Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

Posted on

scoietal dregs need to drive too

It's a place you can go.
What a weekend. I don’t really feel like writing about all the shows, but I’ll just say that the Decemberists were the feather in the cap of a great musical weekend. They are so good live. I missed writing yesterday, things were just too busy and I wasn’t in the mood.

Yesterday I put my Pioneer CD burner on Ebay, starting it out at $200. I’m hoping that the little hack I did to the machine makes it more desirable, instead of less. So far there have been a lot of lookers, so that bodes well. I’m not worried about lack of bids at this point, things usually take of near the end. Hopefully I can make a buck or two on it, since it’ll be all profit to me. Actually, that thing has brought me plenty of money in the past. I sold Beatles bootlegs all through college for extra cash, brining in about $900 in a good month.

Today I had to go to the DMV to get new license plates (I lost one of them). Why is it that the DMV is so busy? I mean, surely there are other places that see as many people per day and aren’t so chronically backed up. There were nearly 100 people in there waiting for their numbers to be called. It was the same thing when Sharaun and I went to the Social Security office to get her new card after we were married. Not only do these offices for some reason move in slow motion, they always attract a very interesting crowd. I mean, “normal” people have to go to the DMV and Social Security right? When do they go? I’m just saying, it seems like the place is always chock full of… umm… people “from the other side of the tracks?” Oh whatever, you know what I mean. The DMV is full of single moms with kids running loose, barefoot rednecks, ex-cons, and every other societal dreg you can think of. Why is this? I did see a handful of regular-looking Joe’s… so maybe this is just my racism and stereotyping showing through.

I’ve half-decided that I’m going to start taking lunch at home whenever I can. Since it’s so close, and I have an hour to myself – I’m going to use that time to get things done around the house. As the weather improves and summer gets here, I can get a lot done in the 40min that I’m not eating or driving back/forth between work. I can even get the lawn mowed if I take an extra 15min or so. Not only is it a potential time to get some work done around the house – it saves me money in the long run by not dropping $8 every day on food. I can make a week’s worth of sandwiches at home for the same amount of money I spend daily on lunch now. Today was my first go at this new plan, but the fix-it man was there to do some house-warranty stuff, so I didn’t get a chance to get anything done. Hopefully I can stick to the plan.

Since I’ve been making some money of late by selling things on Ebay, it’s made me want to work harder to get this t-shirt site live. I’ve been working on creating a functional web storefront where Shaine and I plan to hawk our t-shirt wares. The development is going a little slower than I’d like, but I think we’re pretty close to having a working website. From then on it’s all about marketing. If people start buying, that’s great. One thing that gives me some hope is the reaction I get to the Kiss shirt I wear to concerts. It’s one of the shirts we’re going to sell on the webpage, and I like to wear it to our shows (for some reason, Kiss has lots of indie-cred). I must get about ten compliments on the shirt for every show I go to. Right now I just say “thanks” when someone pays me a compliment on it, but I’d love to be able to say, “Yeah, I got it at angelsnot.com, you should check it out.” Yeah, the website is called www.angelsnot.com – it’s not live yet, so there’s nothing there… the development is going on at an unmapped domain. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we can turn at least a small profit with this thing – I definitely think there’s potential for it.

Today NASA was supposed to make a huge announcement about “significant findings” on Mars. There was a lot of speculation that they might announce they had found evidence of life, either by way of fossils or current biology. That got me really interested actually, and I was hoping that’s what they were going to say. I thought that maybe this Rotini-looking shape was a Mars-worm fossil or something. Turns out they just wanted to tell us that the place used to be “soaked” in water, which is something that most people already believed to be true. So it was kinda disappointing to me. I was really looking forward to hearing the fundies‘ reaction to an announcement of life on another planet. I don’t want to get into where I stand on religion, but I am always interested in religion’s reaction to new science. I would think the affirmation on life other than Earth might cause some interesting waves in the religious community, and with fundies in particular. Owell, the rovers are still there – so there’s still hope.

That’s it for today. I’m gonna cut out a little early and vote, since I’ve been more and more interested in how my opinion can matter lately. Dave out.

Posted on

angry at the urinal

I spit on your urinal!
What’s up with people spitting in the urinal before they take a leak? Is this some manly pre-pee ritual that I never learned about? Is it just a convenient place for chronic-spitters to fix without offending others by keeping a spit-cup at their desk? I’m lost. I only mention it because I actually find it pretty gross. Yeah, it’s a bathroom and all – so it’s probably the best place to do it, but some guys seem to do it with such contempt. I mean, they just spit to be spitting, almost like they’re angry at the urinal or something. Strange.

You wanna know what’s crazy, I thought I was the only person in the world who had ever noticed, let alone, thought about this. However, an on-a-whim Google for “spit in the urinal” came up with a whole mess of hits. Almost all the other links are from fellow bloggers. This tells me that either: bloggers like to examine the bathroom habits of others, or the spit-before-pee thing is really not that uncommon. This, this, this (may be NSFW), this, and this link prove I’m not insane.

Remember the pizza-neck-bomb thing from Pennsylvania? A pizza delivery man was called to deliver a pie to an abandoned building. Next they hear from him, he’s outside a bank he just robbed with a homemade cane-gun and wearing a homemade bomb-collar which is counting down to detonation. He tells the cops he’s been forced to rob the bank and has to follow an elaborate series of instructions to get the collar off before the time runs out and his head blows up. Bomb squad arrives a little late, man blows up and dies, and the FBI has no idea if he was part of some crazy scheme or just a pawn in one. Anyway, that story intrigued me so much – mostly because of the elaborate plan and orchestration, and because of the pictures of the collar and gun the FBI released. Every once in a while I do a Google news search for any updates on it. Turns out the FBI’s leads are running cold – so they released part of the nine pages of letters the guy was carrying. So odd, can’t wait to hear the ending to this one.

Tonight is the Unicorns show at the GAMH, I’ve been listening to “Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone” all this morning to get pumped. What a great album, and surprisingly enough – it’s good “doin’ schematics” background music. I’m really looking forward to this show, not only because I think they’ll be great live – but because it’s a return to the initial hard-core concert crew of just Benz and I. While that may sound gay, well, Ben is totally gay. Yeah… should be fun.

Dave is outta here.

Posted on

this bitchin’ secret cave

I pledge alligiance, to whatever I like.
This morning I woke up thinking it was Wednesday. I even checked my calendar to see what I had going on. I don’t know why, I guess I’m just thinking ahead or something. Looking forward to the weekend perhaps. I kinda wish it was Wednesday.

Man, last night was a crazy dream night. I woke up with so many dreams still lingering in my head. The main one I can remember involves being naked in public places. I found that strange. I mean, I’ve heard of the classic “at school naked” dreams, but I’ve never actually had one. I this dream, I was about to take a shower – so I stripped off my boxers and started walking to the shower. Only thing was, I was at work. To make matters worse, the bathroom at work with the shower was on a different floor than I was, and I hadn’t realized it. Funny since there are no showers at work. In my dream I realized about halfway to where the shower-equipped bathroom should be that I was on the wrong floor. At that point I was stuck. At first I started looking for another bathroom to duck into, but there were none on whatever floor I was on. So I had to walk back to wherever I had come from, stark naked. I remember trying to act like it was all normal as hell, ignoring the stares from strangers. At one point I think the scene changed from work to a shopping mall – just for added humiliation I think. You know how dreams are. Anyway, I remember being all self-conscious and terrified. Strange dream.

The other dream I remember is, I think, somewhat of a revisit to a dream that’s slowly becoming a recurring one. In the only other two recurring dreams I have, the scenery is what makes them “recurring.” However, in this dream – it’s the events that happen the same, not necessarily the surroundings. I think I wrote about it before, but it involves swimming or diving underwater and discovering a hidden cave. Often I’m trying to escape from someone, or hiding from something underwater. Then I always find this bitchin’ secret cave, which in my head is kinda similar to One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship cave from the Goonies. One element of the story that never fails – there’s always a ladder leading down a small rock-chimney into the cave proper. I think the ladder and underwater/secret cave must signify something, but I dunno what.

There was even another dream, where I was living or at least staying in a trailer park. I was the friend of a woman who was in the middle of a failing marriage. I recall lying down in the room where I was staying, hearing them fight, and feeling sad. I remember seeing her in her all-black underwear, crying on a bed in the room across the hall after the fight was over. I think that’s when I left to take a shower… and it turned into the naked-at-work thing from above. Such crazy dreams, I never remember them like that. Wonder if the dream-gods are trying to communicate with me or something.

Well, off dreams and onto reality. I saw the governor on TV this morning before work, talking about the two propositions he’s got on the March ballot. Since I have no idea what either is, I wanted to check it out. On the commercial, if I understood the Austrian accent right, Arnold describes the two propositions as: One to balance the budget and stop the overspending, and one to “tear up the credit card for good.” I liked the credit card analogy at least. Anyway, from what he said in the thirty-second spot, both items sounded reasonable to me. However, being a child of the ever-mistrusting Gen X, I wanted to do a bit o’ research for myself. I found this site which summarizes the current propositions, as well as this one. I found this “yes” site for 56, as well as this “no” site. I found this “yes” site for 57 and 58, and couldn’t seem to find a “no” site. So, I started reading.

After some research, I think I figured out the following: Prop 56 eases the quorum by which a budget is passed – requiring only a 55% vote versus the current 2/3. It also sets aside money for “certain circumstances.” I’m assuming that is the equivalent of me putting extra dough into savings for “what if’s.” Also, and I like this part, if the budget isn’t balanced, the governor and legislature don’t get paid. The opposition to this one say that it also makes it too easy for the legislature to approve tax hikes without enough constituent representation. Prop 57 is getting us some near-term savings by getting what’s essentially a debt refi bond, giving us lower payments over more time (the whole time-vs.-money thing again). Prop 58 makes a balanced state budget a constitutional requirement, and limits the taking out of new bonds to solve the problem (this must be “tearing up the credit card for good”). To me, 56 and 58 sound logical, while Prop 57 sounds kinda iffy. Then again, 56 could be dangerous in that a slim majority (55%) could potentially pass bad stuff. Seems like 57 and 58 enjoy some bipartisan support (1st Google link), which is interesting.

Well, there’s an ignorant voter’s take on what these things mean. At least I feel better for looking into it, now I can vote with some knowledge. I still don’t know if I trust the websites I read… it’s times like these when I need my politico friend Kristi to walk me through the stuff, so I can get a better handle on it. Owell.

Wanna see what Anthony’s gay ass did? He made a color-coded spreadsheet to figure out who owes who what for our recent concertgoing. You can tell he made it, because I ended up owing everyone everything. Peace out y’allz. On the real.

Posted on

grooming our replacements

Lazy is good.
This week went by really fast. Guess it could have something to do with the holiday, but it was also a really busy week at work for me. I’m glad it’s over. My pre-planned weekend activities amount to nothing save mowing the lawn and doing some housecleaning, which is good – I like unplanned time better than planned. I like to be able to choose nothing as something to do, and not be tied to anything. If I’m not committed to anything, the prospect of spending a Saturday working around the house or tinkering with a web page is almost too great a temptation to resist. Also, I kinda think it’s more fun to plan things at the last minute. I like when people call up and spur-of-the-moment plans are made to meet and do something. When you look back on things, spontaneous fun events always seem to be remembered as “funner” than planned ones. I think because there’s that extra bit of “good luck” in the fact that something last-minute worked out so well. Also, I’m lazy and always like to have the “do nothing” option.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on webpages lately. If I’m not working on the t-shirt site, I’m working on the Pac Man Project pages. I’ve been concentrating on both really. I really need to update the Pac Man pages and get them on “auto pilot” so I don’t have to mess with them anymore. I guess now it’s down to a minimal amount of content that I still need to write, but the major work is in re-arrangement and making it look pretty. So, I’ve been fixing the layout and flow and making the whole site easier to navigate and read. I don’t really know why, since there’s no reason really… I guess I just like the project. For the t-shirt site, my motivation is profit. I think Shaine and I (partners in this enterprise) stand a really good chance at making some dough from that project.

I read a really interesting article in Wired magazine on the plane over to Taiwan. It was about the current state of “outsourcing” software jobs to India. While I’m not a software person, being in the high tech industry I am well aware of the outsourcing craze. While the software jobs are going to India, hardware jobs are going to China. Right now we’re on an “accelerated hiring ramp” in Shanghai, and we have yearly percentages of headcount we need to acquire there. The company line is that they’re not actually moving jobs from here to there, but “growing the workforce” to help with some global economy or something. My direct boss-man says he doesn’t buy it, and thinks they are grooming our replacements. I’m not sure how I feel, but I definitely got a whole new perspective on the issue from the Wired article.

I mean, I suppose the whole outsourcing cycle has been going on, on a more basic level, for a long time. In human history, strong people move in and exploit weak people. Eventually, the weaker people learn to be stronger, and at that point the original strong people move on to yet another weaker people and exploit them. I’m no economist, but it seems like: move in to a place, exploit a weaker economy and workforce, drop that place as soon as the weaker economy and workforce strengthen as a result of being exploited, find a new place and repeat. My job seems safe for the time being, but I can foresee a time when I may have to alter the way I think and do things to make myself more valuable than some alien dude who can do exactly what I do at a 6th of the cost. For now, I’ll just keep getting fat and living my American dream-life while they starve. What?

Well, I guess that’s it for me. Dave out.

Posted on

freezeweeding

Where my grass at?
This morning before work I was staring out of my sliding glass door into my backyard of dirt and rocks, and I got a bug in me. I mean, I was looking at the bumper crop of weeds that all the rain has brought me, and started getting really antsy to get back to work on the backyard again. I was feeling all bummed about the progress in the last few months, which amounts to nil because the weather has been against me. I think these feelings were compounded by the fact that it was a beautiful sunny morning. The kind of morning that makes me want to skip work and get some “real” work done around the house.

I succumbed the best I could without skipping work, I went outside and did some weeding. It was freezing out there pulling weeds at 7am, but it made me feel like I’d at least accomplished something regarding the house. While I was out there I came up with a little experiment too. Noticing I had some grass growing where I don’t want it, and knowing I have no grass growing in spots I do want it – I attempted my first grass-transplant. Instead of throwing out the rogue tufts of grass growing in my mulch, I deftly “planted” them in the bare areas of my sideyard (the forklift that brought the retaining wall stones ruined the grass there). We’ll see if my front-yard-Frankensteinery works or not.

Tonight I finally pushed “submit” on my taxes. I was spurred to action when I overheard one of my coworkers mention he’d already got his refund back. Hopefully with the electronic submission, the refund will get here fairly fast. And, after some more research into the whole “supplemental tax” thing from yesterday – things don’t seem quite so bad. I’ll have to pay a fraction of the amount, but not now – so that’s great news. Hopefully we can use some of the tax money to help finish the backyard. Ahh… so many things to spend money on, so little money to spend.

So then, that’s it. I have nothing else to write and I’m tired. Late entry, barely made it on Thursday at all. Until tomorrow.

Posted on

the hunter-gatherer part of my brain

...or you'll freeze to death!
Not much to report today, first day back at work after a week abroad. They recarpeted the entire floor I work on, so before I left for Taiwan I had to box up everything in my cube. Had to empty all drawers and shelves, take down all wall-hangings, pack and box and label everything in site. It was a pain. And then this morning it took me an hour to setup the thing before I could get any work done. Not exactly what I wanted to do on my first day back, but whatever. The boss man said we need new carpet, and I do what the boss man says. It is nice and springy though, but my chair doesn’t roll around as well as it used to. Owell.

I’ve been working on the website I’m doing with my old friend Shaine. We’re gonna try our hand at hawking t-shirts and other assorted gizmos online. We registered a domain and I’ve been working on the inventory database and shopping cart system. Right now I’m cautiously optimistic about the whole thing, not really sure that we’ll make money. But to put it together costs nothing, and we’ve got the merchandise, plus I love making webpages – so for me it’s a win-win. And hey, if we start to turn a profit – all the better! I think there are some good margins in t-shirts, so we’ll see what happens. I plan to have the site live by next weekend. It’d be great if I could finally turn my web-tinkering into a profit-generating enterprise. Only time will tell.

Tonight I think we’re gonna watch movie “Thirteen,” which is kind of a documentary I think. A documentary about rebellion in teenage girls, and I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story. I wanted to see it when it was at the Crest downtown, but missed it. I’m kind of bracing for a depressing reality-type look at modern teen depravity – but hoping it’s not quite as bad as Kids. I figured it’d fit well with the growing-pains-of-American-youth documentary streak I’ve been on. Speaking of visual entertainment, I was ecstatic to learn that PBS is doing another period-type “reality” series. This one’s called Pioneer Quest, and it sounds similar to their previous efforts on Frontier House. I happened upon the original season of Frontier House one day and was hooked right off. It’s speaks right to the hunter-gatherer primal fantasy part of my brain. After that I got engrossed in their England-based 1940 House series, and I apparently missed two whole other installments. I’ve got big hopes for the new series, and my TiVo is on the ready.

The Notwist show was great last night. It was my first time going to Slims, which turned out to be a rather large place – with really good acoustics. The opening band was some crazy group called Themselves that combined some very beatsy alt-rap with a kind of performance art. The rapping/vocals were completely annoying to me, mainly because they were too fast and too shrill and too nasally to comprehend, but the beats and musical accompaniment was superb. In other concert news, we recently added to our upcoming show stable with an indie thoroughbred and a scrappy up-and-comer in the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and the Stars/Dears combo. I’m really excited about both. It’ll be the third or fourth time I’ve seen Death Cab, a second for the Stars, and a highly-anticipated first for the Dears. Good times. Oh, and in further music news – Modest Mouse’s new album leaked this morning… and it is superb… just superb.

OK, I’m outta here. Gotta work on some inventory databases and ASP pages. Until tomorrow then.

Posted on

spam cometh now

I don't care, I still think it tastes good.
Listening to The Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters while I watch the streetlights snap on one by one, I’m sitting in the only lit room in my dark house. This album is perfect, a great winter album – cold and rainy. I’ve been alternating between this one and The Dears’ No Cities Left, which does OK as a winter album – but has a more “summer” tone at the core if you ask me. Both are well worth checking out, and as always I’m willing to send copies to whomever asks. The Dears are playing with the Stars sometime in the coming months, and I’ve been debating going more and more as the album latches onto my brain. We’re booked with Noise Pop and there have been rumblings about Coachella… so I’m not sure what the future concert landscape looks like right now. In the coming months, we are lucky enough to be taking in the following: The Notwist, The Unicorns, The Decemberists, Vanderslice, Pedro the Lion, The Wrens, Earlimart, and bunch of openers I’ve never heard of.

An era of sorts came to an end sometime last week. Seems like the spammers finally got ahold of my primary e-mail address. Up until now, all my efforts to keep my address off the web and out of the hands of spammers seemed to be working. Before last week I’d enjoyed three spam-free years of e-mail. I’ve always used my hotmail address for any web-related sign-up or registration, reserving my pharaohweb.com address for only direct communication with known people and places. Whenever I published my address on my websites, I always used JavaScript code to assemble the html mailto: string on the fly from substrings, so that any web-scouring robots couldn’t do a “mailto:” grep and extract it.

While my efforts seemed to have worked for a while, sometime last week my e-mail must have been sold and sold again. I’m now averaging about ten to fifteen pieces of spam per day. I’d like to thank all the webscription shops who are willing to sell me cheap herbal viagra, the online universities willing to grant me an MBA in three short weeks, the testimonials from people who lost 80lbs from some secret Egyptian mineral, and last but not least the well-represented penis-enlargement lobby, who by all means are soliciting the wrong well-hung gentleman. I’ve decided that I will send a grainy black and white photograph of my horse-sized-member to each and every one of these misguided marketeers in the hopes they will leave me alone once they realize they’re clearly barking up the wrong tree. Tree indeed.

Anyway, in an effort to combat the twenty-some pieces of spam I’ve been getting daily, I started looking for some blocker software. I’ve never really looked into it before, because I’ve never had a problem with spam. My Pop had mentioned that he just did a $20 trial of some shareware that was working great – but I’m all about freeware whenever possible. After a relatively short search I landed on Spambayes. It’s a freeware plugin for Outlook that uses Bayesian filtering to identify and trash potential spam. It builds a database and gets smarter as it goes, but I found it worked 100% of the time with little or no “training.” Plus, I like that it’s a simple Outlook plugin and not a standalone app, less overhead. So if you’re getting spammed to death, check it out – took care of my problem for sure.

That’s it for now. Remind me to write down the story of how Sharaun locked me out of the house tomorrow. Dave out.