SOLID-orange

I spent a few hours yesterday installing an setting up my new system. I love doing harness work, all connections are soldered with Silver and then sealed with shrink tubes.

This unit is AWESOME and everything I wanted it to be. The navigation works fantastic, the picture quality is great and it sounds fantastic. All of the touch screen controls are easy to see and understand too.

I still have some stuff to finish up though, I need to find a more pertinent route for the GPS receiver module as right now it’s just running along the floor under the passenger’s floor mat. I need to get an antenna adapter so I use the regular radio, and I’ll probably want to bypass the factory amp in the trunk as right now it’s way too loud, and the sound quality will probably be better coming directly from this unit.

So I was in Chatsworth California all this week on business. LA is a weird place, it’s surreal. One of the most entertaining aspects for me is the weather, it’s nice all the time, but that has nothing to do with my entertainment. A side effect of the weather is the fact that all the cars there pretty much last until their engine gives out or they get in a major accident. Unlike the North East where everything rusts into oblivion after about a decade of winters, you’ll see cars in LA that are 10, 20, 30 years old and look like they just rolled off the show room floor. I do believe that as long as you wash and maintain your car out there it will pretty much last forever. It’s weird seeing cars from the 70s and 80s rolling down the street like they’re nothing special. Of course this is also contrasted with the fact that Porsches are pretty much the Honda Civic of that area too, and you can drive by the parking lot of a high class restaurant and see a few dozen Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Salines, among other even more rare marks.

Despite that I think I’d have a hard time living there. The sky, while perpetually blue, is several shades lighter in color, likely due to smog. Also the whole area just feels really scummy, if the expensive cars were odd enough they’re often rolling through run-down, graffiti ridden suburban areas. I mean every house has a tall chain link fence around the yard and some of them even have razor wire; even the company parking lot has a gate and 24 hour security personnel. In NH we don’t even have a single security guard, and most people leave their cars unlocked… it’s a long way from LA.

I went to a Dodgers game while I was out there and that was pretty cool, there was a drunk guy in the seat in front of us that proved to be more entertaining than the game. How entertaining? Lets just say he was literally carried out by security by the 6th inning. We also ate at the Player Club before the game which had a great view of the stadium, our seats were great too.

I set out to clean my office this morning and I got it half done… literally you could draw a line down the center where one half is clean and the other half isn’t. I stopped because my brother stopped by and we went to dinner and then filmed a video which was pretty fun. We’re going to film a couple more tomorrow, I’ll be sure to post here once they’re edited and online.

I was going to play some games since I haven’t played in over a week at this point but I ended up starting on one of my new electronics projects. The first part was assembling this Velleman USB kit… it took me about 2 and a half hours but it was quite fun. As much as I like designing my own circuits, it’s always fun to just build something from instructions every once in a while.

I’ll post more about what’s going on with that, once I have more to post about… now I sleep.