This username isn't working for me.

dot_star is the new hotness.

~SMOOCH!~

So I was all prepared to be like "spamcola is a fucking idiot!!1", since he said the new Bjork is pretty MEH when he was over at our place last night.

I'm listening to it now, though. MEH.

It's just Bjork doing her usual "OOOH I'm a wailing pixie" thing over production that sounds sorta like '95-'97 era Autechre. Which is fine, I guess, but I might be over that whole sound.

Current Mood: apathetic

I wiped my F: drive, reinstalled Mint, saw that 7.04 plays even LESS nice with my hardware than 6.10, then reformatted it back to NTFS. Granted, the drive was totally fragmented and now it's not anymore, but there's easier ways to do that than formatting to ext3, cursing your luck at getting the ONE revision (fuck you, A52!) of your laptop that has hardware with crap OSS support, then reformatting back to NTFS.

There are many Linux users out there, google tells me, who have Lenovo 3000 N100 lappys and are just peachy. I am not one of them.

Dell's Ubuntu offerings just keep looking nicer.

Current Mood: aggravated

Got back from this year's Bratfest. It's grown a lot since I last went in 2004, in the parking lot of a large shopping center/small mall: it takes up a whole park now! We went with A&N, sat on the grass and tried to keep some sort of order while the kids ran around (somewhat futile), ate some brats (meat == eh, vast array of swanky condiments == win), and decided that $12 for a family of 4 to sit in a spinning teacup or whatever for 4 minutes wasn't worth it (there's a midway now! Buck a ticket, 3 tickets per person for a ride). They might have had one of those $20 unlimited ride bracelets, but we didn't check: it was 1pm-ish, and 2/3 of the squirt brigade were starting to conk. All told, we spent $11 on food and drinks, and that's it. We've got to make a habit of doing more inexpensive family stuff like that over the summer.

So now I'm at home, a bit tired and listless because a) we need to go outside and walk around like that more, and b) I've been up with the kids since 6:30. So, uh...bleh.

This has been working itself around in my head for awhile now, rooted in a vague but intense uneasiness about the NZ move, and it finally solidified just now as I was coming back upstairs from taking the trash out. I absolutely cannot be 100% enthusiastic about this move unless I'm sure that we're doing it because it's our choice; that we're moving for our own, positive reasons, not because we're running away from debt and student loan payments. This talk of HURF DURF I R SURRENDERing the PT and jetting on like $80k of student loans, running 8,000 miles away to hide from US debt collecters, just doesn't work for me. It's not realistic, it leaves us fucked if we ever decide to move back to the states, it makes the whole endeavor a massively life-changing, very much one-way deal. That's just fucking irresponsible when you've got kids in the picture. I just don't think I can do it running-away style without questioning some of the Important Life Choices I've made, and that's not a good mental position to be in when you're trying to reconstruct a life for yourself and the people you love. We need to be moving towards $awesome_things_about_NZ, without running away from $bad_stuff_here. We can't do both.

Clarification: $bad_stuff_here != US politics and things in that sphere. It only contains bad stuff that we've done to ourselves and would be ducking responsibility for.

Oh, reinstalled WoW yesterday, with the expansion. Went on a character creation orgy and started camping on names I might possibly one day use for an alt. Heh. I'm looking quite hard at Paladin and Druid; I've always enjoyed support/healer/tanking/basically helping people out roles more than straight DD (er...DPS) big-numbers stuff, and it looks like those two are most likely to deliver. Grep is my druid, Ianto is my paladin, and I'm prolly going to main with Ianto for now since the Blood Elf areas are all shiny and new and pretty, and I got my fill of the Mulgore -> Barrens thing last time I played.

Now I just need to switch my brain out of FFXI-mode, and stop attempting to understand spells/abilities/class roles in WoW while looking at them in an FFXI context. Priest != White Mage, Rogue != Thief, Paladin != Paladin. On the other hand, taunting == provoking, DPS role == DD role, and threat == hate. So, yeah. I'll get used to it eventually.

For the record, I'll always like the terms provoke/hate better than taunt/threat :P

voke plz.

Current Mood: tired

Yes. I cut Evan's hair with the clippers. I did my annual summer shear yesterday, and he watched the whole time, fascinated. Today, I saw a spot that I missed, and clipped it off quick. When he saw me doing this, he tugged at me and said "Evan hair? Evan hair? Pleeeease?".

Well hell, I thought. It's summer, it's hot, he's starting to get mistaken for a girl when he goes out, and we're getting him a real haircut on Saturday anyhow. So let's have some fun! I put on a 1" guard, and buzzed it around his whole head. It took about 10 minutes total, and he laughed his ass off the whole time. He thought it was great; we bonded.

But no! WTF!!1eleven TEH CURLZ! YOU LOST MAH BUKKIT CURLZ!!!

Look, H. I know you loved the curls. I did too. But I thought a month or so without the curls was worth the fun we'd have with the clippers. He got to do what daddy was doing, he got to experience a neat new sensory...uh, thing what with the buzzing over his scalp, and a good time was had all around. So please. I'm not trying to "make the kids look stupid", I'm not going to "shave Sophie's head too". It was fun. It will get evened out on Saturday, and the curls will be back by the end of June.

Here he is. You will notice that he is in no way disfigured or retarded looking:

Yes, he looked cuter with the curls. Good thing they'll grow back.

I'm sorry I didn't "consult". This was as innocent as me whipping out the bubbles or letting them play with the sidewalk chalk: toddler shenanigans, nothing more.

Current Mood: surprised

So, yeah. Heidi goes into Half-Price on Saturday with a fairly piddly book bucket, and gets $35 from the same dude. Fuck that place.

Meanwhile. It's Wedensday now, and the internets are failing to entertain me. I've been toying with the idea of getting back into FFXI, since all the single-player JRPGs I've been doing lately have been making me lonely. From the looks of it, though, it wouldn't be worth it. I can't find many traces of my old friends or linkshells, and what I have found points to drama and lameness. Can't anybody just play the fucking game, see the story, be cool to each other, and just hang? That's what I did, and it made me pretty popular; I don't see what it is that gets people all l33t snobby and gear-hungry. Then again, I never made it past 50, so what do I know?

It also looks like the level spread is completely hosed, so even if I did come back and had the time to do exp parties, there wouldn't be anybody to hang with: a typical /sea all on any given server shows maybe 2k people on at any given time, 1k of whom are 75 and the rest are spread over 1-74. Pretty much impossible to get 6 people of your level who don't suck to go out and kill shit.

I've been toying with WoW again just to get some more social interaction; at least there I can hang out and do whatever and not worry about getting my squishy healer ass handed to me by something 14 levels below me. Maybe I'll fire it up after I get the damn house tidied up, iono.

There's work to do to, but I need to VPN in to do it because I can't find an nsgmls package for Cygwin (i swear to god I thought there was one). I wish they would just let me ssh straight into the Blade server, that'd make things a ton easier. I really miss having straight Linux, I could do pretty much anything work-related in half the time.

Oh, and I was looking at ffxiah.com, and saw that the scroll of Erase I paid 700k for around this time last year is now going for an average 25k. That just makes me fucking sad.

Current Mood: listless

Last week, I brought a bucket of books into Half-Price to sell. It was a complete Time-Life series and some other random crap. Got $28 for it. Tonight I brought in pretty much the same bucket, except with a different complete Time-Life series (in better condition, even) and different random crap, and got $16. Different dude this time. Last year, we brought a smaller bucket full of crappy paperbacks to the west side Half-Price, and got almost $50.

I'm starting to think that there's no consistent set of criteria they apply to books to assess their value. It's all about who you get at the counter, their mood, and dumb luck. It's pretty much always a dude behind the counter, so tomorrow wenhaver's gonna go in there with another bucket of crap, all wearing makeup and a cleavage-friendly shirt with a push-up bra, and we'll see how much they give her.

Dude. So this is what went down this morning. I'm in the laundry room, taking a load out of the dryer to put on the dining room table and not fold. While I'm in there, Evan climbs up on the armchair and pulls the fucking fire alarm. I spend a few minutes outside, away from the ear-splitting skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee to try to get in touch with the front office and tell them sorry, my son is an asshole and can you send some people down to fix this please? Kicked to VM 3 times, so I give up and go back inside, where I discover that some duct tape over the speaker does a fantastic job of dampening the fire alarm's bitching.

Then the maintenance people show up (they've got some gadget that lets them know when a fire alarm goes off). This is when it gets really fun.

I open the door for them, and both the dogs shoot out. I get Kenzie back in by calling her name, because she's a good dog like that. Chester was birthed from the spiked cunt of an Elder God and raised suckling liquid darkness out of its cold teat, so I have to run after him. I do this crazy-ass 6 foot dive tackle thing on him, and he slips out of my arms and runs off. Meanwhile, there's like 3 kids in their early 20's who live above and to the right of us milling around on the sidewalk (presumably because of the alarm), who see this then just kinda snicker and don't do shit. I turn around, mutter some unpleasant stuff in their general direction, and start running back to my apartment when I see that the fucking kids have gotten out and started running around.

I gather them up, one under each arm in the classic sidways-kid-football-carry, and plop them back in the living room. I stop by the computer to IM Heidi that her dog fucking sucks and I hope he gets caught by Animal Control again, then grudgingly go out back with a hot dog to try and find him.

There he is, taking a shit on the hill. I wave the hot dog at him and try to call him in (in my nice voice, even!), and the motherfucker just stares at me. It's redonk; I've seen bad dogs before, but I'd never met a dog that was actually willfully disobedient before Chester floorpissed his way into my life. I give up and go back inside and IM Heidi that I tried, I failed, and good fucking riddance.

THEN! THEN! I see him running along the sidewalk with a nice young lady walking after him. I go back out, catch up with her, and she asks if that's my dog and says she saw him sniffing around her porch. I tell her yeah, it's my wife's dog, and I'm trying to get him but I've got two toddlers in the house I need to keep an eye on, too. So she offers to get him while I go back in with the kids. I' thank her and run back in and get the hot dog, because that's her magic bullet.

A few minutes later, she's at the back door with both Fucknose and the hotdog (uneaten!), and I explain the whole mess. She's all "OMG! I was baking cookies and thought I was burning down the whole building!" No, sorry, that was just my asshat 2-year old.

So, everything's back to normal now; there's a big locked plastic fucking thing over the fire alarm now so dipshit can't pull it again, and the 4-legged wedge that's been in our marriage since it started is back toxifying the apartment. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the woman who helped get him back, and a huge eat a dick to the fuckers who watched me dive-bomb (which was totally awesome, by the way), then laughed and stood around with their thumbs up their asses.

Hopefully the rest of the day will go a little more smoothly.

Current Mood: drained

I'm posting this from my bed while the squirts crawl around me and shove blocks in my mouth. I've also got some deadline-oriented work to do somehow, but I need to get this out.

Current Mood: exhausted

I finally threw my hands up in the air today and said "fuck this shit, Evan needs to be in daycare". H got on the horn and found a place for $115 a week that's literally a hundred feet from her work, with an opening on the first of June. Thank god.

I can handle watching Sophie, doing housework, and doing work-work, just fine: she's a total sweetheart. Evan's more of a high-maintenance kid (read: leans towards the wrong end of the sweetheart-shithead spectrum), and throwing him into the mix means I spend 70% of my day focused on him, leaving me so goddamned tired I have a hard time cramming all my other responsibilities into the 30% I have left. I've got like 3 different googledocs¹ going crammed full of things I need to get done at this point, and a lot of the stuff involving house-mess and work-backlog can be traced pretty directly back to Evan eating up all my time.

June 1st is a friday, so we'll probably start him on the 4th. That's only 3 more work weeks of this crap.

*wibble*

¹ Hey Google, when are you gonna get around to adding a to-do list to your weboffice suite? If you did that, you would totally be even aweseomer and stuff.

Current Mood: irritated

I'm about to take a laundry bucket full of an entire Time-Life series, 3 ~600 page Actionscript references, a 1k+ page art history textbook, 2 law books, and several mid-90's era O'Reilly books to hawk over at Half-Price. It'd be fucking rad if they paid by weight. Even something piddly like 50 cents a pound would kick ass.

Got Guitar Hero II on Friday; Nathan had never played it before in his life and was 5-starring songs on Medium the second he picked up the controller. He says the extra pinky versatility he picked up playing violin as a kid helps. Took me about a month of practice before my first Medium 5-star on GH1. After he completely nailed Sweet Child o' Mine on the first try I officially informed him that I was his groupie.

I hate hate hate the 360 guitar controller, by the way. It's uncomfortable to rest on your knee if you want to play sitting down, the tilt sensing for Star Power seems really hit-and-miss, and pressing the select button instead to initiate SP isn't really an option, since it's about the size of a kernel of corn, in a recessed area about 2 inches away from the strumming pick that also contains a d-pad and the 360 Ring. You can just slam select with your wrist on the PS2 controller, not so much here. Great game, great extra content, BOO controller ergonomics. I'm going to have to go through everything on Easy just to get used to SP'ing with this thing; hopefully that won't make my pinky lazy when that blue fret comes into play again.

Oh, by the way: orange fret? What's that?

Current Mood: blah

Three of the best 2007 albums so far. If I do more album reviews in the future, I will put them behind cuts, I promise. I'm fucking tired.

1) Dntel - Dumb Luck. Jimmy Tamberello is the other guy from Postal Service (you know, the one who's not the universally known front man for Death Cab for Cutie), and he's been recording albums as Dntel for awhile now: His first collaboration with Ben Gibbard was "This is the Dream of Evan and Chan" from Life is Full of Possibilities, and that track is arguably the point that Postal Service was born. We're pretty much all familiar with Ben's work with Death Cab, so it's great to hear the solo work of the other half of the duo. Tamberello is a producer, not a lyricist, and as Dntel he writes gently glitchy electro-acoustic tracks that play to the strengths of his guest singers. RIYL Iron & Wine, The Notwist, The Album Leaf, The Books.

2) Avril Lavigne - The Best Damn Thing. Now, THIS came out of nowhere. Wipe that dismissive smirk off your face, you irascible goddamn hipster. Let's get something clear, before we even start here: I dislike pop-punk. Eve 6, Blink 182, Sum 41, Provolone 12, Barrel-Aged Feta 307, that whole axis; though I'll concede that Blink 182 has an amazing drummer. It's fairly certain at this point that the Youth-Media Overlords keep all these guys in a hangar or abandoned silo somewhere in the Midwest. This way, they're ready for deployment to help Keep it Real and Rock Out at MTV's spring break bacchanals and headline those radio station-sponsored summer-fests in the $8.00-plastic-cup-of-beer ampitheatres that litter the country. They called it "Edgefest" back in DFW, I'm sure every metro area with an "alternative" radio station has something similar.

Anyway, in The Best Damn Thing we see Avril, who got famous simply pining for a nice Sk8tr Boi, a few years older, a lot more confident, and totally, hilariously bitchcakes. This is a slickly produced album with catchy-as-fuck songs, and it's just great fun to listen to. The "Girlfriend" single is a total gem, made particularly shiny by our Avril's insistence that YOUR GIRLFRIEND SUCKS. She is stalking your ass, dude, and you will be hers, and that cunt of a girlfriend you've got now, well, she's like, so whatever, and just so not the motherfucking princess our angry little hero is.

Oh, and if you dare mention your girlfriend's name in Avril's presence, she will rip your fucking face off.

See, fun! And she pretty much wears this over the top narcissim proudly on her sleeve for the entirety of the album, but manages to keep it pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek, too. Her lyrical and songwriting chops are on full display here, and damned if they're not compelling: "Locomotive" was pretty much tailor made for those awkward slow-dances in the high-school gym. With The Best Damn Thing, Avril's proven she's not just another young teen-pop singer with a "no really! I'm a skater chick!" gimmick.

3) World's End Girlfriend - Hurtbreak Wonderland. Back to the cerebral stuff, now. This guy is just...my GOD. Long build-ups, big climaxes, funky-ass instrumentation, pretty much everything you'd expect in a masturbatory post-rock epic. But anybody who says masturbation isn't fun is a dirty fucking liar, and Katsuhiko Maeda is one guy on a laptop with production skills that could make a studio mook behind a $200k mixing board seriously think about changing careers.

I'll be posting more often in the future. For now, I'm going to sleep. Music mentioned above gladly provided to RL friends upon request :)

Current Mood: exhausted

...to jkivela for being awesome.

Hope you have a great weekend :)

Current Mood: tired

Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead

Oh MAN, do I ever want this. Not for the kids, either. Listening to Knives Out played on a kiddie glockenspiel is CREEPY when you imagine the lyrics along with it. Oh, and dig that cover art! Love it!

Electra files for divorce from Navarro

"LOS ANGELES - MTV reality marriages are looking more and more like "Divorce Court." The latest celebrity schism moved further toward official kaputness Thursday when Carmen Electra filed for divorce from rocker poser Dave Navarro, according to Superior Court documents."

There, fixed that for them.

The tabloids in the checkout lane at Target tell me it's because Dave was being a naughty boy and canoodling with other ladies. Which is suprising to me, since I was under the impression that even thinking about Dave Navarro will send anybody on the planet into a fit of derisive giggles. For example, in Tshabong, Botswana, when young refugee Kgabosetso Mosielele was asked about Navarro's 2001 solo debut, he was reported to have doubled over laughing for 4 solid minutes, losing his place in the UNICEF vaccination line.

Apparently there are, in fact, people who DO take Navarro seriously. Seriously enough, even, to sneak around and bump uglies with him while Carmen Electra sits alone doing whatever the hell Carmen Electra does.

Current Mood: amused

Just got an all-hands email about new product logos for use in powerpoint presentations:

"Blah blah blah file location on intranet blah blah. Please use the logos to add credibility to your presentations and to reinforce the Apex brand."

*.ppt. Credibility. Heh.

The old saw about polishing a turd comes to mind.

Note: the more meetings in which you've sat stabbing yourself in the leg with a pen to stay awake while some inept middle management fuck uses powerpoint as a crutch, the funnier this will seem to you. Bonus points for any Action Item lists you've seen formatted in Comic Sans.**

**I'm not even fucking joking.

Current Mood: amused

I'm back at work after taking most of the week off 'cause whatever the hell Evan had knocked me on my ass.

Oh, Evan's sick, by the way. He woke up covered in yarf Monday morning, stayed home. Got sent home from daycare Tuesday, which is when i ran over that poor chipmunk backing out of the parking lot. Wednesday and Thursday he was home with a fever. Today he's back at daycare; hopefully he'll be able to stay all day. Took him to the doc yesterday: it's a cold and an ear infection. I'm surprised it's just a cold, to be honest: wenhaver and I were looking up pneumonia symptoms because I felt so fracking bad.

So yeah. That's about it. I'm 27 now, too, so I guess that's something. I don't feel any different, older, or more mature. Everybody else seems a tiny bit dumber, though. I suspect that's how it will go for the rest of my birthdays.

Current Mood: bored

Just got back online from a power outage here at work. Something important must've gotten zapped, because it was down all the way over to where wenhaver works, by the airport. And although I've been unusually good about remembering my SUXR lately, I happened to forget it today, so I had to borrow peoples' phones like a schnook to make calls. Having the DS along for a flashlight woulda been nice too, but whatever.

We stood under an awning at the back enterance to the building and watched the parking lot flood. Used the front wheel of an SUV parked in the street to gauge; the water went from just below where the rubber meets the hubcap to the very top of the hubcap in about 15 minutes. That's a lot of flooding.

The PT is quite possibly stuck back there, so I've got the Outback here with me and need to go put the car seats in it.

Bah.

I might just try to get the PT out anyway. There will be grass-and-railroad-track-driving-over involved, but it seems possible. For science?

Current Mood: impressed

Rule #1:

The Big Loud Important people are always too busy being Big, Loud, and Important to get a fucking clue about how shit actually works.

Current Mood: annoyed