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Now that the dust has settled a bit and Charlotte is on a pretty good sleep schedule, I’ve had a little more time (and energy) to work on some other stuff besides my day job. My good friend Chris and I have been collaborating on a music project off and on for the last couple years and have started giving it more focus lately.

We call our project Soundwave Prophecy. I added a music widget on the right side. You can also visit us on Reverb Nation. We’ll hopefully have a dedicated website up soon as well. Give us a listen. We hope to be making a lot more music in the near future, provided we all survive The Rapture this weekend.

Cheers.

I’m pretty happy with my current car audio set-up, so I thought I’d share it. The goal here is simple: Add bluetooth for both music streaming and hands-free phone calls.

My car is a 2001 Lexus IS 300. The stock audio system came with a 6 disc CD changer, tape deck (!) and your standard am/fm receiver. As any good gadget junkie will admit, a plain old CD player will just not cut it. I’d been thinking about upgrading my set-up for a while but I just wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I finally figured it out a few months ago and pulled the trigger.

The first step was to replace the stock changer/receiver. I’ve always been a bit hesitant to do this because it would change the look and may affect future potential sale of my car (in a negative way). I’ve always felt this way when it comes to most after-market stuff for cars. I decided to pull the trigger anyway.

I went to a local car audio shop and had them install the most inexpensive receiver that was capable of streaming bluetooth, which was the Sony Xplod BlueTooth CD Receiver. I opted for the mic upgrade so my bluetooth calls would have a higher quality. The mic is hardly visible and sits just underneath the rear view mirror. After one hour for installation and a few hundred dollars later, I was all set up.

I needed a secure place for my phone, so I picked up the car dock for my HTC EVO. It’s not the cheapest option on the market, but it’s the best one available IMO, and keeps my phone safe and secure, in a visible and easily accessible location.

Now that I’d got all the hardware situated, it was time to figure out what software would be best for playing my music. I’d been testing out several android music apps and ultimately chose to use mSpot, which is one of the music-in-the-cloud options currently available. It’s a pretty straight-forward service: upload your music collection to the cloud, pay a monthly fee if you need additional space (I opted for the $4/month option), and access your music from any browser or phone.

So now I jump in my car, slap my phone into the dock, and I’m streaming my entire music collection from the cloud wherever I go. Lately, I’ve been hooked on using the “shuffle” option and seeing how quickly I can figure out which artist and song is playing.

On Thursday October 21st 2010 at 5:07 p.m., Melissa and I were blessed with the birth of our first – Charlotte Mae Johns. 7 lbs. 6 oz., 20 inches long.

I’ll soon be adding a bunch of pictures to her album on Picasa.

I finally got around to moving off blogspot and onto my own domain. I suppose if anyone cared, or if I had enough subscribers to matter, I should have posted about this before I actually moved it. Oh well. http://www.nathanjohns.net is where it’s at now!

I’ll start by saying I don’t support a government-sponsored bailout of the Big Three automakers in the U.S. Some quick rambling points:

• I understand there are a lot of jobs at stake. However unfortunate, this is not a valid reason for the auto bailout. 
• The Big Three have been struggling for years. The financial crisis is giving them an out.
• If they don’t get a bailout, they will file for bankruptcy, sell parts of the company, re-organize, and most likely become profitable automakers once again.
• The government as auto industry manager? Seriously? That’s got to be a joke, because if it’s not, my brain might start to leak out of my nose.(I don’t hate the government, I just don’t think they should be making cars).

Here are a couple observations I have on the auto industry. It’s important to note I know very little about the inner workings of making a car from start to finish, etc. etc. Having said that:

1. WTF is up with the process of going from concept to production? Why do the concept cars always look really sexy and awesome, then get totally destroyed by the time it gets to production? I’ve heard one simple explanation that goes something like this: the concept engineers come up with a car, then they send it to the production engineers who say “we can’t do this, this, this and this, it’s impossible” so they change everything to make it work. So they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making a concept car that gets totally borked and re-designed? That seems like a broken system. I understand a car is a very complicated piece of machinery, but damn. Have you seen the before and after pictures of the Chevy Volt? (Before and after pics – the first one I took at Google campus):

I still like the newer look, but it’s still a big downgrade. This happens to be one of the most anticipated cars ever and I thought would be a good example.

1. WTF is up with automobile advertising? Is it really worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a commercial for a truck with Dennis Leary as the voice-over, and then play it like 43 times during a football game? I understand there’s a certain value behind brand awareness, but c’mon. Auto advertising is broken and needs to be fixed. I think they could spend half the money and be twice as effective.

That is all.

I tried to register a couple of .me domain names today. Searching for the domain names returned “available!” messages, so I continued through the registration and payment process. Entered credit card info, etc. etc. Even got the confirmation email.

Then I got an email saying “The following domain name cannot be registered – reason: already registered”.

Well, that would have been nice to tell me WHEN I WAS DOING THE FREAKING SEARCH TO BEGIN WITH. 

I know I’m not the only one this has been happening to. How can they not be prepared for this kind of surge? As the self-proclaimed “World’s #1 domain name registrar”, you think they would handle this better.

To top it all off, they send me an email asking to fill out a customer survey after speaking with their support on the phone. I filled out the survey which included some negative feedback. After I hit the “submit” button, I get a pop-up in the browser stating: “You are about to submit negative feedback. Are you sure?”

Wow. Seriously? You’re f$%&ing right I’m sure.

Time for a doomsday post, but first, a funny cartoon that’s been around for a while:

When you consider all of the things we worry about these days, it can really be quite depressing. Take the following for example:

• global warming
• the economy and possible recession
• the housing market and sub-prime mess
• the war in iraq – still going
• the deficit – still growing
• skyrocketing gas prices and depleting oil reserves
• crazy floods in the midwest
• crazy wildfires in California
• rising food costs
• disappearing or dying bee population – almost 1/3rd of them
• world population is near 7 billion, projected to add another billion in just 12 years
• reality tv shows like tila taquila

Those are just things off the top of my head. So how are we going to fix these things (well, the ones that can be fixed), and continue to scale for the future?

I dunno. I was hoping someone knew. If you have an idea, leave a comment.

I was shopping at Macy’s with my wife recently when, during a long wait at the register in which I consequently got bored and started snooping around, I noticed how incredibly old their computers were:

And this is the case with most of the department stores I’ve been to. I worked at Mervyn’s for a few years during college and always wondered, even back then, why on earth their technology was so dated.