The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 385): Flying Monkeys, Indeed

Watched Weeds: Season 3 in the morning, and then took a walk to the house at #1GF!’s suggestion. Can someone please tell me what’s up with girls and going for walks? Maybe it’s a gal thing, because I don’t know of any guy who just goes out for a walk unless they’re too fat too run or trying to stop themselves from throwing things inside their houses. Maybe I liked walking at one time, but once I turned three and discovered jumping, walking hasn’t really been a source of fun for me.

Because I had nothing to do, I ended up going on the walk with #1GF!, but as a man, I don’t believe that I’m allowed to gain any health benefits from any activity where there isn’t enough pain to justify a “BOOYAH!”. I made sure to undo any health benefits that may have accrued by making sure that we walked all the way to the grocery store so that I could buy cookies. #1GF! didn’t seem to mind because, well, like I said: girls like walks.

As we were walking on what I will now refer to as our “cookie quest”, a pre-teen walked by and yelled out “flying monkeys!”, thinking that she would freak us out with her random behavior. All she ended up doing was making me think, “Shit. I’ve finally reached the age where kids think that random, non-threatening words will freak me out. Aaaand I’m taking a walk. Maybe I should stop into the hardware store and get some tennis balls for my walker.” It was not a proud, youthful moment to say the least.

We walked home and I sat on the couch eating cookies and waiting for either Murder, She Wrote, Matlock, or a Power Chair commercial to come on so that I could feel like people my age can still lead active and fulfilling lives.

Doo Wop was a specific sub-genre of R&B that was born on the street corners of the 1950′s when city kids went beyond simple harmonies of the 1940′s and began vocalizing sounds that were traditionally created by instruments. They inadvertently created an entirely new style called Doo Wop that would become a major force in popular music for over a decade. The genre had peaked in popularity by the early 1960′s, but its influence extended into the electric style of the early Motown sound through groups like the Four Tops, Temptations, Isley Brothers, and others.

I spent a couple of days researching Doo Wop bands for this list, and even though I eliminated a lot of borderline acts with a fairly strict interpretation of what Doo Wop is, I still ended up with over 130 tracks. There should be a good balance between classics and rarities, but I didn’t grow up in the 50′s, so if you notice any glaring omissions, be sure to drop me a comment.

You won’t find Little Jon & The Teen Tones in the mix (I faked the picture from an old Atlantic 45), but you can listen to the Doo Wop playlist by scrolling all the way to the left in the player below.

Enjoy!

It looks like Netflix has added around 226 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at a little over 5,000 on-demand movies.

Netflix must’ve made some sort of deal with Troma Studios this round because there were a ton of B-rated Troma films added to the Watch Instantly service. When you look at additions like The Toxic Avenger (1, 2, & 4, but not 3), Class of Nuke ‘Em High (2 & 3), Zombie Rednecks, Sugar Cookies, Tromeo And Juliet, Vegas In Space and other non-Troma, but B-rated films like Decampitated, G.I. Executioner, Dr. Hackinstein, and Microwave Massacre, it’s hard to see how this update wasn’t railroaded by a B-movie fanatic in the Netflix back office.

In addition to the B-movies, there were a few concert videos that were recorded in each band’s prime including G.G. Allin, Iggy & The Stooges, Dwarves, and Europe. If G. G. or Dwarves doesn’t end up making you want throw up, I’m sure that Europe performing “Carrie” and the “Final Countdown” in 1986 surely will.

The 226 additions and 11 deletions are listed below. If you see anything I might’ve forgotten to recommend (such as Advanced Krumping Techniques), be sure to drop them in the comments.

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (6)

I put together Better Blogroll to give WordPress users a lot more control over the way that WordPress handles and displays their blogrolls.

Version 2.8 was written in response to a user request for the inclusion of XFN data in the blogroll links. XFN stands for “XHTML Friends Network”, and it’s a way site owners can specify what type of relationship they have (such as friend, co-worker, neighbor) with the people they’re linking to. The format is built into the WordPress link manager, but I never included it in Better Blogroll because I didn’t think people used it.

If you specify XFN data in the WordPress links manager, Better Blogroll will now display it. If you don’t use XFN, your links will look the same as they did before. Because “nofollow” and XFN both use the rel tag, setting links to “nofollow” in the plugin will override XFN data.

If you’d like to know more about XFN in WordPress, check out the WordPress XFN page. For more information about Better Blogroll, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress Page.

Mom: You should’ve seen this cute Chinaman that I saw the other day.

Daughter: Ma, you can’t say Chinaman. No one says that anymore.

Mom: What? Well, what am I supposed to say?

Daughter: I dunno. Asian.

Mom: GEISHAN? Oh, come on now.

Daughter: Aaaaasian.

Mom: Well, what’s wrong with Chinaman?

Daughter: It’s like Negro. No one says that anymore.

Mom: Since when don’t people say Negro?

Daughter: Oh, a long time, Ma.

Mom: Well, what am I supposed to call them, then?

Daughter: Black or African American, I think.

Mom: African American? They get TWO names?

Daughter: Yes, Ma.

Mom: Two names. What Am I then?

Daughter: You’re still white, Ma.

[Indian waiter delivers food and walks off]

Mom: Is he a Geishan? Because he looks black to me.

Daughter: Oh, dear lord.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 378): Father’s Day

#1GF! and I went to breakfast with my parents, and then a furniture store, Wal-Mart and the cemetery. It was Father’s day, and I noticed a young mom and her two young children standing over a newly dug military grave. The kids were only about two and five, so I hoped that this wasn’t the only way that their family could be together on Father’s Day.

When we got home, we were tired from running around, so I made some iced tea with three tea bags, some hot water, and some ice. It made me think that about the powdered iced tea mix that people buy. It seemed like the perfect example of how America constantly looks for ways to simplify already simple things and ends up making them more complicated. Iced tea mix takes about ten minutes to make, and we’ve demanded that it be reduced to ten seconds, no matter how many chemicals we have to ingest to get there. The only plausible reason why instant iced tea exists is so that someone can sell you something you didn’t know you needed.

Speaking of things we don’t need, I uninstalled Comodo Firewall and went back to Zone Alarm because the Comodo refused to take my exclusions and it was interfering with #1GF!’s DVR. One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t mess with a lady’s DVR. Once everything was back up and running, we ended up sitting on the couch and watching taped shows until bed.

I mentioned a couple of years ago that there was a crazy bird in the area that imitated the sound of a car alarm. Well, it seems that the bird is back because #1GF! found this gem in our small town police log:

Sunday: 12:23 a.m. caller reports a car alarm sounding and this is an ongoing problem. Officers detailed report only sounds are chirping birds. Female called again and states this is an electronic alarm that sounds like birds and requests that the officers check again. Officer advised and reports this is a bird in a tree.

Have you ever heard birds imitate car alarms in your area?

After some close trimming, beard #25 from my beard page, the Rap Industry Standard is finally complete. The only problem is that #1GF! and I have different opinions on which picture should be added to the beard page.

Even though I told #1GF! that you people are really out of your minds, she still suggested that the tie be broken by the readers. Should “Douche Daddy”, the smooth pimp rapper, or “MC Douchy McDouche”, the rapper hardened on the mean streets of suburbia be added as the official Rap Industry Standard photo?

Cast your vote, and let everyone know which choice sucks the least in the comments. Ya heard?

Which photo should be added as the official Rap Industry Standard?

• Three: 35%
• Two: 21%
• Five: 19%
• One: 12%
• Six: 9%
• Four: 3%

Total Votes: 492
Started: Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Closed: Tuesday, 22 July 2008

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 371): Virtual Vs Actual Priorities

After eating breakfast and watching MadTV, I spent the entire day writing Life Of Riley Week 53 while #1GF! cleaned out her closet. I think that my priorities might be really messed up.

Monday (Day 372): Umbrellas And Boxes

#1GF! and I started the day by going over to the house and having a 90 minute talk with the contractor about all the issues that we have with the way things are going. It was 90 degrees and humid, which should’ve added to the frustration, but everything went really well. I only dropped four f bombs and didn’t use them directed at anyone. The contractor seemed to understand where we were coming from and said that he’d take steps to get things moving faster and in the right direction.

#1GF! headed off to work to save corporate America, and I drove up to the barber shop to get a help solve the world’s problems. I think we had the gas problem solved by the time my haircut was done, but no one wrote down the solution, leaving the world to continue to suffer at the pump.

Brad Sucks – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing (indie): I do my best to thank people who link to me, so while tracking down the person who posted my beard quest to In4mador, I found that the poster had a website featuring his band, “Brad Sucks”. Because there is an armada of unknown bands that use the internet as a deep water dumping ground for cheaply produced musical trash, I can tell you that I wasn’t very excited about the possibility of wading into the auditory garbage pile that day. The guy did link to me, so even though I sort of sighed like “here we go again” when I thought about pushing play, I found it impossible to pass over an artist with such a self-deprecating, smirk inducing name, without at least giving his album a courtesy listen.

After I got through once, I found that it had the same appeal the second and third time through. My hair is too short and my pants are too high for me to consider myself to be an indie fan, but the way I Don’t Know What I’m Doing floats around an indie pop core instead of cutting through the center makes this an indie album for people who aren’t into indie. Some of the album has an acoustic singer/songwriter or even pop-rock feel, while tracks like “Making me nervous” and “Overreacting” have a definitely electronic base. It’s so varied that you never feel like you’re being sucked into another indie trap that will end up at the bottom of that pile of CD’s that you’ve been meaning to sell.

Every other Thursday or so, I comb through the additions to the Netflix Watch Instantly service and throw out a few recommendations on what I think might be interesting to watch. Last quarter, I estimated that there were about 3500 movies available for instant viewing.

Netflix must be hard at work, because it looks as if there are now approximately 4800 movies available on the service, which is a whopping 30% increase in three months. I’m almost positive that there are few movies missing, but this is the closest that I could get without insider access to the Netflix database.

Enjoy!

#

‘Til the River Runs Clear
…And Justice for All
1 Giant Leap
10 Minute Solution: Carb Burner
10 Minute Solution: Fat Blasting Dance Mix
10 Minute Solution: Kickbox Bootcamp
10 Minute Solution: Rapid Results Pilates

When you use Firefox’s built in search bar, the default behavior is for the search results to be returned in your current tab. This is fine for most people, but for bloggers, it can mean that the search results overwrite something long and unsaved that the back button can’t salvage.

If you have this issue, you can eliminate it by forcing search results to open in a new tab. It’s like a built in safety mechanism for absent-minded bloggers, and it’s really easy to implement through a simple change to the Firefox configuration page.

1. Open a new tab and type about:config into your browser’s address bar as if you were trying to go to a web page. If you’ve never seen the configuration page before, this is where you can make all the custom tweaks that can make Firefox into your own personal browsing machine.
2. There are a lot of properties, so type browser.search.openintab into the filter box to filter out everything except the property that we’re going to modify.
3. Double click anywhere on the line that shows up, and the line will became bold and the value will be set to true.

That’s it. Modifications to about:config are instantaneous, so you will no longer have to worry about losing whatever you’re working on to search results. If you ever give up blogging and want search results to show up in the current tab, just find and double click the property again to set it back to false.

Attack of the Buggles!: Use your mouse to move around the screen touching blue boxes and avoiding red buggles. Every time you touch a box, you collect the points, and another red buggle appears on the screen.

Each blue box starts at 10 points, but with every passing second, the box’s value drops and your size increases, making speed as important as accuracy. Every 20 boxes, you get a little relief in the form of a green buggle, which gives you a small amount of time to destroy some of the red buggles that inevitably fill up the screen.

I’ve played a few variations of this game before (such as Ballo), but I think the added time pressure makes this game a lot more more fun than its peers.

My best score was 620. Post your high scores in the comments.

Enjoy!

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 364): The Old, Angry Man

I woke up groggy and turned on the radio, which was set to the oldies channel because even though my in-car entertainment might be death metal, when I turn on the radio lately, I happily listen to the oldies. The DJ started a monologue about “Remember the cartoons you watched as a kid?” and I was groggily nodding along and saying things like “Ha, Jabberjaws” or “I hate smurfs” to no one in particular when it hit me: The DJ wasn’t talking about old cartoons of the 50′s. This guy on the oldies channel was talking about cartoons from my childhood.

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, there. Sure, I remember The Jackson 5ive, The Herculoids, Thundar The Barbarian, Top Cat, Grape Ape, Hong Kong Phooey, Speed Buggy, and the friggin’ Wonder Twins, but I’m not old, man. Oldies stations are supposed to talk about stuff that old people enjoy, like, I dunno, pudding or something. They are not supposed to communicate with me directly because I’m not their target audience. Right?

Just as I was shaking my head at the station’s audacity, “Photograph” by Def Leppard came on, and I said something like “Yea, bitches. ROCK! Who’s old now?” #1GF! thought it was a good time to point out that I hadn’t changed the channel and was still listening to the oldies station. Damn hell crap. Are you telling me that when me and my mullet-wearing friends were in the basement listening to Pyromania on cassette on a boombox and wondering what “Onta Glieben glauben Globen” meant, most 25 year olds weren’t born yet? Fuuuck me. Wear all the big shorts and t-shirts you want, but when the oldies channel is talking directly to you, you might want to start stocking up on pudding and Depends.

Shotgun CD reviews are short reviews on CDs that you can usually pick up for $10 or less. For further explanation, check the FAQ

Tipsy – Trip Tease (dj): Trip Tease is an oddity by a San Francisco DJ outfit that uses space age pop as a basis for their samples. It seems like a novel concept, but when it was released in 1996, there were a fair number of people doing exactly the same thing because of an easy listening and lounge revival. The only other album I can remember in this style from the time was an album called Sacrebleu by Dimitri From Paris, which I. Fucking. Hated. That album shut me off from the style because it wasn’t done right. This one is. If you were ever into space age pop, it’s pretty cool to hear all the different samples mixed together coherently. If you weren’t ever into space age pop, it may not hold the same interest without the mental gymnastics of trying to recognize the samples as they swim by. Is it an interesting oddity to have in your collection? Yes, definitely. Would you take it to a desert island with you if you could only take 25 albums? Probably not, but it’s put together really well for both turntablist and space age pop fans who are looking for something a little different. B

Antonio Carlos Jobim – Wave (bossa nova): You may not recognize Jobim by name, but almost everyone is familiar with a little bossa nova tune called “The Girl From Ipanema” that took the world by storm when Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto recorded it on their album Getz/Gilberto in 1964. Jobim not only wrote the music for that tune, but he’s credited with writing most of the songs on that album. Jobim was a native of Rio de Janeiro and the sleepy, smooth sounds of bossa nova were his playground. For many, Wave might remind you of being trapped in an elevator in 1967, but to me, it’s an awesomely relaxing ride that transports me to a place where I’m smoking a pipe and looking out over the city from behind the plate glass of my wall-sized picture window. With one hand in the pocket of my smoking jacket, I wonder who the beautiful woman is swimming downstairs in my pool, but I can’t be bothered to investigate because women like that tend to only lead to more questions… B+

The Toothbrush is a mustache that was originally made famous by Charlie Chaplin, but it’s so far out of use today that I didn’t think to include it in my beard quest. After getting a lot of e-mail pointing out my omission, I had to figure out a way to include it that would naturally imply a reference to Chaplin and not make me look like one of history’s biggest douches.

I planted the Toothbrush in the list so that it changed when the mouse passed over it, and waited for #1GF! to find it. Like a lot of people, she never did.

Once I pointed out the mouseover to her, she suggested that it needed its own post in case other people missed it, too. Even though it’s a pretty lame to point out your own easter eggs, I figured that revealing this picture should keep me out of corporate offices everywhere and let me stay home and write forever.

I mentioned yesterday how you can add an list to your sidebar composed of all the people that are linking to you, but didn’t mention that, by default, all the links are “dofollow”. Because there is no approval process for links included in an RSS feed, some people prefer to set the links to “nofollow” so that Google is aware that you do not directly endorse every link that appears.

The RSS widget doesn’t include the option to set links to nofollow, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t add it. This is going to require a hack to one of the WordPress core files, widgets.php, which you can find in your wp-includes directory. Because you’re hacking a core file, you will lose these changes every time you upgrade WordPress.

Ready for a little WordPress hackin’? Well, let’s get to it.

I’ve mentioned before that I do my best to give a little something back to people who link to me, but during my recent flood of traffic, I found that sifting through incoming links would eat entire days. I won’t pretend that I minded, but I wondered if there was a more automated method of thanking linkers for people who have jobs that get in the way of spending eight hours a day dedicated to their blogs. Well, there is, and it’s really easy to implement.

If you’re running WordPress, you have probably seen the “Incoming Links” panel on your dashboard that lists people who are linking to you. With WordPress 2.3 and above, that data is simply an RSS feed from Google blogs. Because that same RSS feed can be added to your sidebar through an RSS widget, giving a link back to people who link to you is a snap.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 357): 11,000 Visitors

When I got up to check my stats, I had just been brought up after being taken down for 24 hours due to going over my monthly bandwidth limit. I estimate that I missed about 18,000 visitors in that time period, but I don’t blame my host. I agreed to a bandwidth limit when I signed up, and I had gone over it. It was as simple as that. I had never come close to my 100 Gb limit before, so I never thought to check my usage regularly. If I was lucky enough to have this happen again, I told myself that I’d have to keep a better eye on things.

We filled the day with looking for lights and other house stuff, but it seemed like we should’ve been doing something fun because the weather was so nice. I’m starting to think that filling time with errands is the Yankee way.

Monday (Day 358): 16,000 Visitors Today

We got up early because #1GF! wanted to go out for a walk. I’m not much of a walker, but I had nothing planned, so I figured I should go. It was early and cold, so I threw on sweat pants, not thinking that we would be out too long. After a couple of hours of wandering our town, we decided to stop in to a local restaurant to refuel. We sat at the counter, which I like to do at breakfast time, and got a quick meal.

From there, we walked to the house because #1GF! can’t come within a half mile of the place without thinking of some reason to visit it. I don’t like to visit because I always seem to pick out something wrong, but I went anyway. Once she got her fill, we walked on and on, checking out new houses that were being built and trying to imagine what it must be like to live in different locations. After about four hours of this, I was sweating my nuts off, and itching to get home and into some shorts.

As soon as we walked in the door, we picked up a message from some friends who were coming down to the beach and wanted us to go along. We headed down to meet them for a few hours on the sand. The beach was packed thanks to the nice weather, and we had a group of girls next to us who really wanted us to be able to hear the new Madonna CD. As a male, I have the innate ability to ignore almost anything that isn’t shaped like boobs, so tuning out the music wasn’t really a problem for me. But seriously? Madonna? Even I know that Madonna can’t be hip, and you can tell I’m lame by the way I wear my shorts. Dear girls, U R lame.

Anyway. Our friends’ teenage daughter showed up to say hello, and she’s always fun. She’s a nice kid, and I’m not making fun, but the teenage mind is such a foreign experience to me that I almost always end up shaking my head and laughing. My favorite quote from that conversation was that “Girls don’t like boys who write,” which everyone found amusing, considering that’s all I do all day. She may be right. Maybe girls don’t like boys who write. As long as no one tells #1GF! that I write all day, instead of riding around on a motorcycle, things should work out fine.

When Mike sent over an old commercial for a weird kids’ toy called the Swing Wing, my first thought was, “Monkey? check. Elephant? check. Soundtrack? Meh. If this toy only had a big name band doing its jingle, it could’ve been as big a fad for the head as hula hoop was for the waist.”

It didn’t, so it wasn’t, but thanks to some creative individuals out there, the Swing Wing may still have a chance at catching on with pre-headbangers, tiny hustlers, and kids who are on the “E”. Or the “X”. Or whatever the kids are ingesting that makes them swing around glow sticks these days.

The Swing Wing Thrash Remix (featuring Slayer)

It looks like Netflix has added around 111 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at a little over 4500 movies. I’ve listed 6 that stand out, and the other 111 additions and 22 deletions are listed below.

This is a much smaller addition than we’ve gotten used to, and the trend to add more crappy TV shows continues. Sure, I might think it’s cool that a season of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Incredible Hulk were added, but will I really sit down and watch them? Probably not. I’m even less likely to sit through the additional season of Simon & Simon, and the four additional seasons of both Coach and Dragnet.

I can understand that there are many different tastes that Netflix is trying to serve, but it’s awe inspiring that someone actually sat down and made the decision to add six full seasons of Kate and Allie. And if that didn’t drag down the quality of the offerings enough, a season of Immortal also got added. What? You say you don’t remember Lorenzo Lamas as demon fighter Raphael Cain? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The show was so good that it was canceled after one season.

Hey, at least the movie additions were a little more interesting. They not only brought back District B-13, but they sneaked in Kama Sutra, which is one of those “instructional” sex videos. Meow. Netflix, I had no idea you were such a dirty bird.

As always, if I miss something worthwhile, be sure to drop it in the comments…

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (6)

Some of the people that have been stopping in to check out my quest for every beard type have mentioned that they are incapable of ever knowing the macho feeling that comes with wearing a full beard. For those folks, there is now a flash application called Mustachr that allows you to add over 90 types of facial hair to any photo. The only drawback is that you need an account to save anything, but there’s nothing stopping you from using [Alt] PrintScreen to copy and paste your creation into your favorite art program.

Need Proof of Awesomeness?

This was me as a kid. If I had any idea what kind of ass kicking comes with plaid shirts, thick glasses, and lunch bags with my name on them, I might’ve posted a Mustachr-ized picture on my Myspace page that looked so ultra-badass that it would’ve deterred a lot of scraps in the school yard.

Oh yea. When I was a kid, there was no Myspace. Hell, Prodigy wasn’t even though of yet. GI Joe had a beard and pong was blowing everybody’s minds with the sheer awesomeness of two lines and a bouncing square. We had no internet, and no Mustachr. If I did though, you can bet that I would have added a few pics like these:

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 350): Too Much Choice, Not Enough Wins

It was a nice day out, so we got out of the house with no particular plan in mind. We went to look at a Prius because we wanted to get it crossed off my list, but the dealer had sold out of them and was quoting the sticker price as reasonable. He also said that he was sure that gas would be at $6 per gallon in a few months. Hooray for car dealers.

We decided to switch gears and try to pick out some furniture, but we couldn’t find anything that we agreed on. It was a pretty uneventful walk through a furniture store, although I did get caught by a salesperson when I was fiddling around with the buttons on a recliner and then had to explain that I didn’t want help, I just can’t help playing with buttons and switches when they seem harmless.

Because we had so little success, we decided to switch gears again and try to pick out paint. After an hour in the paint store, we now have 423 shades of blue, 237 shades of red, and 136 shades of green at our apartment to decide on. This is the problem with America. It will take me a week to sift through various shades of blue, but I can only choose two people to lead the country who are essentially cut from the same sociopathic mold. There is too much choice where it doesn’t matter and too little where it should.

We went to dinner at our local dinner haunt, and when we got home, I kicked up Sketchup to try to get an idea of what paint would look like. It was then that I realized that not only have I designed a house that is incapable of hosting a decent media room, but my sectional is probably not going to fit unless we decide to use it as a bed.

My pen certainly didn’t run dry making marks in the win column. To take my mind off of all the decisions that were still unmade, I decided to learn “I pity the fools” in sign language. I can’t imagine it being useful, but I think it’s fun to learn useless things in other languages as long as they don’t involve past or future tenses.

Monday (Day 351): Lost to History

I forgot to take my notebook with me when I drove to the North Shore to look at a piece of granite, and completely forgot to record anything about the day. All I remember is that I drove an hour and a half for a two minute look at a piece of granite and thought that something was going wrong with my car because the High On Fire disc I bought plays a low thundering tone for the first minute of the disc.

Shotgun CD reviews are short reviews on CDs that you can usually pick up for $10 or less. For further explanation, check the FAQ

Valient Thorr – Legend of the World (rock): This, my friends, is what I have been looking for: something with enough driving intensity to trick me into playing air guitar in places that are a little too public for air guitar. This 2006 release from Valient Thorr is similar to the straight rock of the Hellacopters in some respects, but with a more driving, and purely American sound. Thanks to old school rock breakdowns that drag you down like a giant squid and then body slam you onto the shore when you resurface, the dynamic power of this album has made it one that I continually return to. If the energy of this album doesn’t get your blood pumping, then corporate America has dried your bones and left you for dead. This is denim jacket with no sleeves and a patch on the back rock n’ fucking roll. I’m not even going to mention that the band supports the National Kidney Foundation or that they have a collection of the baddest ass beards that I’ve ever seen in one band. Whoops. Well, they do. ROCK. A-

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – 100 Days, 100 Nights (soul): Even though this album was released at the end of 2007, it has the feel of an album that should’ve been released 40 years prior. This is the third release from the queen of New York neo-soul, and it’s a living museum that even a hardcore Motown fan would have a hard time believing was made so recently. I can’t help feeling like I should be listening to this on a transistor radio while laying on a beach blanket on a warm summer day when gas was low and hemlines were high. It has that easy, grooving feel of the summer beach day when all of what you’re feeling is expressed in your smile. For a kid raised on Motown, it doesn’t get much better. This is just that good. A-

PongOut: If you’ve played either Pong or Breakout at any point in the recent past, you know that they offer as much fun and challenge as a hot round of mud wrestling at the senior center when everyone is full of tapioca and getting ready for their Sunday afternoon naps.

Where PongOut makes things interesting is that you have to play both games on a split screen at the same time. You move the mouse horizontally to control the breakout paddle, and vertically to control the pong paddle. It’s like wrestling two seniors at once: You don’t know why it’s challenging or appealing, but strangely, you keep going back for more.

When I play, I tend to suddenly and inexplicably stop paying attention to one of the sides and lose a couple of lives before I realize what’s going on, so the best I’ve been able to do is 11,035. The only essential trick to doing well in this game is knowing that pressing ‘M’ will mute the music.

Enjoy!

Over the last week, you may have noticed that the comments on this site now have little pictures next to them. Have you been wondering what they are? Those are gravatars from Gravatar.com. A gravatar (or globally recognized avatar) is simply a picture that follows a commenter around from site to site when they leave comments.

Why Would You Want That?

A picture is worth a thousand words, really. As a commenter, having gravatar allows you to create a more recognizable online identity that spans across sites. As a site owner, allowing a commenter to have a picture next to their comment makes them infinitely more recognizable when you run across them in your surfing. Unfortunately, gravatars only show up on sites that have gravatar support enabled.

Since Gravatar.com is run by Automattic, the same company that runs WordPress, gravatar.com support was rolled into WordPress 2.5. If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add support for gravatars by adding a few lines of code to your current WordPress theme. If this is something you’d like to do, the complete instructions are below.

If you’ve ever encountered my lack of fashion sense in the real world, you know that I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with not looking like you stepped out of a magazine, but in order to learn how to retouch photos with the GIMP, I’ve had to pick someone to practice on. Because they are really easy to find, I figured that I’d try to enhance some of those pictures of celebrities when they get caught looking like the rest of us.

Here’s a picture of Alicia Silverstone that I retouched. To see the original from Top Socialite’s Celebrities Without Makeup Page, hover your mouse over the picture

I’m no pro and Ms. Silverstone can afford way better retouchers, so I gave up with a “good enough” before I wasted too many hours on it. I’m trying to learn how to retouch things while preserving natural skin texture, but the original photo was a little too pixelated to get any real detail out of even if I had the skill. You can see where I gave up near the hairline, but I think the eyes, eyebrow, and that little bit of hair over the ear show that I’m making progress.

Can You Help Me Out?

Retouching celebrity pictures feels pointless because it’s unlikely that they would ever see the results or care if they did. If I know that someone is going to see the result, I’m more likely to spend time on it, so I’d like to ask a little favor:

If you have a photo that you would let me take a shot at retouching, I would really appreciate the practice.

This is free, and the worse the photo, the better the practice. I know it might be embarrassing for some of you to send me bad pictures of yourself, but I wouldn’t think of putting the results on my site without your permission because I respect your privacy and recognize you as the owner of your pictures. You would be doing me a big favor by helping me to learn how to enhance photos, and hopefully you’ll end up with a picture that you really like.

If you’re game, drop me a comment or use my contact page. The best photos to send are the ones where you think, “This would be a great picture if only [insert issue here].”

And you know that I think your fine just the way you are.

Thanks for your help.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 343): Eat The Rich, Not the Chocolate

I woke up tired, so I stayed in bed and listened to a musical tribute to Mother’s Day on the oldies station. Because I’m used to putting together 45 song Finetune playlists, I felt a little ripped off when the tribute was only seven or eight songs long. I felt superior for a minute, until I realized that the DJ on the radio had a job that paid him to play seven songs, and I was getting paid zippo for laying there listening. I dragged my ass out of bed, and #1GF! and I met my parents for breakfast at at a local restaurant that #1GF! and I used to be regulars at. We hadn’t been there in a couple of yeas, but it was nice to talk to the host again.

After we left, we went to a park to take a walk. When we were leaving, a guy in a Mercedes started tailgating us. It was a small, neighborhood road, so #1GF! pulled over and waved him by. The guy crossed the yellow line, and as he passed, I could see his spiky hair, sunglasses, and one of those golf shirts where the collar is a different color than the shirt. He’s had the gut of a guy who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since high school, but that douchetastic look of a guy who thinks that whatever power he has in his workplace transfers to the outside world. As he passed by, he yelled something unintelligible into #1GF!’s window followed by “FUCKIN’ BITCH!”

Since she had actually pulled over to let the guy by, I gave #1GF! a look like “what the fuck is going on?” and gave the guy a smiling, but very long one finger salute out of the windshield. Because I wasn’t sure if it was aggravating him, I stuck my arm was out of my window way past the elbow. He jammed on his brakes as if he was getting out of the car.

People who know me know that I’m the furthest thing from a violent guy. I’m a firm believer in “live and let live” and actually go out of my way not to offend anyone, but fuck you if I think I’m backing down from anything when I feel threatened. Within seconds of both cars being stopped, my seatbelt was off and I was going for the door, and #1GF! was going for the locks and saying “Nonononono.”

I was a city mouse who was raised on soul. #1GF! was a country mouse, and no matter how much she denies it, she was raised on both kinds of music: Country and Western.

#1GF! might deny her musical roots, but classic country has earned a special place in my CD rack. When I’m slow on the draw and I need somethin’ to chaw, it’s not the tight pants wearin’, goatee sportin’, WWF lovin’ country of today that I’m after. It’s the classics: yesteryear’s harmonies of heartbreak and melodies of melancholy are what I need to get me back in the saddle.

If you’re ten gallon hat is feeling five gallons flat, click the little green button below.

Enjoy!

Warning: Before listening to this playlist, check with your doctor if you have a history of alcoholism, depression, or bleeding in the brain from a head injury. If you have any of these conditions, you may not be able to use this playlist, or you may need to adjust your dosage accordingly. If after listening to this playlist you experience tearing of the eyes, consult a physician immediately because you may be suffering from a rare, but serious side effect as a result of very specific type of heart ailment.