Domestic Geek

While I was over at Apple's site this morning, I saw the front page had a big announcement that in June you will be able to view YouTube content through your AppleTV. That's pretty cool.

We listen to the station 99.5 The Mountain a lot at work. It's great because I keep hearing songs that I need to add to my iTunes library.

The other day I heard a song I love by Paul McCartney and Wings called "1985." I knew they had just released the Paul McCartney catalog on iTunes, so I checked as soon as I got home and all I could find was that tune by Bowling for Soup (which I already have, btw). I did several Google searches and that's the way every kept spelling the song title — in numbers. Yesterday I decided to search wikipedia and decided to start going through the discography. Since the song ended with "Band on the Run, " I decided to start there and lo and behold: it's spelled out "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five!" I went to download the song and it was being offered as iTunes Plus, the DRM-free (without Digital Rights Management) version, so I paid the $1.29 of of my balance and it is all mine. I made Marcus stop watching his show on the AppleTV so I could hear it through the stereo.

I applaud EMI records for being the first to agree to get rid of this DRM crap. It's so easy to get around it, anyway. I will gladly pay a little extra for a song I can play anytime on any device.

I became aware of a site to get t-shirts printed online called CustomInk.com a few years back while working at a screen printing shop. I fell in love with their straight-forward ordering process and "Design Lab" product creator is one of the best in the business. I often wondered with sites like this, why would people deal with the hassle of working like a shop like ours?

CustomInk.com has just about every product imaginable to put your design on: garments such t-shirts, tanks, baseball jerseys, sweats, polos, hats and fun stuff like umbrellas, mousepads, teddy bears. You need to check out the site to see the wide selection available. They're not selling cheap, junky shirts, either. Choose from well known brand names such as Hanes, Gildan, Champion, Anvil, Jerzees and many more.

I'm really impressed that they decided to upgrade the Design Lab. It only used to work in IE on windows, but it seems to work just fine in Firefox and on both a mac and pc. You can choose from their many stock images and font to create the idea you have in mind, or follow their detailed instructions to create art of your own and upload it. They also provide a great demo on how to use the Design Lab. You can save the design and send it colleagues who need to look it over. It's all very cool!

Marcus is wanting some new shirts for his gaming group. I know we'll be using CustomInk.com to order those shirts.

Well, the surgery went really well. I think the dentist was surprised that they came out as easily as they did. It was only in the office a grand total of 30 minutes. I didn't even get woozy either mdash; just numb.

So, I've got generic Percocet and Vicodin and antibiotics and something for the swelling and my kitchen counter is looking like a pharmacy. I'm holding off on the pain meds to see if I really need them. I didn't the last time I had teeth out. I'm not sure about taking the antibiotics, though. I try not to take stuff I don't need and antibiotics always bring on a yeast infection. Plus, taking unneeded drugs causes resistance. I'll see how I feel tomorrow and make a decision then. I did have a wisdom tooth out once that infected and I felt like total crap and don't really want to go through that again. Danged choices.

On that note, I'm starting to ramble, so I think I'm going to go surf in bed until I drift off into (hopefully) the first pain-free sleep I've had in weeks.

It never fails that when one bad thing happens, more come in a cluster.

The battery in my UPS died recently and it started a chain of battery failures. My camera batteries will no longer hold a charge. The motherboard battery on my mac is getting weak. My laptop's battery won't hold a charge for more than about 20 minutes (kind of misses the point of being portable when I always have to find a plug right away). I have to be really close to my car for my door remote to lock/unlock. Heck, even Marcus mentioned that he thinks he may need to get Watch Batteries soon.

It's frustrating trying to purchase these locally because even the nearby specialty battery store didn't carry my laptop battery when we stopped in. Fortunately we have the Internet and online stores like LowCostBatteries.com to make our life easier. I checked and they carry every single battery I need to replace right now. They even carry the hearing aid batteries that my father uses. I'll definitely be making a purchase from these guys in the very near future.

Do yourself a favor and save yourself the gas money and the headaches and just get your batteries online and delivered to your door. Do something fun, like draining the battery on your video iPod instead!