Mary Hart Must Die

'Backslider' by Toadies

2010-10-04T18:21:00.003-04:00

I've given up on a recording a better take than this, at least on video, so we'll all just have to learn to live with the vocal performance, okay people?!

This one is my own little hybrid beast. (much as most of my covers tend to fare) The original guitar line for this song is just notes, no chords, and relies on the bass and drums to add emphasis. I was, therefore, forced to retool it for solo perform-ability.

It's a bugger of a song too. Between the cheaty little F-sharp move I came up with for the verse lick and the impossibly high, while simultaneously grating vocals, it's all just a little too much for me. And that's why I love it.

Return of the Quotes

2010-10-02T22:30:00.003-04:00

Some of you, I'm sure, will remember those halcyon days of fitful youth that flitted by on wings of Roy's-own ever-growing, long-ass list of uncited, author-less quotations -- whose origins only he might say. Well what you didn't know, I'm sure, is though that list receded into dark places of shadowy recess where public eyes durst not go, it yet survived and indeed proliferated.

I've amended it, maintained it, pruned it for the occasional dud, and here, today, I bring her home to hearth and family. I give to you my personal collection of...

Quotations Anonymous

Quotations Anonymous

2010-10-02T22:29:00.016-04:00

"Rejection sucks, regardless of the quality of the individual who's doing the rejecting."

"I'm drunk, but curious if you've ever measured ur penis? If so, how long we talking?"

"[...]without exposition and backstory, [these characters] feel as though they were randomly tossed into an anime story-generating machine."

"Your font is not your personality."

"There is no reason to believe whatsoever that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure."

"Bush expressed profound reverence for God while his policies massacred God's creation and creatures with the utmost irreverence."

"I don't understand. Lakes have beaches."

"These people, they live in a completely different world than the one with air, and ground, and stuff."

"A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ, but a sickness nonetheless; highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone. Look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether."

"Anyone on CourtTV is worthy of the lake of fire."

"We like democracy in strategically irrelevant countries."

"Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, dismissed the idea that the right of association requires a process by which voters have a meaningful opportunity to affect an election’s outcome."

"To say that these reporters are too focused on covering the horserace is really an insult to sports reporting."

"How do you defend yourself against these anonymous people who've clearly... typed shit up and hit send?"

"Where have all the good men gone; And where are all the gods? Where's the street-wise Hercules to fight the rising odds?"

"There is no difference between those who wear a suicide suit and a diplomat's suit. Both are carrying out [...] war crimes and we should exact the full price not only from the minor squads in the field but also from those who send them."

"The story of a Great Flood sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution is a widespread theme[...]"

"If you feel that you can't go on
because all of your hope is gone
And your life is filled with much confusion
Until happiness is just an illusion
And your world around is crumbling down
Darlin, reach out"

"Vacated and remanded."

"The pre-dawn blast on Thursday, caused by a crude bomb made from low-grade explosives, damaged the recruiting station but caused no injuries. That station, like others, has been the target of protests against the U.S.-led war in Iraq."

"Because, to be honest, it gets hard to feel good a lot of the time. It seems to be getting harder as time goes on. I guess I didn’t figure it would be so hard for so long when I quit college and decided to follow my creative urges. I didn’t figure that people would lose faith in Community and fall into a perpetual endgame of post-apocopytical hedonism without the apocolypse."

"[L]ove don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die."

"It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions. I pray you will bring sanity and compassion back to the Senate."

"[...]the first miracle in Jesus's story is that anyone believed him."

"Of course, in the wild, the gorilla would be at risk to be murdered -- by humans. That’s why they have to be caged -- by other humans. Those appear to be the options - prison or death. Not much of a choice. Humanity sucks."

"[...W]hy, I ask myself, why have I put up with you? I can't imagine but now I know. Fear. Yellow freakin' fear. I've been too chicken shit afraid to live my life so I sold it to you for three hundred freakin' dollars a week! You're lucky I don't kill you! You're lucky I don't rip your freakin' throat out! But I'm not going to and maybe you're not so lucky at that. 'Cause I'm gonna leave you here, [...] and what could be worse than that?"

"Vanity of vanities, [...] vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

"The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe."

"Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it."

"Kill everyone! God will know his own!"

"Until I met you I was dead. An impotent corpse existing behind a false guise of life. A life in which I did nothing real. Day to day I merely went through the motions of living, as if I were a zombie. And I always had the feeling as if I were gradually dying. If I'm condemned to go back to that, then I'd rather..."

"My heart always told me that people are inherently good. My experience suggests otherwise."

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. So, my father's in the army; he wants me to join, but I can't work for that corporation. So what I've been doing lately is kickboxing."

"We are plunged into an existence fantastic to the point of nightmare, and however hard we rationalize, or however firm our religious faith, however closely we dog the heels of science or wheel among the starts of mysticism, we can not really make head or tail of it.

"I saw God the other day, by the river on a rainy afternoon. He helped a kitten that was left all alone. It's a god that only I can see. A black-winged angel that came down from the heavens just for me."

"I am Shiva, god of death."

"So if, in the future, we all find ourselves playing 'Captain Bland's Monotonous Adventure' in what moments we can spare between toiling in the Microsoft overmind's off-world mining complex then I want you to know that I fucking called it."

"If it helps your decision: I'd be considerably less likely to end my own life if you said yes."

"I've got to be crazy. I'm on a pilgrimage to see a moose."

"[...R]enounce the life that perishes, and dismiss from your mind mortal considerations, and throw off the burdens of human existence, and lay aside your weak nature, and put away your perplexities, and hasten to escape from these times. For worse evils are still to come than those you have seen happen."

"We X-Nauts are not all rainbows and lollipops, I assure you. We're quite nasty."

"Just give up and admit you're an asshole. You would be in some good company."

"You can make your own liquid pretentiousness at home by burning Limp Bizkit merchandise until Limp Bizkit start crying, then mixing their tears with the ashes."

"[T]here is no straightforward career path to becoming an astronaut, or indeed to becoming Gordon Freeman."

"There is no moral to this story, that I can see. Carry on with your lives."

"A soldier must stop a swarm of beetles that turn humans into zombies."

"...Thanatos..."

"[I]t would be a rare political figure who would appoint someone he didn't believe to be loyal [to his interests], and that is true from the President of the United States to the Mayor of the smallest hamlet[.]"

"Why switch horsemen mid-apocolypse?"

"Let the communion begin. Burn this oil, it is my body. Shoot up this dope, it is my blood."

"Having no personal loan accounts appearing on the credit bureau report, or if they are present but are closed [...], is a slightly higher risk compared to currently having an installment loan and making payments on it."

"Try waking up and enjoying the life you've chosen - okay - instead of calling your travel agent and getting the big 'budget deal.' It's a t-shirt nirvana."

"There always is hope. But you may not feel that hope until you receive effective treatment for any disorder that you might have."

"Zauling. Is there a word 'zauling?' If there is what does it mean? If there isn't what does it mean? Perhaps both, maybe neither. What do I mean by the word 'mean'? What do I mean by the word 'word'? What do I mean by 'what do I mean'? What do I mean by 'do' and what do I do by 'mean'? And what do I do by do by do and what do I mean by wasting your time like this?"

"Do not panic yourselves! This is just a dream... that we are all having... awake!"

"Meanwhile, later yesterday afternoon..."

"Real racism is quiet; it's subtle[...]; there's disclaimers like: 'Dude, you know I'm not racist... But, uh, these [insert group name],' followed by fucked-up conversation."

"For reasons that are difficult to explain, I hated the guy instinctively. With his floppy dyed blonde hair and artsy glasses [...] he looked like the sort of person who goes up to people and says "I'm filming a documentary." "

"Look, your opinions mean nothing. Your forums mean nothing. You're not influencing anybody. You're not some blogging superstar. You're a lonely loser whose only friend is a flickering screen with pixelated text."

"Luckily, it's been well established that time is not a fixed construct."

"Action Bastard, I neeeeed you."

"Watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical; a liberal; fanatical; criminal. Won't you sign up your name? We'd like to feel you're acceptable; respectable; presentable; a vegetable."

"What did you think? ...TV turned a whole generation of girls into sleazy whores? That we normalized promiscuous behavior to the point where college chicks would get naked for millions of masturbating men for the price of a truckers' hat? Come on, guys. Of course it's hypnosis."

"'As iron sharpens iron so man sharpens another man.' Then I realized - Proverbs 27:17 - that's you and me. You showed me the way. [...] No more hate. [...] You're all angels sent to test me. I see that now. It was all a test. Don't you see I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid anymore. I'm not afraid of death. I'm not afraid of anything. I'm free."

"Still, it's funny -- when I heard about non-participatory democracy, I assumed they meant the voters and not the politicians."

"ActionScript is based on JavaScript (ECMAScript) which is based on Java which is based on C++ which is based on C which is based on B, which is a version of BCPL, ... assembler ... machine code ... swapping wires in a switchboard ... removing/inserting wooden pegs in a wheel ..."

"If this is your god you have a severe ontological crisis."

"Boo-hoo, I have fewer melanopsin proteins than regular people."

"I think I might be gay. I saw this penis on the internet today and I thought to myself, "Well that's... that's just fine." "

"You may not know me but I have twelve billion dollars here that says you'll vote for me regardless."

"But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns. Don't bother, they're here."

"We have a motion to fuck these rules. Can we have a second? Motion carried. Fuck you."

"Perhaps this is what I've longed for ever since that day: the destruction and loss of everything. [...] Destruction always comes before creation. And for that goal, even my own conscience must be cast aside. The only path left to me is straight ahead. Now then..."

"'Normal' is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car - that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes, and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

"Is your employment prospect so bleak that you actually consider running away and having rest stop sex to pay your bills?"

"Are you sure you weren't implanted with virtual memories?"

"If Miley Cyrus has a future in music, music is dead to me."

"Lord, as I must do each week let me repeat things over and over as though as to bore everyone and fill up an hour. Whoa, you're a holy, holy, holy guy lord. You are ten pounds of holy in a five pound bag. [...] Lord, let us read from the epistle of the apostle, Romans 7, Leviticus 3, paragraph 9, section 8, 25 or 6 to 4, Chicago: 7, St. Louis: 2, bottom of the eighth, runners at the corners."

"I've spent all my life thinking and I'm tired of it, I want to see results."

"[...]Fire is bright. Fire is clean; efficient and divine."

"I'm done with subtext. Subtext has ruined me."

"And why would you want to do anything for fans? [...] Fans are clingy complaining dipshits who will never ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill tremulous voices the happier you'll be for it."

"Oh, well, isn't this new and different."

"Vision? What do you know about my vision? My vision would turn your world upside-down, tear asunder your illusions, and send the sanctuary of your own ignorance crashing down around you. Now ask yourself, are you really ready to see that vision?"

"Everybody on Earth uses three percent of their brain; three to five percent. That's why they're there. When you use more than five percent of your brain you don't want to be on Earth, believe me."

"Fear's like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feelings, true happiness, real joy: They can't get through that fog. But, you lift it - and buddy - you're in for the ride of your life."

"Please remain seated until your life has come to a full and complete stop."

"You've got to pick your battles, I guess -- and its probably easier to readjust my circadian rhythm than it would be to deprogram myself of the irrational guilt."

"What the people need is the truth. And not the pretty truth: The horrible, awful, terrible truth that hurts peoples' feelings. The truth that makes people get up and do something."

"I have been a fool for lesser things."

"iraq ... or mcdonald's ... same difference"

"You would've kissed her too. [...] She was naked and all... articulate."

"Fuck off, all debts are paid."

"If it's childish to believe in this, so be it. I'd rather be considered a child than follow a doctrine of cynicism, chaos... apathy."

"Who are we to pass through you?"

"Dear Sir, The six o'clock news is an insult to my intelligence and a disgrace to television. I am not going to watch the show anymore, and neither are my mommy and daddy."

"...Slavery, stitched into the fabric of my clothes."

"I like killing people as much as the next guy, but I signed up to kill the bad ones. Health clinics, trade unionists, journalists, agricultural co-ops, Catholic liberation theologians, impoverished Colombian coffee farmers — these are the barbarians, the depraved opponents of civilization? We turned Central America into a fucking graveyard. Whoever momentarily interrupts the accumulation of our wealth, we pulverize. I’m just not feeling good about that anymore, sir."

"Tooth and bone? Unimpressive. I have left these things."

"So if there's a puddle and it has wealth then the moon makes my heart flutter in the ocean?"

"You don’t want to get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie; a rebel."

"I'd rather risk everything on an unlikely fantasy than fester in the image of despair."

"Would it be impolite at this point in the conversation to just run away from you?"

"You so casually say some terrible things too, don't you?"

"There's no such thing [as a broken heart.] That's just a way of describing one of life's little disappointments that comes close to killing you."

"Two eggs do not get cooked as thoroughly in ten minutes as one does, so either let it sit longer or enjoy less-cooked eggs."

"[...Y]ou suck beyond any worldly definition of the word. You have actually created, and are now on a whole new level of inter-dimensional suck! That's how much you suck!"

"I'm no expert here but it seems to me that the pursuit of a mythic destiny isn't something you need to get [time] off a seven dollar an hour job in order to do."

"Maybe this game is just a really complex gun loading simulator."

"...That's life on the Hellmouth."

"There was blood in the water. You all smelled it. I just did something about it."

"Alphabetizing is offensive to me. Order is offensive. It implies that people know what they deserve. They don't. None of us know what we deserve in the slightest. Whether we deserve to be rewarded or punished -- it's our own hubris that takes us down that path."

"Aim to be Hokage and train your asses off."

"[...]I'll learn to fix stuff if you will teach me how to love, and God will radiate out from within us instead of this bullshit from above."

"The people you are referring to are 'hipsters.' They walk slowly because they 'got no place to be, man.'"

"[...]Meanwhile the humans, with their plebeian minds have brought us a truly demonic concept: mass production."

"I'm not at all impressed with a young plumper flicking his phone and thumbing a few choice buttons-are you? I would think not."

"He's not ranting on a street corner about the horribleness of dog poop, but he's close."

"My self-opinion is decided by fiat, not consensus, and I'm sorry, but the polls are closed and I'm afraid you're no longer eligible to vote."

"Press X to make the world safe for democracy."

"That's me as a vampire? I'm so evil and skanky! And I think I'm kind of gay."

"[...B]y this point I think we can all guess, with some accuracy, the amount of time remaining before the next interval in which Roy will feel the need to get in a van and drive the hell away from his life and everything he knows."

"I am the being that you call "the world." Or also, "The Universe." Or "God," or "the Truth." Or "Whole." Or "One." And, I am "you." Welcome, poor fool, ignorant of your own limits."

"[...]sometimes I would expostulate with myself why Providence should thus compleatly ruine its creatures and render them so absolutely miserable, so without help abandon'd, so entirely depress'd that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life."

"[...]people with a messed up ego can do these mental gymnastics to convince themselves they're awesome when really they're just douchebags."

"As to the crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were national, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is the Governour of nations and knows how by national punishments to make a just retribution for national offences, and to bring publick judgments upon those who offend in a publick manner, by such ways as best pleases Him."

"[...]I believe the time has finally arrived for me to stop accumulating experiences and start living."

"Accommodate no one."

"Now, remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it."

"Would you say that the one of your dreams got in you and ripped out the seams? That's what I'd say."

"I'm shit. You're shit. The world is shit. And if you're sitting there thinking, "Yes, it's true. Everyone is shit except me," then you're a double bacon shit with large fries, Mr. Shitface."

"As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared."

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody."

"Pretty soon you get so you can't hope for nothing. You just keep moving all the time, doing what other folks say. You ain't a man no more. You just work day in and day out so the world can roll on and other people can live."

"[..T]he civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined an unchannelized impulses."

"["...A]ll political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient." Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate any way, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does."

"Your video will start in NaN."

"Dear Mommy and Daddy. I am running away. I am sorry, but I can no longer handle the monotony of middle-class life. Everyone at school is a fucking idiot, and if one more person talked to me about that Susan Boyle performance of Les Miserables, I was going to puke my balls out through my mouth. I love you all, but I have to move on. I'm going to Somalia to be a pirate."

"Lord, we cleared this land, we plowed it, sowed it, and harvested; we cooked the harvest... It wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be eating it if we hadn't done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel but we thank you just the same anyway Lord for this food we're about to eat, Amen."

"While I have yet to find the sense of self and inner peace that might imbue me with the strength required to restrain the lustful passions of my woeful talent, I can at least envision the day whereupon I shall."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"Stop, in the name of all that which does not suck!"

"Seems the only thing in this world that is constantly in fashion is one's own insecurity, and in that respect I am happily out of date. ...And I'm not buying the upgrade, fuckers."

"To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for president Bush AND gay marriage."

"Jesus, Lord, protector of all that is good and holy, deliver me from fat people in short pants."

"[...W]hoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."

"Hey, I've been to West Virginia. Be glad you live on this side of the culture warp."

"O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?"

"[...R]ight now half of America is insanely calling socialized medicine a government plot to destroy freedom. Isn't socialized medicine something you boomers desperately wanted? Couldn't you have created a world where it would be greeted with joy, and not suspicion? How did you fuck things up so badly, where people helping each other is perceived as some kind of government plot equivalent to the nazis?"

"My own experience tells me that people are willing to sacrifice individuality for comfort and familiarity. And in his autobiography, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas agrees."

"Unless this is a clever insult."

"It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude of a body of reasonable men; virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual."

"O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!"

"People have been telling me the world is going to end since I was a child. And much to my surprise and disappointment, the world is still here."

"This appeared as a moral dilemma 'cause at first it was weird, though I swore to eliminate the worst of the plague that devoured humanity. It's true, I was vague on the how, so how can it be that you have shown me the light?"

"This is not a bootable disk. This is not my bootable wife."

"You just listen to the ol' Pork Chop Express here now, and take his advice on a dark and stormy night when the lightning's crashing and the thunder's rolling and the rain's coming down in sheets thick as lead. Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes and the poison arrows fall from the sky and the pillars of heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right square in the eye and he says, "Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it." "

"[...]it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does, I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow."

"[...]I will be his elder brother, and care for him and watch over him; and whoso would shame him or do him hurt, may order his shroud, for though I be burnt for it he shall need it!"

"Escape? Spare thyself discomfort, an that is all that troubles thee. For Miles Hendon is master of Hendon Hall and all its belongings. He will remain -- doubt it not."

"Dear diary, My teen angst has a body count."

"Taste is a matter of taste, obviously."

"The whole prospect of [seeing cartoon boobs] was like some kind of cryptozoological thing."

"'The Time Machine' isn't a bad book, it just happens to start out with the trammels of recondite fecundity."

"You couldn't pour pee out of a boot if the directions were on the heel."

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

"[...T]hat the present order of things was not to be taken for granted, that it presupposed a certain harmony between the world and the guardians of culture, that this harmony could always be disrupted, and that world history taken as a whole by no means furthered what was desirable, rational, and beautiful in the life of man, but at best only occasionally tolerated it as an exception -- all this they did not realize."

"Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces."

"But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.

"I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass."

"Fuck oblivion."

"Mata baka ga fueta."

"What the fuck difference does it make if it works or not? Its chief value is to deter. By the time it goes into action it has already failed."

"It's a zodiac animal transformation home comedy!"

"Never be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid these three vices[...] and I can always be hopeful of you."

"That's just 'cause they don't know how to close. But their ability to open is fucking heroic."

"I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change anything if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about."

"I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends."

"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts."

"I can't go on -- so I will."

"Oh my god, lift me up out of this illusion, lord. Heal my perception that I may know only reality and only you."

"There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets."

"All the news that fits in a pie chart."

"If I had a secret that I didn't want anyone to know, I wonder if the speed at which the world turns would change."

"...the internet, ladies and gentleman."

"It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard -- mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven."

"[...]a "white man" disillusioned."

"But maybe he's only a little crazy, like painters, or composers, or some of those men in Washington."

"Date of Birth: As old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth."

"Here come the Earth intruders. There'll be no resistance. We are the animators. Necessary voodoo."

"And so 1213 became the king of chocolate land. Hail his milky wisdom."

"Hana tul set net tasut."

"Massugu jibun no kotoba wa magenai... Sore ga watashi no nindo dakara."

"Any one else read anything into the fact that 'evian' is 'naive' spelled backwards?"

"[...W]hen we're not propping up fascist dictators like Pinochet, Somoza, Noriega, Duvalier, Trujillo, and Marcos, we are a true symbol of freedom."

"Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision."

"...[I] just like to dig an esoteric hole up front to test myself. ...might have overshot."

"Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search. If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second."

"He is an honorable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man."

"You don't even know anything about christianity!"
"I know enough to exploit it."

"Then I was right. Job has all his children killed and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies. There is no God.

"Getting picked last for dodgeball: That sucks. Getting picked last for the fate of the world: That's a real kick in the dick."

"Telescopic Philanthropy"

"If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well, without sincerely meaning it, and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here[.]"

"I expect a Judgment. On the day of Judgment. And shall then confer estates."

"[O]ne should always support the independents, at least until they start making money. (...the soul-less sell-out fucks!)"

"How does my gun know the emotional availability of the guy I'm pointing at?"

"Isn't your drill the one that will pierce the heavens, the earth, and through to tomorrow?"

"Listen, [...] don't forget. Believe in yourself. Not you, who believes in me. Not me, who believes in you. Believe in you, who believes in yourself!"

"I am quite sure, if you will let me say so, that the object of your choice would greatly prefer to follow your fortunes far and wide, however moderate or poor, and see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen way; than to have the hope of being, or even to be, very rich with you (if such a thing were possible), at the cost of dragging years of procrastination and anxiety, and of your indifference to other aims."

"Will my last breath be a yawn?"

"Time is no object here. We never know what o'clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life, you'll tell me? Certainly. But we don't get on in life. We don't pretend to do it."

"Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day."

Retrospect: Toadies at The Magic Stick

2010-09-20T12:35:00.010-04:00

To those of my detractors who may say, "At age 29, 5'7", and 135lbs, Roy is too old, too small, and too skinny to mosh," I can only reply by screaming, "I find a window in the kitchen, and I let myself in..." whilst barreling 'cross the room, shoulder lowered at unsuspecting rib cage.

The Toadies concert last night at The Magic Stick was absolutely boffo baby! I wear my scraped Achilles tendons and bruised forearms with a glowing pride and great personal satisfaction! I haven't been to a concert so damned good in... ever. So let's get to it:

Despite my deep satisfaction with the evening's entertainment I can't but be harsh with the local opening band, whoever they were. They lowered the bar substantially at the show's onset with a barrage of, albeit ably-performed, light-rock schlock more suited to an Emily Osment concert than a deep, down, dirty, 90's grunge experience like the Toadies. (And if you don't get the 'Emily Osment' reference, Wikipedia that shit -- I'm proud of it.) Perhaps they were simply out of place, and suffered for it; but we, the crowd, suffered more, through an entire set's worth of musical predictability. The songs were simple, unlayered, open-chord 'meh,' relying wholly upon the lead singer's vocals - and perhaps a popularity amongst teenage girls - to interest the audience; which they did not.

American Idol: yes. Toadies concert: no.

The real opening act - the touring opening act - came on stage as 'Gringo Star,' and proceeded to kick ass for an hour or so. Starting off with their highly palatable single, "All Y'all," Gringo Star didn't really fit the grunge, 90's mold laid down by the Toadies either. But they deftly overcame the natural affinities and discriminations of the crowd with a historically relevant, vocally cultured sound and brand of American music that I, at first, find hard to categorize. ...That and a great quantity of sweat sprayed o'er stage by a shaggy, profusely perspiring, guitarist.

I pause here to say: It's nice to go to a show of this caliber and not be force-fed the genre and sub-genre of the lead act all night in the form of carbon-copy opening performers. I appreciate the variety. May this trend continue.

Every man in Gringo Star served as a vocalist of some measure and all passed the performance by perpetually passing their instruments off to one another: swapping drummers, keyboardists, guitars and vocal duties as was their wont. You've got to be impressed by a rotating band! All the moreso when they sound as good as these guys.

In describing Gringo Star's sound I can't avoid that glaringly obvious reference, try though I might to protect my ever-faltering self-image as word-smith. They really do sound like an early era Beatles, with hints of 50's beach rock, Van Morrison's jazz, and modern lo-fi punk. But whatever you call it, call it "good," because that's what it is and that's what it was last night.

-

But onto the main act. That's what we're here for, yes? As Gringo Star retires the stage to a hail of cheers and applause; as I retire to The Magic Stick's outdoor, rooftop seating for a breather and a beer, an anticipatory crowd tightens and throngs at stage's edge. Sound check... "Randall!"

The Toadies opened with a crowd-pleasing performance of "Happyface" off their '94 album 'Rubberneck,' reminding us, lest there was ever any doubt, just what these guys do for a living: growling, squealing, disharmonic, minor-chord beauty. (And heavily-veiled songs about stalker-rapists.)

In the interests of fair disclosure I should say that Toadies ranks in my top five all-time bands. The energy inherent to the music, placed alongside my personal history with their mid-nineties catalogue: those youthful memories of frothing teen angst, my early high school years; it all resounds of a time in my life that was...

Really kind of horrible, actually.

Despite that, the Toadies have never ceased to sate my sensibilities, nor to answer any call I might sound for a thoughtfully raging, musical psychopathy. This is grunge, hardcore, and in its most purely distilled state.

But I'm maybe making them out to be heavier than I should. For you can certainly bang your head to the Toadies, but it isn't head-banger music. And yes, I found many an opportunity to present the two-fingered salute at their show last night; but you might as often have found me, eyes closed, listening intently, picking apart the subtleties of thoughtfully constructed overlapping guitar riffs, or taking note of the Toadies' trademark shifting time-signatures. Mostly though, you would have found me making friends and dodging elbows in the mosh pit. (...At least when not uncouthly straddling the girl in the leather jacket standing in front of me at stage's edge whenever the crowd lunged suddenly forward. "Nice to meet you," I say as my pelvis cups her ass.)

Toadies presented a number of songs off their new album, 'Feeler:' An album, I'm told, was written some decade ago but kept from the presses by evil, nasty, cold-hearted record label bastards. Feeler, in its present state is supposedly a distinct reworking of that original intellectual property, so as to avoid the aforementioned capitalist, pig-dog, swine's claims that they own it, and no one plays with their toys but them! Yeah, suck on it Interscope.

Without being further exposed to the new album's content I can say that what I heard at The Magic Stick last night was, more or less, more of the same. And we're all quite pleased at that. May the Toadies continue to epitomize grunge! They need only keep it up for another five years or so. At which point the 90's will have finally edged the 80's out, becoming a retro fad. Wherein the Toadies can again reign at the top of the charts, where they so deservingly belong to be.

DIY Street Fair

2010-09-18T13:58:00.009-04:00

I saw two bands at the DIY Street Fair in Ferndale last night. If the DIY website is to be trusted, the name of the first band was 'Outrageous Cherry.' A particularly suggestive title considering both the drummer and bassist appear to be of fetchingly non-consensual ages.

Once you pop the fun don't stop.
(Oh, that's really bad. I actually feel ashamed.)

Then came 'Goober and the Peas.' I don't know how to feel about this one. They were an entertaining act, and yet...

The band thinks less of the crowd for showing up.

Afterwards we stopped in at a bar where they didn't serve my kind. Ordering a beer turned out to be too complex a transaction for me to complete without assistance and since no one had an abacus and there was only one copy of Lenin's summary of Hegelian dialectics to go around, I remained thirsty.

Another Goober advertises his wares.

In conclusion: Someone needs to knock Ferndale down off its high horse. And I'm just the man to do it!

Flo TV

2010-09-12T19:58:00.007-04:00

For those so impossibly, hopelessly, helplessly addicted to the pandering, ignorance, falsehood, egotism, and slow-death of television: Now you can take your killer with you!

Durrr... I like TV!

Another 'something' for you to stare vacantly at in the public space while breathing through your mouth and failing to interact with reality. That is when you aren't breaking conversations to stare slack-jawed into your palms, while thumbing a few 'lols,' you fucking twat.

Congratulations.

'Away' by The Toadies

2010-09-07T17:06:00.007-04:00

[UPDATE: I've deleted this video because... I don't have to explain myself to you people.]

It's a banner day for recording. First 'I'm Impressed' by TMBG, now a mad Toadies cover!

Atop which its the first video from my new pad, as well as the first to feature the trashy little electric guitar I'm holding in stead for my sister, who will almost surely never get it back. Muahaha.

I've been training my voice up to this Toadies cover. I still have some difficulty keeping my throat open throughout the whole song to hit those highest highs, as you may or may not notice here. It's one of those performances that I can only do successfully once or twice a day. After that my larynx mumbles something derisive about the recording artist's union and walks off.

Anyway, this was the first take and the most successful. The vocals are a little back in the mix, but I'm satisfied. Note to audiophiles: The reverb heard here is natural. My new apartment has awesome acoustics. Though I admittedly didn't put them to grand use here.

And as always, watch out for white-guy knees!

'I'm Impressed' by TMBG

2010-09-07T12:58:00.004-04:00

Download

Ah, They Might Be Giants... When do you fail to entertain?

While I open myself to an all too obvious criticism by posting this, I do so both heedless and regardless. Here's an acoustic cover of TMBG's, 'I'm Impressed,' aided much by my present suffering under seasonal allergies. Seriously, more than one have remarked that my vocals sound better when I'm congested. If I'm ever going to make it in this business, it's going to take a lot of influenza!

Don't mind the inauspicious little coda. I'll find something better for future performances.

Touch my Muffins

2010-09-06T19:44:00.009-04:00

I expanded my baking pedigree today when I attempted some simple from-scratch muffins. I was only planning to make a loaf of bread, but when I got to the second rising, I thought, "as long as everything's already dirty, why not use this next hour of thumb-twiddling to try something new." Those were my exact thoughts. Verbatim. Note the quotation marks.

But I quickly ran aground when I found I had no baking powder. I had baking soda on hand, but no powder. "What's the difference anyway?" I asked the internet. "Well," says the internet, "baking powder is really just baking soda, but with a palette-neutralizing acidic agent added to enable a steady release of the gases that promote rising; usually cream of tartar."

"But I don't have any cream of tartar, internet-sama. Would lemon-juice work? That's acidic. I've got that!"

"Uh, maybe."

So, I substituted 3/4 of a teaspoon of baking soda, added to the dry mix, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice, added to the wet mix, in place of the 1 tablespoon of baking powder called for in the recipe. Then, for a filling, I threw in some raisins and brown sugar. It tasted good as a batter anyway. Let's see what we get:

In the pan.

Out of the pan.

That golden brown booty.

So we may have overshot the rising agent a tad. Still, they taste pretty good. At least my pantomime seems to think so!

I made pastry!

Was there ever any doubt?

They could be sweeter, actually. But what do I want for raisins and brown sugar? Anyway, next time we'll go 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and maybe they don't all come out looking like breast implants.

But what about the bread?

Even my bread looks sexy.

Best tasting loaf yet! Though I need to work on my shaping method. This rolling it up and tucking it under business gives the ends more lift than the middle.

That's going straight to my hips.

Space Band Live - Track 5

2010-09-02T00:24:00.009-04:00

Download

I'm living on 4th Street in Detroit where local artists known as 'Space Band' practice/jam/perform occasionally. Space Band is a percussion-oriented groove band that creates sound and music spontaneously using a myriad of instruments; and certain other objects that don't really qualify as instruments. I've quickly fallen in love with their music for its depth, layering, and unapologetic art.

Before I start sounding any more like some douche-critic, I'll get to the point. Last week I heard Space Band tuning up down the block, so I came sailing out of my apartment building and down the sidewalk with a Zoom H4 handheld digital recorder mounted atop a monopod in tow. I placed my recorder in an out of the way spot, sat down, and enjoyed the show. The H4 captured the performance startlingly well and after a four-hour mastering session, it sounds like absolute gold.

So: despite having yet to provide the band with a chance to vet my work, I am summarily jumping the gun and proudly presenting the world with track 5 off the album I'm calling:

'Space Band - Live From the Mothership'

Goodnight Fishes

2010-09-01T13:52:00.006-04:00

Why, that didn't last long at all. Either the female population is getting less appealing or I'm getting wiser in my old age, because I've already closed up shop on the personals hunt. However, I couldn't leave the floor without airing some selfish commentary on my way out. (I never can.) I changed my profile title to "Nevermind." and learning from Kurt's mistake, aimed the shotgun at someone else.

My parting words follow:

"

I guess I'm just not cut out for the online personals scene. Honestly, the way things are going I have to wonder if I'm cut out for interaction with females at all. I don't seem to know how to talk to you. I know I'm being funny, witty, and intelligent. I try to start off on a resoundingly upbeat and positive note. Yet every attempt I make seems to end in some form of dejection.

I think my problem lies in the effort to represent myself fairly. I try to be honest and to the point with you, and you almost always recoil from it. Apparently you prefer a little more horse sh*t up front; a little more of the magic kingdom treatment when things first get started. And I suppose I must be coming off too real and uncomposed; too interested when I'm interested; too in love when I'm in love.

Therein lies your problem too: You want honesty in the long run: a truthful, straight-talking guy who won't walk around on you. But in the first instance you want someone to play a little coy; be a little aloof; make you wonder; get you excited. In other words you want a guy who'll lie to you on the first date, and be absolutely truthful by the six month anniversary. The problem with that is: most guys who will lie to you on the first date will lie to you on your wedding day and all the days thereafter. So you mostly end up picking ***holes, because ***holes are everything a girl wants, if only for the first two or three months.

No, I haven't had much luck on this site. I'd like to say that most of that is your fault. I read the ads on here and I can't believe the ignorance, simplicity, and repetition of it all. You have no idea how many of you say the exact same things in your profiles, nor how frequently what you say has absolutely no substance to it whatsoever. Otherwise at least half of you aren't really looking for anything out of these ads other than a fluff to the ego, or the sense that you're "trying" when you really aren't. And atop that a great lot of you are unabashed, outright liars, marketing yourselves in a light that couldn't be reproduced with a twenty kilo-watt bulb beaming down from a low cloud in God's heaven.

Seriously, the most physically attractive lot of you are obviously only on this site to stroke your own vanities. You give me three hollow lines of text that tell me nothing whatsoever as your description, and then pair that with eighteen pictures of cleavage, tattoos, exposed mid-riff, and bathing-beauty shots. Gee, what a great personality you've presented here. I really want to get inside your mind . By the way, is that mind of yours a 'C' cup or...? These girls are just collecting emails from horny morons as a testament to their physical dimensions. I'm sure it's a real boost to the ol' ego, ladies, but some of us are here for a reason, and you're just getting in the way.

And while I'm near the topic, what sort of double-standard is it that the women 'round here feel so free to post shots looking confirmedly down their push-up-bras, but meanwhile deride any man who dares post a picture displaying more than his hair and teeth? So wait: you can show me the tattoo that starts at the bottom of your right breast and disappears at the base of your inner thigh, but if I post a shirtless something, taken at a beach, I'm some kind of jack ass? You're in a sun dress with back-lit silhouette detailing every line of your nude body, but if I'm featured in a snap wearing bike shorts, that makes me a prima donna? Only the girls get to be pretty, then? Is that it?

Then we have the obese contingent - no small population (PUN!) - who simultaneously lay bear the desire to receive honesty and forthrightness from potential mates and suitors, only to then post the most deceptive and misleading self-photography they can lay hands on. Pictures from high school; from three years and thirty pounds ago; pictures taken in fun house mirrors; pictures shot with vertically distending lenses equipped to the cameras. And my god! how you women manage to find the exact poses, angles, and lighting that will mask acknowledgement of your own heaving third dimensions... The 'hard-lit, downward angle, neck up, sucked-in cheek shot' is just prolific on this site. You don't think that makes you a bit of a liar? a bit of a game-player just like you claim to hate with such passion? when you display a picture that says, "Hi, I'm 130lbs," and then show up on our date with a body that confesses, "eh, more like 180." Might I suggest you don't ask others to provide you with levels of honesty you can't be bothered to bring to the table yourselves?

In fact, there's something creepy about most of the photography on this site. It's become more and more conspicuous as I've browsed more and more profiles that most women know exactly their best side, angle, pose, and facial expression. If you look carefully you can see them making the same face in every shot; turning and lifting their heads by exactly the same slight degrees. To think that women, en masse, as a race and gender, have spent that much time preening before mirrors in the pursuit of their most favorable likenesses, and once found, then trained themselves to adopt that pose the instant someone brandishes a camera... What wretched fate is this? What self-inflicted egoism! What hitherto unfathomable vanity deigns turn truth to fiction and kill the spontaneity of a simple photo!

And the content of these profile descriptions! Sweet lord, was my entire generation's female population spoon fed lead paint chips throughout childhood. The retardation here is perverse.

So, you love your friends and family, eh? They "mean the world to you?" Is that right? See now: that's actually the kind of thing you don't have to say aloud. "I like my friends," is a statement that tells me you aren't too damned bright. See: because, everyone likes their friends. That's why we call them 'friends,' and not '***holes.' Now, if you told me you loved ***holes; that ***holes meant the world to you; well then I'd be impressed for you are truly an evolved being who has overcome the childish discriminations of humanity. As it is, though: telling me you love your friends and family is kind of like shouting, "I eat food!" and it sounds as dumb.

Besides which it is one of the many things you all say in near unison. I can only hope that you have no idea how many other women have written the exact same sentences in their profiles. I but pray that you are not intentionally being this redundant. Though even if you are unaware it speaks poorly of the whole gender that so many should categorize themselves so similarly; not to mention with such shallow, empty statements.

"I love my friends," "I like to have fun," "I like to go out, but I also like to cuddle on the couch with a movie," "I like pretty much any kind of music," "I enjoy travelling."

You see how all these statements are actually non-statements. They're what we call filler. They express and reveal nothing about you as an individual. Most of them amount to saying, "I enjoy things that are enjoyable." So when you use these phrases, you are wasting everyone's time displaying a mock aloofness that you're not even conscious of -- and no one wants to date the semi-conscious. Except, of course, the semi-conscious.

And what's with this trend of putting up a personals ad wherein you expressly tell me that you are too busy to actually have a relationship with me? Every third person on here is going to school while working full time and volunteering three nights a week somewhere, and they expect someone to voluntarily attach themselves to this scheduling quagmire as some kind of perfunctory Boy-Friday. Listen, I understand that you want it all, ladies, but if you can't make time for finding it, then you don't get to have it, okay -- case closed. Move on. Don't waste our time. What you're telling me when you put up ads describing your own lack of availability is that:

a.) You expect me to do some kind of magnificent, wooing, dance of the gods that will impress you enough to make a hole in your otherwise impenetrable schedule, just to try me out. And:
b.) If after that herculean effort to sequester a first date, we should actually hit it off, you'll only be immediately available to me in tiny increments, leaving me to await patiently the whims of your date book.

Gee, I can't wait to dive head first into that relationship. Let me make all the effort for both of us, so that you can have the convenience of occasionally pulling me down off the curio cabinet to play house for a spell. Awesome!

Intelligence is a big factor for me when I'm looking through these profiles and, to date, the female population of this site has represented itself rather poorly on that field. From the quality and content of your profiles I can only glean that you are at least not so intelligent as to bother displaying that intelligence when trying to attract a mate. That elucidates your priorities pretty vividly for me. Clearly the majority of you are not looking for smart men. If you were then you would unruffle and display some of your own IQ-feathers as lure, and I say here, once and for all, you have not done that.

Well, I sort of started out maudlin and turned quickly caustic, didn't I? I've been watching a lot of Dennis Miller comedy specials, so... Anyway, I say all the above to say this: I think we're done. You're just not good enough for me and this has already been a great waste of time.

Goodnight fishes.

"

Directions of Product (Dollar Store Engrish)

2010-08-31T14:58:00.014-04:00

Here's a dollar I won't get back:

The front.

The back.

The kicker.

For the record - and the search engines - these are "YIN'ER BEST CLEANERS CLEANING SPONGES," and the back of the packaging reads as follows:

"
DIRECTIONS OF PRODUCT

THE PRODUCT IS HIGH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CLEANING TOILET ARTIELES OF INTERNATIONALIZATION. THERE ARE CHARACTERISTIC: DECONTAMINATION IS POWERFUL. NO BRUISE. DON'T BE STAINED WITH GREASE, IT IS LIKED BY HOUSEWIFES OF THE LLNITED STATES OF AMERICA, JAPAN, THE SOVIET UNION, ITALY ALL THE WORLD.

USE: THE PRODUET IS USED TO WIPE ICEBOX, WASHING MACHINE, ALUMINUM PRODUETS, PLASTICS PRODUCTS, PORCELAIN, GLASS WARE, STAINLESS STEEL PRODUCTS, CLEANING IS EASY.

POINTS OF ATTENTION: BE USED TO RINDS OF SURFACE ROUGH WARE, TOILET STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

"

...and I quote. The dollar spent? Totally worth it!

Simple Neon Arrow

2010-08-31T00:11:00.003-04:00

In the course of graphically designing a web page for a new night club that will be opening in Canton, I required an image of a neon sign in the shape of an arrow. After perusing the Google image gallery and finding nothing quite to task I decided to try modeling it in 3d.

I found a very concise tutorial, exactly suited to my level of experience within Blender and, augmenting it a touch here and there to better meet my mind's eye's beholding, put the effort to bed in under an hour.

The result:

...Simple but photo-realistic and exactly what I needed. Note that I made the curve 3-dimensional so as to twist the glass tube toward the backing piece. I think that little detail is what sells the image.

Mosquito in Profile

2010-08-27T13:13:00.007-04:00

Late last night I felt a mosquito alight upon my exposed hand - the only portion of skin not hidden beneath quilt or pillow - and work his muzzle deep down into the dermis for a warm draft. And I'm fine with that. Hey, that's what I'm here for! I'm really just a walking, talking, 44oz, blood-flavored Big Gulp, and I accept that fate. I'm not going to spend my whole life begrudging an entire genus of plasma seekers their daily bread, but for the instant of mildest discomfort necessarily associated with the work. Just keep off the face, alright?

As I say, I could feel the rustle and occasional pinch of a mosquito making hay atop my right hand as I lay waiting for sleep. But as time wore on the sensation of being bit, usually a solitary event followed by acute stillness, repeated and increased in frequency. Eventually I lifted my head from the pillow and turned to address my hapless nurse who couldn't find the vein, readying a stern lecture on the evils of taking advantage of others' kindnesses. But what do I find here? Two mosquitos! Side by side, working their little noses into the fleshy buffet of my skin in unison; bearing all the aspect of a two-man team alternately humping away at a hand-pumped railroad car.

Two o'clock in the morning, or no: this was worth a photograph. Carefully I drew back the quilt and sheets and carefully I lifted my hand from the surface of the bed. And to my drinkers' merits they did not stir as I negotiated my camera.

But shooting photos in the dark - and one-handed nonetheless - takes some dialing-in; in the process of which one of my small companions filled his belly to the brim with blood and flitted off in gourmand satisfaction, leaving me but one prima donna to preen in the impromptu shoot.

See the blood reddening his belly? That's me!

Vanity

2010-08-25T19:21:00.002-04:00

I'm going to sell prints of this.

Rutting Season

2010-08-25T18:02:00.003-04:00

I give you the text of my latest personals ad:

"
I'm a newcomer to Detroit as of the 1st of this July. I moved here from forty miles north, in Clarkston, with the purpose of being closer to the Detroit Zen Center in Hamtramck. I now live so close to the Zen Center that I can bike there; and I do, on occasion.

I prefer biking to driving, so when I've the option you'll find me at the pedals. I've so far mapped a fair strip of the city - mainly that surrounding Woodward - ridden on bicycle. I've chased fireworks down Trumbull; I've sat fountain-side at Campus Martius park; I've turned a mile or three of the river walk; and I've made the grueling trek all the way out to Belle Isle and back (near twenty miles round-trip) twice, pausing of course to swim and sun on the beach; all from behind the handlebars.

I'm definitely digging Detroit.

I like to read. I'm currently thigh deep into Charles Dickens' catalogue and enjoying it profusely. Though I'll say there certainly seems to be no shortage of angelically tempered, misused, orphan children dusting round the streets of Dickens' London. Neither is that city found wanting of monastically chaste, ethereally beautiful, doting and devoted sisters, wives, and daughters, in the full ripeness and bloom of youth. But that we should all be so lucky as to find ourselves parent-less urchins wandering the streets and county roads of a Dickensian England.

I play golf regularly. I play disc golf occasionally. (That was last season's sport.) I play the guitar, the drums, and I sing -- all proficiently but not spectacularly. I record and mix music; I post the occasional Youtube video; I work out; I watch Naruto Shippuden and Kyou Kara Maou; I sit at the Zen Center; and I go to 'Space Band' shows.

Brace yourself. I'm going to field some negatives now:

I don't own a television and I don't want one. I'm pleasantly ignorant of the goings-on within the tube and I prefer to stay that way, thank you. I don't listen to the radio, read the papers, or check the Yahoo headlines. As for current events, politics, and public opinion, I've had my fill. I was rather vocal on politics, government, and economic philosophy once. Having tried it I find that I much prefer turning my head and holding my peace.

I don't have a Facebook account, or Twitter, or even a cell phone, and I closed up the Myspace shop long ago. I don't want in on your social network. I don't care how convenient you think it is to be constantly in touch. I, for one, have no desire to be harangued with mindless, idle chatter.

I want to start baking. I want to put a band together. I want to learn Japanese. I want to find a job outside of IT. I want to feel a woman's skin against my lips, nose, and cheek.

If you can help with one or more of these, send self-addressed stamped envelope...
"

Bread without a Bread Pan

2010-08-23T20:40:00.005-04:00

I refrained from purchasing a loaf of bread when I went grocery shopping today, despite dire need thereof, resolving instead to conjure some up using my many infernal magics. It was to be my first loaf from scratch and all was coming along well enough until I reached for the bread pan - into which I meant to summon my dark-pastry from the netherworlds below - when I realized that I don't actually own a bread pan.

Well, necessity is the inbred cousin of invention... Have at you kitchen cupboards!

Rise from your grave!

Matching a square pan with sides of a tolerable height to a longer pan of similar dimensions I achieved full bread pan velocity. I rubbed those sides of each pan in margarine which would make contact with the dough, and continued reciting incantations from my book of shadows. The flames of Hades soon rose to an even 400 degrees and a mere thirty minutes later I was manging on one tasty voodoo sandwich.

Fresh from Hell's own Oven!

Cerberus gets the scraps.

Firefox is Dead to me

2010-08-18T20:28:00.017-04:00

Once upon a time I abandoned Internet Explorer for this really slick, really sleek new browser. It opened up faster, browsed quicker, and had more customizable features than IE. It really was the bee's knees and everybody thought so, I tell you what! And it's name was... Netscape.

Oh how the mighty do fall! A few minutes later Netscape decided that I would doubtless prefer the option of adorning the margins of my browser with custom graphics, to such paltry considerations as speed and performance. About the same time Microsoft wised up (if only momentarily) and tuned it's browser for performance, sending me and a whole generation of hopeless internet addicts running gleefully back to embrace everyone's least favorite browser once more.

Time passed, seasons changed, and sure enough a new contender emerged brandishing a moniker resembling that of a poorly conceived Pokemon character: Mozilla Firefox. And oh how the fanboys did come a'runnin to laud it's many noble virtues. (Not to mention a handful of it's noble faults.)

Internet Explorer was jilted once more - the ignorant slut - as we all collectively shouted, "I choose you, Firefox!" But not for sake of standards compliancy or plug-ins galore. For what did we cross the aisle? Speed, baby. Speed. It popped, it zinged, it whizzed like greased lightning trying to bury a turd on a marble rocking chair... or something. Of course this is not to undervalue the momentary virtue of being significantly less-targeted by malware than IE was. Surely many horny, porn surfers preferred Firefox for it's prophylactic ability to keep their digital doohickeys trojan free.

Aye, Mozilla and her Firefox were the cat's meow, I tell you what. They were...

But through a recent moment of serendipity I found call to step back and take a good look at our favorite son, Firefox, as it exists today; putting aside the hype and foregone conclusions of days passed. And you know what I noticed? Firefox is the absolute slowest browser to open. That's right. The slowest! Slower than IE. You know what else? The Flash plug-in's performance under Firefox is laggy.

Well, these two deficits don't exactly mount a huge case against it, I suppose. But still it was enough to drive me back to the browser dealership to take a look at the new models. You know what I found? The hatchback Ford Fiesta is fucking sexy!

And so is Google Chrome. It's been a while since I took Chrome for a test drive and time has aged her well. Chrome opens faster than any other browser I've tried. The flash performance kicks ass. Why? Probably because it's not a plug-in. The latest Flash player is built directly in.

Chrome gives me more viewable area than any other browser, mainly by ditching the Title bar, going straight to tabs, and placing the information you'd normally get from a Status bar into a hovering, disappearing, reappearing, magical mouse-over event from the land beyond time.

At first, I admit, I was disgruntled by the lack of configurable options. Well, now I champion this lacking. Less truly is more. Just give me a good, fast horse to ride and keep your bloated, deluxe model with the in-mane HD display and whinnyable ring-tones. I don't want it!

I have five extensions in Chrome right now. One puts a Gmail icon and new message count on the toolbar; another puts the Google Voice icon on the toolbar; another blocks flash content by default unless I click it; another brings in my Google Bookmarks; and the last allows me to save web pages as a single file. That's everything I need and more, right there. And with these features installed and enabled Chrome blasts out of the starting gate and round the track before Firefox can even loose it's obese, cellulite-ridden thighs from the ever tightening fit of the old Poke-ball. Chrome is as CSS3 and HTML5 compliant as any browser should be. It's hip. It's happening. It's the place to be, baby. Get on board the choo-choo train.

Firefox has followed in the footsteps of Netscape, favoring tens of thousands of plug-ins, and user-customizable skins over speed and performance. May she rest in peace... the whore.

Long live Google Chrome! (Until something better comes along.)

'Distance' Tab by Long Shot Party

2010-08-10T19:04:00.006-04:00

...by overwhelming Youtube request.
[Watch my cover HERE.]

'Distance' by Long Shot Party

Tabbed by Roy Tousignant
August 10th, 2010

This is the shortened, for-TV version of 'Distance' as
heard in Naruto Shippuden's OP2. The song opens and
closes on the chorus.

-Chorus-
   G      A      D
E|-3--  |-0--  |-2-- -|
B|-3--  |-2--  |-3-- -|
G|-0--  |-2--  |-2-- -|  x2
D|-0--  |-2--  |-0-- -|
A|-2--  |-0--  |-0-- -|
E|-3--  |-0--  |---- -|

  G      A      F#m    Bm     A   
|-3--  |-0--  |-2--  |-2--  |-0--
|-3--  |-2--  |-2--  |-3--  |-2--
|-0--  |-2--  |-2--  |-4--  |-2--
|-0--  |-2--  |-4--  |-4--  |-2--
|-2--  |-0--  |-4--  |-2--  |-0--
|-3--  |-0--  |-2--  |-2--  |-0--

  G      A      D
|-3--  |-0--  |-2--  -|
|-3--  |-2--  |-3--  -|
|-0--  |-2--  |-2--  -|
|-0--  |-2--  |-0--  -|
|-2--  |-0--  |-0--  -|
|-3--  |-0--  |----  -|
                    
-Verse-
  D5     D5b    G5     D5  
|----  |----  |----  |----
|----  |----  |----  |----
|----  |-7--  |----  |----
|-7--  |-6--  |----  |-7--
|-5--  |-5--  |-5--  |-5--
|----  |----  |-3--  |----

  D5     D5b    G      A      D
|----  |----  |-3--  |-0--  |-2--
|----  |----  |-3--  |-2--  |-3--
|----  |-7--  |-4--  |-2--  |-3--
|-7--  |-6--  |-5--  |-2--  |-0--
|-5--  |-5--  |-5--  |-0--  |-0--
|----  |----  |-3--  |-0--  |----

  Em     A      D      Bm 
|-0--  |-0--  |-2--  |-2--
|-0--  |-2--  |-3--  |-3--
|-0--  |-2--  |-2--  |-4--
|-2--  |-2--  |-0--  |-4--
|-2--  |-0--  |-0--  |-2--
|-0--  |-0--  |----  |-2--

  Em     A      Bb     C      D  
|-0--  |-0--  |-1--  |-3--  |-2-- -|
|-0--  |-2--  |-3--  |-5--  |-3-- -|
|-0--  |-2--  |-3--  |-5--  |-2-- -|
|-2--  |-2--  |-3--  |-5--  |-0-- -|
|-2--  |-0--  |-1--  |-3--  |-0-- -|
|-0--  |-0--  |-1--  |-3--  |---- -|
                                
-Repeat Chorus- x2

-End-

Expanding a DIV to Size of 'background-image'

2010-08-06T10:24:00.031-04:00

I struggled with this for a bit yesterday and found naught but forums telling me 'it can't be done,' or 'why are you doing that, it's stupid,' so I thought I'd share the solution I developed.

The Problem

Here's the scenario: You have a DIV that will contain some text. You have different background-images that you want displayed under the text depending on which page is showing. But the background images are of varying sizes.

What you want, therefore, is a way to expand your DIV to the dimensions of whatever background-image you happen to stick inside it, without having to explicitly declare width and height values, either at your style sheet or in-line.

...and now you're off the rails.

One could surely pose a number of "why not" scenarios, such as: 'Why not just declare the width and height in-line?' or 'Why not just make the text part of the images?' Or one could pontificate upon the myriad of client and server-side solutions for querying the image size and declaring the DIV dimensions equal by script. But instead, let's just assume that we are coders and geeks, and that if there is a simpler solution requiring less explicit declaration and more uniform code distribution, then that elegance of design is our tacit desire and reward.

Solving

First off we must accept and acknowledge the limitations before us. The 'background-image' declaration does not care for width and height. It will fill a DIV with the image you choose, but it cannot under any circumstances be used to alter the boundaries of the DIV. Give that up right now!

Besides which, a 'background-image' declaration here would have to be placed in-line to meet our need of changing it across different pages, and I think it a best-practice to avoid in-line styles wherever possible, favoring HTML tags for dynamic content.

The solution, therefore, must be implemented from within the DIV. Anything placed inside a DIV of undeclared width and height will expand that DIV to fit. So in place of a 'background-image' declaration, we will set an <img> tag inside the DIV. The IMG's dimensions will be determined upon page load and the DIV will expand to match.

<div id="my_div">
  <img src="images/bg1.gif">
</div>

Now comes the text we want displayed atop our IMG. Just shoehorn it in there with a <p> tag. We'll make it work in a minute.

<div id="my_div">
  <p>Contact Us!</p>
  <img src="images/bg1.gif">
</div>

So now we have a DIV containing two blocks: P and IMG. What we want is for the P tag to overlay the IMG tag, creating the effect of IMG as a background. We accomplish this by use of negative margins and 'z-index.'

First off, the P tag has its own vertical margins which we'll want to zero so we can have a simple text-block with no extraneous white-space to work with. As for making our IMG into a background, we can force the P tag to overlap IMG's boundaries by giving IMG a negative 'margin-top.'

#my_div p { margin: 0 }
#my_div img { margin-top: -80px }

If you looked now, you would find that the text of the P tag has more or less disappeared behind your IMG. Here the IMG tag has a higher natural z-index than the text, meaning it is being drawn after, or overtop of P. We can change that by giving the IMG a negative z-index, which places it dimensionally beneath P. Note here that when you set a 'z-index' you must also make the 'position' of the element explicit, or it will not take effect.

#my_div p { margin: 0 }
#my_div img {
  margin-top: -80px;
  position: relative;
  z-index: -1;
}

Finally your P tag should be sitting proudly atop your IMG which has effectively become a background-image. Huzzah! Full code follows...

The Solution

<head>
  <style type="text/css">
    #my_div p { margin: 0 }
    #my_div img {
      margin-top: -80px;
      position: relative;
      z-index: -1;
    }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
  <div id="my_div">
    <p>Contact Us!</p>
    <img src="images/bg1.gif">
  </div>
</body>

Beautiful isn't it? Just four lines of CSS and you can now switch out one background for another of an entirely different width - and even a different height if the design is right - without so much as a whisper regarding those properties. All you declare explicitly is how far down to drop your text over the image. "Can't be done," my eye!

There are some pitfalls to watch out for when implementing this method. For instance, it might seem just as easy to make the 'margin-bottom' of P a negative instead of the 'margin-top' of IMG, but if you do it this way Internet Explorer, in particular, just might chop off the vertical edges of your IMG if P's block fails to fill the DIV out to the full height of IMG. This can be countered by augmenting line-height, but then you're fighting battles you don't have to. Yeah, I may have learned that one the hard way.

There you go: Dynamically expanding a DIV to the size of a background image. Tada!

Hot Damn and Cool Lemonade

2010-08-01T16:38:00.004-04:00

Download

This tune also lifted from the July 31st session with Brandon F. Only after submitting 'Ball that Jack' from the same session did I realize this jam's obvious superiority. Dig that beat, baby.

Ball that Jack

2010-08-01T16:03:00.006-04:00

Download

Here's a pretty little number taken from a jam session between Brandon F. and myself. It features clipped electric guitar and sporadicly kicking e-drums. It's the first session of it's kind, equipment-wise, so some dials still need dialing; buttons buttoning; levers levering...

It's certainly not the best jam to come out of the day, but it's the most song-like and self-contained. (Read: Publicly consumable.) Enjoy.

[UPDATE: Also available from this session: 'Hot Damn and Cool Lemonade'... It's much better!]

I'm here.

2010-07-30T22:58:00.004-04:00

In case you aren't down on the upside I'll give you the straight skinny. Listen good. This cat's been scratching on a different roof, you dig? Kitty got his own litter box and now it's tuna every night. We're broadcasting live from midtown D-Town at 50,000 watts. So can you hear me, people? Holla' Detroit what!

Detroit, sho'nough. No skin, baby; I wouldn't kid you. I'm a straight talkin', tall walkin', cool character. I got no time to mix and rhyme. I just keep riding and swinging, lifting and singing, breathing and holding that line. And I'll be hold it till the kingdom come or bust. Bank that, baby-o.

Bank that.

Dissatisfied and Leaving - Jungle Disk

2010-06-23T17:37:00.002-04:00

I've been using Jungle Disk for some time now to backup my data to Amazon's S3. I've formed a less-than-stellar opinion of the software on a number of different heads, (see: Jungle Disk 3.04 - Update From Hell) but today I noticed an 800mb data transfer in process and wondered what it was - so large - that I was unexpectedly backing up. Upon investigation I found that Jungle Disk was re-uploading a certain collection of videos and other files which I'd recently gathered together and moved into their own sub-folders. Now, these files had all existed in the backup previously, they were just moved one folder deeper from their last position.

I personally find it ludicrous that an online file backup system should be unable to deal with a simple move operation like this, without uploading the whole file's content a second time. There's hash data, modified dates, file sizes, file sampling, and so forth... all which could be used to recognize these changes to say: "Hey wait, this file is already on the server, it's just somewhere else in the file tree now. I don't need to upload the data again, I can just modify the associated meta data."

Today's 800Mb's pushed me over the edge and set me on the search for some other software solution that will quietly run in the background and let me backup to S3. Yes, Jungle Disk has so disappointed me that I'm willing to re-upload my entire data set at Amazon's usual 85Kbps just to be rid of them. I'm making inquiries now. I'll report any success using other software.

'Jitensha' Tab by Oreskaband

2010-06-10T23:40:00.013-04:00

My first official guitar tablature. ...by Youtube request.
[Watch my cover HERE.]

'Jitensha' by Oreskaband (Ore Ska Band)

Tabbed by Roy Tousignant
June 10th, 2010

I should note that this is my way of playing 'Jitensha'
on an accoustic guitar for the purpose of a live, solo
performance. It is not 100% faithful to the band version.


-Verse-
 F5        Eaug5     D5        Bb5      C5
E|----     |----     |----     |----    |----     
B|----     |----     |----     |----    |----     
G|----     |----     |----     |----    |----     
D|-10-     |-10-     |-7--     |----    |----     
A|-8-- x16 |-7-- x16 |-5-- x16 |-8-- x8 |-10- x8 
E|----     |----     |----     |-6--    |-8--     

F5        Eaug5     D5        Bb5
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|-10-     |-10-     |-7--     |----    
|-8-- x16 |-7-- x16 |-5-- x16 |-8-- x16
|----     |----     |----     |-6--     

A5        D5        Bb5
|----     |----     |----     
|----     |----     |----     
|----     |----     |----     
|----     |-7--     |----     
|-7-- x8  |-5-- x8  |-8-- x16 
|-5--     |----     |-6--      

A5        D5        Bb5       C5        C5 (staggered tempo)
|----     |----     |----     |----     |-------     
|----     |----     |----     |----     |-------     
|----     |----     |----     |----     |-------     
|----     |-7--     |----     |----     |-------     
|-7-- x8  |-5-- x8  |-8-- x16 |-10- x9  |-10---- x3 
|-5--     |----     |-6--     |-8--     |-8-----     

-Chorus Chords-
FMaj    EmAug5  Dm      Bb
|-1--   |----   |-1--   |-1-- 
|-1--   |----   |-3--   |-3-- 
|-2--   |-0--   |-2--   |-3-- 
|-3--   |-2--   |-0--   |-3-- 
|-3--   |-3--   |-0--   |-1-- 
|-1--   |-3--   |-x--   |-1-- 

-Bridge 1-
Bb5       A5        G5        C5
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|-8--     |-7--     |-3--     |-10-    
|-8-- x8  |-7-- x8  |-3-- x8  |-10- x8 
|-6--     |-5--     |-5--     |-8--    
 
Bb5       A5        G5        F5
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|----     |----     |----     |----    
|-8--     |-7--     |-3--     |-3--    
|-8-- x8  |-7-- x8  |-3-- x6  |-3-- x1 
|-6--     |-5--     |-5--     |-1--    

-Bridge 2-
Bb5       A5        G5        C5       
|----     |----     |----     |----      -|
|----     |----     |----     |----      -|
|----     |----     |----     |----      -|  x3
|-8--     |-7--     |-5--     |-10-      -|
|-8-- x3  |-7-- x3  |-5-- x3  |-10- x7   -|
|-6--     |-5--     |-3--     |-8--      -|

Bb5       A5        C5       
|----     |----     |----     
|----     |----     |----     
|----     |----     |----     
|-8--     |-7--     |-10-     
|-8-- x3  |-7-- x3  |-10- x8  Pause x6
|-6--     |-5--     |-8--     

-Outro-
Bb5  A5 G5             C5
|------------------------------------------|
|------------------------------------------|
|----------------------5------5--5------5--|  x3
|-8--7--5--x--x--5--x--5------5--5------5--|
|-8--7--5--x--x--3--x--3------3--3------3--|
|-6--5--3--x--x--3--x--3------3--3------3--|

  F5        C5        Bb5       D5        Bb5       E5        F5
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------5--5-5-5--3--3-3-3--7--7-7-7--3--3-3-3--9--9-9-9--10--|
|-3--3-3-3--5--5-5-5--3--3-3-3--7--7-7-7--3--3-3-3--9--9-9-9--10--|
|-3--3-3-3--3--3-3-3--1--1-1-1--5--5-5-5--1--1-1-1--7--7-7-7--8---|
|-1--1-1-1--3--3-3-3--1--1-1-1--5--5-5-5--1--1-1-1--7--7-7-7--8---|

-End-

W00t.

'Jitensha' by Oreskaband

2010-05-28T12:32:00.007-04:00

Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle... I reverse engineered this song from scratch, people. Though, it's probably tabbed out nicely somewhere -- I just always have to do things the hard way, don't I? I'm covering the full version here, but I heard it first (and fell in love) by way of Naruto Shippuden's latest credit's roll.

The lyrics are memorized phonetically and from katakana transcription. No, I don't speak Nippon-go.

O, ne? Hai! So desu!

[UPDATE: By request, I've tabbed out my method of playing this song and posted it here.]

This Day in 1981...

2010-05-25T16:10:00.009-04:00

By "this day" I mean Sunday before last, and by the trailing ellipsis I mean to say that I was born. Whereas "this day," 2010, I went golfing con mi padre.

'Old Joe Something was a woodsman and he rowed his boat ashore.'

After nine holes and 48 strokes at White Lake Oaks I then proceeded immediately to Bay Court Park for 18 holes and strokes-unspecified of disc golf, yet still con mi padre.

"Everybody get down!"

As you can surely imagine, after twenty-seven holes and two golf-oriented sporting activities I really needed to eat some Mexican food. "To Mexico Lindo!" ...con mi padre y mi madre también.

Now that I had the whole family assembled we retired to la casa for cake-by-Mom.

Just add homemade whipped cream.

And you were there, and you were there, and your little dog too.

Andy, the timid.

Let's open presents! I got a divot repair tool; A crazy prong-ended hand tool whats purpose only my dad knows -- and isn't telling; A deck of cards printed for the website Omega.com featuring - instead of naked ladies - ham radio equipment, capacitors, oscilloscopes, multimeters, and other obscure tech; a good hat; And... wait. What's this behind me here?

"A brand new car!"

No one mention the white Mongoose in the room.

I recover from the blind-side. Dad goes home. My mom and I have a beer and talk about the good-old days, or the lack thereof, or something. I don't recall.

Mi madre con su perro Andy.

Some days later my new license arrives to announce that in four short years I've gone from pudgy, rosy-cheeked stoner, to officer tight-ass, highway patrol.

Me thinks, for soothe, the truth lieth here betwixt.

'Virus Protector' Removal

2010-05-19T16:57:00.006-04:00

I came across an infection going by the name of "Virus Protector" today. It had taken over the Windows XP shell via:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\shell

...replacing the value 'Explorer.exe' with its own executable (randomly generated filename) located under C:\Windows\system32\. It had also disabled the task manager via the registry at:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

This combination left no entry point for online repair since even Safe Mode boots whatever shell the Winlogon refers it to.

I removed the hard drive and hooked it up to a diagnostic machine. I cleaned the temp files and ran a virus scan as a matter of course, but a certain methodology I used makes this article worth writing -- if only to me.

Guessing, at that time, that the Winlogon\shell value was the culprit I used LoadHive.exe to mount the software portion of the infected machine's registry located under C:\Windows\system32\config\.

Upon inspecting the Winlogon\shell value I found it redirected, (of course) but as I was accessing the registry offline now, correcting the corrupted key by editing the value at the registry wasn't the easiest solution. Instead, I made a copy of C:\Windows\explorer.exe, renamed it to match the name of the infection, and pasted it in place of the virus. This allowed me to boot the computer normally and continue the repair by unlocking the registry, which had also been disabled "by my Administrator." Thereafter I edited the Winlogon\shell's value back to its correct value of simply "Explorer.exe," thus defeating Virus Protector.

The End

P.S.: Pretty neat how you can close off a machine entirely just by hijacking the Winlogon\shell and disabling task manager, ain't it?

[ Update: Why didn't I just edit the Winlogon\shell value via Loadhive.exe, you ask? I have no good answer. I just got it in my head that Loadhive was a read-only tool. It's not. Changes made after a hive is loaded are written to the hive as they usually would be. So nevermind any of this, I guess. Just change the shell value when you're in regedit and be done with it. ]

Kick-Ass Fails to Kick Ass

2010-04-21T12:55:00.004-04:00

Random blogger hazards movie review out of boredom... Lord save us.

I saw 'Kick-Ass' yesterday for a matinee. It cost me $4.50 to get in; $7.50 for the small popcorn and regular-sized Sierra Mist. I was actually on-time for once, which meant I sat plugging my ears, humming the Om in an attempt to drown out the five minutes and 105 decibels of ghastly local advertising.

Previews were curious. There's an 'A-Team' movie coming out that should be fun if you're not religious about the old TV series. As much as we all liked the A-Team, I don't think anyone will care if today's Hollywood blasphemes it a bit. Those characters were all caricatures of themselves to begin with, so the worst damage Hollywood could hope to do them would be in attaching some over-rich backstory and depth of character they were quite happy without. ...Then destroy the old trademark GMC van in some epic sequence and replace it with the highest bidder's newest-model big, ugly SUV.

Yes, I am psychic, thank you.

On the way passed the ticket counter I also caught glimpse of a poster heralding a new 'Tron' movie in the works. Now that one will suck... balls. A Tron sequel in 2010 will be blasphemous - with little doubt - and in no way worthy of the original. The best you can hope for there is some "amazing CGI" -- presumably the same "amazing CGI" in EVERY movie these days. I'm sure if you look hard enough The Sisterhood of the Traveling Dildo, or whatever, had "amazing CGI" too.

So, Kick-Ass, right... Summarily, it lacks acting. Though you mustn't hold that too much against the actors. Not that they haven't their share in the blame, but the film, as written, plainly just didn't call for any acting.

The main character is the modern movie stereotype of likable teen dork. At least, I suppose Hollywood would call it "likable." As this character might pertain to acting cues: When girl in scene, bumble, crack voice, and look stupid. When danger, bumble, crack voice, and look stupid. When in doubt of motivation...

Before I get too far gone, I should say that the plot is very well-constructed, and both the story and the story-telling have many charms. The movie is persistently self-aware and never manages to take itself seriously, even during what are supposed to be the most rending, grandiose climaxes. (Where the viewer might otherwise appreciate the moment's gravity.) All in all, the framework of the movie is very good. In fact, that's just what I'd call it: The framework of a movie. Girders, columns, beams... An excellent substructure upon which to erect an actual movie, which at this time does not exist.

These characters are dragged along by their collars at the whims of an intractable plot. They don't contribute to it. Their personal decisions don't influence its direction. None of them ever takes hold the rudder and turns the boat. We've got a script here, folks, and we're heading toward the end of it.

No one is likable. The geeky main character never grows a pair; or by the time he does it doesn't count because the story has devolved, by then, into self-parody. This is by design, of course. He's not really meant to stop being an everyman; or rather an everydork; but be it intentional or not the result is you spending two hours watching a nervous, fidgety, voice-cracking leading man whose character must force himself to overcome the same innate sense of mortality and weakness in every third scene, all the way to the credits.

The female lead and love-interest is way too blue-eyed, sugar-bear, flawless complexion, cute to be considered in any way sexually attractive, even when she's nude from the waist up, holding a breast in each hand for modesty, and getting an oily rub down from our half-naked protagonist. Yep, that's in there. Nope, not aroused.

Then there's Nick Cage who plays... Wait a second, I love doing this:

Nick Cage is Adam West as Big Daddy.

Nick doesn't get enough screen time for his particular brand of crazy, moody, monotone to become something humanly relatable. Even in his own films it tends to take a while. So there's another undeveloped character just sort of trucking the plot forward.

Even 'Hit Girl,' the eleven year old show-stealer/death-bringer is written with so little personality that even her bloody, too-cool-for-Neo action sequences can't really carry her into your heart. Oh how I long for Natalie Portman's Matilda.

But okay, here's the thing: It's not really a bad movie. It's good in a lot of ways. It's best if taken as a sort of snake-eating-its-own-tail parody of comics and the modern movie-making standards of comic-based films. Would I recommend it? Meh. If you got time and money...

The reason I'm so down on it here is that I see what could have been. Kick-Ass is a great movie that never got made. Hollywood stopped working on it when they realized there was enough already to sell a reasonable amount of popcorn. It's an abortive film, to my mind, that was either written too well to just be a summer-movie or too poorly to achieve the greatness it hints at, and between these worlds lies my contempt.

That and too much exposure to congested, nasily teenagers, pretending to pretend to be cool.

Same Old, Same Old

2010-04-17T21:26:00.002-04:00

Our Constitution really looks like crap, doesn't it? I can only hope our descendants will laugh their asses off reading it someday. We start with the statement "all men are created equal" and spend the next four hundred years having to write in, "that means black people too," "that means women, too," "that means native Americans, too..." And here we stand in the far off year of 2010 - where flying cars dot the sky - arguing over whether it should mean homosexuals too. Not to mention whether torture counts as cruel and unusual; whether water-boarding counts as torture; whether a citizen has a right to their citizenship; whether it's illegal to spy on people sans cause or warrant; whether an individual gets a say in their own proliferation; whether the opinion of the department of justice should be held as incontrovertible fiat; whether war-crimes are war-crimes; and what the definition of the word 'is' is.

The mutual lunacies of American politics, law, and the media organizations claiming to cover it in a "fair and balanced" way drove me to NPR at first. NPR provided the only news media I could entertain without being driven to fits of fury by the "common sense" stupidity being bandied about as wisdom. Eventually, NPR couldn't keep me sane either. I found that even -they- were guilty of filtering and censoring content and contributors based upon popular consensus, regardless of that body's irrationality. In fairness, I suppose no one can present the daily news in a tolerable way when the day's news itself is become utterly intolerable.

The Bush era of lies, ignorance, bigotry, lawlessness, murder, and conspiracy nearly drove me to what some have politely called 'direct action.' Thankfully I managed to pull myself away for a view from a longer perspective and concluded that the world, taken en masse, is really just some sort of sickness. That there's a reason all the great spiritual figures of the various religions teach abandonment of it and its concerns, and that I could only do myself and others harm by taking personal responsibility for the behavior and policies of nations.

As I say I started by switching to NPR, then even that had to go. As of today I don't watch television; I don't listen to the radio; I don't read the paper. To quote Joseph Heller, "I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change much if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about."

Despite my media blackout I still hear more than I want to about politics. How people can be angry about Obama's health plan, which is so paltry an act of legislation, such a band-aid on a hemorrhage... That some should deride it as being "socialist" when it's the most capital-centric, corporate-friendly thing that could have happened to the private insurers... That no one, for all the months of commentary and conjecture and idiots shouting into the wind, ever saw fit to propose the concept of simply collecting and allocating enough federal tax dollars to cover everyone's health needs, all the time; and especially in a country that claims to be eighty percent Christian, and is thereby obliged to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the sick and imprisoned, lest their God should forsake them...

Well, it's all just as ridiculous and meaningless as ever and I'm happier to turn a blind eye and deaf ear and let the devil put on his little stage show. I figure, if you do what's right on an individual level, person to person, then all the lofty declarations of all the over-educated, under-literate, morons wearing suits, feigning global-ownership, don't amount to any effect anyway.

White Kids Love Hip-Hop

2010-04-14T00:02:00.003-04:00

Download

So, I'm a rapper now. What? You gonna bring some? You best step son!

I heard this song for the first time yesterday and today I'm covering it. This is a little number by 'MC Chris' of Adult Swim fame. I had way too much fun layering vocals here as you shall soon hear.

Gypsies by 'Stevo'

2010-04-08T19:48:00.005-04:00

This is a song written by a local artist - and fella' I used to wuz in a band with - who goes by the name of Stevo P. Rockenstein. It's long been one of my favorite songs to play - the strumming patterns are particularly endearing - and, hey, what do you know? Here I am playing it!

Easter Weekend - A Retrospective

2010-04-08T18:02:00.014-04:00

So, okay... So like... Like...

On Thursday, dad picks me up, we go to the Big Apple for lunch, or dinner, or something.

Linner.

His latkes are over-browned. Somethings always over-browned with him. Then we go disc golfing at Bay Court Park.

Put a shirt on, you dirty hippy!

We drive back to his place in Flat Rock and on a whim he fixes (re-rigs) the yoke on my bike.

Egg whites.

Then he fixes up his own bike and we take a night-time ride with neither helmets nor flashers of any kind.

Safety hazard.

Somehow we survive, watch movies, fall asleep. Next day he washes and vacuums the Focus.

Love of his life.

We gear up and head out for the links. The golfing begins - the golf-golfing, I mean - at Willow Metropark.

Fore. Four! LOOK OUT STUPID!

"They're both mine. I like a wide selection."

Dad swings.

Son swings.

"Someone bring me a cart."

I'm out with a 61, in with a 56. Hang on, math skills required... 117 on a par 71. Best I did was three bogeys. Walking the Willow Park course is not recommended. Eating more than salad before hand is recommended.

Go home, sleep. Wake up, golf more!

Well, first get gas.

Oh and I suppose we'd better eat hardily this time.

No, I'll take a non-illusory eating establishment, thanks.

Hash-browns were over-browned.

Hooah! Let's do this thing! Get some! GET SOME! You hear that Lake Erie Metropark? We got your number, baby! Uh! (Hey is it windy out here?)

Action-shot!

The club house.

The freakin' wind!

Turned out to be 30mph gusting wind with intermittent sprinkling. Great day to golf! (<-- facetiousness) The 18th hole was so windy I couldn't stand still in it to hit the ball! Out with 58. In with 59. 117 again! At least I'm consistent.

Plus, I picked up a par 3, this time... Hit the 5W off the pad. It sails out nice and straight, sets down on the green thirty feet left of the pin. My first putt tops the hill, rolling down and well passed the cup leaving a ten footer, which I sink the hard way -- in the back door, even. (maybe)

Later that night we catch the 6:55p showing of 'How to Train Your Dragon.' Not bad. I'd recommend it.

Next day, home for Easter supper.

Dad and Josh discuss tires, pickup trucks, and how to be Men.

I eat this.

"Say pa!"

"Yes son."

"You know what we haven't done in some time?"

"Golf?"

"Golf."

Nope. Still not sick of it.

After supper, another quick nine at Indian Springs Metropark and I'm in with 54 on a par 35. I was on fire! Sixes for fours all day, one bogey and my first-ever par on a par four. Two on, one up, and one long nail-biter in.

My drives are short, but consistent. My 3W is magic. My putting ain't half bad. Who's up for a quick 18?

Goodbye You Fucking People

2010-03-30T23:22:00.009-04:00

As of April 16th, 2010 this website will nolonger be accessible via the web address http://www.youfuckingpeople.com/. I initially purchased the domain, YouFuckingPeople, with great notions of a website filled with caustically entertaining rantings about... Well, about you fucking people, of course. Complaining about your many retardations seemed to come natural to me and I figured I might as well go into the business. Almost immediately thereafter however, I soured completely on the idea, judging it an unhelpful enabling device for my worst qualities: bitterness, self-segregation, and a whole slew of other negative habits I'd hoped to curb, generally. I recanted, changed the site's title, and made the YouFuckingPeople domain into a hidden redirect. (Fat lot of good it did me, eh?)

I am choosing not to renew the domain. So any of you who've been accessing these pages via youfuckingpeople.com will need to start coming in the main gate: http://tvopiate.blogspot.com/. ...At least until another whim hits me and I change things up again, invalidating all my page rankings and confusing my many devoted reader.

So heads-up you motherfucking asshole fucker people bitches. Say! That sounds like a good name for a book!

'I Come From the Water' - Toadies Cover

2010-03-16T16:49:00.002-04:00

Oh Toadies. How do I love you? Let me count the ways... Twenty-seven.

Note my face, neck, scalp, and various hidden unmentionables turning hot red as I belt out the latter half of the bridge circa 1:30. Ah, those were the days! I used to be known for my shrieking, red-faced coffee house performances. You can never go back, you know? And all dogs go to heaven.

People, not so much.

Alonedness

2010-03-15T12:51:00.014-04:00

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

--

I can't help but look at you and see a walking, talking corpse. You'll be dead soon won't you? Just fifty or sixty more years of your precious comfort and distraction and you'll be rotting in the fucking grave -- another immature soul ready to spin the wheel again, Pat! Ready to waste another century careening haphazard and directionless 'round the sun.

Just keep putting roofs over heads and food on tables. Hey, maybe you'll manage to survive long enough to get Alzheimer's and forget it all just before you die, confused and alone.

The world is truly against me. No joke. No exaggeration. And it's the biggest chip on my shoulder. It's probably at the heart of my current despair. You just set such a horrible fucking example don't you? You aren't kind, or patient, or long-suffering, or respectful, or happy. Or happy. Or HAPPY. You're sad, angry, hateful, unsympathetic, abrasive mal-intents, who'll manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal at the drop of a hat to get something you want, then go to church on Sunday to thank God for making you in His perfect image. And you see nothing wrong with any of it. You don't worry. You don't regret. You sell out, fuck over, and sleep well at night.

I guess that makes me lonely. Deep, cavernous loneliness, that's me. Last-man-on-Earth style loneliness. Yes, I'm the only one of my kind. The only one who sees something wrong in whiling away this life clocking in and out in pursuit of ever greater paychecks. The only one who sees comfort and convenience as a death knell; as something to stifle and rob him of potential. Who sees ownership as burden. Who sees security as sham.

Oh, but wait, no. Let me explain: I know you all think you see these things. I know you "understand" them and "agree." What I mean is that I actually believe and apply them to my life, not just wax conjectural in agreement when someone brings it up.

I called myself a Christian for a while. Why? Because I loved and followed the teachings of the man they call Jesus Christ. Not because I liked the idea of a magic man dying so that I can go to heaven after I finish up my heathen, money-chasing, comfort seeking, bullshit excuse for an existence. I actually followed the teachings: Give up your property. Be meek. Serve your fellow man... I didn't just show up in suit and tie on shabbat, nodding as the pastor conceptualized. I lived what Jesus said.

And that's where we differ, you and me. That's where I'm alone. I know you don't think I'm alone. You think I just feel alone, right? even though there are so many people who are with me? You for example! You're right here with me. You feel the same way! And since you agree with me when I talk about the shallowness and greed of our culture, I must not really be alone. See, but here's the separating point: I leave our little hypothetical discussion and go back to my minimalist lifestyle where I choose not to work more than twenty hours a week, where I save more than I spend every month, where I hope and plan for a future rich in spirit as well as physical adventure... Whereas you head back to your forty hour work week, and your hundred dollar a month cable package, and your fifty dollar a month cell-phone contract, and your leased, $26,000 automobile, and your adjustable rate mortgage, to plan the next thirty years you'll spend paying it all off, so that you can at last be free to get right back into hawk on some new shit.

That's where I'm alone: Where I actually try - successful or not - to live what I believe in. And if it weren't for you, if it weren't for your overarching societal imperative of 'go to school, get degree, enter profession, acquire spouse, have children, buy home, retire, die...' If there were a few people wandering around who actually lived according to an ethos that didn't revolve around money and comfort and this prepackaged, nutrient-added life-path you all follow like fucking lemmings right off the side of the cliff, then maybe I could find some inspiration and support for a true ideal.

But that isn't how it is, is it? I'm fucking alone. You've all either bought in, sold out, or both, and I'm left as the only human being alive who wants to squeeze some life out of this life before it's up; who wants to be a good, kind, understanding, sympathetic, intelligent, thoughtful, peaceful, spiritually centered adult human being at some point premortem. Oh wait, I'm sorry -- who wants it AND ALSO FUCKING PURSUES IT. Who doesn't expect it to drop out of the sky after fifty years lived in complete contrast to the desire. See, that's what I mean when I say you're out to get me. I look to you for support and comradeship, because you claim the same desires but all you ever really do when I draw near is infect me with passivity, mediocrity, and your inexplicable tolerance of shitty, meaningless lives.

If I had just one person, just one human being who was ready and willing to come with me; one person to lean against, to be stronger for, to share the goal with... If I weren't completely alone, and worse, beset upon by an insipid, insistent world that feigns agreement while chastising and persecuting any who venture it; if I could occasionally say or do something foul and not immediately have it redoubled and returned with a childish "Oh yeah?"; if I weren't the only one making the effort to restrain his baser mannerisms and encourage his higher self... If any of this!

But so long as I never see a real life example of charity, compassion, and love, I'm fucked. If it's just me, making it all up as I go, fighting you all tooth and nail for some small corner in which to practice sanity, it just can't happen.

My father talks about the "end times" as predicted by the author Ellen White -- those last few decades leading up to God's triumphant return and subsequent destruction of everything he first created. While I'm no believer I do seem to keep coming back to the idea of the 'last days;' those that hallmark the end of all human endeavors in which even God, in omniscience, can find some subtle hope or worth.

Ellen White tells us that in the world's final chapter God's true followers will be persecuted and that they shall be forced to flee into the mountains. The common interpretation of this prediction envisions either an atheistic or secular-specific society turning upon the elect, viewing them as some sort of terrorist threat to civilization, and therefore imprisoning them, torturing them, and so forth. Basically what we do to Arabs in this country now. The last of God's chosen who escape the gulags will flee the populated world and hide from their oppressors, safely ensconced in mountainous, uncultivated areas.

I can't help but wager a reinterpretation: In the end times the last few people who consider life as more than simply an effort to gather and reproduce, being mainly separated from one another and therefore very much alone in their pursuit of the higher self, will be forced to flee the retail, consumer driven, TV watching, pop-trivium obsessed, inane, insane world that subdues and persecutes the higher man while bolstering the carnality inherent in his lesser self. They shall wander into the mountains to live unseen and unheard, where they will not truly or fully enjoy all that life might have offered them had they been born at any other than the end of times, but where, abode in their hermitages, they will at least find the peace and devotion their lost and crazed societies would not allow.

HIO 2.0 FTW

2010-03-15T01:30:00.003-04:00

Another hole in one. Now that we've got that pesky hymen out of the way they're lining up like sailors!

My First-Ever Hole in One

2010-03-09T23:35:00.006-05:00

...in Super Swing Golf for the Wii. Talk about a fruitful day, huh? First bike ride of the year, first oil change of the year, and now my first-ever hole in one. I'll set the scene:

Blue Water; Hole 6... An inexplicable stone column, 242 yards, and a 9mph cross-wind stand between me and and immortal glory. Kooh pulls out the 2W from her Air Lance III's, gives a careful nod to Dolfini and sends up a silent prayer to the golf gods -- that 'he is fallible;' that perfection is unattainable. She rears back, muscles up, and smacks the ball with every bit of curve she's got in the bag. Pangya!

It sails out to the left of the obstruction as the gallery watches in a hush. The ball is spinning; trajectory curving. The shot is dead on the pin! But no, it's coming in too fast! The crowd leans forward in anticipation. A thousand muscles seize; a thousand lungs all hold a single breath. My god! What will happen? Will this moment never end?

Plunk.

What a little Warm Weather can Do

2010-03-09T18:03:00.004-05:00

Today marks my first bike ride of 2010. I freed the Schwinn from storage-hell, overfilled the tires as is my wont, and rode a pleasant loop to bank and back. Just think, I'll be able to ride the bike to work again soon. If this Indian spring holds out another day I might even make a break for it tomorrow.

On my ride I saw so many people tuning up their cars in the warm weather that I decided to give the big red van an oil change. The last she had was in late September and I suppose, old as she is and counting now that I've only got a four quart pan, I should change it more often. But winter... But I don't drive it much... But but, but butt.

The engine developed a new sound recently that's been bugging me so I went with a heavier weight oil. (Like that's going to do anything.) I'd like to do what I can for the transmission soon, too. The transmission fluid has been overfull since the day I bought it and its always shifted a few degrees late for my tastes.

Next for the van is trans filter and fluid. Next for the Schwinn is chain and gear oil. Next for yours truly is Mexico. ¡Hasta luego, putas!

Midnight Bloom

2010-03-09T14:09:00.003-05:00

I love the darkness and the blueish palette here.

Trippy man.

I simply crushed the levels together in GIMP for this last one. Thought it might make a nifty desktop background for somebody. Not me, of course. God no! But you, maybe.

'XP Internet Security' corrupts '.exe' file associations.

2010-03-08T17:28:00.029-05:00

Not interested in my musings? Just want removal instructions?
Click here to jump to Removal Instructions

We've got something new and interesting in the world of viruses today folks, and its proliferating like gang-busters judging by the three infections that made their way into the shop this week. The front end of the virus is calling itself "XP Internet Security," though there's nothing new about that.

We've long been plagued by "Internet Security" and "Personal Antivirus" (PAV) variants: Flashy viruses that throw up messages from the taskbar and open 'Scan result' styled windows telling you you've been infected with two or three dozen nasties and that the only way to get rid of them is to Click here, enter your credit card numbers, etc. Nope, there's nothing new or interesting about any of that. It's old hat! What is new and interesting about this latest "XP Internet Security" infection is the method by which the virus starts up.

Rather than squeeze into the boot sequence circa msconfig or attach itself to the winlogon or write itself into an AppInit_DLL statement, or a thousand other things I see three times daily every day of the calendar year, this new-styled "Internet Security" infection is hijacking the ".exe" file extension association. By prepending the path of the virus executable to .exe associations in the registry the virus gets an opportunity to start up every time any executable on the machine is called. And the best part of it - from the virus' perspective, anyway - is that this method of initialization, simple as it is, isn't monitored by the tools of the industry. In other words, Hijackthis doesn't look for registry changes there. (yet)

Thankfully this piece of malware came out a tad under-ripe. Had the developer spent a little more time with it, it might have really been a barn-burner. Had they integrated a method of masking the executable from detection, randomized the file name and hidden it in the system32 directory, it might have been all-but invisible! But the early release has doomed it to one-hit-wonder status.

Hijackthis doesn't detect the startup entry but it does see the executable running - it does tell us the path to the virus - and that's enough information to put this one to bed. You can run a Hijackthis scan, open the log, see the path to the virus, track it down, and simply delete it. (Or rename it as I usually do.)

But wait! Removing the virus is one thing. Undoing the damage to the registry is another. For once you quarantine or delete this virus, you'll immediately find that none of your programs open up anymore. Due to the way the virus had infected the .exe file extension, your machine has forgotten how to open executables!

This is where I pause to applaud the developer. That, my friend, is a thing of beauty. Kudos.

Anyway, its all fixed easily enough. The virus overwrites standard calls to executables, but it didn't modify the "Run as..." registry entries for them. So to start any program you need only right click it, select "Run as..." from the drop down menu, uncheck "Protect my computer and data..." and there you are; Bob's your uncle; program's running.

With that bit of information in hand you can navigate to the \Windows folder, (Explorer.exe, and therefore File Explorer, is unaffected by the extension corruption) pop into 'Regedit' and search the registry for references to the virus executable, repairing the infected associations as you go. That'll get your .exe's opening again.

Then it's just a matter of some incidental cleanup. The infection knocks out all the detection and notification features of the Windows Security Center and it also turns off the Windows Firewall, so you'll want to set that right as well.

I'm impressed with this virus because defeating it required a departure from my methodology. I don't usually need anything but Hijackthis and Sophos Anti-Rootkit to detect and defeat everything, and I suppose I didn't really need anything more than that here either. But for a minute there, this one left me scratching my head -- looking at a perfectly clean HJT scan and no indication of a rootkit. That's good! Then I remove the virus and discover these executable errors popping up like penalties imposed on me for killing the virus. That's really good! Then there's the joyful process of reverse engineering it and coming to understand how and where it was able to start up without being detected by a Hijackthis scan.

That's a worthy opponent! That's a satisfying day's work, there.

Removal Instructions

CAUTION: These instructions are not written so that just anyone can follow them. They are not written for you. You don't know what you're doing. You'll mess it up and it will be really bad. Don't read this. Don't try this. Call a computer repair guy, you cheapskate. You have everything to lose.

Locate the Virus
The variant described here installs itself to "C:\Documents and Settings\<User Account>\Local Settings\Application Data\av.exe". Other variants may install elsewhere. To detect them, download and install HijackThis. Select "Do a system scan and save a log file." In the log file, search the "Running Processes" area for suspects.

Show the Virus
Open "My Computer" and navigate to the location of the file. It is a system-hidden file so it will probably not appear. To see the file click Tools>Folder Options>View and uncheck the "Hide protected operating system files" box. Click yes when prompted with the warning and then click OK to close the Folder Options dialogue.

Kill the Virus
Delete the file "av.exe" or quarantine it by renaming it to "av.exe.quarantined". Go back into Tools>Folder Options>View and re-check the "Hide protected operating system files" box. Restart the computer.

Open Regedit
You will not be able to run .exe files regularly because the virus corrupted the registry. Open "My Computer" and navigate to C:\Windows. Locate Regedit.exe and right-click it. In the drop down select "Run as..." Uncheck the "Protect my computer and data from unauthorized program activity" box and click "OK."

Clean the Registry
Make sure "My Computer" is highlighted in the left pane of the Registry Editor and press CTRL+F to bring up the "Find" dialogue. In the search field type the file path to the virus. ("C:\Documents and Settings\<User Account>\Local Settings\Application Data\av.exe")

[UPDATE: Since writing I've found it beneficial to search the registry like so: .exe" /START. More recent versions of the infection I've just seen will install under multiple system accounts like 'LocalService' and 'NetworkService,' and with mutliple files like 'av.exe' and 'ave.exe' so being less specific may discover more infected registry entries.]

Click "Find Next." When you find a key with a value like this:

"C:\Documents and Settings\<User Account>\Local Settings\Application Data\av.exe" /START "%1" %*

...double click the value to edit it and delete the path to the virus along with the /START command from the beginning of the key, leaving whatever remains after it. In this case you would delete "C:\Documents and Settings\<User Account>\Local Settings\Application Data\av.exe" /START and you would leave "%1" %*. Then press the F3 key to continue searching the registry for more instances of the virus path.

You will probably also find a key for iexplore.exe that has the virus path followed by the path to iexplore.exe. Just delete the virus path and the /START portion from any keys you find - this one included - while retaining whatever follows, as described above.

You will find other keys that are just pure references to the virus. They are easy to distinguish from the previous kind if you pay attention. You can just delete those.

When you reach the end of the registry, close regedit. You can now run .exe files again. That is, unless you jacked it up. In which case you can always download the "EXE File Association Fix" at http://www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm and merge it with the registry to get things running again. ...Unless you can't. In which case: I told you not to try this in the first place, man. What the hell were you thinking?

Re-enable Windows Security Center and Windows Firewall
The virus disables Windows Security Center features and the Windows Firewall. To put these in place again, open Control Panel>Security Center. Under Firewall click Recommendations. Uncheck "I have a Firewall Solution I will monitor myself...", click the "Enable Now" button, and click OK.

Under Virus Protection, click Recommendations. Uncheck the "I have an antivirus program that I'll monitor myself..." box and click OK.

In the left column of the Security Center click "Change the way Security Center alerts me" and put a check in all the boxes there. Click OK.

Done
You are done. Good work. Hit the showers.

Cover of 'Just' by Radiohead

2010-03-05T14:45:00.006-05:00

I did it to myself. I did. With guitar, drums, and vocals too.

From 2p to half passed midnight, this was another whole day's work for me. But oh so very worth it! Experience glee lately? I have. When I saw the finished product. Hell, the first of the video composites was enough to get the glee going.

No, those aren't twin brothers but disembodied portions of my soul whom I asked to sit in on this jam session. The video trickery is done with - of all things - Windows Movie Maker. I created my own xml "transition" using the techniques exampled at rehanfx.org, splitting the video into thirds with blurred edges and compositing twice to achieve the final effect.

All the work was done in a single day from setup to recording to mixing to editing. The quality of each component suffers minimally under the sheer number of balls being juggled here, but I have to say that this came out better than a lot of my less involved projects. Its something of a magnum opus and I'm proud. Yes, I amaze even me.

'Alones' by Roy

2010-02-26T00:28:00.008-05:00

Cover of 'Alones' by Aqua Timez
Download

Am I taking this too far? I don't think so. In fact, I think I'm taking it just far enough. This is the real deal y'all and I ain't kidding. I've got ten hours labor into this one. So you listen good, you!

See you Saturday with another version of the same song, suckers!

It's sort of an inside joke.

Cover of 'Alones' by Aqua Timez, AGAIN

2010-02-23T14:40:00.004-05:00

Download

[UPDATE: I ended up recording and posting three different versions of this song over the course of four days, finally pulling out the e-drums and really going nuts on it. So, don't listen to this crappy version, please. Listen to this crappy version.]

Okay so... A day later the version of this song that I just submitted sounds like so much ass to me. The world just doesn't understand! It's gets to be so much with the playing guitar and the singing and the reading/reciting lyrics in a foreign language where 'e' sounds like 'a' and 'i' sounds like 'e...' Its too damned many balls in the air is all and the performance suffers for it.

Today the lyrics of the second verse are much more familiar to me -- almost memorized at this point. Aside from a tiny blemish here or there, today's version is much much better, I think.

(Tomorrow's will be absolutely awesome. -wink-)

Cover of 'Alones' by Aqua Timez

2010-02-22T18:18:00.014-05:00

February Bloom

2010-02-20T14:02:00.003-05:00

ISO: 100, Exposure: 1/10 sec, Aperture: 4.0

Banda Wasabi

2010-02-18T23:31:00.006-05:00

I cried a little. It's okay if you want to too.

We are a nation. A threat to your borders. Maybe we can't speak Japanese, but we can damn well sing it. You're going to have to deal with us sooner or later.

Hairu Nippon! Hairu Anime!

Seek

2010-02-17T17:26:00.008-05:00

All seeking is directionless. See what you find.

When you are kneeling in the utility room meditating before work... When your inability to focus on the space between your eyebrows; to hold the flow of energy through your interlocked fingers at the forefront of your mind; to sit rigidly without questioning the perfection of your posture... When you begin, of these frustrations, to lose faith even in the purpose and goal you've placed before yourself; when none of it seems to come together and you wonder what you might be doing wrong or whether there's really any way to do it right at all -- Look about you and realize that you are standing in a wide field: An endless green pasture that leads to mountains and lakes and rivers and plains and low lands and valleys and caves and plateaus; an endless, unexplored bounty of truth and fiction, purity and taint. There are no limits or boundaries and maps are worth little here. For none but you can find this field - no other has ever visited this inner world of yours - so none can say for certain where you'll meet perils or where treasures lie. This is your own private country. None have come before you. Explore!

Forget direction and goal. To be directed is to follow a path. And surely there are many virtues to following paths; deride it not! But path-following is not seeking, it is path-following. Seeking has its own virtues, pleasures, hardships, and rewards, and no one may discover these by following paths, for no path leads where seeking goes.

Seek and let your heart be light. Seek and care not for what you find. Seek and worry not for direction. Seek and be steadied by the knowledge:

All seeking is directionless. See what you find.

AVG Offline Installer Download Link

2010-02-17T15:12:00.004-05:00

It's harder to find than you'd think. AVG doesn't exactly publish this info, for some reason. This is valid for AVG 9.0 and at time of post pulls down the file "avg_free_stf_en_90_730a1834.exe."

I'm noting this link as much for myself as for you. In fact, more for myself. I never really cared for you.

http://www.avg.com/in-en/download-file-ins-afg

Riven Accomplished

2010-02-14T18:43:00.006-05:00

How many video games require that you take notes? I love this stuff. Today I completed Riven. Here I memorialize the greater portion of my notes - don't cheat! - including: translation of the Rivenese number system (you can extrapolate up to 24), sacred animal notes, submarine path, dome elevation maps, matched fire bead colors, and more! I guarantee I'll be pirating whatever comes next in the Myst library post haste. You've just got to play these games!

Games? Works of art!

Suckers.

2010-02-13T22:46:00.002-05:00

After madness is clarity. So keep it up.
You're playing right into my hand.

Taken for Granted

2010-02-11T20:58:00.008-05:00

It had been so long. I had hoped that I'd taught her some civility, decency -- if only as it regarded me. It seems like six months or more that she'd managed to treat me with a simple reciprocal human respect. But today she relapsed -- and how! Twice in one day - in the span of two hours, even! - and after such a long sobriety. What a shame.

First she told me to go get her mail. "Just go back downstairs and throw your shoes and your coat on, and your gloves and your hat that you just took off twenty minutes ago, since you just got home from work and go fetch my mail. I see your mother standing right there, getting ready to leave soon anyway, and who wouldn't be nearly as put upon to simply grab the mail on her way out as you would to get back into your whole winter outfit just to traipse down to the end of the driveway and grab the mail that I could easily wait to read tomorrow. But you do it! 'Cause... you know, I said so." At least that's how I heard it.

I looked at her like she had completely lost her mind -- as surely she had. Finally my mother offered to grab the mail on her way out. I walked away insulted and disappointed in this sudden regression to previously corrected behaviors.

A few hours later she shouted down the stairwell another order in the guise of a request: To go across the street "to so-and-so's house and pick up the this-and-that she's lending to me." You might think it was a question, a "Would you be willing to," or a "Could you do me a favor and..." but it was neither. It was an, "I've arranged for you to go do this without consulting you. I've already told her you're on your way so she's waiting for you now. And, oh yeah, she's about to go to bed so you better get going. See you when you get back -- which I've decided will be immediately. Bye."

She went so far as to let it slip that so-and-so had offered to bring the whatnot over to her, but that she had refused this sane and reasonable concept of not involving outside parties in an interpersonal exchange that had nothing to do with them. "Oh no!" she said, "Don't trouble yourself bringing it to me. I'll just have my house-boy Roy come fetch it from you like a fucking dog. After all, its late and its cold, and who wants to get all dressed up and run back and forth in this weather? Certainly not you or me! Let's just let my personal gimp handle it. Oh gimp! Oh minion! Where art thou peon? I have a job for you!" At least, that's how I heard it.

It would have been easy to just mumble under my breath hateful little curses at the socially retarded fool bellowing from the top of the staircase and go and do whatever stupid bullshit she'd arranged on my behalf. I could've went and retrieved the whatnot, walked back in and dropped it on the table like a goddamn brick - signaling just what portion of my asshole she could eat - then I could've come downstairs, brooded for a half hour over what a dried-up, sandy, old cunt... what a self-centered, psychopathic, geriatric child she is, and how roundly taken for granted I am by all in general. And then I could've gone back to whatever I'd been doing and slowly forgotten the whole incident. Yes, in truth it probably wouldn't have taken me five minutes, round-trip, and I'd likely already have placed this whole worrisome incident behind me.

But boundaries must be set. I've spent too many days of my life shoveling other people's loads in preference for the emotional convenience; too many days suffering my own desires' unfulfillment in order to keep the tentative peace. Well... It suffices to say that the whatnot rests yet still upon so-and-so's stoop.

Make no mistake, I've suffered for this claim of mine to dignity beneath the weight of an irrational guilt and its counter point of spiteful indignation. Still, I think its worth it. She must be taught. A child cannot be reared without punishments, consequences. Besides, for my pains I have earned something of infinite value, something I may never have understood otherwise. I have learned what a parent feels when they discipline their child. I know now that while the thoughtless child lie in bed scowling, full of hate for their patron, bemoaning the verdict rendered, the parent who punishes suffers all the more. For while the child rests in perfect, one-mindedness; in blissfully ignorant, selfish hatred of the sure injustice that has befallen them, the parent who punishes is meanwhile tormented by doubt and guilt; reproving their sternness, questioning the use of it, and at last even whether or not they were in the right at all. This splintering of mind is invariably more painful and tormentuous than the punishment given. I suddenly understand the commonly held, parental concept of ungrateful children. A parent punishes a child for the child's good and in punishing necessarily suffers this debilitating self-doubt and irrational guilt, and atop it all the child, who should be grateful for the stern guiding hand, who should praise their parent's willingness to withstand this self-imposed suffering on the child's behalf and for their betterment, responds not with appreciation and awe, but with hate, coldness, and the withholding of their love. I also see now why there are so few good parents and so many rotten children. For when a parent chides a child, they must needs be chide themselves ten-fold for it. ...Easier to spare the rod.

But I return now from depth and understanding to the topic at hand. In case you were all wondering, I am not an indentured servant, yours or any others, and have I ever been, I ain't no one's bitch no more. I've stayed longer than I meant, I've worked harder than you paid me for, I've carried mine, yours, and his so you could all have hands free to hold each others' dicks. Now guess who's done?

You want something from me, you can have the fucking decency to ask. And by the way, I'm allowed to answer no, and I will. Getting upset when someone doesn't agree to do something you ask of them, means you didn't really ask them anything. You took them for granted. You gave them an order with a "will you please" stapled decoratively to the front of it. And in my book that kind of makes you a piece of shit.

Pangya!

2010-02-10T20:55:00.008-05:00

In the third round of Kooh's Pangya Festa tournament - versus Cecilia at Blue Moon, I believe - and having no more than six holes to work with, you'll note... I managed to rack up almost 1800 natural pang! (Around 2200 if you count bonus pang.) I know, I know... so young.

"How is this feat possible?" you ask? "What unnatural Faustian bond with the dark lord was required to achieve such stunning figures?," you inquire? "What the hell is a 'Kooh' and why does it have a 'Festa' you lost and desperate soul?" you bemoan?

First off, I'm talking about 'Super Swing Golf' for the Wii, aka 'Albatross 18,' aka 'Pangya,' aka the most repackaged, remarketed 3d anime-styled video golf game ever released. (Its a short list.) A 'Kooh' is a playable character, and an astoundingly sexualized one for an eleven year old girl. But then again they do grow up so fast... especially when they're eleven year old Asian girls who play golf and captain pirate ships for a living. (Just ask Luffy. He golfs, right?)

So, now that you're hip: How did I score 1770 natural pang on Blue Moon, and in only six holes?! By dropping not one, but two - count 'em - two shots in from over 160 yards out. -plunk- The first one was around 200 yards, actually.

You should've seen it! No potions or power shots needed, just a keen eye, a steady hand, and a barrel full of luck. (Luck is a skill too... apparently.) I even had a bit of curve on the ball to ease it back against the wind! Yeah, that's right. This wasn't no windless, straight-in sinker. No sir! I was hitting a friggin' 3W off the carpet, bounced the first-cut on my way up and rolled in for an eagle on a par 4 like it weren't no thang. Uh-huh! Detroit what?

The second was even more magnificent to watch. Get this, son. I loaded up a power shot, set myself a Tomahawk, adjusted for wind and under-hit to take a little length off; no powerspin required. That ball bursts into flames, goes flying at the pin like a snowball riding a bat out of hell, comes down - catches the beam a foot off the ground and rides it like a well-lubed stripper straight down into the hole. That's right,: I hit a 160y, tomahawk'd, motherfuck'n beam-in, mother-fucker! Albatross! Par 5! 500+ yards! Who run Barter-town?!

Master Blaster runs Barter-town!

People

2010-02-07T14:53:00.009-05:00

It is important neither to speak with - nor listen to - people if you wish to know peace. People are horrible. They want you to come to them; they are lonely and troubled without you. Truly they suffer in your absence and feel it as a void within their hearts, and when you come at last with extended hand to comfort and enjoy each other's company they trouble you with tones of voice and flippant, caustic comments; act as if you owe them something; entreat you to hennish tales, rumors, and private judgments cast down upon strangers, always from a lofty pace of cowardice. People are petty children without reason, thought, or understanding. They do not wish any more of themselves than ignorance, nor can they see beyond their own inflamed sense of self. People are a massive unchecked ego. They have no redeeming virtue.

A person, an individual, alone in a room, huddled over some careful, private task -- this has dignity. There is beauty in the lone animal practicing his nature's inclinations. But as few as two of them become a bumbling of the task. Two must split attentions. Half a mind is left to know the work before them, half is set to watch and judge the other; to guess at how the other might be judging in return. Two minds are two minds split; what halves remain can hardly make a whole. And they and all are better off in solitude where men and minds and hearts may truly grow.

Take people in as small a dose as can be had and feel no guilt denying them your stay. They only want you there to hurt you. They only need you there to lean against, to gauge how much they weigh.

A Soft White 3D Lightbulb, by way of Myst

2010-02-06T15:54:00.013-05:00

Last weekend I got it in my head to replay the old Cyan Studios game 'Myst.' Myst was epic in its day. It's too hard for me to concisely express all the reasons Myst was such a landmark game, and its not the purpose of this post to try, so I'll simply point to its most distinguishing characteristic: It was pre-rendered.

While other game developers and hackers were trying to come up with ever more efficient ways to calculate and render objects live, the creators of Myst went just the opposite way. They put their efforts into creating as "realistic" a 3d environment as they were then apt to, with little concern for rendering engines. Myst heralded the age of click-through 3d environments. Beautifully rendered environments presented primarily as static, pre-rendered images. Depth was added to these environments by splicing pre-rendered animations over-top, making all interaction with the game world into a truly cinematic event.

Well, I downloaded Myst and bested it in no more than eight hours. I'd played and completed it once before, mind you, when I was a child. But I was left so hungered for more of this thoughtful, rational, intellectual, and artistic style of play that I immediately sought out another game, 'Riven: The Sequel to Myst.' This I'd never played before. In fact I would discover there were a total of four sequels to Myst of which I'd never been aware. But I begin again to digress.

I'm playing Riven now and I have no qualms saying that the quality of the graphics and the 3d designs are up to par with, only where they do not wholly surpass, the games being released today. This from a game produced in 1997! Again, Riven benefits from pre-rendering, where the games I have to compare it to are all live-rendered; but I count it a strike against today's developers that they have chosen to shackle themselves and their artistic abilities to the limits of an live-rendering engine. Not everything has to be first person shooters, you know.

In any event I find myself artistically inspired by the visual beauty, the profoundly intellectual and challenging gameplay, and the pre-rendered delivery concept of Myst and its successor Riven. I've started drawing out my own, admittedly derivative, ideas for environments and landscapes. Playing Riven especially, has set my mind to a style of creativity I've not known myself capable of for years. This is the mind of a child at play with toy soldiers or an author whose finest arts are in fiction; in creating complex, subtle, nuanced worlds and characters whose every action and thought has a purpose, unfamiliar but logical and easily understood.

I've found myself penciling out ideas for structures: elevated huts in floodlands that solve the inconveniences of seasonal flooding in the most simple, droll, and subtle ways; Floating towers whose very structure mimics the cruelties of the class-based economy; Flat desert landscapes speckled with pyramid-styled homes hewn of rough-stone, grouped together into tiny townships interspaced between huge, cylindrical depressions in the earth where industrial structures, pipelines and catwalks, glint hateful scowls toward the land they occupy in the noon-time sun.

These ideas are mainly far beyond my abilities to recreate in 3d, or at least beyond my sustainable interest in doing so. Nonetheless one of them seems momentarily manageable and sufficiently curious, and I've the will to try.

Last night, as a sort of precursor to gauge my waning skills I chose a simple object from around the house to model with an eye toward photo-realism. Well, more like semi-photo-realism. Anyway, I knew how good I wanted it to look and today I finished what started last night, meeting my own criterion for completion of the model and refreshing my basic knowledge of Blender, the 3d suite I'm modeling with.

Soft white lightbulb.

[Update: Re-rendered under much more thoughtful and appropriate lighting conditions, and sans the ugly textured plane.]

A little light goes a long way.

Now onto marshland tree-huts with elevated docks and spiral staircases and canoes on ziplines...

Hair Loss

2010-02-04T15:21:00.005-05:00

Photo Montage

2010-01-30T10:51:00.013-05:00

A motel we did not stay at on the way to Florida, whose signage met the perfect shade of dusk.

Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, as testifies my skullcap, purchased thereat.

Where can that fish be? It is a most elusive fish. And it went wherever I did go. Oh fishy, fishy, fishy fish. A fish, a fish, a fish, a fishy-o. Oh fishy, fishy, fishy fish, that went wherever I did go.

Father and sister, under the sea, in an octopus' garden, in the shade.

The look on sister Emily's face is so purely human; so between breaths; between trying and not; between caring and not. This is the face of Maya the earth mother, whose joy is as much in creation as it is in destruction. Who smiles and gives birth; who smiles and strangles her newborn child to death. This is the face of nothing and everything. And the fish are pretty too.

And then Grandma and I hung the Christmas lights.

Buster, angered by the existence of anything larger than a bowl-sized body of water, fought a battle with the pool, and to my surprise smelled little like a wet dog should.

Victor's Thanksgiving table setting, pre-carnage.

Carnage.

Back in Michigan the cat gets a Christmas gift; proceeds to swat at the mouse on the stick for three consecutive hours, falls asleep next to it, wakes up and renews pursuit.

Christmas day at cousin Jeremy's. Three extended branches of the family tree pile gifts beneath the pine and try to tolerate each others' existence for a few hours. They meet with an unlikely success!

Be the ball.

I order a cheap electronic drum kit. It comes broken. I tell customer support where they can stick it. They overnight me a new one.

The new one.

An early morning flower blooms one day as I'm preparing for work.

This very morning all my suspicions are at last validated. I am being stalked by some hairy-palmed, peeping-tom of a rabbit!

...Even 'Rocky' had a montage.

Bad Mood

2010-01-22T12:17:00.011-05:00

I may be chemically depressed. I wonder if that's what it would be called. I'm definitely in a bad mood, and have been, more and more, for the past week or two. I'm easily excited to anger and quick to bursts of rage. It's not really depression as I define depression. It's violence; violence of the temper -- that's what I've caught.

Now, it's not that I'm sitting here typing this message with a furrowed brow, red cheeks, and a hateful stare, thinking of how stupid everything is and how it should all go off and die somewhere. No really, I'm not. I swear. I'm quite content just this moment. If I didn't know any better I would suspect that I am no more restive than is my tendency; that I am as bio-chemically inert as a juniper in February. No, I don't know what that means either. I'm just trying to say that I feel absolutely normal in the interims. It's only when some small trifle of a disturbance falls within my purview that I find my moods leapfrogging passed the usual landmarks of annoyed, frustrated, and angered, straight into manic-homicidal-fit mode. Seriously... Hulk smash!

Hulk smash, indeed! I've been going straight into a full-on 'get the fuck away from me' mode without passing 'Go' or collecting $200, and I just haven't been able to stop myself. I haven't been able to pull myself aside and realize the insignificance of the thing that's upset me. And I had really started to be very good at that lately.

I've felt, for a few months now, that I am finally becoming a man. Probably since I turned twenty I have wondered if I would ever feel like I was an adult; if I would ever perceive myself as a full-grown, legitimate member of humanity, and not just a wide-eyed child bumbling through life, tossed about by the winds that flutter 'round this life. As of late I have begun, at last, to sense the end of my adolescence approaching. I find I have a sturdiness of mind and heart... Surely I will never cease to waver with the winds, nor would I want to. It is my nature to float a bit, to dabble in a thousand things. It is a nature I would not betray for much. But I judge that I have steadied greatly. I can more and more frequently see beyond myself and others, beyond the fleeting things; beyond moments and situations that would previously have entrapped me in their seeming importance.

Perhaps the greatest sense of maturity I now find has come in the recent discovery of what seems the suddenly sizable wall of life standing behind me. Even as I hope the most and best of my life is only soon to begin, I have become aware the depth and bounty of my own private archives thereof. A sense of superiority has emerged that comforts and adds perspective to my cares; that soothes and eases my worries with the awareness of the many similitudes present in what is new, to what I have, in my own time, seen come to fruit before and so often watched wither away again. I have witnessed, with my own senses, enough now to lend comfort to myself - not always to search it out in others, as does a child - but to look inward and grant my own inner being strength, resolve, encouragement, and even a meager port of patience, by sheer reflection upon my own vast stores of previous realities that once were, and are no more.

By these I am fast becoming a man. Yet, here I stand as evidence of the child within, very much alive and kicking; overwrought with momentary though uncontrollable torrents of anger.

I can see myself, even in the midst of these spells. There is still the father figure within watching over and rebuking the smallness, the petulance of the outburst. But he is so small then. His voice is such a tiny point of light in an otherwise complete blackness of firmament. I do not truly hear his tiny rebuke, but only see that he is somewhere far off and away rebuking; as one sees a ship's sail the moment before it vanishes behind the planet's edge. And I am powerless to restrain myself.

I suppose I had been using the signposts of annoyance and frustration as a means of early detection, to combat anger and hatred before it had the time to mass its full forces against me. Here, now, I find my enemy has redoubled his resolves. Every attack he wages is a blitzkrieg. The whooping of sirens sound nolonger as deterrent; nolonger an an announcement to mobilize defense -- but now only as a warning to take cover; that the bombs are in the air, gravity is nigh and irresistibly drawing them upon us, and nothing can be done to undo their course.

This is a chemical thing. I'm certain of it. Something is off in my brain's chemistry that is causing my sudden propensity to rage; this turning again into the worst shades of child-self. The knowledge codified itself within me just this morning when I realized the exact correlation of my temperament's fouling to my sudden increase of appetite. I have been eating greater portions these passed two weeks, and many snacks throughout the night. I now understand this as an unwitting subconscious attempt to regulate my faltering moods; to meet the gap of a chemical imbalance with the chemical releases come of consumption and digestion.

Yet I take it as further evidence of my budding maturity that I was able to detect these things. Not long ago I may have bumbled about, a tangled mess of hostile emotions, for weeks or even months without ever considering the source. It is often so difficult to read one's own changes of character. Or had I detected it, I may just as well have done nothing at all to curb it; may never have even considered the possibility of correction. It's strange how capable men are, though only when it concerns themselves mind you, to ignore shortcomings, and even when one is recognized, to draw it closer to themselves as a sort of welcomed parcel of their core being.

I recall with fondness a woman I once knew who, after treating me to a somewhat jarring car ride, announced solemnly and soulfully, "I'm a bad driver. I know I'm a bad driver and I've accepted that about myself." That didn't stop her from driving, of course, nor from bending as many fenders. And insomuch as I know it never occurred to her seriously, then, to go out of her way to learn any better driving habits. Nor was she able to fully grasp the danger in continuing to operate a two ton vehicle in the public space as a self-proclaimed "bad driver."

I take it as a further indication of my coming of age that I have divined this sudden emotional impropriety of mine, and moreso that my life's experience has granted me both the tools and designs to correct it. I once wheeled among the starts of mysticism and the best of what I have retained from those youthful pursuits is my admittedly abbreviated knowledge of meditation. While I haven't seriously practiced the art in some years and even now feel uncertainty in its application, I know exactly where I shall start in the reseating of my wayward chemistry. The mini-meditation I speak of requires simply that I close my eyes and breathe deliberately with the intent of bringing on a certain physical sensation -- a tingling about the neck, and eventually upon the face and shoulders. The results are physically pleasurable and inspire an increased sense of well-being. Incidentally I find it difficult and undesirable to focus my eyes for some time after this simple process. I have long suspected the medical results of this meditation to be a sort of burst-release of serotonin. Whatever its nature I mean to implement it in again lengthening my so recently shortened fuse. I shall also take this as a cue to lay designs on some form of fuller meditation and perhaps become more constant and rigorous in my physical workouts, which have slackened of late -- very probably due the same cause.

Drum, drum, red drum, redrum, REDRUM!

2010-01-22T01:07:00.005-05:00

All day drumming. All damned day. Trying to settle this whole ASIO thing and get my MIDI EDrum solution for the IED05 MKII stabilized. ASIO4ALL had been really inconsistent, occasionally working perfectly, then acting up again on the next system reboot; dropping or losing hits. It's very frustrating. This is not the way computing is supposed to be and it's putting me in a bad mood. Results are supposed to reproduce on a computer. Same hardware, same software, same situation, same results. Zero or one. On or off, damnit!

Anyway I tried this alternative to ASIO4ALL called ASIO2KS, and spent all day developing a theory as to why some buffer rates were perfect - didn't drop a single hit - while others, regardless of buffer size, were complete rubbish. I penciled down the few buffer rates that were working, noted a significant sound improvement and immediate end to the buffer overrun fart-noises in 3 and 4 block mode, but couldn't find an absolutely perfect buffer rate in those modes. I finally accepted that I wouldn't be able to use ASIO2KS because the designer wrote in a kind of shareware-style thing where after ten minutes use it starts beeping every thirty seconds, ostensibly making it unusable for recording and damned annoying for everything else. It's especially ridiculous because the guy isn't even selling it! If it had worked flawlessly, and he'd wanted ten or twenty dollars to get rid of the beep, I might've sprung for it, (eventually) but you go to his site and everything is a beta version. He so anticipated selling the thing that he built a 'pester' into it from day one so everyone would have to come back to him for the retail version, and then he never actually took it to market. There's capitalism for you, folks. An otherwise perfectly usable program sabotaged by its maker on the merits of anticipated revenue; greed, to be followed by stifling apathy.

ASIO2KS being therefore deprecated I eventually reinstalled ASIO4ALL, hoping to apply what I'd learned in ASIO2KS. Mind you, the learning process was all day... It was 10pm when I, at last, went back to ASIO4ALL. And quickly discovered that nothing I had learned about ASIO2KS bore any relevance to the configuration of ASIO4ALL.

Nevertheless our stalwart hero marched on. I quickly found that setting ASIO4ALL to 3 kernel buffers and any buffer size below 192 samples ended my disappearing strike woes, and in the end I actually left it at 4 kernels and 152 samples, which seemed to be the 4-kernel butter-zone where all buzzing disappears.

This, however, I have no faith in, seeing as the last time I found the "perfect" settings, they ceased being "perfect" on the next restart of my machine. I did, however just notice in the ASIO4ALL documentation that they recommend turning off processor p-state switching (SpeedStep) while ASIO is in use. Now I just happen to be running the awesomest mobile processor Intel ever put out - the Pentium M - and she is known for her seductively sultry ability to clock down from 1.6Ghz to 600mhz in steps of 200mhz, under varying loads. I suppose that could be causing some of my problems... I'll reserve judgment there until further testing. For while it seems a plausible suspect prima facie, I happen to know SuperDrumFX (the VSTi I'm loading) to be a major draw on my CPU's resources. I would be surprised if Intel's SpeedStep is finding occasion to do anything but open the throttle up wide as she'll go, while SDFX is in use, Captain. (Probably has to take off the governor, matter of fact.)

Recording is going to be the biggest bitch of all. My preference is to record as MIDI data. That would be best as it would allow for the most flexibility. I get butterflies in my naughty-bits when I imagine being able to reach into a drum performance and nudge an early strike into its proper place. The problem with MIDI recording is that I just don't seem to have the power here. Running SuperDrumFX on any host more complex than SAVI or VSTHost just lags it all to hell. My trusty HP NC6000 laptop is at last, and finally, showing it's age. Funny to think that it took all this -- a demand for less than 10ms audio response from dynamically generated, overlapping wav playback during simultaneous timestamping of incoming midi events. It's the first thing in so many years that 1.6Ghz and 768Mbs hasn't been able to handle. Goes to show how overpowered the average computer is these days, with your Quad-core, 4GB DDR3, 32Mb cache SATA-II, and whatnot. I digress.

MIDI recording while the VSTi is active has so far resulted in little more than the occasional sputter of an errant drum firing way off time. The MIDI input seems to all get recorded well enough, but the solution is not of much value if I can't hear what I'm playing while I'm playing it. And in fact, even playback of the recorded MIDI track has been too much for the sequencer I tested to handle. More of the strikes playback than sound during recording, but thirty percent or more still disappear in lagsville.

If I can't have MIDI recording, I'll settle for capturing the wave output, but there are problems here as well. The A-number-one problem is playback during recording. To record for production purposes I need to be able to playback a music track to drum along with during record. Because I lack an elegant solution that can simultaneously host the VSTi and record the output without bogging down SuperDrumFX, I've had to playback the song and record the wav output using a seperate program. I've been trying Audacity.

But Audacity can't just reach in with a magic microphone and record the audio being produced by SuperDrumFX. If I want to record the SuperDrumFX output with a separate program, Audacity or any other, I can only do so by recording the main audio bus, or in other words I have to record every sound that is currently being sent to the speakers. This, unfortunately, would include the playback of the song that I'm drumming along with. Sigh... The shorter version is: I can't easily record a clean drum track during playback. I have hopes that I'll be able to put VSTHost to the task of overcoming this. It hosts SuperDrumFX well enough, and if I can simply figure out why it's recording functions are producing wav files nothing knows how to read, I might have a way of capturing my VSTi's output before it hits the bus.

If I ever succeed in nailing down all this mind-numbing bullshit I mean to write and record a whole slew of material promoting the IED05 MKII as a viable eDrum kit. I might just start a separate blog dedicated to expanding the capabilities of the IED05 out of the box. In fact, once I've hammered out an all-purpose software solution, I'd even like to delve into DIY'ing some more natural drums for the kit. All together it's a good winter project and for $140.00, let me tell you, when you get this little kit working perfect - if you can get this little kit working perfect - it's a damned beautiful sight to hear.

Collapsing Margins / Borders in CSS

2010-01-20T14:51:00.008-05:00

Here's a simple example of the kind of unexpected behavior caused by collapsing margins in CSS.

<div style="background-color: red">
 <h2 style="background-color: cyan">
  Hello flawed world!
 </h2>
</div>

The Problem

When displayed, (tested in Firefox 3.5.7) the code above produces the text "Hello flawed world!" on a cyan background, and nothing else. This is not as expected.

The <h#> tags have a built-in top and bottom margin to them of around 20px. Now, a margin, specifically, is white-space surrounding a tag, outside of it. Margins push out from a block's position to create empty space around it. With this in mind, the code above should produce 20px worth of red - the background color of the <div> containing the <h2> - above and below our cyan-backed text. But it doesn't.

Meet the concept of collapsing margins. Because nothing whatsoever has been placed in the space between the div's borders and the h2's borders, the browser is taking it upon itself to remove what it perceives as empty-space by collapsing the margins together.

I don't know why it might be beneficial for the browser to collapse margin-space this way, nevertheless here we are. We must work around it.

The Solution

In order to get the desired margins to appear we must prevent the browser from perceiving them as empty. The simplest, most unobtrusive thing to shove in the gap is a bit of padding. Padding is sort of the inverse of margins, in that it creates white space within the block, rather than outside it; pushing inward from the borders. 1px worth of padding will keep your margins and borders from falling in on themselves.

<div style="background-color: red; padding: 1px 0;">
 <h2 style="background-color: cyan">
  Hello flawed world!
 </h2>
</div>

The corrected code inserts 1px worth of top and bottom padding to the div. Again, note that the padding is added to the outer container. It pushes inward, giving the previously empty space between the edge of the h2 block and the edge of the div block a tiny bit of content. In the example I've used the 2-value format of the 'padding' style, where the first value represents top and bottom padding, and the second left and right.

I've always looked at margins and padding as being the same thing in a different direction. Apparently this isn't entirely true. For some reason the CSS standard views white-space created by margins as sacrificial when unoccupied, but maintains a hallowed view of white-space declared as padding. Preserving padding makes sense. Not preserving margins... I'm sure there's a reason, but from the coders perspective it seems an inconsistency.

Learning Time

2010-01-19T20:39:00.007-05:00

Inspired by Nik Maack's article HERE, I created and published a short flash 'animation' at Newgrounds.com. Check, check it:

Learning Time

May it not be blammed by the twelve year olds who run that place.

Happy Palindrome Day!!!

2010-01-11T10:56:00.003-05:00

It's here! Finally, we have arrived. W00t w00t w00t w00t...

01-11-10

It's a palindrome day! Break out the Cristal and order me up a fleet of albino whores. This is gonna be one to remember.

Christmas Accomplished

2009-12-26T01:06:00.004-05:00

Painful as it was getting here - Verily, though I come kicking, screaming, wailing and gnashing teeth - Christmas itself has come off quite well. I am thoroughly satisfied with my long-tormented gift selections. Though I began with feeling uninspired and apprehensive to spend, my few inspirations now appear to have been dead on, and the time spent brooding over them, worthwhile.

If I can say this without sounding like a cock... I occasionally catch a glimpse of myself from a perspective not my own. And I don't think it's anyone else's perspective either. But it's sort of, what I'd call, a hypothetically valid perspective; a way of seeing me that no one does - including myself - but that we all could without necessarily being wrong. Today I saw how all the stress and frustration I suffered picking out gifts and deciding how much to spend, could be measured as a positive personality trait. I see, not in an after-school-special, day-time TV way, but in a real, serious, human being way, that the anxiety and pain I experience in life is often evidence of my legitimate desire to please the people around me; to see people happy.

I was chewing acid all month trying to find the money to spend on gifts worth giving, and at the end of it all I witnessed the seeds of my suffering blossom in the delight of the people I gave to. When I was wracking my brain for ideas, all I could see was the lack of them. But today it finally hit me that the lack of ideas did eventually give way to ideas, and the reason they did was because I spent so much time thinking about them. And the time spent thinking about them was really time spent in consideration of another person's nature. So when I say I see myself from a hypothetically sound perspective, I mean that I now recognize how I too - cold, selfish, fickle old taciturn me - could be measured a considerate, caring person.

Hey! I did it! I managed to compliment myself without sounding like a giant tool!

Why to Dance

2009-12-22T10:49:00.006-05:00

I wonder when I learned to dance. I danced last night and didn't know I knew the steps until this morning. She took my hand, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful girl in a sundress. Soft face, rose pedal skin, catty, curly, gently smiling lips. She took my hand in hers; pulled me onto the floor before I'd even seen her. All introductions were made, mid-dance.

I don't know that I've ever danced with a woman before, though I'm sure I'd never truly danced before I danced with her. Together, somehow, we were lighter than one. We floated, fluid slipping through the people, chairs, and things around us. I imagine she was leading then. Anyway it wasn't me. I was being drawn - not pushed or tugged - but coaxed along by an invisible force, the way a fast-flowing river moves around you when you give yourself over to it. Then, a whirlpool! We spun so fast and free I let her go for fear I'd hurt her arm in holding on.

The people around us smiled, felt our joy, and all began to dance as well. At some point, music began to play. We hadn't waited for it, after all. When we came together again I tried to take some sort of lead -- as much as one can lead when two are in such blissful harmony. I put my hand at her waist and gently bucked the current around us, teasing the shores and eddies of the river in which we flowed. We danced so beautifully. When I remember it, I feel as though we must have kissed, the memory has that flavor, that touching, caressing delight -- but we didn't. The kiss my heart recalls, the warm embrace and shared release of one into another: it was the dance. The dance was her kiss.

At last I put my feet down deep into the sandy soil of the river pulling at our waists and held fast against its currents as I dipped her. The dip was not the will of the dance, but my own; my fervent desire to dip, to have dipped, this wonderful creature of freedom and beauty and life. I loved the shape of her motherly body, I loved the fabric of her dress, I loved her golden skin and curled cheeks. I loved this girl who had come and seized me by the hand, who showed me now - not how to dance - but that I had it in me to. So I dipped her with all my gratitude and love. And though it was not the will of the dance that I should stop and bend us so and look so into her eyes -- though it opposed the currents under foot, this too was beautiful.

The dance we danced was a pure, unselfconscious delight the likes of which I've never known before and cannot imagine ever knowing awake. For sooth we danced in dream. Still, until this very morning I would not have believed I could know such a lightness in my being, even in sleep. My mind and heart and spirit are so often divided, so often at war... I could not before imagine them capable of such an armistice; of granting me the inner peace to truly, freely dance.

I keep imagining that I was visited by an angel. That some other being descended from a high place, to come into my dreams, dance with me, and show me what was hidden within; what I had gathered in pieces, and was lacking only a beautiful stranger's dance to bring together as a whole. Under my angel's tutelage, in one night, for a moment, I mastered the art of dance. I don't mean technically. I don't mean the motion and maneuver or the precision of step. These are but measures of the inconsequent. It is the unfettered, child-like joy; the complete lack of self awareness... That! That is dance! To know no mirror, no reflection, no vanity; to sense no other self floating overhead, no critical observer casting judgment; no embarrassed ego, mindful of the thoughts of others. To dance and be one. To dance with another and be two being one. I wake from a dream and suddenly know that dance is the fusing of self into self, and perhaps at its highest, of self into other. It is a harmony of inner strings that, well-tuned, allows the music of unbridled passion and joy to resound within.

The freedom of movement! To be led! To lead! To feel the unseen current tugging at your hips, choosing your path of its own flitting whims. Truly this is God. God, the gentle artist full of whimsy, painting airy scenes with long, delicate fingers and fine, horsehair brushes. He painted a tree, made the tree to leaf and flower, made the leaf and flower to fall, and in their falling God painted the dance. And was much pleased.

But God painted man to dance better. For when leaf falls, its dance is its falling: its complete submission and perfect obedience to the master artist's stroke. Man's dance is better because his dance resists the fall. And even God knows not what dance will come when he deigns paint of man. Man twists and turns and grasps and leaps and dives in his fall, first against it, then toward it. He resigns to it in one moment, drifting with the painter's will, and in the next he stands in violent opposition; in running right and left; in climbing up again from where he fell before. Man's dancing is the stroke and flourish not even God's brush can create. It is the movement come of soul seeking heart and heart seeking mind; division's desire to oneness; separation's yearning to embrace. Dance is man's becoming God.

This dance is in me. I know this now. I've danced this union, if only in dreams! My heart has loved purely, my soul has felt the invisible's ebb, and my mind has known only the now. That is how I danced with the lovely girl in the sundress. That, I think, is what it really is to dance. I may surely never dance this way while waking, but it is great encouragement and comfort to my soul that some part of me knows this freedom and joy. I felt it in my dreams. It's there. Somewhere inside myself I know not only how, but why to dance.

Parkour Training - Day 2

2009-12-20T21:36:00.017-05:00

So I'm a few years late to the party... I showed, didn't I?

'Parkour' or 'Free Running' is that crazy stuff those kids on the news get killed doing on rooftops. No, wait, that's crack. Parkour is moving through your environment with precision, strength, flourish, and art. Imagine, for example, you come upon some high fencing in your path. Do you:

A.) Walk around it.
B.) Climb over it.
C.) Run up the side of it, punch from the top, hit the ground, roll out, and come up running like Neo, and shit!

If you answered 'D' please review the available options.

Free running seems to involve finding the upper potential of movement; coming to an understanding of your physical capabilities as a biped; and putting body momentum to your ultimate use and enjoyment. All this appeals to me. As does the aspect of cutting new, unseen paths through the otherwise rigidly defined world at large. Tic tac'ing walls, Kong vaulting embankments; sprinting over rooftops... Aye! It's the sailor's life for me!

Then there's the exercise benefits. I merely started toying with some of the basics yesterday and I am sorer today - deep down muscle-sore - than I've been in a long, long time. I thought I'd been using most of the same muscles Free Running called for in my ritual exercise routine, but I do believe we've found a good dozen or so that were dozing on the job. I assure you they sleep no more! I am beat, bruised, and battered like you don't even know. And you can go right ahead and interpret that statement literally, an' it please you!

"Hairy back incoming, sir."
I haven't had a real, honest to god, yellow-brown, bruise in years. I have to say I'm quite proud of it. I earned the two large welts seen here practicing some simple rolls. Yes, basic tumbling. I haven't quite found the sweet spot that will keep the horns of my hips from catching the floor yet, and what you see here is the result. Funny I don't recall this five-point, shoulder-blade, hip-horn, spinal-column bruising pattern from my childhood -- wherein I'm sure I must've performed the bulk of my lifetime's tumbling maneuvers. Oh to be made of mostly cartilage just once more!

It being winter and all, I seem to have picked a bad time to become enamored with a running sport, but such is my way: the hard, desperate, bleak, soul-sick, self-deprived way. That's what makes Roy, Roi. (Or vice versa) But enough of this! Let them eat...

Beefcake!

Product shown does not represent actual item.

Fingers

2009-12-20T11:46:00.009-05:00

I was jogging down the street just after dusk when I heard a shrieking; a cry of pain and torture. For a moment I hesitated to follow these sounds, slowly easing my way toward the cries as I considered them. Ahead I saw a man emerge from the side of one of the suburban homes dotting the lane. Finally, I took to a sprint.

"Does someone need help?" I shouted. "You tell me," was the extent of his casually delivered words, his eyes and gestures alone directing me to the scene.

At first I came upon a thirty-something man lying on the ground on a sheet of plastic. He was in a sort of collapsed position with his head set partially against a wall, either faint or asleep. He looked peaceful enough. I took him for drunk.

Blood had pooled in the alleys formed by the crumpled plastic beneath his shape, primarily at the ends of his arms; the right more grossly than the other. Several of his fingers were gone. They'd been chopped off, cleanly and in straight cuts. I knew immediately that he'd done it to himself; and not at all by accident.

I continued around the back of the building and found another man, older than the first; middle-aged; in the prime of middle age. He was sitting on a stool at a wooden table beneath the hot, yellow glow of a naked light-bulb. The ground around him was bloodied as well. All of his fingers were gone.

He sat with a solemn slouch and his face held a complex expression. He had the look of a man who regretted having had to do something, but who refused to regret the actual doing of it.

Seeing both men now, I felt the pressing need to either take action or at least make some sort of proclamation. After all, I'd rushed to these men to aid them, not just gawk at the horrors found. But I didn't know quite what to do, what to say. Neither was bleeding any longer, and the amount of blood loss did not seem, to me, to be life-threatening. I knew, without a doubt, that both of these men had done this thing themselves, had self-mutilated. These were acts of free will undertaken by men who had fully known and understood the permanence of the losses they would incur when first they began whatever strange enterprise it was that brought them before me now.

I couldn't quite bring myself to say aloud that they should go to the hospital. It seemed too ignorant to speak such an obvious conclusion, like telling a man stood stoically at roadside, watching his house burn down, that he should call the fire department. If he hasn't already, he wants the house to burn.

"Well, you're not going to bleed out," I said. "That's what they tell me," responded the newly fingerless, middle-aged man, in a slightly bothered tone. All I could do was stand gaping at the sights before me, which I did for some time. Then suddenly the man's attitude took a lift, as though my presence had drawn him from his inner contemplations. Now he came upon me with the look of boastful satisfaction; the sort of gleeful pride a child takes in displaying a rare new toy he's only just acquired.

He held out the stumps of each hand, turning them in the light for my inspection. Then his own eyes settled on them, widened in wonder. His gaze seemed to peer right through the hands, as though he was looking not at the skin and bone and flesh of them, but at the thought and story, the secret meaning deep within and far beyond the hand.

With this glint in his eye he let out a chortle of a laugh, and as we both looked down into his digitless palms he said to me, with a little smile at the corner of his aging mouth, "This is the first thing I've ever done with my life." And I knew exactly what he meant.

Jungle Disk 3.04 - Update From Hell

2009-12-19T15:48:00.005-05:00

A letter to Jungle Disk Support: (An Online File Backup Solution)

Yesterday my Jungle Disk Desktop software asked permission to update itself to 3.04. I allowed it. Because of this I spent half an hour recreating my backup set, reverifying my S3 information, and generally redoing and undoing everything the update did. This was a sloppy, mismanaged, poorly implemented, and unintuitive software rollout. Please consider all of the following.

You will surely agree that there is no situation in which any software update should wipe out all previous customization and user information, and yet that's just what this update did on my system. After the software updated itself and restarted the machine I was asked to enter my login information. It was poor timing that this coincided with your service outage yesterday, so I closed the program and waited for your website to go live again.

When I was again able to log in, my new Jungle Disk 3.04 asked for my S3 data again -- mind you this S3 data was known to my previous version of JDisk. Then it walked me through creating my backup job all over again, from scratch, as though it had never ever heard of me before; as though I hadn't done this very task when I first signed up! With all due aggravation I went through this tedious, and unnecessary process once more; again finding all the little check marks - invisible unless you click the "Advanced" radio button, hidden throughout the visually unintuitive Configurations tree - which describe my desired backup set.

"No, this is the only computer I use JDisk on, DON'T hit the server with a bunch of LIST requests every two minutes that I'll have to pay for at the end of the month." "No, don't store ten versions of every file that gets edited, 3 is more than enough for me." And so on.

When I complete the arduous and completely unnecessary task of resubmitting all my original preferences, I click 'Backup Now,' just to make sure that everything is working; to confirm that Jungle Disk still sees all those files it took me over a hundred hours, uploading to the Cloud at 90kbps, to begin with. To my complete lack of surprise, it doesn't! It wants to upload my entire backup set all over again!

Here is where I discover your new Vault format, and further that it is incompatible with your old Jungle Disk 2.0 file system. And, of course, if I'd like to use a Vault then I'll have to upload all my data all over again -- even though it's all right there in the same S3 account and could surely be moved laterally if your Dev teams were to invest that effort.

So, all the configuration I've just done is worthless because I'm not going to spend another whole week clogging up my bandwidth, uploading files that are already there! After reading the comments of some equally frustrated users at the forums I head back into the visual mess that is the Configuration tree, delete the Vault that JDisk just walked me through erecting, and again! again! go to work configuring my old Jungle Disk 2.0 archive. Again!

Thankfully, the JDisk 2.0 backup set recognized the files that were already in the Cloud and I plan to continue using 2.0 for some time hereafter. I have no interest in the Vault now, as it is the Vault that caused me all this trouble.

Summarily, when a user clicks "Update," they shouldn't have to worry that all their previous configurations will be lost, nor that their files might become stranded in a sudden obsolescence. And if you are rolling out a new format it should be stated over and over again in large font, on otherwise empty pages, that your current data will not transfer to the new format. "You will have to upload it all again." And thereafter the user should be given the clear two prong choice to upgrade to Vault or stick with JDisk 2.0.

Settings that I have used previously should follow me into a rollout of new service. If I didn't want to backup 10 file versions in JDisk 2.0, then I probably don't want to in JDisk Vault either! For that matter, you should have saved the configurations from my original backup set before the update and simply duplicated those selections for Vault service, if I wanted to use Vault.

I also suspect that had I just accepted the Vault transition and uploaded my data all over again, nothing would have been said about my old JDisk 2.0 data still sitting up there in the cloud, costing me $.15 per Gb, per month, for the privilege, and rotting away to no use. I'm guessing you don't have any system in place to notify or remind the user of the redundant data they'll end up storing after transitioning to Vault.

While I'm at it, I might as well add that I would like the option to update more often than once a week, without having to do so every single day of the week. Putting the scheduling option on a slider, like it is, instead of a series of checkboxes is plainly ridiculous. I don't know how you came up with that one.

I like your service. I like storing my backup in Amazon's Cloud. Your software has proven itself technically proficient, quiet, robust, and reliable. But this rollout was intolerable in every aspect. I couldn't possibly recommend your software to the average user as it is. Jungle Disk is presently for power users only. Anyone who doesn't want to, or hasn't the experience to dig through pages of settings and preferences cannot use this software reliably. It is visually unintuitive, the wizards are incomplete, the advanced settings all need tweaking right out of the box, and if an update comes down - God forbid you install it straight away: you might lose everything you've already done.

I hope you will take my experiences in this upgrade and the preceding criticisms to heart and make the kind of changes that would allow me to recommend Jungle Disk to friends, colleagues, and customers.

Windows Install Halts at 'Loading Files' or 'Inpecting Hardware'

2009-12-18T14:56:00.011-05:00

The Problem

An HP 764c came in today for a new hard drive and a clean install of Windows 7. The install disc froze up early at the "Windows is Loading Files" screen. As soon as the status bar filled up all the way, the CD drive spun down, and nada.

After swapping out memory, graphics card, ribbon cables, dvd-rom, and disabling every bit of hardware I could at the BIOS, I finally tried booting a Vista install disc in place of Win7. It too froze at exactly the same spot. Then I tried XP. The XP disc halted even quicker at the "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" line. At some point I tried booting a liveCD of Ubuntu. (a Linux OS) Ubuntu booted happily; I opened Firefox; browsed Newgrounds... Ubuntu was running like a champ. This made it seem like a Windows hardware issue -- presumably a hardware fault Windows couldn't deal with, but that Ubuntu didn't mind.

This would prove a red herring.

The Solution

In the end, having dismissed every piece of hardware that could possibly be at fault, I discovered the culprit in the form of a snapped heatsink mount. The heatsink was only half secured and apparently the CPU was locking up the machine as it overheated. I confirmed this by laying the computer on its side and applying pressure to the loose side of the heatsink with a screw driver. So long as I held it down, the installs all scooted right passed their earlier failing points.

Ubuntu threw me way off the scent for a good, long time. Having seen a non-windows OS load into memory, run applications, and shutdown - all without hesitation - had exempted overheating from my suspicions early on.

That Ubuntu managed to run on a system with an overheating CPU is perhaps a testament to its efficiency. I can only imagine that Ubuntu never put a significant load onto the CPU, even as it booted from ram, installed drivers, and opened applications. Where, in comparison, all three Windows discs couldn't so much as query the PCI bus without tipping the scales and torching the CPU.

The Spooky-Ass Internet

2009-12-15T17:02:00.010-05:00

Right now, right this very second http://www.transferbigfiles.com/ is inaccessible, erroring 503. And at the same moment three other file transfer sites are not working correctly. All of them, every single one that I have tried to upload to, registers my 166mb upload in less than ten seconds. This is truly not the case. Even if I had that kind of bandwidth to go around, which I don't, these file transfer sites wouldn't receive any individual upload at such speeds either. After the upload bar shows 100% it just sits there like its waiting for something to happen. Meanwhile I can see from my packet activity that I'm transmitting up at about 30-40KBps, despite the 100% showing in the interfaces of these various sites.

I tried opening them in a different browser, thinking I had some strange file cache jam up in Firefox, but both Firefox and IE are affected, proving the issue to be browser independent. Add to these strange happenings that FileDropper.com's flash interface came up doubly broken - unusably broken - until I refreshed by clicking the header image of the site, and I'd say that the internet is acting pretty spooky out there, folks. Best stay indoors today.

I'd like to suspect Flash, as the common thread here seems to be Flash based interfaces, but I haven't installed a new flash engine in either browser recently, and I doubt all three of the file transfer sites I've tried would update their swfs to new code, only to watch it break. Still, it's possible that some part of my own flash client has been bullocksed without my consultation.

Here's what I'm thinking: Maybe all these sites are using Amazon's Cloud services for their file hosting and databasing (unlikely) and Amazon has just issued a system-wide patch with a major bug in it. (more unlikely) Or maybe my internet provider has done something wacky that's causing the errors. (really, very unlikely)

Or there is a great big spooky howling ghost in the internet! Holy hauntings, Batman, what'll we do?! Steady Robin, steady.

Fly on Napkin

2009-12-10T00:40:00.008-05:00

Alternately titled: Kindness and Death.

Not to ruin the illusion but this guy was still alive, last I saw of him. He was either injured or ghastly cold when I got hold of him; not moving too quick, nor at all venturing to take up his namesake and fly. He kept tripping on things and rolling onto his back. I'd offer him the edge of the napkin to grab onto, whereupon he would right himself, crawl onto the napkin, and immediately turn his back to the camera -- the thankless little fuck.

Blogger's Word Verification form gets Cut Off

2009-12-09T19:10:00.007-05:00

The Bug

When 'Comment Form Placement' is set to 'Embedded below post' the Word Verification portion of the comment submission form gets cut off and left partially undisplayed, making it difficult for users to leave comments.

This seems to be a problem in some of the default templates provided by Blogger (including the 'Rounders' templates) where the height of the area containing the comment form has been rigidly set, in my own case to 275px. This is enough to encapsulate the comment submission area, but not enough to accomodate the 'Word Verification' form. (aka: The Captcha.)

Workaround

Warning: You may wish to backup your current template before attempting these changes.

Click the Layout tab in your Blogger dashboard, then click the 'Edit HTML' option. Under the 'Edit Template' section click the 'Expand Widget Templates' checkbox. Press CTRL+F to open your browser's 'Find' dialogue and enter the text below:

blogger-comment-from-post

Hit Enter and your browser should locate and highlight the first instance of that text on the page. If all is well you should be looking at this block of text:

<iframe allowtransparency='true' class='blogger-iframe-colorize blogger-comment-from-post' frameborder='0' height='275px' id='comment-editor' name='comment-editor' scrolling='no' src='' width='100%'/>

The problem is in the "height='275px'" portion. 275 pixels is not enough space. I recommend you change the height value to 420px. This should be just enough space for the comment field and the Word Verification form to expand into. Once you've set the height value, click the "Save Template" button and you're done.

Flora

2009-12-08T15:59:00.005-05:00

This Christmas is not faring well, so says the lining of my stomach; so says the tossing, wearied, sleepless nights. The money goes out and does not come in. My recent Florida vacation adventures cost me half a month's pay and resulted in little of the vacation-y goodness I'd hoped. Now comes Christmas to add insult to financial injury.

Last Christmas went so well, I recall. I had such good gift ideas, and felt so fiscally unhindered at the time. I stumbled onto coupons and was able to give more than I'd hoped. It all came off so gloriously.

This year it's all a flop. I haven't but the one good gift idea, and it's for my father, who - as always - is calling off Christmas this year. He'll get his nonetheless.

I've found a series of heartless, dispassionate gifts to fill the place of the good ones I lack and my Christmas is now typified by anxiety and discontent. I've had one good gift brainstorm and found that even this rare, good idea is out to get me. It's a damned expensive gift to give and if I give it I can't bring myself to give much more. This necessarily places a great weight and importance on the gift and if it is not up to snuff I might just as well count all my giving-efforts worthless. There is further, a dread possibility that this gift would need returning, and the only place I can find to buy it is Amazon.com, and it's heavy as all hell, so the cost of shipping it back adds one more barb to the wire flossing at my ear canals lately.

Winter itself is an expense. I'm forced to drive everywhere now, so come the cost of gas. And winter entertainment is a bit more expensive than the other kind. The outdoors turn inhospitable and barren leaving men to amuse themselves indoors where the luxury of walls and heat take on a premium. I'll soon have need of coats and boots and such that I have somehow failed to retain from winters passed. All must be bought. Each has its cost.

And all this want of money has brought me to the sharp, deep precipice that is my current income. I once made twice what I make now, doing the same work, at the same location, putting in the same hours. But I came and left and came and left, and upon my last return times were bad and my services could nolonger be afforded at the going rate. Spiteful of money, never much of a capitalist anyway, I was happy to accept a pay cut while our business waned. And there I have remained.

But times aren't bad now. Times haven't been bad for a while, in fact. Oh, maybe for others; maybe for the economy in general. But as far as I can see our little shop has been pounding away with just as much business as we've ever had, and for quite some time now. Meanwhile my pay has not raised; my income has not returned. And though my worth is often noted and my labors very well appreciated, this appreciation has not extended itself monetarily, but only at the lip. My labor is billed at $80 per hour and yet I see naught but pittance of that, even as business booms. Five years exemplary service to the same employer: and my reward is poverty-level income. If I worked for a corporation this kind of thing would be expected, but I work for a friend, so it's an insult.

All this and more has been weighing on my mind and resting like a rock in my stomach. The gifts and deadlines of the season, paired with my regular obligations, tied to the one-time loss of a misfit vacation, bound to the rising costs of the season, matched with my unrewarded labor in the form of a flat income... And this not to mention the physiological effects of sunless, gray skies, lack of exercise, and a persistent chill that haunts me indoors and out. Well, I'm depressed, anxiety stricken, and my mind is taking every chance it has to redouble the weight of my woes. Even my dreams are starting to attack me.

So I've decided that it isn't a coincidence, but a meaningful, and charitable act performed in the greatest, and most magnanimous spirit of sympathy, that the potted tree on the other side of the room - that sits outdoors all spring and summer, basking in the warmth and sunlight, but never flowering, has decided -- yes, chosen this very day and moment to cast open a single flower as wide and as beautiful as any, for my soft consideration and health of mind. It is its gift to me. That only I had one as good to give to it or any.

Fauna

2009-12-08T15:47:00.006-05:00

Grandma made some experimental muffins to go with dinner the other day. They were really heavy and a shade too sweet to serve with dinner. I liked them anyway. She didn't. So out they go to feed the squirrels. And who come 'long to meat, instead of squirrels?

Hungry-Hungry Possum.

My best shot, after major enhancement.

As a Consumer, She is Complete

2009-12-06T13:25:00.006-05:00

Anyone else having trouble coming up with gifts for people this year? It started last month with my Grandma's birthday. I looked all around her house, considered her hobbies and daily activities, her needs and desires... and found that she has everything in the world. Every thing she could possibly desire is in her possession already. Which is an odd situation, I should think. Not too many can say the same. But I believe it's more or less true in this instance.

She's got a computer that does all she could want of it, with a really nice flat screen my cousin gave her one Christmas, and a printer that gets the job done. Her TVs are just as she wants them. Her kitchen clock-radio is the only she has use for. She's often in the yard, when the weather permits, doing light gardening and heavy cleanup, but she has every utility and device that could assist her in these pursuits already. Her truck is pristine and she's loath to drive more than two miles at a time anyway. She plays bingo every Thursday - or so she tells us - but what am I going to get her a bingo marker? Clothes, furniture, kitchen appliances, toiletries, dishware, phones, electronics... She either has it or hasn't a need for it. As a consumer, she is complete. (There's an album title for you.)

So what do you do?

Meanwhile there's my mom who, as a new-ish home owner, has need and want of a number of things that spring to mind, but they're all just a few dollars outside my anticipated spending zone. I'm considering teaming up, to make the purchase of one of them, but the only other person buying for my mom this year is Grandma, and with two other daughters, each one baring her up another twenty-seven grandchildren, I doubt Grandma's fractional contribution would bring me any closer to my spending comfort zone. Maybe I'll just bite the bullet and spend the big bucks. It would do my miserly comportment some good.

Then there's sister Emily. What do you give to the child who would be queen? I feel that my gift should somehow express my disapproval of her generation's 'New Moon,' Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus mentality. But what gift could possibly contain all that? Maybe a Dead Kennedys - Mr. Bungle box set. (He said with almost no knowledge of either band's music. And then abruptly ended.)

Fossilized Chivalry

2009-12-05T14:17:00.003-05:00

"[...]I will be his elder brother, and care for him and watch over him; and whoso would shame him or do him hurt, may order his shroud, for though I be burnt for it he shall need it!"

"Escape? Spare thyself discomfort, an that is all that troubles thee. For Miles Hendon is master of Hendon Hall and all its belongings. He will remain -- doubt it not."

Judge the Tree by its Fruits

2009-12-02T17:29:00.004-05:00

In response to A Prayer for Ronald.
---

So just because Enron and Tyco and Worldcom and Haliburton and Blackwater are evil, doesn't mean I should assume they all are. And just because Ameritech, AT&T, Avon, B.F. Goodrich, Bank of America, Bank One, Bearsterns, Bellsouth, Citibank, Clorox, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, Diebold, Dow Chemical, Eastman Kodak, Eaton, First Bank, GNC, Hershey Foods, J.P. Morgan, Marriott, National City, Nestle, PacifiCorp, Panera Bread, Proctor & Gamble, Sallie Mae, Sherwin-Williams, Southwest Bank, Southwestern Bell, Union Bank, Wachovia, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney, Wells Fargo, Winn Dixie, and Zale Corp...

...secretly took out life insurance policies on their employees for the express purpose of turning a profit on their deaths, subsequently bleeding insurance providers and their legitimate purchasers dry with these statistically guaranteed "dead peasant" policies...

...Just because a couple thousand of the apples are rotten to the core doesn't mean I should assume the last half-dozen in the barrel are? Okay, well, I disagree.

My government has, throughout the years, imprisoned it's own citizens in concentration camps, murdered church goers who sought only to escape the 'ways of the world,' poisoned its own soldiers on the battle field, illegally stripped citizens of their birthrights to citizenship, physically tortured captured soldiers and civilians alike in an effort to gather information known to be unreliable, secretly surveilled their own electorate's communications and then pardoned themselves of the crime, corrupted election results, redistricted voters for political gains, erected road blocks and denied people of certain colors and persuasions access to ballots, invented fictional international incidents to facilitate fiscally desirable wars, armed and sponsored terrorist forces to overthrow sovereign governments, entrapped and arrested civic leaders... COINTELPRO... Bay of Pigs... The Cuban Five... Yearning for Zion... Jose Padilla...

And these are just the documented, proven acts of my government. No conspiracy or conjecture in the list above. But I should withhold my cynicism?

The Summer of the Shark, Super Sunday, Shock and Awe, Howard Dean's red face, "Torture and the Ticking Time-Bomb" the lack of single-payer options in the healthcare "discussion," no footage of Bradley Tanks in the US, '60 Minutes' withholding video of ATF forces firing on the exits of a burning building, G.W. Bush pelted with eggs on inauguration day never shown on TV, Fox News refuses to show building 7's collapse, no images of death from Iraq and Afghanistan, "terrorists have weddings too," the term "religious extremists," Obama's peace prize...

Listen, you can deride the individual who shouts "there's poison in the well" without a reason to suspect it - go ahead - but we've all seen more than enough evidence of corporate evil and inhumane greed. We've all seen more than enough evidence of government plots to subjugate and/or outmaneuver the will of a populace. We've all seen more than enough evidence of media propagandizing, tabloidism, and self-censoring journalism. And the incidents have become steadier and more egregious than ever before in the passed ten years.

We have every reason, at this point in time, to approach any and every corporation, government, and media outlet warily and with suspicion of mal-intent, remitting trust only once these have overcome their own much deserved, and well-earned reputations of corruption, collusion, and outright evil.

Ronald McDonald may want you to like him and trust in his products, but no more than the crack dealer on the corner desires the same. Both will be your best friend right up until their mutually addictive and poisonous products eat your insides out and leave you for dead. Then it'll be your fault for buying it from them.

Black Friday is Murder

2009-11-27T00:47:00.005-05:00

Here's to those who die this day, who soon shall breathe their last beneath the footfalls of the slathering, beast-like, obese consumers of this nation; who die, trampled to death, year in, year out, each Black Friday, a witness to America's naked greed; a justification to her enemies.

In mere hours human lives shall end, cut short in the pursuit of what need? What cause? Savings. Yes, in moments men will die for discounts. They will be killed for coupons. Awash beneath the blue of morning's first light, mindless mobs shall murder. Them less sure of foot shall fall and end.

So here's to those who stumble when the mall doors open, and here's a curse upon the heads of all the rest, who pushed and shoved and knew not, and cared not. May they die worse deaths, slower, still more meaningless, than those they kill this day.

May your savings rot and fall off.

'Brand New Day' from Dr. Horrible

2009-11-10T17:59:00.007-05:00

Yep. I did another one from 'Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.' I'm a sucker for quick, tongue-twisting deliveries -- I couldn't resist.

This is my most successful performance to date, acting-wise. In fairness the role was written for me, so... BTW: is that not the best still capture ever? I look like a freaking madman. Awesome. Eat your heart out Heath Ledger.

'My Freeze Ray' from Dr. Horrible

2009-11-07T23:09:00.006-05:00

[EDIT: The video here is not the original posted. It has been replaced with the "strong contender from the high seventies" mentioned below. For the moment I've decided I like this take slightly better.]

That's right girls, I'm doing musicals now! Get out the hot pants!

This is the first number from 'Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.' It's absolutely brilliant, of course. It didn't really have a choice in the matter, being the progeny of Joss Whedon and crew. I'm not saying Joss Whedon is God or anything - because that would just be sacrilege - but I have noticed that you never seem to see the two of them in the same place at the same time, if you know what I mean.

Incidentally I did around ninety takes of this song before quitting; most abortive, but still... The one I used for the final cut came from somewhere in the fifties, though it was up against a strong contender from the high seventies. I'm still not certain I chose the better of the two. But cuts must be made!

I'm surprised how smooth my voice is in this register. For nine years of smoking I had no idea these dulcet tones were in me. There's the reason to quit! Fuck your health kids, quit smoking today: it'll increase your vocal range.

'Hopeless Bleak Despair' by TMBG

2009-11-03T17:27:00.004-05:00

That's They Might By Giants to you. By the way...

On Mondays I never go to work. On Tuesdays I stay at home. On Wednesdays I never feel inclined; work is the last thing on my mind. On Thursdays it's a holiday and Fridays I detest. Oh it's much too late on a Saturday and Sunday's the day of rest! Oh no, no, I never go to work.

Roy vs Halloween - Halloween Wins

2009-10-31T19:42:00.005-04:00

This will be the second in three Halloweens that I've gotten all dressed up and spent the night sitting at home. At least this time it's by choice. I thought I had something going here with the pumpkin carving and the mask. I've been making a papier mache mask for the last two weeks, when I had time, in hopes of pulling out some sort of crowd stopper this year. But two weeks spare time hasn't been nearly enough to craft anything worth putting on and the mask sits entirely unfinished.

Tomorrow I'm set to help my dad move the last of his big furniture into a new apartment. So the anticipated early morning heavy lifting ain't exactly encouraging me to get out and get rowdy tonight. It's mostly mood though. Call me Boll Weevil, I just don't feel up to it. I might manage some cheap-ass pizza and a rented movie, but a full-on human gathering sounds to be more burden than anything else right now.

Anyway, here's what I might've looked like had I attended your gathering. I did not.

Honey, you can't afford me.

Extremism is Required

2009-10-31T16:12:00.000-04:00

A year or two ago I read the teachings of Jesus and discovered that they were nothing at all like Christianity. That they were much better and more profound than anything the Christians in my life - including two years Christian schooling and my father's life-long Seventh Day Adventism - had ever led me to believe.

Aside from being an unflappable peacenik, Jesus, it turns out, was a rabid anti-capitalist. Who knew? Certainly the Christians didn't know. Not by the looks of their opulent homes and driveways full of consumer toys. Not according to the contents of the church parking lot, for sure.

I was so overwhelmed with the image of a spiritual leader who advocated the development of -- can you believe it? the spirit! over the stock portfolio... over the body or even the mind, that I decided to take this Jesus fellow up on the challenge.

He said to forgive everyone, so I did. He said to love everyone. I made a best effort at that. It wasn't easy but it wasn't quite as hard as you'd think. He said to sell off everything and give the money away: Done. "Take up your cross and follow me." Right-o, where we goin'?

This isn't the time or place for my story, but what I gained from doing as Jesus taught was a life rich with challenge, suffering, and most importantly, reward. I gained a life where the world was a game, at some points a sad and desperate game that could still fill the players with despair, but always a game. Life was innately foolish, and yet I was indeed living it. I was a participant! I was alive. And I realized just how often that hadn't been the case.

I eventually lost grip of the fundamentals that led me to the road and kept me in good spirits and good stead throughout my asceticism. When I look back I can see a number of personal weaknesses, challenges I failed to overcome, that eventually amounted and chased me back to our present ease of death. But one of the most surprising deceptions that led me from the good path was the very self-deprivation prescribed.

Maintaining my own lack of goods became itself a distraction from my goals. The struggle to remain poor in the face of opportunity and the good-will of a community became an impediment to the cultivation of my spirit, much as capitalism had been before it -- though surely to no equal degree. I felt guilty when I had more than ten dollars in my pocket and when someone offered me work I regressed into intellectual capitulations. This guilt-laden inner turmoil served only to shrink my otherwise expanding outer awareness back down to the blind, pin prick of self; quite the opposite of my intent.

I've read tales of 'Bud' the Buddha and 'Sid,' Siddhartha. Both end in the same conclusive phrase: "The Middle Path." I hate that term. Maybe it's the phonetic resemblance to "middle class" or "middle ground," but the verbage seems to me to lend itself the air of an enabling device; of a justification for lethargic conformity. It turns my mind to the bourgeois: that race of men who've made a whole from one third chastity, one third sin, and one third vacant opportunism. "The middle path" is so easily misconstrued that the phrase itself may be to Buddhism what Christians are to Christianity - a red herring.

One of my favorite books is 'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse. Hesse's Siddhartha isn't a prince, but simply a well to do young Brahmin. You might say he's an upper middle class kid at the top of the pyramid, ready to go far in his family's aristocratic circles. But he quickly realizes that the path he's on doesn't go anywhere. Accruing all knowledge, as is the practice of his peoples, hasn't led any of his elder counterparts to true enlightenment, and his own studies have done little to soothe his aching soul. So he heads into the wilderness and joins those who seek enlightenment through suffering; who pursue their inner peace by numbing both body and mind to all the world's woes. They think every thought, suffer every pain, deprive themselves of all comfort until no misfortune can move them one way or the other. Of course, Siddhartha soon decides that for all his pains he is grown no closer to enlightenment and that any relief he has found in these practices, be they of his father or of the wild monks, is merely temporary. He muses, most entertainingly, that he can see no difference between such lofty meditative methods of silencing the ego and drowning his soul's confusions in a bottle of rye. Both Brahmin and drunkard awake the next morning to meet their pains renewed.

His path is long and wild and soon enough he decides to taste the richness of what he calls the child's life, embracing the more common paths of sexuality and commerce. It begins as a game and it is very entertaining and fulfilling when played as a game. But these worlds slowly infect him. He starts to take them seriously and they lose their charm. After some time he awakes to find that he is nolonger pursuing his goal of enlightenment but that he's been indoctrinated into a cornucopia, an orgy of the self -- exactly what he first set out to overcome.

In Hesse's 'Siddhartha' the key is not the middle path, but the fullness and wideness of the Buddha's life that enable his enlightenment. By old age he has seen so much of samsara - the endless cycle of life and it's worries - he's walked through so many of it's layers that he finds his final peace in embracing it all. All is samsara. All is life. All is death. All is suffering. All is joy. All is ignorance. All is wisdom. All is hate. All is love.

It is not the moderation of some middle path that brings Siddhartha home to eternity, but the sheer extremity of his existence; the breadth of his life. In the end he knows compassion and understanding for all men because he has walked a day in every shoe. He finds freedom from want by having embraced the wants of all; by knowing the sincere pursuit of every foolishness; by knowing all samsara to be a necessary elixir that must be tasted in full.

From my personal journey I've learned the greater happiness there is to be found in the absence of the comforts modern existence demands. To those who seek it deprivation is a comfort to the soul, for what's sake they are wise to let the body rot. But where deprivation ceases comfort it becomes penance for uncommitted sins. It is pain for pain's sake and there is no rationalizing it.

Between opulence and destitution lie a better way, perhaps. But it is surely not an equidistant. Extremism is required.

The Pumpkineer

2009-10-26T00:10:00.005-04:00

Pumpkin of Doom
Maw and I caught us a twenty-two pounder today. Boy, I tell you, I widdled him something fierce, too. Sure enough'll last him, I reckon! Chaw!

One love.

Summer of the Shark

2009-10-24T16:54:00.008-04:00

You people are really fucking stupid, ya' know that? Are you aware? just how ridiculously goddamn retarded you are? Yeah, you nibble-nuts. See me pointing? You!

Just want to take a quick sec to put things in perspective for all you dipshits at home. Every year, I'm told, six-thousand people in the US die falling off of a ladder. There are 1500 accidental deaths by firearms. And around 1600 people win no less than a million dollars playing the lottery. This all per annum.

Now put those factiods in your pocket for a minute (you dumb motherfucker, you) and follow me back to the oh-so distant year of 2001. In 2001, prior to a couple of planes flying into a couple skyscrapers, the news - not the tabloids, now, but the Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, "You're watching CNN," tick-tock 60-fuckin-Minutes, news - was out there for months, screaming at the top of their shameless dollar-whore lungs, about shark attacks. Did you hear me right? Yes, I said "shark attacks."

Early in the swimming season they latched onto an attack survivor's story and for the entire rest of the summer could not shut the fuck up about sharks, attacks, and shark attacks. They were so adamant in espousing the danger to the world's swimmers, that they dubbed summer 2001, "The Summer of the Shark." Yes, I'm serious. I was there. It happened. Look it up.

The results? Coastal beaches everywhere received less swimmers. In other words: You ignant' fucking people actually believed this shit about shark attacks. You actually believed that sharks had suddenly decided to go to war with human beings. Oh, you can try to say you didn't believe it - that you didn't fall for Walter Cronkite's horseshit lies - but the numbers tell a different story. You and yours weren't at the beach in '01. You were at home, on the couch, tuned in to the sensationalist, ratings driven, propaganda that passes for American journalism. You were buying, reading and consuming the very media that was unabashedly lying to you, and in the most blatantly obvious manner. You were enabling it! You were tuning in and paying their sponsors. You were feeding the beast that was eating you alive you stupid human-fucking-waste.

And in retrospect? What really happened in the "Summer of the Shark?" Shark attacks were down 15% from the year before. You were more likely to win the lottery; You were more likely to fall off a ladder and die; In fact, you had a better chance of being struck by fucking lightning than being attacked by a shark in the summer of 2001. They were lying to your face the whole time - all summer long! And you, because you're such a rubbernecking, trailer trash, 'Faces of Death' renting, professional wrestling fan, idiot - lapped it up like a kitten at a leaky cow udder. You ignorant asshole, you.

Now this year, with just two months left out of 2009, that same media that advised you so well about the imminent threat of sharks growing legs, coming up on land, and eating your babies while they're still in the womb, is pulling out all the stops to make sure that you don't forget for a minute about the massive viral outbreak what presently threatens to sweep the nation snuffing out your childrens' lives in a tidal epidemic that's sure to leave more bodies than survivors! Look out America! Run for you fucking lives! It's H1N1! It's 2009, "The Fall of the Flu!" Boogedy woogedy woo, dipshit!!!

As of this very day, H1N1 - aka "the swine flu" - is reported to have claimed all of 1000 American lives this year. Now since you're so fucking stupid, I'll go ahead and do the math for you, and project a total of around 1200 deaths by year's end.

In other words: You are more likely to be accidentally shot to death by a neighbor cleaning a gun; you are more likely to win a million dollars in your state's lottery; you are way, way more likely to kill yourself while changing a light bulb than you are to die of this H1N1 that the media is skull-fucking for ratings' sake.

And so long as it's stuck in there, let's give it a twist and see if we can't break it off by pointing out that 30 times more people will die this year thanks to the good old fashioned, every day, over-the-counter strains of influenza that don't nobody give a shit about right now, because they're all too fucking retarded for this month's "7 Action News: Special Report - Death by Swine" hysteria bullshit.

If you got an H1N1 vaccine, you are dumb. I'm using simple words now; I think I've run out of other ways to express your intellectual lackings. You are dumb. You probably voted for Bush and against socialized medicine. You're dumb. You probably own a Swiffer Sweeper and drive an SUV. You're fucking dumb! You probably think eating at 'Subway' is a fucking diet, because you're really, really fucking dumb, mang.

They have got you! They own your ignorant, cowish ass. You buy whatever they're selling. You lap up whatever they pour in the bowl. You are one ridonculous fucking numbnut motherfucker, you are. And you're the problem, by the way. It's you. Oh, it's all you! You're why democracy don't work anymore. You're why capitalism has eaten the soul out of this nation. Put it this way: You're the shit-for-brains that talks up how evil Walmart is, then turns around and goes shopping there. Cause you "just can't beat the deals. Sure I know it's run by Satan, but it's 2 for 1 on Swiffer pads this week! Who needs self respect when you've got coupons!"

It's the Summer of the Shark, you dipshit. Tune out! No. Not in... Out! Yeah! That's an option. Yeah, if you press the red button again, it actually turns the TV off. No shittin' ya. You know what? "H1N1" is just "leet" text for hiney - as in butt. As in, "We be fucking you good tonight, America. Tune in at 11 for more major-market consolidated-media dick up yo' ass."

God! You're just so fucking dumb!

(That 1600 lotto millionaires figure seems high, don't you think? I'll bet the internet is lying to me... again!)

'Distance' by Long Shot Party

2009-10-22T13:58:00.006-04:00

Yep, I'm covering 'Distance' again. This time I've ventured to sing it in the original octave and register. Look out! As always I have little idea what it is that I'm saying here, but I like it just the same! More so, in fact.

After much study I've decided the lyrics to this song, as subtitled by the fansub group Dattebayo, are just wrong. I've come to this conclusion by comparing an alternate lyric sheet to the album-version of 'Distance,' finding the words much easier to enumerate there. It is clear, by the lyrics heard in Long Shot Party's music video, that Dattebayo got tripped up somewhere, presumably by the steady mixture of Engrish and Nipon-go throughout the song.

It certainly wasn't happy news to discover this fault in Dattebayo's translation, since that's how I originally learned this song. It meant breaking myself of the first delivery, which is none too easy - mind you - when you don't speak the language you're singing; when you first learned the lyrics phonetically! Well, eventually it sunk in... as evidenced by the absolutely flawless performance above.

Yes, you are welcome, mankind. You are welcome indeed.

OMG U GUYZ!

2009-10-16T12:04:00.004-04:00

I met it first a few weeks ago, I don't know where. Then a few days ago Ian and I were at a bar, skillfully unweaving Aristotelian precepts, when all our labors fell and shattered - we lost our place - and lost control, overcome by hysterical laughter at its sudden, unanticipated presence.

Now, I don't know why, but today - days later - it finally happened. I should've seen it coming. I woke up this morning and there it was at the foot of my bed, whispering in my ear as I drug myself out and up and toward the shower. I rode the bike to work today, thinking I'd lose it in the cold, hidden beneath coat and scarf; let it chase me naked through a brisk fall morning at a 12mph wind chill. But it managed even nude, it was with me there as well.

And as soon as Kevin walked out the door just now I couldn't help it. Alone in the shop I finally lost control. It got inside me, took over, and I saw myself... I heard myself singing:

"I've got a feeling... that tonight's gonna be a good night. That tonight's gonna be a good, good ni-i-ight. [...Got a feelin']"

It's the slight overlap at the end that seals it for me. I'm helpless in the face of rounds. Like red heads and innocence they disarm me.

Well, let's live it up.

Wild International

2009-10-10T14:00:00.009-04:00

"
They say that in war the truth be the first casualty. So I dig in: Selector - I, the Resurrector - fly my shit; sever your neck wider than ever with my tongue dipped in funk arsenic. Burn this illusion, this lie, with straight arson shit! Your arsenal's stripped. Power aint full jackets and clips, it's my ability to define phenomenon. Raw Crenshaw, '84. Boogie down before L.A.

When the war break off, where you be? Take off? Stand in full face off? with the M1 millimeter, let the rhythm of the chamber hit 'em. Let the rich play catch with 'em. Better yet, make 'em, eat 'em, and shit 'em till they so full of holes that they drown in their own.

I'm like a nail stuck in the wrist of they Christmas. Don't need radio to leave their family a witness.

Muhammad and Christ will life? ...will lay your body down to a tune, so wild, international. In the desert, full of bullets, let your body rot. With my chrome, with my verse, with my body. Rock!

In this era where DJs behave - be paid to be slaves - we raid airwaves to be sane. And what's raining from the station? Cash fascination like living dead.

Fed agents distract us fast from a disaster's wrath. For sure, air war was flooded like the 9th ward on the AM. On the AM! Turn and face them. Hatred and mayhem! "Slay them!" "Dangerous!" I take razor steps. It's the swing from the bling to the bang on the left! It's the murderous return: boom back, full strap. Your six that got clipped, you can't clap back.

With minimal lift and criminal flow I'm killing 'em soft and billing 'em fo' everything stole. And once again I'm that nail in the wrist of they Christmas. Watch me make their family a witness.
"

Here I've transcribed Zach De La Rocha's lyrics for the song 'Wild International' from the band and album One Day as a Lion. I've attempted to give it a traditional paragraph form and remove some of the signature lyrical flow. By adding punctuation and breaking the lines on the thought, rather than the beat, the ideas distinguish themselves more clearly.

I shall now, in pompous arrogance, interpret these lyrics. I will expound upon them, putting things in that aren't really there, and freeing whole volumes of thought and text from just a few syllables. I advise that you stop reading here and go form your own opinions instead. (I should consider the time taken to write this a self-indulgent waste.)

The first verse sets a violent tone for a song considered on whole to be a blisteringly angry threat and a call to armed revolution. The first line, a simple derivative quote, ("In war, truth is the first casualty") sets the stage for a few of the song's prevailing notions of thought control and military media warfare. De La Rocha builds himself up a little at the beginning, annointing himself the resurrector of truths lost to the veil of war. Slitting the enemy's throat is symbolic of an inability to make rebuttal. Stripping him of his "arsenal" is as well, a claim that there can be no argument to the ideas that follow. Power lie not in military might but in thought. Wars are born of men and minds, not means. No army on Earth can withstand the might of its protectorate. Power is reason and who controls their own mind is more powerful, and dangerous, than all armies.

The second paragraph is much benefited by punctuation, almost that it need not be further considered. It begins with the challenge: When the war between man and his oppressors begins, where will you be? Will you run from the fight. Will you desert mankind to the shelter of them who promise you only subjugation. Or will you stand against the powers of the world that have so long bound you. Will you seize and hold the will to stand and kill the capitalist oppressor as he and his have so long been the murderers of men, and worse?

The pitch to chorus is tough. A nail through the wrist of Christmas... Well, that would be a disappointment to anyone, to say the least. The truth and death of Jesus as received during the celebration of his birth. Forced recognition of sobering truths despite an effort to remain blind to them.

"Don't need radio to leave their family a witness." An incredulous threat, intended to remind the consolidated media and Pentagon propagandists, brought to flog later, that no amount of media censorship, hype, or spin can wipe away the real images of death and destruction when they land in your own backyard.

The third paragraph and chorus is a challenge. I've transcribed the first line as "Mohammad and Christ will life?" And I've followed it immediately with "...will lay your body down." If heard correctly, I find this an unexpectedly poetic and intoxicating pun, capturing with a masterful terseness the hypocrisy inherent in both religions. The collective gods of Christian and Muslim world alike espouse doctrines of peace and life, while in practice Jesus and Mohammad, God and Allah are all equally likely to spray your blood across the sand impiously, unbothered even to grant sport a grave, leaving corpse to rot in open air. All these gods are more often the trumpet heralding war than leading to peace.

"to a tune so wild: international," begs mention here as it distinguishes the type of war being condemned in the chorus. De La Rocha is a militantly minded artist, and I believe, an advocate of violent revolution. Thus it is not war in general he is deriding, but these foreign wars of aggression, empire, and capital gain. A civil war of liberation and self determination would presumably be just fine by him.

The last line of the chorus ("With my chrome, with my verse, with my body.") may be less thought out than I will suggest, but I imagine it the sudden juxtaposition of the speaker to the position of the dead. De la Rocha is here entertaining the notion of himself dead or dying on the sand of a foreign nation, and so the listener is juxtapositioned with him. All to die and disappear, mind and body, on foreign soil, with none to care; least of all them that led us to the fight.

The second verse begins with the consolidation of media. I suspect some personal ire in this songs mentions of radio. One Day as a Lion can't be getting any radio play from the Clear Channel syndicate. Of course they mustn't have expected much airtime considering the lyrical content of the music. I know well the great frustrations suffered from beneath a glass ceiling and One Day as a Lion along with Zach De La Rocha earn the right to their anger as poets and musicians only allowed so many decibels, so large an audience, and so far a reach by the consolidated media interests at large.

So while it is as likely that the second verse's opening lines regard the Pentagon's hypocritical propagandizings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those populations' attempts to publish and air their own responses without being detected and destroyed for it, I enjoy these comments as a more domestic affair. To be clear, I find these statements regard widely the consolidation of media, the lack of intellectual diversity, and the absence of perspective and individuality across mainstream outlets. I do not mean to imply that this is purely, or even first, a personal slight by a poet scorned. But that scorn may feed the flames of the song's overall vitriol.

"And what's raining from the station? Cash fascination."

In the bible Jesus says that you cannot serve both Mammon and God. Mammon is the personified representation of greed. No one can serve two masters, says Jesus, and he teaches that too friendly a relationship with money, goods, comforts, and convenience is enmity with God. You cannot be spiritually sound, says Jesus, and know the want of money.

Today our current policy in Afghanistan is outwardly and unashamedly to "whip a little industry on 'em." I have heard the opinion voiced by an average news anchor - not a crazy, fascist, CNN talking head - but by a run of the mill, wallpaper reporter that in order to stem "religious extremism" in the middle east, America's policies should be to increase the capital opportunities available; spur entrepreneurship; and encourage new fiscal markets. In other words, "we can destroy the belief system that leads them to resist us so zealously, by slow and unnoticable means until all that remains of it is dogmatic ceremony, if we can erect a middle class of relative ease."

It's a perfectly logical conclusion. I've seen it work wonders to those same ends here at home in America. And I cannot believe how unrepentantly Satanic capitalism and America really are. Nor how acceptable this depth of evil has become to the average citizen. When "America's enemies" say that we are the great Satan, it's because we are. We are trying to destroy their culture. We are trying to drive a wedge between them and their God. We really truly are the modern embodiment of Lucifer's will. Nice to meet you. Beverage? Towel? Hot poker in your ass?

I'd like to think that the two word phrase "Cash fascination" embodies all of this and more, both abroad and at home. It also sets up the next few lines of the song as they regard the racist attempts at deflection and Marshall law following hurricane Katrina. These being the "looting" claims of the fascist capitalist demon fuckwad cocksuckers.

A merchant city under water; no meaningful response from the Federal government; tens of thousands of unrepresented people sleeping in a sports arena, and under armed quarantine for the disease of being poor in a disaster (and therefore libel to do anything!); civil rights abuses piling up one after another; and all the media can talk about or show is a few opportunists running off with soggy stereo equipment. So much so that enough heads turned from a city in peril, unassisted by all the systems supposedly in place to help them, to the "need" for Marshall law and national guardsmen. The need to start shooting down anyone walking out of a Piggly Wigglies without a receipt scotch taped to their forehead. Finally we see this government's concern! Not people. Property! "Quick get the guns and protect the lifeless inanimate sundries that those cold, wet, hungry, homeless people are trying to walk off with!"

"the swing from the bling to the bang on the left." The media was able to blow up a few incidents of looting to the point that America was able to accept the use of military force for the purposes of policing an American city. This leads right into "the murderous return." That sacrifice of constitutional grounds that can never be undone. The powers-that-be winning another precedent enabling them to come in and hold the peace by overwhelming intimidation and lethal force.

An alternate interpretation might leave De La Rocha speaking from the perspective of the media throughout this latter half of the verse; mocking their fear mongering and laying bare the racism innate in all those suggestions of an impending danger posed by a large black community suddenly homeless. Like animals the white man caged but wishes he'd just gotten rid of, broken loose and threatening now - this race of dark savages - to infiltrate our nice, white villages and carjack us all to death for fried chicken and watermelon money.

Another interpretation of this last section could leave it spoken on behalf of the people: A violent outburst of hatred toward the establishment. The "swing from the bling to the bang on the left" could prophecy the shift in the populace from their obsession with comforts and goods to the stronger desire for a just and humane world. This leaves the rest of the song as a string of threats against the establishment.

The last line before the pitch to chorus is a beautiful enigma to me. He could be speaking from the perspective of the authority, who, during a crisis, is hovering around in helicopters gunning people down over a stolen TV. I prefer, however, to think that he's returned to his earlier push toward violent revolution; that he's speaking on behalf of the people, as they regard the powers of oppression. The proletariat, finally armed, having found it's resolve to seize control, is at last "killing 'em soft and billing 'em fo' everything stole."

Or it could be a song about puppies. One of those two.

Prosimian-Man

2009-10-06T12:23:00.008-04:00

I am man and you are not. This is your world. You belong to it. You are sated by it, happy of it, and none to your fault. But I am an accident. This is not my world and I am not happy of it. I'm not meant to be here. But I am stranded. I am made myself the butt of a woeful cosmic joke.

In eternity they gambled, "What do you think would happen if we took one of us - a spiritually developed being; a consciousness who desires meaning and virtue, life and love; whose goals would not abide the comforts and trivialities of a life lived only for the sake of living still... What would come if such a being, unawares, were bore upon a planet of hairy, tick-eating ape, and left there to believe in it his natural home?"

The pot must ever grow among my kindred, casting bets on how it all shall surely one day end for me; or yet how it must one day still begin. For it can not be fairly said that my life has much begun, though false-starts do amount in me aplenty.

But what should happen to a spiritual being set among the squalor and feces of a race of primates? What mechanism might he find by which to cope amongst a peoples dedicated in every proposition to acquiring the largest bunch of bananas readily available, be they either on the tree or in some fellow other's apish paw. To always seek and take the largest cache, by lawless force as needs shall be, and spiting every meal come them of the un-bunched abundance budded, budding freely over and about.

Then to guard the loot's the thing! First to heap up treasure, then to lay aground the thicket, sharpen claws, beat chest, howl thunder. For peace among apes is only come of sinew's fear; of the one's supposed death and loss upon the other's much labored image of insurmountable virility.

And last to gorge! When gathered and preserved, to overwhelm the senses with the excess of the ill-got gains. To have as much and more as can be had, that some be lost to vomit. The primate's life: to live for sake of living. Every carnal comfort bought to ease the road to death, and nothing more pursued.

What becomes of man as born to ape? So decrees the cosmos to test the supposition and I am born. Though true the pool slows growth as I grow older. The odds, at first predicting a romantic teenage suicide, have long since turned to favor natural death, as there to be preceded by long and pitiful, unlikely, apish life. Such even that the parlour of heaven's gamblers has turned from roguish curiosity to the laments of guilt and despair.

They expected more of me. I am one of their own and here they find me lived amongst the apes; choosing here to stay. The suicide was much preferred to this. They would have found it just and right and beautiful, and I'd returned to my compatriots to cheers and laughter; the multitude's hands rapped upon my back. But fearing death too greatly I taught myself, instead, how well to suffer and remain. And heaven suffers with me for it.

They meant to see me killed - a god amongst heathens, man amidst ape. "A flame too alighting of the truth to be politely tolerated must be squelched at hands his own or otherwise." So they thought and right they were. But I have out-stepped their suppositions, hiding what alights of me beneath a bushel. I have thinned the air that feeds the wick and learned to breathe in shallows. I am a disappointment to my gods. So do I apologize. I must be putting on an awful show.

I am a man set among apes and I have likened it to a great cosmic wager. It is nothing less! though at once it may be more. Perhaps the ancients planned that I'd alight in these prosimians a thing or two before my passing... before they killed me for it, or I myself. Perhaps it were a task to come and do and die and then go home, and be again among my kind in joy and love and laughter of the trip; failure no disgrace so long as prodigy return me home to kind.

Oh fear of fear that heaven is not something I must earn my place among but one to which I first belonged. Fear of fear that, here beneath the bushel, walked among the monkeys, my posture doth decay. Fear of fear of fear that on that day I die, I die too monkey to go home.

Television is Like This

2009-10-03T13:25:00.006-04:00

Television is like this:

Imagine you're fourteen years old again. Imagine you are a fourteen year old male. You've hit puberty. You've thought you were in love once or twice. You've experienced a lot in fourteen years, really. And lately you've become painfully conscious of other people. Nolonger do you run and play with mindless, uncaring joy as a child does. But now you are all too aware of the outer world's assumptions, expectations, and opinions of you.

Your tastes are changing. You've become interested in music and art on a new, perhaps more spiritually profound level. Sure, you're still just a dumb fourteen year old, and you probably think whatever they play on the popular radio station is great, but you are learning to experience music and other forms of art in a new way; a way that seems to impact you personally; that speaks to you directly.

And you've just begun to entertain a sort of rebelliousness and angst. You now find yourself unconsciously probing the boundaries of your world; bringing challenge to the so-called conventional wisdom, and to those authority figures who, until now, guided and predisposed all your understandings.

You are a fourteen year old male. You're evolving. You're growing. You're becoming spiritually aware. You've been on this planet fourteen years and there's a million miles ahead of you, sure, but your personal journey of self-discovery has undeniably begun.

And let's suppose that as you are undergoing all these changes and awakenings, the outside world, all your friends, all the people you've been told are cool, whose footfalls are to be noted and imitated, are all at once telling you, in the friendliest, most sincerely compassionate manner, about all these things they think you would really, really like... as a fourteen year old male.

They give you names of bands and television shows. They give you authors and movies. They give you artists, games, women, foods, and flavors... So helpful are they to point you at those things which they believe you, in your present state of mind and at your level of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development, would find illuminating, intoxicating, diverting, and entertaining; that would make your world - your very life - a richer, more prosperous, more meaningful and enlightening journey.

And with all these kind suggestions overflowing the basket of your open arms you take yourself to a video shop to pick up the number one film, that very gem of celluloid theatrics that all your friends and peers joined together to laud above all other works, as that which would most pierce the fourteen-year-old male soul.

You bring it home, put it in the player, and press play. And it's fucking Barney. 'Barney the Purple Dinosaur - the Movie.' Or it's an hour and a half installment of 'Elmo's World.' You're a teenager, the bud of a man, and they've got you watching 'Hannah Montana on Ice.'

Then you turn on the radio to the sound of the DJ pitching you into one of those "great songs" by one of those "awesome bands" your peers mentioned. And it's an 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' cover.

You look again at the list of foods to try, and they're all Gerber brand. The women meant to satisfy your raging hormones are boyish and dull, the games are peg-in-hole, and the artists all color-by-number.

Television is like this: Imagine you're a twenty-eight year old male and the whole world is trying to give you just what it thinks a being of your emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturity will want; will desire to see, consider, and discuss. And every single one of them is so sure they've got it right that they all, a thousand different media outlets, each employing hundreds of thinking, reasoning human beings to choose and produce the content they find worthy, all of them independently but simultaneously conclude that what will benefit you most, what will most endear you to them, what you really truly want to see and hear is "Dave Letterman had sex with staffers."

...

Lord send me boyish women and Elmo's World.

HijackThis crashes on Event 1000 - msvbvm60.dll

2009-10-02T16:22:00.012-04:00

The Problem

I've seen this twice now. HijackThis crashes after being open for a bit, to the tune of a nondescript error message. In Windows Vista: "HijackThis has stopped working." Sometimes you'll get a few minutes use out of it before the crash. Sometimes just a few seconds. Sometimes it won't crash at all. It's only ever a problem on a laptop (I think) and this time I encountered it on a Gateway M-2626u running 64-bit Vista.

The Details

The application error log reads like this:

Faulting application HijackThis.exe, version 2.0.0.2, time stamp 0x466838c1, faulting module MSVBVM60.DLL, version 6.0.98.2, time stamp 0x4791a724, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0005d26c, process id 0x114, application start time 0x01ca43853341371a.

At first I figured there was a virus on the machine crashing HJT on a timer event. Wrong. I figured msvbvm60.dll had been corrupted and so I tried replacing it. No change. I finally noted that the application seemed to crash when I was dragging the scroll-bar or maybe resizing the window. With this in mind, I thought the video drivers were somehow the problem; 64-bit hardware drivers are always suspect. But again, no.

The Solution

In the end the culprit lie in the touchpad, or rather Synaptic's touchpad drivers. HijackThis crashes, for whatever reason, when you trigger a mouse-scroll event using the right or bottom edges of the touchpad. It's very difficult to come to this conclusion unless you are intentionally trying to scroll this way. I wasn't, but I must have been catching the edges of the pad as I used the mouse and triggering a scroll; that made it very hard for me to see what was causing the application to suddenly die at such odd intervals of use.

The file that enables the scroll functions in question is the "Synaptics Pointing Device Driver" at "Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\SynTPEnh.exe"

Disabling it in the startup routine via 'msconfig' will prevent HJT from crashing, though it will also disable the scroll functions of your touchpad; something most people never use and that only gets in the way, anyway. (Much as it did here.) I say turn the thing off.

My Golf Swing at 60fps

2009-09-27T13:51:00.005-04:00

There's probably as much or more virtue in recording an off-day to see what's wrong in your swing as there is recording and reviewing your best. This is notedly an off-day for me. I've just started playing with a looser grip, which was working wonders for me at the range and on the course yesterday, but which is probably throwing off my timing today. Excuses, excuses...

I'm hitting whiffle balls here. Little pink, crappy ones that dent easily and seem to lack the weight needed to accurately represent an arc. I eventually split or crushed all my good ones and thought I'd give the cheapsies a try; half thinking they were marked down because it's probably hard to sell pink golf balls. But no. They're just light-weight junk is all.

I'll also note to the unfamiliar viewer that I am 'pigeon-toed.' So if it looks like my legs and hips are doing something impossible or unnatural, it's because they are.

And, yes ladies, those are my triceps bulging and rippling. And I'm sorry, but no, you can't have any of this delicious carnal hotness. Deal with it.

An Irreverent Hypocrisy

2009-09-25T20:41:00.002-04:00

Continuing comments at You Are Your Television - Kill Everything.

"
It sounds like you are trying to excuse the people [...] for playing along; for voting against their own interests; for tuning in to a consolidated media that lowers their standards and keeps them stupid; for allowing atrocities to be committed in their names and under their flags.

But whether they made the problems themselves, whether they built the world in their image or someone else rammed it down their throats, they still live there. It's still their world and nothing can exempt them from the responsibility they bear for failing to respond to the real problems of their age; much less for playing along and paying homage to them. Example: Governor G.W. Bush didn't magically conjure a hurricane or personally poke holes in the levies, but when Louisiana flooded he damn well should've sent help. That's civic responsibility.

"We didn't want great big SUVs poisoning the atmosphere, unnecessarily depleting unreplenishable natural resources, increasing the demand for oil and thereby encouraging principalities of war and unrest to fits of murder in the middle east... But hey, now that they're here, fuck it. Look, honey, there's a TV in the headrest!"

If you're saying the people are too stupid to be responsible for their own actions... Okay. I can feel you. But if that's your point you should probably hang onto the stones of cynicism and defeatism, as panes of glass are rather expensive a material to build a house out of.

And if the people are too stupid, or ill-informed, or uneducated (oh the many diplomatic ways of calling people 'stupid') due the machinations of wealthy industrialists and capitalist oppressors... Good, great. We agree. So where's the beef?

Better yet, let's try something constructive here (since "troll" seems to be everyone's new favorite word to bandy about with irreverent hypocrisy) what do you think could be done to remedy the unaddressed evils in a world full of people too indoctrinated to recognize them? Let's talk solutions here. Let's pretend to hold ourselves to the same standards we claim to hold the rest and pause to look inward and ask of ourselves, "What are you going to do about it?"

Personally, I've got a 12 step plan which I'd love to outline for you now. Oh, but "Lost" is coming on, and it's sweeps month! Fuck it, I'm sure someone else will straighten it all out eventually.
"

Slow Boot at XP Logo

2009-09-25T15:40:00.014-04:00

The Problem(s)

A machine came into the shop this week with a litany of issues, starting with a corrupted BIOS, an overheat problem that eventually led to the power supply, and an inexplicably slow boot time, hanging most notably at the Windows XP logo and scroll bar. The latter of the issues proved a challenge worthy of my efforts.

The Flailing Hunt for a Fix

We start with the basics. MSConfig, Hijackthis, and Sophos Anti-Rootkit (bullocks to RootkitRevealer) revealed no significant abusers. A defrag set the bits in order. Services and start-ups were reduced to good measure. And all without change to the incredibly long boot.

Some quick reading introduces me to a program called Microsoft Bootvis: A tool for recording and visually analyzing the sequence of events taking place during XP's boot cycle. In many circumstances, I'm told, Bootvis can cut startup time in half just using it's automated procedures. Though in my case, automation did not yield significant results.

The visualizations, however 1.) told me that the boot sequence was taking around 90 seconds start to finish, and 2.) about 70 seconds of that was dominated by two processes: an 'AVG Antivirus' dll file and fltmgr.sys.

First thing, I uninstalled AVG, immediately shaving twenty-five seconds off the boot time. This still left fltmgr.sys eating up fifty seconds all by it's lonesome. And on a 2.8Ghz Hyper-Threaded P4 with a gig of ram... Uh-uh. That boot is still way, way too slow.

I looked into fltmgr, of course, but found it an underlying construct of the OS - one that, in all likelihood, was supposed to be there, doing whatever it was doing throughout the boot.

I then turned my eyes to the visualization in Bootvis that showed the Prefetch process overarching the drivers sequence and taking just as long as any of the drivers. So, after some reading, I deleted the contents of C:\Windows\Prefetch and changed the registry to prefetch only boot items thereafter. This yielded no change in boot time.

More reading... Someone mentions the file indexing for XP's "high speed" search as a cause of slowdowns. I turn off indexing on the c:\ drive and disable the service. No change.

Disable print/file sharing. Nope. Network drives? Nope. Disable all superfluous hardware in the device manager: Out goes modem, network adapter, floppy drive and controller. Nope. Physically detach secondary IDE channel along with CD/DVD drives. Nope.

The Solution

In the Device Manager, under IDE Controllers, I finally found - stumbled onto really - that both channels had somehow reverted to PIO mode. This can prove a bit of an annoyance when it happens to your CD drive, and you suddenly find that burning a disc takes an hour or more; But when it happens to your hard disk... Well, you've lost gobs and gobs of bandwidth to an inferior data transfer mode, the likes of which the word 'bottleneck' cannot begin to describe.

The desired mode here is DMA and the easy fix to get your IDE channels recognizing their DMA capability again is to simply uninstall them by right clicking the offending channel in the Device Manager list and selecting 'Uninstall.' (They will reinstall themselves on reboot.)

After uninstalling both PIO-moded channels and rebooting, DMA 5 capability was detected once more and my customer shall be happy indeed to report - to friends, colleagues, and total strangers alike - a reduction in OS boot time from ninety to thirty seconds. I say again, :90 to :30. (That's with AVG reinstalled.)

And all this regards merely the boot time. Imagine how slow every other operation that required a call to the disk must have been. I wouldn't have noticed it in a few hours doing a repair (especially while simultaneously working on two or three other systems) but the disk access must have been insufferable!

Once a program is loaded into memory, of course, even the end user wouldn't easily notice a difference in performance, but that first double-click to open a program must have been taking... Well, by these figures I suppose it was taking at least three times as long to perform every disk operation!

The more I think of it the more I think this woman owes me some baked goods for figuring this one out, don't you?

In my Six-Fo'

2009-09-24T20:26:00.009-04:00

...my eight-nine to be exact. But hell it is a red Chevy so - six of one, half dozen of the other.

Today I began a full-scale tune up on my G20 Chevy van. I say "began" because it remains now in pieces and I have retired for the day. I started this project with a visit to Murray's. The man behind the counter had a sort-of permanent smile and upbeat attitude that seemed incredibly sincere, though extremely unlikely. I noticed myself being wooed by his smile, suggestions, and helpful demeanor. A half hour later I walked out with $75 worth of a tune-up. That guy will be President in 2012.

Seriously though, he was a great help and pointed me in some necessary and worthwhile directions I hadn't then considered. I walked into Murray's planning an oil and filter change, new air filter, and spark plug afternoon. I walked out planning an oil change, an air filter, spark plugs, plug wires, distributor cap, and distributor rotor. Or in other terms, every single act of vehicle maintenance I know how to do without a guiding hand.

The oil change went off smoothly; I even managed to drain the filter without splashing crude around. Then was the challenge. As an old-school cargo-style van, the engine is not so much under the hood as it is three inches to the right of the driver's right knee. Access to the engine is basically behind the ashtray on the dash, and it's a bitch to get behind.

On the contrary, once you've spent a good quarter hour prying the plastic back it's actually kind of nice to be able to sit in a captain's seat while you tinker with the engine. Though it does make a helluva mess.

With the engine exposed I first wrote down the orientation of the plug-wires to the distributor cap. Then I started pulling wires, and here's where I am especially indebted to the fellow at Murray's who told me I was going to need new wires once I got under there. For with each wire I pried back came a puff of blue dust; oxidized copper. A closer inspection of the plug ends thereafter would not have allowed me to, in good conscience, put them back on, feeble and broken as time had rendered them.

Then we pull the plugs. But wait, I don't have a socket deep enough. Back to Murray's. Cha-ching... Up to $80.00 now. I pull the plugs, install the new ones, and decide to tackle the distributor cap and rotor. A stripped and rusted screw eats up another fifteen minutes all on it's own, but I prevail and reach the rotor.

But the damned thing won't come off. A rotor basically just slides into place and this one won't pry off with a foot-long flathead. Fuck it: I break it off. Now we slide the new one on... We... We slide the new... Damnit... Get on there... Motherfucker won't go on. Maybe a little tap with the hammer. No. Pull it back off for a minute and let me look this over. Shit, I cracked the new rotor with the hammer.

What's happened is, the gear shaft on which the rotor sits has gathered some rust over the passed twenty years. No? Really? Sure has. And that has expanded it's foot print such that the old rotor couldn't release and the new one isn't really big enough to accommodate the extra millimeter of oxidized metal.

Sandpaper! I cleaned up the surface with some sandpaper, and the new rotor - though cracked - at least proves that it will now take the shaft. Now I'll just need another rotor... 'bout up to $90 with that, but I'm not going back to Murray's tonight. Evening is settling in and I'm getting hungry.

I finished running the new plug-wires and as I left it I need only slide on a new-new rotor, top that with the distributor, plug the wires back in according to my diagram, and reinstall the ashtray/firewall. All of which I shall complete tomorrow after work, having swung by Murray's yet again for my 2nd rotor in two days.

As of now I am sweaty and tired, covered in rust, grease, and electrolytic gel. So I'm off to shower, but don't worry, then I'll come right back here and regale you with all the details of how, where, and in what order I lathered.

Come to think of it I might just forgo the shower and have sex with your mom instead. Boosh! (See 'cause she's a dirty whore.)

Ant vs. Spider - Spider Wins

2009-09-21T20:15:00.012-04:00

I was heading outside to film my golf swing when I noticed a congregation of crawlies on the screen door. A trio of ants - one grounded, two with wings - and a deuce of spiders that included our old friend Spider-Hunter! He's gotten even bigger, by the way.

You can see his Armpit Hair!
I didn't get any passable shots of Spider-Hunter this time, but made great labors trying to take just one good shot of his counterpart, what had caught itself one of those flying ants I mentioned and held it in a death-grip. Despite three or four dozen snaps I just didn't have the combination of light and angle I needed to get a decent shot. This one will have to do:

That's just Creepy.
Next time: My golf swing at 60fps.

Slice() is a Lie!

2009-09-20T19:14:00.005-04:00

Today I tripped over a long forgotten Actionscript woe: De-Referencing arrays. What'll happen is, you'll slice() yourself off a copy of some multidimensional array, then later you'll change one of the values of your duplicate only to find it isn't really a duplicate, and the original it was slice()'d from has changed as well.

The problem is that slice() and concat() apparently only make true duplicates of the top level of an Array. So when you slice() off a 2D array, you end up with a genuine copy of that array - sure, sure - but what you've copied is really just a bunch of shallow references to the original.

Here's some code to try and make sense of it:

var sacred:Array = [ [0,1,2], [3,4,5] ];
var heretical:Array = sacred.slice();

heretical[0][0] = 99;

trace(heretical); //99,1,2,3,4,5
trace(sacred);  //99,1,2,3,4,5

Mind you that if you alter the reference itself, say by changing the value of heretical[0] rather than going straight down to [0][0], you will have replaced the path to 'sacred' and heretical[0] will be thereafter wholly independent from sacred[0], such that any changes to heretical[0][0] will nolonger be reflected in 'sacred.'

It's a really old problem in Actionscript made new again by the Vector class brought in with Flash 10 and AS3. The Vector class is, after all, little more than a type-specified Array(), and so it is subject to the same slice() and concat() pitfalls. But in practice it's easy not to think of your Vectors as Arrays and that's how I managed to butt heads with slice() again today.

Here's an example of the slice issue using the Vector class:

var sacred:Vector.<Vector.<int>> = new Vector.<Vector.<int>>;
var heretical:Vector.<Vector.<int>> = new Vector.<Vector.<int>>;
var vInt:Vector.<int> = new Vector.<int>;

vInt.push(0,1,2, 3,4,5);
sacred.push( vInt.slice(0,3) );
sacred.push( vInt.slice(3,6) );

heretical = sacred.slice();

heretical[0][0] = 99;

trace(heretical); //99,1,2,3,4,5
trace(sacred);  //99,1,2,3,4,5

Once you get deep into your own code - when your eyes have glossed over from too much trigonometry and micromanaging nested loops - it may not be immediately obvious to you that your Vector.<Vector.<int>> is, at end, an Array containing an Array containing some integers, or Array[Array[int]]. And that any duplication of that top level array really only passes along the inner array, which is still just a collection of references.

I don't know why Adobe hasn't provided a deep copy method for Arrays by now. I understand that the issue presented here isn't really a bug; that slice() is doing just what it says in the livedocs: Returning "a new array that consists of a range of elements from the original array, without modifying the original array." And that the shallow-references we end up with are the "elements" of the original array, as stated. Still, how many people have to bump their heads on the ceiling before Adobe integrates a method of really, truly, no shit, deep-copying an array? I suggest Array.noShitCopy();

Today Rocks!

2009-09-19T17:50:00.006-04:00

This is a great day, don't you think? Blue skies; A little nip of fall in the air - you can smell it coming on, can't you - but still decidedly summer. Still warm, sunny and exuberant.

I went golfing with my dad today; in this perfect, awesome weather. And sure, it was a good game, but that's not all that has me glowing. I don't think, anyway. It's this air, maybe. I can taste the life, smell the aliveness in this air. Brisk air and warm sunshine. God grant me more like these. It's really too good a day to waste any of it sitting here typing about it so I'll just say what I came for and get back out into it, if you don't mind.

I shot a 107 at the White Lake Oaks golf course. I had a lot of good shots today, my drive improving greatly in consistency where perhaps not in accuracy. I rarely found fairway off the tee. I scored my first-ever par, and on a par 3. It was one off, one on, and one in! Hell of a par! And to end the day, on the 18th green - think of it, the very last shot of the day - I sunk an unprecedented, never before seen, crowd-pleasing 35ft putt for bogey. Thirty-five feet! We walked it out. Damn it was a good game.

But I'll waste no more of this marvelous oxygen sitting typing. I've got to keep this day going. The air is just too animating to resist. And you've got to make moves to parlay the good ones you get. Onward to adventure!

The TV Majority

2009-09-18T23:23:00.003-04:00

Part of my comments, excerpted from the article You Are Your Television at Nik Maack's blog.

"
[...B]ecause I never seem to tire of saying it, I don't watch television. I don't listen to the radio or read the papers for that matter. And the reason I made the choice to turn it all off and leave it off, after a life much spent - I shamefully admit - mentally cataloging episodes of Roseanne, Tool Time, and Animaniacs, (all great shows!) was because of how damned stupid and vitriolic I came to see the beast, television to be.

I now find myself fortunate enough to be television intolerant. I just can't take it. Everything is a push; Everything is for sale; Every word has been focus group tested for maximum affect and majority agreement; and I, for one, am insulted and infuriated it by the whole fucking show. So I don't tune in. I can't. It just makes me angry and hopeless. It disgusts me: what passes for communication; what stands in midst the majority of my neighbors homes claiming itself to be reality.

And the argument you make that this hell-spawn thing, TV, is what the people want... I have to agree. It's hard to believe it's come to this, but this is as the majority desires. Hell, a good percentage point's worth of the population are part of the fucking revenue stream! They're content contributors. They're coming up with this horrible, mediocre, self-censoring tripe, writing it down like it's all worth repeating, and then filming it for Christ's sake... going so far as to put that extra bit of effort in, to spruce it up with special effects and shit! It's them! It's absolutely them. They want this TV. They crave it!

Doubtless, this -is- the product of addiction, lifelong conditioning, the lack of meaningful education, corporate-aristocratic influence, and so on as you suggest...

But what I'm starting to understand now is just how useless democracy really is in this situation. That these people cannot be brought together to see their shared interests; they cannot be motivated to accomplish those things they talk about; they are utterly dominated and, when considered en masse, will continue to be so in perpetuity.

They are a TV people. And I guess I'm coming to realize that you just can't leave it up to them. The same way you can't ask a child what they want for dinner every day, or whether they'd like to go to school. They are incapable of making these choices for themselves. I'll say it again: They are incapable. They won't change anything. They won't fix anything. They won't demand justice. They won't demand their due.

And if change is a goal - which at this point is probably futile - then it must be pursued without employing the majority. The will of the majority must be ignored, for it is the majority's will to destroy themselves and everyone around them. The majority's will is to miss the house payment but pay the Comcast bill. The majority's will is to kill 2,000,000,000 people in the middle east without an explanation why.

If change is a goal it cannot confer upon the majority. A minority must simply seize what it is able, as it unilaterally sees fit, and as I suppose has always been the way. And when all is done, that minority must write the history books as though the transpiring events were all due the will, strength, and fortitude of the people united.

I guess what I'm getting at is: This is a pretty fucked up world we got right here. [...]
"

Boys in the Hood

2009-09-11T23:26:00.006-04:00

Download
Covering Dynamite Hack covering Easy E. A cover of a cover... How original. Strap in for this one folks.

I love the mix I whipped up here. A liberal delay opens up the vocal track's stereo field; guitar track gets duplicated in each channel, eq'd using a single bus; everything compressed with the tube simulator... Little, yellow, simple.

Spider-Hunter

2009-09-10T16:41:00.007-04:00

...By which I mean a spider whom is also a hunter or is otherwise occupied or employed in the business of hunting; note the hyphen. This, rather than indicating those learnedly professed in the art of hunting spiders. What?

In the blind.
This fella' had spun a web flat against the outside of my sliding glass door, affording me the perfect opportunity to get these closeups. I ended up taking in the monopod's legs and simply leaning the camera directly against the glass. So there is literally an inch of seperation between lens and subject here. That's why you can see his little wee-wee so well. Tee-hee.

On the mend.
Twice, while shooting, a bug tried to fly through the glass door, brushing against Spider-Hunter's web in the process. Both times I was in the middle of taking a batch of bracketed shots when suddenly Spider-Hunter disappeared out of the frame. And boy, could he move.

He didn't catch anything while I was shooting - damned shame, that - but it was surely not for lack of trying. It took him less than one second to move to the exact point on his web that had been grazed by the passing bug, which is an even more amazing feat when you realize they aren't really using their eyes to dial into where they're headed. At least I don't think so... Eh, what do I know. I'm just the picture-takerer-guy.

Our boys in Europe send Adolph home to Mutter!
"Why spiders," you ask? Because they're there. Literally. It's spider season and I'm hemmed in by them on all sides. I might as well take a few snaps, you know? It's the least they can do to strike me a pose in repayment for biting the ass out of me in my sleep, don't you think?