Fast friends

Watching a movie at 75 mph.

Dead tired

Landed!

A full day of travel is over, and Drew celebrates by the luggage.

Dentist

A perfect check-up.

Cheeto fingers

He's also showing off the new ink.

It even has...

...windows!

My temporary desk

At IFC is so much nicer than my cube at my office.

Drew's bed companion

I wonder what their pillow talk is like?

Like father, like son

Slightly different tech, both valid ways to kill time at LAX.

Ready for the zombie attack

Scooby sandwich

Craigslist is music to my ears

Some people heard me complaining about my music woes. The stereo that I have set up in the kitchen has served me well for probably 6 years, and it was great. It had a 5 disc changer, played mp3 files, had a great digital tuner, got great reception, and had a nifty line in we used to listen to ipods and other external music sources. Unfortunately, it's been dying a slow death over the last 2 weeks. It has a 'click of death' that comes in randomly, and will cut the audio out for several minutes at a time. I thought it might be rogue IR beams from outside, and tried blocking the receiver port, but it happened day and night, and pretty much rendered the unit unusable.

We never really used the cassette or CD player functionality of the unit. We had it up on top of the kitchen cabinets and had a line in dropped down through the cabinets for external music, and otherwise, it was used to listen to AM or FM. What I really needed was something that just did that.

So I hit up craigslist, looking for a deal. Eventually, I happened upon this puppy - a Pioneer DSX-V412, which was just a 6x100w DPL2/DD/DTS receiver. It might be a bit overkill for this function, but it works perfectly. The best part of all - it was only $25! I picked it up from a very nice lady in American Canyon during our trip into Richmond and Berkeley today.

Here it is, majestically perched on top of the corner of our cabinet. The line-in goes through a hole in the top of the cabinet, and comes out at the bottom of the same cabinet (credit: Amy).

And here's the whole setup from a distance. The only shame is that I now have enough power to push 6 speakers, and I'm only running 2. If we happen upon some more speakers in the future, we'll add them on later.

The target shopping cart-o-vater

Safe for kids? We didn't test it.