Saturday, April 17, 2010

Monday, April 5, 2010

Weekend Athlete!

i'm doing my 1st triathalon april 25th. it's a sprint and i've been training hard to stay out of the bottom fourth.

to lug my bike around, i'm using a 2002 lexus is300 sportcross. i have really enjoyed this car, but i'm always apprehensive to transport the bikes (especially the mountain bike) since i feel like the carpeting is getting trashed.

i'm thankful for the hatch and fold down seats, but loading/unloading the bike (or bikeS for that matter) is never a task  i look forward to. so--i'm seriously considering a Honda Element.

while doing research, i found the most rad site. cars.com has a guy that reviews sport utility vehicles from the perspective of the weekend athlete. check it out here.
of course he found the element THE most weekend athlete friendly car. here's what i love about it:

1) the interior is hoseable--rubber mats are there to handle muddy tires
2) you can stow your bikes vertically inside
3) it has a tailgate
4) it handles like a car
5) if you lay down the front and back seats, they form a nice impromptu bed to chill out on.
6) supposedly the seats are comfortable for long distance treks.

oh and my favorite--a crotchrocket will fit inside!!  (one of my dreams is to race a motorcycle around a proper track)

without further adieu--here's the review!


"error sending" or "authorization error" scanning from a Brother MFC 8480


installed the 3/2010 firmware update and beat my head against trying to get it to scan to a UNC path for an hour. you never know what kind of funky syntax the different vendors want. one time on a Canon Aficio, i had to enter the domain name in ALL CAPS. so i tried all kinds of combinations of slashes after the path, before the path, yada yada yada.

i gave up and called support. turns out that Brother is aware of this issue and that they are working on a patch.

in terms of features, i like what this unit offers. it has a nice and large LED panel which provides intuitive access to up to 10 SCAN TO destinations, and provides the standard copy/fax functions of course.

You can assign any of the 'scan to' slots to a respective UNC path or FTP server.

simple & straight-forward scanning to a share--the only way to do it. HP--you guys should learn a lesson from these other guys.