I’m not sure if this was big news around the nation or not, but a guy used a jet pack to fly across the Royal Gorge yesterday. It was widely covered by the local media, and you can even see some video of the ride on denverpost.com or YouTube. I was scared just crossing the bridge earlier this year and cannot imagine actually flying over the gorge. The aerial tram ride that is offered might be the closest thing to the jet pack ride, though the jet pack took just over 20 seconds to cross the gorge and reached 75 mph, while the tram tops out at just over 10 mph. The video footage doesn’t do a good job of showing the massiveness of the gorge, but it’s thrilling nonetheless.

So I’m in the market for a new cell phone, and today the Blackberry Storm has been released. Many of you may already know about this, with the amount of publicity it’s been given. I was seriously considered taking the plunge and getting this phone until I started reading some of the reviews today. I think I would really like having access to my email and the web at all times, I am just a little concerned about the specifics of this device. The push/touch screen was supposed to be a big selling point, but so far I’ve been reading very mixed reviews of it. I think I’ll try to get into a store soon to check it out in person before making a final decision. Or I’ve heard that there’s a money back guarantee through Verizon that may be worth looking into. And don’t try to convince me to get an iPhone, G1, or other device as I don’t plan to leave Verizon anytime soon.

Comcast decided to disrupt my internet service for the last 24 hours or so. I called them and complained and they credited my account, though I’m not sure how much of an adjustment will actually be made. I’m just glad that I am once again online. More tomorrow.

Has anyone downloaded Chrome yet? If you have no idea what I’m referring to, google has released their very own stripped down web browser. I know they announced it weeks ago, but you have to give me a little break as I’m still playing catchup from the trip. I haven’t downloaded it so far, but from a few reviews I can’t wait to give it a shot. I love the fact that each tab runs independently from others, so if you have a crash on one site it isn’t going to bring the whole browser down. One item that concerns me are some of the add-ons I use with firefox and the fact that I may not be able to function without them.

I’ve ordered a few things online recently. The first I ordered on the 10th, and it finally showed up just a few days ago. This isn’t the fault of the retailer, as they shipped just a day or two after I ordered. This is the fault of the shipping company (or companies), just look at the route my package took:

You’ll notice that my package was actually in Denver on the 15th, but what happens next? It goes all the way out to Los Angeles! And then finally gets back into Denver on the 20th, five days after it was already here. You would think that the shipping software would have features build in to prevent this very thing from happening. Not to mention the added weight that was unnecessarily transported all over the place, costing extra money for fuel. And what really stinks is I just placed another order from the same company and it is taking a very similar route as the last one. According to the tracking page, the package is in Denver today, but who knows when it will actually be in my hands.

Normally I would apologize for all of the downtime recently, but believe me when I say that it frustrated me more than it did you. For the first time since we moved to Denver, my IP address from Comcast changed. Normally I wouldn’t expect this to cause a huge amount of downtime, but this case was different. Just like I typically would, I updated my nameserves at zoneedit.com first. In the past this was all I ever had to do and the site would be working again within a few minutes. This time I was not so lucky. After making the changes, everyone on the outside world was probably still without access to my sites for hours. Inside my network, I could access my router admin page, but that was it. In fact anytime I tried to go to any of my sites, I was redirected to the stupid admin page. Perhaps this should have clued me in to the problem, but it didn’t. Instead I spent the vast majority of the day making changes to my apache configuration, trying to get another IP address, uninstalling software, and anything else I could think of. I got nowhere.

Finally I decided that I would try making changes to my router configuration since the admin page seemed to be the first problem. After a couple of hours of banging my head on the desk, I finally clicked this little button on one of the admin pages that says, “DHCP Renew.” At first I was a little concerned, because after I hit the button the page tried to refresh but never came back. Later I would realize that this was a good sign, since I was actually edit the router config while my address bar still said edpaffjr.com. After a hard refresh on the page, VIOLA!, everything was back to normal. The bad part is that I changed so many things throughout the day, I now have to make sure I didn’t break anything else. Don’t you just love computers?

Our DVR has been acting up recently. Late last week, when I first noticed the problems, it would frequently pause for a few seconds when watching a recorded show. The frequency of this problem seems to be increasing, and I’m starting to lose out on some of my favorite shows. Before it gets any worse, I am going to take the defective box into Comcast and exchange it for a new one. I wonder if they have new and improved versions available, or if I’ll just get a new one that is identical to what we already have. Has anyone else had any problems?

Today is yet another woot-off. I just bought an iRobot Roomba Discovery SE, the intelligent floorvac robotic vacuum. Kim and I are often too busy to clean the house thoroughly, plus we really hate cleaning, so hopefully this little device will help us out with the floors. We’ll see. There will definitely be a ton of other products on woot.com today, so keep your eyes on the site.

Yesterday morning I caught a glimpse of an Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world. It was doing low speed, low altitude flyovers near General Electric in Cincinnati as I was driving to my parents house. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, all I knew was that it was huge! So big, in fact, that modifications had to be made on a runway at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport so it could land there for tours. Hopefully I’ll be able to take a ride on one of these in the future.

I finally have the swamp cooler working again! For those of you who aren’t familiar, a swamp cooler, or evaporative cooler, is a device to cool the air that is common in low humidity climates. So you wouldn’t use one in Cincinnati or Kansas City, and therefore I had never heard of such a thing until moving into our house in Denver. Instead of central air, we have this monster machine up on the roof that magically cools the air.

Well it was cooling the air fine at the beginning of the summer, but over the last couple of weeks it suddenly stopped being effective. It was blowing air, but the air was not cool. So instead of hiring someone to come in and take a look at it, I do what I often do and consulted the web for any information I could find. After some research I was convinced that the filter pads needed to be replaced. The pads are continuously sprayed with water and the evaporation there is what cools the air as it comes into the cooler.

First, I had to get a bigger ladder so we could get up there and see what the problem was. So I am now the proud owner of a twenty foot extension ladder. The fourteen or sixteen footer that I bought first wasn’t tall enough to reach the roof. Once we were finally able to get up on the roof, we removed the huge pads from all three sides of the cooler and immediately went over to the local hardware store to get some new ones. We put the new pads in on two sides, but before putting the last one in, I wanted to test the system.

So I turned the water pump on, which should soak the pads, but instead nothing happened. Crap! I didn’t even think to check the water pump before replacing the pads. Anyway the motor in the pump must have died because all it was doing was producing a light hum and no water was flowing. I later took the pump into the store and asked if they had anything to replace it. Fortunately swamp coolers are very popular in this area, so they had just what I needed. And finally, $30 later, the swamp cooler is working again and probably better than ever with some brand new pads too!