Christmas Gift Brag 2008!
Posted on December 28, 2008Well Christmas has done come ‘n’ gone. Hopefully we all got the presents we all wanted. I know I got some pretty sweet stuff. Here was my take for 2008:
Gift Cards!
Who doesn’t need gift cards? I got $15 for iTunes, $50 for South Pointe mall here in Lincoln, $50 for Best Buy, and $20 for Juice Stop (not pictured). All will come in handy for my desk project I’m working on.
Vodka!
Who doesn’t need sweet delicious vodka? This vodka comes courtesy of Hangar 1, where they make their vodka in an airplane hangar in Alameda, California. A very quality product.
An Ugly Vase!
Every year on Christmas Eve, my dad’s side of the family gets together at Grandma’s house. And instead of a normal gift exchange, Grandma visits the dollar store and picks up about $25 worth of stuff, to be given away as bingo prizes. And I won this vase. Woot.
A Banjo
I’ve been wanting a banjo for some time now (I think it’s at least partially Beerorkid’s fault). So, ma and pa went in and got me one for Christmas. It’s pretty rad; I’m looking forward to learning how to play it. I already know two chords (G and Am, represent!) I’ll be strummin’ and a pickin’ in no time!
What’d you guys get?
Tweets of the Week
Posted on December 13, 2008Just a few of the best toots from my Twitter this past week.
- “The one thing that keeps me editing all this .asp and dreamweaver code is, it’s either this or go clean the toilets. Not sure which is worse”
- “Lie I almost told the perky young girl working the drive thru at Amigos: That I was the bass player in Collective Soul.”
- “Poking around random Chinese servers I found via Google. Hmm yase this seems like a good idea.”
- “I wish we had drunken sarariman here in the states. Why must you keep your best inventions to yourself, Japan?”
Filed Under Humour, Lists | Leave a Comment
Artists of 2008
Posted on December 11, 2008This was originally supposed to be albums of 2008, but there was no way to get that data out of iTunes without doing xml→sql conversions and all sorts of nasty work, so instead I took the lazy route and went with my most played artists of 2008, since Last.fm has that data stored for me. And rather than doing top artists that came out in 2008, or that released albums in 2008, but just the top artists that I listened to in 2008, regardless of all that. Cuz c’mon, new music is shit. There ain’t really been anything good recorded after around 1981. So let’s dig in.
- Los Amigos Invisibles- This one isn’t all that surprising. This Venezuelan acid jazz electro funk group has five albums out, all of them very good. Their newest album, 2005’s Super Pop Venezuela, has the fantastic tracks “Si Tu Te Vas” and “Yo Soy AsÔ, definitely worth checking out.
- David Bowie - No explanation needed. Bowie is legendary. I’ve been listening a lot to his most popular songs, but also been digging around for some of his lesser known songs. There’s always something good to be found with Bowie
- The Decemberists - Old-timey maritime indie folk rockers The Decemberists have an album coming out early next year. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since the lush, progressive The Crane Wife came out. Listen to The Island trilogy here:
- Rush - C’mon. It’s Rush. Good old hard progressive Canadian Ayn Rand-inspired Rush. Good stuff.
- Steroid Maximus - One of the many side projects of avant-garde composer J.G. Thirwell, Steroid Maximus contains elements of jazz, big band, avant-garde, soundtrack and exotica styles. Les Baxter on industrial-tinged drugs. Really out there instrumentals that make you feel like you’re in a spy movie. Worth checking out. Ecotopia is relatively easy to track down, his other albums are not so much.
- 16 Horsepower - This one kinda came out of left field. 16 Horsepower was a neo-gothic country group. One of the big reasons why I want a banjo. They’ve got the kind of songs that tell a story, about the dark side of the south. Here’s “Black Soul Choir”, off of Sack Cloth and Ashes:
That’s the top six. I don’t feel like writing any more, so good night.
Dude
Posted on November 1, 2008I decided to visit the nearby Burger King tonight, for a little late night nosh. So I order my Italian chicken sandwich, because for a basic BK thing they’re not bad, and pull around to the window. There I discovered, much to my surprise, the girl working the drive thru was rather cute. Normally, the people working at that particular location are pushing a quarter ton each. No seriously. Let’s do a little experiment. Reach out your arms straight in front of you, zombie style. Now imagine your stomach reaching out to your elbow. That’s what these people are. But anyways, not this one. She was actually attractive. And wearing a halloween costume.
A gothic angel sort of affair I’m assuming. Dark makeup, frilly black dress, and black wings on her back. Very cute. But here’s the thing. Clearly she didn’t plan ahead with this costume. The drive thru window has a long shelf between where the worker stands and the window. So to hand me change, a drink, or food, she has to bend down pretty far to reach. And her frilly black dress was fairly low cut.
Herein lies the problem. Drive thru windows sit pretty high up, and my car sits relatively low. So for her to hand me things, unless I look away completely, I’m pretty much staring straight down her cleavage. This presents an issue. I’m just a hungry guy, I don’t want to appear as a creep. But my only options are a) stare at her breasts, b) look in the opposite direction as she hands me things, and fumble around trying to grab them, or c) hold my hand up to shield my eyes from her bosom, like I’m trying to block the sun out of the sky. Not much in the way of choices there. What else can one do in that situation?
Filed Under Humour | 7 Comments
Went to a Concert Last Night
Posted on October 10, 2008At Lincoln’s Zoo Bar, Tyler, Matt and I went to go see The Bellflowers, Little Brown Jug, and Black Squirrels. It was a great lineup, we drank too much, and we enjoyed the show.
First up was The Bellflowers (MySpace Link), a good old fashioned country band from here in Lincoln. Their pedal steel player is one of my wine reps, and so that’s how I found out about these guys in the first place. You may remember them from a concert I went to a while ago, where they played with Loup River Band. From that came this video of them performing. I didn’t get any video of them this time, unfortunately. Bonus awesomeness for this band: They have an honest to god singing saw. You never see singing saw players any more!
Little Brown Jug from Joshua on Vimeo.
Second act was Little Brown Jug. The only video I shot last night with the D90. It was really dark and I was really drunk, so the cinematography is pretty bad, and I’m still getting used to the controls. But it’s a good song. Go to the Vimeo page to see HD. You can kinda hear Tyler and Matt yammering in the background, but it adds to the bar vibe. They have the cutest fiddle player ever in this band, by the way.
The final act was from up in Omaha, Black Squirrels (MySpace link). They were a little less old-timey with their sound but were very good. They had an accordion player, so it was a night for unusual instruments I guess. Definitely worth checking out.
Be sure to check the Flickr for the rest of the pictures from the evening, there were some good ones.
SWAOPcast #000
Posted on September 16, 2008A while back, when The Superfluously Worthy Auspicious Order of the Peat was formed, there was talk of using a microphone to record order meetings. A test microphone was purchased, and subsequently returned, but at least one meeting was recorded, at the beginning of the summer. I finally got around to editing that audio, and until the SWAOP website begins in earnest (hopefully soon), I’m going to post the audio here. The microphone we used wasn’t very good, as there was no way to turn up the gain, and since then I’ve worked out what I hope will be a much better solution. At one point in the audio someone was fiddling with something on the table that the mic was sitting on, and so of course that gets picked up quite well, which bugged the hell out of me. I’ve got a boom stand now though so that’ll be remedied in the future too. The catchy little ditty up front is something I put together and I thought it was kind of neat so I’m using it for theme music.
Play or download SWAOPcast #000.
Filed Under Hurray!, I Made This, Podcasts | 1 Comment
Maybe It Was a Titmouse
Posted on September 15, 2008Me: Any way, for some reason, our IT provider is our DNS instead of Verio, which is our host and domain registrar.
DB: Ahhhhh.
Me: So while Verio’s shit is pointing to the new IP address (which I still don’t know why they changed it), dns.bizco is pointing at the old address.
word
Me: So I have to call Bizco tomorrow, ask them to kabooble their DNS kerjigger, or whatever they do, and i’m sure we’ll get charged $200 for them to do it.
Me: Pretty sure that’s an O’Reilly’s book.
DB: lol
Me: “Kaboobling DNS Kerjiggers”
Me: It’s got an owl on teh cover.
Filed Under Humour, Overheard, Tech | Leave a Comment
How Much Happy
Posted on September 14, 2008DB posted a tweet about how he only has 39 songs with the word “Happy” in the name in his iTunes library. So he decided that this should be a game. How much happy do you have in your library? My library, not that happy. Only 7 here:
Douche Moments
Posted on August 31, 2008I was driving through the parking lot the other night, coming home from a long day at work, and I happen to see a pair of attractive girls getting out of their car, presumably also coming home from a long day somewhere. I am one who is often wont to listen to music while I drive, and at a loud volume, because that’s the way music should be listened to. (I am also one who is often wont to use words like “wont”, but that’s neither here nor there.) So I drive past, looking cool and such. I see them, they see me. And then it hits me.
Fuck. The song coming out of my iPod is ska. I hadn’t really been paying attention to what was playing, and now, instead of cool, I was the guy listening to ska. A ska cover song in fact. Ska-punk covers are the pinnacle of douchiness, and to be seen in public listening to such is a terrible thing. I shall be forced to wear a badge of shame for this terrible douche moment.
Filed Under Meta, Rants | 3 Comments
The eMac Project
Posted on July 31, 2008It all started a couple of months ago, when I found an eMac on Craigslist for $60. Neat! I thought, a project computer. Little did I know…
It arrived in good condition, just a sharpie wound on the top edge that I tastefully covered with a sticker. Once that project was completed, I decided to start in on installing Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the LiveCD wouldn’t work. It would boot up and then end with a black screen. Cock. Fortunately, the alternate-installer cd is text based, so I could use that. Ubuntu installed, let’s start up. Boot screen, and… Blackness. After spending several hours on the Google, I figure out, it’s a problem with the X windowing system’s configuration file. It has no way of working with the eMac’s built-in display. No windowing system, no UI. I had no experience editing an xorg.conf file, I don’t know what most of the settings mean. I’m barely able to edit a text file from the command line. After some more googling, I found a copy of somebody else’s xorg.conf file for an eMac, for another version of Linux. But I somehow managed to figure out which settings I need, saved the changes, and rebooted. And result! I managed to solve that problem.
But it was so slow in Ubuntu. Running Panther, the machine’s paltry 256 Mb of RAM didn’t offer much but it was able to run decently. Not so in Ubuntu. It was slooooow. The time from clicking on a menu to the menu actually being drawn was measurable in seconds. Ok, I’ll get some RAM then. 2×512 Mb sticks from OWC, $60 shipped. Not a bad deal at all. Amazingly, replacing memory in the machine is quite simple, only one screw involved. And speed was much improved. Hurray.
But after spending a few days with Ubuntu, I realized that I don’t really care for it. Despite three days effort, sound wasn’t working. There was no plausible workaround for the fact that there’s no Flash support for a PowerPC Linux machine. And that’s not all. A lot of the big selling points of Ubuntu simply haven’t caught up with PowerPC support, and might never, since it’s such a tiny sliver of an already small segment. It was time to switch back.
There was just one small problem. It didn’t come with any CDs. And since it only has a CD-ROM drive, any DVDs I had lying around wouldn’t work. I did some web searching, as there are places online where you can still buy old OSes, including Jaguar and Puma. Only problem is, they’re very price. And I’m not willing to pay $75-$130 for a dated system. Unfortunately, eBay auctions for CDs were few and far between, and frequently had bids pushing to the retail prices. Finally I found an auction for a set of eMac restore CDs. I asked the seller if they were CDs, just to be sure, and he said yes. So I bid, and won for the amazingly low cost of $35 shipped. A few days later the CDs arrived, so I eagerly put them into the plucky little eMac.
And nothing happened. The eMac refused to boot from the CD drive. Ubuntu wouldn’t even recognize that there was a CD in the drive. Did some more googling, even posted on the PPC section of the Ubuntu support forums. I put the CD in my iMac to make sure it wasn’t a bad disk. It was fine. I ejected the disk and that’s when I noticed something. On the disk it said “DVD”. Even though I had asked specifically if it was a CD and was told yes. Shit.
At this point, I made an executive decision. It would be cheaper to buy a DVD drive for the eMac than it would be to drop more money on disks. I popped down to the shops and found an ok DVD drive for $49. And it even has Lightscribe. Whatever that is. I tear apart the eMac using Wilko’s eMac teardown guide. It’s a pretty machine inside, all shiny chrome and neat parts, so I took some pictures, which will go up on the Flickr soon. Continue taking it apart… Still taking it apart. 45 screws later, I pop the new DVD drive in. 45 screws. That’s bad. Then there’s putting the whole thing together, remembering which screws go where, and so forth. When I finally put it together, I only had four screws left over, and no guarantee that the drive or machine was even going to work when I hit the power button.
Plug it in, nice spark from inside the translucent power cord, hit the power button, and it works! Put the DVD in the drive, reboot, and even that works! Amazing! So now I’ve got Panther running on the machine, a 700 Mhz G4 eMac that only cost me $205 altogether.
So that project is all finished, I sit down to see what I’ve missed in the RSS feeds, and I see this.
Cock.
Filed Under Apple, Tech | 2 Comments
