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? 

Verizon sucks big hairy monkey’s butt.

I had a battery ordered from an eBay store to replace the dying one I had on my cell now, and I figured it was safe enough because the seller had a near perfect rating from thousands of buyers. Otherwise I’d have to get it from Verizon, which charges a hefty 40 bucks for the same battery (WT*??) This way I was getting it for just 10.

Battery fried my phone. I don’t mean it simply didn’t work: it @#$% NUKED MY PHONE. When I put the original battery back in, it kept giving the error message “Use Genuine Battery,” and then it would power back down. I found out later on that Verizon’s LG line of phones uses a chip in their batteries to prevent customers from purchasing cheaper batteries from third party dealers. Well, isn’t that just lovely?

I took my phone to a service center hoping they could fix the problem. A battery swap didn’t work, so they held onto the phone to see if it could be fixed (maybe by resetting the software). I came back and the Verizon guy simply dropped a crappy replacement phone in my hands, along with a receipt to sign for it.

“Dude, the hell is this? Where’s my phone?”

“Oh, we couldn’t repair it, so we’re giving you a replacement phone.”

I looked at the phone. It had scratch marks all over the screen and looked like it had been used for years.

“This phone isn’t new. I want my old phone back. What about all the contacts and pictures I had on it? That all goes poof, just like that??”

A shrug of the shoulders.

“And this phone is refurbished for crying out loud.”

“No, it’s straight from LG.”

?????

“Yeah, and? It’s still refurbished… you know what, forget it, just give me my old phone back.”

Great service, huh? I decided to try my luck at another service center tomorrow. I have a suspicion they just took the phone, threw it in a drawer, and unwrapped a replacement phone for me without even taking a look at it. I’m hoping another service center might actually try to repair it, or at least give me a better phone.

Even though it really isn’t that big a loss (I could recover my contact list easily enough), the whole thing really chapped my ass for some reason. Maybe it’s the gall of them trying to force me to buy a proprietary battery over three times it’s actual cost. Maybe it’s because I was just having a generally bad day. Or maybe I just hadn’t eaten enough for the day. Or maybe all three.

Update: Since a few visitors are coming here looking for info on the “use genuine battery” message, I should note that if you swap the battery and it still doesn’t work, that message really means, “I’m broken, I need to be replaced, and if your warranty ran out, well too bad for you.” Ironically enough, after I got a replacement phone (with a few days to spare on the warranty), I also got a replacement for the battery that originally fried my old phone, and this one worked perfectly. Go figure. Long story short, if you want to try a third party battery to save money, make sure you back up your contacts, and make sure the phone is still under warranty. Otherwise you’ll be playing Russian Roulette with your cell. Before you do something like that, ask yourself: Do I feel lucky?