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teetering on the edge of collapse

In the USA they lock you up for that kinda shit, brother!
My gawd y’allz. As crazy shows go, last night was one of the craziest I’ve seen. The Unicorns are three fresh-out-of-high-school young guys who do whatever the hell they want on stage. After watching nearly the whole show with my mouth open and a “what the hell” expression on my face, I thought I’d write about it a bit. For me, the show was confusing, funny, unbelievable, and entertaining as anything. Musically, it often seemed like the songs were teetering on the edge of collapse, but I think maybe that’s just how these guys play. Let me do my best play-by-play to try and get across what I mean.

We went to the show to see the Unicorns. There were three opening acts, so we knew we were getting ourselves into a late night. Two of the three openers were “meh,” while one – Irving – showed a lot of potential. When the last opening act left the stage, it was about a quarter to eleven. The Unicorns took their sweet time getting on, not taking the stage until somewhere around 11:30pm. That’s when three guys took the stage. One guy, will call him the long-haired one, was decked out with a pink matador’s cape, pink pants, and pink suspenders. The other guy, we’ll call him the curly-haired one, had on a pink tie and pink Boy Scout style belt over grey slacks, no shirt. The drummer, we’ll call him the drummer, had a white dress shirt and pink pants. All three were barefoot.

The opened the show with “The Clap,” which set the tone for the “we’re either gonna fall apart or get through these songs” vibe that stuck around for most of the show. The two “front-men,” long-haired and curly, switched between guitar, bass, and keyboard – each having playing all by the end of the show. The drummer worked with a regular drum kit, a drum-pad, and an AKAI MPC2000 sampler. As for the band’s on-stage histrionics, where do I begin?

They came out, did a brief unintelligible banter with the crowd, and then launched into song one. Apparently there was some guy heckling from near the front of the crowd, and he and the band exchanged some good-natured barbs at each other. Throughout the next couple songs, I guess this guy was still ribbing them – and I could hear him comment after each song. By the third song, the band was telling him to “eff off you eff-hole” (and yeah, that’s what they said). Before the fourth song, they told they guy (or everyone, who knows) that if he didn’t shut up – this would be their last song. Sure enough, as the song ended, the club turned on the vamp and the band walked offstage while shooting each other confused looks. To me, it looked like they didn’t want to leave – but the club started vamping like the show was over and they just did. About a minute later they came back onstage. The long-haired dude took the mic and addressed the heckler (or whatever he was), saying: “Hey, we just talked to the boss of this place… and apparently you don’t even work here. You work for me now, I own you, you’re fired.” I had no idea what was going on. All I knew was that, if I waited 45min for these guys to take the stage – they had better at least play that long in return.

Anyway, the rest of the show was just as strange. In summary: In the middle of songs they broke into Kylie Minogue and 50 Cent covers. At one point the long-haired one accepted a joint from a front-row fan and proceeded to smoke marijuana throughout an entire song, on stage. After which he started clutching his chest and conferring with the other band members – who announced to the crowd: “Our friend here is having an ‘uncertain’ reaction to the marijuana… we’re gonna give him a few seconds for it to wear off.” Then he ambled up to the mic and asked the crowd for some “nachos or chips.” Someone was kind enough to throw a box of fig newtons onstage. Long-haired stoned dude snatched them up and ate one, showing poor manners by telling the crowd, while eating, that: “Fig newtons are chewy.” There was bass guitar humping, go-go dancing on speaker stacks, a bottle of vodka, and even a show’s-over crowd surf by the long-haired dude. Certainly an entertaining show, if somewhat insane.

That’s all I have the heart to write today, any more and I’d be forcing it. Bye.

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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.

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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.

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skipping class

Lazy is good.
A good weekend, felt nice and slow – like I like ’em. I must’ve caught a awful sleepin’ in bug, because I didn’t wake up until after 10am on both Saturday and Sunday. It didn’t seem to suck the productivity out of the weekend though, as I got a lot of yardwork done on Saturday. I’m trying to get the backyard as prepped as possible for the upcoming work-season (when the weather turns). I really can’t wait to get back out there and get to work. I hope to have the sprinklers, sod, and patio done this summer. We’ll see.

While in Taiwan, I realized that my laptop bag is way too heavy. I mean, I was carrying around so much random and unnecessary junk, all of it heavy. I had all sorts of cables and cords and converters for every country in the world. As well as my old TI-89 graphing calculator and it’s 100+ page manual. I decided that when I got home I would give it a thorough cleaning and slim it down a bit. After said cleaning, I was left with my calculator and manual and the link cable for it. Well, after reminiscing about all the good days of LaPlace transforms, differential equations, and 8-bit grayscale Mario Bros., I decided that I’ll never need the horsepower of that calculator again. So, onto Ebay it went. Hopefully it will fetch me a bit of money to help pay for the Garbage Pail Kids I just ordered (shhh, don’t tell Sharaun).

On Sunday, I spent some time redesigning and putting the finishing touches on my Pac Man pages. I wanted to create a nice menu system, and finally add all the pictures and content I’ve needed to upload. I used a free DHTML menu builder to create the nice rollover menu system, and took some new pictures for the results page. I think the final product came out really nice. I still want to add a few things to the pages, but they’re now the most complete they’ve been since I launched the site. I seem to be getting more and more feedback on them lately, and people seem to be enjoying them.

This Wednesday night is the Unicorns show, which I’m really excited about. Since this week is Noise Pop, we’re staying overnight in the city on Friday to catch a triad of shows. I used hotels.com to book a hotel in the city hall district which is in walking distance to the GAMH. We should be able to hoof it to the show on Friday night, and then figure out the best way to hit the double-feature on Saturday. Should make for a fun weekend and some good music.

I have several very vivid memories of college life, but one of my most vivid is of one single even that, for whatever reason, got stuck in my brain as a particularly enjoyable one. It was around noon one day, and I was walking around campus by the engineering library. My next class wasn’t for another few hours, but I didn’t want to leave campus because I had no car and the bus trip back and forth wasn’t worth the amount of time I’d be at home. So I was sitting in the sun reading. A couple buddies of mine spotted me and we chatted for a while when we realized that none of us had class until later that afternoon. So, we decided to walk across the street to a little bar/grill called The Swamp and get some lunch.

The weather was so nice, and The Swamp had a big-screen TV pulled out into the courtyard area and was playing a mid-week football game (as they often did during sunny warm days). We ordered some sandwiches and a pitcher of beer. Because the Florida sun can get hot, they had these awesome pitchers with a frozen core that kept the beer nice and frosty to the last drop. Halfway through the sandwiches, we ordered another pitcher – and we’d gotten pretty tied up in watching the game. And, as that cycle replayed itself over and over, we found ourselves watching the sun go down. Having missed our classes, gotten completely off our heads, and watched a game and a half – we just decided to stay. We hung out until 8ish, then caught buses to our respective homes. Full of beer and sunburned, I remember being so content. What a great day, and far better memories than what I would’ve picked up in whatever classes I missed.

Until tomorrow, did you know the corn nuts are just deep-fried corn?. See ya.

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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.

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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.

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enough to pay taxes

Declare the pennies on your eyes.
Well, yesterday was a fine example of Dave’s First Axiom of Finance: There’s no such thing as extra money. Ever since we moved into the house, I’ve been getting property tax bills from the county. When I set up my mortgage, I had them open an escrow account that I pay into each month to cover my taxes and homeowners insurance, I assumed everything was OK. After getting and immediately filing several bills, I got a little paranoid once and contacted my mortgage company to make sure the escrow account would pay the taxes as promised – they confirmed that all was OK. So, I went on happily filing the now-familiar tax bills in my unread “property tax” pile. Around December-time, I even got a statement from my escrow company which showed that they’d paid my taxes and all was well. I was happy.

Happy until, on Monday, Anthony mentioned just got stung on some kind of “supplemental property taxes.” Apparently, he had been blindly filing his tax bills in some drawer as well – thinking his escrow account would take care of them. I guess he’s a tad more observant than I am – because he noticed the word “DELINQUENT” on one of his bills. He opened it to find that, whatever these “supplemental taxes” are, they were marked “unpaid” and had a $100 penalty attached. He told me to take a look through my pile and make sure I wasn’t getting hit with the same thing. It was funny, because I had just gotten another one of the bills upon getting back from Taiwan this past week. Which, Anthony said, was right about when he got his.

Upon getting home, I found that I was indeed in the same boat as Anthony. My supplemental taxes are marked “unpaid” and there’s a $100 fine attached. So, I now owe the county some $2000… not a nice unexpected bill. Ugh. After a thorough review of my escrow account and property taxes due, I arrived at the conclusion that taxes suck ass. And not only that, the people that put together these statements are sadistic idiots of a breed unknown to me, who can read gibberish legalese and use a numbering system which is foreign to this planet. On top of that, they use old dot matrix printers and some Fortran script to print what’s possibly the most illegible and cryptic missives known to man, sprinkled with words like “anticipated disbursements” and “targeted cushion amount.”

Anyway, the whole point of this story was to demonstrate Dave’s First Axiom of Finance. Rewind a couple weeks to find me sitting in my comfy computer chair, doing my taxes with TaxCut. After an hour so, I happily announce to Sharaun that we’ll be getting $2000 back this year! Wow, having a house really paid off – writing off that interest put us in the “itemizing” range, and we’re finally getting some cash back. Oh, but wait… I now owe exactly $2000 in “supplemental property taxes.” Funny how having a house enables me to get just enough back from my taxes that I can now afford to pay… my taxes. I shoulda never thought of that money as “extra,” that’s the kiss of death. If you get unexpected money, try your hardest to think of it as a curse… maybe then the God of Breaking Even won’t smite you as he smote me. Good luck.

Enough about dough. Last night we watched the movie Thirteen. I had been anticipating it, since it got such rave reviews. Turns it out is based on a true story of one thirteen year old girl’s desire to be popular – and the self-destruction that comes from pursuing it. I was expecting something shocking and interesting. I guess it was a little of both, but I kinda felt like it wasn’t as well done as it could have been. At first, the whole thing was a little too over-the-top for me. Kind of like a souped up after-school-special, and just a little too Go Ask Alice-ish. But as the movie developed, I ended up accepting it for what it is: a decent statement on what some girls go through during those initial teenage years. Yeah, so they chose to profile an atypically extreme example, but I wonder how atypical? I guess that’s the point. So yeah, it made me think – but it was nowhere near as riveting as Spellbound.

Loving the Modest Mouse album more and more… the song “Float On” is genius, a real foot-tapper. Dave out.