Cocktail Confessions

Today is December 18th, 2009….and I’m bored out of my skull.  I stare at the clock and realize that I have just under four hours before my shift ends, and it days like this that seem like time stands still.  The four hours will feel like six and in a two hours from now it will feel like eight.

It’s Friday and I have other things on my mind right now…like finishing some last minute Christmas shopping, going to the grocery store to buy for a Christmas Eve meal I am preparing for my family, wrapping the last few presents, a load or two of laundry, and of course a final cleaning of the house before my relatives arrive.

It’s hard to look busy at work when the phone is silent and the whole staff is here and your boss sits only a few feet away.  I tap furiously here at the keyboard taking a break every few minutes to see if there is any ‘breaking’ news on CNN or FoxNews.  It’s more or less the same crap as it was an hour ago, and pretty much the same crap as this morning.  You know you’re bored when as a guy you start reading the ‘Living’ sections as I seem to muse that I am discovering some feminine side of my psyche buried deep within the recess of my mind.

As of today I haven’t had a drink in 2 weeks.  Yup, not once of alcohol in 13 days.  Oh, I haven’t stopped drinking by any means, it’s just I wanted to try a small experiment on myself.  See I went to the gym two weeks ago and I was very forlorn to learn that I gained all the weight back I had recently lost, most likely due to a few recent hop and barley induced binges.  So, I wanted to see how much weight I would actually lose naturally if I cut out all alcohol until Christmas Eve, or a total of 19 days.  Today is day 13, and while I have yet to weigh myself (most likely tomorrow), I actually do feel better and do feel ‘skinnier’.  Now since I haven’t actually weighed myself, I really don’t know if I lost anything or not, but it ‘feels’ like I did.  There have been a few days (okay, at least two that I can recall) that I really was jonseing a stiff drink or a beer, but I didn’t cave.  Hopefully I won’t cave tonight, but I have a feeling I may have at least 1 or two beers with my friend Jon.  After work we may go to a wine bar that serves craft beers and the only way I can avoid his mocking scorn and my own temptation is if I do not actually go.

Oh, last week I went to a bar with a bunch of my friends and I got a healthy dose of razzing for not imbibing in at least one drink.  I don’t blame them or am mad at all…I’m usually the first to have a drink and a decent tolerance.  It should be interesting to see how I do if I hold out until Christmas Eve.

In other things….I am loving my new Motorola Droid.  It really is a fun phone and I get a chance to Face Book and chat with a few friends throughout the day.  The Google map and GPS feature is really fun and interesting, especially since I added an account with FourSquare.com.

Lastly, as I type this, I am using my Droid to listen to LastFM.com and streaming Daft Punk radio.  This thing is awesome in that respect that I have a 24 hour, real time DJ to any type of music genre I can think of, commercial free.  Dare I say it’s even better than my Sirius satellite radio?  Yes, it is.  It’s pretty awesome that I also have this as an app on my XBox 360, so I can stream the same radio content through my home stereo that is hooked up to my game console.

Update on my Ford Sync and Droid issue…

Well, the Internet is a smart thing and after a brief perusing of some forums, I see that I wasn’t the only one having issues ‘sync’-ing there new Droid with MS Sync in Ford cars.  It appears this is a know issue and various reports share that there is a ‘rumored’ fix coming Dec 11 in the form of a patch.

However, after a bit more digging, I did discover there is an alernate Motorola pairing code that uses four digits instead of Sync preferable 6 digits.  The good news?  Well, after fiddling with teh menu option on my steering wheel, I discovered a ‘Special’ PIN number on my Ford Edge, and once entered into my Motorola Droid…..VOILA…it works!

Granted, I’ll feel much better when both the Droid patch comes out in a few weeks AND I get Ford to upgrade my Sync firmware to what it actually should be, and not the version that is currently installed when I bought my car two years ago.  But for now, it appears I got the Bluetooth to now work.

Well, against better financial judgement I broke down and finally upgraded my cell phone after almost 3 years of using my sturdy and reliable LG. 

I went ahead and purchased myself a Smartphone, and a new Motorola “Droid” at that.  I went with the Droid as it comes pre-installed with Android OS 2.0 (Eclair) by those nifty tech heads over at Google.  Also, being my first smart phone required me to get my very first data plan as well.  Thank goodness the company I work for has a corporate account with Verizon as it affords me a nice monthly discount as well on both voice and data.

I’m still getting used to the phone.  It’s much bigger than my LG workhorse, and of course more expensive, and most likely more fragile.  So far, I love it.  It has a lot of nifty features and I’m really digging the GPS with turn-by-turn instructions and live traffic reports.  The way it handles contacts is pretty cool tool, either via the phone interface or a gmail account, and updates pretty much on the fly.  I also enabled Latitudewhich will allow me to track and locate my friends if they so choose.  I can also update my Facebook and have access to a lot of apps, although I suspect most are junk or duplicates and up to this point I’ve never used any, so I can’t really think of too much of a need to start going app crazy now like Apple-heads do.

However, one cool app that of course made it to my Droid is ’10001 Cocktails’.  As the app describes itself: “Put the bartender in your pocket!  Browse and search thousands of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drink recipes on the shot-cocktail-recipe.com website!  Add fresh drink ideas and drink reviews and save your favorite drinks to your personal list.”  Don’t think I won’t!

As far as using my new phone as my MP3 player and viewing YouTube videos….well, not yet.  I’m still hoping to get a new Zune HD in the coming months.

The only drawbacks so far to my new toy is that battery life (when in use and not in standby mode) seems to get sucked dry faster then Motorola would like you to believe it does.  Also, the Bluetooth cannot sync with my Ford Sync yet…that may be a firmware issue on Ford’s part though.  The last 3 attempts at updating my Sync at the dealership, the machine has been ‘down’.  Ugh.  I mean the phone’s Bluetooth works great…I already paired it with my old Motorola headset just fine…I just can’t get it working with my car stereo yet.

Now in a completely different and unrelated tech issue, my XBox took a dump on me late last week.  I got the dreaded RROD (Red Ring of Death) which signifies an internal hardware error that is most likely attributed to a faulty design when it comes to dispersing the temperature inside the console.  So the bad news is my XBox has been shipped back to Microsoft and may not have it for the next 3-4 weeks….Awesome, just in time for Christmas and my holiday break where I’ll get all these new games I can’t play.  The good news is that it is still under warranty and Microsoft is supposed to fix it for free.  So it shipped out Monday this week.  I’ll just have to cross my fingers and make sure it gets back new and improved in 3 weeks.