Scammed

So I went into the city to see if I could get some tickets from a scalper to see the Nine Inch Nails show tonight. Found a guy who said he had tickets for a reasonable price. Went to do the exchange and he makes off with the cash and I have no tix. This is unfortunately reinforcing my fundamental distrust of human beings.

Mood: Grim

Moon Pictures

I was leaving the building last Friday and was struck by the way the clouds looked with the city lights from below and the moonlight from above (I really love the cloud in the middle that looks bluish grey.). I have tried to capture it with my camera. Click on thumbnails to enlarge.

Quietly Busy Weekend

Hmm, somehow I appear to done a fair number of things this weekend.

Friday: At guitar lessons I learned some new things, including blues shuffles. Remarkably easy to do and fun. So Aki came by and we played together for a while. He did some very interesting things with the harmonica (e.g. doing a guitar lead on the harp). That was a lot of fun. Need to do that again. On the way home I noticed that whenever I engaged the clutch on my car, it gave out a disturbing squeaking noise. This was especially disturbing since I just spent a ridiculous amount of money on repairs that included (among other things) replacing the clutch. Looks like another trip to the dealer in my future. Sigh.

Saturday: Got up at an unreasonable hour to drive into the dealer to have them at the clutch. After only a couple of hours they determined that the clutch cable they put in was defective and replaced it. On the bright side, I did get to see some gripping action of No Limit Holdem Poker playing on the TV at the dealership. Wow, how did the retiree guy lose when he drew two queens? Unbelievable! Almost as unbelievable as the Travel channel showing a poker championship. Well, since I was up, I figured I'd get errands done. Got tires ordered, which was necessary since I declined to get new tires as part of the aforementioned repairs ($750 for four tires? I don't think so.). Went to Best Buy (yay gift cards) where I got some CF cards for the camera. Damn, CF cards are cheap now. I got 512MB for $50 (less after rebate, assuming BB actually pays it), about a 1/4 of what I paid a couple years ago. Got groceries, made myself breakfast and then rested for a little bit before the evening's entertainment. Met Aki, Rachel, and Tim at Tanto's Japanese Restaurant over on Saratogoa Ave. Pretty good if you're down with seafood (and if you aren't... well never mind that). Then on to the Improv to see Darrell Hammond. He was pretty funny, although I couldn't tell if he was wasted or not for a while. A tad tipsy, perhaps. The impressions were great (he does such an awesome Clinton) and some of the jokes were devastating. Played some pool at South First and then off to bed.

Sunday: Got up earlier than I wanted to (but probably later than I should have) to drive into the city to try and get some System of A Down tickets. They're playing tonight and the tickets were only available at the Fillmore. Evidently I am not a big enough fan, since some of the people starting lining up around midnight on Saturday. I was about halfway there when the DJ on the radio said if you weren't already there, you probably shouldn't bother. Sigh. Oh well. I went into the city anyway since I had my camera and was going to go to Golden Gate park. I love San Francisco. Whenever I go there there's always something unusual to see. This time it was a woman, black, thin, probably in her 50s, standing in front of a bus stop at the intersection where I was stopped for a red light. I was trying to figure out why she was standing in the street bent over at the waist. Then it occurred to me that she appeared to be masturbating. In the street. At 10 am. Either that or she was trying to get a squirrel out of her pants. Did not have my camera ready, or I'd have something to share. Shook my head and drove on.

Golden Gate Park was lovely and the weather was quite pleasantly warm (yes, in SF). The main concourse where the Academy of Sciences and the De Young Museum were closed for renovations, so that was a bit disappointing. But the Japanese Tea Garden, Stryber Arboretum, and the Conservatory of Flowers were all open, so that afforded plenty of opportunities for photos and rambling. Met a couple in the Japanese Tea Garden who were having wedding pictures taken, which was cool. Took a quick nap in the Arboretum. Shot a lot of pictures, some of which are quite promising. Here are a few. Hope to get more on yahoo later.
(click for larger images)





Drove out of the city and decided to drive down Route 1 to Santa Cruz since the weather was so nice. Got stuck in traffic at Half Moon Bay (they were having an air show or an auto show or something). The coast was gorgeous. Looped northwards at Santa Cruz and headed. And then I rested.

Reznor Remix Revisited

So, it appears there are already a bunch of fan remixes to Nine Inch Nails new song "The Hand That Feeds" based off the GarageBand project released just the other day. This site currently has 128 versions, some of which are quite good, if completely unrecognizable. Check out, just for example, "the loss of humanity" mix.

Reznor Lets Fans Remix His Latest Single

Want to remix the Nine Inch Nails song "Hand That Feeds"? Now you can. Trent Reznor has released it as a GarageBand 2 project (which requires a Mac, unfortunately for the PC owners of the world). The song was originally produced as a Digidesign ProTools project, which he converted to GarageBand to make it more accessible. Reznor says whether or not he releases other songs depends on how this experiement turns out. I think this is pretty cool. At some point I will hopefully even have GarageBand 2 (I have the original version) and be able to play with this. [article]

True Grit

Went to see the The Crystal Method in the City last night with Noelle and Carl. The show didn't start until 10pm and was scheduled to run until 3 or 4 in the morning. Not sure if it did, as we left around 2am. It was in some club I've never heard of called Mezzanine, which is probably one of the nice clubs I've ever seen. They had a nice light setup and a cool visualization screen on the wall. Ken and Scott came on around midnight and did a DJ set which was great. The opening DJ was really cool tool. Danced my ass off in my own unorthodox style for two and half hours. I feel surprisingly good, considering. I saw TCM at 4th and B in San Diego last summer and this was a much better scene. There appeared to be a wide variety of people there, not just the club kids. And a lot of people freestyling. I think all shows should start at 10, so I could go to work and then to the show afterwards. :-) Highlights:

• Creepiest Dancer - The guy in his 50s who kept downing drinks and appeared to be seriously weirding out the two girls in front of me.
• Cutest Scared Girl - The tiny girl who seemed to shrink back away from me each time I show much as glanced in her direction. I don't think I'm that scary. I don't bite. Hard.
• Favorite Game In the Club - Is That A Dude?
• Best Sample - Enter Sandman
• Coolest Bouncer - The guy out front with the MadCat Battlemech patch on his jacket.
• Cause of Most Concern - The guy who stopped and bent over next to me for about half an hour and proceeded to lean against a pole after that. Kept wondering if we were going to have call EMS.
• Favorite Street Person - The guy who waved us into the parking spot conveniently located right around the corner from the club.
• Best Sugary Drink - Berry Slurpee!

Rick James Soundboard

I give you the Rick James Soundboard. Warning: the audio clips are not really work safe, as I found when I clicked the "4 Thumbs Down" button. Page needs reloading on Safari sometimes it seems. "I'am Rick James 1" [sic] is probably my favorite.

Note: This is probably only interesting if you watch Chapelle Show.

From the What The... Department

Depeche Mode has a remix album of their hits? Why was I not alerted?? I caught a really cool new version of the video remake of Enjoy the Silence (quicktime required) on VH1 Classic/Current this morning at an unspeakably early hour. There's more info about the album here on their microsite.

Concert Trifecta

Saw three shows in three nights this weekend and they were all great. Started out with Mark Hummel and the Blues Survivors at JJs with Aki and company. Solid blues show as usual. Saturday night was U2 at the Arena. Excellent show! Noelle scored us tickets that had a nice view of the stage which had several rings of chase lights that were really pretty and programmed to do some sweet effects. High points of the night for me were Zoo Station/The Fly/Mysterious Ways combo (yeah, I listened to Achtung Baby a few times in the early 90s) and New Year's Day. Sunday night was Garbage at the Warfield. Another Awesome show! Shirley Manson is a great performer. They played a bunch of songs from their upcoming album, which from the sounds of it, promises to be another great one. The band was really tight, especially since this was the first show they'd done in a couple of years. They were supposed to open the tour in Seattle a few days ago, but evidently all got the flu. Anyway, they seemed really happy to be there and the show was hot. A bit on the short side for my taste, but what can you do? Anyway, the shows coupled with an obsessive consumption of video game goodness ate up the bulk of my weekend. Can't complain. :-)

Smug Satisfaction

I note with a certain amount of smug satisfaction that over on e-bay most of the bids on the Audioslave ticket auctions are not going very well. I.e. no bids. Suck on it! Suck! On! It! Now if only these opportunistic bottom feeders would go somewhere else, that'd be swell. I can dream, can't I?

Giant Robot Magazine!

I was hanging out in a Barnes and Noble waiting around before meeting up with some of my peeps at a blues show at JJ's and I wandered through the magazine section where I saw they were selling Giant Robot Magazine. I did a double take. Giant Robot Magazine! Holy crap! The Slashdot crowd must be going nuts over this one! It's evidently a magazine about Asian and Asian-American pop culture.

Questioning Reality

I had a really weird experience the other night. The Butterfly Effect was on cable and I thought I'd watch it again, since I saw it with a friend of mine a few months ago and I thought it was decent. All is well until the very last bit when suddenly the movie ends completely differently than it did when I saw it on" video a few months ago. I'm watching the credits roll and thinking: "WTF, I distinctly recall a different ending than this." Fortunately, I discovered through the power of google, that the Director's Cut of the movie ends differently than the theatrical release. I hate it when my perception of reality is challenged like that!

BTW, the Director's Cut is a much better ending than the theatrical release. Damn focus groups.

Congress Investigates National DRM Standard

I was surprised to find out yesterday that Congress was holding hearings on whether or not they should mandate some national Digital Rights Management system. Evidently there is some hand wringing about the fact that you can't buy music from Real's online music service and play it on your iPod. Y'know, there is a format that lets you do that. It's called MP3, kids. But none of the major music services use MP3 out of fear of massive retaliation from the music industry. It's also funny since if they hadn't passed the DMCA, I don't think Apple would really have a leg to stand on when they accuse Real of illegally reverse engineering their DRM, since subverting copy protection wasn't such a huge deal until they passed that piece of crap legislation (also at the behest of people like the RIAA). [article]

Where Is Triumph??

Befuddling Star Wars fans are waiting for the latest Star Wars movie, which is not due for more than a month, outside of Gruman's Chinese Theater in LA. Only problem is, Star Wars III is not supposed to be opening there. I am constantly pleased by humanity's ability to a.) surprise me and b.) make me feel better about my own life. [article]

I Want A Timberwolf!

As reported in this slashdot post it would appear that those crazy Japanese have done it again. They have made a real live mecha style walker robot that runs on a 250cc gasoline engine and comes complete with nerf gatling gun. It's a bit, uhhh... unsteady and it doesn't walk so much as roll, but it's still pretty interesting. Check out this video (WMV required) of it tooling around (slowly) in a parking lot. Now we just need a Cougar or Madcat.

Sin City

I saw this over the weekend. This is the most wildly over the top pulp movie I've ever seen. I enjoyed it. :-) It's a collection of sequences that are for the most part very loosely related to one another in the context of Sin City, where the best humanity seems to get is morally ambiguous and goes way downhill from there. The sequences are mostly black and white, with bits of color thrown in for that noir feeling. There is a lot of violence, almost distractingly so (think the Tokyo fight scene in Kill Bill running for the better part of two hours), but the worst bits are completely stylized and it's all cartoonish (since it's based on a comic, this is not too surprising). The score is also remarkably good. It reminded me a lot of Morphine, only edgier and without vocals. A solid film.

Damn You Ticketbastard! Damn You Scalpers!

So, I wanted to see Audioslave at the Warfield next month so I got up at 9:45 (which was 8:45 until this morning, thanks to DST) and got online. Right around 10 (and I know what time it was because I'm connect to a network time server) I try ordering tickets at Ticketmaster. I get the "These tickets not yet available for sale yet." page. I reload the page. Same thing. Again. Again. Again... And so forth for almost six minutes, at which time I get through to order and try and order and... It's sold out!! WTF? This is the third time this has happened out of the last four concerts I tried to order tickets through Ticketmaster. I start ordering online at the appointed hour and the first time I get through, they don't have any tickets. Somebody must have tickets, but who? Oh, the scalpers, that's who. Either the brokers who do this for a living or the "fans" who through the convenience of e-bay can easily buy extras and make a tidy profit off them on the auction site. At last check there were 124 auctions there for Audioslave tickets at the Warfield. Some of the auctions for this show in San Francisco are operating out of San Diego, New York, and Bumfuck, Washington, so they are clearly in it for the money. I found a scalper website that was offering their wares via Craigslist less than 40 minutes after the show went on sale. This makes me very upset (again) with humanity. I get the feeling that I am not going to be going to as many shows as I used to, at least if the bands are remotely popular. Oh, it's not like the scalpers are necessarily even hiring homeless people to order tickets online as they used to do. Now they have gone high tech, according to this article.