Mindful Musings

Jennifer and I just purchased a Serta Nightscape Pillowtop King sized mattress from Sam’s Club and Jennifer had to “personalize” our bedroom. So here are the pictures of her new room, her new bed, her new chair from Overstock and my Miata. I am loving every moment of the Miata so far. Lots of repairs and upgrades planned and I cannot wait for my father to get here again so we can work on it together.
PS: Sleeping on the Serta is just freakin dreamy. We LOVE the pillowtop with its memory foam (I think) and the sheer expanse of a king sized mattress.

Pictures of Jennifer’s new King sized bed and my 1990 Mazda Miata

PS: Just for the records, I really like the way Jennifer has decorated our room.

Seen my new Mazda Miata/Green Cars blog yet?

Ice-Swipe Challenge: Only for those that are over 21. Win free stuff from Coors light. Pay close attention to your screen and practice before trying the game.

I LOVE the bright white HID look found commonly in high end cars such as beamers and I have always wanted to convert my Honda Accord to have the white look. The closest thing to HID that I have found (and at the cheapest price) were Sylvania Silver Star High Performance light bulbs. I have been using them for about two years. However, I have a major complaint.

These Sylvania SilverStar headlights burn out about once a year. I spoke with the salesperson at AutoZone and they told me that this is a common complaint and lots of people have to replace these lights once a year. She went so far as to say that the heat from these bulbs actually cause other wiring problems in some older vehicles. Now the only problem I have with them is that they burn out very quickly and cost almost as much as four regular headlight bulbs. So this past weekend, I took my one burnt bulb and the one good one and pitched them. I might look into the HID conversion kit in the future.

Also, I purchased a Mazda Miata (1990) over this past weekend. More on that very soon.

I saw a new kind of email scam for eBay that was amusing. I had someone email me the following…

Hello,
I am interested and will like to know the shipping from Chicago IL, handling and your form of payment
Thanks

and since I was not selling anything on eBay and fraud, internet, media and everything in between is my business, I was intrigued. Of course, the link pointed to some IP in france and not eBay but thats the boring part.

Needless to say, ebay needs to find a new way to deliver messages to their customers, one that does not include logging in or sending information via email. How about including some sort of an “email secret” with every email? If that does not show up inside the message, it can easily be deemed to be invalid. PGP comes to mind, but judging from their track record and the pain of installation, it would never fly. I also hear that with the recent acquisition of the Verisign PayFlow business by eBay, they are supposed to buy some tokens (approx. 1 million) from Verisign to assign to Paypal customers. Interesting turn of events.

So I went out and bought myself a watch. I had been shopping for some time and had quite a few possibilities but nothing concrete. First a little background on my present watch.
I had purchased this gem back when I was in college (I think it was m ysophomore year) in and around 1997. It is a Casio PathFinder Pro Trek Triple Sensor back from the day. This watch has had its battery replaced at least four times and the watch strap has seen at least four incarnations. However, it still works and works quite well. There were a few issues with it. It was starting to look a little raggety, the little hole for the strap pin was getting worn out and the strap would come undone very often and the battery was starting to die again. So I had started looking. There were a variety of options. I could go for another Casio Triple sensor but they are huge and with time they have gotten bigger (and uglier according to Jennifer). I could go with something Seiko (SND43 and SND413 were good options) and there were myriad watches that I just could not and should not afford (like the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M, humana humana humana).

Jennifer and I went to look at a new mattress at JC Penny’s yesterday and since we had been shopping for watches for some time, we decided to take a look see and Penny’s had a good discount going on watches. So there I found the Pulsar World Time Chronograph (PBL047) for about $125 including taxes. This watch appealed to me for many reasons.

It was simple yet elegant, different yet useful, nice yet not outlandishly priced and best of all, Jennifer liked it on me. So we purchased it on a trial basis (I love being able to return expensive stuff, thus not purchased online). I like it so far. The strap was mammoth sized so that was annoying to resize, but otherwise the watch feels nice. It is a tad heavy, but nothing prohibitive and I can easily type with it on my wrist. In addition, I think my parents will really like it since it is metal and looks sohpisticated rather than chintsy on my wrist.

Time will tell.

I have said this before and I will say it again, “server moves suck”! However, this time it was even worse, though the second time is always the charm (or was it the third time?). Never mind that.

After a lot of trouble, backwards backups (and destroyed servers) and thankfully for the people behind Plesk, this blog and all others that I control and/or write are back on the new server. We should see faster speeds, lesser interruptions, no popups and best of all, more peace of mind. However, in the process I seem to have lost a lot of ground according in Google. Though my Pagerank remains the same, I see a HUGE drop in search engine traffic. I could attribute this to the yo-yo effect of switching IPs or to the fact that I did not have a single IP assigned to a single domain but none of that is the whole truth. I will have to wait and see (after making the necessary changes of course)

For now, the blogs are back up and I hope to keep them that way.