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it’s just a reminder…

that someone, somewhere is having a worse day than I have had…

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sorry for the shitty quality of the picture, but all I had was my camera phone on me. And yes, there is a car underneath that mess, I drove by about five minutes after it had happened, and I needed to get gas… glad it wasn’t me!

Another worse, slightly crappier picture after the jump…

More…

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Two new bands I’m digging…

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!

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Hey… I’m the DJ…

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

PS… My music collection is all over the place, just so you know. Be kind.

For the more “eclectic” musical taste, check out David Byrne’s radio stream. Great background music for those late night bloggers.

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New Year…New Look…

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?

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Christmas Roundup…

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!

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Goodbye White River Dolphin, I hardly knew you…

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

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Our President reads… ???

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.

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Small minded people suck…

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??

Needless to say, I’m pretty pissed off about this. It bothers me on so many levels, (I am hispanic, and also a US citizen) but mostly I can’t help to think of how much of an idiot this person is, and how small minded. Anyone have any thoughts?

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Charlie Brown would *NOT* approve…

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Updated movie list…

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!