I suck. Wanna know why? Cuz I never post, that's why! So my bro came down this weekend and we celebrated his birthday. It was a good time. We ended up going downtown to catch King Missile III live. Very very great stuff. It was a blast for me to see him again after 11 or so years (when I saw him last in Austin, TX). I had a good chance to speak with him a little bit and I bought 2 albums from him. One, apparently, was released in 1997 and had, like, zero distrobution. The other is their newest release which hasn't been picked up yet for wide(r) distribution. In either case, it's very great stuff. The down side is that some asshole plowed into my car while we were parked downtown having a good time. I didn't realize that there was anything wrong until we hit the freeway...where I noticed that the road noise was considerably louder than usual. When we got back, sure enough, there's a huge dent in my door and the door doesn't seal properly. I had it adusted today for the tune of about $1600. Wonderful. I just love having to make a deductable because some [probably drunk] jerk wasn't careful. People suck. So if you like listening to streaming audio, I highly recommend God's Dog. It's a pretty tight little genre, but I've been hooked lately.

Interested in how long the war machine has been feeding? See how long your hard-earned tax dollars have been working on the war, with the exclusive noisybox war time clock.

We're on the brink of war. I'm going to see Ministry. In some bizaare way it seems only fitting.

Oh, well, let's see. I'm still living. I'm interested in entirely too many things. While I was in Seattle, I purchased a Pioneer LaserDisc (heh, remember those things?) remote control for a buck fifty at a thrift store. The only real reason I had any interest in it is the jog controller. I figure, if it's hackable, it's a nice little handheld controller. I think that perhaps I'll look at adding a [few] port[s] to it for generic controller purposes. There's a twisty spring-actived shuttle control around the jog wheel (I'm sure you've seen them) that I'm hoping is resistive. I may even (as time allows) hack together a PIC circuit to support the remote via IR. Maybe not, but it's an idean. Also, while in Seattle, we found our way to an open market where Stacy and I scored some insanely bizaare semi vintage postcards. I need to scan these things, they're so utterly strange. I paid a buck a piece for the midget handling bread, JAKE the alligator man, and some disturbing greetings from some livestock-now-meat handlers. Perfection. Now, that all that's out of the way, allow me to link whore for a bit... I got my recent eBay win today from invisible (actually invisible "rob"), and it's great. Weird, but great. If you're bored and in need of a time-consuming distraction, then LinkSwarm comes to your rescue. Think memepool with a warez-flavored style. I was going to go to the PLUG meeting last night, but it took me like 30 minutes to get halfway there, so I said fuck it and went home. I would have been late. It would have been rude. Since Dean told me about his (er, Rebel's) new pc-slash-PVR, I've been totally jealous. I've been thinking more and more about rolling my own linux-based PVR. I can't fucking stand commercials any longer. MythTV looks absolutely amazing, and I really like the idea of avoiding monthly fees (ala tivo) and not getting tied into a propriatary product that could kick it. Fortunately, these guys suggest some reasonable hardware, the key things being a Shuttle mainboard in a slim case. Gah, it's all about the benjamins. Perhaps one day I'll just break down and buy the components to build myself a nice little open PVR unit. Until then, I tinker with XMLTV and love marvel at how well it works. And last, but not least, I ran across the Miranda IM client today, something that really looks interesting. Smaller is better, and damn, it even supports Jabber.

I put up the photos from our recent trip to Seattle. Yeah, my camera sucks, but there are some good ones. I didn't realize that panties were just free like that. Weird. Enjoy it.

Well, if you're like me, then perhaps you're sick of the bloat in Winamp version 3. It's not really a horrible product, except for the silly little fact that it doesn't work properly, it's slow, VERY bloated, and, at least on my setup, likes to crash pretty frequently. Hell, I'd even install it again if they would release an update! Damn guys, get with it! I'm not the only one complaining! So then maybe you're interested in trying Zinf, formerly FreeAmp. It's an open source mp3/ogg player for a variety of platforms, most notably Windows and Linux. Zinf the good: Pretty small footprint, quick to open and play files, nice clean playlist and file indexing module kicks the shit out of Winamp3 when it comes to speed, even across a LAN. It also uses MusicBrainz (an excellent project!) for CD identification. Zinf the bad: Um, the keyboard bindings are undocumented and are less intuitive than Winamp's. All the skins/themes (including the default) are really quite fucking ugly, compared with the nice eye-candy that Winamp has. Forget visualizations and plugins. For anybody who has more than a few thousand mp3s, it needs a way to search/filter the indexed list. Summary: Just want to listen to some music and hate waiting for Winamp to load and/or crash and/or freeze? Try Zinf.

I burned some time today making some tedius changes to the [we]blog script here. If everything worked as intended, you probably won't even notice any changes...but behind the scenes things are quite a bit different. I can even edit existing entries now...which is something that I've been meaning to implement for the past two years! Of course, that doesn't ensure that I'll actually catch my mistakes and go back and fix them...but at least I have the ability to now if I want to. You know, I could spend the rest of my time just working on my projects, building stuff, exploring creatively in various ways, making sounds and noises and breaking little circuits apart and putting components back together in interesting ways, and doing collage and scanning in documents and making things. I just wish somehow I could pay the bills doing it. Give me some mp3s, a hot soldering iron, and a PC and I get pulled in quickly...

Well, the noisybox server is finally mounted on rails in the ominous rack. Phew! After all is said and done, I have to say that I don't think the whole rack thing is worth it. Sure, it's nice to have something like that...but when I think back on the high number of hours I have spent on it, I just don't think it's worth the effort. The whole thing is modded to hell...and I can certainly say that I'd be hard pressed to find another person (with the obvious exception of stm of chach-house) with a full rack in their 'puter room. I suppose that's something to take a little pride in. Too bad I'm not a very prideful person. Ultimately, I just don't think I need the rack. In fact, I'd have to say that it probably just makes things more complicated. In a few years (knock on wood!) when I retire the new server, I'll probably end up getting rid of the rack and going for

1. small
2. easily modifyable
3. easily upgradeable

For fucks sake, I can't even drop an AGP card in the new server. Don't get me wrong...I like what I have...it's just a BEAST.

So I got Donnie Darko on DVD for my b-day! We watched it last night and it reinforced in me just how good it is. Thanks to dean the bean for exposing me to it. I'm not exactly sure how I missed it originally, but damn, it's a very good film. I have to say it -- it's much better on DVD than the crazy stretched copy Dean showed me. :) I picked up the new Pigface album yesterday (used, but in excellent shape!) and "Mount Eerie" by the Microphones. I heard the Microphones album last time I was in Lubbock and some very respectible KTXT DJ played it in its entirety. Wow. Drop what you're doing right now, get together some cash, and go buy this album. I mean it. You won't be disappointed! Ok, it's maybe a little artsy for some people's tastes...but goddammit...that fucking record moves me. Last thing -- the noisybox [we]blog now has a subject line. Big whoop. Behind the scenes, though, the logs are being written to files and also shoved into a MySQL table. I likey. I'm planning on doing some more cool stuff with MySQL...please just give me time.

Not that anybody (other than me) cares about this...but after posting the last message I fuckin realized that something like 80 or 100 of my log entries were missing. Huh? I can't even begin to tell you what happened...just somehow, sometime they got killed. I couldn't even tell you when. Ug. The good news: I managed to restore them from a backup. I'm not entirely confident that the set is 100% complete...but it's certainly better than it was. :) Ok, I need to back up more often. That's for sure. I VOW to run Linux on my desktop PC before I ever install Windows XP. Please hold me to it.