I’m in love. She’s Italian, stunningly sexy, and her name is Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. Actually, she needs to wax her upper lip and looks best from a rear 3/4 view… but that’s a given, being Italian and all.

Man was I beat Sunday. That’s enough 2–gig days for me this year. Sheesh. My brother Bob and his 2 girls came up for a little vacation. The girls wanted to go to the megamall. They got here about 4:00 on Sunday. Took ‘em out for supper, then it was a beautiful night to sit on the deck and yack. They’re such good girls. They took off late this morning for the mall. He called late this afternoon from the hotel (the girls wanted to stay in one so they could go swimming). Even after 6 hours of shopping, the girls were still running around, stealing soaps and stuff from the maid’s cart that was left outside their door. Yup, they’re Bob’s alright.

Last week I went through the guide to see what movies were going to be on TCM. TiVo’d The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!. We watched it tonight. I remember seeing it when I was probably in 6th grade or so on TV. I remembered it quite a few years ago and Kim & I rented it. It’s one of my favorite comedies from that period. It’s very rare to see a movie with the same quality of comedy these days. It was Alan Arkin’s movie debut, and included about every old guy with a New England accent that we’ve all seen in tons of movies and TV shows, most notably Parker Fennelly, the “Pepperidge Farm remembers” guy (also in the Don Knotts classic How to Frame a Figg, a so–so Andy Griffith movie Angel in My Pocket, and the very good Hitchcock film The Trouble with Harry).

Got a short 1–set outdoor deal at 1:00 today, then a full night back at Schuller’s Tavern. Hopefully they’ve addressed the generator issue since last year when we kept losing power. It’s also gonna be about 15° cooler this year, which is good when the stage is an asphalt parking lot with a tent over it.

Watch the best dance duo of the 20th Century.

Once or twice I’ve sent work email to My Friend Brent™, because my manager’s name is also Brent. Their last names look a bit similar when Mail autocompletes when I type “bre”. Looking over the comments in this OS X hint I see that you can type any part of a recipient’s name, including their last name. Duh. Why didn’t I think of that before? Now I can type “hag” and “ber” to get the right Brent.

If you’re gonna rob a computer store, don’t pick one that specialized in surveillence. And pull your fucking pants up, ya goddamn retard.

If you’re gonna get arrested for being drunk, first take care of your jock itch.

If you’re gonna meet an underage kid for sex, you should probably eat something first and take your daily requirement of iron so you don’t pass out.

Well dang. I haven’t seen this episode Classic Albums yet. Steely Dan’s Aja. Here’s the making of Peg, Deacon Blues, Black Cow (the beginning is pretty funny when Donald starts rapping along with it, mimmicking some dumbass rap ripoff of the song), Aja… ah hell, just look at the list of similar hits when you get there.

Smoke the big O! Smoke as you go! I sure miss seeing cigarette commercials on TV. That’s fine advertising.

I have only 1 game that’s built for Intel Mac’s, Call of Duty 2, and I’ve had that for what seems a long time. Long enough that I’ve been completely through it many times and am bored with it. I decided to load X–Plane on the Pro and see how that works. Other PPC–only games I’ve tried on it run like shit. X–Plane, however, runs just fine. The batteries in my flight stick were dead, so I put 2 new ones in it. A few flying sessions later I suddenly heard some cracks and fizzles from the stick. I quickly took the bottom cover off the knocked a battery out. Ah. It takes 3 batteries, not 2, so the 2 new batteries were essentially charging the old one, not something that works well with alkalines and leads the the “may explode or leak” that it warns about. Good thing that didn’t happen while I was asleep and got hot enough to get all flamey and shit.

Perhaps the best blog (nsfw) ever created on the interwebs. It’d be the perfect blog if not for the weirdo bondage/s&m crap.

Ran over to the AT&T store today and traded in my phone. They only had 2 phones with voice dial; RazOrs (I refuse to spell it without all the vowels) and something else. The new Razor would cost me $50 after rebate. “Oh, we have the first generation also, which is free after rebate.” Yeah, I’ll take that one. I also got them to give me the car power adapter for free. I hate the flat keypad on these things. But what the fuck. At least I finally have something with Bluetooth so I can easily sync contacts with the Mac instead of always having the phone out of date because it lives in my truck.

So my new cell phone arrived yesterday. It came with its own memory card thingy, and I don’t know if I could’ve pulled the one out of my old phone and put it in the new one, so I entered everything into the phone book by hand. This phone at least has a pref for storing new entries on the card rather than the phone, so maybe it’ll make it easier to move to a new phone next year when they require me to move to yet another new network technology.

After I got done with the phone book, I noticed that there was no way to set a person’s entry to use with voice dial. In fact, the phone doesn’t have that feature at all! The fucker on the phone told me it did, along with Bluetooth, also missing from the feature list. I called and complained about him lying to me, and about having to personally spring for a new car charger because my old one doesn’t fit the new phone they forced me to get. The girl was very nice and understanding and said she’d mark my account so I could buy a charger then they’d reimburse me on my bill. I’m also going to the nearest store and see what models have the one important fucking safety feature I want (voice dial), and hopefully they have one for the same price so I can trade in this piece of shit and not have to give them any money.

Agian, this whole cell phone industry is a scam and makes idiotic people even more annoying when they’re in public or driving and yacking away about their pathetic lives. Let’s go back to CBs, damn it.

Just for the helluvit. Ross Valory on a Steinberg. Sadly, it was recorded after Gregg Rolie left. I love Steve Smith’s china type during the 2nd guitar solo hunk.

For those times when you want to see how much UV light is reaching your skin when sunbathing, you’re gonna need this Fuji DSLR camera (I refuse to use the Fujifilm name—it’s digital) that can capture UV and IR. It’s only $5k for the forensic kit package.

Need to prevent someone from stealing your iPod or iPhone? Just hide it in a case that looks like a brown Zune. That’s too fucking funny. Nobody with a lick of taste would want a brown Zune.

A few weeks ago we came home to a message on our phone from AT&T saying one of our phones needs to be updated to PCM. I don’t keep track of all the goddamn cell phone shit, so I figured they had an accounting error and were talking about my old non–digital bag phone I was able to use until a few years ago when it just stopped finding a network to connect to. So they called me today and said the same thing. I said that my phone was only 3 years old or so. Yep, that’s the one whose network is going to be shut down. What the fuck? How stupid are cell phone companies? What, they don’t have the foresight to create network infrastructures that are scalable and upgradable? The same cable laid decades ago for cable TV now carries digital content they never dreamed of back them. Ethernet has managed to stay 100% backward compatible through 2 major speed upgrades. Even 802.11b devices can still connect to 802.11n routers.

So, they’ll be sending me a new free phone—an LG something. And all the old phones that are no longer usable; what a fucking waste. I hate cell phones and everything they stand for. But they are handy when you’re not at home.

Click this, then try to hide the article’s title from your eyes while you click the play button. Listen to the sound of that engine screaming through the forest. As it approaches, you probably have a pretty good image in your mind of a pack of Hell’s Angels, heads a–flame, riding blown Husqvarna–powered minibikes fueled with the blood of virgins. Well, what eventually comes out of the trees isn’t quite that menacing. But goddamn, what a great sound.

Neighbor Caroline asked if I could help find her picture collections. She’s been using Photoshop Elements on her PC to scan in photos, organize those and some digital photos into a slideshow. After she created the .wmv, all her collections went away. From what I could figure out, collections are stored in a catalog (.psa). So I used XP’s crappy find feature to find all .psa’s. None. The prefs say they’re stored in C:\blahblahblah, but that folder isn’t even there.

Fucking Windows.

I also noticed that when she was showing me what she’d done and where she has her actual picture files, she right–clicked the task bar to bring up Task Manager, then double–clicked the app/window she wanted to bring forward. Why’d she do it that way? Because her task bar no longer shows each app/window like it normall does. All the fucking around I knew how to do wouldn’t bring it back to normal. My guess is that there’s some registry entry we can delete to restore the task bar to its original state. That’d be easy to do if you could actually search the registry, but regedit doesn’t seem to have such a useful feature.

Fucking Windows.

Some other neighbors & I need to convince her to get a Mac.

I was cleaning my shop this weekend and went looking for a box to put some mic cables and parts in. I noticed a couple boxes that weren’t marked. They were full of old developer CDs from Apple, part of the collection of MultiAd crap that came along when we got rid of the office. There were System 7 betas, OpenDoc SDKs, QuickDraw GX betas, all sorts of old, dead technologies. I could see no use for them other than selling them on eBay, but that ain’t my cup o’ tea. So, I went through them, saving good jewelcases, tearing cardboard off Digipaks and removing inserts to recycle.

Back then, they made up cute, dorky names for each developer CD, like “Hack to the Future” or “The Byte Stuff”. Some had slightly interesting artwork. I ended up saving 2 of them for geeky art display purposes; “Night of the Living Disc” and “Spinal Trap”. Then I ran across this Japanese edition. Here’s the jewelcase insert:

Will someone please form a team to go clean up the radiation in Japan? It keeps getting more and more obvious that they’ve been going insane and/or gay ever since we dropped the bombs on them.

Ordered some CDs the other day, which arrived today. Got Queens of the Stone Age’s new one, the 2 Desert Sessions discs from sessions 7 & 8 and 9 & 10. DS is a project by Josh Homme of QotSA and a bunch of other people from various bands, including P.J. Harvey. The songs are written and recorded for musicians’ sake rather than to make money for a label. Cool shit. Also got Marilyn Manson’s new one. Haven’t heard much of it yet, but the 30–second snippets sounded good.

We went over to neighbors Geoff & Caroline’s to celebrate the 4th on their new big ass porch. No rocking chair or banjo, but it’s still a great porch.

I took today off to help Kim with a FileMaker/AppleScript project. While FM has improved a lot over the years, there are still things that make you go “what the fuck? Why do I have to do it this way when the smarter way would be much easier?” She needed to add the values of a variable number of fields, all named with numbers like “Wk 200701 Sales”, Wk 200702 Sales”, etc. There is no way from within a FM script to construct a variable whose value is one of those names, then use that variable to access the field. So, since all fields referenced by name from AppleScript are strings, we had to go that route. Sorta like a back door.

We watched Reno 911!: Miami tonight. We love the show, and the movie had some pretty funny stuff, plus non–bleeped cussing and breasts (woohoo!), including a long scene on a topless beach, which featured Irina Voronina (nsfw) helping them try to get a whale off the beach. She’s not ugly when she’s naked. I like this one. The extended scenes are comedy gold. Watch them again with comentary.

Ack, my blog wrapped to July. In case you missed it, or CD is done. Hit the Previous Month link below because I’m lazy and don’t want to copy & paste.

Our guitarist John’s wife takes her horses to shows once or twice a month in the surrounding states. When she’s gone, he likes to go out and see a band. Kim & I met him last night at Decoy’s in Hopkins to see a band called Loose Cannon. They were incredibly tight. I didn’t care for a lot of the songs they covered, but they are all good musicians, and the vocalist is really good (and a nice rack). She reminded me of Ellen Foley, the girl in the Meatloaf video for Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. But, the band also opens some pretty large cans of corn, especially the lead guitarist (we agreed he is actually Lt. Dangle from Reno 911). He did lots of hair band guitar poses, guitar–in–the–crotch, and at one point donned a Slash wig, hat, and unlit cigarette. They also have 2 ministages (like a small bench) that they stand on during solos and such.