The other day, my roommate and I went for a bike ride in Lester Park (one of the many wonderful parks in the Duluth area).  It was my first time ever biking on an off-road trail like that, and even though it kicked my butt, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to doing other such excursions again!

I bought a bike this weekend.

It’s a 95 Trek 970 Mountain Bike

• Older shimano (XTR and Deore) components
• RockShox Quadra21 shock in the front
• Specialized Strong Arm cranks
• Specialized seat
• new Scott grips
• ZX welded aluminum frame thats guaranteed for the life of the bike

(I have no clue what any of the above really means, other than it’s some name brand stuff)

I’m hoping that biking the mile to work and back every day will help me get rid of my gut, and help me lose a bit of weight.  I’m also going to cut back on certain foods/drinks, try to eat more healthy, and drink more water.

Tonight I’m heading down to Minneapolis to see my brother’s band play.  Then tomorrow morning, I’ll be taking part in the Neuwerks Fall Escape.  It’s an annual tradition where a bunch of European car nuts get together and take a nice lovely drive through the colorful countryside of Southern MN and Western WI.

I look forward to it, as I haven’t been out and about for a while.    I just have to remember to bring my camera.

Well Tuesday was my birthday.  This year was rather uneventful, but pleasant.  I went to the cities for a meeting for work, and afterwards I met my parents for dinner.  We ate at Champs, and I had this really good spicy jambalaya.  Other than that, I didn’t do much.

It’s been so cold out I haven’t had time to work on my cars lately.  This is a sad thing because my SPG needs some more attention, and my NG900 wants more power.  I ordered myself a birthday present for my NG900, an Autometer Sportcomp II boost gauge (30hg/30psi) so I can tell how much I’m boosting with the turbo.  The OEM boost gauge doesn’t have actual PSI values.  I’m also tempted to get a MBC+A (Manual Boost Controller + Anticipator) so I can crank the boost up, but I’ll only max out at 15psi with my current ECU.   Most likely I’ll set aside a little bit each paycheck for the car, and then in April/May go straight for a Stage3 Nordic Tune.

I can’t wait for the weekend, then I can take my mind briefly off work and relax.  I’ll probably finish my book this weekend and start another one.

I have officially decided that I dislike Christmas shopping.  It’s not that I don’t like buying gifts for others, or spending money on friends and family, I just don’t like shopping.  I spent a couple hours this evening wandering around the mall, trying to figure out what to buy for people.  But the problem is that I don’t see my family all that often, so I don’t know what they want, or what they need, or what they already have.

And then since it’s Christmas, there is the assumption that gifts are supposed to be thoughtful and meaningful, specific for the individual.  This is what makes it difficult.  If I was to go on vacation somewhere, and buy some random shirts or trinkets for people, they would be happy even if it wasn’t something they wanted or liked.  It’s the thought that counts.  But at christmas time, if someone gets you something you don’t want, you just return it.  It takes away from the spirit and the thoughts behind the gift giving.

I’d much rather buy someone a present out of the blue (like a DVD or CD, or a funny/cute item) or treat them to a movie, or pay for a meal.  That shows more of the spirit of giving than trying to buy something that they will like or want on a day when everyone is expected to.
That and the crowds and shoppers at the malls and the crowdedness of the stores just annoys me.

Anyways, enough about that.  I stumbled upon a goldmine of funny cat pictures the other day (the link was sent to me by a friend).  So I saved all the pictures I could, and put them together in a gallery at http://amishgeek.com/g2/.  I’m slowly going through all the photos, and naming them, and adding keywords so all 1000+ photos are easily searchable.  I’ll also be re-uploading my collection of random funny pictures of other stuff soon too.

Having roommates can be quite humorous at times.  For example, just tonight, my roommates Steve and Jacob were arguing about fantasy football stuff.  Steve was making fun that Jacob was all of a sudden in last place in their fantasy football league.  All this in the midst of watching the Colbert Report together.  Jacob and I decided it would be kind of fun to make a “Colbert Report Drinking Game”.  So we might have to do that over the next week.

To talk about how random the stuff we do, Jacob put in the “School of Rock” DVD just to watch the last scene where the kids play at the battle of the bands.  Steve thinks that if he could just play drums he could do it all.

Meanwhile, here I sit with my laptop, playing around with photobooth and my isight camera taking before and after pics of my haircut. (no i’m not narcissistic).

Ok, so I’m bored on a Wednesday night and have nothing to do.  I need a garage so I can work on my car.

I came across this personality test today, and decided to take it.  Now normally, I don’t waste my time on these personality tests, but a bunch of other people I know were taking it, and so I thought I would see how it pegged me.

Well I was shocked to find out that it had me nailed down almost to a T!  The test said that I am ENTP “Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving”.  Here is what it has to say about people with an ENTP rating:

http://typelogic.com/entp.html

Profile: ENTP
Revision: 3.0
Date of Revision: 26 Feb 2005
“Clever” is the word that perhaps describes ENTPs best. The professor who juggles half a dozen ideas for research papers and grant proposals in his mind while giving a highly entertaining lecture on an abstruse subject is a classic example of the type. So is the stand-up comedian whose lampoons are not only funny, but incisively accurate.

ENTPs are usually verbally as well as cerebrally quick, and generally love to argue–both for its own sake, and to show off their often-impressive skills. They tend to have a perverse sense of humor as well, and enjoy playing devil’s advocate. They sometimes confuse, even inadvertently hurt, those who don’t understand or accept the concept of argument as a sport.

ENTPs are as innovative and ingenious at problem-solving as they are at verbal gymnastics; on occasion, however, they manage to outsmart themselves. This can take the form of getting found out at “sharp practice”–ENTPs have been known to cut corners without regard to the rules if it’s expedient — or simply in the collapse of an over-ambitious juggling act. Both at work and at home, ENTPs are very fond of “toys”–physical or intellectual, the more sophisticated the better. They tend to tire of these quickly, however, and move on to new ones.

ENTPs are basically optimists, but in spite of this (perhaps because of it?), they tend to become extremely petulant about small setbacks and inconveniences. (Major setbacks they tend to regard as challenges, and tackle with determin- ation.) ENTPs have little patience with those they consider wrongheaded or unintelligent, and show little restraint in demonstrating this. However, they do tend to be extremely genial, if not charming, when not being harassed by life in general.

In terms of their relationships with others, ENTPs are capable of bonding very closely and, initially, suddenly, with their loved ones. Some appear to be deceptively offhand with their nearest and dearest; others are so demonstrative that they succeed in shocking co-workers who’ve only seen their professional side. ENTPs are also good at acquiring friends who are as clever and entertaining as they are. Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience — good, bad, or potential.

Some Famous ENTPs:

Alexander the Great
Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart
Sir Walter Raleigh

Fictional:

Mercutio, from Romeo and Juliet
Horace Rumpole, from John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey series
Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective Lord Peter Wimsey

Now that I am working up in Two Harbors, and have a 20 mile commute to work every day, I’m seriously considering moving to Two Harbors. While I enjoy a rather inexpensive rent where I’m living now, having roommates does not enable me to spend more quality time with my son, as I am not able to take him overnight or for the weekend unless I go to my parents house. That and the $350-400/mo I am spending on gas for my commute does not help either.

So in my search for housing in Two Harbors, I have two options. One is to rent an apartment for anywhere from $500-700/mo (I need a 2 bedroom so I can have a place for Nathan). The other is to buy a house, which would leave me with a $500-700/mo mortgage payment. I’ve elected for the buy a house option, and will fall back on the renting option if I am unable to buy a house.

In my search for a house, I found the perfect house for me. It is a 2 bedroom, 2 story house, with large living room, formal dining room, and large kichen with in-kitchen dining area. It has an unfinished basement, but it’s a slab basement and is very large. The bedrooms are massive, and it could easily be turned into a 3 bedroom house. It also has a 2 car, oversized garage in the back, which would give me an excellent space to work on my cars.

Now the asking price for the house is $99,900, but it’s been on and off the market for a while. I also tried getting approved for a mortgage at both the local bank and the local credit union. Both said my credit was too poor. So now I am looking for other methods to finance getting this house.

Even if I can’t get this one, the search still continues!

So I finally got tired (read: Lazy) of dinking with this site. I can’t just get rid of it, since it is the first domain name that I ever purchased. So I decided jut to throw up wordpress on here and use it as the CMS, as well as a place for me to blog on a more personal level… thus letting my other blog: www.aaronabramson.com to become a more professional blog about what I do for work etc.

So here is where I will post/update yadda yadda about the more personal happenings in my life. I’ll try to resurrect my old blog I had here and archive my old posts and info, but we’ll see.

[edit]

So I sucessfully ousted my old blog entries all the way back to 2003 when I was using phpWebSite as my CMS. I also imported all my posts from aaronabramson.com as I’ll most likely wipe that blog clean and start with a clean slate. Or not, I might just upgrade that to the latest wordpress, and post stuff there too. Who knows.

I’m still working on getting all the other content pages (non blog) moved over. Gotta dig through raw database tables to resurrect that data.