the modern man’s bible

That is how I believe it is meant to be, but I will say that I will probably carry it with me until I have completed all the page-turning chapters!

That is right, for those of you that know me well, know that I don’t read unless it is school related (and I am not evena fan of that). But I have purchased my first “outside of school” book at Hastings yesterday.  What it is it? Simply put (as the title states) -

The Man’s Book - The Essential Guide for the modern man,  by Thomas Funk

This book tells a man nearly everything he would need to know. Here are some of the chapters…

• Health
• Women
• Dress
• Outdoors
• Drinking
• Smoking
• Cooking
• Arts & Science

So, need to know how a suit is supposed to fit? How to make a whiskey nightcap? What liquir to stock in your house? How to tie certain knots? How to start a fire or even carve a turkey? That is right, it is all in The Man’s Book.

It is a rather quick read and as the book says, it is organized in the way that men think, so finding things in it is very easy.

So, grab a copy and know every secret that a man should know! haha….

My favorite so far is the different trims of beards. I had no idea the different names of beards. That part has been pretty funny!

some people just love them both

If you are like me, and have turned into a social network addict, try this cool little Adobe Air application…. TweetDeck.

Thank heavens for this program! With one application you can update your Twitter account and Facebook status. The really nice part is that it also shows a number of other helpful things like your direct messages in Twitter and your replies.

And since it is an Adobe Air app, it has a very small footprint and takes up little space on your computer. And it runs very smoothly.

It gets an A+ from me and it is just in beta right now!

jmo’s last.fm

I have been running around the past couple days messing with my sites (as you might be able to tell). And in finding a new widget to show all my social sites I have joined, I realized there were some I haven’t looked at yet. Holy cow! that is terrible!

So being the computer geek I am, I had to fix that. And I found some really neat stuff, so it is a good thing.

First, if you haven’t looked at Last.fm, please, go do it! It is really cool! You get a free account, setup a short profile, and start looking up your favorite bands. The cool thing is that just about every band you can think of has a radio station for them. They are stations started by just users of the site, but they put some really good tracks. The only thing is that in order to have your own station, you do have to pay a fee. But to do it, you also have to have a variety of 45 songs from 15 different artists. If you don’t have that, then you can’t do your own radio statio to begin with.

But for free, you can look up your favorite artist and listen to the station that is already running. So one of my favorites is The Pogues Radio. They have a bunch the Pogues and Shane MacGowen, The Tossers, Floggin Molley, The Real McKenzies, The Dubliners, and the list goes on. Great celtic drinking music! haha… Take a look at my profile - http://www.last.fm/user/jonsmof

The second is Delicious. It is very simple, a bookmarking site. You sign up for a free account, it adds a few buttons to your browser, but when you hit a site you like, then you can tag it and add it to your account page. Your bookmark page is available to everyone, so it is kind of a “bookmarking the best on the web” type deal. But pretty cool. I am using mine to start building web design reference sites for my team at work. Take a look at my profile - http://delicious.com/jonsmof

now i’m making progress

I have been slowly but surely making slight increases in my riding trying to get up to a respectable distance and at least some amount of a work out.

Today I did just that, I finally crossed the 3 mile amount! I road for about 3.1 miles this afternoon. Granted, the track I am taking is a lot of hills, but that is good, so I am getting a “rest” on the downside and a good workout on the upside.

There is some changing I need to make to the ol’ bike to make it a little more smooth. Like greasing the chain and chainrings. Not to mention that a slightly smoother tire would make it a bit easier of a ride, versus my monster mountain biking tires from back in the day.

But I really like doing it. Hurt like hell afterwords, but that is a little less each time. haha…  Anyway, here is my little track. It is like slightly over 1.5 miles one way. Works for me though!

my little pet project

I am trying to find something to work on or do, that is outside of my daily work stuff, and also outside of school. So, I decided I was going to get back into bicycling.

So I hit the garage and got out the old Raleigh M40 mountain bike I bought off my older brother many years ago. I would say maybe 12 or 13? Something like that I think. I know it was a long time ago.

Anyway, it has been taking up space in the garage as we moved from house to house, and then into our own home finally. But I thought, what better way to get outside and do something, then work on getting it back in riding shape. Then I can even do some riding again (once I loose a litle weight first, haha…)

But it has been pretty cool so far. I have replaced the grips with new Pedro clamp-on grips, replaced the tubes in both tires and put in new rim-tape, and adjusted the brakes and the derailers. The tubes were the funniest. The patches from the days of trail riding with my brothers, were hanging on by nearly nothing. Probably explains why the tires kept going flat. haha…

There is still more to go. I am going to put new brakes on it, and then eventually the big “refresh”…… Changing out ALL the cabling. Yep, it is all pretty damn rusty after over 10+ years of spending time in garages. It scares me to think of the hell it will probably be to strip out and replace all the cabling. But if I can do it, I know it will be cool. Plus I want to put on new Shimano shifter/brake lever combos. The shifter still works ok, but it is old and hard to run. But of course replacing the cabling will likely help that as well.

Anyway, here is a photo of the old beast. I will have to update this as I keep working on it through the summer.