Fixpert

Today I worked a regular day at the job. After work I swam 1/2 mile, rode my bike home (only 2 or 3 miles), then ran 3.2 miles. Then I wrote a post on my family blog, uploaded some pics of my freshly pimped cube to flickr, did laundry, made dinner, played Brain Age and a couple rounds of Sudoku. Now I’m tired!

I want to explain the Brain Age/Sudoku action though. This weekend, my friends Aaron and Mong let me tag along to their friend’s BBQ in Hollywood. There was food and beer of course, regular BBQ. Except, nearly everyone at the BBQ is a game developer and the BBQ soon turned into a Tetris Attack tournament on the SNES. I had never played this game before, but games like Tetris are on par with crack for my brain, so I knew it wouldn’t take long before I was hooked. It took about 4 games and I started to get the hang of it.

Tetris Attack rules! And it was a perfect party game. I think video games have a bad rap for making the players anti-social, but I think I would much rather play a Tetris Attack tourney with the homies than try to scream at each other in a smoky bar with music so loud that you can feel the other person spitting on you every time they talk, and the conversation winds up being meaningless. I guess they don’t have smoky bars in California (big plus!) but you get the idea.

The next day, I was craving some similar nerdery, so I got Brain Age and Tetris DS for my little Nintendo DS. Tetris hasn’t gotten much attention from me yet because I was immediately hooked on Brain Age and the Sudoku puzzles found within that game. Yes, I’m late to the Sudoku game, but I think it’s extra fun playing it on the DS. You can click on a cube and it quickly zooms in. Then you can either enter your answer or scribble a couple little possibilities.

Update: Fixpert now appears to be fixed, thanks for your moral support!

Friends of Fixpert, I beseech you! What the hell is going on with my site? Only the homepage works, everything else apparently doesn’t exist anymore?! Clicking through to any category or article you get an error page from my hosting company — not even the usual WordPress 404. Plus I think my RSS feed is broken. I’m using WordPress 2.0.1 for a content management system. Everything looks completely normal in my WordPress admin, all the articles and comments still appear to exist via my admin interface. I don’t think I’ve made any major changes to the site recently, just posting regular articles.

I am working with my hosting company to try and diagnose the problem, but I don’t know if it’s a hosting issue or a Wordpress issue. I am distraught, poor little Fixpert! Any ideas guys? Please email me at info [at ] fixpert [dot ] com. Thanks dudes!

Um…hi. I guess my site fixed itself. What the hell? That was weird. I was poking around in my WordPress admin interface. I switched the themes back and forth from the old school Fixpert theme to this new one, and now the posts have re-appeared out of the blue? Either that or whoever was messing with my site secretly decided to take pity on me and fix it. Thanks friendly hacker. Anyway, crisis resolved for now I guess. It’s kind of unsettling. I don’t really like things breaking without understanding what happened, and how to prevent or fix it the next time around. Sheesh!

I don’t know how on earth I found this, but check out this casting call for a musical that involves bike messengers!!

Male Bike Messenger: Early-Late 20s, pop baritone to high F; Male Bike Messenger: Late Teens-Late 20s, pop tenor; Female Bike Messenger: Late Teens-Late 20s, pop belt or high mix. Note: The three bike messengers below should be gritty, city-wise types. Seeking all ethnicities for the messenger roles. The producers would like to present a multicultural cast. EPA procedures are in effect. Prepare 32 bars of a song appropriate to the character in which you are interested. See character descriptions for vocal requirements. Bring pictures & resume, stapled together. (Posted: July 27, 2006)

Hilarious!! I would totally go see this play. Looks like it’s in NYC. I’ll have to alert some of the NY messenger homies, not sure if any of those guys sing, but they’re certainly “gritty, city-wise types” haha!! This is either going to be the best musical, or the worst musical of all time!

Dudes, I was tooling around the web looking for ideas for a new setup for my favorite bikey, so I did a Google Image search for Surly Steamroller and 3 of the images on the first page were mine, woo hoo! I even got the #4 position.

Two of them were from my Clean Your Bike! post. The other is from my flickr photos.

I’m sure this post will quickly become outdated during the next Google shuffle (kind of like the beloved truffle shuffle) but for the time-being, I’m stoked!