Relaxing

Sleeping in and hanging out in the house are the majority of the plans for today. We are planning to watch the rest of the episodes of FRINGE that we have recorded on the TiVo while on vacation. We finally made it through our Dexter, Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead episodes. It was cool going through all of them one after the other but seemed like we had a ton of shows to watch so almost made me feel anxious to get through them before this weeks episodes.

Today is the last race of the season for NASCAR and I have not being watching much of it since about 3/4 season. I am recording today race "just in case" but I don't know if I want to sit on the couch for 4 hours even though I thoroughly enjoy every lap of every race. Maybe I will just TiVo through it. While that sucks and you miss what all the teams overcame to get to the checkered its just how it is. In the past watching the Sunday or Saturday night race was my time to not work on my race karts in the garage prepping for an upcoming race, no house work or yard work, so it was easy to decompress and watch the races. Anymore I can always think of a handful of other things to better spend my time so I have been trying to as best I can.

Plus I have a cool movie that I picked up before vacation called "Bones Brigade an Autobiography". I watched the original Bones Brigade videos (Future Primative, Search for Animal Chin) and others enough times to wear out the beta-max tapes they were recorded on. Yea I went there and yes it is a beta-max version. My dad and grandpa thought at that time beta-max would easily overtake the VHS but as we now know that is not what happened. Anyway, it will be cool to see what the Bones crew have done in this movie and at the same time will make me miss the old days when one of my biggest problems was if we should street skate, skate a pool, street ramp or half pipe that day.

Yesterday after breakfast at Pegs I ran over to Target to see if I could find one of the electronic augmented reality toys similar to the AR Drone called Sphero. Sphero is this colored ball that is controlled via Bluetooth from an iOS or Android device. It is actually pretty cool and does have a lot of underlying code going on to make it function as it does; rolling, changing color and doing pre-programmed "tricks" which are essentially patterns like a figure 8 for example. I will say for me its still not quite as cool as the Parrot AR Drone, probably because it does not fly or have a built in camera but really it does not need it and the AR is over 2 times the cost compared to the Sphero. The battery life is great, about 60 minutes on the Sphero but you will pay for it when charging time comes since its about 3 hours. The AR Drone has a short flight time but you can easily have a charged battery on hand or wait a few minutes for a charge, not hours, and you are up flying again.

No matter, I had a lot of fun yesterday chasing Oggy around the house with Sphero and he was having fun growling and pawing at it so it was money well spent in my book. Most would disagree at $129, but I enjoy learning about all types of tech and the investment is well worth it. If I was not anticipating an AR Drone from Santa this year I would already have one of those too! I never dove into the original because I wanted the HD camera and a few other things I had hoped they would come out with in a future version and they did. At this point I should probably wait for the 3.0 version but I just cant, and honestly there is no signs that say its on the way.

Quickly in the "On the soapbox" news. I was listening to a show Cicely was watching this morning that is independent to the Reno / Sparks area talking about boutiques and local happenings. As usual a lot of it was non stop referencing and talking about Burning Man and how this company will bus you out there and this company will dress you properly and this other company will make sure you have the right hair for the event and so on. I mean really? For everyone going out there as a personal way of "sticking it to the man" it sure seems more like a for-profit event (mega profits actually) and the man is not getting stuck. Kind of a joke if you ask me and it sucks for those that were there at the start to see what it has become. I remember we were considering going to the first or second one but never did.  Even then you could tell that its direction was heading towards profitability more than it should have based on its roots. I kind of wish we had gone because there is no way you would get me out there now. To me its like those that think they are punk rock because they bought some suspenders and a gig shirt at Hot Topic. Sorry, that just makes you a store bought poser.

That is about it for today, I think its time to kick back on the couch and watch some TV, play some games and mess around with photos and stuff if time permits. All in a Sundays work, right!
 
"Burning Man, the Walmart of campgrounds" -Curt Baker

Photo: New toy, Sphero