Jay Adkins

Safe to drive?!

Jay — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:25:48 +0000

This morning I get in my car and it won’t start. I’m thinking “what the @$#!” is going on here because I bought the car in 2006 brand new. This shouldn’t be happening. Finally after attempting several times I get it started. As I was driving toward my favorite coffee spot that starts with “Star” and ends with “Bucks”..sorry had to do that. Anyway, I get to a red light and when the light turns green, I go to shift from first into second gear when I hear this horrendous noise and my car begins to buck like a freaking out of control horse. Ok, maybe not that intense, but still. I look at the dash and my check engine light has come on. GREAT! Now what do I do?

I decide to drive to the nearest gas station and park the car. I shut off the car and wait a few seconds, then start it again. Everything seems ok at this point, so I turn around and head back for home. I called the dealership and they said to bring it in if I could drive it in. So, slowly I drive the car to the dealership, explain to the service manager what happened and then proceeded to wait for what seemed like an eternity.

The service manager comes out and tells me the freaking accelerator chip is defective, which by the way is covered under my warranty..thank God for that! The accelerator chip is defective? I was going down a residential street. Had I been on the highway at say 70mph, I could have lost control of my car and been roadkill.

The service manager tells me after doing an oil change and a cabin filter change and a coolant flush that he doesn’t have the chip and it will be Tuesday before he gets it in, but he says “It’s safe to drive until then”. I’m not sure whether they borrowed parts from another car or what but it seems ok now. It just struck me funny that he’d say it’s safe to drive until then. This all caused me to miss work today, so it’s been one of those days. Sorry, just thought I’d vent a little.

You Know You’re A Geek When…

Jay — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:58:16 +0000

So, I got to thinking today about just how big of a geek I’ve become over the years. I mean, I’m a Web Designer and Developer for a living. That in and of itself should tell you something. I never in a million years thought when I was in high school, “hey, I think I’ll design and build websites for a living when I get older”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I quite enjoy being a geek. I love Star Wars (all of them), Star Trek and Lord of The Rings. I wear t-shirts with sayings on them like “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 and I’m a complete gadget freak!

After reading a post on CNBC…yes I said CNBC. That alone frightens me. I found the following list compiled by Jane Wells and thought it fit me and well, probably some of you as well.

You Know You’re A Geek When…

You are registered in more than two social media networks.
You commonly refer to yourself in the Real World by your online “handle”: Han, ObiWan, HogwartsPrincess, TolkienExpress etc.
You have to frequently make references to the “Real” world or “real” time as it differs from the virtual reality you commonly live in.
Your favorite authors are limited to JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Isaac Asimov, and “George Lucas.”
You’ve played roleplaying games beyond the age of 15, or think WoW means anything other than an expression of surprise or disbelief.
Have had your geekdom permanently etched on yourself
You know all the names of the characters in Mario’s world: Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Princess Peach…
You have a collector’s edition or collectors’ items from any SciFi movie, series.
You know who Eddie Deezen is and are/were the President of his fanclub
You go into convulsions when your internet connection goes d- (shudder, couldn’t even finish that..).

Hat tip to Jane Wells for the list!

Google Renamed To Topeka

Jay — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:47:25 +0000

Being born and raised in North-East Kansas, I couldn’t pass this up. As you know already if you use Google at all (and who doesn’t?), you saw that Google renamed themselves to Topeka Friday for April Fool’s Day. There was a lot of media attention, some good and some bad. One particular blogger on a well-known site who trashed the idea of Google renaming itself to Topeka for the day (you know who you are) had no reason to trash the change other than, in my opinion, just to have something negative to write about. I mean come on, it was all in good fun.

Shout out to Topeka Rapper, Brail for this video:

Although Topeka is has now been changed back to Google, April 1, 2010 will remain a historic day for Topeka with all of the nationwide media attention in their competition to get Google to choose their city for a high-speed Internet experiment. Props to Google for having a sense of humor and choosing to be Topekans for the day.

Driverless Audi To Climb Pike’s Peak

Jay — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:43:37 +0000

Source: YouTube

Toyota Simulator

Jay — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:47:28 +0000

While all the hub-bub about Toyota cars having accelerator problems is fresh in everyone’s minds, I wanted to share this video. Pretty funny in a sick kinda way. I’m saddened by all of the families affected by the problem and this is a serious problem, so I’m not making light of the situation. I just think the video is funny, so please don’t read into this post any further than plain humor. If you’re offended by this video, I apologize in advance.

Jay

Dancing KC Cop

Jay — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:43:56 +0000

I can honestly say that being a prior police officer, I never danced in front of my camera. I made a few funny faces to test it out but never danced. This is pretty good though…

Lego Superheroes

Jay — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:12:48 +0000

Chances are, if you’re a geek you probably have at some point played with Legos. Heck maybe you still do but that’s cool because I know people in their 30′s who still play with Legos. If you’re a Lego fan, you’ll be interested in the Lego Superheroes that I found at ComicsAlliance.com. Enjoy!

Hat tip to ComicsAlliance.com for the uber cool photos.

Tuesday Thoughts – Web Design & CSS

Jay — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:37:55 +0000

In this day and age, there is more focus on great web design than just pure functionality. In the early days of the Web, we saw websites that weren’t exactly masterpieces in the art world sense, but they were highly functional (at the time). Now we fastforward to 2009 and the trend we’re seeing is a high focus on the aesthetics of web design rather than just how the site functions. In my humble opinion, this is an excellent thing due to advancements in not only the web technologies or coding languages being utilized.

My favorite coding language, if you will, being a designer, is CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. This allows designers to design to their heart’s content knowing that with CSS all those fancy designs can become reality. I, like many of you, design and code my own websites. This gives me a better insight into any possible limitations of design and the actual code going behind the code. This also allows me to design, code and place that code into various popular CMS or content management systems for easy updates to the website. CMS usage allows me to build more websites, faster because I don’t always have to manually manipulate the code to change content as we had to do years ago with pure static sites.

Just about anything you could dream up can become reality using the right technology and it’s all right at our fingertips, literally.

Netscape founder, Marc Andreessen backs new browser

Jay — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:10:57 +0000

That is correct. If you haven’t gotten the news from TechCrunch, Mashable or any of the other tech or social media type sites out there already, I’ll fill you in on this little ditty. Marc Andreessen, founder of the once popular browser Netscape case strapped his thinking hat back on and is now backing a new browser called RockMelt. There are no Alpha or Beta releases as of this posting but they should be out later this year according to Andreessen.

Andreessen said earlier this summer that he was backing the new RockMelt browser citing:

“There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch.”

Someone please explain to me why we need yet another browser to jack-with and test staging sites on before they role out to production and become live sites.

I’d just be extremely happy if my least favorite browser IE, which I affectionately call Internet Exploder would dry up and go away.

Feature Length Movies On YouTube

Jay — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:08:09 +0000

: Image by diankarl (busy in JKT-will visit your stream soon) via Flickr

Ok, I know I haven’t posted since before the Independence Day celebrations but I do have good reason for that. You see, I was kidnapped by some..um..angry badgers. Yeah, ginomous angry badgers and…oh, who am I foolin? I’ve been preoccupied with other shtuff! Anyway I’ve got some big guns just in case we ever do have an attack of ginormous angry badgers and I WILL use them. In fact, I’ll just call Chuck Norris and he’ll take care of my light work for me.

On to another topic. Now I may be way behind the game here but I just realized the other day that Youtube now has full-length feature movies on their site. Oh yeah! You know you dig the Karate Kid

Huh? Huh? Yeah, I thought so. And what about Bruce Lee? That’s right! Bruce F-ing Lee! I couldn’t embed that one… Punks!