Monthly Report 2

Well, there's not a lot to say. I'm alive, I'm very frustrated at work, but the bills are under control, mostly. This says to me that I must be treading water quite well, but I much prefer to swim. I'm actually not fond of swimming, come to think of it. I wonder what the metaphor for getting completely out of the pool is.

My good friend Ben is visiting right now, and it's nice to have company after a long day of work. Someone with whom to share a beer and play video games. He decided to extend his visit to cover both of my days off, so we get to spend some good time hanging out.

The leader of the band, Kurt, and his wife celebrated a birthday together recently. That was fun to attend. Good beer, good times.

The amount of overtime I have been getting recently is astounding, and makes for quite a bit extra in the bank. I was thinking about maybe getting another bike, a stylish one, or upgrading the old computer here. We'll see how that pans out. It goes pretty tantamount against the teachings of Dave Ramsey, a financial makeover guy I've been reading from lately. However, if this suck is going to suck like it sucks, then I want to have some fun at some point.

End Monthly Report 2.

-The0

The Eagle Chicks

As I am quite short on time lately, and tired of being so behind in my writing, I'm cutting the next few entries to short records. I'm more sorry to me than I am to you for this.

I had the rare chance to see The Eagles and The Dixie Chicks live recently. It was a gift from Dr. Girlfriend's awesome family, and circumstance could not have been more against me. I requested the day off roughly 8 weeks in advance, and due to being very suddenly shorthanded at work, not only did I work a double shift the previous day, but I was called in to cover the following day, while still getting that evening off. The idiotically optimistic way to look at this is "At least they are relying on me." More on that in a later post.

I was a zombie for the first hour of the show, which sadly meant that I couldn't really appreciate the Dixie Chicks as well as I should have liked. They had a very good sound for a live performance, but something was off. I later noticed that the singer (Natalie) had shaved off all of her hair. The most popular speculation is that she did it for a Make-A-Wish Foundation girl. Good of her, to give that kind of connection to the kid for the entire tour.

I was never much of an Eagles fan, but it was a very impressive display. I was glad to see talented saxophonists accompanying a classic band as such. Don Henley is apparently the only original component to that band left, or at least the most household-y name of them. They played their old stuff, Hotel California, then their new stuff, which I in no way recognized. They finished with Takin' It Easy, and then the show ended. They were just great on stage. I'm pretty certain I can't be the only one who thought of Bill Nighy's character from Love, Actually when I saw Don Henley. I have a few photos from the event, which I suppose I took for posterity's sake, but they came out well enough. I still got to make the event, and my life is fuller for it.

NEVER miss out on a big event simply because you are fucking exhausted. Buy an energy drink, and you can sleep when you're dead.

-The0

1.21 Gigawatts could make a MASSIVE SLI Array

So I'm taking a shower, and I'm thinking, "Alright! I'm going to be early at work! No stress today!" when I hear this loud noise. I thought something had fallen over in my shit storm of a bedroom, or that maybe someone was in house. Not seeing anyone, or hearing a response, I finished up my shower to investigate. Nothing disturbed, no one to be found, but my computer was off. And wouldn't power back on. Something, was wrong.

The LAN jack was still lit, so that meant power must still being flowing in there somehow. I flipped my breakers, nothing. I unplugged it for five minutes, got dressed, re-plugged and tried again. Nothing. I started closely examining the PSU. There it was, the unfortunately familiar scent of ozone and smoke. After a quick disassembly (yes, I'm well aware of the risks involved with that, and what's worse [probably an explanation of why this happened too] is that this wouldn't be the first time I've opened my PSU for repair purposes), I confirmed my fears. My PSU had burnt out with such force that it had made a noise audible over my fucking shower.

So, being as I was already running "behind" for work, I had to make an arrangement. I called up my friend, and explained my situation, he had a bit of time on his hands, and decided to help me repair my system. I emailed him my specifications, and he ran out to Microcenter, shopping for what he would want if he had my system, with the promise to be paid back the instant repairs were complete. "Repairs" to my system is a bit of a misnomer, come to think of it. Every time something breaks on the thing, I make it a point to upgrade to the next level of awesome. I had a 600 watt CoolerMaster PSU, and I'm now I'm running a 750 watt Modular Corsair PSU. My case is already running an average of 9°F cooler, and I will NEVER have to worry about power slip-ups for my SLI array at least 24 months.

If 600W makes that loud of a pop, I very well believe that 1.21 GW could indeed send the DeLorean back into the future.

-The0

My previous phone was DesDroid

So, a shitstorm occured while I was moving my friend back home. I picked up the bike just fine, which was just as awesome as I thought it would be. I drove my friend's truck back from Kirksville to St. Louis with his dogs in the back, and through many instances of bad luck, I had a flat on a busy fucking highway on a hot day with no spare tire. I nearly killed his dogs I believe, but we pulled through it all with good planning, good people, and everything wound out fine. I even had time that night to move furniture in, hang out a little bit with other friends in the neighborhood, see Dr. Girlfriend's parents, and then, head on by the parental homestead. That is where I finally picked up my new cellular telephone.

I have a T-Mobile MyTouch Slide. I love the hell out of it. Despite a gimmicky UI, This is Android, Google's beautiful response to anything Apple. This thing has many, many useful features that I am still learning how to use. I carry it in a microfiber cloth, because the thing is so new, it doesn't really have a case that will protect it the way I would like. I'm a bit of a spazzy klutz, no doubt, and this thing will wind up like my last phone if I'm not careful.

What was especially funny is that the official release of my phone actually WAS delayed, by 2 weeks. Somehow I signed up on the right lists, and gave my email address to the right people. I had a new phone waiting in the back of the store with my name on it 2 weeks before release day. Anyone reading this who has a MyTouch Slide, I likely got mine 2 weeks before you did. It felt really cool to me, to be on the relative cutting edge of technology, at least as far as QWERTY phones on the T-Mobile network go. Yay.

Apparently as far as applications are concerned, I realize that Android is the underdog in the smartphone world. Blackberry leads the world, followed closely by iPhone. But this is an awesome phone nonetheless, and for my money, I choose open-source. The free magic I have no idea how to practice is the magic I choose to embrace.

Long Live Google!

-The0

Aeroplane

Well, this is going to be a little fun.

I’m sitting at a near abandoned airport gate, waiting to board the smallest public flight in my life. Faint muzac plays just barely audible over the whir of the air conditoning. It has been so long since I was last in an airport I had forgotten to wear easily removable shoes. Between work, sleep deprivation, and general excitement for this trip, I decided the first thing I had to do once I had found my gate was get some caffeine in me. This was a daunting task, it turned out. They have machines with card readers, but it seems they don’t like to work without a cell connection to their mainframe, I suppose. Undeterred, I went to an ATM, and withdrew a bit of cash. With bills too large to be accepted by the machine, I tried to make change out of a machine which did not want to work with me either. Frustrated, I went to the nearest actual Starbuck's kiosk, expecting them to tell me that my money was no good either. Fortunately, I was able to walk away with a large frappucino.

Waiting for the boarding to occur, I made a single serving friend with a fellow passenger, on his way to pick up a truck. A mystery man sits in the back of the aircraft, and a woman just across from my SSF, presumably a native of my destination, Kirksville, Missouri. We are flying in a six seater dual engine aircraft, a Piper Navajo, model pa31-350. We have leveled off at 8150 feet, flying at a steady 150 knots. The lovely thing is as I stare as these little black keys, we are actually flying low enough to catch glimpses of the earth through the sporadic cloud cover. We must still be closer to St. Louis, because I either just saw some sort of refinery, or the Science Center.

This is a multipurpose trip which happily came together. Barely. My best friend, mentioned in a recent post, has finished his education at AT Stills University. His life is progressing and happily bringing him back to St. Louis, for the time being. I was there to help move him to Kirksville, and now I am en route to help move him back. I’m excited for it. On the way back to StL, we are going to stop through our college town, and of course, see a couple of the important alma mater sights, and coincidentally, the old bike shop. As a gift to my astounding Dr. Girlfriend, I spent some of my recent superfluous overtime earnings on an Electra Boney Finger 3i. Electra is one of the last companies that actually builds a quality cruiser bike in the United States, and it so happens that not only am I a fan of Electra, but my mechanic is a dealer of them (this might be a causal relationship, come to think of it.) As mentioned earlier, I will happily do my business through him for the rest of my life. Hell, if I have enough left by the end of this biking season, I may just purchase another cruiser for myself. They are quite baddass, and pictures will follow. Oh yes, there will be pics.

Hell of a bit of turbulence when you’re in something this size. Not my first time on a small aircraft, just my first time on a small land plane, not a sea plane. Experiences from my trips on those will come later. This trip nearly didn’t happen because I was scheduled to work almost all the way until the wire's edge of timing. I was barely able to get to the airport with time to spare for my check-in. I’m quite glad to be flying. The ticket cost was a fraction of the gas cost, and the transit time just over a third of what it would have been if I had driven. We’re beginning our descent now, after a 50 minute flight, at 175 knots, -650 feet per minute.

If you were bored by reading this, I’m not sorry. I find this exciting as hell. Flying web log post. Started in an airport, written during a flight, and finished on the ground

Quite a respite, a fleeting flight.

-The0

Prince of the Mods

But not like the Scooter-riding, Italian suit-wearing Mods. You see, in spirit of my previous post post, I thought I might divulge my aforementioned compulsion. A spirit of change, the winds of non-conformity!

I have this fluid theory on life. "Nothing is truly yours until you modify it." Modification! Change in order to make something more to your liking. This can be as complex as a total overhaul of your car, as ho-hum as adding a part to your bike, or as simple as changing the settings on your cell phone. So long as you make it better to your liking, it's your thing. Your object, your mirror reflecting who you are to you, and to the rest of the world. It's a conversion to conversation piece from stock NIB item. It's materialistic, but it doesn't have to be.

It can mean modifying one’s self too. Taking effort to change for better or for worse. A workout regimen, a tattoo, or a drug addiction. Whatever moves you forward. I feel like I owe it to myself to undertake the task that makes my life better to my liking. Fluidity, Improvement, Personalization, and Movement. It's like Kung-Fu zen. Or just plain metal. I don't care. No! It's metal. There, that's my stink on the idea.

This philosophy came forth during a period where I was starting to get into bikes and computers. I got my close friends to subscribe to the idea as well. It's come to the point where the only ones who know what's going on with our stuff, is us. Awesome times, to be sure. I make it a point to modify my computer at least every six months (it helps to keep it closer to the cutting-edge, if you will.) My bikes get tweaked monthly. My sax? I tune its springs as they fall out of tune. I do this to pretty much everything.

It seems like a good way to go through life. You'll always be able to find something to do. You'll always be richer for some experience, and if nothing else, well, at least you tried to do something new. It's a lifestyle. Change to your liking. Change to you. Essentially, it's like being yourself, but with an effort-filled, yet subdued way. Comment with questions if you're confused.

-The0

P.S. (reference) The title is only Prince, because Vince Noir is King of the Mods. (/reference)

Black and Red

Just before I went to college, I needed a way to transport myself. As I did not yet have a driver's license, and never really had access to a car anyway, it came down to a simple choice: Walk, or Bike. I had a high-quality Schwinn that my parents had actually bought for my little brother. He was already driving himself to and from school, so I claimed it as my own. This was my first foray into cycling, which was one of the costliest and most beneficial decisions I have made in my life.

During my sophomore year I began to ride with my best friend, who was a pretty aggressive extreme sports enthusiast. Through riding with him, I learn how to launch myself off of tall objects and then, while remaining mounted on the bike, land with the rubber side down. Everything was was progressing swimmingly, from skill to stunt complexity, until we started breaking our rides. We needed to find a machine that would keep up with our riding ability.

Since I already had a Schwinn, I had the old catalogue, in whihc I circled a couple of wish bikes. During a random trip to a bike shop about a half hour away, my friend pointed out a dual suspension bike just sitting in the store. About a week later, I was owner of one of my wish bikes, a 2001 Schwinn Rocket 88 Stage 4. Due to a compulsion which I will explain in a later post, it wound out being phenomenally upgraded, tweaked, decorated, broken, repaired and customized over the course of our riding careers.

We both had our bikes of choice, and this one was mine. When you ass spends that much time in a certain saddle, hunched over in a guaranteed position, you start to form a bond. I freaking love the Rocket. One evening, after a strenuous free day of simple stunt practice, my friend and I leaned our respective bikes outside of our fraternity house. I came back out to a horrible truth: My lovely Rocket had been stolen. A quick review of the surrounding area, plus a driving-mad-through-town excursion (I had gotten my license by this point) turned up neither hide nor hair of it. I was crushed. After hundreds spent and hours burned making it my masterpiece, it was simply gone. I couldn't quit sobbing. That was September of 2005. I still have a copy of the police report.

Let's fast forward to July, 2007. I was awoken one morning to a call from my old bike mechanic in my college town. Through his own efforts, he had distributed a description of the bike to all the bike shops within an hour of the town. Because of the insane amount of modification I had made to the Rocket, it was a total bastardization and amalgamation of cycling genres. A light trailbike with downhill racing brakes, XC drivetrain components, and stunt tires. It had shown up at a store a half hour away, having been brought in for service, presumably by a relation or friend of the fucker who stole it. The shop owner recognized it, called my mechanic, who then called me. I was speechless, and flustered out a thank you after collecting the number to the other store. I paid them to bring the bike just out of limbo, and then took it home a week later.

Later on in the following year, I dropped a massive amount of money to get it past its former glory, right into semi-pro condition again. I of course did all this through my man in my college town. Doing all my business through him for the rest of my life seems like a fair way to express gratitude. After all, I might never had seen my black and red abomination again if not for his effort and work on it in the first place. Some significant food for thought. What if I had done every bit of the modding myself? What if my friend and I never chanced upon his local shop? What if...

The moral of the story is multi-faceted. Keep loyal to your merchants. Write down your serial numbers. Lock your shit up. And after all of that, don't lose hope. Things that are taken from you are only things, and if they are truly meant to be yours, they'll come back.

Materialistically Yours,

-The0

Edit: 06/12/2010

I think it proper to add a picture, in order to really express the feel and love in this bipedal locomotion device.

Coincidence by Design?

I was driving back from a tap-house with a friend when a certain part of DJ Tiësto's live show at Dance Department in 2001 started playing over the vehicle's stereo system. It's hard to find a recording of this, and it's a trance track, so it's all one massive song. Still, I turned up the volume starting at 45:46, and showed my friend the melody that played.

Directly after that, I pulled out the CD and inserted Mutter, Rammstein's 3rd album. I advanced it to Ich Will, and had him listen to the bridge verse. Sure enough, a very similar melody played off of Flake's keyboard. We're talking 95% the same. Mutter was released before DJ Tiësto's live show by about 6 months. Did DJ Tiësto copy Rammstein, or was it simply a coincidence?

The idea I'm actually trying to bring up here is the point which came up seconds later in that very car ride. With the amount of musical groups out there, the finiteness of the musical spectrum, and the amount of popular material out there, it is nearly impossible to create original musical material. Everything will sound similar to something, be it Ich Will, Beethoven's 9th, Dethklok, or Vivaldi's Seasons. The very tune you may have idly whistled this morning could be strongly copyrighted by a very malevolent musical group. This can lead into a popular topic of what constitutes original content any longer, and does RIAA's authority apply. If so, where? Anyone who knows anything about this, please feel free to post in the comments.

My favorite bit of unoriginal content in Rammstein would be in their song Moskau. Those who have played Half-Life and Half-Life2 will remember the Gauss gun, a gun which would wind up with a very distinct sound. This sound can be heard throughout the song, but most noticeably at 3:10, end of the bridge. In my eyes, this shows that Rammstein, if they don't like us Americans, they at least like our video games.

Winding up for a busy day by listening to good music,

-The0

C2H6O

OK, so here it is. My first, long-planned-finally-conducted drunken post. I have been wondering what a drunken post would look like for a long while now, and I think the idea for which I've actually been shooting has been to simply stream what goes through my head during these very frequent and very horrifically private times of inebriation.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is blaring at me as I hunt down specific keys, Dana Snyder's clever interpretation of Master Shake believing again that somehow he is in the right, no matter how ridiculous the situation. Orgy's Vapor Transmission fighting for more of the sonic realm of awareness. It is winning, Eva winning over a magnificent part of attention from this current mood, feeling, and environment over to an earlier, more nostalgic part of my experience. I got this CD from a very then-close friend, right when I first moved into this apartment.

I've lived here for more than 3 years, longer than I've lived in any one place, including during college. Even back in Junior High and grade school, I switched rooms several times. This little overpriced hovel I keep now is my area, my home, my space. I'm going to miss the hell out of it. I know I have to move soon.

I think I am very glad for the fact that I kept a daily journal after the first 8 months that I lived here (14 month total of writing IN that journal, 8 months after I moved in, if that makes sense), and then, right after I gave up that, I started this blog. I think it might be a very good thing that I kept some form of chronicle. For you see, with as much as I drink lately, from job-related stresses and life-stresses in general, I may very well forget my golden years altogether. That is the reason I try to make it a point to get a regular number of posts out. To at least get a regular record of my experience out. This weblog isn't for all of you, you see, not to disregard my readership where it exists. This is for me to keep track of and categorize my memories for all time.

They say that once something is posted to the internet, it can never truly be erased. As long as electrons flow and hard drives continue to magnetically flip bits, I will remain immortal in my obscurity.

There seem to only be more questions at the bottom of this bottle, for the record.

-The0

The Dead Wings

It's finally dead. I killed it. I beat the fuck out of my dying, ancient-when-it-was-new phone. It had it coming. It was an HTC Atlas PDA phone, and I fell in love with the full keyboard and touchscreen. It was really fun, when it was new.

It was also poorly built from the start. One accidental drop will absolutely void the clips that hold on the back/battery door. This will allow your battery to disengage whenever the damn it so pleases. Massively annoying. And the touchscreen of such a phone then was ridiculously brittle. You bump a counter top with the thing in your pocket, you can kiss the screen goodbye, or at the least, the touchscreen. Say hello to operating your voice mail with the keyboard open. On the last iteration of this battery fumble, I rapped it, in simple frustration. This rapping, no more severe than I had given it AFTER the touchscreen broke, shattered the screen. I was fuming, and smashed the thing mostly into a hulk of itself. Somehow, it CAN still receive calls, the best plus I can give it this far into the game.

Not that I'm EVER going to want to place another call on a Windows phone ever again. Windows Mobile 6 is a fat, steaming pile of shit of an operating system, especially on a 200 mHz processor. There are absolutely NO fun or useful applications or features that can be downloaded for WinMo6. It had a rudimentary web browser which could make it all the way to YouTube AND download a video that would exceed its minuscule memory reserves, only to find that wasn't the ONE type of video media the little piss-wad would play.

3g service wasn't precisely fresh then, but it wasn't old-news. Still, fuck that feature. GPS, nil, reliable boot-up, null. Hard reset required once a month? You bet your fucking ass.

I'm sticking with my provider, but fuck Windows. I love you Microsoft, but you fucked me over just as much as HTC did then. I'm going HTC again, thinking that they've improved themselves, but the future of cellular communication is Android, I think. As others of my clique have said, it's good that there is a reliable competitor for iPhone. God bless you Google.

My phone of choice releases in 11 days. Here's hoping it doesn't sell out before I can get one.

-The0

Zombie Walk!

So, a couple of weeks before Halloween last year, I heard of the concept of a Zombie Walk. It's like a flash mob, only instead of everyone just showing up, everyone shows up as zombies. They lurch about town, stopping traffic and generally making unaware citizens give weird looks.

Having no idea how to coordinate a flash mob, and given that the time frame was so small, I did nothing about my desire to actually participate in one. I perused the web and found that there were couple of really good ones that occurred in St. Louis and a couple of other cities. It sounded fun.

I think the idea of a flash mob is to simply show up with approximately NO warning, thus planning a flash mob is a little counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, I have decided that by the time Halloween rolls around this year, I will have organized and conducted a successful Zombie Walk.

There are a lot of fun variations off of which you can play. People running away, being caught up, horded by zombies and coming up as an infected. You could get zombie hunters, even dress up your dog. We could even try and play up some publicity, maybe litter flyers to a certain charity, or simply raise zombie awareness. There are so many options and things to plan, which is why I've started now.

The tentative date is October 23rd, and we're thinking somewhere in the University City Loop. More details are certain to follow. Here's the Facebook link.

And remember: BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINNSS!!!!!

-The0