I Feel Like Kicking Fonzie's Butt!!

Well I'm back. All I really have to report is that it's been a very stressful month. I applied for a reverse mortgage through OneRevese Mortage. You know the one, the Fonz is their spokes-person. What an incredible waste of my time. I jumped through all their hoops, ended up sending them $300 for an appraisal, and waited several months for their rejection. Don't do any business with these people. If you really have any questions about what happened, e-mail me.


The good news about my pending sale is that I have some lookers coming it 6:30 this evening. They are friends of mine and are interested in a lakefront house. They were been out once and spent a few hours. Now they want to come out and spend some time, alone. I've been cleaning up and rearranging the last few days in anticipation of their visit. I only hope that they are trying to decide where to arrange their furniture.(fingers crossed). These are quality people and I don't think they are just wasting my time.


Instead of just waiting around, I have been proactive. Even though I sold my vinyl record collection, I have many hundreds of CDs left. I know I don't want to take multiple boxes of CDs in my fifth wheel, so I started doing research on how I would be able to reduce the collection, yet still have it accessible. I began by copying all of them to my hard drive of my main computer.

CD Command Central

boxes of cd's yet to be Loaded                                                           

 I knew I wanted to put them on some kind of thumb drive, so I could play them when I wanted to. That worked out pretty well. In the meantime, I changed the head unit in my Ford F350. I went to Best Buy and found exactly what I was looking for.

It's an Alpine 124SXM.  Best Buy made me a terrific deal. Not only does it have a tuner, it plays CD's, has an input for iPods and MP3 players, works with Pandora, has built-in XM Sirius radio, but the real kicker is the USB bus on the front that accepts my zip drives and plays them back in crystal-clear fashion.

Great new player with thumb drive!

I loaded a ton of music on one of my zip drives and went out that evening (after the installation), plugged it in and got an error message. What! Can't read error? What the heck? After a little research, I learned that I couldn't load the zip drive up with the CD and expect it to play, because CD files end in .cd. So I erased all that and reloaded the zip drive from my Windows Media Center files that I had saved. Well, who knew? Those files end in .wav. So, back to the computer and a little more research, to find out I have to make my files MP3's. YouTube came to the rescue and showed me exactly how to do it.

 For the third time, I took my zip drive out and plugged it in to the new Alpine. Success! Now I just have about eight more boxes of CDs to load up. In the meantime, I get a wonderful kick out of outlawcountry, XM channel number 60. They seem to play my favorites all day and all night.


I'll let you know how the house selling business turns out. I still have faith that things are going exactly the way they are supposed to. I know there's a season for every purpose unto heaven.


I sure do appreciate you coming by.


Michael Ultra

My buddy Joe Ely in Italy

Heard on OutlawCountry daily!

Joe Ely and Michael Ultra
outside original
Stubb's BBQ