Aaron Unscripted A blog about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings…

Blogging

I'm not very consistent with my blogging habits. It bothers me, I come up with a lot of ideas, pieces of content, and updates in my life that I would love to share. If I find the time and inclination sometimes I manage to log in and start typing up a small piece.  In the end I find that the quality of the content is mediocre at best, or the general idea or content is better shared through other media forms like facebook, twitter, or on google reader. All that content can be seen on my blog through the lifestream widget. Also, in most cases, pushing  that content through those sites makes it easier seen by the audience I was intending to share it with in the first place. I also think a large part of what drives me to share my ideas, is the feedback and discussion that it brings, and that is also a benefit of pushing content through those sites.  

I really want to put together quality content, have it available to my audience, and so that it creates valuable discussion and feedback. 

On a side note, I think that there is an undertone of what I'm saying that has to deal with where the personal blog is headed, and what facebook and twitter are doing to take some of the highlights of what the personal blog use to be a platform for.

For my next post, I hope to fill in some of the blanks to tell you what my coming future, and this blog have in store.

Pictures, 2001 BMW M3

M3 overlooking Eugene Or, from Skinner's Butte

[More pictures if you click on the image]

I got around to washing and waxing my M3 today. It was a pretty sunny and warm day, and I didn't want to waist the good weather sitting inside. It took me nearly 4 hours to finish, and boy does my car look good! I decided to go out and find a little scenery and take a few snap shots to share with everyone. 

It is a 2001 BMW M3, in Laguna Seca Blue, with grey and black trim interior.

I have to say, I have no buyers remorse. To this day I catch myself staring at it in awe, and thinking "damn that's a sexy car". It is also the UTMOST fun to drive.

I <3 my BMW.

Panning for Gold in Sweet Home, Oregon

I spent last weekend with my girlfriend and her family. We went up to the mountians outside of Sweet Home, Oregon, stayed in cabin, and went panning for gold. It was raining on and off all day, and was kind of misrable weather. I kept my hopes up by looking for a nugget the size of my fist. Not much luck in that department, but we did find some small chunks. Nothing to get rich off of, but we did find some gold!

Panning for Gold

One small chunk of gold we found panning.

TiredEyes H-Mob Productions

I was checking out my skis, the prophet 100, @ the company site, lineskis.com, and I started watching their video's. Got me pumped up to go skiing again. A couple of songs featured in the videos caught my attention, and I think you should check them out as well.  I got to looking into TiredEyes and didn't find much other then a myspace band page featuring some of his music. It appears that it's a solo project. It says he's from Mt. Hood, ands he is looking into releasing an album shortly. I only hope I can get a hold of it in one form or another. Hope you enjoy the music as I have, and maybe if/when I look back into my blog posts in the future I'll be reminded to look into that album

The music is a mesh of indie, instrumental, and electronic. The groove is mellow and chill, yet there is a tension that provokes adrenaline/excitement. It's a good beat to get you rolling, and pumped up.

Mt Bachelor EPIC ski day!

Went skiing at Mt Bachelor today.

Mt Bachelor Ski Trip

I finally got to put my new ski equipment to the test. It did not disappoint. I am very happy with all of it. I have been skiing since the 4th grade, and this is the first set of equipment that I have ever owned. Probably the most enjoyable day I have had skiing in a long, long, long time, and I owe it to the personally fitted, new equipment. It was really an amazing day. Clear skies and no wind. We also hiked to the top of the mountain, and skied down what is called "the bowl". A first for all of us that went. Truly a little frightening looking down, but after taking the initial hurl down the mountain it wasn't all too difficult. Bachelor has a cool feature where you can look up the lifts that you had taken, and it calculates the number of feet you had skied, according to the Bachelor website we skied well over 21,000 vertical feet. Not bad for a day on the snow.

First Bicycle Ride

I took my new bike for a quick test run this morning. BURR! It was a bit chili this morning, I'll have to invest in some gloves, and riding pants. I'm really excited to take it on a good long day trip. I love the feel of this ride, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. I hope that feeling continues as I get some miles on the bike.

I took a couple quick snapshots of my bike, album after the link...

My New Ride the 2009 Novera Safari

A view of my Desk and Livingroom set up

Overhead View of My Desk

Desk View of Livingroom

Just wanted to share my Desk, and living room set up.

x2 Edit: FEATURED! The Media Mecca

Edit: I put my pictures up on Flickr and added them to the Lifehacker Show and Tell group of people showing off their workspaces. I also added a bunch of notes to my flickr pictures that might be worth checking out.  I received some flickr mail from Jason @ Lifehacker saying he would like some more info about the set up, because they are interested in featuring it. How cool would that be? Anyway I typed up my reply. I figured it was a pretty good explanation and overview of the set up, and wanted to repost it here:

About my home set up, I guess you could say it really isn't all that conducive to getting things done. There are plenty of distractions going on if you want them, but if your job is your hobby then it really isn't too difficult to stay on task. And if you don't have a job...

My roommate and I decided that we enjoy the entertainment and social side of life. We often have a few friends over. Think of the reason that people go to Starbucks to sit around for hours on their laptops to get some work done, or go to the sports bar, laptop in hand, to follow the statistics and their fantasy leagues. We have kind of the same idea about having our computer desks right off the home theater area. (My roommate is set up on the opposite side) We spend entirely too many hours on the computer, and to feel a little less anti-social it just makes sense to not be held up in separate rooms. There is also a certain convenience to being able to use the entertainment area while we are surfing the web.

The function behind the multiple screens in our theater area is so that we can watch more then one thing going on at once. The easiest explanation would be for sports, and catching two games at once. However, my roommate and I are still debating on how best to pull HD content. We only have one cable box to stream content from at the moment. What happens more often, is that the sports game isn't very interesting, but we don't want to miss anything, so we end up playing video games or watching a movie at the same time.

As for some other quick notes:
- We tend to only use the projector for main event type things, as to not burn through the bulb just having it on for something we aren't fully tuned into.
- At the heart of the theater set up, everything is ran off of a 4x4 HDMI Matrix. We can put any of the four inputs onto any number of the four outputs.
- We have the Audio Receiver off of one of the HDMI outputs so we can choose what input we want to listen to.
- The remote for both LCD's work on each other, and is sometimes a pain if you're not being careful. (mostly just for power and volume)

Big Day, New Novara Safari Touring Bike, and New Tires on my Car

Well the title pretty much says it all. I had a pretty busy day running around doing various errands. I haven't gotten a chance to ride my bike yet, but will probably take it for a ride tomorrow morning. The link to my 2009 Novara Safari. One of the errends I had to do was to get new rear tires on my 2001 BMW M3. I got to watch tirefactory work through the waiting area window, they did an excellent job looking after my baby. I was amazed at just how worn my tires where, a few more hairs off the rubber and I'd been running slicks. After driving down a few blocks and hitting an on ramp with my new tires, I could totally feel the improvement.

Long Hiatus

I figured It was about time that I started blogging again. Every time I tried to get back into it, I would get caught up in the aesthetics of the way the site looked. I would get frustrated in my searches, and non-understanding. Well, I kicked it back to the default look, I decided content should be king.  Maybe someday I'll figure out the aesthetics.

In my search I did find the cool widget, Lifestream, you can see in the sidebar. It should keep up with my web presence.

It's been a long hiatus. Hopefully I can keep this new flame lit.