Big Concerts, Big Emails

First of all, I got a spam email today titled "Genetalia Showroom". I think that's fantastic, and I actually read the contents of the email to repay them for making me laugh. The contents basically contained some sort of bogus stock tip. I'll be buying three thousand dollars worth of whatever it is tonight.

Also, The Fray was just playing a concert at the Park Grill in Millenium Park. It's not unusual for us to hear concerts up here from the park, but I kept hearing huge crowd roars after each song. I had no idea who they were until they closed with that "Everyone knows I'm in over my head" song. Then I recognized them. I stood up to take a peek just as they closed, and got to see them make a quick getaway through the park into a waiting van while park security gaurds held back a respectable number of young teenage girls. It must sort of suck to be in a band then then realize that little girls are your main fan base. But then again, they are buying your albums, so it probably doesn't suck that much at all.

I know the pickings have been slim 'round these parts of late; I've been dedicating most of my online efforts to geting The Blogulution up and running. It's there, use it, enjoy it. Pat and I have been enjoying our own personal message boards, though.

I'm excited about my short day at work tomorrow, followed by a full week off as I head up to Wisconsin for my family reunion on Sunday. I will have internet access and a lot of time on my hands up at the reunion, so I expect I'll still be in touch whilst up there. I also tested the limits of my phone's memory today by recording about four minutes of high-quality video and didn't even make a dent. Thus, I will hopefully be posting lots of pictures of my cousins next to things like Mt. Rushmore and the Panama Canal to demonstrate how large and in charge they are. I've been boning up on Sheepshead so I can hold my own at the card table, and I think I can still take most of those dudes on the tennis court. I'm not so sure about basketball this time 'round, though... We'll have to see.

This is all you get.

Go to www.spanishturtle.com. See, it's the blog now. I warned you, people - I hope you were prepared! The old blog location will be there for a while at least, so you stragglers can get your links together.

Furthermore, I put up some pictures in the gallery of our trip to Michigan. This, for example, is a sand dune. Wheee!

The Blogulution

There's a very simple little something over at The Blogulution. Note that I don't yet own www.THEblogulution.com, which I'm thinking I should get and point at the same site.

Baby steps, people.

Also, I'm thinking I'm going to move my blog to the front page of spanishturtle. Be prepared for that. It may be somewhat traumatic when it actually happens.

The Return of Music, TV and Blogging

There haven't been any posts in a week and I figured, actually having something to recommend, this would be a good time to break the silence. I haven't been interested in music for quite a while now, but I'm starting to get back into some new stuff. I just stumbled across a new band that I'm enjoying. Check 'em out: Gym Class Heroes (careful, the site plays music). Click on the 'Download Music' link (2" on the ruler) to hear a few of their songs. I think I might actually buy this album - a very rare occurance for me.

The heat has finally broken a bit in the city, and I'm pretty f'n happy about that. We've been able to sneak into the den again (we hadn't been in there for a few days, as it is essentially an oven) to watch all of the content that had piled up on the DVR. Without The Television Review to turn to, let's have a summer TV opinion lightning round:

The Real World - Road Rules Challenge is finally picking up. The event this week was kind of cool (swimming with sharks), and soooo much better than the early shit (swinging a ball at the other teams while standing on a stump). Now that the veteran players have to start going for each other the crap outside the challenges is also more intersting.

Chappelle's Show is awkward and rarely funny now. The hosting feels uncomfortable, and I think everyone has that same wonder of why these guys would essentially sell out their friend like this on national television. I suppose he probably doesn't care, and maybe even gave them the go-ahead. But even the skits feel unfinished and very much like things that would have ended up on the cutting room floor. The first of the "lost episodes" featured a bit where Chapelle was told he shouldn't do another season because it wouldn't be as good as the earlier seasons. Having seen what they shot before he left, I wouldn't be suprised if that was a lot of the stress he was feeling. Hopefully they're saving the best stuff for the last show.

Fast, Inc really is not maintaining my interest. I started the recording after seeing a commercial before the first episode, and it seemed sort of cool. With each episode they seem to be having a harder time coming up with content. But hey, there is very little to watch during the summer, so this will probably continue to be a breakfast time favorite.

Life on the D List follows Kathy Griffin as she pimps herself out to anyone that will pay her a few dollars. I'd never seen an episode before, but we've recently watched a few. The thing is that I didn't watch this because I don't especially like Kathy Griffin. But the show is entertaining - not because of her (her stand up is so boring!), but because of everyone else in it. Kathy does the ocassionally funny thing (she seems able to channel Andy Dick once in a while), but her parents and husband tend to react to things in fantastic fashion. Her parents don't seem crazy, just funny. They also go with the flow better than anyone I've ever seen (especially her father), and due to the show they get a lot of crap thrown at them. My favorite thing thus far was when her parents picked up her niece and nephew from Kathy's mansion. At the end of the episode they drive away very slowly down the driveway as the grandma yells "Everyone hold on for dear life!"

Hussle is a show from jolly old England about con artists who basically con someone every week. This was pretty cool for two episodes, but now they are getting pretty bad. They are obviously trying very hard to not just have the crew run a typical con every week, and try to spice it up with different twists. This week they kept flashing to old-timey scenes shot in cheesy silent film fashion to tell the history of a dead con artist. It was literally unwatchable.

I just came across a realty show last night about a car dealership that follows some typical scumbag car salesmen trying to close deals at a big, flashy Dodge dealership. I only saw half of the episode, but I was mesmerized. This guy sold a couple a Durango and afterwards both sides spoke to the camera about how they had out-negotiated the other. I'm going to have to check out another episode to 1) see if it's any good, and 2) find out the name.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been very solid; this is the only of these shows I would be watching if it was Feburary. I didn't love the 100 dollar baby episode that much, but the scenes where steroid-crazyed Charlie and Di (Dee?) yelled at each other were great. The two episodes from last week were fantastic, and even in the poorer episodes you get a moment or two that warrant the replay button. I don't think this show has the wide appeal to survive in a fall prime-time slot, but I'm very glad to see it has a home during the summer months.

Finally, you're finally on a site with a pagerank. The front page of Spanishturtle got a juicy pagerank of 4. Sweet. I geeked out a bit over that.

Activity Fever!

Pat suggests it, I do it. That's the way it works. Drum Machine is up on You Tube now. (I feel sort of strange having something public like this.) I just put it up (search for Drum Machine), so we'll see people have to say, I guess. I've also been wanting to shoot something new; something simple, mostly to get to edit. I'll have to do that when I have some spare time, which I'm just realizing I usually have more of than I think.

Lately I've been doing some work on a website for a guy I know here in the city during the evening. Nothing big, just some SEO and design whatnot, but its making me re-appreciate not having anything I'm supposed to do at night and how much free time I actually have to spend on things if I want. My typical weekday night is predictable; come home, grab a soda, talk to Maria, watch TV, eat dinner, go to bed. I'd say three nights a week or so are spent that way... Its awesome, and a lot of times that's all I want to do after work, but I think I'll see if I can't spend some of that time producing something rather than just vegging out. At least until Gilmore Girls* starts again. And not tonight - tonight is videogame night. But tomorrow. Yeah.

One thing I am thinking I will tackle in the near future is creating the blogulution homepage. Thanks to Pat's creative spelling during the Bloggies of '05, we have a spelling of "blogulution" that is currently available as a url. I believe I shall buy this, create a general blogulution forum, invite Joe to mirror / migrate his awesome blogulution page over there and start playing with PHP. Also, while we're discussing web sites, The Television Review is officially kaput. I believe we have had one visitor in the past month (give or take), and I can't really muster up any interest in it. It will be remembered as a failed experiment, and replaced by the more all-encompassing blogulution forums previously mentioned. It'll probably stay up for a while due to the ignorable costs involved with keeping it live, but I don't even go there anymore.

*Last night they had a marathon on TV, which Maria and I watched for a bit. We saw the episode where Suki's kids were baptised - AKA one of the first episodes where I thought the girls were going to reunite and the show was going to be back on track. Watching them blow past the opportunity and plow on into what I now know was a waste of a season made me sort of sad. But it also made me sort of excited. Gilmore Girls in the fall is a time of promise, a time where anything can happen and the air is crisp and clear. Despite the lackluster season we just endured, I'll be pretty excited when the next season rolls around.

Heart Attack

I just had Blogger eat my blog. I know this has happened to memebers of the Blogulution before. The problem is that sometimes when you edit your blog in the Blogger interface it only loads up part of the template. So if you're just making changes to the upper portion of the code that loads, you may not notice the rest of the template is missing. Then you publish that code and BAM - your beautiful blog is destroyed. Thankfully I had copied the template into Dreamweaver to look at new background colors. I would have been pissed, I tell ya.

Furthermore, I made a couple of small changes, most notably the color, because I just realized after visiting Pat's blog how much my color scheme was to a default template's. I'll probably change some more stuff around in the near future.

No Sleep = Blog Post

I could not sleep last night for whatever reason, which gave me lots of time to think about things. Aside from thinking how tired I was going to be today, some of the things I recall are:

-I'm sort of thinking about going back to school. My Dad has been pushing me to consider doing this, and the fact is that if I'm ever going to do it it makes sense to bite the bullet in the next couple of years so I don't have to retake any courses. I'd have to find the right program, as I would never study computer science again nor would I study something that offers no financial benefits. Also, I don't think I would want to do it anywhere but Madison, as the idea of going to some random school in the city a couple of nights a week sounds awful. It would take a lot to get me back in a classroom, but I could see it being good if it all worked out.

-I want to go to Target to buy a couple of fans and maybe a new shirt or two. I wonder if that new Target is done (they're building one very close to our apartment). The thought also crossed my mind to look into getting an air conditioner in the den again.

-I'd love to learn how to really write some PHP. My little PHP experience has come through editing free source applications, but it seems simple, robust and quite interesting. I think maybe I'll buy a PHP book and try to write something sometime. Maybe even during my family reunion... hmmmm...

-I had a really good weekend. Its always a very good thing when Maria and I get to spend some time alone together doing somethign other than lazing around on the couch. Also, I really enjoyed seeing the guys from Wisconsin on Sunday, and the whole day went really smoothly. Typically when a group that size gets together with half-formed plans nothing happens easily. But we hung out, watched soccer, played basketball and saw a movie with almost no hassle at all. I think everyone had a good time.

-Around 5am I woke up (one of many times) and decided I really wanted some milk. I got some, and it was tasty. Harry and I saw some dudes with a bitchin' beer bong from their balcony to the ground and beer pong being played outside, and Harry invented a fraternity name / cheer for them; "Omega Pi Mu! Moo, Moo, Moo!" I thought of that as I drank my milk.

Haircut

I just got my hair cut by a guy with a shaved head (irony!), and I'm not entirely sure what to think about it. There are some parts that have been left long that are typically cut short, like the back (making me feel like I have a mullet). Maybe I just don't know anything about haircuts. Oh yeah, that's right, I don't. I was also told I should be using conditioner, to which I said, "Who am I? Joe?"
Joe and his conditioner out on the town

Three Days Later

Three days after we played soccer I find that my legs basically don't hurt anymore. I was suprised to find that the pain related to trying to play soccer wasn't so bad after one day, actually escalated a bit into day two, and then dropped off significantly on day three (today). In comparison, three days after playing paintball I was just beginning to regain my ability to go down stairs without putting all my weight on a railing. So soccer hurts less than paintball (though had we played soccer for a few more hours that may not be the case). I think the real danger of paintball was that it wasn't exactly exhausting at the time, but slowly tore one's legs apart. What made soccer leg pain especially annoying is that it turns out that you use the same muscles to kick a ball as you to do lift your legs up. This becomes a problem when those muscles are really sore and you're trying to do things like drive a stick shift.

Other than my legs not hurting anymore, my other big news is that I scored this totally nerd-tastic Google bag from our Google rep today. That's h-o-t: nerdy. I'll bet that when I use it to carry my calculators and glasses around everyone will laugh at me, except massive dorks like Joe and Dan who will be secretly envious. Finally, a way to announce my love of internet companies, carry my Harry Potter books and turn off women in one convenient package!

2.5 days through a 4 day weekend

It is currently Sunday night, and I am sitting at home watching Drum Line (having just watched 8 Mile) with a couple of empty beers beside me and my pants... somewhere unattended. Movies about the good guys winning via intense show downs and a scientifically perfected blend of PBR (thanks, Ted!) and 312 (thanks, Goose Island!) makes for a pretty damn good solo night. Maria has been in Colorado for a couple of days now, and will be there for a couple of days more. It sounds like she's having a pretty good time; which is good, I like to hear my lady is having herself a gooooood time. I'm just glad that I'm managing to stay entertained in her absence.

Joe and Bri were joined by Mootzy "Gorilla" Smushhouse in Chicago this weekend, which was great. It was really nice seeing everybody, and it's very nice that I will get to see all of them again tomorrow night. Dan, Pat and I spent a couple of hours just hanging out in my apartment while Pat played FIFA, I complained a lot, and Dan took a nap. This was EXACTLY a scene out of 208 S. Bassett, and it made me very happy. Bri, Joe and I got to hang out a bit the day before which I really enjoyed. I'm pretty impressed that Bri has completed her nursing training / testing, even though she thinks she may not want to continue in the line of work. Lots of people would have just dropped it, and seeing it out takes determination. I really enjoyed talking to Joe and Dan about jobs and other grown up type things. It sort of freaks me out that we all work now, and own things, but taking some comradery with my fellow dork professionals helps (though, I must say that both Joe and Dan have deepened their dorkatude, while I have lost some of mine; which is not a good thing). Someday it'd be awesome if Joe or Dan or Pat or Chris or somebody started a company and we all got to work together. It would also be awesome if I won a million billion dollars and just bought us all houses in Bfield so we could hang out in each other's basements every night.

Tomorrow I have to work for a few hours until 2(ish), which is sort of silly, but also sort of no big deal. I think it will be something of a nightmare downtown and on the train (due to fireworks and the Taste of Chicago), but it's a short day, which I don't really mind working. Afterwards I get to book it up north to my house and then slip out of the city up to Bfield for an evening of soccer (real life, in person soccer!) and hanging out in Harry's basement. Needless to say, I am ex-cit-e-d. It's so great when you get to see old friends a couple of times in a week, resulting in a temporary feeling of old-timey-ness.

So, with that, I'm off to watch the rest of Drum Line, finish my beer and eventually head off to my big, empty bed. Have a great 4th of July, Blogulution!