Nellie McKay

Last year some random horrible podcast I was listening to played a song called Sari by Nellie McKay. Since then I’ve been hooked on her music. I kept listening to that horrible podcast for months, hoping they’d introduce me to some other great artist, but they never did. Last night Molly and I went to see her live in Portland. It’s probably the best small concert I’ve ever been to. It was a pretty small place (The Aladdin theater) and we were fairly close to the stage. Nellie’s hilarious and threw all kinds of bizarre commentary and jokes in between her songs. She seemed high the whole time.

Nellie McKay on YouTube

The official Nellie McKay site

A Nellie McKay fan site

The Mist

Emily and I were in line at Albertsons today and I saw a paperback of Stephen King’s old book called The Mist. On the front it read “now a major motion picture.” It’s the first I’ve heard of it and it comes out next month! It’s one of my all-time favorite Stephen King stories.

Here’s the trailer for it.

Here’s the imdb page for it.

It’s written/produced/directed by Frank Darabont, the same guy who wrote/produced/directed The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. Those two are my favorite Stephen King movie adaptations. The trailer looks awesome and I can’t wait to see this.

Desktop Tower Defense completed!

I can have my life back! Today, at approximately 3:30pm, I completed every level of Desktop Tower Defense! I finished all the levels months ago, except for the “10K GOLD” Fun Mode. It was nearly impossible. But I’ve finally beat that one! You think its easy? Try it yourself at handdrawngames.com. A big fuck you to murd0c who introduced me to this game earlier this year. It’s been 0wning my life ever since.

I pledge to never visit that website again. I was actually thinking about setting up some parental controls on my computer that would block that website. I’ve been wasting hours a day on this stupid thing. Wonder why there hasn’t been a new PLA Radio in months? It’s because of this game. I’m actually serious. Everyone blame murd0c. Wow, what am I going to do with all this new free time? My life seems so open now. The possibilities are endless!

If anyone notices a new version of this game coming out, DO NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT!

Kitten and Roomba

I’ve been wanting to get a cat ever since I moved to Oregon and today we finally picked one up.

He’s going to be strictly an indoor cat since we don’t have a yard. So far he’s gotten to know the house pretty well and we’ve teased him to death with the laser pointer. He doesn’t have an official name but the kids are talking about naming him Charles or Chuck. I’m not sure why. They’re also going over names of Halo 3 characters. Hopefully they’ll settle on something this weekend.

Here’s something I videotaped last month. We built a cage around a Roomba to trap it. It worked for awhile but eventually it escaped, proving that these things will soon enslave the world.

My homepage

I’ve been occasionally working on my homepage these past few weeks. Mostly in the side bar areas. Over there on the right you’ll see a new section called Podcasts I Like. I need to fill that up because I listen to a lot of podcasts. But for now, there’s the few that I listen to the most. Also on the right are links to other web sites. That was always there, but I added a couple new ones. Most notably, Spessas. If you don’t see it, refresh a couple times and it’ll pop up.

On the left sidebar you’ll see all kinds of journal archive options. First there are random journal entries, then old entries by category and then old entries by month and year. Exciting, eh?

No kids this weekend. Bored. Went by Molly’s and picked up a FREE matress for Emily, saving $100 that I planned to spend on one soon. And drove around Corvallis and Salem, picking up some 500 gig hard drives. Transferring tons of data to a 500 gig drive is taking forever. No idea what I’m doing tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stay in all day and get things organized around here.

Myspace friend requests

Is it just me or does everyone get dozens of fake Myspace friend requests every day? It’s really getting out of control. And having to delete that many requests whenever I go online sucks.

9/24 UPDATE: I looked at the Myspace account settings today and found that they have CAPTCHA verification options for friend requests. All I had to do was turn it on. So my nonstop friend requests will probably stop now.

Iphone

Saturday the kids and I stayed inside all day playing Xbox 360. Sunday we drove to Frys, then decided to go to Portland after that. Spent the day in Portland, wandering around downtown and visited the Saturday Market a few times. Went to the downtown mall and ended up in the Apple Store for awhile. After playing around with the new Ipod Nanos and the Ipod Touch, I noticed about a dozen Iphones on display. They all had service on them so I used each one to call my own cell phone so I would have their numbers. When I got home, I added the phone numbers to this thread:

http://www.phonelosers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2279.0

This evening I was sitting at the laundry mat, reading the paper, when my phone rings. It’s a 503 area code. Apparently someone managed to find my cell phone number in the Iphone and called me. So I answer and talk to some guy. The conversation goes a little like this:

ME: Iphone support, this is Steve Jobs. Can I help you?
HIM: Yeah, uh, how do I do internet on this thing?
ME: Hit the F7 key.
HIM: Oh… Okay… Do I have to use Itunes to activate the Iphone?
ME: No, Itunes is built in so you don’t need a computer at all. One of our salespeople can activate it in the store. And the phones are $149.99 off today!
HIM: Really? Wow. Do I have to use AT&T for service?
ME: No, we’re compatible with all carriers now. Even Boost Mobile and Cricket and Sprint PCS. In fact, AT&T canceled their contract with us so they’re the only ones we don’t work with now.

It goes on and on like that. He had a zillion questions for me. He was wanting to know all about how they worked in Europe and stuff. He asked where I was and I told him I’m in San Francisco. I told him that I was the inventor of the Iphone. He didn’t seem to recognize the name Steve Jobs. This makes me want to go back there and put my phone number into the speed dial of every display Iphone.

Xbox 360

Got back in town last night around 1am. I’m not crazy about driving at night, but the drive was good. Lots of tumbleweed flying around in front of me, making me even more paranoid of deer. Listened to lots of Skeptoid and Blackalicious again. Also listened to about 30 minutes of a church sermon while flipping through stations. Those are hilarious.

Had an Xbox 360 waiting for me in the mail. I bought it broken from Ebay a couple weeks ago. Turns out the only thing broken on it was the power supply. Other than that it works perfectly! Score! It cost about $100, which is right around what I expect to get for our old Xbox. So free Xbox 360! Aside from having to buy a couple controllers, that is. The broken one didn’t come with a controller. Some guy won our old Xbox on Ebay a couple weeks ago but never paid for it. He did the same thing to 5 other people who were selling Xboxes. What a jerk. His rating is now -3. I haven’t rated him yet. I should give him a positive rating, just for the hell of it.

Tonight we got pizza from Little Caesar’s and went to Blockbuster to rent some Xbox 360 games. Emily got Kameo, Payton Bioshock, and I got Rayman. Holy crap, Rayman is funny. We’ve been passing the controller around, taking turns playing rounds. I’m not really into gaming myself, but I wanted the 360 because the kids love the Halo games so much and the new Halo comes out this month. But Rayman is great. This is the first I’ve ever seen it, aside from that bizarre clip on Altalp’s avatar on the PLA Forums. I think our entire weekend is going to consist of playing with the Xbox 360.

Renting games is expensive! $6.99 each? Damn! I’ve been looking on Ebay and it seems that I can buy the games for not much more than that. We get them for a whole week, but it’s still pricey. I don’t think I’ll be doing anymore renting. Speaking of video stores – we went to Blockbuster because the one we usually go to went out of business. It’s the one that I used to wander around in while Little Caesar’s was cooking my pizzas, snapping pictures of all the new releases that I intended to download once I got home. I think it’s been about a year since I’ve rented from anywhere. I think I should feel guilty about them going out of business since I quit renting in favor of downloading.

Gaming aside, the 360 is about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s media capabilities are really impressive. I bought 3 months of Xbox Live from Blockbuster and it appears we can download movies and TV shows from the net. Plus wallpapers, themes, and all that junk. Plus it can stream all the media from my other computers on the network. I’m not sure if this includes Divx video, but that’ll sure be a bonus if it does. So far only one directory of my photo album is showing up on the 360, but I think it’s slowly adding the rest. It’ll be cool once it’s all done. I had no idea the Xbox 360 was this cool! I HEART MICROSOFT! (If anyone wants to school me on cool things the Xbox 360 can do, feel free to in the comments!)

A few days ago I found my new favorite blog. It’s called Behind The Counter and it’s about a guy that works at the Wal-Mart return desk and all the craziness he has to deal with from people. He’s got some great stories and his writing style is hilarious. So far I’ve read almost all of his 2007 entries. They go all the way back to 2003 and I plan to read all of them. So everyone should read that. (I know I posted this previously, but that was in a private entry and I want more people to discover the awesomeness that this blog provides.)

Goodwill

After a lunch at Wendy’s, I ran across the street to see if there was anything good at Goodwill. First I found a 5 1/4″ diskette case with a giant Apple logo on it. I really wanted it, just for the logo. But I resisted since I have no use for a disk holder. I tried to peel the sticker off, but there’s no way it would come off and stay in good shape. I just now checked Ebay and there are lots of Apple Computer stickers on there.

A shelf full of Nokia cellular phones! All $3.99 each and one even had a charger for it. This Goodwill always has a large collection of cell phones but this is the first time I’ve seen almost all the same model of Nokia.

An outhouse! With a door that appeared to open. So I opened it…

To reveal a guy sitting inside.

My holiday Monday has been somewhat productive. I worked all day. This evening I painted on my clock (don’t ask), bought an electronic baby toy from Goodwill to hook into my home alarm system (don’t ask), upgraded the HDD on the kids’ computer to 220 gigs (from 20 gigs) plus fixed a few misc. things wrong it like the PCI cards slipping out of their slots, and watched Little Nicky (I love that movie). Goodwill had giant packs of balloons for a buck each so I picked up about 10 of those for our next UFO scare attempt. Oh yeah, I don’t think I wrote about that last one yet.

I don’t know what the hell I did yesterday. I think I was just home all day, catching up on email and other internet-type things. Oh yeah, I did laundry. Someone left a U.S. News magazine from 1993 at the laundry mat and I got to read all about president Clinton’s universal health care plan. I hope his plan works! Saturday the kids and I went on a hike at Avery Park in Corvallis.

Fairs & Festivals

On Friday evening we went to the Arts & Air Festival at the Albany fairgrounds. Some hot air balloons were supposed to lift off after dark but they canceled that because it was too windy. Can’t say any of us were too disappointed though. On Saturday we went to the State Fair in Salem. We spent 5 or 6 hours there playing games, going on rides and seeing animals.

Payton tried to refuse to go on any scary rides, which included pretty much all of them. I told him he didn’t have a choice and we went on the Sea Dragon. After a few screams of terror on it, he decided that he loved it and wanted to go on it again. So we did before we left. Same thing with the ferris wheel, he was completely against that at first. So he conquered two unreasonable fears yesterday. Here’s a video of our 2nd ride.

Not much else going on here. I’m just organizing my office today. It’s been trashed along with the rest of the house for the past couple months.

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