Well, the link to this page seems to come and go over at Jambase, but you can see their Bonnaroo Schedule now. Decisions I'm going to have to make:
Jack Johnson vs. Tortoise: Johnson starts at 3:00, Tortoise at 3:30. No brainer, I'll be going to Tortoise.
Ben Harper vs. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones: Ben at 5:30, Bela at 6:15. That'll be a game-day decision.
Allman Brothers Band vs. The Roots vs. Leo Kottke and Mike Gordon: I think I start at the Allman Brothers at 5:30, wander briefly to Kottke/Gordon at 6:00, and catche the beginning of The Roots at 6:15, then make a decision.
Medeski Martin & Wood vs. The Flaming Lips: Again, a no brainer. I am not going to miss a Midnight to 4:00 AM MMW show. It should blend nicely into Particle at 4:00 AM, too...
North Mississippi Allstars vs. Galactic vs. O.A.R.: They only overlap by a bit, so I should be able to catch a bit of each, and the entire Galactic set.
James Brown vs. moe. vs. SuperJam: I get about a half hour of James Brown before the jam starts up. That'll probably be one to download, though. Don't want to miss much of moe.
Overall, not bad. I was worried I'd end up with something like Tortoise vs. Medeski Martin & Wood and have a tough decision to make.
May there be many more... Gimpysoft is three years old today. In that time, I have successfully accomplished my stated goal of keeping Greg, Ed, Raj and Troeger posted on what I'm up to.
It's good to have goals. Happy Monday, everybody...
I've tried three of Stephen Green's Friday Recipes and have been impressed each time. I think I'll be making this week's Marinated Flank Steak With Horseradish Sauce at a barbecue tomorrow.
I truly am hoping he can find a publisher for his proposed recipe collection, which he hopes to call "The Bachelor's Guide to Getting Laid Through Cooking". That's always been one of my favorite techniques, and about as successful as the rest, unfortunately. I'm counting on Stephen's book to turn things around, though.
Publishers, be sure to get in touch with Steve and make that happen!
Matt Welch points to a Tim Cavanaugh review of a book about a magazine about the go-go 90's internet boom. Why do you care? Because of this line:
If we throw in hybrid business/consumer books published as subsidiaries of larger magazines, we get oddities like Time Digital (renamed ON) and Forbes Digital Tool, the Web-only adjunct of Forbes that deserves praise for bearing not only the worst title of any Internet publication but the worst title of anything ever in the history of the universe.
I wish I was as cool as Tim Cavanaugh.
As a result of NZ Bear's changes to his Blogosphere Ecosystem, I am no longer an Insignificant Microbe. I've clawed my way up the evolutionary ladder and can now claim the proud title of Slimy Mollusk!
Mr. Bear needs some icons to pretty up the ecosystem page, so help him out if you're artistically gifted.
Times and venues for the acts at Bonnaroo seem to be posted over at Jambase.
If I get bored this evening, I might just draw these up on a grid of some sort so I can figure out what decisions I'm going to have to make.
Yes, now that I'm single again, back to what I do best... Obsessing over the post Kids In The Hall careers of the Kids In The Hall. From the Columbia-TriStar newsletter:
TV Poll NewsThanks to those of you participating in the TV poll. Based on the overall selections, we have now planned to put out a number of the titles chosen. Please look for The Tick, Soap, Newsradio, Dilbert and more to be released on DVD later this year. Thank you again for your selections, your opinions matter!
Hooray for obsessed fans warning each other to vote in the TV Shows on DVD poll! Sometimes this crap apparently does work...
I never really bought that Weblogs As An Important Journalistic Advance theory, but when you read stories about Iranian students being arrested for their writings it seems like there's something interesting going on.
Further details about weblogs in Iran can be found here.
Be sure to head on over here and send some get-well-soon wishes to Vicky.
Why is it that you can be single for well over a year and a half and fine with it, then get all freakin' mopey after one half-assed relationship that didn't even last a month?
And you can't even win four out of seven at the darts league?
And ants eat your house?
I'm sorry, but there are exactly three reasons to ever drink Pabst Blue Ribbon:
1. You're poor and it's cheap. 50 cent drafts at Buzzard Beach, I suppose that's OK. If they serve anything else for the same price, get that instead.
2. As an excuse to try out your Dennis Hopper impression. "Heineken??? Fuck that shit, Pabst Blue Ribbon!!!"
3. Somebody left a bunch in your fridge after a party. Even then, it would be better to use it to boil bratwurst.
But not on the body of a hobo. In my freaking house. Carpenter Ants, I'm fairly sure. That must be what's been causing that leak in the computer room window. They're nesting in my wood, and causing leaks in various places around the house. A local pest control service claims it'll cost $135 to take care of it, and I think I'll pay to have it done professionally so I can be as sure as possible that they're all freaking dead before I start tearing wood off my house and fixing whatever damage they've already managed to do.
Home ownership rules.
On a more positive note, we did have a fun Good Friday party last weekend. Drank too much, but didn't really wake up with a hangover. That's mainly because I didn't really wake up... I slept most of the day Saturday. It was nice. Brittany and I went to see Ani DiFranco Saturday evening. Ani's a pretty damn good guitar player, and has plenty of energy. I enjoyed the show, and even recognized a couple of the songs she played.
The good was slightly outweighed by the bad this weekend, though. On the bright side, an infestation of Carpenter Ants is orders of magnitude better than an infestation of Termites, but I'm still not happy about that discovery, and not looking forward to attempting the repairs. As a matter of fact, I don't really know where to start with those, and this may be something I'll just have to hire professional help for. We'll see, though. I'll try to take things apart around that window and see if I can find obvious damage. That needs to be done this weekend, if not sooner.
Anyone want to help?
Fine. I'm trying to avoid the whole lung cancer thing. So I quit smoking. Great.
Now you're telling me that I'm going to have to quite inhaling plutonium too? Is life really worth living without the occasional Plutonium huff?
BTW: Tonight's party is BYOP. My stash is almost gone, and I haven't been able to get in touch with my supplier in Iraq for the last couple of weeks...
Well, this is probably the lamest thing I've heard in quite a while... The Oakland Raiders are apparently suing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (and the Jacksonville Jaguars) for trademark dilution, the Bucs because the pirate theme is too similar, the Jags for using Black and Silver.
NFL attorneys argued there will always be overlap among logos and colors... Herlihy seemed sympathetic to the NFL's position.If California tells Tampa Bay to wear a new uniform for games here, he said, then Florida might say "when the Raiders come to Florida, get that logo off your uniform,'' Herlihy said, suggesting the Raiders might "put a daisy on your uniform'' as an alternative to their pirate.
Ouch.
How did I miss that the World Horror Convention 2003 is coming to Kansas City this weekend? I'm going to miss horrifying events like Cowthulhu's Casino Mixer.
Congratulations to The Great and Powerful (and Fertile) Raj on successfully impregnating his wife... I suppose this means more baby pictures on Gimpysoft in December or so.
Also as he points out, I have now fallen one step further back in the procreation race. But as a friend (?) once told me, "Yeah, it'd be a shame to lose those genes..." I suppose I'll find a girlfriend just as my friends' kids start school, I'll be married by the time their kids are in junior high and have kids when they're in high school. This way, I guarantee myself a steady stream of babysitters.
Congratulations, Raj...
If you would like to make your own replica KITT, KARR, KIFT or Goliath, look no further than Knight Replicas.
What the hell is it with Chicago and our (11 and 1!) Royals? Raj, can you shed some light on this crap?
OK, so maybe the protest against Augusta National fizzled... That doesn't change the fact that the club is run by a bunch of good-old-boy fuckswitches and filled with members who ought to be ashamed of themselves for not speaking out against Hootie.
That's just my opinion though, I could be wrong...
Set your VCR's, Michele is going to be on the teevee next Monday. CNN, in particular...
I'm a sucker for a good Magritte joke. Plenty more where that came from here.
I'm sorry Governor Masuda, only by defeating The Great Sasuke in the ring will you earn the right to unmask him...
Much thanks to Gurney for pointing me to this... Apparently there is a Knight Rider movie in the works. Hasselhoff is to have a role, but not as Michael Knight. So who would make a good Michael Knight? The Ain't It Cool boards suggested Bruce Campbell, and I certainly wouldn't complain about that, but it probably is unlikely. Also, will they get William Daniels to do the voice of K.I.T.T. again?
OK, of course you know what K.I.T.T. stands for, but who remembers what K.A.R.R. was an acronym for? Who remembers the name of Michael Knight's evil twin and his evil truck?
And why didn't anybody tell me about the Knight Rider video game? Any why can't I buy Knight Rider on DVD?
In other news, there is a script for a sequel to Tron and it may get made too. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the Tron 2.0 video game a lot more than any sequel, but I'd definitely go see a Tron sequel.
I leafed through a copy of Modern Drunkard Magazine last week over at Molloy's and I meant to link it. I almost forgot, until Sara at Hit & Run reminded me.
I haven't been looking for a new job, but maybe it's about time I started.
OK, it's not actually about freedom, or terrorism, or even wireless technology...
The war in Iraq is actually about fast food...
Stephanie Schaudel, co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-war group in Chicago, said the "richness of culture" in Iraq is going to be subjected to Americanization by U.S. corporations during the post-war rebuilding of the war-torn nation. The result, she indicated, would be difficult for Iraqis to swallow."Some people would think that seeing a KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don't," Schaudel said.
Schaudel sees the destruction from the war as the greatest threat to the Iraqi people, but believes their suffering will continue as America's cultural influence increases.
"You can just look at what those kinds of businesses have done to the diet and health of many Americans to think that it might not be the number one thing we should be exporting," she explained.
"Iraqis have really good food, they don't need a KFC," she added.
The horror... The horror...
Terribly sorry about that downtime. My computer table at home almost collapsed under the weight of all the machines and monitors on it last night. In the process of removing a monitor I think I jostled something loose on the server and didn't notice it was down until this morning. It took me a little bit of time to get it going again, but pi is back up now. I'm starting to think it might be time to decommission this machine before too much longer. We'll see, though.
In other news, what I've suspected for the last couple of weeks has finally been confirmed. I am in fact single again. Dang it. Well, I did meet somebody else last Wednesday. Although I'm sure that that isn't going anywhere either, maybe I am getting a bit better at meeting people now. Probably just random chance, though. Maybe she'll make it out to the party...
You're probably asking yourself, "What party would that be, Ryan?" "Why, that would be this Friday's First Gimpysoft.com Lame Party of the Year" would be my answer if you actually asked that question. Then I would tell you when (7:00 or 8:00 or so...), where (email me for directions), and that you need to bring your Own Damn Booze. I'm newly single, and that bottle of Jack is all mine. Hamburgers will be provided.
Well, that's about it. To recap:
Computer Table: broken.
Ryan: single.
Friday: party.
See you Friday...
OK, I had it wrong. Apparently the Kansas Senate voted down the statewide lifting of the Sunday Liquor Sales ban. That leaves us at the status quo, which due to some recent court rulings means that cities can individually vote to allow sunday sales, which many have.
More specifically, the Kansas Senate voted against accepting the House version of the bill and sent it back to conference. They'll take it up again when they reconvene on April 20.
My senator Nick Jordan voted no. I just sent him an email asking him why. I'm assuming that I won't get a satisfactory reply from him, so he's probably lost my vote as well.
Overall it's going well anyway, for me at least. I'll be able to buy my booze in Lenexa starting June 22. I still think that we need to get the ban lifted statewide. I feel sorry for the folks that don't have the luxury of living within 10 miles of the state line, and don't have a Patriot like Marshall Rimann in their local community. I want the right of Kansans statewide not to have to watch football sober guaranteed by kickoff this September.
Since it's such a pain to find on the Legislature's website, the voting record on the motion to accept SB 2 as amended by the House (allowing Sunday sales statewide) is as follows:
Yeas (Patriots): Barone, Brungardt, Buhler, Bunten, Emler, Feleciano, Gilstrap, Gooch, Haley, Hensley, Jackson, Lee, Morris, O'Connor, Schmidt, Schodorf, Steineger, Teichman
Nays (Chumps): Adkins, Allen, Barnett, Brownlee, Clark, Corbin, Downey, Goodwin, Harrington, Huelscamp, Jordan, Kerr, Lyon, Oleen, Pugh, Salmans, Taddiken, Umbarger, Vratil.
Abstaining (Sissies): Donovan, Wagle.
Absent (Probably Drunk and Passed Out): Tyson
A resolution passed the Lenexa city council allowing Sunday liquor sales. Assuming the state doesn't pass a statewide ban, which looks unlikely, Sunday sales will start in Lenexa on June 22.
And I'll be there when they open... I'll be shopping at Rimann Liquors in particular. Not only do they underwrite our local NPR station, Marshall Rimann made the original request to the Lenexa city council.
A statewide lifting of the Sunday hooch sale ban is currently back in the Senate.
Oh, and to Mr. Babson, who says:
Sunday liquor fever is high in Topeka and in Johnson County cities, including Leawood and Lenexa. It's like watching lemmings.Last time I looked, Sunday was still the Sabbath.
...
If you want to buy booze on Sunday or gamble at a casino, there's plenty of opportunity to do so across the state line. Kansas communities should not be seeking to enhance revenue streams or balance budgets at the expense of human frailties.
Would you please kindly STFU? I'll deal with my own human frailties, thank you very much. I don't need your protection, but thanks anyway for the kind thoughts.
According to Merriam Webster's Dictionary Nee-uh-lis-um is a perfectly acceptable pronunciation of nihilism. So piss off, you pronunciation nazis...
And I'm going to link today's Bleat and suggest you read it...
The Fog of Peace comes next; we will hear many stories of Setbacks and Troubling Developments and Roadblocks to Peace and the rest of the vocabulary the media deploys when a brutalized nation is freed from jail and does not immediately assume the characteristics of a Nebraska small-town school board. We’ll hear of many babies thrown out with the Ba’ath water, in other words.
Ba'ath water... Heh...
Yeah, it's working now. You can listen at:
http://radio.gimpysoft.com:8000
This site may be a bit slow over the next several hours. I'm currently uploading the last batch of music to my new dedicated Gimpysoft Radio server. I'll activate it later today and give you a link to where you can tune in. To start with it's just going to be playing a fixed playlist, but I eventually plan to make a slightly cooler playlist selection system.
At this point, I plan on only hosting live music, and only in whole-show form. The idea is that it'll be playing a show and you'll be able to vote for the next show to be played. I hope to make it more complex than that eventually, but probably not until I get a new hard drive for that machine. Once a 200GB drive drops under $200 I'm on it. At that point, I should be able to get all my music on the server and offer a fairly wide selection.
In the meantime, what I have on there is:
Bob Marley & The Wailers 10/31/1973
Drums & Tuba 2/6/2001
Bela Fleck & Edgar Meyer 2/13/2002
Disco Biscuits 6/23/2002
Steve Kimock Band 4/1/2000
I'll let you know when it's active.
My quest to be able to buy beer before football on Sunday without having to drive fifteen miles is one step closer. My representative Cindy Neighbor abstained and officially lost my vote next year.
My Gimpysoft.com Blogshares are languishing in the doldrums. As a 20% shareholder, I demand some answers from the CEO (Chimp Executive Officer).
We at Gimpysoft.com realize that investing can be difficult in these troubled times. Uncertainty about the war in Iraq and the unstable international political situation in general make these trying times for the individual investor.
In addition to these factors affecting the market in general, the infrequently updated mediocre personal weblog sector has been hit particularly hard. It sometimes seems that with the wealth of frequently updated, actually funny, and well written weblogs, there just isn't room for the little guy any more. The loss of our upcoming Blog A Day Tour stop certainly didn't help things either.
On the other hand, the board here at Gimpysoft.com believes that we are well positioned to take advantage of what we see as a coming rebound in the infrequently updated mediocre personal weblog sector. Not content to wait for a rebound in the ovarall market, we are proactively implementing a three step plan to increase shareholder value:
1. A five-fold increase in link-whoring over the coming quarter.
2.
3. Profit
We thank you for bearing with us through these difficult times. We look forward to a return to profitibility by the end of Q2 2003. We remind you that shares in Gimpysoft.com are still available, at what we believe is a bargain price.
Via Ken Layne, a slideshow of our future masters from Robodex 2003 in Yokohama, Japan.
The Kansas City Star now has their own Iraq Weblog.
Update: Hmm... Maybe not... Looks like this is just a Knight-Ridder syndicated type deal.
Just on the heels of potential Sunday Liquor Sales in Kansas, Michele points out that football schedules have been announced.
Of course, I'll be up in Green Bay for the October 12 game vs. Kansas City. I ought to catch a game at Arrowhead sometime this year, too. Maybe Cleveland on November 9.
Only 154 days to go...
Only 154 days to go...
Well, we're one step closer to a great victory in our current war on religious fascism.
That's right, soon we'll be able to buy beer and liquor on Sundays in Kansas.
No more driving to Missouri when you forgot to buy beer before football on Sunday. Now all you Kansans better contact your state representatives and ask them to vote yes on the House Substitute for Senate Bill 2 [pdf]. It looks like this particular pdf doesn't have the Huff amendment applied to it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is the one we want.
Be sure to mention something about "supporting local businesses", or "increasing Kansas excise tax revenue" rather than "wanting to get trashed on the Sabbath". I think it'll go over a bit better that way.
Get in touch with your representatives now, the house votes today to send this to the Senate. If this doesn't pass, I am running for office in 2004 on a pro-Sunday-liquor platform. Who's with me?
Kansas City Royals: Undefeated
Houston Astros: Undefeated
(And wow... Five runs in the bottom of the ninth for the win!)
Why am I paying attention to baseball again?
Why somebody posted this picture in this Fark thread I don't know.
I am rather proud of this picture, though. I took it in the parking lot of the Hooters in Fayetteville, AR.
I suppose that this also proves that my server could theoretically handle image hosting for a Fark photoshop contest, but maybe those get hit a bit more than the comments for a random story...
This one in particular was hit over 500 times since it was posted last night at around 11:00 PM. I wonder what the load is like for a photoshop contest...
In other news, I hope to get Gimpysoft Radio working again this weekend. Probably more empty promises as usual, but I finally have a machine that's beefy enough that I can more or less dedicate it to the task.
My company's tryouts for the Kansas City Corporate Challenge are getting started this weekend. I was originally planning on only signing up for racquetball, but since the darts tryouts are right near my place and I just bought darts, I figure I'll show up for that too. Tryouts for that are this Saturday.
I'm starting to worry just a bit about racquetball, though. Tryouts for that start next Monday, and they only list the locations for the tryouts as "various". I'm sure I'm going to be stomped by the 30-40 year old guys who have been playing for ten and twenty years, but I was looking forward to the tryouts. On the upside, this Sunday I beat my normal racquetball partner three out of five games for the first time ever. That's been close to a year and a half. I'm sure he was just having an off day, but it's good to get that at least once. I'm sure it's going to be brutal this Thursday, but I can't slack up. I'm in training.
Strike first strike hard no mercy sir!
It is kind of sad that there's no boxing or martial arts competition... Lay off my friends will you, Cerner? Take that. This'll show you to hire away all our employees, Block...
It is very early in the morning and already it's shaping up to be a piss poor day. I woke up at around 5:00 this morning with a general sense of unease. Maybe it's just the warm temperatures and the fact that we haven't switched over to air conditioning just yet. Regardless, after about thirty minutes I decided that I wasn't going to get back to sleep. I got up and went to pay some bills that I meant to do last ngiht.
Ugh. That's just never a pleasant task, and was further exacerbated by the fact that I had $350 worth of car repairs over the weekend. I did manage to get everything paid, though. Looks like I'll be cutting out tonight's going out, and possibly Friday's Big Smith as well. Horrors!
After that pleasant task was taken care of, I decided to see if I couldn't get another hour or so of sleep before I went in to work. No such luch. Finally, I gave up and went to take a shower. I finished up my shower and as I was drying off there was a knock at the bathroom door. That can't possibly be good. It turns out it was the roommate notifying me of a major water leak underneath the bathroom. Well that's just great. I get some clothes on and go to check it out.
After looking, I immediately figure out what was going on. It's a problem with the toilet up there that I've been putting off fixing for the last six months. Just the right circumstances came together that allowed an absolute ton of water to spray past the back of the toilet tank for the entire period of time I was taking a shower. I shut off water to the toilet and decided that I was going to take the morning off to get it fixed properly like I know I should. I did manage to get the water drained out of anywhere it collected, and get most mopped off the floor.
I sat down to write an email saying I wasn't going to make it in this morning when I remembered that today is our weekly staff meeting. There have been some interesting changes at work lately, and I didn't particularly want to miss this meeting in case there was some information about how things are going to settle down around here.
So here I am. I'll probably head home for an early and long lunch to get the toilet fixed, and may end up just taking the afternoon off to make sure nothing else horrible happens. Probably won't... I definitely know where the water was coming from, and it's shut off at the source. But the way things are going so far this morning, I don't think it would be a good idea to leave plumbing repairs unattended for several hours.
Ugh. Better get some work done now, though... Hope your days are going well...
There are soldiers.
Then there are American Soldiers.
Then there are Marines.
Then there are Marines who haven't had a smoke in two weeks...
Is it St. Swithin's Day already?
Note to self: Learn to spell. Or cheat.
Gimpysoft.com has finally completed its IPO. Shares are now available, a steal at $0.05/share. Anybody owning more than half my shares will be able to post to this site.
Excuse me while I go buy up the rest of my shares... And be sure to check out the cool new look over at Blogshares...
|
E-Mail: gimpgimpson -at- yahoo ICQ: 10860361 AIM: Gimpysoft |
