM EDT

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My dad has decided that after living without his Mustang convertible for a while, that he’d like to have a topless car again. He and my mum want to go vacationing on Route 66 or some other cliché thing, and I can understand that.

The problem is that nice convertibles are kind of hard to come by in the Soo, and overpriced if you can find one that hopefully isn’t trashed. This is where I come in; I’m living in a market full of them, and I work at a garage, so I’ve been recruited to find him one.

Another ‘Stang would be alright, but I think what he really wants is a Mazda MX-5 Miata. So last night Meghan and I went to check one out in London. It was a 1997 with 86,000km on it… and yikes. It was trashed, so we walked away. Besides, it was green.

Meghan found another one online today and sent me the link at work so that I could check it out on my way home from work. And check it out I did. This one is in much better shape, better colour, and it’s newer (a ‘99), which means more refinements, and more power. Always a plus.

The exterior was in great shape; the fabric top had not a tear or seam out of place, and a real glass back window with a defroster. There were only two dings, and neither of them are all that noticeable. Everything was clean under the hood, and inside, both earmarks of a car well taken care of. Since this one was actually worth looking into, I took it for a test-spin.

Everything I’ve heard about the MX-5 is true, and oh man does the ‘zoom-zoom’ marketing slogan ever not disappoint. The car has catlike reflexes, and responds to the driver’s every input as though it can read your mind. When you point it, it goes. Now. When you hit the gas to accelerate, it goes. Now. It isn’t a super speed machine, but it is, through and through, a sports car.

Posted by Ron as Fire-in-a-can at 10:55 PM EDT

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If you have to be a consumer, might as well do your part and make your opinion about products known. Companies actually pay marketing firms for this information. To entice people to participate, they even offer perks every once in a while.

Meghan often participates in these surveys, not out of the hope of a reward, but rather for the first reason I mentioned, however, perks don’t hurt either. She recently participated in one such survey on hotspex.com, one of the usual sites she receives invitiations from. They have a points program which you can redeem for contest entry ballots, savings coupons, or donate to charity. To encourage you to complete the surveys, particularly the longer ones, they feature a Wheel-of-Fortune-style wheel, rendered in flash, in which you can win stuff. Usually, it’s just bonus points, but they also have an iPod up for grabs.

Meghan hit the jackpot last week; she won the iPod. It’s a 1GB iPod nano, with her name engraved on the back, though they misspelled it. Neat to win, but we never would have bought one otherwise, for several reasons. Firstly, they’re overpriced. Secondly, I have precisely zero interest in itunes. Thirdly, they’ve become disgustingly trendy. Almost as bad as big sunglasses.

So in keeping with the ‘iTunes sucks’ mentality, we looked for options with this thing. The first thing I could think of was eBay, but with an engraving on the back, resale would be much less than retail value. That’s when we found out that you can load non-Apple firmware on these puppies, which unlock their true potential. No more DRM bullshit, no more being locked into using iTunes, no more format restrictions.
We found a couple different firmwares to try, the first of which was iPodlinux. As expected, installation was a little kludgey, but we made it through. We had to disable apple’s annoying utility that blocks non-itunes transfers to the device, but once done, you’re free to make a new ext2 partition and install away. So we got that in there, only to discover that mp3 support (via podzilla), while enabled, was rather primitive. You can do lots of other things with it, and has great skinning support out of the box (the Amiga themes are particularly nice), but primarily, I still wanted to use it as a music player for my 1-hour-each-way commute to and from work every day.

By suggestion from somewhere on the ipodlinux.org website, we decided to try Rockbox instead. A quote from the Rockbox website really says it best. While not as easily made pretty as iPodLinux, its music player works far better, and is easier to transfer songs to.

So, now we have 3 different firmwares to choose from on boot, and 768MB left to store music and other files, which is plenty for my immediate purposes. Did I mention that it plays Doom?

Posted by Ron as Computers, Music at 7:48 PM EDT

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I suddenly feel compelled to rant a little bit on the sheer stupidity of all the hype surrounding yesterday’s date. 6 June, 2006. So fucking what.

Rescheduling (which is retarded in and of itself unless absolutely medically necessary) the birth of your child so that his/her birthday doesn’t end up 6/6/06. Talk about retarded. I have trouble believing that a rational human being, even a Christian one, could find the superstition of the ‘number of the beast’ a compelling enough reason to take any kind of drastic action.

I invite the antichrist, “please, come to us already; purge the planet of all those wankers.”

Posted by Ron as Media, Religion at 10:12 PM EDT

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Tonight I did some modification to this site that I’ve wanted to do for a long time now; I’ve added a ‘Recent Comments’ section to the sidebar on the right. Yay me.

This brings up something which had been occuring on the old MT blog: I was getting comment spam again. Not just any old comment spam though. No URLs, since I’d banned them, no displayable email addresses, since I hid them. Just random bot-comments, but something struck me about them. They had all been left in the same post, amusingly enough, entitled ‘Spam,’and they all had the same tone. Pathetic, and full of ennui. Despite the fact that these posts are in fact spam, I decided to leave them. Not sure why exactly.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 1:30 AM EDT

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Thanks to Luke, I’ve upgraded the site to the WordPress blog engine from Moveable Type, which was starting to show its age. This looks to be a much more flexible and attractive system, with the side benefit that it’s even easier to use.

I’m still playing with layout, colours, themes, and all that, but at any rate, it’s much nicer than the old one.

On top of the added eye candy that WP is capable of, some of the themes available are flexible enough that I will be able to show all the content that I originally had in mind for the site without having to learn a whole ton of code. Bonus.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 10:32 PM EDT

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