Now you will no longer need to park your new Aston Martin at West Coast Customs for 3 weeks to have Louis Vuitton leather seats installed. LVMH has purchased Aston Martin to place the marquee auto name next to its stable of high-end products including leather trunks and wallets to champagne and cognac.
Update: Louis balked at the $800 Mil price tag and passed on the majority stake purchase.
To hijack Chicagoist’s content in consecutive posts would be terrible. So here is their explanation of how Chicago’s prevailing professional football team become known as the Bears.
The team our city’s rooting for this coming Sunday was named after another Chicago sports legacy, the Cubs. In 1921, home base for this team in the newly formed American Professional Football Association (now known as the ubiquitous NFL) was in fact Wrigley Field (known then as Cub Park). The former Decatur Staley’s, founded in 1920 when the league itself first formed, and sponsored by the A. E. Staley Company (a starch manufacturer), had just moved to Chicago as the Chicago Staley’s.
Ever since moving to Chicago I have many times pondered the correct abbreviation for the elevated train. Chicagoist sheds some light on the subject.
We guess it really depends on who you ask. There’s really no doubt on what the CTA’s stance is on the subject, and we suppose they would have final say in the matter. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think their convention is a little bizarre. And it also doesn’t mean that people in Chicago don’t have very personal and definite opinions as to what they think our venerable system of elevated trains should be called, CTA be damned.
Not only should you be watching the President’s State of the Union address, for obvious reasons, but Engadget HD points out this is a great opportunity to compare the HD gear of the major networks.
Update: On Chicago Metro Comcast NBC is by far the best HD feed. I can not believe that Fox was not broadcast in high definition.
Irony can be a spooky event when items unexpectedly coincide. The wife and I drove out to the western ‘burbs today to pick up a few items before the NFL championship games started. Needless to say we were on a tight schedule. During the 25 min drive to the mall we casually chatted about the mileage and condition of our beloved Passat and what auto we might want next. We briskly ran our errands and returned to the car with half an hour before the Bear’s kickoff. I unlocked the car sat down and inserted the key into the ignition when a strange feeling washed over me. (more…)
Nice website for finding the FM frequency in your area with the least amount of traffic. That is to say noise, so that you can tune your Sirius satellite radio station with minimal interference or in my case the iTrip; which in Chicago is nearly impossible to tune. Now my only question - how do you pronounce Sirius?
The Apple rumor windmill has been silenced. The device is no longer hidden away in the patent office or FCC’s paper piles. iPhone has arrived - well not until June really. I need not post any details here for every single blog in the world has highlighted the features better than I could. All I will add; yes I will be getting one. No, I will not be first in line for Apple is notorious for first generation hardware issues.
Update: Now that the full details of the iPhone (possibly temporarily named) have been flushed out I see this device as less revolutionary than a simple aggregation. The lack of third party apps, built-in battery, lack of memory expansion and no 3G make the phone a über stylish iPod with phone support but not a full smartphone. The Blackberry Pearl is still top of the list for my phone succession.
Update 2: iPhone ring tone sure sounds like a xylophone.
Lifehacker has some pretty good suggestions now and again. This tip on searching Gmail for emails with attachments and being able to further drill down to find exactly what you are looking for is worth a bookmark for future reference. And that is what I am doing here.
Please pardon the mess while I tweak this new design. Over time I will add new components and enhanced functionality. This is the first time that I am trying to write code while the design is live. The goal is by making it live I will work on this site with more regularity. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new style.
For those of you using Firefox, and who isn’t these days, Google has developed an extension that will help sync your browser settings from computer to computer. I use at least three different computers nearly everyday and I have always fought with keeping my bookmarks and settings the same across the systems. This Google Browser Sync is an unobtrusive extension that will sync bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, saved passwords, and restore your open tabs and windows across browser sessions.
The only issue that makes me think twice about installing this extension is the fact the Google pretty much has all of my information and I mean all. I use gmail, gcalendar, greader, and ggroups. I trust Google. Even though I probably shouldn’t, I still trust them.
And to all a good night for 2006. This past year ranks up there with the best of them even if the blog posting was lack luster. Here is a list of events that happened to Stickrod throughout the year:
January - Visited the wife in Bermuda where I discovered the Dark & Stormy resulting in injury
February - Celebrated 1 year of marriage on the 5th
March - Observed St. Patrick’s day in a Mexican bar
April - Wife’s birthday, age not to be listed
May - Vision problems, and wedding at the ocean
June - Wicked, another wedding this one with military flare
July - Holiday at the Cape. Finished 2nd in a charity kickball tourney. Venetian night on Monroe Harbor
August - Achieved 30 years of age, need I say more
September - OSU football commenced (and finished with a perfect, undefeated season as of this post, I am optimistic)
October - Friend lost
November - Mock Thanksgiving dinners. A legend passes
December - Holiday galas. iPods multiplying like rabbits
I look forward to 2007 with new challenges and experiences on the docket. Here is to wishing all of you a happy and healthy new year.
I am going through a site touchup out of view in an attempt to clean up some of the crap lying around this site not to mention the code bloat. In the meantime check out Best Photos of the Year - 2006 by Time magazine.
A friend living in San Francisco had a fun day of Santarchy. In his own words:
Once again it’s the holiday season, which means eggnog, mistletoe, and Santarchy!! This Saturday Tatyana and I went down to Fisherman’s wharf for the San Francisco event check santacon.com for the event in your city! If you don’t have one already, start one). Like last year the forecast was for rain, cold, cold, rain. Miraculously the skies were clear on our way down the hill to the water. The first stop was Pier 39, aka Fisherman’s Wharf. Ground zero for tourists. Along the walk we would occasionally see a Santa or two heading in the same direction. Once we were closer, Santa’s were spilling out of cars, trolleys, and buses. (more…)
Along with fixing the comments on stickrod.com I have started using coComment to track my conversations / comments that I leave for others. I tend to lurk around other’s blogs and not leave feedback even when I find an item of interest or I may possibly be adding value to the conversation. For some reason I feel that coComment entices me to actually leave a note and look at it later.
I will let them explain in detail how it works. In early release form some users created Greasemonkey scripts to notify when comment forms were detected. This is no longer needed for the coComment dev team released a superb Firefox extension. For the “other” browsers a bookmarklet is available but users must remember to enable it before leaving a comment. RSS feeds update when replies are present and other tools are available for enhanced usability of the service.
coComment came around early this year and has since shown tremendous growth. Let’s hope their innovation remains strong and does not head the way of Gravatar.
(cc) MMII – MMVIII
stickrod.com— orginal design based on tumblr ala tumblelog.
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