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[pwhodges]

 

Whatever it was, it gave me cancer.  Operation, then radiotherapy, hence the dots of course.

[nekowafer]

Lasers!

[pwhodges]

Heh!  Actually, if I was inclined to look for a reason other than chance (which I'm not), I would point to the fact that I spent ten years working around radio-isotopes in hospitals (I wrote programs for gamma camera imaging).

In other news, now that I have passed my 65th birthday, I am no longer simply planning  not to retire, I am in a state of being not retired.

In yet other news, today I fixed a major server problem that has prevented me setting up a cluster for the last two months - now I can move forward again with upgrading the whole server installation at work.

[Patrick]

The people at the bar where I used to run open mic are dicks. The people who run the open mic there now are also dicks. They combined forces and managed to push my bestie Lukas and I 3 hours down the list so that we wouldn't be able to play until almost the very end; Lukas wound up leaving in disgust and anger, so I stayed and played solo instead. Fuck 'em though. I broke the 'swearing' rule with at least 3 F-bombs, I went over my song limit, and I stole a bottle of wine. The wine was made by the owner at his winery and he valued the bottle at $75. I guarantee his wine isn't good enough for that price tag, but I also guarantee that when Lukas and I drink it, it will have the sweetness of a year's worth of payback for the lies.

[Barmymoo]

Hey people who live in America, I am coming back! July 11th - 24th 2012 the college choir I just joined is doing a tour of Eastern USA, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington DC). Even if Christian choral music isn't your thing it would be great to meet up with people and I'm pretty sure we'll have free time to wander and explore. I'll know more nearer the time but I'm so excited, I've always wanted to go to New York!

[Zingoleb]

Oh, I'm going to personify the DMV and then either punch them in the dick and/or kick them in the cunt, depending on how they're personified. They keep fucking around with my new ID, and after going through more paperwork, they say I'm not going to get it until the 23rd of August. My flight leaves on the 24th.

[valley_parade]

Boston

May, remind me closer to next summer, I'll get a few days off and come down for some hangouts!

[Liz]

Well, we were talking on facebook about doing the next meetup in D.C....

[valley_parade]

An ex was telling me about a bar she went to in DC that has skeeball machines.

Fricking skeeball!

[Lines]

Would go to that bar.

[Blue Kitty]

I'm not sure if drunken skeeball is the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever.


I fear for everyone else there

[nekowafer]

I could definitely come to D.C. for a meetup. That would be pretty awesome. I also love skeeball.

[valley_parade]

I mean I could likely do DC, but I also promised Patrick that if his band hits New England next summer I'd hang for a week and help out with shit.

So there's that, too.

[Jace]

Shane if I learn drums wanna start a band? You're closer than These Estates

[valley_parade]

Jace do you like Weezer at all? My friend Tim and I have been playing some old Weezer covers (and Interpol and shit) sans-drums lately.

[Metope]

May! I'm gonna try to get an internship in NYC next summer! Let's hang out in New York! Don't care about DC, sorry folks but all the cool internships are in the big apple.

[valley_parade]

Too big and ugly of a city for me. 

[Metope]

I love it! Also, it has all the cool museums I'm gonna apply for internship with, even though I seriously doubt I'll even get close to ever getting through. But then again, I said the same thing when applying to the Glasgow School of Art and look where I am now!

[JD]

I just got back from a week camping in Alberta. The Rocky Mountains say hello.

[Zingoleb]

Blehhh.

All my Vermontian plans have fallen through; my girlfriend's parents have decided to break us up, by first keeping her from getting an apartment, where I was going to stay, promising me a place to stay instead, and then revoking that at the last minute. There's been that, and a bunch of other bullshit, so...after selling off my instruments/vinyl records/books and everything, I was left without a place to go. So, my friend suggested I move with him out to Washington state, and my girlfriend bought me a ticket. I'm leaving Ithaca, NY on the 24th, in two weeks and a day, and landing in Seattle that same day. I have a friend who's picking me up and  taking me to Olympia, and I have a few places to stay, and about $500 in savings. I've no real plans beyond that except "survive", because every time I make plans they always get boiled down to nothing but "oh fuck how do I survive now" anyways, so I may as well just start from there.

So. West Coast. Yeah.

[Jace]

Jace do you like Weezer at all? My friend Tim and I have been playing some old Weezer covers (and Interpol and shit) sans-drums lately.

I'm pretty sure that I'm actually one of the guys from Weezer already.

[Tom]

Today was the worst, I had to get vaginal smears from a lab-rat with a couple of q-tips. Oh and I grew a beard for a month but I shaved it off today because I just got to the point where I was too self conscious about it and for no other raisin other than I started to feel super gross and all the ginger was creeping me out (my hair is dark brown). Also my skin is really soft and mostly unblemished milky white so fuck my fat face.

[valley_parade]

No wait Zingo, did you get rid of the Dirnt bass? 

Jace, you may or may not actually be Mikey Welch. It's a possibility.

[Zingoleb]

No, I still have it. I'm probably going to have it shipped to me when I can afford to do so. But I got rid of my other guitars, my keyboard, my violin, and my dulcimer.

Also I ended up staying up all night watching Buffy re-runs and texted my friend at 5 am "can we have our own Willow please?" to which she replied "you are our willow hon".

[Tom]

I was just woken up the sound of tiny bones cracking coming from under my bed. There is Fallout level gore.

[Patrick]

I mean I could likely do DC, but I also promised Patrick that if his band hits New England next summer I'd hang for a week and help out with shit.

So there's that, too.

I mean this is very much up in the air though considering the fact that we have no idea what we're doing

[McTaggart]

My sister bought a new Toshiba laptop. Once it finally finished installing all the crappy bloatware that you don't get a chance to opt out of we tried to use internet explorer to get Firefox. Internet explorer would not leave the msn homepage -- it kept tripping over a tracking pixel on the msn site and freaking out and not doing anything. On her brand new laptop the internet straight up did not work! What the hell, Toshiba?

Anyway I downloaded Firefox on my computer and we installed it from there and all was well, but it's lucky we had another computer and some degree of wizardry else it'd be completely useless.

[Blue Kitty]

I half heartedly suggested to my girlfriend that we try cosplay at one of the conventions we go to this year or the next, mostly to gauge her reaction, and she said she would try. I've always wanted to try and do something like it, as most of my pictures from the conventions are the various people that are brave enough to do it, so I'm kind of happy that she is thinking about it.

I suggested to her Roxanne Richter from Scott Pilgrim while I'll try Professor Pyg from Batman

[valley_parade]

Jesus christ, $90 a pop for Bruins preseason tickets.

I wanted to see Drag The River next month, but that's out of the question now.

[Zingoleb]

So, I'm living in a house without running water. My father's place. Instead, he runs a hose from his neighbour's house to his (with their permission). I desire a bath, yes? So, what I have to do is fill a pot with water, put it on the hot plate, and then pour the water into the bathtub. Well, I rigged up a makeshift system to keep the water running into the pot without my having to hold the hose down. Lessons learned tonight:
 
A) I am not an engineer.

2) A garden hose, at full blast, whipping around the kitchen, can do an incredible amount of damage to everyone and everything in the way.

[Lupercal]

Please write a book, because your life of hoses and trucker hats and green dresses and tractors sounds pretty interesting.

[Patrick]

I wholeheartedly support the idea of you writing a book, Leslie! I'd read it, for sure, and I would happily help promote it in any way I can. You've got a neat way of conveying

Dear blag,

There has been so much going on lately that I've just been too busy to write about! I'm gonna try and catch you all up.

Last Thursday, Squawk-Anna and I met up in Berkeley and had a little acoustic jam up on the UC campus! It was a whole lot of fun, we gelled well while playing together, and as soon as the opportunity presents itself again, I am definitely going to jump on it. Also, Anna's rad as hell. Just saying.

Over the last two weeks, my friend Lindsay and I have been meeting with the manager of a coffee shop here in town and hammered out plans and details in preparation for an open mic that we wanted to try starting up there. A lot of stuff was super easy to work out, and last-minute stuff was kept to a bare minimum. We even got good parking before setup! The open mic began ten minutes behind schedule last night, but we got an unexpected HUGE turnout. It was a standing-room-only audience on opening night, and we had a good turnout of musicians, poets, and comics too! Many of the people who signed up were totally impromptu, but we saw a lot of really awesome talent, and aside from the late start and a single 20-minute dry spell of performers, everything went really smoothly! It was an unprecedented success, and I was absolutely tickled with it!

Over the course of planning and preparation for it all, it was brought to Lindsay's and my attention that our work running our first open mic (at the place that screwed us) had gotten a lot of attention from people all around the Bay Area (as far away as places like Santa Rosa), but by time many of them went, we had already quit. And with the guy who started running it after us, people complained that they were getting fucked over, and many said they wouldn't return. The last part was a huge disappointment (dammit, all our hard work shot to hell by those assholes), but learning about just how far our reputation had spread made us both really proud!

Tonight, I am going to be doing another 'first' by running the open mic at my favorite bar, this time by myself. It's a fantastic little divey-type place, and I've been coming to their Wednesday night jams pretty religiously since the very day they started (around April or so). Since I'm fairly proficient in a bunch of styles on a bunch of instruments, I've made a reputation for myself at that place as being a standby player for any situation, which makes it easier to get a jam going quickly. Combined with the fact that I'm much nicer to everybody than the guy who started this jam night (same guy who took over Lindsay's and my old open mic), I was approached by the owners about taking it over. I'll be making a solid 20% of whatever the bar makes. I have got this shit on LOCK right now, I think, and I'm going to put a lot of energy into making this open mic worthy of repute.

It feels like karma for the bullshit I took at my first open mic has come back to me with interest, and right this minute, I feel as happy as I've ever felt since leaving Albania two years ago. Hoooooly fuck I feel great!

[glyphic]

Ok. Haven't posted here in forever. Haven't really told anyone about this, either.

I got a job with a company in Palo Alto, CA. I'm moving in just over two weeks. I'm so incredibly excited and nervous at the same time. Goodbye St. Louis! I won't miss finding blood trails leading to/from my backyard! Hello, Silicon Valley, where I will be sourcing/recruiting the best programmers in the world.

[Patrick]

DUDE WE SHOULD HANG OUT except I have literally no way of getting to Palo Alto since they don't have BART

[Tom]

We finally got a new washing machine!

[Elizzybeth]

At first I was like, "Wait, how will that help Patrick get to Palo Alto?" Then I realized it was an unrelated statement. 

Washing machines are good!  If you've been living without one for a while, you probably understand what Hans Rosling means when he partially credits them with the advancement of women in the western world.

[Zingoleb]

Yeah, I've been doing my laundry in the kitchen sink for a year or so. I just upgraded to a bathtub!

[glyphic]

Patrick,

Hangouts would be rad, but I'm going to be a penny-pinched, overworked son of a gun for a few months. Maybe we can form a family band and set fire to San Fran in the future!

[pwhodges]

I just finished the last migration of eight servers at work from physical boxes, old Virtual Server virtual machines and VMware virtual machines, all into shiny new Hyper-V virtual machines.  The Microsoft utilities for each of those conversions worked remarkably smoothly - impressively, in fact.

The new virtual servers are running on a cluster with a big RAID-6 box of disks.  Moving a running virtual machine from one physical host to another without it pausing is really cool.  VMware can do that too, but using VMware instead of Hyper-V would have doubled the total cost of the system (the VMware management software was quoted to me under a special university deal at slightly more than the hardware cost).

As these conversions required the machines to be unavailable and so had to be done out of hours, I've had over a week of working evenings - remotely, from home - until midnight (as well as normal day); so I'll be taking it easier for a while.  There are a couple more new (virtual) machines to build, but they can be done normally, during the day.  Moving the whole department off the present Exchange 2003 server onto a new Exchange 2010 server will be the biggest job, but probably not as tricky as what I've just been doing.

[schimmy]

Dear internets. What the fuck do you do when you lose everyone who means anything to you? I'm talking "Isn't worth being a friend" and "Is in another country for a year." What the fuck do you do?

[Scandanavian War Machine]

personally, i play more video games

i don't necessarily recommend it

[Patrick]

Patrick,

Hangouts would be rad, but I'm going to be a penny-pinched, overworked son of a gun for a few months. Maybe we can form a family band and set fire to San Fran in the future!

As long as you don't mean the latter part literally, you've got a deal.

Dear blag,

I surpassed expectations for my first night running the open mic at my favorite bar, and made more money than I thought I would for such an event. On my first night, I literally doubled the hourly wage that I earned working for Target. If that keeps up, I will be making the same money for half the total work hours. And I work one night a week at this place *and* I have another night at another place that earns me income. I'll take it.

[Zingoleb]

The septic tank banked up while I was asleep, flooding the house with raw sewage. This is now officially the shittiest place I've ever lived - thank god I'm leaving in less than five days.

[valley_parade]

I am hopefully going to play cricket with some friends this weekend!

[Patrick]

And it's something impressive enough to put on your CV too. You can only grow in experience from that kind of work.

Oh yeah. I'm definitely already manipulating the text of my resume to include this.

I'm actually looking into finally moving to Berkeley f0 r33lz now. I spoke with my bandmate earlier, and he's going to talk to his roomie on the subject of subletting to me. We already know that their landlord isn't going to have any objections. It'll complicate the arrangement with getting to the places I'll need to get to for the open mics, but it'll be worth the commute if I can keep attendance (and therefore drink-buying) up at the Wednesday night one.

I feel like the Wednesday night thing has me relying on myself to get what I want, though, and that's something that money can't buy. Especially after the last year where I basically haven't been able to provide much at all for myself.

[Tom]

I'm doing my Pharmacology assignment, it's worth 5% and I've already done 3/4 of it. It's really alright, no problems but I have the suffocating suspicion I'm doing it very wrong but I've been following the marking criteria to a T. I gotta quit being so neurotic.

[HiFranc]

I'm doing my Pharmacology assignment, it's worth 5% and I've already done 3/4 of it. It's really alright, no problems but I have the suffocating suspicion I'm doing it very wrong but I've been following the marking criteria to a T. I gotta quit being so neurotic.

You can only do your best and see what happens.

[Jimor]

Patrick, that is really cool to hear you're finding your niche and that everybody is seeing and appreciating the effort you're putting into it. I've been finding that when you treat musicians with respect and look out for their interests, they'll show a lot of loyalty (well, except the douches that always exist in any field, but better off without them anyway). Of course, you understand this from that perspective, so you already know what's going to work. BTW, if you ever want to try playing up here in Sacramento, I at least know who you should talk to about it.

I just got back from filming another show, and it was face-meltingly incredible. Headliner was Sister Crayon, an act that I had heard about for years, but hadn't seen before.

I want to say something "out loud" that it's not at all in my nature to say. I am the best at this. I don't mean the best in town, I mean the BEST. I have yet to see a video online that captures live music as well as I'm doing right now. I will add a caveat that I'm talking about "single-camera" style shooting, although there are plenty of multi-camera "professional" videos I've seen that somehow botched translating the live experience. I feel right now that I can walk into any venue, and as long as the sound guy doesn't completely blow it (not a given as I'm sure Patrick and other performing musicians can attest), I'll come out of there with the best live videos that act has ever had.

So there, I've thrown down. I don't mind being proven wrong about this, because it means there's somebody out there I can learn from, but so far I haven't seen it.

[Patrick]

I don't mind being proven wrong about this, because it means there's somebody out there I can learn from

This attitude is a great one to have. Also, PMed.

[valley_parade]

I am hopefully going to play cricket with some friends this weekend!

Aw screw you, rain. Screw you.