I remember some time ago reading a funny story about a guy’s misadventure making a medicine ball. I thought to myself, “The worst that can happen is that I’ll mess up the cuts on a PVC pipe and have to buy another $2.25 pipe to start over with.” I knew that, whenever we built the medicine balls and parallettes, we’d be working outside. Spilled sand or miscut pipes outside damages nothing. Right.

When Eric and I got the supplies out to my car, I pointed out that the seats in the back fold down flat and that there should easily be enough room to put the PVC pipes in the car and close the rear hatch. Unfortunately, I loaded the PVC pipes in the car, put one end against the windshield on the passenger side and closed the hatch. This caused the PVC pipes to impact the corner of the windshield on the passenger side. Yes, now I have an impact fracture from the inside about the size of a dollar bill. So, my parallette construction project just added a $150 windshield repair to the bill.

Eric and I wandered to find burlap bags, found the clock ticking against us as we researched glass repair options, and finally scrubbed the medicine ball construction (which would involve running to a beach to get 50 pounds of sand and, the way my luck was going, dumping it all over the interior of my car). We decided to focus on building the parallettes.

The actual construction part of the parallettes was really easy. While Glassman’s instructions call for a high level of precision and straight cuts, we had minimal tools and cut the pipes by hand on my front lawn. Using electrical tape as a cut guide, in accordance with the instructions, was brilliant, but electrical tape never forced a straight cut from a small hack saw. While some of our cuts were weirdly crooked, once the parallettes were put together, they were as solid as they would be if we had used a mitre box.

After some testing, we were both surprised by how solid and useful these parallettes are. I was also surprised by how much more challenging kicking up to a handstand is when you’re effectively nine inches taller. Fortunately, we have photographic evidence of our adventure.

• 1 PVC Pipe, 10 feet: $2.23
• 4 PVC Elbows: 4 x $0.47 = $1.88
• 4 PVC T Joints: 4 x $0.65 = $2.60
• 8 PVC End Caps: 8 x $0.53 = $4.24

• Electrical tape: $0.59
• Mini Hack Saw: $6.49
• PVC Cement: $4.79

• Windshield repair: $150.00

Today’s grand total: $183.77

The lesson: When loading your car with something long, don’t put the end against the windshield.

Ten years ago, I started blogging here with a post about a rave massive I attended in San Jose to ring in 2000. A lot of things have changed on the internet since then — namely several billion new blogs. I’m in the old guard of ancient bloggers, but I set myself apart from the other old guard members by never figuring out how to consistently attract an audience.

This is something I’m aiming to correct in 2010.

These days, we have a myriad of web presences to distract us from our core web sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a host of other distractions. I think, for many of us, the core web site is still important, if only for its historical legacy and the notion that this here is something that I own, something in my control — something that lives on my server.

In the days ahead, I’m thinking hard about the future of this web site. I’m tempted to blank the whole thing and start afresh. I’m also tempted to delete entire categories of posts and purge the old outdated crap. For now, the correct course of action is to forge onward and try harder to write content that matters. Interspersed among the rote crossposts letting the two of you who read this that are interested in my DJ mixes or my music, I’ll try to write more things that are useful or insightful or revealing.

I noticed toward the end of my marathon of ambient tracks that, if I made it to track 52, there would be 49 tracks in Ambient Improvisations. Well, I might as well throw down the extra one and make that “album” an even 50. So, today, on New Year’s Eve, I churned out three tracks over the course of the day, all three of which I built using my M-Audio KeyStation Pro. That brought my total to 53 for 2008. What do I win?

If you had asked me in January if I’d consider writing over six hours of music at 40 beats per minute, I’d have laughed. I write house music, after all. It’s easy to get locked into a single-minded idea of genre. It’s even easier to doodle around, produce nothing, tweak rough drafts over and over, and obsess over perfection. The exercise of improvising music for seven minutes, mixing it down, and letting it go is cathartic.

I think for 2009, I’m going to make it a point to use my 26 Stubs to craft songs. Buying DJ gear and reviving Digeum with Jay allows me the opportunity to see if whatever those “stubs” become mixes into other music I love. I’m really excited about music again and, if the 50 sleepy ambient tracks did nothing else, I think 2008 won me that excitement.

Imagine my surprise this afternoon when I found that the $200 early termination fee was still in place. They decided to charge me this because I had not made any changes to my contract after June 28. I find this completely dishonest and the fine print on the T-Mobile website that I looked at should have made this more clear.

I tried to talk to the representative on the phone, but they’re not going to budge. I was a T-Mobile customer for more than 5 years, but they don’t care. They just want to sell their crappy service and also-ran cellphones. I understand that.

So, if you’re a T-Mobile customer considering getting an iPhone, you’re probably going to want to wait, unless you’re ready to take a $200 thrust right in the brown ring. Had I known about this, I’d have waiting until January for a new iPhone.

Is there a class action lawsuit in progress? I’ll join!

Color me pissed. I could have spent that extra $200 on disco and condoms.

With higher resolution sound files, my mixes will sound so much better and, if at some point I plug my stuff into an honest-to-goodness sound system with actual dancers, I’m going to not want to have my stuff sound farty. Ripping at a low resolution and listening on an iPod is okay. But, my computer has more than 200 GB of free space now. I might as well upgrade my MP3 collection (especially since, as I’ve recently discovered, my eMusic downloads are all 192 kbps VBR).

So, now to dig all the dusties out of the closet and find all those compilations over the years and rerip everything. I think 256 kbps is a little bit of overkill, so I’ll import everything from now on at 192 kbps VBR MP3s. My next Digeum Mix Session will be ripped to 160 kbps VBR. I think you’ll enjoy the difference.

And now to find all those thousands of CDs. I really should organize them better. Like, I dunno, in one location? <gasp /> Imagine!

Through focused, almost obsessive, attention to my diet and working out (doing CrossFit since September), I have been able to maintain a lithe 150 pound weight (some days, I’m a pound over; some days, I’m a pound under) while building functional strength since then. My next step is to buy a barbell and bumper plates to ramp my fitness training up to the next level.

A year isn’t very long, but this year feels like an eternity. That big, bulky Apollo of 2007 has given way to a lean, mean machine that sets personal bests on workouts with startling regularity.

Here are my five upcoming fitness goals.

1. Acquire a barbell, bumpers, gymnastic rings, a Dynamax ball, and squat stands for portable workout awesomeness.
2. Max the APFT by my 38th birthday.
3. Take the CrossFit Level I Certification, the Running & Endurance Sports Training Certification, and the Olympic Lifting Certification.
4. Figure out the muscle up, double under, unassisted one-legged squat, L sit, and handstand pushup.
5. Score a first class on the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test.

There are some exciting things coming. I can’t wait.

What I Like About It:

• The price: I got this car for about $4000 less than it would have cost me new.
• The color: It’s not white or some weird color. It’s kind of bluish green.
• The new car smell: Despite having 16000 miles on it, it still smells like a brand new car.
• The comfort: The seats are really really comfy. This is going to rock on a road trip.
• The versatility: The back seats fold down flat and, unlike the 2009 Vibe, the back window opens separately from the tailgate. Awesome!

What I Don’t Like About It:

• No AUX jack: I’m going to have to buy an aftermarket iPod interface and install it myself or pay a bunch of money to have one installed.
• Fumes: When I got the car, it came with about an eighth of a tank of gas. I made it to my home gas station for the first fill up, but I’m sure if it’d been another mile, I’d have pushed my car in.

At last, I have a nice car again. It’s no hot rod (At 128 horsepower, this thing feels pretty much like the Toyota Corolla whose engine powers it), but it gets decent gas mileage (topping at 32 mpg hwy). I decided that the versatility of a small wagon and the niceness of the cabin outweighed the slightly higher fuel economy in the two other front runners (the 2008 Pontiac G5 coupe and the 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt LT). Now to await the sticker for my license plates from DMV.

Note to friends in San Francisco: Given SF’s status as a car theft capital, I’m not going to drive my shiny new car into the city until I have a registration sticker from DMV. That’ll let me take the temporary with my name and address out of my front window.

Also, on this day 12 years and one month ago, my last Pontiac was totalled by my housemate. This Pontiac has full coverage, though. Aspicious anniversary, no?

Nobody’s just going to accept your Capital One BlankCheck. Expect to sign it over and come back for your new car when the dealer gets the money.

The first couple of dealers that said they needed to run my credit saw me turn on my heels and walk out. After I talked to eight car dealers in the area, including the ones selling used cars, it became evident to me that a BlankCheck is not just good for cash. Someone’s going to run your credit and you’re not driving off in your shiny new car, unless you’re really really lucky. (Subsequent calls to Capital One confirmed that this is usually how it goes. They really should correct their documentation.)

After two months of searching and having car dealers quote me $300 off MSRP on new cars (yeah, right, I said “COMPETITIVE”, not “DOUCHEY”), I found a 2008 Pontiac Vibe on a nearby car lot. Sadly, this Vibe has an automatic transmission and is a rental return. It’s not as fast or as fuel efficient, but I don’t drive very much anyway.

I haggled a little bit, but they’d marked the price down on this one. Incidentally, it’s actually the first Vibe I test drove in April, but now it’s much cheaper. I got them to agree to my price and decided to let them run my credit. They decided to accept my BlankCheck, but I have to go get my car another day.

Yeah, I could have kept shopping, but it’s been two months and countless hours of test driving. I now have signed the papers and, soon, I’ll be driving my first new(ish) car in 12 years.

On Stevens Creek Boulevard, I walked over to the Honda dealership, the fourth dealership I’ve visited to look at the Civic. Due to soulcamp’s incessant suggestion, I keep this car on my list to keep my options open. They had one Civic on the lot, but it was boxed in and they didn’t want to have it driven. Well, that’s fair enough, but I’m not going to beg to test drive a fucking Honda. Sorry, Honda, you’re about to get crossed out.

I wandered onto the Volkswagen lot, just because I felt like checking out what they had to offer. Despite not having much interest in a Jetta, the salesman convinced me that it would be fun to take it for a spin. The five-cylinder engine was very European and race inspired, but the shifting was aggressive enough that this little car required a bunch of revving off the line. It was way too easy to accidentally put the car in third instead of first off the line, but at 170 horsepower, this was a zippy little thing. Still, I need a car that beats 30 miles per gallon.

After picking up Oz at my house, we headed to Capitol Expressway Auto Mall, where I test drove three cars in three adjacent lots. Two of them were fun and one got crossed off the list.

The Saturn Astra I test drove on a lark was quite a surprise. The fun, tight manual gearbox accelerated smoothly, quickly, and powerfully through the gears as I punched it on the freeway, feeling the acceleration and deceleration, how it cornered and handled. This car is nice and has a roomy interior. I didn’t expect to say this, but the Saturn gets to climb a few spots up the list. It’s well-appointed and it was fun to drive.

The 2009 Toyota Matrix S was very fun compared with a manual compared with the less powerful and older 2008 Matrix base. It wasn’t quite as fast as the Saturn, which has a more efficient and slightly smaller engine. But, the Saturn is a European car imported by GM from Opel and the Toyota is a Japanese car. There’s quite a difference. The Matrix was nice, but it doesn’t get 30 mpg in the S version. I think I scared the salesman half to death.

Next, I took the Ford Focus for a drive, although the guy really wanted to sell it to me now. I understand you asking for the sale, but no. The acceleration was okay, it gets good gas mileage, but it just feels like junk to me. The seats are plain Jane and the car is completely devoid of any character.

Finally, I test drove the Toyota Corolla base with a manual, after the Toyota dealer in Sunnyvale went to all the trouble of getting one on their reserve lot, the only manual transmission they have. It was quite fun to drive, had a nice enough interior, and probably earns the right to push a few of the cars higher on the list down a little ways. It did take quite a bit of work to take it on a test drive, but it was worth it. I don’t know if this is quite my style, but no frowns for the Corolla stick.

On Memorial Day, I tried my luck hunting down a 2009 Vibe with a manual transmission, a 2008 Cobalt manual, a Pontiac G5, and a Honda Civic — especially the Civic. After visiting my sixth Honda dealership today (and about a dozen visits overall) and still failing to test drive the Civic, I did my due diligence. Sorry, Honda, I have to cross you off my list. If you have 100 Civics in stock in Daly City and a gaggle of them in San Francisco, but you can’t take me for a spin in the stick, I’m just not going to waste my time anymore, especially since the car isn’t really my style anyway.

Next weekend, I’m damn sure going to find a 2008 Cobalt LS coupe, 2009 Pontiac Vibe, 2008 Pontiac G5, and 2008 Scion xD (all with manual transmissions) to finalize my list.

The Contenders

1. 2007 – 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt LS coupe
2. 2009 Toyota Corolla
3. 2008 Saturn Astra XE
4. 2009 Pontiac Vibe base
5. 2008 – 2009 Pontiac G5 (still can’t get a test drive in this)
6. 2009 Toyota Matrix base (still have to test drive this one in the 1.8L)
7. 2008 Scion xD (need to test drive the manual)
8. 2008 Honda Fit
9. 2008 Honda Civic
10. 2008 Ford Focus

1. No car salesmen older than I am. Get the hungry young man who loves cars. He knows that you’re not interested in the Camry. He knows you want something that, while it may not get you laid, won’t totally prevent such a thing from happening. He knows that you want some zip in the gas pedal, while not expecting a Ferrari, but still something that holds its own at the gas pump. He also doesn’t want to hang around the showroom. He wants to go peel out. (Note: I’m using he here because I’ve never met a female salesperson on any car lot in California. Ever.)
2. Time wasters. If you wander around the lot and nobody comes out to greet you and show you some cars, go inside and talk to the receptionist. As nicely as you can, explain to her that you’d like someone to come show you a car, and which car you’d like. If she tells you you’re going to have to wait, give her five minutes. Is that impatient? No. You’re a cash customer, you want to test drive a car, and the dealership next door will be ecstatic to take you for a test drive without making you wait for an hour.
3. No lazy assholes. If he offers you his card and says “When you’re ready to buy a car, give me a call and we’ll talk”, he doesn’t deserve your business. You’re not at the dealership for the free coffee, are you? Hey, salesman, why are you talking to me without keys in your hand?

Bonus tips:

1. Hooptie drivers. If you see the car salesman bolt from the lot as soon as you leave and jump in a car that is worth less than $1,000 — especially a car that isn’t a classic or a marquee of one of the brands his dealership sells, move on. It’s understandable if you’re at a BMW dealer, but if the guy hucking Pontiacs drives off in a 1986 Honda Prelude that spits black smoke, that’s kind of a warning sign.
2. Locked down lots. If every single car on the lot is locked during business hours so you can’t poke around in the cars without a salesman on your jock, that’s kind of a red flag. They’re going to be really pushy. A good car lot leaves at least one of each of its models unlocked, so people can adjust the seats, check out the gizmos, and get a feel for the car before they talk to the salesman. I poked around in a brand new Toyota Matrix for 20 minutes once, folding the back seats down flat, opening the tailgate, adjusting the seats, and sitting in the back. That was good. A little quiet time with the car is good.
3. Aggressive pushy sales guys. In my experience, some sales people, especially immigrants, try much more aggressively to try to get you to buy something—anything—right now, right here and will never budge on price. (Note: I won’t specify any particular kind of salesman who is the most aggressive, but when I have to struggle to make my desires known, I have to ditch this sales guy and find someone who isn’t going to try to hoodwink me.)