Published on Monday, November 28th, 2005 .
Technically my birthday is tomorrow, the 29th… but I went out of town this weekend to celebrate early since there’s really not much to do on a weekday for my birthday. We decided to go to Atlanta to see Evol Intent and Spor at the Masquerade. All in all, it ended up being a helluva trip and a memorable weekend. So here’s the quick rundown.
Friday: finally got out of Knoxville around 9-ish and arrived in Atlanta sometime after midnight. We were staying at the Residence Inn downtown Atlanta and were originally planning on having to pay for 2 nights. Since we got there after midnight, they decided to only charge us for one night and mark us as an early arrival on Saturday. That means we saved $90 on the room alone, plus $19 for valet parking. Talk about nice! After we checked in and got all of our shit upstairs, Sam and I went to the Cheetah and Steve and the girl he brought stayed in the hotel room because she was under 21. Sam and I were going to walk but ended up taking a cab because it was only $10. Got to the Cheetah a bit after 1 and found a table. Sam ordered some food and a beer and eventually I decided to order a long beach tea. Beers were $5, mixed drinks were $9, which is absolutely ridiculous. I give her my card to start a tab and have two drinks since they were so damned expensive. Seemed like every stripper in the place was a knockout. They had 3 stages and no pole… about 25 dancers working altogether with about 10 on stage at any given time. I ended up getting two dances for $10 each and we eventually left at about 2:45. We go back to the room and pass out.
Saturday: I wake up about 9:45 for some idiotic reason. Check my phone and find a text message from where the previous night’s transaction went through. Problem is, it was for $150!!! Apparently instead of doing like most places and holding your card until you pay your tab, they pre-auth it for $150. Stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. So now I’m fucked out of $150 until Monday when the actual charge for $22 goes through. Anyway, we all get up and go to the Mall of GA and walk around there for awhile. We ate and nobody bought anything. On the way back, we stopped at a package store and bought a 1.75L bottle of Bacardi Razz, some coke, 3 shot glasses and a bottle of TGI Friday’s mudslide. That’s what rocks about their package stores.. they sell EVERYTHING. Coke, beer, red bull, liquor, shot glasses, orange juice, etc. We get back to the hotel and start drinking about 6:30 or 7… The chick gets so stupid drunk she can barely hold herself up. I get a nice little buzz and Sam can just sorta tell he’s been drinking. We then go to the Vortex, a bar and grill on Peachtree. We get a table and the waitress shows up. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says “I heart girls”. Hot as all holy shit, but of course she’s a fucking lesbian. I order a burger that I barely ate because I wasn’t as hungry as I thought. I asked the waitress for a blowjob and mentioned that a redheaded slut would be cool too. So she brings me a blowjob and also has two redheaded sluts in her hand. The waitress and I each drink a redheaded slut and I drink the blowjob later. I also managed to get a long beach tea before I left. Steve decides that the female is too drunk to go to the show and he has a wicked headache so he just drops the two of us off at the Spor/EI show. The show was absolutely amazing. Probably one of the best shows ever. I only had 2 drinks there because they were $7 each. Outside of that, it was an incredible show and tons of fun. I took something like 100 pics though about 30 of them were either unintentional or unusable. The bartender was just plain hotness personified. I met up with a dude from Knoxville down there and we hung out a bit. We finally left the show about 2:30 or so and went back to the hotel and crashed… got up Sunday morning and came back home. All in all an amazing weekend.
Pics from the weekend here
Published on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 .
Remember the old myth that eating turkey makes you sleepy? Well, it’s just that, a myth. It’s been said that the tryptophan in turkey causes you to feel drowsy and eventually go to sleep if you eat enough of it. Problem is, there’s not even enough tryptophan in turkey to have that effect on people. Hell, beans and beef have more tryptophan than turkey does. I don’t think it’s so much that eating turkey caused people to go to sleep. I think it’s just that natural reaction where after you eat a big meal you just want to go relax and you just sorta end up going to sleep anyway because your body’s busy working on digesting the food. I mean, I’ve noticed the same effect regardless of what I eat if I eat enough of it. Then again, I can’t really speak for turkey because I can’t stand the shit.
Published on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 .
Oh joy, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Whoopidy-fucking-doo. Seriously… I don’t spend time with my family so it’s really a pointless holiday for me. I don’t speak to my mom and all my other family is out of state. Not only that, I don’t really understand the point of Thanksgiving. What are we giving thanks for? The fact that we came over and killed a shitload of Native Americans, stole their land and displaced them to other areas just so we could have a new place to live? Yeah, THAT’S something to celebrate! White man pissed off the Native Americans; they gave us tobacco as payback. Ouch. Anyway, I’ll stop before I go off on some tirade that nobody’s going to read. Needless to say, I’m not really a holiday kind of person. I don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter or really even the fourth of July. At least the 4th has SOME significance. Christmas and easter are Christian holidays that don’t have any real historical significance (they’re chronologically mis-placed, technically speaking) and I’m not a Christian so I don’t even feel as though I technically should be celebrating them. Christmas is especially retarded since you spend $500 in gifts for other people and get $500 in gifts in return. How about we just save the money, buy ourselves what we really want and just get together and eat dinner? I doubt that’d go over too well since most of American retail business relies on the Christmas holiday shopping season to keep their heads above water. Which brings me back to Thanksgiving. The only thing I like about this holiday? Black Friday! I know that sounds completely asinine, but there are a few good reasons. First, the sales rule. That means I can buy myself stuff that I want/need at greatly reduced prices. Fuck buying shit for other people, I buy for myself only. Second, the malls are always packed with all kinds of beautiful women shopping for stuff… so the scenery’s really nice. Not to mention I have a thing for watching and analyzing people, so it gives me ample opportunity to do so. Best of all, I ride a bicycle so parking is never a problem. All in all, Thanksgiving itself is completely fucking pointless but hey… I’m not really complaining. For the record, it’s called Black Friday not because it’s a bad day but because it was historically when retail businesses finally made it “into the black” (became profitable). If you’re curious about who has what on sale? Try here. That’s all for now, folks… perhaps more to come later if I feel like it. For now, it’s time to go to work.
Published on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 .
No, not because I care a thing in the world about speaking it… but I came across this flash animation done by Microsoft to advertise the release of Visual Studio 2005. It’s unbelievably disturbing and I’d really like to know what in the hell they’re singing and what the text on the screen is. Needless to say, it just goes to show how differently companies advertise in Asian countries than they do here. They apparently have a completely different sense of humor or something. Talk about weird shit. Jeez. Just watch it and you’ll understand.
Published on Friday, November 18th, 2005 .
Thanks to Boy Genius on blackberryforums for the pics and info… but here’s a few nice comparison pics between the new Cingular-branded Blackberry 8700 vs the Verizon-branded Moto Q.
more pics of the Q
For those that don’t know, the Moto Q is a super-thin PDA soon to be released by Motorola on the Verizon network. It supports 1x EV-DO for high speed data, runs Windows Mobile 5 and sports a 320×240 64k color screen… It has dual stereo speakers, bluetooth, 1.3MP camera, video capture and uses miniSD for removable storage (unlike other motos which use microSD). Looks like it’ll be a kickass phone… Motorola is saying it’s expected to be released first quarter 2006.
Published on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 .
No, really… absolutely unbelievable… Google’s stock is over $400 now and currently sitting at $401.36. By far the highest priced stock on the stock market currently. Not only that, they’re talking as if $500 isn’t out of the question. When Google went public, they went public at barely over $100 a share, as far as I can tell. Imagine investing $2500 in google at that rate. You’d have nearly $10,000 now if you sold it all.
It just seems that Google can do no wrong at the moment. Obviously things could change but damn, they just keep striking gold in everything they do. They’re also opening offices in Mexico City and Sao Paolo, Brazil to increase their reach in Latin America. Not to mention, they’re rolling out free WiFi in Mountain View, CA (where their home offices are). They’ve also just rolled out a new Google Base service that allows people to upload content that they want indexed and made available online. It can include almost anything you can imagine, from what it appears… even stuff for sale (like Ebay, even!). Should be interesting to see how that pans out. Google also bought Orkut, which is a social networking site much like myspace except that as of right now it’s invite-only (like gmail). Obviously they have their gmail service that gives you 2.5GB of email storage. Google Groups indexes usenet and makes posts easily searchable over the web without having to use a newsreader client. Google Mobile allows you to search google via your web browser on your phone or via SMS commands. Google maps and google local have been integrated such that now you can find a map of an area and search for businesses of whatever sort in that given area. Pretty sweet shit. Seems that whatever you need, google has. It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo & MSN plan to compete.
Published on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 .
Christ… I slept 16 hours last night. How the fuck did that happen? I got home at like 1:30pm, stayed awake til maybe 4pm or so and then went to bed fully expecting to be awake by about 10pm. Well, I wake up and there’s a bit of sunlight out so I’m curious as to the time. I look at my cellphone, 8:30…. AM! I’d managed to sleep 16 hours and completely miss Friday night. I had a good 15 missed calls and something like 10 voicemails. Yikes. Tammy thought I was ignoring her existence and most likely figured I was out doing something with someone else. She wanted me to come see her and well, I wanted to but obviously I couldn’t since I was knocked the fuck out. All in all, a shitty night. I’m making up for it tonight by going out and getting drunk at Fiction. I’m hoping Tammy’s not so pissed that she doesn’t at least call tonight so I can explain to her what happened. I’m not even sure why I slept so long… Probably the fact that I’ve not gotten more than about 6 hrs of sleep more than once in the past two weeks. Guess I’m all caught up now!
Published on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 .
I’d heard about this a couple of times before but it wasn’t free so I never really bothered to mess with it much… Now that it’s free, it’s worth talking about. It’s called Pandora and it’s based off the Music Genome Project database. Basically you put in an aritst’s name and it sifts through the MGP database for music with similar qualities and plays them for you. Undoubtedly one of the most insanely cool things I’ve ever seen in my years of using the internet. I’m quite the music geek and always looking for new and interesting things to listen to and this seems to really fit the bill. For those of you that don’t know, the MGP is a project where people (volunteers?) went through and listened to all different kinds of music and “tagged” it with various relevant properties. Basically Pandora just finds your chosen artist or song in the database and looks at its tagged information.. Then it searches the database for music with similar qualities and plays it for you. It’s completely free, though I’d suggest having a high-speed connection to really enjoy it. Also, you can create more than one “station” and even add different kinds of music to a given station if you so choose. Definitely worth checking out.
Published on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 .
There’s a new version of Firefox in the works as we speak… Version 1.5 has been through a couple of developer previews (named “Deer Park”) a couple of betas and has now reached its first release candidate (RC1). I must say I REALLY like 1.5 better than the current 1.0.7 release for quite a few reasons. Version 1.5 now automatically checks for updates to your extensions, themes and to the browser itself. It doesn’t auto-upgrade your extensions or themes; instead it leaves you to periodically sift through your extensions manager or your theme manager and click the “update now” button next to any extensions that require an update. Browser updates are now incremental instead of having to download a whole new 5MB installer file just to update a few files. VERY nice touch if you ask me as that was always a pet peeve of mine. Granted, on 8mbps cable it’s really not so bad but it was still the annoyance of having to go through the entire installer yet again just to upgrade minor versions (eg. 1.0.6 to 1.0.7, which had very small changes). Now, you get a notification that there is a new version out, an option to download or decline to do so and should you decide to download, it’s only between 500K and 1MB (600K seems to be about the norm for the two I’ve done). RC1 also adds the ability to drag tabs to new spots on the tab bar to re-order them. Not something I use too much at the moment but a neat feature that previously required an extension to do. Other features they’ve added include more descriptive error pages (better than the ones IE offers, even… and light years ahead of the old stupid dialog box that popped up and told you pretty much nothing), better popup blocking (I’ve noticed small improvements myself), better performance of the forward/back buttons (to compete with Opera), a wizard to report broken websites (haven’t used it yet), and some unmentioned security fixes. Even though it’s only a release candidate and not the final product yet, it’s still worth the download in my personal opinion. Plus, when the final is released it will be a small upgrade from the current RC1 release so it’s not like you’ll have to go download another 5MB installer when RC2 then the final come out. Extensions for the most part have all been updated to work with the new version so that’s not an issue either. I’ve run across a few in the addons database that don’t state they’re compatible with the new version, but most of the major extensions have been updated to work. So far only the google toolbar doesn’t work with RC1 (though it worked with beta 2). All in all, it looks as though Firefox has just gotten even better than it already was. As far as I know, there won’t be any new features between RC1 and final, just bug and security fixes. I like it a lot and it most certainly will continue to be my primary browser. Give it a whirl, you’ll probably like it too.
Published on Friday, November 4th, 2005 .
November 26th at the Masquerade in Atlanta Spor & Evol Intent are having a CD release party. My friend Steve and I have decided this is just one of those shows we CANNOT miss. Evol Intent and Spor are two of the sickest producers/DJ’s I’ve ever laid ears on in my life. This show will be absolute sickness to the max. I can’t wait. It’s on a Saturday night, which is really nice since I’m off.. It’s also the weekend before my birthday, so that gives me a hell of an excuse to celebrate like a motherfucker. I’ve only once done something worthwhile around my birthday and that was like 4 yrs ago when I went to Washington DC to see Dave Ralph. This show will be so much better since DnB > Trance anyday. Hopefully it’ll be more than just Steve and I going… I’m kinda hoping my friend Andy goes and maybe a couple more people. I found a decent hotel for $50 a night only a half a mile from the venue. Doesn’t look like too much of a dump from the pictures and for $50 a night, who’s complaining. There’s tons of stuff to do in downtown Atlanta so it should be a fun weekend, no doubt. The thing that really kicks ass is the fact that the show is just $8 admission. Seems that jungle shows are cheap to get into, unlike trance shows. I generally have paid $15-20 admission for trance DJ’s in the past… Paul VanDyk is going to be in Atlanta sometime next week and his tickets are $25 pre-order and like $30 or something at the door. Yet again, dnb > trance. Oh well… I’m excited… can’t wait. 
Here’s a few links to the info
Event info
Evol Intent website
Evol Intent on myspace
Spor on myspace
