27 posts from 2006

   First Daughter Barbara Robbed in Argentina

   George's daughter had her purse (including cell phone) stolen in Buenos Aires, under the watch of her assigned Secret Service au pairs. So a quick list of things I'd love to see the burglar come forward with from his haul:
    i. Topless pictures from her camera phone
    ii. Pocket Bartender 3000-in-1 mixed drink recipe database
    iii. Condoms (to the anger of abstinence-only supporters)
    iv. Lots of condoms (to the amusement of everyone)
    v. WMD
    vi. Dick Cheney's heart

   In other news: it's not freezing cold out today like it was the days leading up to Thanksgiving, which is a welcome change. I haven't really taken pictures in almost two months, I need to try stretching that muscle again soon. I should also find where the cell phone I had went and build my bed frame. Oh, and get a haircut. Geez, step off, old man. And I was really enjoying the weather, too!

Progress Report Update: The bed frame has been constructed and put in place. I noticed I got some cuts on my palms, which doesn't even make sense. I guess it could be from the metal I grabbed in the box spring to move it since the frame doesn't look like it has anything sharp enough to cut with. It's uncomfortable, but I just watched Road to Guantanamo so I think I'll live. Here, have a song about Buckethead:

Buckethead

Colonel Claypool's Bucket Of Bernie Brains

   Wow. Wow. Wow. I heard this movie was scary, but damn I wasn't prepared for this. The scariest thing in the world is Pentecostal 10-12 year-olds who were saved when they were 5. Not because they're young and Pentecostal, but because of the situations and rationales their parents all have for making them so.

   Also, pedophiles. At least one absolute pedophile spotted, but plenty of possibles. Oh, and speaking in tongues never ceases to be simultaneously hilarious and frightening to me. Nevermind the worst Christian rap I could've imagined. I'll try to get clips up at some point, but I can't split it up while watching very well.

Update: At least two definite pedophiles.

Video Game Covers

    For your listening pleasure, I present a selection of twelve tracks culled from what I've found so far in the genre of video game cover music. I haven't included any here, but I'd also recommend these metal renditions of Metroid music if that sounds like the kind of thing you might be into. Click the Kirby to save the song as MP3:

<(^o^)> // Low-Tech Son - Fever [Dr. Mario]
<(^o^)> // Temp Sound Solutions - Hudson's Adventure Island
<(^o^)> // The Advantage - Braveheart Level [Solar Jetman]
<(^o^)> // Wave Theory - Simon's Town [Castlevania 2] (LIVE @ MAGFest 2)
<(^o^)> // Temp Sound Solutions - Bio Senchi DAN + Friday the 13th (LIVE @ MAGFest 3) These MAGFest 3 tracks are a bit quiet and mono, sorry but it's the best I had to deal with. Can't find the official recordings from this show.
<(^o^)> // NESkimos - Zelda Dungeon (LIVE @ MAGFest 3) A really nice jam on Legend of Zelda dungeon music.
<(^o^)> // Smash Brothers - Zelda 2 (LIVE @ MAGFest 3) Anyone who didn't like Zelda 2— you're just wrong.
<(^o^)> // Minibosses - Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! Medley
<(^o^)> // Fumapero - Super Mario Bros. Thank you, Japanese person whose name I will never know. This is amazing.
<(^o^)> // The Advantage - The Moon [Duck Tales]
<(^o^)> // CAst - Mother Earth [Mother]
<(^o^)> // virt - Crystal Flash [Super Metroid] A 22 minute medley of all but one song in the game

   So Anthony who Mike knows from Magic has gotten me into videogame inspired music since we were in his car to go bowling the other night. I've got The Advantage and Minibosses which I knew of but hadn't really listened to since he those were what got played in the car. Then I found out about MAGFest, which was once the Mid-Atlantic Gaming Fest, but now the MAG stands for Music And Games— a winning combination. So thanks to that I've gotten some bootlegs from MAGFest 3 in 2004 of a few good acts.

   Smash Brothers consists of Ailsean, Prozax, and one of the only videogame/rock/? artists I had any favor for previously, Virt. I've tried to upload his Metroid medley Crystal Flash and the Zelda-inspired Blood of Gannon to Vox before with no success, I'll try again soon to see if it's improved any. Regardless, they have a great set including music from Life Force, Zelda 2, and May's theme from Guilty Gear XX. I saw a picture of Virt and I wished I never had, but that's not a very nice thing to say so let's pretend I didn't.

   I'm listening right now to Wave Theory who seem to be a hip-hop/west coast rock fusion act, the likes of which always seems to hail from California, Santa Rosa for this outfit. They start off with a Metal Gear: Solid skit, drop an original composition with references to Robitussin and salmonella, and then perform (much to the loss of the listening audience I'm sure) a dedication- in dance!- to Shinobi.

   I'm in the process of getting more of the acts from the weekend, but so far it seems like a really, really fun night of music. I'd highly consider going to MAGFest 5 in the first week of 2007 if I have the capital, because the hour long sets and two nights full of acts really seems like it's a good return on the investment. Plus, it sounds like an anime convention with my least favorite part removed- the anime. More updates as events warrant/I convert and seperate these sets into tracks I can upload.

In honor of Vox's launch tomorrow, what's your favorite feature or aspect of Vox?

Unlimited bandwidth and the ability to link directly to uploaded media. I'm so done with you jerks the minute that faucet gets tightened. Just kidding <3....kind of

Addendum: A great and wonderful thing happened today- I did my periodic Google for "Wales is Ok" shirt and found that John Allison of Scary Go Round has actually made one available! It's not identical to The Boy's which is disappointing, but not so disappointing as to stop me from getting it. I may also get either the Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton t-shirt.

"Wales is OK" Design

Wales is OK!

   So last night I had a dream involving: pet/domesticated elephants, bears, and giraffes. The police questioning me because I reacted negatively to a poster of George W. Bush (in my interrogation I wrongly said the only reason they could question me was the USAPATRIOT Act when I had meant the Military Commissions Act) only to be saved by having Bill Maher as my company since he drew the animosity off of myself. I saw a guy with a Bible trying to hire a prostitute at the main bar of some Chinese restaurant (think Hong Kong in Harvard) who I then chased out and caught up with to ask about that contradiction. There was also nudity and a wedding, though I can't remember any details about either. I smoke a lot of weed during the dream which isn't typical, and even one of the two police officers was a toker- but that didn't stop him from taking the high ground over a terrorist, which is essentially how I was treated after the poster fiasco but before they put the cuffs on Maher.

   There was way more, but I spent too much time rolling around in bed being comfortable after I woke up and forgot a lot of it, which is regrettable. I think once we (Mike, Jesse, and me though they were absent through the rest of the dream) got back to the car, we had a dead bear in it— like we hadn't left any windows cracked and it didn't get enough air or something? Either way, it was a sad, sad sight. Unless you hate bears.

    Sorry to hit you all with another dream log, but I'm not sure what else I'd post here. I read everyone else's LiveJournals or Vocēs and don't see much in the way of things I'd consider worth saying myself— I doubt anyone cares to hear how many hours I've worked the past week, or what I've eaten, and those are two of the only details I can think of to recount my past few days. The only journal I could think of emulating would be Nessa's, which seems to only be enviable in that she uses it when she wants/needs to and not because it's been a week since the last post or anything. Who knows, I might roll this weekend— that's a guaranteed post either during or after. Until next time, kids!

So I have Vista RC1 installed (and activated even!) and I'm using it now, for lack of options. I got Mac OSX 10.4.7 installed and running after a good amount of effort and weeping, and then fucked it all up and ruined my boot table and could only get into OSX and not XP or Vista. Then I tried to patch my graphics to use my card and fucked that up. So now I manged to get into Vista with a GRUB disc. I think I can fix XP once I finish downloading the disc I need to repair install it, then I can just wipe the Apple disc and start it over.

Oh god I will never be that lucky!

Next Day Post-Game Update: Well I ended up going to bed around 5:30PM. This is quite obviously the punishment I get for assuming I'd be able to have fun for free. However, I feel like having "fixed" the problem I no longer fear it arising again- as soon as I back up the source trees for work onto discs, I'm going to be redoing my disks from the ground up in preparation for multi-OS goodness. Of course I do have work to do now that I wanted to start at 7:30 this (yesterday) morning before this fun started. List of discs that contributed to causing/solving this problem:

• JaS Mac OS X 10.4.7 for x86
• PartitionMagic 8 CD (won't boot! Source of all the problems!)
• BootMagic 8
• Callisto Beta 8 (ATI Drivers for OSx86)
• Windows XP Pre-Install Environment [x86, don't think there is an x64 one]
• Windows XP Pro SP2 x86 [French? Portugese? One of the two]
• Windows Vista RC1 (5600) x64
• Windows XP Pro SP2 x64
• Super GRUB Disc v0.9528 [the most useful 401KB file I ever downloaded, comes in floppy, CD and USB flavors]

   In summary, my number one complaint about OS X on my computer's hardware is that it has known issues installing to Serial ATA disks on boards like mine with nForce 4 chipsets. I had a nice little bother-no one partition made out for it on my newest drive, far away from dangerous messing with the boot records and partition tables. Then I find out (after trying 12 times) there's no way I'm going to make it through the full install without a disk access error on my SATA drives so I grab a random PATA drive from the shelf (I have three more sitting around still, hopefully a quieter one) shove it in, format it, and then tell OS X to go to town. Having no floppy drive, I never made boot disks when messing with BootMagic and it loses track of how to get into Vista's BOOT.ini equivalent. If I chose the PATA drive when booting I could use BootMagic to go into OSX and that ran fine until I got greedy and tried to enable resolution changes and such for my card using omni's Callisto package, after which atttempting to boot OS X freezes on console as it's supposed to draw the login window- I believe this means it's seeing my LCD as CRT or something, but either way I'm definitely learning the necessary boot modes for the darwin kernel before fucking with that again- I could've used -s(ingle user mode) and -x(safe mode) in addition to -v.

   Then I used the Pre-Install Environment to verify I could access my disks, only could get to one. Load up the Windows Vista Recovery Console, and I can see the other. Neither Vista nor XP can repair install at this point because I've been messing with the partition/boot headers enough that they don't think they're looking at a partition they can work with, when obviously they can since they're already installed there. I hoped unplugging the PATA would change that (since Windows has some issues reported on not installing to SATA when PATA is available) but no such luck. So now I'm booting with that Super GRUB Disk into Vista or XP. OSX was giving me "your computer MUST be restarted" business after the latest install (which ran while I went to the store, so no idea if that finished well) and then after fixing up Master Boot Record and messing with partition headers a bit to get the Windowses working, I'm getting "HFS+ Filesystem Error" on attempted boot, so that shit's going to wait.

   So yeah, there's my adventures in fucking my own shit up. Oh, and if you've read this far (which no one has) and you've been keeping track of how frustrating this must've been (keeping in mind I wanted to be working, and that each step of progress was preceded by an hour of trying to find a way to make progress,) I'd like to mention the icing on the cake that was this beauty- last time I replaced my heatsink I didn't have the foresight to remove the power-supply from the case before starting. Once I've already got the goo on the chip, I realize have to pull the PSU out to get this done. Since then my front staus lights (hard drives, cpu, etc) and my RESET BUTTON have not been properly rewired. Just IMAGINE how many times I've had to reboot in the past 24-36 hours, I might've saved a cool hour of my life if I had that button.

I clearly need to get the first three seasons of this show. I've watched the four episodes so far from the fourth season today, and this is really, really good. It's everything I wanted The Shield to be. I may never have fallen for Entourage, but HBO still bats better than average by my count. Baltimore is a city rotting from the inside— this much has always been true.

    On 101 Constitution Avenue, a lobbying haven located across the street from our nation's Capitol building:

   Visitors to Washington who want to see democracy in action traditionally waste their time at the viewing galleries of the Capitol building, where--if they are lucky--they might see one or two legislators mumbling mechanically for the c-span cameras. It is, as everyone knows, a big letdown--a disillusionment that is cited whenever smart young people relate how they got to be so wise to the world. 

    My advice to those visitors: Walk across the street to Charlie Palmer Steak. This is the place for political spectatorship in the age of Abramoff, where you can see the questions before the nation actually being resolved--and can do it over a meal, too, saving yourself a trip to Applebee's later. Start with the miniature lobster corndogs, $9, a nod to the deep-fried treats of your red-state youth (but made with lobster, get it?), and then slyly bribe yourself with a plateful of the domestic Kobe sirloin, $68. Wash the whole thing down with a half-dozen Manhattans--you will need them. Look around you while you eat: This is not the dim, windowless steakhouse of your weekend debauches in Wichita. It is light; it is open; its polished limestone walls are accented with Wedgwood blue; a curtain of glass showcases the prominent, prosperous diners to the sweating world outside. See that pond burbling in the middle of the restaurant? And the heavy steel ingot they use to prop up your menu? It's because of classy touches like these that your congressman is never moving back to your home state, regardless of what he says about "sharing your values." 

    Speaking of that congressman of yours: If you're lucky, you will see him here. Indeed, for the price of that steak you can watch him and his fellow members make decisions that will affect you for the rest of your life. And, when they do, you will see that they're making these decisions in close consultation with non-members--people just like you, in fact, only with better hair, better clothes, better manners, and a better job working for far richer and more important companies than yours. 

    I showed up at Charlie Palmer one evening in July, only minutes, I was assured, after Tom DeLay had departed. I took up a post with an advantageous view, fortified myself with a few drinks, and watched the proceedings unfold. A parade of well-dressed VIPs poured by--top SEC personnel, important aides, U.S. senators, numerous representatives, former White House officials, and lobbyists of every stripe--all of them dressed perfectly and wearing expressions of unflappable satisfaction, if not outright hilarity. A contented-looking fellow in a vivid yellow tie was whispered to be the aide who made some congressman a populist. A man squeezed through the jolly crowd wearing a weathered face and a shirt embroidered with the words missouri corn growers association. A party rumored to be a Big Pharma affair roared on in a private dining room just behind the bar. 

    Who are these special beings who pay for--and, in some cases, write--the laws that govern our lives?

...

    One example of how this works, according to data provided by Public Citizen: From 1998 to 2006, the University of Alabama paid Van Scoyoc $1.5 million; over that same period, the various officers of the firm contributed at least $123,500 to Alabama Senator Richard Shelby (two of the firm's vice presidents are, in fact, former staffers of Shelby's); and, during those years, Shelby earmarked some $150 million for the University of Alabama.

    Every element of this chain is, of course, formally unconnected to every other--innocent and wholesome as a newborn babe. But imagine, for a moment, that this is exactly the racket it appears to be. That is to say, what if the company's officers were really able to charge clients $1.5 million for making contributions of $123,500 (a twelvefold increase) and if the University of Alabama turned $1.5 million in lobbying fees into $150 million in earmarks (a hundredfold increase) and if Shelby himself pocketed $123,500 in campaign donations just for greasing the skids when the call came from 101 Con.

   Check out the full article over at The New Republic [use l:readtnronline/p:read123 or another.] I wanted to be a lobbyist when I was younger- I heard about the job and decided there couldn't be a better one. I guess at that point I didn't really understand the terrible nature of it all; I'll amend my statement to there can't be a better one— for someone with no soul.