vanillatray

I'm tired of everything.

Happy Monday all.

Currently taking calls at work and quickly getting the hang of everything here.

Also I'm afraid that the carpal tunnel in my left hand is acting up. I have been wearing my wrist brace semi-regularly. I believe it's just the previous pain and damage flaring up from the winter air.

Still, it's no good. I have to play guitar later this week for band practice and I have to practice for myself.

The pain is different than what I usually feel. Also it started up during a week that I wasn't typing and now I'm in a different work environment I'm at less risk of doing further damage.

But, this shouldn't be a blog about my weak and stupid wrists.

This should be a blog about something better. Really, though, I'm terribly bored. Calls come in every so often. I follow blogs and post things here and there. I was looking at my scratch pad here and thinking that I wish I could draw.

I mean, really draw. Not the crappy doodles I do regularly. If I actually enjoyed drawing this scratch pad would be full of so many awesome little things.

I need to start recording again. I can't record or play music during the lull in between calls. All I can do is write and read blogs.

I guess I should start writing fiction again.

Or bringing in my DS to play final fantasy.

Whatever.

Last night I went to Magpie with Martin and Luke. One of the barista's looked oddly familiar and I played the "you look familiar" line on her. Yes, it's an old trick to pick up on chicks, but she acknowledged that I looked familiar as well.

We couldn't place where we knew each other from and this conversation kept returning throughout the night as Martin, Luke and myself enjoyed our dinner and ciders.

By the end of the night I find out she's going to school to get into game design, with interest on 3d character modeling.

As I buy my peanut butter cookie I state, "and you have a boyfriend?"

"Yes!" and she gives me his name. "You know him?"

"No, it's just you're too cool to be single."

And we laugh awkwardly.

Today I'm eating my peanut butter cookie. It's a pretty awesome cookie actually.

I started another blog.

http://thelastgenerationoffidelity.blogspot.com

This one will be semi-professional and will follow music events rather than this LJ which will remain about personal life stuff.

12 minutes left in this office. No phone calls coming in. No emails coming in. Everyone else but one tech and two operators have left for the day.

Tonight I was supposed to hang out with a hottie, but she was busy and had to reschedule. In leu, tonight will be writing material for Saturday.

Saturday from 11:00 to 7:00 I will be in the studio with Instagon, recording with my MOOG. During this time I'm also going to try to convince to trade places with mr. art lessing and wail on his guitar while he whops out on the moog.

Saturday evening, after recording, I will jet back to Java Lounge to perform a quick chopstick number. I requested to be last because I realize I'll be tired and honestly at the moment I don't feel like I'm going to put out my best.

After that, likely I'll meet up with people that went to see Times of Desperation.

Sunday I'm going to designate to build my new computer. Finally. I'll just need to wake up, drive to buy RAM, drive back and set it up.

I might likely buy a few PSP games while there, but that's a buyer's remorse for another entry.

This week's buyer's remorse, utilizing amazon's awesome deals

Always Sunny in Philly seasons 1-4 $45 (deal of the day!)
Ultraman complete collection $8 (omg!)
Shin Chan Season 2, Part 1 (now I'm complete thus far)

Computer that I'm building will have
ALESIS video card with 1gb mem
AMD tri-core 2.6ghz proc.
ALESIS m.board.
and I need to buy 4gb ram and maybe a new dvd rom drive.

and fallout 3....

My home desktop has been down for over a month now. This is due to a lack of time and money rather than just skill.

I got the IT position at work. Included with the promotion, and raise is a FUCKING LAPTOP!!

So the desktop can wait.

I turned 30 on the 5th.

I drove with my dad to WI and IA during this last week, arriving back at 8:30 this morning. I haven't properly slept since 2 this morning, which was 4 hours (maybe) at a rest stop in the middle of NV. I kept waking up because my feet were freezing.

Proper sleep on proper surface was at my uncle's place, Thursday night, on a couch in his basement.

My cousins are awesome.

My kitty is terrorizing the bathroom.

Actually I haven't eaten anything all day but some cheese curds I got from Wisconsin.

Bother, I need to go get something to eat.

I already got two call backs about the contact mics I sold during noise fest. I soldered them to stereo jacks, however I made the solder points to both rings so I didn't think it would have been an issue.

If you're having an issue with them and want your money back or for me to fix them, DON'T HESITATE TO CONTACT ME!

I don't want anyone to feel that they got ripped off. The mics themselves are of great quality. And I will go out of my way to make sure you're happy.

Here are some solutions that you can try.

First easy solution is to try using a stereo cable.

Second easy solution is use a stereo to mono plug.

**ALSO**

I feel like a god damned idiot

**ALSO**

I'm trying to track down everyone I sold one to.

Tonight is noisefest. woop woop

I've been reading this blog of my friend Chuck, Women That Chuck Likes. (I'm too short on time right now to get the link, but if you're reading this, Chuck, post the link). And it's almost inspiring me to take some fictional scribblings and post them sometime.

Not now, of course.

But what I do when I see a cute girl in public instead of talking to them and getting to know them I write up a short story for them, a fake background. Because I've found in recent years that most people bore me, so it's much more interesting to come up with a clever back story for them than actually meet and get to know people.

Thus begins the downward spiral of being a total shut in and socialpath. I've been looking forward to this for years actually.

Writing this entry on my laptop again. My desktop is fucked. It wasn't the HD that crashed but I think the disk controller on the motherboard.

Also it doesn't help that I haven't had much time to work and test everything.

Basically, replaced the hard drive and got the same error when trying to format or install windows.

Anyways.

Zombieland is a very fun movie.
Let the Right One In was brilliant and very well put together.
Crank 2 was awesome.
Burn After Reading was horrendously disappointing. It was like they decided to stop writing the script and go outside and play kickball instead.

Through yesterday and today I made 10 contact mic's for sale at the noisefest. For those of you reading this and are planning on coming out to the fest I'm selling them for $8 each or 2 for $15.

Also right now through my myspace and facebook I'm suggesting people come up with a clever name.

So far, besides my own names, Cerebral Josh is in the lead when he suggested "jailbait."

I just want to say that I sold cheap jailbait.

Bah, I need to get to bed.

*UPDATES*

More names taken from my myspace bulletin that I liked:
suicide bananas
twats

At least that's my assumption at this moment. Last night I went to hang out with my neighbor for a few hours and I come back and my computer screen went completely black. Tried rebooting a few times in both windows and linux, then I forgot I broke my linux setup a while back.

My setup for the last few years has been 40gb maxtor for the operating systems and programs and the 200gb has been for all media. So in case of a virus or whatever, I can wipe the main drive and not have any issues. This has been good to me.

Tried booting with the windows cd, got an error that a .sys file is corrupted and refused to finish repair. Booted with Boot N' Nuke, which never fails and it actually failed.

lol.

I'll likely go out and purchase a new HD.

I tend to update this site when my desktop is broke because it's much friendlier to a 10 year old laptop than the other sites. Even gmail can slow it down once I get a few chats going.

Regardless...

these guys sent me an add request on myspace.

based on this picture alone, should I add them?

Technically 2 days doesn't count as a tour, especially when one of them is only 3 blocks away from my own house.



Regardless...

why is every other song on this bossa nova station another version of The Girl from Ipanema?

writing this on my ubuntu desktop. sound still doesn't work and I'm going to download the latest version before I mess with that again.

The current manner of interviewing has been following the behavioral style of questions, where questions are asked and answers are given based on how the participant would behave in such a situation.

I just figured out a better method of interviewing which would be perfect. I would call it the Confused Doctor method. A participant would show up for an interview and someone would mistake the person for someone already in the position they are applying for. "Oh good you're here," they would say, "I thought you would never show up." The curious participant would follow the person until they're in a room of the particular work environment already in progress of something stressful.

Much like how in movies when people are walking around a hospital and an orderly would confuse them for a doctor, get them in scrubs and put them behind someone needing surgery.

This method would fully test how capable a participant is at handling stress and assessing a situation.

In most movies, the surgery is a success, so there really is no risk involved.

Also like that movie where Dolly Parton became a radio DJ when she was applying to be the radio station janitor.

In a manner of ocd, since I got my first cd burner, around 2001, I had been finding many methods of backing up my music. I got a car stereo that played mp3 cds and I started backing up music to mp3 cds. At first I was using Music Match Jukebox to rip cds, which at first would only rip cds at 128kbs unless one purchased the major copy. Years later I switched to winamp as my primary music player which is far superior. Ripping cds with winamp, however means ripping them to WAV unless I purchase the mp3 encoder, which I don't need to.

I encode the wav files to mp3 using lamedrop, which works out great because with lamedrop I can set the quality (320kbs yeah!) instead of justifying the crappy 128kbs because of the software being used.

Recently I found the oggdrop program grouped in a game download and I have been encoding stuff to ogg to experiment with the unappreciated format.

Oggdrop, however, crashes all the time, so re-encoding full cds takes a few tries. I tried looking for a newer version and found that it's strictly for linux and mac and someone merely made a windows port of it, which explains the crashing.

So NOW I'm going to look for an ogg plugin for winamp so I can bypass a whole step in this process.

My ipod is running rockbox which fully supports all audio formats, so converting stuff to ogg isn't creating an issue there. The only issue I may have is sharing music with other people that don't have winamp or a mp3 player that supports ogg.

And in that event it would be a quick drop to convert ogg to mp3 I imagine.

Technology is so stupid sometimes. Seriously, I shouldn't have to do this much work to enjoy music on the go.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, if I just owned a mac and was happy with itunes and had it upload to my ipod this wouldn't be "work." but really, with this method I feel I have more control of everything.

Anyways, happy labor day. I canceled practice with one band, waiting for a friend to come out to go watch a movie, and another friend is back in the states whom I'll visit with later this evening.

I needed this lazy morning. It's 2 and I'm still in pajamas.

Buyer's remorse from Dimple in Davis
Kid 606, GQ on the EQ+++
John Zorn's Cobra Tokyo Operations 94
Anaal Nathrakh In The Constellation of the Black Widow

All cds encoded to ogg 256kbs (-8.00q) :D

Someone here came back from Wisconsin and brought a bag of CHEESE CURDS!!

omg cheese

In recent months a lot of my friends have stopped updating myspace and started updating facebook. I joined facebook and this week I determined that I'm strictly going to use it as a chat medium since not everyone is on AIM, as they should be. I'm not going to play the stupid games or fill out the stupid quizzes or even pay as much attention to it as I did in updating my myspace shit.

So this is my morning break: check email, check RSS feeds, check myspace and facebook (both of which send email updates, so almost unnecessary), post bulletin of upcoming shows, check the message boards. It's all too much.

The internet isn't as cool as it used to be. Now it's work.

some emails in regards to the porno parodies of tv shows.

kevin:
i really want to see "this aint no happy days"

me:
yeah, me too. also the gilligan's island one and brady bunch

kevin:
come on lets make it happen simpons style. we buy together and share it.

me:
only if I get to watch it first

kevin:
no then it would be all sticky when i get it.

me:
who finishes ON the dvd? seriously.
"oh no, I need to eject it RIGHT NOW guuwaaaaaaaa there you go kevin! yeah"
but yeah, no, we're buying separate copies.

kevin:
or thanks to 2009 we can buy one copy and give u a burnt one

me:
k, after I burn a copy I'll have to test it of course.

there's another serious update which will be a friends only post. sorry lurks!

Trying to download Loonatics. 1 seeder and I'm getting no bits.

Grrr...