While I was at church this past weekend, I was sitting with my team after we had finished the run-through early and a couple of my friends (adult friends) started talking about Facebook. Soon, more people joined in the conversation and I finally had to stop them and ask how many of them were on Facebook. It turns out – all of them! I was the only one that wasn’t. So, under the crippling weight of peer pressure, I buckled and signed-up.

I can’t say that I fully understand all of it (What’s with all the poking nonsense?), but I admit that I can see the fun in it. I only have a few friends right now, so that I don’t become overwhelmed while I’m learning how to use it. So, go ahead and look me up, poke me, prod me, tag me, or do whatever else you are supposed to do to me and I will try to roll with it. I’m off to see if there is an iPhone app for Facebook. Oh, and don’t look for me on MySpace, because I would never go there.

jimmy

Q: What’s your workout regimen?

A: I do about 40 minutes a day of qi gong, the fundamental exercises of tai chi. It looks like nothing, but if you learn from somebody who knows the shit, it’s really hard. Or I’ll swim about 200 yards in a pool, just to get a little bulk. I’m about 140 pounds, but I was a big boy when I graduated high school — 160 pounds. Singers look funny at 160, unless you’re in Lynyrd Skynyrd.

He confirms the qi gong, sex, and swimming regimen in this radio interview with Terry Gross.

jimmy
 

But yes, my preferred style of long-form blogging is not conducive to daily entries and I have failed at my challenge to blog for 20 straight days. Meh.

jimmy

The Site: added some links to the links page.

The Workout: legs (five exercises, instead of the usual three), biceps, and triceps at the gym. We did three groups so that we don’t have to workout tomorrow. I’ll just do the treadmill.

jimmy 

Today’s Workout: 2 x 30 minutes on the home treadmill. The first 30 minute leg ended with a random power failure, which is common out here just past the city limits. The treadmill stopped cold and I almost went through the wall. Maybe I should put a UPS on the treadmill for safety. Anyway, the second 30 minute leg was 4 mph at a 3% grade, which amounted to 300 calories burned (or so the NordicTrack says). Naturally, I was listening to the latest edition of Trance Tuesday.

jimmy 

• 11.30.05 – Saw The Spazmatics at Cedar Street on a Wednesday night with Janea, Debbie, and another friend of theirs, whose name escapes me. The band was fantastic and we had a great time dancing to their perfectly rendered 80′s covers. Our fun was only hampered by the fire-code-busting crowd, made worse when they went into a star-struck frenzy trying to rub elbows with Matthew McConaughey and a wasted Lance Armstrong, who for better or worse was standing right next to us at the back of the dance floor. Debbie spoke with him at length, but I never got a full report of the exchange other than she was being a protective mother hen to the hapless lad. He also had protective help from his tall blonde arm-candy (ahem, pre Cheryl Crow break-up), who at one point popped me on the back of the head and demanded, “Down in front!” I turned around to look at the pair, the girl looking quite pleased with herself and Mr. Armstrong looking a little dazed and unsure of his position. I made a dozen quick calculations before finally blustering something incredulous, yet benign enough to diffuse the situation. Meanwhile, the girls were having their own problems with guys dry-humping them on the dance floor. It was almost too crowded to avoid some contact, but some guys were going way too far. [old man] I don’t know if it was that particular night/crowd/venue or if that is the way things are now, but it was very uncool. [/old man]
• In December, Mrs. Pribble and I took a cruise to the Western Carribean. It’s probably too late for a full write-up, but I have a partial write-up and some photos which I will publish separately soon.
• In March, I went to Florida to see my first professional road race – the 12 Hours of Sebring. A very thorough write-up of this event is coming very soon.
• In April, we did the Cypress Valley Canopy Tour for Peyton’s birthday. Not inexpensive, but very fun for most of us. Afterwards, we went to Peyton’s mom’s house in Johnson City for one of the best home-cooked meals I have ever had – homemade fried chicken, homemade baked macaroni and cheese, green beans, sweet tea – all perfect southern standards – really, I can’t talk about it anymore. If I ever run away from home, that’s where I’m going. Anyway, I found myself sitting next to a fella that I had never met before – David Williams, the husband of a friend of Peyton’s. To be honest, for most of the meal, I was concentrating on the meal and not really participating all that much in the conversation at the table. Then at some point, possibly during my third helping of macaroni and cheese, I heard David say something about freediving. I almost dropped my fork. “Excuse me, did you say ‘freediving?’” He had. I had stumbled upon a freediver. How difficult is that? Well, let me explain it like this – he told me that he was a member of the South Texas Freedivers Association. “How many members do you have?” I asked. “About six.” So, what is freediving and why do I care? I’ll explain in an upcoming post.
• Mrs. Pribble and I decided to cut off our cable a few weeks ago. I’ll pause while Rob gathers himself together. We have been subsisting on network TV, PBS, and DVD releases of TV shows, which is a far better way to watch a series. The quality is better, it’s more efficient because there are no commercials, and of course you can cram an entire series into just a couple of weeks and then get on with your life. The down side is that we have to wait for the DVD releases, which is agonizing. We also have to avoid commercials and spoilers. I just finished watching the series finale of Alias and I kept having to close my ears and eyes to the Lost commercials. Anyway, when Alias first came out, I thought it was brilliant. It pushed all the right buttons with me. But, a victim of its own success, it was left to wither on the vine by its creator, while he went off and…well, created Lost. Alias jumped the shark for me during the third season and I haven’t watched it since, but I owed it to myself to see how they finished. My favorite character has always been Sydney’s dad Jack, so even though most of the episode was rather meh, I was pleased when Jack came through at the end with a perfect coda. So long, Jack – you were the coolest.

Today’s Workout: 30 minutes on one of the brand new bikes at the gym, chest, shoulders.

jimmy

Also on Friday, Mrs. Pribble brought home her new treadmill – a NordicTrack C2300. With quite a lot of effort, we managed to unload this 300 lbs. machine from her 4Runner and get it into the house. Except for maneuvering it into place, assembly was straightforward and fairly easy. It’s a very nice machine and seems sturdy enough. I have used it twice in two days, but plan on using it on days that I don’t go to the gym. I also use a treadmill at the gym, so over the course of the next few weeks, I hope to compare our home machine to the professional units. This also leads me to the first of two commitments:

1. Within reason, I will go through one program (30 minutes) on the new treadmill on any day that I don’t go to the gym.

2. I will make a blog entry every day for the next 20 days, starting yesterday (hey, I’m not stupid). In about 20 days, Mrs. Pribble and I will be going out of town with some friends and I won’t be able to make any entries that weekend.

Today, I entered all of my old blog pages through WordPress and edited their timestamps, so that they are now annotated and archived correctly. If you ever wanted to comment on any of my old stories, you may now do so. Also, Mrs. Pribble (who is a programmer by trade) talked me into using WordPress to manage all of my site content, so I will continue the migration process over the next couple of weeks. She’s a smart cookie, so I better listen to her.

Now Playing: Hide and Seek – Imogen Heap

Nothing but a beautiful voice and a vocoder. Soulful, harmonic, space-age a cappella.

Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cutouts
Speak no feeling, no, I don’t believe you
You don’t care a bit, you don’t care a bit

Listening to this music makes me want go out right now (midnight), find an underground after-hours club, drop some methylenedioxymethamphetamine, and then dance it off for hours until the sun comes up. The only problem with that plan is that I’m already a little sleepy, I haven’t done drugs in years (and besides, X causes severe long-term depression and I don’t need any more help with that), I wouldn’t even begin to know where to go to find an underground club, and I’m almost 40 years old, so you know – inappropriate. I guess I’ll just keep working on the site and I’ll listen to more of this music tomorrow, when I’m on the treadmill. Love to dance, though – love to dance.

Anyway, the biggest change in the website is that I will now be using WordPress blogging software for my blog, rather than coding each page by hand. This will make posting and archiving much easier and it will allow comments and other features that my earlier blog didn’t have. I’m still trying to decide if I should use WordPress to manage all of the pages in my site, or just the blog. In the meantime, I am trying to get the blog page to integrate properly into the site. The site looks fine on Internet Explorer, but looks terrible in Firefox. Graphically, I haven’t done much different with the site. I moved the menu bar so that it is easier to read. Otherwise, I am still stuck on the same black, white, grey, and red color scheme, which I think can do no wrong on the web (or in print). Maybe the v.2.0. will look different. Frankly, I think it’s more important that I write more content and the main change in the site should make it easier for me to do that.

jimmy

I never really had time this year to prepare a proper Halloween costume, so on Monday I simply raided my closet for a just barely serviceable costume, just like I have done for the past several years. This year, I’m “Mr. Stuck-in-the-80′s.” Wow. What a stretch. I’m basically wearing my ordinary clothes circa 1984: Levi 501 jeans, a thin leather belt, a pink Polo pullover, an unconstructed blazer, with shoulder pads and multiple lapel pins (“I’m the one your mother warned you about”), and black loafers over white socks. I have a bandana around one wrist and a black Swatch on the other. I spiked my hair and am wearing an earring. Anyway, this costume won’t win me any contests, but it’s brilliant in it’s own way. First of all, it was free and easy to put together. It is enough of a costume to qualify for the participant’s prize of free movie passes at my office costume contest. And finally, my office has a somewhat conservative dress code, yet here I sit in jeans, mussed hair and an earring, so I feel like I’m stickin’ it to the man! This is fun, but next year I really need to swing for the fence and try to win or place in the Halloween costume contest. The best costume I ever did was Edward Scissorhands. I think I could make it even better. Maybe Ken could help me with version 2.0 of the scissorhands. We’ll see.

July 10, 2005, my website UrS4.com celebrates its sixth year on the Internet. On the same date (actually a couple of days before), I pulled the plug on UrS4.com and replaced it with this new and more personal site.

First uploaded to the Internet on July 10, 1999, as Jimmy’s Audi S4 quattro Pages, my site focused on the ’92-’95 Audi S4 and S6, rare sport sedans with perhaps the best turbocharged engine Audi has ever made. It was also my first effort as a website designer. The site was built using an early version of Microsoft Publisher (WYSIWYG) and was heavily influenced by the color schemes of Audi’s corporate web site at the time.

On December 14, 1999, UrS4.com debuted, replacing Jimmy’s Audi S4 quattro Pages with a new domain name, a new logo, and an all new design. I began using Microsoft Front Page (still WYSIWYG) to build and maintain the site. The site temporarily went black in horror of 09.11.01., but otherwise continued to serve as a technical FAQ for the Audi enthusiast community.

In 2002, the latest version of the site was published, featuring much easier navigation and a cleaner layout. At it’s high point between 2002 and 2004, site statistics indicate that UrS4.com got about 200 unique visitors per day, who generated about 100,000 hits per month.

By the time the site reached its high point though, my own interest in the site had started to change. I was adding more and more personal content on the site at the same time that I was ignoring the core content, which I haven’t updated in over two years. So, I decided to let my friend Darin Nederhoff steward my old site here, at S-Cars.org. We have been cooperative sites almost since the beginning and even though it wasn’t necessary, he will even be hosting a full “classic” version of UrS4.com, when it was at its best. Of course, the site is also completely archived at the Internet Archive here. Even in disrepair, UrS4.com leaves its independant status as the 1,677,575th most visited site, according to Alexa. That’s not bad for a homemade enthusiast site without any traffic generating features (forums, classified ads, etc.) Well, until you consider that Zombo.com is at 108,884. My own employer is only a little better than 1.2M. So, my new goal is to crack a million.

The new site will obviously be much more personal in nature. I have finally bent to the idea of having a blog! The site will also have an archive of notable posts that I have made on Internet forums over the years, as well as copies of the personal travelogues and track reports that were already on the old site. I don’t know what else I will put on this site, but I hope to have fun with it. Another difference in this site is that I am coding this site completely by hand in Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is a huge step for me and I have to thank my wife Kimberly (who is a professional programmer) for giving me the encouragement (as well as a little tutoring) to do this. It has already proven to be both rewarding and frustrating. I can see why my wife likes this – it is something to completely obsess over! I have already done so while trying to get the site to look the same in Microsoft Internet Explorer as it does in Mozilla Firefox (which it still does not). And then there is all of the unkempt code strewn all over the page. I spend half of my time just trying to get source code to line-up neatly, even though it really makes no difference whatsoever. I probably should have followed my friend Rob’s advice and just got an account with Blogger, incorporated it into a basic site and been done with it. Now I’m having to do everything by hand and I don’t even have all of the nifty Blogger features like reader comments and auto-archiving. I’m a moron.