the internet is f***ing crazy

people around the hospice assume that because i own an apple, i must be smart.  what they fail to realize is that the reason i own a mac is because i'm NOT smart. 

somehow, i've become the office IT guy after fanny pack got fired.  i should pause for a moment and explain that in day to day conversation i have names for people around the office.  i'll use the same naming convention here. soon, you will be as aquatinted with princess, the troll and all the rest as i am.  unfortunately fanny pack got the boot so you won't hear much about him. suffice it to say, he wasn't hacking it.  now i'm the IT guy. 

the best part of it is this: when anyone has a problem - and they range from "I can't unlock my car" to "what does this blue screen mean?" to "i'm on fire" - i just google it. server crash? google fixes it.  i've realized that i need to take google out to lunch sometime and tell it thanks. 

anyway, i spent all morning trying to figure out all this network solution stuff. apparently i will be administering a whole network through microsoft sharepoint and building dashboards for the administration using VBA macros in excel.  and to think i thought i'd be a writer. all this has taught me that the internet is crazy. wiki virt cerf. boggles the damn mind, i tell you what. 

gotta roll them bones, so i'm out. stay classy, bojos. 

check your face:

cause drew's back. 

since my last post i (big breath) quit my job, moved to texas, started working for a hospice, made a bunch of friends, lost a couple friends, got asked to be someone's best man (rad), drank too much, worked out too little and consumed more coffee than should be legal.  

now i live in texas ... again. but soon i will move from san antonio to ... someplace ... else? 

it's been a nutty year-and-some-change, and i missed you too, non-audience. but i need you. really. 

i'll be filling in the gap between april 2008 and august 2009 as i'm able to get around to it. but let me say that i don't miss LA. i miss the people in LA more than i can say and i've been abysmal about staying in touch with them. sure i talk to clark and eliot on the reg, but tony? grace? rachel? seth? what happened? 

oh yeah, i moved 1370 miles away to the butt-end of cool. i've worked a job that, while more exciting than SDM was about ten times as awful. dying people are depressing, who knew! i've learned a ton and written a ton (minus the parts i left out because i was drunk or something and i can't remember).  

drew's back. and it tastes like handsome. 

don't fence me in

you know, people, there are a lot of things i love about life. 

rock and roll makes me pretty happy. and burritos are A+. and i basically have a constantly hard-on for kathy ireland '85-89 (even if she has big eyebrows. drew doesn't mind. drew loves you for you, kathy).  i like roleplaying, too(the kind that involves dice and hit points, not the sexual kind - actually, come to think of it, i've never participated in the other kind. do people get off on that? i mean, is porking a cop or a secretary any different than your girlfriend / spouse? how bizarre. i mean, sure, i can imagine a scenario where i come home and kathy ireland is dressed up all metal and we put on led zeppelin iv and screw like the heavens depends on it but really ... but really, that might be the hottest thing i've ever thunk up. wowzer. more importantly, this parenthetical has gone on too long.).

but there are some thing i don't like. namely, being bored. that's why my current job is so awful. i sit here at my desk watching one of my bosses get high and play xbox while the other one plays internet poker and watches "cops." i wish that i was joking.  i want to quit  so badly and take another job, any other job. hell, i've thought about applying to borders or some equally soulless cooperation where i can earn my living and go home at night and work on my stuff. it just feels like that would be a massive step backwards, and since i'm not gaining in traction otherwise, that feels like a big mistake. 

you know what i want? i want to leave this place for the country or at least someplace more normal. there just isn't hope in a city. what did maylene & the sons of disaster say? "i've travelled this country far and wide, but i'll always be a son of the south?" you can never get away from home and you can't go back there. 

it's a sad time in a young man's life when zen makes the most sense to him. 

oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, 

don't fence me in. 

let me ride through the wide open country that i love, 

don't fence me in. 

let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze, 

listenin' to the murmur of the cottonwood treest, 

send me off forever but i ask you please

don't fence me in. 

what you meant to do, part I

welcome friends to a new section of my blog i'm calling:

"what you meant to do." 

here will i climb atop my soapbox and in all rightness declare a better decision on could have made in a given circumstance. and by better i mean better. so for instance: you had a star wars trilogy marathon at your house last saturday. what you meant to do was have a star trek, evens-only, marathon (2, 4 & 6). see how it works? let's begin. 

so, you bought a jethro tull album: 

what you meant to do was buy a gentle giant album: 

you dig yes. hell, you even like alan parson's project. but on this sunny saturday with nothing to do, you wanted some prog-rock with a medieval chant / church organ / acid jazz rhythm section kinda thing. like a foolish fool, you went with 'tull. now everyone thinks your not-altogether-awesome. but why did you mean to buy gentle giant? 

let's start with the obvious. just glancing at the picture provided above, one can quickly discern that gentle giant is slightly more ugly than jethro tull. and if rock and roll has taught me anything (besides TCB) it's that the uglier you are, the more you are likely to rock. rod stewart's been a sex icon for three decades and married a supermodel. janis joplin won the superlative for "ugliest boy" in high school. i rest my case. 

and don't think i'm pulling one of these it's-cool-cause-no-one-has-heard-of-it things.  take the aforementioned rthym section of Ray Shulman and John Weathers. the bass pops in perfect synch with each hit of the snare creating these funky breakdowns over Derek Shulman's meandering vocals - and all the while Kerry Minear on the organ is just comping away (and occasionally throwing in these slick little runs).  it's been done, for sure. but they are able to do it so well. as far as a comparison to Yes goes, it's definitely more Close to the Edge than Fragile (i'm thinking siberian khantaru and total mass retained in particular). meanwhile, tull is plugging away at pretty standard jazz licks with flute stabs here. 'tull always seems to loose it's edge to me. This Was is basically a blues album, Passion Play is an almost painfully repetitive and Minstrel in the Gallery had a great A-side but that damn 20 minute song about humpty dumpty and the birds and ... well, whatever the hell that was. 

in 'tull's favor Ian Anderson does have an amazing voice and range.  if this were a songwriter's competition, i'd have to give it to Anderson over Shulman. but in musicianship, experimentation within the genre - not to mention arrangements - the trophy goes, without a doubt, to gentle giant. 

i ffffound it

we are the robots. 

following up yesterday's short, ridiculously poorly written / organized rant about the internet, i thought i should share with (who?) you one of the best sites on the ol' information super highway. as soon as you're sure your boss isn't looking, go check out ffffound. it's essentially an open lexicon of photos - no organization, no blogging or anything. it's like finding a big moebius strip lined with photos; you search and search and then end up back in the same place you started. 

in fact, it's the most like surfing you are likely to find on the internet. you just cruise, seemlessly falling from nerdcore photos, to absurd japanese print adds and technical diagrams until you stubble onto photographs that are, for all intents and purposes, pornography and then, miraculously, emerge into a world of television pastiche and high art. 

it's like a little microcosm of life or something - or rather, the distilled stuff of life. pictures without context, art without ownership. you end up looking, trying to process what you're seeing but what you're seeing can't really be understood because it isn't an encyclopedia - it's just a pile of pictures. it's like when you play a computer in chess: it can't be thrown off or bluffed because it simply doesn't know what that means. the pictures you see are processed, but they don't really mean anything to you without an author or some context to tie it into. i would look at some picture of a star wars something-or-other and think "i like star wars" but i couldn't explain what the image meant to me because i didn't know the who / what / where / when / why. it was just an image, click and it's gone. 

wild stuff. or maybe i just like to wax metaphysics. 

tubes and lasers

welcome: to the world of tomorrow! 

the internet is pretty amazing for a series of tubes. i mean, sure, we all remember that senator who couldn't articulate at all - AT ALL - the internet in any vaguely recognizable way ("an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock"). but seriously, who can rightly explain the internet?

google image search, that's who: the internet is lasers.

personally, my favorite term was always information superhighway because if brevity is the soul of wit, surely al gore and some guy from south korean are surely the wisest of us all. check out this picture of the T1 backbone of the internet circa 1996. 

in closing this brief, non-sensical entry, everyone should go read this newsweek article from 1995 about why the internet will never amount to anything. of particular hilarity: 

"Yet (some expert who makes me look like an ass) predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure ... We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

umm, amazon averaged $1,236,250.00 a month last year. how much did your mall make? 

amazon.com's income statement, 1997-2007 (source: morningstar.com)

(USD $MI)

watch out for that -

- flying ray? 

by now, we are all well aware of the dangers associated with breaching the habitat of the wild ray. if nothing else, steve irwin's untimely (but - let's face it - inevitable) death at the deadly whip-tail of a ray taught us to leave rays the hell alone. but this, as well as more recent developments have led me to change one of my fundamental beliefs about life. 

you see, many years ago, while watching discovery channel's shark week i decided that sharks were natures most evil creature - pure evil, in fact. they mentioned this one island that these man-eating sharks go to every year at the same time when a kind of bird goes there to lay eggs. when the eggs hatch the cute little bird guys all have to learn how to fly by getting up in the air and over the (now shark infested) water. thing is, these sharks leap outta the water and grab the little guys right outta the air. then - and here is the really messed up part - they don't eat them. they break their necks, bite off a wing or something and LEAVE THEM DYING AS A WARNING TO OTHER BABY BIRDS. pure evil, right? 

but, as i mentioned, my view has changed. sharks don't really kill alot of people - in fact, on average only about 20 a year. mostly they just take a leg or a chunk of flesh. so really, in the end, they are not so much evil as they are colossal assholes. although, they do sleep with their eyes open - a warning never to trust an animal that doesn't have eyelids (reticulating membranes don't count). 

having heard a story this morning about a woman killed by a ray, i now believe that the ray has taken the sharks place as a nature's most evil creature. a woman, just hanging out on her boat, is suddenly and viciously attacked by a ray that LEAPS OUT OF THE WATER AND TACKLES HER. apparently, there is a similar - in fact nearly identical - case from 2005 but i failed to find a link to it. i did however find this story about a man who was stabbed IN THE HEART by a ray. see, while sharks are built like torpedoes and full of teeth, your common ray is much creepier. utilizing a long poison bard he STABS YOU IN THE F***ING HEART. this brings up some crucial shark-to-ray comparison points: 

1. most shark attacks are due to sharks mistaking people for shit they actually like to eat - like turtles and seals and stuff. sharks don't like the taste of what is essentially a big hairless monkey. 

2. sharks tend to bite extremities, because they look meaty and delicious - can we really blame them? 

3. rays, on the other hand, seem to have an in-depth knowledge of human anatomy, that not only denote amazing powers of intellect, but also a deep seeded will to destroy all humans.  

in closing, i think rays are nature's #1 most evil thing. a close second is the sacculina carcini, which is only saved the number one slot by being slightly more awesome than it is evil. in contrast, i believe that dogs are the most A+ super nice animal on earth. as proof i submit this video of a dog leaping off of a boat to attack a shark. someone give that dog a medal. or some snausages.

i do apologize if all this talk about evil and animals killing people has bummed you out. as a way of apologizing, i present you with this awesome page where you can waste several minutes basking in nostalgia.