Now I have to find a way to put the bottle down…

Internet radio is a wonderful thing… At least it is on a broadband connection. I remember my first experience with “internet radio” back in 98 I was on a 56k dial up and it chocked my connection and the sound quality was something akin to a piece of string and two cans. Now flash forward 7 years and a much better connection. It actually sounds good and doesn’t affect my connection. Which as we all know is very important to me since I’m forever playing SWG and Planetside.

Anyway my two current favorite are www.racketradio.com a mix of just about everything out there, as I’m writing this the songs playing have been hard rock / heavy metal and a bit of Depeche Mode and Weird all thrown in for good measure. I wonder who requested those **looks off into distance**

The other favorite is sputnik7 It’s a mix of mainly heavy stuff. Since I’m already pretty pissed off at work I don’t listen to it as much at home.

Remember kids Gammawaves carry more cooking energy then microwaves, which is why nuclear weapons have such a nasty reputation.

It’s easy when you don’t know better

A while back I copied my music to give to a friend so that they would have something put on their shiny new 40gb iPod. Two nights ago I get this rather long rambling message on my answering machine about what great a broad taste in music I have and how much she is learning about me as a person. It was a nice warm and fuzzy feeling I got with that whole broad taste in music thing. I don’t like a lot of stuff but what I do like seems to be pretty broad. I also tend to think that some types of music just get better with age.

Pink Floyd is a good example of this.

Music that still sucks even after proper aging is anything you don’t like. Music is art and it’s all up to the end person as to determine whether they like a particular piece of music.

I think it’s interesting how people get fixated on a particular part of a artists career and don’t consider anything before or after a moment. I like to trot out Pearl Jam as a good example of this. Clint and Brandi are good friends and loyal readers (so I know they will see this sooner or later). The only Pearl Jam they have heard other then what is occasionally on the radio is the “Ten” album from 1991. Don’t get me wrong Ten is good and it holds up rather well 10+ years on. However There are 7 albums worth of material that have come out since then. I’m sure they have listened to “VS” (I think that CD was standard issue for everyone in High School in 1994) I’m fairly sure they haven’t heard “Binaural” or “Riot Act” both of which are excellent CD’s and have come out in the last 5 years and both had maybe one or two singles released just to keep the record company happy.

Anyway my point is to me Pearl Jam is a current group. When someone says Pearl Jam then I think the songs “Save You” or “Bush Leaguer”. When Brandi or Clint hear Pearl Jam they may think “Daughter” or “Release”. It’s all a matter of perspective.

I’ve been writing about Pearl Jam for the last 10 minutes and the music that has come up has been “Radiohead” and “Smashing Pumpkins”

I guess I like there to be some sort of depth to my music. I cannot wait for a new TOOL CD that will keep me busy for several months.

Which brings up another point… I’ve been buying most all of music from iTunes for the last year now. The last CD I bought was A Perfect Circle “The Thirteenth Step”. That has been well over a year now. I have about 15 CD’s worth of music on my computer that nothing more then files on my computer. I guess music has finally been boiled down to it’s most basic componets. Sound and a non physical medium with which to carry that sound.

I need a hobby I’ve got way to much time to think about stuff.

The Life of a punch bowl…

So little brothers roommates have moved out which means that me as his older brother now gets a bi-weekly visit instead of a single visit maybe every week. Don’t I feel honored.

Anyway I do enjoy talking to my brother it does help that we are no longer at each other throats on a pretty constant basis. Doesn’t mean he can’t irriatate the hell out of me. Just that we are not at each others throats.

Tonights conversation consisted of him talking and me listening. At one point he said that next book he plans on reading is “Zen through motorcycle repair” I found that funny since 1. My brother is far from zen and 2. He doesn’t own a motorcycle. But if you know Scott then you already knew that.

So that got me thinking about other zen books and what their titles may be

“Zen and the art of washing machine repair”

“Zen and Home Improvement; Achieveing one-ness while increasing your property values”

“Zen and getting laid”

Yeah I think that one would be a best seller personally. But that is just my thought.

The grass is always greener on the other side. And in my case it’s true the neighbor on either side of me has greener grass then me. Then again I don’t have grass I just have dirt… well dirt and twig attached to a stick.

And I hear he uses a MAC too…

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was
better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly
God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, “THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am
going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those
results, I will judge who does the better job.” So Satan and Jesus sat
down at the keyboards and typed away.

They moused.
They faxed.
They e-mailed.
They e-mailed with attachments.
They downloaded.
They did spreadsheets!
They wrote reports.
They created labels and cards.
They created charts and graphs.
They did some genealogy reports.

They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning
Suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of
course, the power went off. Satan stared at his blank screen
and screamed every curse word known in the underworld. Jesus just
sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their
computers. Satan started searching frantically,
screaming:
“It’s gone! It’s all GONE! “I lost everything when the power went out!”

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the
past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate.
“Wait!” he screamed.
“That’s not fair! He cheated!
How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?”

God just shrugged and said,
“Jesus saves.”

Hi ho on the down low range…

I was watching a trailer the other night for a movie called “Gunner Palace” it’s about a American artillery unit in Baghdad from late 2003 to mid 2004. I’m watching this trailer and the only thing that I can think of is… The people in the movie can’t be more the 21 or 22… Holy crap I’m 25 and I’m older then them and they are “Seasoned combat veterans” I seem to have one of those moments about once a year I’ve been having them a lot more lately. I’m going to be 26 next month and I have problems imaging being married with kids at this age much less being in combat.

It just blows my mind.

Anyway instead of a lawn this year I’m going to do something a little bit easier.. I planted a tree… Right now it’s a twig attached to a stick. If I kill this then I will just write off the whole green thumb thing and stick with computers.

Maybe I should save myself the money and time and just do that anyway.

Ever notice how if you put enough olive oil in to a pot of water before you add the spahetti how it looks like urine?

Hope you weren’t eating lunch when you read that last line.

I think the people at the iTunes music store have a real hard on for Bill Shatner. This week on the front page under the exclusivies tab there is a album from both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (or as they are known to the non geek set Capt. James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock) It was just one of those things where I said… this must be a sign of the apocalypse.

And as Matt is reading this he is firing up iTunes to see if I’m shitting you or not.

I shit you not.

Oh speaking of strange things….

I’ve been having a rough go of it lately at work and some people have helped to make these last couple of weeks just a bit more standable. I would like to call them out so they can come to front of the class and take a bow or at the very least have things thrown at them.

Curtis…

Brandi…

Clint…

I’m not going to say anything about them if you have been a reader (and actually those three make up half of my total known readers) then you know about them already. If you are a newer reader (with in the last year or 3) then you probally need to hit the ol’ website and see the previous incarnation of this here blog like thing and read up on these fine diamonds among my mountains and mountains of rough.

What wonders does ye think ?

I’ve gotten my 15 boxes of girl scout cookiees… this year I mixed it up and got samoanns in addition to my normal thin mints.

So if you have a girl scout cookiee craving in the next couple of months you know who to hit up.

No really I will burn out on girl scout cookiees in about a week here and not know what to do with the rest… of course come july nothing is better then frozen thin mints.

Anywho The must see movies this year in order of release are

1. Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy (it can’t be as good as the book but as long as it’s weird I will be happy)

2. Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith; All I have to say is No Jar-Jar is still a good thing.

3. Serenity; Firefly comes to the big screen! This is the movie I’m waiting for, more so then Star Wars actually.

If you have not seen firefly go rent the series from your favorite online rental place you will thank me later. It’s really very good across the board. To bad FOX totally messed it up.

Not that I’m bitter or anything

Oh wait I am bitter.. but not from FOX I’m bitter from work

but that is another story for another day

**system error not allowed to talk about work on blog like thingy**

damn… my brain just blue screened.

Riding the bit torrent….

It’s been a rough week at work… so I decided to do something just for me tonight… I was going to attack the last thing in the Linux world that I have never tried… I was going to instal Slackware Linux (Que somesort of thematic music) however I seem to have a problem. And I whish it were only related to this one Linux Distrobution but alas it as has been on all of the distro’s I’ve downloaded in the last 6 months.

Yes I’m getting corruptued Linux downloads!

OH THE HUMAINTY OF IT ALL

**note as if this weren’t geeky enough I’m about to go off the deep end, if you are not a geek you may want to goto another blog since this is about to get real boring real quick**

About six months ago I had 3 things happen all with in about the same amount of time that I really can’t pin my finger on any one event.

1. I got a 200gb SATA hard drive and add in raid board to run it off of (I have the SATA connections on my motherboard but I’m paranoid about them failing so I’m keeping my data drive off of my MOBO SATA ports)

2. I got a Dual Layer DVD-/+R/RW burner, It’s SONY DV-700A I’ve patched the firmware to all hell.

3. I started to use bit torrent to download my LINUX ISO’s

Now the part that doesn’t make any sense to me is the one where one of these would be making me get bad LINUX ISO’s

I have been able to download KNOPPIX from bit torrent and store it on my data drive and burn it with the DVD burner and not have a problem but why can I not burn a good copy of Fedora, Mandrake, SUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, or Free BSD? I’ve tried burning them at the slowest rate possible I’ve redownloaded them. I can’t think of anything else.

I wouldn’t think that they are coming off of the torrent traffic as bad since I’m sure that the bit torrent app has some sort of MD5 check summing going on.

I’ve burned a million CD’s and DVD’s on my burner for friends and backup with out a problem.

I’ve got all of my media stored on my 200GB drive and I haven’t had a problem.

This is all just very mysterious to me it’s almost like my ISP is somehow corrupting my torrents as they are coming down the wire.

Which I actually wouldn’t doubt. Hmmmm.

Oh the light…it burns the flesh!

Good lord it’s 9:30 on a Sunday morning and I’m making a post… I must be feeling sick or I just have something to say.

I’m willing to bet that I just feel sick. Very rarely do I have anything worthwhile to say. At least I think so, then again you people are the sick and twisted that keep coming back for more of my goodness 🙂

OK moving on, What’s up with all of these “Magnetic ribbon’s” on peoples cars? I keep seeing Yellow “Support our Troops” which I’m all for and Red, White, and Blue in the style of the American flag. I think that one is for supporting our country but I’m not quite sure as I’ve never seen it up close long enough to actually read it and then there is the Pink ribbon for “Breast Cancer awareness” I don’t know about you but I’m a guy and I’m checking my man boobies for tumors… I don’t think you can get any more aware then that.

So where are the ribbon’s for protectings us from censorship from our own government and the NFL.. by god the Godaddy.com girl was hot and I should have been able to have seen her twice during the superbowl not just once… but no instead we have 30 minutes of mister I’m the most successful surviving beetle.. Yes I didn’t like the half time show… I could have defiantly worked with a Brittany Spears “Full wardrobe malfunction” personal thought right there. Seriously when FOX blurs out a cartoon characters rear end because they are afraid of fines from the FCC when 2 years ago they showed the same scene from the same show from the same episode unblurred you know things have gotten out of control. Remember this is FOX this is the same network that brought us low brow humor and scantily clad women on a nightly basis.. and actually it still does.

What about a ribbon for free speech in all of it’s forms whether it be by a person speaking or source code to a program.

What about a ribbon for the fact that our nation has 250,000 men and women at war and when they get back they may or may not have all the money they need to continue with higher education if they so choose? OK this one is kind of interesting… but hear me out. I have a good friend who was medically discharged from the Marines about 2 years ago now and has part of the GI Bill paying for school but he still has to work and still has to make other bills. Personal thought but anyone who serves in the military should get a full ride to any public university in their home state on the governments dime. I’m sorry what we pay our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen. Is pitiful and then they are put in harms way… they deserve a full ride to college.

OK it appears that I actually do have something to say. Maybe just maybe this is the start of something different or it’s just me venting… who knows.