WTF? Seriously, what the fuck? Was this video actually created and OKd by Microsoft? Note how the loser that programmed the crappy Mission: Impossible rip–off couldn’t figure out how to switch it to 5/4. I take that back. It wasn’t programmed, made obvious when you hear to the drum parts that float somewhere near the beat. That’s even more pathetic.

And jesus tap dancing christ, who was the idiot that invented those big floppy bow ties for women’s business suits? Please track them down and pistol whip them for me.

Well that was a hoot. Things started really coming back somewhere in the 2nd set, although I needed to hold back and not make things too out there so I didn’t throw off the rest of the band. Nick, Brent, & Denny could easily keep things straight when I’d do weird things like offset the beat by a 16th for a measure, but this band doesn’t have that experience yet. But damn was it hot. The bar didn’t have the air on until we started at 8, but it was too late for it to catch up. And we only had 4 lights. One of the halogens was on me. Shit. Luckily, the beam is so narrow on those that I could lean back against the wall to get about10° of relief. My fingers held out pretty well, although my left thumb and index finger were getting a bit sore by the end of the last set. No blisters though. The rest of me is sore and tired.

I caught part of a Dream Theater concert on Classic in Concert. I never got why a lot of progressive bands like this do so many ballad–type songs. It just doesn’t work. How can you follow a 9–minute song that explores half a dozen time signatures and a ton of weird key combinations with a touchy–feely song about girly crap? C’mon, make with the fast 5/4 and 15/16 stuff!

Got a nice little case done to hold the snare and brain. Thick carpet lines the brain compartment. After I finished I realized I forgot about the throne. That damned thing is so hard to store because the backrest doesn’t easily detach from the seat. If left together, it needs a huge case so it doesn’t get ripped up. Maybe I’ll mark each position with tape and take it apart every time. Pain in the ass, but hey, it’s more comfortable than my old “cafe style stool”, and that thing wasn’t adjustable.

Fixed a bitch of a bug today. One customer was complaining loudly about it, and it was what I’d call a slightly irritating cosmetic bug that didn’t affect PostScript printing (which is what all presses and such are). I found it in the 3rd party graphic lib that is no longer supported, so we can change it willy nilly if we need to. That’s a good thing, but annoying when it happens because it’s so poorly documented and uses an ugly coding style.

Goddamned woodpecker has been enjoying our siding lately. I hear him a few times during the day and go out to throw rocks at it. This morning the little fucker was at it at 6:30. He does his pecking up on the 2nd story, about 10’ from the head of our bed. Pounding on the wall doesn’t seem to help. The bitch. I might have to get out the big plastic owl we bought at the old house and hang it under the soffit up there and hope it helps. Or maybe pour some Tabasco on the siding.

Had band practice tonight. The 2 newest tunes are coming together; I Hate Myself for Loving You (Joan Jett) and Simple Man (Skynyrd). Yeah, weird combination ain’t it? We’ll probably have one more practice before my first gig in somewhere around 11 years. Lookin’ forward to it. Got started on building another case. I’ll finish that tomorrow and make another. I can’t believe my original cymbal case is still in one piece. All the pieces are only joined with a few thin metal L brackets, and most if not all of them are nailed on with short roofing nails. Norm would be so proud. When did I built that? Before ‘82?

“Jubal. Jubal Jubal Jubal. Juuuubal.” Yup, I’m watching Anj & Barn.

Reading through the latest Macworld, I saw a short feature review of the latest release of Adobe Creative Suite. I was a bit pissed off when I saw that they added a feature to InDesign that I dreamed up a year or two ago and added to the suggestion list for our next major release. It’s a find command for finding elements, letting the user choose any element property such as fill color, frame weight, etc. My idea was also to extend our existing Find dialog that currently works for text by adding a tab control; one for text, one for elements. Sure enough, they did it in exactly the same way. (Click Advanced Find/Change.)

This is a clear sign that Adobe has hired psychics. Some of them are on the “read the thoughts of other developers” team, and the others are on the “hypnotize management and make them think the new icons are attractive and useful” team.

Today Kim drove my truck to work so I could take her FX to get the Diamond Fusion windshield treatment applied, cuz the Infiniti place is closer to our house than to her office. I made a point to tell her to not run over the garbage can and recycle bins at the end of the driveway behind the truck. She missed that stuff, but managed to clip the basketball pole with the front corner of my truck. Goddamn it all to hell. No sheet metal damage, mostly looks like it can be buffed out, except of a couple gouges on the bumper skin. Women.

The window shit is pretty cool. There used to be a youtube demo video, but I can’t find it now.

Got a couple sheets of 13/32” plywood today and built a new hardware case, same dimensions as the old rocket box, but a shitload lighter. I wanted to make sure the joints would be strong enough to hold the weight of all the hardware. I suck at guessing weight, but I’d say like 60–90lbs? Since it can be hard to find aluminum angle iron in the right side and even hard to find decent corner caps, I went with glue blocks instead. 2x2s sliced at 45°, glued, airbradded, then screwed. I knew that trying to slice a 2x2 at 45° can be dangerous, and I saw a nice illustration of that fact. I figured that cutting half the way through would be less dangerous than trying to slice all the way through and still have something to push on without forcing it into the blade when it comes out the end. A 10” long piece was just about through the 2nd pass when it decided to catch on the blade. All I heard was a very loud bang from behind me. It punched a nice hold through the first layer of the hollow core door and dented out the second layer befoe bouncing back. Luckily, I was standing to the side of the blade path. The end of my Rockler aluminum push stick got a nice gouge when it hit the blade and bent it up some. The first thing I did was check for all my fingers, since the pain is sometimes delayed after sudden injuries. All good, just a small injury from the flying wood about 3/8” long through a couple layers of skin.

The VP of our division does woodworking, and lost the end of his index finger last year when his tablesaw got violent. His middle finger also had a slice to (or maybe through) the bone, but it looks almost perfect. He’s now looking into buying a SawStop. Good idea. They look like they are incredibly well–made.

Finally watched Borat last night. Although we enjoyed it a lot, it’s another case off too much pre–view hype. Some parts are definitely hilarious, but it wasn’t the rolling–on–the–floor movie it’s been made out to be. My god, that poor food store manager is the most patient man in the world. “Cheese. Cheese. That’s cheese. Cheese. Cheese. Cheese. etc…” That was one of those bits that goes on so long that it keeps getting funny again just when it starts to get boring and repetitive.

I’m tired. Why? Jeff “Peanuts” Anderson called me at 7:45 in the morning… a Saturday morning. He called to let me know they were getting together at the Roost (hometown bar) to plan our 25th class reunion. What, he thinks I’ll drive 6 hours to do that? Jeff has always been not so smart, but what the hell kind of world does he live in where it’s OK to call people you barely know that early in the morning? That’s just wrong, even on a weekday.

During the time that I was able to sleep before that, I dreamed up an entire episode of Scrubs. It was weird. It had a plot, surreal comedy sequences, even the signature moments of “black talk” between JD and Turk. We like the show enough, but only see maybe 1 or 2 episodes a week (TiVo’d syndication), so I’m not sure why my brain decided to become a Jewish writer.

But possibly the strangest thing of all is the movie that’s on UHD right now, Ride the Wild Surf. Typical ‘60s surf movie with Shelley Fabares, Fabian, Tab Hunter, even Barbara Eden (meow!). The strange part came when I saw 23 year old James Mitchum playing a surfer.

I tell ya, they’s musta be a–puttin’ somethin’ in the water t’ make us all crazy like. We’s a–gotta get back to serious bizniz, like exterminatin’ whitey.

After Joe Jackson was a Police concert at a small UK college. It was the end of their European tour after Outlandos d’Amour, right before they were to head to the US for the first time. In fact, they’d already written Message in a Bottle and played it publicly for the first time here. Sting played a fretless Precision or Jazz (I can never remember which is which) the whole show, Andy was on the same Tele all night (“What’s ‘e doing on the tele?”), and Stew had only 2 crashes, 2 mounted toms, and no splashes or Octobans.

I assembled the mantle Wednesday afternoon while waiting for email. Final pictures are over there. ⇐ ☜ (Just testing if I can use the Unicode entity for that glyph. It might only show up on Mac's.)

I just ran across an old Joe Jackson concert on VH1C’s BBC Crown Jewels. Looks like it’s the Night & Day tour. The guy always had great musicians in his band, like the bass player (Graham Maby on the album) and Sue Hadjopoulas on percussion, bells, and keyboards. Joe’s a great performer too. Kinda spastic, like the Joe Cocker of the ‘80s.

One of the bugs I fixed today makes me glad that I don’t get paid per keystroke, cuz it took just one; change > to >=. But then there are the other days when I’m designing new features and it’s pretty much non–stop typing. Now that 8.0 has shipped, new feature time is right around the corner. I live for that shit. I already added png export earlier this week. I started it more as a proof of concept type thing, just wondering what the API was like. Piece of pie, although it took a while to figure out how the archaic setjmp crap works. It uses that to handle errors because it’s written for multiple platforms and it’s plain C instead of something modern and good like C++. Ended up using setmp in my png callbacks, set a semaphore, then threw an exception back in the C++ code. Fuckin’ gross.

I didn’t get the mantle put together because I had to add some glue blocks in a couple spots to make it easier to attach parts. I sure hope wood glue holds up like it’s supposed to (I use Titebond II), because this thing has very few fasteners throughout.

Cripes! Check out some of the incredibly wild stuff at the Viva Las Vegas 10 rod show. Lots of ingenuity and creativity. Plus, the Purple People Eater is there. You’ll know it when you see it. Bitchin’!

I’m on the home stretch with the mantle. Got the first coat of poly on yesterday and the second today. I took some time and uploaded more pictures. Click the link over there on the left. Maybe I’ll get it all put together tomorrow evening. Woohoo!

Here’s my set for this go ‘round. Yikes, I need to dust the Wuhan! I took a couple minutes and replaced all the rivets that had fallen out decades ago.

Performance–wise, I’m still not up to 100% of where I was in the Dial Tones. It’s like I need to rebuild the links between the “hey, do that pa–da–da–whack thing up here and a ruff on the kicks ending with snare and splash on 4” part of the brain and the part that tells the limbs to actually do it. I also still wasn’t totally comfortable with the new pedals, so I made some tiny tweaks yesterday and even raised the throne about half an inch. It’s weird how big a different small changes can make.

Well, that was a long drive. Left the house at 12:30 and made it to the hotel in Peoria by 7:45. Google maps gave me wrong directions at Waterloo/Cedar Falls, telling me to take an exit that turned out to be a 4–lane city street through the city (check it out, do Get Directions for Minneapolis to Peoria and look at step 7 through9). Had to wait for a train, so I checked a real map and 218 just goes around it like I thought, so I got back on that. Stopped in Coralville to eat a sandwich I packed in the cooler. I headed down to the little riverfront park right off I–80, behind Perkins and all that. That area sure has changed, what with the purdy brick street leading down to the huge fuckin’ Marriot. Happily, the park is still there behind the hotel. I pulled into the first camper spot and ate. Nobody else there, except for a tent that looked abandoned, the wind had blown it mostly on its side. As I ate, I noticed that the wind was blowing the tent bottom up and wrapping around what looked like a body. It never moved. So either some nut is really camping there and they have no vehicle or other stuff at their campsite, or it’s a homeless person (I thought they had it made downtown where it’s warm), or it’s a dead body in there.

Illinois sucks. Interstate speed limit is 65; 55 for trucks/campers/barges/etc. I kept it down to about 76, 77 (whatever it takes) because it was getting dark enough that it was hard to spot obvious cops.