cleansweeping

A hodge-podge of a Tuesday to ya friends, glad you found some time to stop by. I won’t try and monopolize your attention for this entire entry, rather I’ll just do a bunch of unrelated paragraphs as I work to clean out the bits-and-pieces bin (you know, where I’ve scribbled stuff down that doesn’t really fit anywhere else.

Today I decided to play a little midday hooky from work, taking a longer-than-usual lunch so I could repair the shelf that fell down in the garage – just fell right off the wall. I’d like to blame it on my immense wealth, and the fact that I have so much money I’ve resorted to storing boxed of gold bricks on my garage shelves – the weight of which became too much for my little shelf and caused it to tear off the wall. Unfortunately it was less exciting than that, and I’m not hording gold bricks just yet (give me a few more years). So, I swung by the lag-screw store and picked up some parts, rehung the shelf and replaced all the stuff (mostly hiking gear and Christmas lights), all while I listened to Elvis’ classic 1956 Sun Records sessions (that’s a good additional detail for this story, right?). Anyway, after that Sharaun and Keaton and I had a picnic lunch in the backyard (the weather is unbelievably gorgeous in Northern California lately). We had turkey sandwiches and diet root beer on a blanket in the warm sun. All in all it was a two-and-a-half hour work-diversion, and was entirely worth it.

Changing subjects again… I must admit I was quite depressed this last Friday when I finally found out the details around Radiohead’s summer San Francisco appearance. After the announcement, lean on specifics, that they’d be co-headlining the new “Outside Lands” festival in August, a three-day event additionally anchored by Tom Petty and Jack Johnson, I was excited to see them for what would be the third time. I watched various webpages and message boards eagerly for more details, and was happy to see that fanclub members would get first crack at tickets during a limited onsale on Saturday. Then, I found out that the onsale will be limited to three-day passes, each to the tune of $200. I guess if they don’t sell out those, they may consider offering single-day tickets. Since Radiohead only plays Friday night, and I don’t really have a desire to pay $200 to stand in a field with 60,000 other fans for one night of an abbreviated three-day festival – I’ve decided I’m not gonna go. Sucks, but I guess I can’t really complain since I’m choosing. Owell. No Radiohead this year.

And, somewhat related: I listen to music every spare moment at work. When I’m not on a meeting, or not talking to another human (using our mouths to make sound), I’m on the PC listening to music while I PowerPoint, Excel, or Outlook my way through the day. Really, that’s pretty much what I do. I’ve thought before, that if there was no Microsoft Office suite of applications, I’d have no idea what to do with myself every day. I guess I could draw things on my whiteboard, or assemble letters into words and phrases with my fingers like the ancient Phoenicians used to do or something… who knows. But, music helps make it all somehow a little less banal and monotonous – just a little. I mean, I listen to music at home too, and let me tell you that Cream sounds much better from the couch with sunlight streaming through open windows than from within my gray-walled tomb on headphones. It’s just a known fact, I think. Still, not having music at work might cause me to shrivel and die – and I say my thanks every day that I got a job that affords me that luxury. Way to go desk job!

And, continuing to sweep out the archives…

Been doing some blog sprucing lately, not stuff that you’d likely notice – but stuff that pleases me. For instance, ever since I added the “view all comments by” feature a while back I’ve hated the way that bit of text is smashed right up against the end of someone’s comment. I like the feature, you should check it out if you never have before, but I hated the formatting. So I set about hacking PHP and CSS files and fixed that, and the resulting all-comments page too, just to make them a little more readable and better formatted. Like I said, it’s actually a fun feature – and I added it to encourage more healthy discourse, so get to discoursin’, or something.

Kind of on the blogging topic… it worked well last week, so I’m going to try it again: It’s time for You Decide Friday #2. I realize I missed Monday’s entry (which I feel is the ideal spot to debut a poll), but let’s try the concept again, shall we? This time, I switched my polling software to one that I’m actually able to close when I want. The feature I lost is the ability for your to enter your own options when you vote – it was novel and cool, I know, but realistically it wasn’t working, and, besides, it was vulnerable to scripting injection attacks… stupid. Now then, here we go:

[poll=2]

Finally, it has come to my attention that my link to Keaton’s American Idol audition tape in yesterday’s entry was broken. I’ve since gone back and fixed it, but just for completeness sake you can check it out (and marvel at the apparently huge amounts of spare time I once had) by clicking right here.

‘Night.