Yesterday I picked up a friend from the airport. He had gone down to Acapulco for a working vacation, and had a life-changing and eye-opening experience down there. The way he phrased it made me worry that he had joined some cult, but luckily, it wasn’t like that; just another 23 year old reassessing his situation in life, the universe, and everything.

While I was down there, I stopped by and picked up a 100ft. roll of 12-gauge speaker wire and some tools at Fry’s. Today I mostly strung up by system; I’ll probably need to get some more wire (It’s a 14′ x 21′ room, but I 3 doorframes that I need to overcome.

Last bit of navel gazing: the nice thing about not having to pay utilities is being able to use your (admittedly small) gas oven as a toaster. Also, you know you’re lazy when you use the squeeze cheese because you can’t be motivated to cut up the monterey jack block in the new fridge.

Yes, boys and girls, there are some posts that make reading miles of drivel all worthwhile:

From: Cash Bailey

Subject: I almost had a heart attack when Wahlberg started singing that song from TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE in BOOGIE NIGHTS.

Comment:

Goddamn. The three things that defined my early childhood were Indiana Jones, ROBOTECH and TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE. I sobbed like a little bitch when Optimus Prime was killed. I try to imagine the young kids now feeling the same way about Pokemon, but I just can't because Pokemon is nonsensicle bullshit. We were lucky as kids, we had great stuff like ROBOTECH, ASTRO BOY and HE-MAN but these poor tykes now are stuck with Pikachu and those crack-smoking TELETUBBIES.

Coming across gems like these reaffirms my faith in the Internet as a medium.

Aaron, at youngpup.net has an interesting little thought on old-school, new-school, as it relates to rollerblading and the “DHTML community.” I mentioned it to a friend, and he sort of related to the rollerblading thing as similar to what happened in the professional Quake playing community. One thing that I pointed out that nomenclature when using “community” is sort of a misnomer; that is, in these cases, we’re talking about not so much community dynamics, but the development of a new craft/skill. Now, on thinking about it, here’s where I think that client-side web development differs. While the actuall technology and specifics are new, the screen medium itself and the design and programming skillset in which DHTML design/development is rooted in is not. Which is not to say that there isn’t a whole realm of exploration out there, or that the comparison isn’t valid (rather, it seems very apt and insightful). I definitely see it as a good trend that more and more web creators are starting to get tired of workarounds for non-standard / non-spec implementations. Hopefully, the young turks don’t forget everything though… like named anchors.

All in all, street parking sucks. However, it has given me an ample time to vastly improve my previously mediocre parallel parking skills. Honestly, I can now reliably fit the car I’m driving into ridiculously small spaces. Now, I don’t know about this “car length + 2ft” business, I do just fine with 4-5 inches. Since I just parked yet again in a spot that my car had no earthly right to be, I just thought I would share. Street parking still sucks though, and I’m putting off making my new car purchase until I get a spot in my building.

Last night, I received my package from Post-Parlo Records (since it was so cheap, I went ahead and bought Everything). The original impetus was that I was going through my MP3’s and came across some from Subset, a band that one of my former co-worker’s is in.

Since I’ll be resuming my archiving of my CD’s soon for my MP3 Jukebox for my home system (this USB->Coax converter is the only component I have left to get), I figured that I should probably get started seeing what’s out there nowadays. Two formats that I haven’t looke at quite yet, but may should are: Ogg Vorbis (waiting for v1.0), and Monkey’s Audio (Windows only? Grrr).

In any case, I grabbed and reset up the latest version of EAC (v0.9p11 still), checked out Dibrom’s latest recommended compile of LAME (v3.90.2-ICL) and fired away.

Listening through my 4 year old pcworks speakers, you really can’t tell the difference between any of them. With a quick run through my Grado SR-60s that I have at home right now, both r3mix and alt-preset standard sound really good. My Sennheiser’s are at work, but I’ll probably hold off on comprehensive testing with PCABX and multiple tracks etc. until I get my sound system set up. Feel free to give these tracks a spind and send me an email w/ your thoughts.