starlord.net

Corn Flakes

Did you know corn flakes aren’t made just with corn really, that is, they are mixed with malted barley and some say wheat, and they also have high fructose corn syrup on them, along with sprayed vitamins and BHT (a preservative, though really, who needs it when they are packed into wax plastic bags to keep them fresh already? Anyway, c’mon, what’s up with that? I guess so they can sit on shelves for a long time before someone buys them. Never thought about it, really, corn flakes, well by the very name one would expect they should taste like … I dunno, CORN maybe?

Just a rant.

Waiting for something smart fortwo

Back in March 2007 I placed myself on the $99 reservation list for the smart fortwo. For those that have been living under a rock the past 10 years, this is an environmentally friendly 2 seater, developed by Swatch, now owned and produced by the Mercedes-Benz arm of Daimler.. etc.. in France. Anyway, so, there are 3 dealership “smart centers” within a 2 hour’s or so drive of me. There’s San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento. Further South there is Santa Barbara, but, I digress..

This week, the first batch of smarts arrived at smart center San Francisco. Woo Hoo!

Was I one of the lucky first? Well, No. Not yet anyway. I am crossing my fingers my car will arrive soon though

Am I a bit impatient? Yeah, maybe. Well, here I am, founder of the smart owners club of San Francisco, Northern California’s premeire smart club, and I haven’t even got my smart car yet. That’s kinda silly.. really, but okay I can wait..

So, I call the dealership and ask if they may have an idea when my ‘reservation’ will arrive. Well, they don’t know. These cars are coming in ‘waves’ so to speak, a bunch of em arrive at the dealership, and the dealership calls the people who put their hundred bucks down to come and pick it up, and uh by the way, you owe us like $11,000-$16,000 or so for the remainder of your balance, will that be cash, check, or financing?

All kidding aside, that is how it works. The dealership told me to call smart usa about it, so I did. To be more specific, I reached a lovely scripted call center, and they didn’t really know much more than what you see posted on the smart usa website. They did however say that in March, the website is going to be updated to order and track your smart car. Gawd I hope I won’t have to wait that long!

Other than that, nobody anywhere seems to know what happens to the cars between France and the dealership (let alien conspiracy theories run rampant on that one), or at least the call center guy I spoke with didn’t know, or if he did, he wasn’t telling..

More music posted!

Hey everybody, remember mp3.com?

No, not the one they have today, but back in the day of adventurous internet stuff where artists uploaded their tunes and could burn CD’s online and send them out to people?

Yeah that was fun.

Well, I posted up the albums (in mp3 format) from earlier works “debut” (circa 2000), “go! go! go!”(from the MOD tracker scene, around 1993+ though there are some later remixes of the same tunes I had around then), and the “recovery” soundtrack album (1992, done solo on a Korg DW-8000 synth).

Hit my discography page for the links to listen or download these tracks (yes, for free of course!) — when I get around to it we’ll be posting a more user-friendly interface for the less computer savvy, GUI-driven listeners…

Cheers!

Weird stuff you can do with Google – Pt.2

Did you know that, other than searching for stuff on the web, images, and youtube/video, Google has built-in keywords that do stuff? Yeah, heres one: “define” will give you a dictionary search of any word, for example, if you type “define:egress” into the Google search box, you will get back all sorts of definitions of the word from several places, not only that, links to the word meanings in different languages. Pretty cool huh? I also use this for spell-checking words, for example, if you type in “define:buter” it will give you a suggestion of another spelling, butter, along with its definition.

There’s other stuff you can do with the search box that you may or may not be aware of. Use it as a calculator, currency or measurements conversion, maps, weather, translation, shopping, music, all kinds of stuff!

Here, check this page out to see all the funky stuff you can do just with search features.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html

For anyone that has done any reading about your search options, you may know most of this, but they update it all the time with new stuff. I’ll post more stuff you can do with Google soon as I come across anything else really interesting or useful.

Cheers,
Christopher ‘starlord’

New tunes uploaded to AcidPlanet

Yep, I uploaded a whole mess of tunes to AcidPlanet (where I host some tunes, naturally)

You can listen to my playlist live by clicking this link:

http://www.acidplanet.com/Components/PlayList.asp?UID=141904&T=8455

Or visit my AcidPlanet page to get more info about me and the music by hitting this link:

http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?AID=21759