Gecko Bloggle

I’m not deep - I was just looking for a bug, I swear.

So it’s a Saturday night, during fireworks in the West End, and I’m in a deep chair with big ol’ armrests, and I reach over for my glass of scotch (thanks, Claudia!), and I end up sitting there for about three minutes, turning the glass round and round, watching the liquid seep down the sides of the slightly squared glass, like something out of Blade Runner.

Until I notice it’s like something out Blade Runner, and remember that I started turning the glass because I’m pretty sure I saw one of those little flies go in there, and didn’t feel like ingesting another no-see’em today (I swallowed one during the bike ride home about a week ago, and so I’m good for a bit, mmkay?)

Where was I? Oh yeah, bending my head a little tonight, that’s right, I forgot.

I need to relax about my kids. They’re kids, and they’re being kid-like. Doesn’t matter how refined and and high-strung the West End is, my kids are being KIDS. They’re six (going on fourteen) and two (going on three), and I just need to chill out and let them be kids. Yes, they make noise, and get stuff on their faces, and drop things, and knock stuff over, and are just generally little human beings trying to figure out how to have fun and do things they wanna do. Who am I to mess with that when they’re not hurting anyone?

So yeah, more going to the park, and less “shushing” on my part. Really nothing to be gained, there, if the truth be told.

So what brought this up? A new (to me) album by some guy named Tom Baxter, by way of Radio Paradise. Tom Baxter sounds (almost too much) like the lead singer of Elbow, with a healthy dose of Damien Rice in there, too. I hit AllMusic.com, and looked up Mr. Baxter (and queued up some Damien Rice and was reminded how much I heart Lisa Hannigan’s deliciously overwrought vocals - she manages to come dangerously close to the shark-jumping ranges of Tori Amos, but missing it somehow), AND THEN read the blurb about him (Tom Baxter, remember him?) and his latest album, Skybound

There was a popular term slung around in British music-critic circles a few years back, “dad rock.” That is, anything that middle-aged men could point to in an attempt to prove that they were still as hip and with it as they had been when they were teens, and which they mostly liked because it was so baldly derivative of what they liked when they were teens. Wilco, for example, is probably the ultimate dad-rock act, with Coldplay not far behind.

and I thought “This? This is dad-rock?” but after reading a little further along, there’s a slightly snooty reference to Tom Baxter’s stuff being “mom-rock” in counterbalance to bands like Coldplay. Seriously, the review reads sorta like one of those “It works, don’t act like you invented it” kinda comments. There’s just a hint of “How come this guy’s album is selling, and I’m stuck writing reviews on AllMusic.com?”

Yeah, so I’m sitting around listening to a largely acoustic album, and not listening to the idiots who went to the fireworks six hours early, and are now bombed, and staggering home with their sunburns and aggression, and thinking I… uh… like this album. Not quite in the same jaw-dropping way I responded to Damien Rice’s stuff, or the way I was floored by the wall of clangy angst I felt with Elbow’s first album, but hey, nice stuff. This album makes me wanna sit here and write, instead of getting out on the porch, and yelling “Yeah, yeah, flashy light go boom, now GO HOME!” at the drunks and tourists who are flabbergasted that anyone actually LIVES down here, where there might be, y’know, THE GAYS.

(Didja know you can italicize a period? Well you can.)

So go pick up a copy, and grab a few for your moms and dads out there, and let them decide whether it’s sexist or misogynist or somehow stereotypical to enjoy it.

Or maybe I’m just buzzed from the scotch (or is it “Scotch?”)

Pretty sure I didn’t eat a bug though, so, win-win, really.

(Thanks to Cheeseblog, who first told me about Radio Paradise, WAY back when Napster was a thing, not an example.)

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Posted on August 2nd 2008 in General, Grumpy Old Man, Music

Oh, are you still here?

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This was going to start as a little piece talking about how much more time I spend at Facebook, but I don’t spend much time AT Facebook, I’ve been spending time chatting with friends VIA Facebook. See, there’s this chat system, and it’s meant to allow users who are on FB to chat with others on FB, “live.” It’s their way of keeping you at the site, and hopefully looking at the odd advertisment for whatever it is (I seem to have a well-developed set of side-banner blinders, to the point that I’ve been at “dark underbelly of the web” sites looking for information about a server exploit or something, and had my then-very-young son point at a picture on the sidebar and ask “Where’d that lady’s clothes go?”)

So yeah, so I don’t see the ads, sorry Facebook, sorry Google. I don’t see ‘em.

Even worse though, is that I no-longer even VISIT Facebook any more, since my Blackberry has a Facebook app that handles messages, pokes, photos (including uploading, how “this just in” of me), status updates, and wall posts. See? Almost everything you need to do on FB is on my BB. But no chat. If I wanted to chat with my FB friends, I had to visit the site.

A few weeks ago, Digsby changed all that. Digsby handles email notifications, instant messaging, AND Social notifications (including Facebook, including the chat feature). Don’t need to go there any more.

OH, and it does this weird little chat widget thingie. I think it’s over on the right there somewhere, right?

Yeah, pretty hip.

So, I’m going to try to write a little more about all the nerdy stuff that’s going on. I’m learning things again, and that’s good. I wasn’t learning much at EA any more. There were things I didn’t know (believe me), but I wasn’t learning any more, ’cause I was too busy writing up documentation for people who wouldn’t read it, so when they freaked out that the latest version of something was (omigod) DIFFERENT, we could try to defend ourselves by showing glossy versions of what was freely and widely available in the way of documentation online. Sad.

Whew, was that a bitter moment?

Yeah, so if you hit my Delicious list, you’ll see what sorts of things I’ve been linking/saving, including Timbap, which is this crazy “plug a turntable into your computer and then put a timecoded record on the platter, and BOOM, you’ve got the ability to play MP3s…” thing, and I was like “I can spin MP3s on my computer and my turntable for $12 instead of $250?” until I realized that it was just a way to SELECT MP3s and then hit play. Not a way to control how fast they play (at least, I don’t think so).

What else? Oh yeah, I went to NewType Computer Workshop and playing with an ASUS EEEPC, which was a sorta-failed attempt at making a laptop for kids. They crazy cheap (most models under $400), very small, reasonably fast, and look sorta like the big brother to a Nintendo DS (not the Lite, but the big plastic & MarioKart style). I tried it out for a minute or two, and thought this is really cool, if I was about 30% smaller, all over. It’s a neat machine, but I am too big for it. My fingers wouldn’t really ever get “fast” on one of these things, and I didn’t see a mouse for it, so control of the mouse would be non-existant. All in all, a cute device, but not something an old Road Worrier like me would use to keep in touch with the office. I have a Blackberry for that, I guess, and I can type pretty quickly on that, so I’m good.

I’ll have to check out Dell’s new “E” series laptops when they hit the shelves.

What kinda nerdery are YOU folks up to?

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Posted on July 30th 2008 in Hardware, Hey Cool, Music, Places, Software

I broke the test!

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Posted on July 30th 2008 in General

I think I’m going to like working here…

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I got this apron from work.
…yeah… I know it’s a game company
…I don’t know what aprons have to do with video games either. Maybe we’re making an online cooking game, who knows? Nobody ever tells me anything. I mean, it’s kind of random, but it could be worse. They could have given us… like…. socks or something. What? You know, socks! With like, the company logo on them? Stop looking at me like that, it’s not THAT weird. At least socks are practical… This one time, at E.A? they gave us these metal chunks that kind of looked like the company logo… nobody had any clue what it was. I would have loved to have been at the meeting where that got approved… “Okay, we’re partnered with a junkyard to provide us with chunks of old Buicks that sort of resemble our logo… we can hand them out as presents to the employees!” …So weird. What was I talking about? Oh yeah…
How do you like your burger?

Thanks to Ripley for the modeling assist.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking they don’t do “real” clothes, I can attest to the fact that at some point recently they made some of the nicest hoodies I’ve ever seen. Like, better than my GapHoodie.

Okay, need to get the kids outside before all three of us lose it.

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