Yep, I finally got around to it, pictures from my 4 state vacation tour, beginning with a little place called Kent Falls in Connecticut:

Oh look! A tree! *click*

It also stands to reason that a state park called Kent Falls would have, well, falls in it right?

The sign said not to climb the rocks. So I climbed the rocks anyway to get this pic.

It had been pouring rain all morning, but the weather was finally clearing up some, providing me with lovely cloudy weather type pictures:

I like clouds.

After Connecticut, it was on to Massachusetts, where I made a hard right and a beeline towards:

OH YEAH.

The first thing that immediately seizes your attention when you enter this ridiculously MASSIVE store would be not candles, but this:

Oh my holy sweetness...

I’m totally loving the Christmas atmosphere too, starting with a long line of gift boxes that were moving along like a gondola around the store:

Why can't my apartment look like this?

Then things started getting a little nutty:

What up, cracka?

Eventually I came upon the Christmas village section, which literally went on and on endlessly, I honestly had never seen so many miniature villages in my life:

So purdy...

And then of course, the candles…

Oh Big Daddy YES!

And that was just the orchards/fruity section, after that I finally came upon the main area of the store:

Holy flaming wicks of external wax!!! O_O

And then, behold, the mother of all candles:

I WANTIE!

Ok, ok, that’s it for the candles. Yes I know I need help. Yes I know I’m a girlie whirly boy-boy for digging candles so much, but I gotta be me. Anyhoo, after that, it was off towards the Mohawk Trail (Route 2 in Massachusetts):

Screeched to a halt so I could get this shot off.

This is when I started to lose a signal. I was getting up there in the mountains and even Verizon was having trouble. I was pretty sure I was still on the right track though, until I saw this sign:

I KNEW I made a wrong turn somewhere...

Heh. After finally arriving in Williamstown, I spent the night and the next morning continued into Vermont on Route 7:

I could live here... well no, it's still Vermont.

Honestly, no camera in the world could truly capture how majestic the scenery was. Truly one of the best scenic drives I’ve ever taken. I finally got off Route 7 and headed east on Route 4 to Killington. After a while I finally pulled over when I saw this resort:

Autumn becomes Winter... Magnificent.

Man, I can only imagine what it must cost to spend a night there. But WOW, what a view.

After some thought, I finally decided I would spend the rest of my vacation time back in New York at Lake Placid, and turned around to head back to NY. I took Route 125, eventually leading me to the Crowns Point Bridge. This drive alone may have well been the highlight of my trip. I passed by a barn and the scene was so pretty that I immediately U-turned, parked the car and got out my camera and tripod so I could take a few pics.

No sooner than I got out of the car and started walking when I saw two dogs coming out of a backyard near me, the size of HORSES I tell you, and of course they immediately galloped in my direction.

OH BLEEEP!

I ran like a crazy man back towards my car, the tripod banging against my legs while I furiously got my keys out to open the door, banged my head on the roof, then leapt in and slammed the door. I was in a daze, and after a moment I collected myself and looked out the car.

The stupid dogs had already gotten bored and were actually YAWNING at me. Who keeps their dogs unchained in an unfenced yard anyway? Gads.

Rather than chance stepping out again, I simply took the pictures from my driver’s seat. The windows up of course. These dogs were HUGE after all.

If this photo had sound, you'd hear the barking of the dogs that chased after me.

I took a bunch of shots with different exposures and merged them all together to make the next image. Didn’t come out great, but oh well.

An enhanced view of the barn. Meh.

After that little escapade, I continued down and saw such a wondrous view of Lake Champlain that I had to stop one more time, and I’m glad I did:

It's hard to tell, but this was literally just a narrow street beset by water on all sides.

I had come at just the right moment, with the sun setting beyond the mountains and hitting the lake at the perfect angle:

Pretty beyond words.

Here’s another shot:

I saw this and never wanted to go home again.

I did the same thing here that I did with the barn, taking shots at different exposures and merging them together again:

An enhanced view of Lake Champlain.

Finally, here’s the Crowns Point Bridge itself, connecting Vermont to New York:

You can just make out the bridge, which literally closed the day after I went over it. I had nothing to do with that by the way.

I stayed the night at Ticonderoga at a GORGEOUS Best Western, then moved on at long last to Lake Placid:

Onward to Lake Placid!

Checked in at a hotel that offered a pretty lakeview room:

” title=”A view of Mirror Lake.” width=”300″ height=”400″ class=”size-medium wp-image-2421″ />

I did some exploring around town for a couple of days, including checking out Saranac Lake too, which was right next door:

Saranac Lake, small but pretty!

After two nights I moved on to another hotel, this one offering a lakeview AND a fireplace. Oh yeaaaah…

A view from my balcony at the last hotel I stayed at before going home. Wah.

Yes, I think I’ll live here… forever?

This is what makes it all worthwhile baby.

And the bear that attacked earlier? Well we decided to bury the hatchet:

Vicious, attacking bear and I reached an understanding.

After my last night there, I rose up in the morning, and took one looooong, last look at my beloved lake, before steeling myself for the agonizing journey home:

One last view before I go home... *sob*

I have more pictures by the way, but I uploaded the rest of them to my gallery. You can check them out there to ooooh and aaaaah my work if you’d like. (Or laugh at it instead. Either way, I dig the attention.)

Tags: autumn, camera, Christmas, Connecticut, fire, fireplace, journey, lake placid, laptop, Massachusetts, new york, Photos, teddy bear, ticonderoga, vacation, verizon, Vermont
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I’m on the last leg of my vacation trip, and finally have some time to sit down and reflect on my experiences so far, especially when it comes to blogging about it all.

Rather than use an iPhone (which are not hearing aid compatible and relies on the crappy AT&T network), I went with the next best thing, an iPod Touch that I tether to my PDA Phone using Verizon’s Broadband Connect. This way I have the advantage of using a faux iPhone on the Verizon network, as well as access to the Internet wherever I had a signal. I didn’t have to worry about motels or restaurants not offering wifi for my laptop either, since I could tether my laptop to my phone instead.

As far as connections go, Verizon gets an A here. There were times when I completely lost the signal, but I was so far high up in the mountains that it was to be expected. If I had to guess, I’d say I had a signal and access to the Internet virtually 99 percent of the time. Total WIN there. It makes liveblogging or livetweeting my experiences as they happen as easy as pie. Mmmmmm, pie…

Many of the apps on my iPod relies on geolocation to work ideally, especially Google Maps, and as long as I was in New York this wasn’t a problem. It was amazingly accurate in pegging my location, despite the fact that the iPod had no GPS chip.

That is, until I wound up in Massachusetts. Then the iPod went from thinking I was in Martha’s Vineyard, to thinking I was in Seattle.

Despite being unable to track me, I could still use Google Maps manually instead of having to rely on paper maps, except that it incessantly flashed popups telling me it could not locate me, even though I was not using the geolocation feature, and I couldn’t find any way to disable it either. I already know you can’t locate me, there’s no need to tell me that a hundred times a minute. Yeesh.

The net result of all this was a ton of wrong turns, missed exits, and complete absurdity when I came across a street in Google maps that simply did not exist in real life. FAIL

So it looks like I will have to supplement my iPod with a bonafide GPS device now. The TomTom is working on an iPod dock for the future, though I don’t know how reliable it will be, and I hear Garmin is better for the USA. A speakerphone would also be a bonus, as it would negate the need to get a headset (I’ve been thinking about getting one, but the only time I would really need it is for when I’m driving.) Something to research for the future, for sure. In the meantime, if any of you use GPS devices, I could use some advice on what you think worked the best.

Other than that, the iPod was very useful for finding points of interest, though it tended to be a hit or miss thing. Some things worth checking out wouldn’t be listed, so I always had the feeling that I was missing something right under my nose. As far as locating highly rated hotels in the area, the Simultravel app I was using for that gets an F for EPIC FAIL. It only listed a fraction of the hotels within the area I was in, making the effort of locating a good place to stay for the night on the fly a monumentally hair tearing experience. I ended up going back and forth from using Google Local to surfing TripAdvisor all on my iPod’s Safari browser, and since TripAdvisor is a slow and bloated site to begin with, just trying to find a place to stay on the go proved to be more ridiculously frustrating than it should have been. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Hotels.com’s tailored made site for the iPhone that finding a place to stay finally became more of a pleasure than a horror. It’s how I found Best Western in Ticonderoga, New York, easily the best hotel I’ve stayed at by far, and while chatting with a friend on Google Talk on lodging ideas and checking my email, I booked a reservation there while I was pulled off the road somewhere south of Burlington, Vermont, doing it all on my iPod. Technology can be truly beautiful sometimes.

As for finding points of interest and dining, I used a combination of Yelp!, Where to? and Google Local to find places worthy of checking out. It made such an impromptu vacation as mine all the more pleasurable and easier to manage.

Finally, I noticed when entering a dining establishment that the first thing I would check for was an electrical outlet to plug my laptop in. LOL My laptop’s battery gives out after only 40 minutes, so it certainly does create a handicap when I’m lugging it around. That MacBook with its 7 hour long battery life can’t come soon enough for me.

As far as the digital/internet side of my vacation goes, I certainly learned a few things that will better prepare me for next time. Another thing I need to get a handle on is how to manage my blogging/social media time. I noticed I spent far too much time responding to tweets and comments when I should have been driving and getting to wherever I was getting. And once the day was spent, I found myself too exhausted to blog about the day’s events while it was still fresh on my mind. Ironically, when I finally had time to recap my vacation experiences so far, I ended up blogging about my third day of vacation, rather than the first day, so my chronology was all out of sorts. I was also using BrightKite to tweet/blog my latest movements, but I only used it intermittently, and there were times when it didn’t go through at all. It made for a disjointed way of getting the crux of my vacation experiences out there for all to read, but since this is all new to me, I’m sure I’ll eventually find my mojo and liveblog my experiences in a more consistent manner.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go light my fireplace.

Tags: battery, blogging, browser, driving, experiences, geolocation, google, google maps, gps, hotels, internet, iphone, ipod touch, laptop, new york, PDA, phone, social media, technology, travel, tweet, vacation, verizon, wifi
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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So tomorrow I start a 4 state vacation tour (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York), and I did virtually nothing to plan for it except sketch a rough itinerary of where I might go. I don’t even know where I’ll be lodging either.

And hey, guess what the forecast will be the whole time I’m up there too? Why rain, rain, and oops, lookie here, even more rain!

Sigh.

I feel pretty good about it though, until about sometime yesterday when it suddenly hit me and I panicked for a minute: “ZOMG im drvng 100s of milez n i dunno were im goin or were im stayin i dnt pln anthen at all omg omg omg im gonna die di die aahhh aiiieeee!!!111111!!”

But I’m feeling much better now.

It’s been three years since I’ve gone anywhere, but what makes this trip truly interesting is that it will be an opportunity to finally put my iPod Touch to the test. I have all sorts of travel apps on it to help me find hotels, points of interests, and even people within my Facebook/Twitter network who might be nearby. Since my iPod is tethered to my Verizon phone, it also puts Verizon’s network to the test as well. Will I be able to stay jacked into the Internet wherever I go, and blog/tweet about my experiences as they happen? That’s what I’m hoping for. It will be the first time that I will utterly rely on my iPod as my beacon and guide rather than paper maps and AAA tourbooks. (Although I do have an AAA app on my iPod too.)

One of the things I’ve wanted to do with this blog was to write about my experiences as I go out there and spontaneously experience life beyond the prison that is my home town. But I also wanted to be able to easily share it all with the two or three faithful people who read my blog as well, and now with these newfound digital tools at my disposal, it makes it all possible.

It’s funny, the last few times I went on vacation, the only way I could even check my email was to stop at the local library or internet cafe and use a guest account. I didn’t even have a cam phone, so if I saw something interesting, there was no way for me to instantaneously take a shot and upload it for others to enjoy. Even when I had a laptop, half the time the motel didn’t have free wifi, so there wasn’t much I could do with it either. But now with Verizon, I have access to the Internet virtually anywhere in the United States. It’s opened up a whole new world to me, and I can’t wait to explore it.

So tomorrow, it begins. I’ll be getting up at 4AM and from there will begin my trek north. If you want to keep track of what I’ve been doing and see the latest pics/video, just read my side posts (up in the top right corner), or follow me on Facebook/Twitter if you haven’t already. That should serve as my filler content until I have a chance to blog again. Hope you enjoy my writings as much as I hope to enjoy this trip. Assuming I survive that is.

Why yes, Gecko is in fact coming along for the ride.

Tags: Connecticut, experiences, internet, ipod touch, itinerary, laptop, Massachusetts, new york, phone, travel, trek, vacation, verizon, Vermont, writing
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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So how’d you spend your weekend Linc? I’m glad you asked me that!

Let’s start with Day 1:

My state FINALLY allows us to get our defensive driving certificate online rather than put up with the agony of attending a 6 hour course with a bunch of other dweeb nozzles looking to reduce their insurance costs, or because they drove through 5 red lights on their way to OTB while kicking back a Bud Light like the real men of genius that they are. The worst thing about these “courses” is the instructor telling us with a straight face what a traffic signal does, and that red actually does mean you have to stop. Oh, and of course the ever so popular “Let’s all go around the room and introduce ourselves and explain why we’re there” routine. I hate that crap. Just give me my toilet paper of a defensive driving certificate and let me be on my way, please.

I found the cheapest internet course and immediately signed up, only to realize yet again why New York continues to suck dangling donkey balls. Because you see, I’m required to do 6 hours, whether it’s online or offline, and the presentation I have to do is timed so you can’t fast forward to get to the end and do a quiz or whatnot to finish the course. Either way, I still have to waste 6 hours of my life. And just to make sure I’m not AWOL and swapping with a buddy while the presentation moves along, popup messages randomly appear that demands you call an 800 number and repeat a series of numbers which they use for voice identification purposes so they know you’re still you. All this to save $10 a month on my insurance? Yeah, I won’t be doing this again.

So that was Day 1. Enter Day 2:

I took a nice drive around and eventually found a roadside diner that had free wifi, so I dropped in and broke out my laptop while chowing down on a Texan grilled cheese sammich. The atmosphere was nice, you could see the sunset in the distance, and I’m feeling pretty good about things. My laptop boots up and…

Blue Screen of Death.

I spent the next 30 minutes rebooting and ultimately failing to log into Windows, and dreading the thought that my laptop of almost 6 years had finally bit it. I needed it to last just a few more months too until I could replace it with a MacBook Pro.

I wasn’t ready to toss in the towel just yet, so when I got home I went to work on it. I was still able to boot into safe mode, so I tried disabling drivers and a few other tricks, all to no avail. Finally I decided to look at what’s called a dump file for clues as to what caused the crash. A dump file gets created when you log back onto Windows after your PC flashes the blue screen of death on you. I found it but couldn’t even read it, so I started googling for more info. Apparently I needed a debugging tool to analyze it, so I downloaded it, clicked the file to install, and…

“The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.”

This, despite the fact that I WAS the @#$%ing system administrator, and was logged in as such. I tried to install it again. No dice. So I googled some more, and tried a few registry hacks to make it stop giving me that message, and of course none of them worked. So I switched gears and installed the debugging tool on my desktop instead, then used my thumbdrive to download the dump file and upload it to my desktop.

Now it came to learning how to actually use this tool. I had no idea what to do with it, so I googled some more, and finally came across a series of instructions to help me weed out the relevant info from the dump file. It goes like this:

1. Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> “cmd”)
2. cd \program files\debugging tools (Or wherever they are installed to)
3. kd -z C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini???????-??.dmp
4. kd> .logopen c:\debuglog.txt
5. kd> .sympath srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
6. kd> .reload;!analyze -v;r;kv;lmnt;.logclose;q
7. You now have a debuglog.txt in c:\, open it in a text edit (Notepad?).

I don’t think landing the Space Shuttle could be this complicated. Nevertheless, I followed the instructions carefully and was finally able to nail down the file name that my laptop choked on, a file called vsdatant.sys. I googled it and it was a file that belonged to ZoneAlarm, a firewall software that I had running on my system, though I hadn’t updated it in a while. So I uninstalled it, rebooted, and Windows finally came back up again!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay, I had saved my lappie-top!!!

I immediately started updating all my software, installed Service Pack 3 for WinXP, and rebooted several times to make sure the problem was truly gone. By this time it was after 4AM, so I patted myself on the back for a job well done, and went to bed. Woke up the next morning, feeling refreshed and happy, then booted up my laptop.

Blue Screen of Death.

At this point I’m pretty convinced now it’s hardware related, most likely the memory. In one desperate last move, I raced down to the computer store to buy the only memory they had in stock compatible with my laptop, then raced back to swap my memory. I was pretty sure this would do it. It had to be the memory, right? It’s the only way my poor lappie could still be saved.

Blue Screen of Death.

Sigh. I finally thought, @#$% it, and formatted the drive. I nuked everything and installed WinXP completely from scratch, and that my friends, is what finally resolved the issue. I only had to lose everything that was on my laptop to get it done too, though fortunately, I had copies of all my files on my desktop as well, so no big loss. But thank you so much, Microsoft, for designing the most cryptically ridiculous non-intuitive OS in creation. May you all rot in San Francisco.

I couldn’t stay mad though, I was happy enough to get my laptop back and running even better than before. I was planning to go on vacation next month and I would have felt naked not having it with me so I could blog on the road.

After the laptop saga finally ended, I ran some errands and came back home late in the evening, satisfied in the knowledge that despite the fact that I got no rest whatsoever, I did get a lot accomplished. I get my mail and my happy karma is ruined once again by a disturbing letter that will be the subject of my next blog post. Nothing alarming really, just a quick note to let me know my personal info and social security number had been stolen and that I would imminently become a victim of identity theft and fraud. No biggie.

So how was your weekend?

Tags: blue screen of death, crash, defensive driving, googling, identity theft, internet, internet course, laptop, mail, Microsoft
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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Yep, it was one of “those” days.

I came into work, and I see a note at my desk telling me I need to report for duty outside. Eh?

So I go outside and I see my old CO, who tells me, “Linc, thanks for volunteering to help us out today.”

“Hmm, that’s funny, because I don’t remember volunteering for anything.”

“Oh, then your supervisor must have volunteered you.”

… … … …

“Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s just for today. Here, help me bring this stuff on the bus.”

I helped him carry a few folding tables and then saw the bus.

“Dude, that’s a prison bus.”

“So?”

“I’m not getting on a prison bus.”

“Why not?”

“It’s got bars on the window! Are you gonna like, chain me down too?”

“Stop whining, look if you do this you’ll get to go home an hour early.”

… … … …

“Let’s go.”

Our trip would take me down to the local Medicaid office, where I had to help out in screening applicants. Yes, seriously. Interesting job I have, after all not many people can say they rode a prison bus to a Medicaid office so they could run background checks on applicants named Pablo.

It wasn’t a bad day though, but had I known I’d be there for HOURS, I would have taken my laptop with me and jacked it in so I could check up on all them wonderful people who follow me on Facebook, Twitter and whatnot. Ah well, maybe next time.

As the applicants rolled in, I took them in one by one and went over their forms. A middle aged lady who looked like she just got off the bus from Guatemala handed me hers and I took a quick look. I noticed she hadn’t put in her height.

“Ma’am, you forgot to add your height here.”

“¿Que?”

“Umm, your height? You need to fill out what your height is right here.”

“¿Que?”

Sigh.

Fortunately I didn’t get too many like that, but this is definitely not a job I’d want to do on a regular basis.

So what did you do today?

Tags: job, laptop, Medicaid, medicaid office, screening applicants, supervisor, volunteering, work
Categories: In The Coal Mine
 
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So now that the sky is falling and the world is soon coming to an end, it seems my plan to pay off all my debts couldn’t have come at a better time.  Just a few more months and I will be back in black, so to speak. 

And I figured, what better way to celebrate the coming of Armageddon and my soon debt free existence than to give myself a much needed and overdue makeover?  After all, if I’m gonna go out, I might as well go out in style. 

This is where you, my beloved readers come in.  I’m going to need some advice and suggestions to complete my makeover here, and your much valued advice will most certainly be welcome.

So where do we begin?  Well it begins of course, with…
 

The Leather Jacket

 
Yep, there’s not a brother in creation who can lay claim to being the baddest of the badasses if he’s not donning a slab of weather beaten leather.  And I don’t mean the kind of leather sported by a 500 pound biker either:

Oh, HELL NO.

No, not quite.  I’m looking for a blazer type jacket that swings in the breeze as I walk in slow motion towards whatever epic battle I’m about to engage in with a gritty but determined look on my face.  Something like the following might be more appropos:

I'm kind of a big deal.

JCPenny’s never seem to have what I’m looking for though, and something like this I can’t chance ordering online because it’ll likely either be too short, too long, too tight, or too loose.  Something like this has to be perfect.  Oh, and something like this also has to have a big enough pouch to store all those women’s hearts I’ll be grabbing up when they see me looking all fine and whatnot.  So, suggestions?  Maybe an online store that will tailor make a jacket based on the measurements I give them?  Ponder over this some while I move on the the next item on my list:
 

The Watch

 
It’s kinda sad, but I haven’t been wearing a watch for years.  The last watch I wore was a titanium hunk of metal that was given to me as a graduation present from my folks after I finished college, my mother’s reasoning then being that I should have a gift that not even I could break.  She was wrong of course.  The thing gave up the ghost a few short years later, and my wrist still has that pasty white line around it where my watch used to be.  Here’s a tip by the way: just because a watch is made of titanium doesn’t mean it won’t break if you end up dropping it on the street the same day a dumpster truck passes through.

Anyway, the thing that held me back here from getting another watch was that I kind of liked my watches to be a bit.. well,  gadgetry.  You know, one that could tell me the weather, latest sports scores and what was currently showing in theaters.  So I ordered a watch from MSN Direct that looked like it had been lifted off of Dick Tracy’s dead body and thought I was once again the epitome of cool.  The watch would update with all kinds of nifty info and graphics via a radio signal.

The only problem was, I happened to be living in a dead zone 50 odd miles wide between the two areas where the watch could actually get a strong signal.  Needless to say I don’t think holding my watch out the car window as I desperately tried to balance between driving and using myself as a human antenna was quite what the designers had in mind.  Another downside was that the antenna was built into the wristband, and it was about as bendable as a block of steel.  While a lot of thought admittedly went into its design, comfort obviously wasn’t one of them.

So, what to do?  I still wanted a watch that was a bit gadgetry.  And man do they have gadgets watches aplenty.  They even have watches where you can upload videos or watch TV on as well!

Nothing says COOL like a watch that can get Rick-Rolled.

I might be going overboard with this though, especially since I have an online buddy who is convinced beyond measure that if I even think of wearing a monstrosity such as the video watch above, I will never get a girl, never, ever, ever, ever, amen and amen, for the love of all that is good and holy, please, do not sully the human race by wearing such a ridiculous contraption.

Well alrighty then. 

That still leaves the question of what brand and type I should get though.  Obviously I want a good, quality watch that will last, maybe solar powered, small and not bulky, black leather wrap, (to match my black leather jacket of course) built in compass, (I’m constantly getting lost so this is a must), and since I can’t get weather reports, I figure one that can read barometer levels would be a nice alternative instead.  Oh, and it has to light up.  I don’t mean the fuzzy wuzzy neon glow in the dark silliness either, I mean light up nice and bright so that a plane flying overhead could see it.  Seriously, I’m fed up with not being able read my watch because I’m running from the police and the dumpster I’m hiding in makes it too dark for me to tell the time.  It’s just uncivilized.

So, suggestions?    Moving on along in the meantime:
 

The Sunglasses

 
There arew few things in life I’m more finicky about choosing than sunglasses. They’re always too round, too ugly, too rickety, too bulky or too much or too little of some damned thing that I just end up hating it after a while.

With sunglasses this awesome, how could you not want me?

Bottom line though, the glasses have to be polarized.  When you can see clouds the way God probably sees them, then dude, those are the kind of glasses I want.  Only problem is, polarizing sunglasses are rarely mirrored or opaque enough so you can’t see the eyes.  And that just won’t do, especially when I’m checking out a super hot awesome babelicious babe’s umm… shoes.   It’s none of people’s business what I’m looking at anyway. 

I did see one brand that had polarized but completely opaque (none of that ugly brownish tint) at a Mall once, but I never got the name.  Once again, suggestions on brands I could check out are welcome. 
 

The Cellphone

 
I’m with Verizon, which as some of you Verizon users know likes to nickel and dime every bloody damned thing you do on your phone including using the built-in calculator.   Seriously, this is the one network where if you utilized every possible feature they offered you’d probably pay oh, about a grand a month or so for the pleasure.  And just to milk it further, let’s not pay a one time fee to download, say a ringtone.  Let’s offer a SUBSCRIPTION FEE instead where you have to subscribe to a ringtone you like on a $%^&ing monthly basis.  Dude, seriously.  Not cool.

And since I’m using a basic LG phone, it takes me about 10 minutes to dial in complete sentence when texting someone (including Twitter).  I could go Blackberry I guess, but let’s face it, we all know there’s only one solution here:

My hands are manlier.

I’ll have to jump ship and go with AT&T though, and from what I understand of their monthly plans, the costs can get steep ($80 or so for the whole works including unlimited text).   But a coworker let me try out the iPhone just for a minute and it was enough for me to fall in love.    Yep, I definitely wantie, especially when all the favorite apps I use have also been ported for the iPhone.  Heck even my webstats service ported an app for the iPhone.  Mobile blogging and twittering would get a whole lot more fun with an iPhone too, especially if I get caught in a Cat 5 hurricane and want to live blog the experience while sharp debris fly around me.

So for those of you who jumped from your former network to AT&T, was it a real pain?  I was told I can still keep my phone number from Verizon, but I’ll have to find out for sure.  One thing’s certain, I just can’t be a true badass now if I’m not carrying an iPhone. 
 

The MacBook

 
Villains use Windows.  The good guys use Macs.  There’s a reason for this, so who am I to break with tradition?  Besides, I need a machine that removes as many roadblocks as humanly possible between creating multimedia content and uploading it to my blog.  Do I wanna make a video?  Click click, done.  Do I want to create a podcast so y’all can swoon at the sound of my stud sounding voice?  Click click, done.  Photos, Music Composition?  No problem.  They really do make it that simple, at least from what I could tell when I played around with a MacBook for about two hours at Best Buy until they threw me out.  Microsoft?  I don’t know what these people are smoking, but Vista acts more like a virus sent by the Russians than an operating system.  Seriously, how hard can it be to make something as user intuitive and fun to play with like GarageBand?  I’d like to compose some bit of music and videos one of these days, but Microsoft, they like to leave that sort of thing up to third party developers who charge you $500 for the pleasure of installing their bloated craptastic software onto your system, which then proceeds to chew up your memory into bits, cause your hard drive to forget how to spin again and your video card to go blind from insanity.

When I say I want a pimped out notebook, this is not what I mean.

So, it’s settled that a MacBook is a must, especially if I’m going to be traveling a lot and living in dinky (but yet homely) apartments.  I’d love to get one secondhand, but from a cursory look on eBay they’re so high priced even secondhand that I’m probably better off getting it new.  Sad thing, this will probably be my biggest investment, and it’s not one I’m ready to make unless my blog earnings justify it.  So how can you guys help?  Well if you got one lying around, feel free to donate it to the brutha here.  It’s for a good cause.  Or, you could  link to my blog.  No, really.  Adding a link from your site can really do a lot to boost my standings in the search engines, and in return I’ll be happy to link you back.  Lincoln needs some link love, sugar.  

And finally:
 

The Motorbike

 
Yeah, you knew this was coming.  A badass without a bike?  It’s like Mozart without a piano.  Although, I might make an exception here only because I simply don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to go trudging around the country with both a SUV and a bike.  I could get a trailer I guess, but that tends to overly complicate things more than it should.  I already got a sweet ride, so is a bike really necessary?

Well yes.

It’s kinda like skydiving or bungee jumping, one of those things you do once in your lifetime, just to see what it’s like, at which point if you’ve managed to survive the experience you can then go around boasting about what a reckless badass you’ve been (though this is probably something I wouldn’t want my mother to know about.)

Plus, the chicks dig it, which is pretty much the only reason I’d think of getting one (and yet another reason why Mom is better off not knowing.)

Yes, I really am THIS awesome.

There’s crazy though, and then there’s suicidal.  While I’m down with crazy, I definitely wouldn’t get a bike with enough CCs that I could outrace an F-16 fighter jet.  A simple beginner’s bike with 250CCs will suit me just fine, thank you.  Bike enthusiasts will laugh at me, but most people won’t know the difference.  And besides, the chicks dig it.  Though truth be told, I really dug the Harley Fatboy that was used in the movie Terminator 2.  How cool would it be to have a bike you can effortlessly latch an oversized shotgun onto?

Get off my bike, Arnie.

Ok, on second thought, that might be just a bit too much (especially since the bike model Arnie rode on still retails for like $15,000 today.)

No, I think something a bit more sensible might be in order, such as the Kawasaki Ninja 250, which is touted as a great beginner’s bike and only retails for $3,000 or so.  Best thing about it of course is that it seats two. 

In case you haven't noticed by now, black is my thing.

On the off chance that anyone reading this is a bike enthusiast, happy to hear if you have any thoughts to add. 
 

Conclusion

 
That about wraps up all the ingredients needed to realize my lifelong dream of becoming a Super Righteous World Saving Badass.  Ahhh, I could see it now too: waltzing into a Dairy Queen somewhere in Smalltown, USA, taking my helmet off to reveal my studly, tousled, raven black hair, and ordering up the kind of drink only badasses would dare to order:

“Give me a milk…  CHOCOLATE.“

Dudes, who wouldn’t want me? 

Tags: Bike, black, black leather jacket, cell phone, debt, debts, fun, garageband, God, laptop, living, MacBook, makeover, mobile, motorbike, music, notebook, phone, Photos, podcast, stud, sunglasses, travel, verizon, Videos, watch, wishlist
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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