Sleeeeeep

Oy vey. Got up at 7 to go hiking with Mike. Had a nice trip down to Pinnacles where we hiked for about four hours. Got home around 6. Cleaned up and took a nap. Did errands and packed for the flight tomorrow (er, today) at 9 to Vegas, where I will begin the insani^H^H^H Coachella Adventure. Massive Attack! Tool! It should be great. Need sleep now, though. Back next week.

Depeche Mode Still Good

I had the pleasure of escorting Jenn to see some friends from our youth: Depeche Mode (along with a few other folks). Hard to believe I saw them in November. They played basically the same set as in SJ. I got to hear "Nothing's Impossible" so the evening was a success. :-) The coolest thing I saw last night was all the DM fans in Shoreline singing the chorus to "Enjoy the Silence" at once. A lot of fun and dancing on the grass under the stars (I think I saw some stars up there.). A little tired this morning, but I'll survive, I think. <hums "Enjoy the Silence">

High Octane Day

Man, take the coffee out of my diet for a few days and I get super wired when I finally do get my morning coffee (must be what the grande latte enema is like). Add in a warm spring day and I've been in a fine mood all the live long day. A little tired now, but overall I'd have to say this was a pretty happy day. Not going to question it. Had a nice lunch with a number of good friends who've gone on to work at my favorite fruit company and picked up a new Mac Mini to replace my ailing G4 tower. It's so small and cute. And quiet! I've named it Core Solo ("You owe Jabba, Solo!"). Tomorrow I groove out with Depeche Mode, etc.

Ah, time for a nice nappy bye.

iPod Fueled Morning Drive

So on my drive in to work the iPod decided to play for me:
After the Flesh (x2)
Fight Song

and as a cool down,
Plenty

Talk about upping the octane on my morning! Stay out of my way, bitches!!!

Bilingual

So, I go down to the company gym, and as I get on the elliptical climber, I notice that the dance music station they have programmed on the satellite radio is playing:

"You fucking me makes me bilingual."

Which makes me do a double take, since they usually don't place music with naughty words in them, much less this ditty by Jose Nunez. Weird.

Jonathan Coulton

I saw some lyrics by this dude at work (long, not interesting story). He has a blog at jonathancoulton.com where he posts new and usually very funny songs as part of the Thing A Week Project. It kinda reminds me of TMBG. Topics include:

Code Monkeys [Code Monkey]
Imminent Zombie Attacks [Re: Your Brains]
Mad Scientist Romance (It's one way.) [Skullcrusher Mountain]
etc

Check it out! It's good stuff. He takes donations, btw.

Weird Dream

The other night I had a dream that i remember, which is odd, because I rarely do. In it I was in a gang of bank robbers. We were going through with a bank robbery even though we all basically knew that it was going to wind up badly and we'd go to jail or whatever. It was weird that the sense of inescapability of our actions was so explicit.

Angel

you
are my angel
you come from way above
to bring me love
to bring me love

her eyes
she's on the dark side
neutralize
every man in sight

Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you....

you
are my angel
come from way above

Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you....

Not One of My Best Ideas

Ow. I was feeling better (getting over a head cold) and kind of disgusted that I hadn't exercised in three days, so I decided to go jogging yesterday (pathetic 18 minute mile). I survived ok, although I was reallllly dehyrdated afterwards. But today, ow! I can't flex my legs at all. Walking down stairs is ... challenging. Evidently the exercise machines in the gym haven't been working the muscles as hard. :-p

The Fat Song

Wherein Foamy delivers a tactful and lyrical message to Germaine that he is concerned about her weight gain. [song]

Easter Pictures Posted

Pictures from the Easter dinner are up. I think Noelle was demonstrating that you can't in fact bite your elbow.

edit: Non-arm licking photo substituted.

Looking at Tissue

"That's not right."

Thank You For Smoking

This movie is great! It's a dark comedy about Nick Naylor, a "morally flexible" lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Naylor spends all his waking hours defending the rights of downtrodden multinational corporations. To give you an idea of what he does, in the opening scene, Nick tells the audience of the Joan show that it's not in the best interests of Big Tobacco for Cancer Boy to die, when they want to keep him as a customer. Anyway, it's wickedly funny and I highly recommend it as one of the best films I've seen in the past year or so. [trailer]

More Global Warming Cheeriness

I was in the gym last night and I saw on Anderson Cooper's 360 show (I think that was it) they had a piece about global warming that showed all these polar bears and talked about how their birth rates are down. Polar bears get most of their summer calories by hunting seal pups from ice floes in the spring. Which is difficult if there are no ice floes. No summer calories, no baby polar bears. The bears have been observed eating a lot of stuff they don't normally eat, including stalking caribou and foraging for berries. They also mentioned on the show how a research ship in the Arctic found a bunch of young walruses coming up to the ship, which is unusual, because they are usually accompanied for a couple years by their mothers. The researchers theorized that they had been abandoned because they couldn't keep up with the rest of whatever a group of walruses is called.

Ya know, the human race knocking itself off because its stupidity I can accept easily enough (you reap what you sow). But it bugs me that we have to drag all these other species along with us. :-p

Anyway, there's a new movie coming out called An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore that talks about the problems we face due to climate change, which I hope folks have a chance to see. There's more info here at the Climate Crisis website.
[trailer here]

Neil Young Records Protest Album

Just after releasing "Prairie Wind," Neil Young has released a new album called "Living With War." The new album, which evidently came as something of a surprise to Reprise Records, features a song called "Let's Impeach the President." Glad to see that Neil is still in the game of generating political albums. Neil's website features more info in the text crawl at the bottom of the main page. [article]

Driver Caught Changing Traffic Lights

A Colorado driver was caught using a special gizmo that changes traffic lights which he bought off of eBay. According to the police report, the driver said he "was always running late" as his reason for why he used the device. Sigh. Just the reaffirmation of stupidity and selfishness I needed first thing in the morning. [article]

The Big Come Down

Man, I am spent. I've been going and going and going this past week. The past 48 hours in particular. And now there is no more going. Well, for a few more hours anyway. I feel like I've had an out of body experience where I watched myself at a party. Everything is in the third person, how strange. Now to sleep, perchance to dream.

When I Grow Up

When I grow up
I’ll be stable
When I grow up
I’ll turn the tables

Trying hard to
Fit among you
Floating out to wonderland

I ♥ you, Shirley.

My Shadow

My shadow's
shedding skin
I've been picking
Scabs again
I'm down
Digging through
My old muscles
For a clue

I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could have been
I've been wallowing in my own confused
Insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in
I wanna feel the changes coming down
I wanna know what I've been hiding
In my shadow
My shadow

Change is coming through
My shadow
My shadow's
Shedding skin
I've been picking
My scabs again

I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could have been
I've been wallowing in my own chaotic
Insecure delusions

I wanna feel the change consume me
Feel the outside turning in
I wanna feel the metamorphosis
And cleansing I've endured in
My shadow
My shadow

Change is coming
Now is my time
Listen to my muscle memory
Contemplate what I've been clinging to
Forty-six and two ahead of me

I
Choose to live and
To grow
Take and give and
To move
Learn and love and
To cry
Kill and die
And to be
Paranoid and
To lie
Hate and fear and
To do
What it takes to move through

I
Choose to live and
To lie
Kill and give and
To die
Learn and love and
To do
What it takes to step through

See my shadow changing
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way by
Stepping through my shadow
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
Forty-six and two
Just ahead of me

Lucky Number Slevin

Saw the new Josh Hartnett vehicle (oh yeah, Bruce Willis, Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu, and Stanley Tucci are in it) Friday night. Overall I thought it was pretty good noir-esque thriller about a case of mistaken identity and a couple of aging crime lords at war with each other. I thought it was going to be pretty light hearted and funny (which it mostly was), but the first fifteen minutes were extremely dark. Hartnett did his some surprisingly good work. No, really, he was good. I especially enjoyed the dialog, since there was a lot of repartee between Hartnett and the gangsters who think he's someone who he is not. Liu had a lot of good lines too. She's hot and witty (well, she reads well anyway). Anyway, it took me about half the movie to figure out what was going on, although I guess some of the people I went with jumped right to the proper conclusion. I thought it was a good ride, but YMMV. Weird set design, though. Funny wallpaper.

Tip of the Day

Remember kids: You can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being.

Army of Anyone

Hmm, Richard Patrick of Filter and the DeLeo brothers from Stone Temple Pilots have gotten together to form a new band called Army of Anyone. Given that these are two of my favorite bands, this could be like mixing your peanut butter with my chocolate. Keeping my fingers crossed until I hear something out of them.

Movable Concert

So, I got this antsy feeling, which I get from time to time. I just felt like going for a ramble. Rambling on foot is tricky around here. Too much pavement and concrete. Driving's the next best thing. Needed to get away from people and buildings and lights. So I got in the car, rolled down the window (the better to smell things) and hit the road. I knew when I stopped in Saratoga to get something to drink that it was going to be a good trip because when I got out of the car I smelled one of my favorite smells: the watery smell in the air when the sap begins to run. I got into the mountains and fell into a zen-like state that's like meditation for me. It was dark and damp and the music was blasting. Perfect.
(Love. You. iPod.)

I drove up to Boulder Creek and then to Santa Cruz and then up the highway to Half Moon Bay before heading home. The music kept me in a semi-hypnotic state while I watched the surf hurtle behind me.
[playlist]

Oh, and Kristi, if you heard NIN blaring away in the night, that was probably me. Sorry.

Holy Crap! Windows On Macs?

Today Apple announced a public beta of a new program called Boot Camp, which they're releasing in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Boot Camp will allow users to partition their hard drives and install Windows XP on the intel based Macs. This is despite the fact that Windows XP (and now Vista, evidently) do not support EFI (the BIOS replacement in the new intel Macs). I wonder how they pulled that magic off. What's even more interesting to me is that this Macworld article suggests that you will be able to do on the fly hard drive partitioning, which has not really been possible since Mac OS 9. That's really cool if you decide you want to make a new boot volume but not get rid of the data on the existing volume. Presumably Apple wants to hook Windows users with this feature and reel them in with the Mac OS once they become accustomed to it. :-)

Weather Report: Rain

40% Chance of Rain tomorrow. Here's how I feel about it. (Thanks, Shirley!)

ShitShitShitShit

Note to self: In future, prepare a more convincing lie when the VP in charge of your group asks how it's going. "Staying the course" evidently was the wrong answer. Or maybe it was the delivery. This led to a brief discussion of how I was doing configuration management and not software development and how maybe that's not a good use of my skills. Which would be great except the group he mentioned by name as a place that could potentially use my help has a worse reputation for dysfunction than the one I'm already in. Damn my obstinate truthfulness.

DeLay To Resign From Congress

Indicted former House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay will not seek reelection in 2006. DeLay is feeling the heat now that two of his close aids have plead guilty to conspiracy charges related to the Jack Abramoff scandal. So I guess good things do happen on Mondays. [article]