busy bee

So as part of my new health regimen, I've been trying to get out of the house more and take rides on BART. My hope is to expose myself to as many different antibodies as possible to help strengthen my immune system. Of course, now I'm finding less time to get out to the gym or go biking. But I think I'll figure out a good balance between work, play, exercise, and food.

Believe it or not, I'm pretty sore from playing about 20 minutes of Wii boxing yesterday (I also broke a decent sweat). If you Google Wii boxing, you'll come across a cute video of a little girl playing the game and a spastic woman playing the game (I'm probably in between somewhere as far as style goes). But the bottom line is that I may finally have a quantifiable reason to purchase a game system! Woohoo!

In other news, my Kenwood KDC-MP8017 (AKA my car's now dated CD player) has finally been repaired! I purchased this when MP3's were being made famous by Napster. Due to a serious design flaw, the ribbon cable that connects the unit to its display face broke (you really need that display to see what's going on). I mothballed this unit only after a year or so of operation.

Fast forward four years later and I found that I wasn't alone in owning a flawed receiver. So much so that replacement cables were being sold on eBay for 10 bucks! Between me, Cathyrn and her mom (who has serious skillz in electronics fabrication), the old cable was desoldered and the new one was resoldered in its place. Granted, while I had spent 10 bucks for the cable, 3 for the solder, and 15 for the new soldering iron when brand new MP3 units are going for 90, I got to have a fun experience with Cathryn and her mom, I now can try to solder anything I can shake a stick at, and I didn't send yet another piece of electronics into the landfill :)