Ranting, raving, and nervous babbling.

[6:32 PM]
Happy Work-day to me...
So, here I sit, at work, on my birthday, until midnight. Good way to finish of my b-day, right?

Yeah, I know, and I don't expect any sympathy. With all of the power problems we have to have 24-hour babysitting coverage all weekend here at work, and I got the 4p-midnight shift.

And, honestly, I was a major slacker and didn't make any real plans for the evening anyways. I mean, I'd have made some calls and ended up doing something - out for a beer, dinner with friends, see a movie, etc. - but it just wasn't to be.

[1:02 PM]
BULL. SHIT.

MPAA to regulate 'home theaters'.

Please dear god tell me this is April Fool's come early.

[11:23 AM]
I'm looking outside and thinking to myself that I could have swore I heard someone say the words "Pineapple Express" just last week. Funny, I don't recall Pineapples going together with snow, ice, and pile-ups on the freeway.

[8:22 PM]
This falls under the "you can't make this shit up" category:
Soft lights, Moroccan cushions and a lot of self-love

[8:10 PM]
Back from the dead!

Okay, not really.

Basically, before Thanksgiving I made a pledge to redesign the ol' website over the 4-day T-day weekend. If you haven't noticed, it didn't happen. In an effort to not make myself look like a hypocrite I decided to not post any more blog entries unless they were to a new fancy-pants redesigned site. Well, enough of that bullshit.

I do still plan on redesigning the site, but for now I'm going to resume entries.

My plan is to try to get a hold of the new iLife '06 for my Mac and see what kind of web site I can stir up with the new version of iWeb. I've heard from a few sources that it's pretty darned fancy and super easy to use. Now to get off my lazy ass... (yeah, right)

In other news, I had to find a new home for my servers this week, and after 3 years of having my servers housed in someone else's office, I decided it was time to stop playing around and move them back home. I'm now sitting 6 feet away from my servers, and it's a wonderful thing. Of course, paying Comcast their "Business" class blood money for that priveledge isn't a wonderful thing. Sigh...

And when it rains, it pours. And not just in a "it sucks to live in Seattle right now" way. Although the Seattle rain isn't helping any. (grmble, grmble...) I've been dealing with my server move, getting ready for a trip to Houston for work, playing go-fer for Mom and Dad while they're in Arizona, and keeping things in check for the big wrap-up to the Tax Filing Season at work. Any one of these things will cause stress, but manageable stress. Pile all of them on at once, and I've been a fairly grumpy guy lately.

My apologies to those who I've not been getting back to, and bigger apologies to those I've been acting like a turd to. The trips to Houston won't be subsiding any (they'll be increasing, in fact) but the other things should fade out soon. I won't be able to get any vacation time around 4th of July this year, but by the end of the summer I should have almost 3 weeks vacation time saved up and my boss has to let me use them because the company policy is "use 'em or lose 'em". I'm sure my boss will be just thrilled to have me gone for 3 straight weeks. What am I saying, he probably will be. But, that's a whole 'nother blog entry.

[1:23 PM]
It's Thanksgiving. Woot.

Yeah, I know I should be more upbeat about it, but this damn cold is still kicking my ass. I got about 12 hours of sleep last night (with breaks every so often to pee and reload on cold medicine), got up at 9am feeling pretty good, and by 11am was utterly exhausted again. But, I don't dare take a nap because I'd end up sleeping right through Thanksgiving dinner.

Totally not harshing on my family, but I really hope that dinner goes fast so that I can get back in bed and get some rest. I am SO sick of being sick. I'm getting rest, eating okay, drinking lots of fluids, and taking my vitamins, yet I'm still going through a box of Kleenex each day and don't have hardly any energy to speak of.

Sigh.

[5:29 PM]
Prelude
People who know me know that I listen to a pretty broad scope of music, mostly rock-centric. To clarify, I was fully in key with rock in the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's, but then towards the very end of the 90's (and certainly almost all of the 00's) rock music really started to suck.

Please don't take that too far off the handle, there are certainly exceptions that have come up every so often during that time.

So, when the new-music pool of rock started to dry up, I started moving the opposite direction: Classic rock. Not "oldies". Classic. The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the list goes on. These guys took the Blues, pepped it up, and laid the way for what is today's rock music. In my book, this music will never go out of style.

So, here I am enjoying my newfound old music, when I happen to run across...

What I actually meant to talk about
So, you say you want a Revolution?
(This takes you to Part One, be sure to watch Part Two as well. And it probably won't work for both of you with Mac's)

Whoa.

Sure, I've heard This and heard That about the 60's, but something about this guy's essay (or photo essay would probably be a better term) really brought some things home and enlightened me on a rather dark period of our history. Okay, "started to" enlighten me, as there is just no way you can really run down the entirety of a such a timultuous decade in 10 minutes.

And it's the fact that it only started to enlighten me that's got me hooked. I simply must know more. Damn, I gotta go talk to my Mom now.

You see, my Dad was a child of the 50's, and can wax eloquent about his first Model A, pumping gas by physically pumping gas in the first-ever gas pumps, and of course, Elvis. Mom, on the other hand, was a child of the 60's. She lived on The Ave, has piles of old rock LP's (her favorite is Donovan), went to rock concerts, and swears to this day that she only used roach clips to hold her long bangs of hair out of her eyes.

Long-time readers may recall when I got my record player last March I went through my Mom's old record collection and was awestruck when I realized that my Mom was actually "cool".

The only problem is that when she talks about things nowadays, it's usually about what the grandkids are doing, how stubborn Dad is, or who in the family has what ailment. I'm sure that at some point tomorrow we'll all hear about Dad's colonoscopy that was just last Friday. Yeah, *that's* what I want to hear about at Thanksgiving. But, that's Mom for ya.

Hmmm... how to get her to talk about the old days? I mean, it's not like I can bust out a hooka or or a fat rasta spliff or something. Besides, she was only using them to hold her hair back, remember?

[5:21 PM]
Catching up
Little tiny microbiual creatures have been kicking my ass. Yep, a cold has put me in my place. Truly, it is probably more of a flu than a cold, but I did't do any throwing up. In my book a flu is when you throw up, and a cold is pretty much everything else. This has been one honkin' bad-ass cold.

So, that's what's been going on and why I haven't been posting anything. I also had to get a new keyboard that was both USB and Mac-friendly, as the one I had was PS/2 and only Mac-capable via a wonky PS/2-to-USB converter. So, that's why I'm typing so slowly. Please bear with me here.

I'm sure that the 4-day weekend will help my sickness, but it's pretty full with family stuff, so I'm not sure exactly how much rest I'll get.

Sigh...

[10:15 PM]
I'm lazy. Deal.
Okay, so I'm not doing too well at keeping this blog updated. I do feel bad, since I honestly wanted to try to keep it up this winter after taking such long sabbaticals from it during the summer.

New Shiny and a new Site Overhaul
So... Yeah. I'll cut the crap and get to the chase, since it's late and I'm sick. There are only two reasons I'm still up: 1) I'm trying to finish my "Breathe Easy" tea, and 2) I'm playing with my new toy: a shiny new Mac Mini!

Yup, this post is being posted from within the shiny, metallic bubbliness of Apple Macintosh OS X with the help of Firefox.

A major site overhaul has been on my mind for some time now, and with both the new Mini and a 4-day weekend coming up I've decided that I'm going to do a massive site change over the holiday weekend and I'm going to do it with the Mac.

After seeing what Sean's done over at Alcon Artz with his Power Mac G5, it seems that media design and Mac's are the way to go.