30 Random iTunes tracks

I stole this from Joel; his list was originally 20 tracks

1. Quietdrive - Time After Time
2. The Cure - Trust
3. James Blunt - Cry
4. Ace of Base - I Saw the Sign
5. Blondie vs. The Doors - Rapture Riders
6. Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax
7. Johann Sebastian Bach - Allemande
8. Blue Man Group - Klein Mandelbrot
9. Sigur Rós - myrkur (recycled by ila)
10. Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond
11. A.F.I. - The Interview
12. Josh Groban - Un Amore Per Sempre
13. Paul McCartney - Dance Tonight (Music Video)
14. Múm - Finally We Are No One
15. The Prodigy - Jericho (Genaside II Remix)
16. Thrice - The Arsonist
17. Céline Dion - O Holy Night
18. Robert Miles - Fable (Message Version)
19. Björk - I See Who You Are
20. Eminem - Say Goodbye to Hollywood^*
21. Norah Jones - The Long Day Is Over^†
22. Justin Timberlake - Summer Love/Set the Mood (Prelude)
23. Dastgah Systems - Avaz of Afshari
24. Madonna - Get Together
25. The Beatles - It Won't Be Long
26. Led Zeppelin - Walter's Walk
27. The Darkness - Get Your Hands Off Of My Woman
28. The Postal Service - Clark Gable
29. Massive Attack - Three
30. Eurythmics - Here Comes The Rain Again

I have no idea what this list says about me other than I have a ridiculous spectrum of musical tastes.

_{* Rather appropriate considering the strike situation...
† Yesterday's theme song for me and work.}

Oh sweet baby Jesus, thank you Apple!

New feature in iTunes 7.5!

Weather, Dreams, Beatles Musicals and Apple. How very not cohesive.

Good lord it's cold! I'm not talking about just kind of chilly. It's damned cold here. I suppose it's appropriate then to have The Vince Guaraldi Trio's Christmas Time Is Here playing in iTunes right now. (Actually, it's just because I'm listening to The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack). Anyways, back to the cold. Right now, it's 50º and 73% humidity. Normally, this wouldn't be as horrible as it's been today but just two days ago it was almost 90º, so a drop of nearly 40º is quite a shock to your system. Onto the next subject...

Last night I had a strange dream. It was odd first of all because I don't normally remember my dreams. I assume this can only mean that they're too disturbing for me to remember. I usually wake up at least once per night with my heart pounding so I figure it's a safe assumption. Anyways, in this particular dream, I was part of a group of guys that both consisted of friends and people I'd never met before in a bowling alley. To get a picture of what the bowling alley looked like, I'm going to reference the trailer for Across the Universe (which I desperately want to see but it's not in theaters here in Wisconsin):

These pictures are essentially what I saw in this dream. Unfortunately, we weren't running around the bowling alley singing "Hey Jude," it was something much MUCH worse. The Backstreet Boys. We were singing the Backstreet Boys...what the hell is wrong with me? Regardless, I un/fortunately was the lead singer in this imagined boy band and ended up serenading someone at the end of the song so I guess at least that could be put in the Pro column. When I woke from this dream, instead of a wacky dream, a nightmare was held in store.

I decided to install Adobe Creative Suite 3. What is with Adobe's obsession with having to do things differently from every other developer on the Mac OS X platform Of course, there's the obvious exception of Microsoft...as Steve Jobs said, "They have no taste." I believe that translates over into pretty much everything they do whether it's in Windows or on the Mac; you don't magically gain taste just because you're porting a program or suite to the Mac. Such is the case with Adobe though to a lesser degree. Firstly, they use an installer that has to be written by Satan himself. The first thing I had to deal with was this:

I've installed many, many programs on both of my Macs since I switched almost 2 years ago now and Adobe's Creative Suite Installer is the only one that's ever bitched about my having Safari open. Granted, this is much less of an inconvenience in Leopard (more on that later) than it was using Tiger. In Leopard, I'm able to close Safari, reopen it when CS3 is done installing and choose "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" from the History menu. I take issue with the fact that I've installed everything from Handbrake to Final Cut Studio and programs that modify the Library files used by Safari directly and I've not had to close it until installing CS3. Adobe is a company with a market cap of over $26 billion dollars, you'd think they could hire a coder or two to figure out a way to install their crap without having to close Safari.

So after about half an hour waiting for my four programs to install, I opened up my Applications Stack to see it completely filled with 10 new folders for the 4 applications that I installed. Look, I understand that Adobe is a important company in the media world, their formats are standards and they deserve the success that they've had, however, they're getting more and more arrogant. I'm going to defer to AppleInsider on this one. They were talking about how awesome the new Dock and Stacks are:

The only downside is that some developers insist of putting their applications into a folder of junk and then name their apps after themselves, notably Adobe and Microsoft. Dear Adobe, I know you make Photoshop. Don't call my Photoshop "Adobe Photoshop," and please don't stuff it inside an "Adobe Photoshop" folder. Anyone who knows how to transverse folders to install a plugin can probably also handle doing a Show Package Contents. Just give me a Photoshop icon. We're Mac users, remember? We don't need a Programs Folder so messed up that the operating system warns us not to peruse it, as Windows does, expecting that we set up a parallel bunch of icons hidden away in the Start Menu's program manager just to launch apps.

As well, I'd add all of the other folders that have been added in without my selecting them. I don't need Bridge, I don't need Stock Photos and your help system should be build in like every other app on OS X. This along with the fact that it took Adobe 18 months after Intel Macs were released to come out with a Universal Binary version. The Intel transition was announced in June 2005 from what I understand of the process, if a program was written in Cocoa it simply needed to be recompiled to make it a Universal application. This wasn't something that was sprung on developers, they knew about it for a while. The 2 years total it took for a Universal CS3 is ridiculous. ...Well, at least they're not Microsoft, trying to get their shit together for an update to their 4 year old version of Office:Mac while Apple is taking the wind out of their sails with iWork '08.

I mentioned Leopard earlier and it's nothing short of aweseome. While there's not huge differences in the OS, there's a lot of refinement and little things that make it great. I noticed one in particular today while emailing back and forth with my mother. She mentioned "tomorrow night" in the body of the email and when i scrolled over it, there was an outline and this contextual menu.

Like I said...little things. Also, I can no longer live without Spaces which is why I'll be buying Leopard on the first day it comes out.

Wow...If you're still with me, I think this may be my first marathon post. Congratulations to me!

Currently playing in iTunes: Kodo - Inside the Sun Remix by Yoshida Brothers (the music from the Wii commercials)

I'm a loser, baby...

I've come to two realizations:

1. I use the ellipsis [...] way too much.
I don't know how or when I first came around to using said punctuation, however, I use it at least once per post and multiple times per instant messaging conversation.

2. I need a hobby.
Let's be honest. I don't do too much. I need to find something to occupy my time other than downloading and listening to music. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.


Currently playing in iTunes: Loser by Beck

Just. Stop.

...Please.

I was looking through my Facebook NewsFeed and saw that my friend Stephan had befriended someone named Mary. Out of curiosity, I opened the link to Mary's profile. What I saw made me vomit:

50 applications.
50.
50!
What the hell do you need with 50 applets? Would you like to see what mine looks like?

I have seven. Only one is added from Facebook Platform: an Arrested Development quote box. I'll admit that I may have had up to about 10 applications at one time but then I figured out that there's no point to them, they slow down the site and they're making Facebook into nothing more than a MySpace with a consistent color scheme. All told, the crap that this girl had added to her profile totaled roughly 20,500 vertical pixels. That's 15 printed pages. That's just outrageous. You don't need three travel applications or two(!) superlatives applications. Furthermore, it shouldn't take me more than about 4 seconds to find your wall (This girl's was hidden at around the middle of her profile).

People were afraid of Facebook becoming MySpace Junior when they opened it up for everyone to register. They were wrong. Platform was what made Facebook into MySpace when it allowed people to add tons of crap to an otherwise perfectly fine profile.

In other news, Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) just ran onto the Colbert Report and gave him a sword.

Currently playing in iTunes: Blackbird by Evan Rachel Wood

Moving on up... (Update: ...Or not.)

I'm moving this thing over to wordpress...I hear it's pretty good.

Update: After reading a little about wordpress and what its limitations are, I'll be staying with blogger.

True patriotism

It's rare that I use this blog (very rarely, in fact) , perhaps more rarely than I should. Something though, has riled me up to the point to actually make a post (!!). Here it is:

Fox News anchor Jon Gibson recently mocked Jon Stewart over the sincerity of his tears on air after September 11th. I'm not sure about anyone else or their opinions on Fox News/Jon Stewart/Whatever; I'm sure you can tell my opinions on everything from the list of my groups on Facebook. Regardless of political persuasion, it is inexcusable to question the sincerity of something that we all, as Americans were feeling that day and for weeks to come afterwards.

Like most people, I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001 when I heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. As a junior in high school, walking into school, I went into the library like I always did and saw that the librarians were watching TV, a strange occurrence indeed. Naturally, I wandered over to see what could possibly be tearing the librarians away from their ever so important librarian...ing. To my eternal horror and amazement, I saw the first tower on fire, smoke pouring out of the windows. At that point, reporters thought that it was an accident. About 90 minutes later, I came back to the library. The second tower was burning. What I saw didn't look good. I remember saying to the librarian, "That one looks like it's going to fall." Sure enough...

As the school day wore on, the details of this yet unprecedented attack on our country became more horrifying. Like everyone else, I was pissed. I was sad. I was afraid. The only particular reaction I remember was, "Holy shit!" The next day, I wanted to do something about that feeling, I wanted to drop out of school first chance I got and join the Army. Whoever did this, I wanted them to pay and I wanted to be part of those making them pay. Like the rash, young teenager I was (and still am, minus the teenager part) I wanted revenge. That was my way of dealing with the pain and confusion over what had happened to our way of life and country. Others dealt with it differently as they saw fit. I didn't question how they chose to do it, we all were feeling the same thing and we all knew it and whether you admitted to it or not, that day changed you. No one questioned that, no one had to. We were united.

Now, almost 7 years later, where are we? We are in an (arguably) unpopular war, bickering and arguing over withdrawal plans and wiretapping. We have pundits and partisans and hacks and the list goes on and on. We've lost our unity thanks to a few who feed off of hatred and bigotry.

One of the reasons why I'm joining the Army is that I want to make a difference in what I feel I've contributed in getting this country into. I want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan and help do what little I can to make the world a safer place (even if our presence there in the first place was what caused it to become less safe). I'm hoping that we can start to see past partisan politics and absolutism and start to make this world a safer and better place to live in.

For those who'd like to see Jon Stewart's monologue from the Daily Show after they returned to the air on September 21st, here it is.

>:-(

So sadly enough, I was at work and ended up being pretty bored. I thought to myself...what if I disconnected this ethernet cable and plugged it into my MacBook, would I be able to get a connection? Lo and behold, it worked and now I'm performing my normal jobly duties on my MacBook making me a much happier camper. The system that's used here at work is actually pretty pathetic. I'm not positive about the configuration of the server(s) but after using the workstations that they have for about a month, I'm positive that they can't handle the workload. That, along with the use of Windows Server 2003 makes a bad combination. So I just decided to bypass that system entirely and connect my MacBook. Long live Mac. :)

Huh?

Apparently I still have this thing...I didn't really even know that it existed in the first place. More to come in the next few days, I guess.