Month: July 2003

My Wife, The Comedian

The wife got fixated on our walls recently. So, she decided to paint them. All of them. It’s taken her a while, but they look really good. Painting your walls is the ultimate reset button. All of the cobwebs and dust are at their lowest levels in years and you get the visual stimulation of the new color all around you.

Of course, once the furniture was moved back from the walls, it seemed silly to just slide them back into the same place. That’s no fun. So, along with the new wall colors, we have also completely re-arranged our furniture. The feng shui is in full effect at themuy household. Frankly, it’s alot better. Our house is pretty damn small and thus the placement of furniture is crucial to the flow. The wife keeps saying, “I just love our house now.” Over and over again. Ad nauseum.

Slowly, our house is coming back together. Last night was the “hang shit on the walls” phase of the project. We had hung almost all of the pictures and were hanging hooks. It was getting late and I was getting grumpy. I was sick of the “hanging shit on the walls” phase. The wife said she just had one more thing to hang, a cute little hook she’d had for a while that was perfect for the kitchen. Well, she couldn’t find it.

“I guess you’re off the hook,” she said.

*rimshot*

PHP Gibberish

As I was searching the php.net website for some useful funtions, I came across this bit of advice and thought I’d share it with you:

Think of list() as if it was a function building and returning a non-associative positional array of variable references from its arguments, the latter arguments being prototyped as reference arguments. The returned array is then returned by list() also as a reference instead of as a value (as with classic scalar functions)

The fact that I pretty much understood that paragraph scared me.

Drummers are Weird

So, I’ve been searching for a vintage drum set for the past few months. In case you’re wondering, I’m looking for a Gretsch “round badge” kit from the late 50’s to early 60’s. I just crave that Charlie Watts sound. If you’ve got one, let me know.

That’s not the reason for this post. In my search for the perfect vintage drum set, I’ve been reduced to doing Google searches and going through page after page of results in hopes that they might hold that hidden drum bargain. Not surprisingly, I’ve come across a few nut jobs. Everything from patriotic, vietnam vet drummers to über-drum geeks to the scary “look at my drums in this black light!” types. Drummers Web is one such place.

It’s a virtual swap meet of questionable merchandise, lost souls, bad spelling, bad taste, poor web design, mean-spirited rants and just about everything else that makes this internet thing so insanely great.

Here’s a great rant about, uh, well, I’m not sure, but it’s definitely entertaining: If these guys are drummers………

And then there’s the obligatory fag debate: You’re a fag! No, you are!

But don’t take my word for it, try it yourself! Google search for “drummers”

Enjoy the moronity.

I Heart Mozilla (Firebird)

Well, I’ve finally made the switch. No more Internet Explorer as my default browser. From now on, it’s Mozilla Firebird for me.

Besides having a cool/retro-70’s/muscle car sounding name, Firebird also sports these features (standard):

  1. Tabbed browsing (of course)
  2. Pop-up killer
  3. Advanced bookmark features
  4. Automatic image resizing
  5. Middle click to open a link in a new tab
  6. and more…

But here is the real killer reason I switched: Extensions. These are cool browser add-ons that allow your surfing experience to be way easier. Here are a couple of extensions I’ve installed:

  • Tabbrowser Extensions This adds mucho functionality to the tabbed browsing experience. Now when I click on a web link in an Outlook email, it doesn’t open a new link in my open browser (losing the page I was previously reading) it just opens it in a new tab. Very cool.
  • SearchThis If I highlight text on a web page and right-click, I can search for that word on: Dictionary.com, IMDB.com or Amazon.com
  • Web Developer 0.3 This is the single coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. This adds a toolbar to Firebird with tools for debugging and laying out web pages. I can instantly turn off Java, Javascript, or CSS, turn on/off images, outline all table cells or block level elements, open up all style sheets in a separate tab, validate any aspect of the web page through the W3C validator, resize the browser to common screen resolutions and many many other things. This is going to save me a lot of time.

I highly recommend this browser. I didn’t realize how stuck in the past IE was until using Mozilla Firebird. I’ll never go back. Happy surfing.

In Case You Didn’t Know

The war in Iraq now costs $3.9 billion a month. Or, about a billion dollars a week. Yeah, you read that right, one billion dollars. Recently a school in Oregon had to shut down for summer early because they didn’t have enough money. That same week our government spent one billion dollars on the occupation of Iraq.

Here are some more numbers: Iraq Cost Could Mount to $100 Billion.

Here’s an article about Oregon’s school budget crisis: Banking on Legislature’s school budget.

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s come up with some lies about our schools that will trick our government into giving money to our states for education! Let’s try to get one billion a week! Who’s with me?

Alejandro

Okay, it’s time to get a little bit serious around here. Alejandro Escovedo has some health problems and needs your help.

“Following a show in Phoenix on April 26, 2003, acclaimed singer-songwriter and playwright Alejandro Escovedo collapsed and was hospitalized due to complications from Hepatitis C.”

He is currently recovering and undergoing treatment at his home, but his health bills are (believe it or not) staggering. Like many, many musicians, Alejandro does not have health insurance. A lot of people are giving money to help him out and you should too.

Take a moment to think about all of the musicians in America who struggle financially for years of their lives in order to make the art that they (and you) love so much. It pisses me off that there is ZERO support from our government for these people. Arts funding in America is a joke. Every year, funding is cut more and more and artists are discouraged from trying to do what they love.

When I was touring in Holland recently with Magnapop, we played with a Dutch band called Caesar. This band is doing pretty well in their country. They were number one on the independent music charts in Holland (only to be knocked out by the White Stripes), had a sponsorship deal with Converse, and were touring their asses off. Each member of this 3-piece band had part-time jobs to help with their rent. But, they also had assistance from the Dutch government. It’s a 3-year program and they have to fill out a lot of paperwork and jump through some hoops, but I thought that was amazing. They receive discounts on their rent (half price!) and other benefits just because they are musicians. And, of course, health care is not an issue for them, since health care in Holland is nationalized.

Contrast that with America where the arts are looked down upon by our government in terms of financial support and there are national scandals because some guy took some homoerotic photos with the government’s money. Big fucking deal. Let me tell you something. Art is integral to culture and culture is being slowly squeezed to death by our government. Artists need support and if our government isn’t going to give it to them, it looks like it will have to come down to the private citizen.

That’s why I just gave Alejandro Escovedo $30 of my hard-earned money.