Well, they may not be *new*, but they are new to me. Anyways, on heavy rotation on my station are The Weepies and The Decemberists. Thanks to the wife and Jen and Jeffrey Rowland for tuning me in!

Labels: Misc

If you hang around me long enough, It won't be long till you hear me say "I should have been a ________."(Fill in with pro football player, cop, referee, rock star, politician...) Not because I necessarily want to be those things, it's mostly because I have moments of genius when I think I can be better than those that do it professionally. The wife is amazed by the fact that my giant, inflated head can even stay up anymore.
Anyways, I've been scouring the net for a way to be able to stream my mp3's at home to my computer at work (or anywhere I wanted to have access to my music.) I tried a couple of different apps, but finally stumbled upon Mercora.
The cool thing about this is that it lets me setup my own radio station. I can have up to five channels playing at any one time. I can also create a play list and create custom channels. For now, I added my whole My Music directory. Anyone that goes to the Mercora website can search for my DJ name and listen to a sample of what I have on my hard drive. How cool is that? The best thing is that since I rip Cd's entirely, I forget what music I have on my hard drive, and this randomly selects music and streams it to me.
So now I am the DJ ( I can FINALLY cross it off my list) and I personally think it's better than anything that is streamed on the intertubes.
If you want to give it a listen, go to Mercora's search page, and search for jinric. You can also listen to other DJs, or listen to random mixes categorized by genre.

Recent Stream

Labels: Misc, My Life

I figured it was about time to change the layout... I was starting to get bored with the old one. So... here's the new design... what do you guys think?

Labels: Misc

Wow… is Christmas really over? I hope everybody had a happy one. We had a great one here, with all the family getting together at our house this year. (We missed you Kate!) Now that the dust has settled, I can start playing with some of the goodies I got:

A cool photo printer/scanner that can print photos straight from the memory card. This is pretty cool and goes hand in hand with my desire to take more pictures. She also took her slr camera in to be cleaned up and got me some rolls of black and white film.

I also got some pretty cool shirts. The wife bought me an “inspirational” shirt. It’s about the size I can wear when I trim down, so I need to get my butt back in the gym again.

One of the best gifts that the wife got me was three guitar lessons from Guitar Works. Awesome!!!

All in all, it was a great Christmas, not so much because of the stuff, but mainly because we got to spend time with our families. I hope you and yours had an excellent one too!

Labels: Misc

It's always sad when something or someone is completely wiped off the face of our earth. In the latest instance, it seems "a rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct..."

Honestly, I'm mostly worried about what shape we are leaving our planet for our kids. That's the kind of stuff you start thinking about when you start having kids... but oh yeah, I'm sad about the loss of another species... *sigh*

Some background info can be found at baiji.org

Labels: Misc

I came across this article that says George W. Bush has read 60 books this year. Sixty Books??? Really? Come on, by my calculations this means he has to read at least an hour and a half every day. I'm guessing most books have at least 500 pages, multiply that by 60, comes out to 30,000 pages. Divide that by 365 days, and you get 82 pages a day. At a minimum of a page a minute, that's about 1 1/2 hours per day. And that's if he started on January 1st.

I'm no literary giant, but I've read a couple of books this year, and the biggest challenge has been finding the time to read. I'm a pretty busy guy; family and work usually take up all my time. How can he find the time to read sixty freakin books??? The next question is do I really believe that he has read them. Ummmmm, I'm going to have to go with a big fat NO. I call BS on you, Mr. President.

From US News...

George W. Bush a bookworm? White House aides say it's so. The born-again president's literary interests start with the predictable, such as his daily readings from the Bible. But he also enjoys books about Abraham Lincoln, his political hero, and, of course, yarns about baseball-in a past life, he was, after all, the managing partner of the Texas Rangers. Staffers say the president is actually engaged in an informal contest with White House senior adviser Karl Rove to see who can read more books this year. The latest score card has Bush ahead 60-50.

Labels: Misc, WTF?

This was posted anonymously online about my company:

Well to start with - they did not show up on May 1 to pickup all the equipment we rented over the weekend. That also happened to be day of the "boycott". I get home the following evening to find 2 people that speak only spanish and 1 american that is their manager/translator. Had I known they were to use non US labor I would have never done business with them.

This was my response:

While it is true that XXXXX hires "non US labor", we do so by legal means. Our workers are contracted for work for the season. We undergo a rigorous process that is approved by the US Labor Department. Our workers hold H2B visas, and are entirely legal. These gentlemen are hard workers, pay their taxes, are respectful and return to their families when the season is over.

Our not picking up on the referenced day had nothing to do with the "boycott". Our workers did not even realize that such a thing was going on. We simply had an abundance of work and had to delay their pickup. It is our opinion that it is a small minded point of view to think that because there are non English speaking people on a job site that they are illegal aliens.

We can see the benefit of a website such as yours, but the danger is that people can anonymously post information without any facts. That you do not contact that employer to verify such claims does not give an equal voice in the process. We understand that there are many businesses hiring illegally, but XXXXXX has NEVER hired anyone illegally and we can prove so with all our documentation. We ask you to kindly remove the post above, as it can negatively impact our business. You may contact me at XXXXXXX if you have any further questions.

Thank you,

XXXXXXXX
Director of Operations

The wife thinks I was too nice, that I should have given them shit for allowing someone to make a flippant comment without any facts. I'm giving them a couple of days before contacting a lawyer. On their site, they claim that anything posted there is "alleged." I have no idea on the legality of it, so I'm wondering what they can or cannot do. If you say something is alleged, can you pretty much write anything you want about anybody??

Labels: Misc, WTF?

I think this is what Christmas is *not* about...

*good grief*

Labels: Misc

Here we go: (after some great recommendations)

Love Actually
The Ref
Miracle on 34th Street
A Christmas Story ( I feel like a loser for never having seen this)
A Muppet Christmas
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Die Hard
It's A Wonderful Life
Scrooged
Meet me in St. Louis
Christmas with the Kranks

Whew... lots of movie watching. Still need some more, but this will get us through for awhile. Thanks guys!

Labels: Misc

It might be much, and we might be in holiday overload by the end, but we are going to try to watch one holiday movie a day.

So far we have seen: (In no particular order)

Elf
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Irving Berlin's White Christmas
Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The Family Stone

So... twenty days to go. Any good holiday movies out there? We need recommendations people!

Labels: Misc

If you love reading, then help others achieve the same goal... The folks over at Pharrout and RVAblogs are running a fundraiser to benefit the Virginia Literacy Foundation.
Every little bit helps... so give a little!

Give here.

Labels: Misc, Richmond

I am waiting till the last possible moment to hit publish on this post, cause really, that's my style.

The end of NaBloPoMo is here... so many thanks to all my new eFriends (or is it iFriends), family and random bloggers and readers that came through to say hi.

Good night friends!

Labels: Misc

Small clip from the movie. We watched it tonight and think everyone should watch it.

( I need to sell my suv ) *sigh*

Labels: Funny, Misc

watch a silly ass teeny bopper movie like John Tucker Must Die.

Labels: Misc

Do you know Ze? He is the founder of The League of Awesomeness.

Labels: Funny, Misc

This is the coolest commercial I've seen in a while. I read that they launched 250,000 bouncy balls down a street in San Francisco. And the music by Jose Gonzalez is phenomenal.

Higher Res version can be found on the Sony Advert site.

Labels: Cool, Misc

As I was reading Will Wheaton's post about his evolution as a geek, I started thinking back to my teen years and certain things that would definitely qualify me as having an inner geek.

Everyday in 8th grade, my friends and I would sit at our lunch table, dice in hand, playing a Marvel Comics role playing game that was a cheap knockoff of D&D. This is ALL we talked about. I remember that I was Hercules, and my friends were Silver Surfer, Thor, and The Hulk. I picked Hercules because I was enthralled with Greek mythology.

In 9th grade, I made it on my school's JV basketball team. I won the student-athlete award that year.

During my sophomore year, I could barely look a girl in the eye. I also started playing another weird spin off of D&D. This time it was at my church with our youth minister. We would gather at his house and roll odd shaped dice while exclaiming "My sword of righteousness beats your helmet of truth" or something like that. We would fight in the forest of apathy and in the mountains of insecurity. Weird.

I also made it to my team's varsity basketball team. Aside from my basketball skills, I think the coach wanted me on the team to help tutor some of the other players. I again won the student-athlete award.

My social awkwardness melted away during my junior and senior years, and I gave my little inner geek friend a respite. I know my little friend is still there though, rejoicing over obscure facts, new technology, and the knowledge that one more computer in the house can never be enough.

Labels: Misc, reflections

mainly because I can't think of one.

Tonight:

The incredibly hot wife is out on a girls night out with her equally good looking friend. I believe they will be breaking lots of hearts tonight.

Tomorrow:

Is the Richmond Marathon. My brother, Dave, has run it. He was encouraging me to run it this year, but I wouldn't commit to it. I wanted to run the 8K.

Oh , and by the way:



I am:

going to be sitting at home. Seeing as I have 6 more months before I can even jog, I can't help but to feel a little envious at everyone that I see running.

I am also:

turning to mush.

Labels: Misc

So there we were, last night in my dream, trying to get the kids out the door and into the truck. That's when the phone rang and when I answered, It was Barack Obama on the line. The wife was not pleased with me answering the phone, because any little distraction means that I will be that much slower getting out the door. So Sen. Obama starts chatting with me (those details are a bit fuzzy) but we talk like we are lifelong friends. I keep telling the wife to lower the radio, but when I turn around, there sits Bobby Brown signing "Tender Roni." And not cracked out Bobby, but smooth, suave Bobby. I ask him to sign a bit quieter, and as he heads to another room, I go back to chatting with the Senator.

What a weird combination. Any dream interpreters out there?

Labels: Misc, WTF?

This morning as I was heading out the door for work, I mentioned to the wife that I had traded a satellite radio for a Nintendo Gamecube. Well, I guess I forgot the conversation that we had a couple of weeks ago when we decided NOT to go the video game route, or at least hold off as much as possible to prevent the kids from falling into a video game addiction.

p: So you went ahead and did it anyways? That's fine, you just do whatever the hell you want to.
me: HA.. If I did whatever the hell I wanted to, then I would...
p: Go ahead... what would you do?

So I wouldn't risk saying one more stupid thing, I decided it would benefit all involved for me to just shut up.

Oh, by the way, we decided to store the game system until Christmas. Woohoo!

Labels: Family Love, Misc