It's almost two here, and I really should be in bed, but I was searching for information on a Cisco Catalyst switch and stumbled on this guy's site. It's truly weird; Cisco information disguised in the form of celebrity interviews. (borderline NSFW) Having said that, it's good info and it does make a rather dry topic more interesting.

I haven't been much of a blogger lately, and I apologize for that.

So a quick recap of the week. Last Monday I wrecked my bike; I hit a curb wrong and the front rim folded up and left my skittering off of the sidewalk. The wheel was a total loss; I bought a new one and put my bike back together in time to go out on another ride.

Tuesday and Thursday brought band practice. We're recording another song, called "Mindgames" but we haven't got a take that we're happy with yet, so we're going to try again tomorrow.

First off, let me say that the house party on Saturday was excellent. Tons of people showed up; we played three and a half sets, and it seemed like everyone was having a pretty good time. We quickly killed the first keg, followed by the second one rolling in sometime in the middle of our second set. The P.A. sounded very good and the block construction kept the outside noise down, resulting in zero police visits. I got home sometime around five in the morning; kudos go out to Ted, his sister, and Iso for throwing such a good party.

Pigeon plays tonight at Ted's house party....and I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be a good time. Several friends from the area are coming to see us, and my friend Bill is coming in from Las Vegas.

The weather here has been suprisingly mild the last few days. I'm hoping it will hold out until tomorrow, and then I'm going to try and summit Usery Mountain again with some friends in tow.

I haven't been in much of a blogging spirit lately....so I apologize for the week long delay. Stuff *has* been going on...I've been keeping busy.

On Wednesday, I managed to accomplish something that I haven't been able to do in years....to get Wine running. I ran Internet Exploder on my GNOME desktop, and while a few of you might scoff at why I'd choose to run a browser I often mock, I assure you that my reason was pragmatic. USAA, my insurance company, has a website that only renders correctly in IE, and I wanted to be able to pay my bills at home if needed (I don't have a Windows machine at home). Additionally, I want to be able to run Outlook on my work desktop natively, so that I can shut down VMWare. Wine has really come along in the last few years, and probably the efforts of transgaming and Codeweavers have helped. Thus far I haven't been able to get the Office installer to run correctly; the files install mostly, but the installer bombs when it tries to create shortcuts for various items. I'm sure it's something dumb that I'm missing, as others have had success.

Another weekend down....can't say that I did too much. Neil and I washed and waxed my car, and I helped him out with some minor plumbing repair. Hung out at the Monastery for an hour or so and watched Ted and friends play volleyball, followed by a spirited discussion afterwards that featured cartoons and sex.

I bought "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" on Friday, so I'm building up the Kevin Smith collection a bit.

With the hot weather approaching, I've been pouting a little bit on Phoenix. But yesterday, I read Amy Silverman's article in the Phoenix New Times as to why she loves Phoenix. It sort of inspired me to write a top five list on what I love about Phoenix.

Five reasons I (sorta) love Phoenix:

• Jobs     You can get a job here. One that doesn't suck...and as much as I love Seattle, Phoenix is the hands-down winner here.
• Decently maintained roads     After seven years of driving on the I-5 in Seattle I just got used to driving in the left lane; not neccessarily to pass anyone, but because it was the newest lane and therefore didn't have grooves cut into it deep enough to lose a car in. Granted the 101 is no picnic during rush hour, but you can get around on the surface streets fairly decently if you need to at that time, and any other time of the day, the freeways are a joy to drive on.
• Metal Devastation     It is, after all, the world's most Satanic brutal store. In reality, it's a cool place to buy metal and punk stuff that is not Hot Topic.
• Filiberto's     It's ghetto Mexican food that rocks! It's also pretty cheap.
• Cool sunsets     Begrudingly, I do have to admit that they're pretty spectacular here.

I'm not really sure how to write this, but I want to get it off my chest, so here goes.

I ended up emailing Lisa last week about some tax crap related to the Navy screwing up my exit paperwork. She emailed back. Feeling cordial, I asked her if she wanted her old blog domain name. She mentioned that she was now using userlisa.com, so I popped over to check it out. I saw her mention a guy named Joe, apparently her boyfriend, and in spite of my better judgement, I decided to click over and check out his blog as well. I decided to check out his mentions of Lisa over the past year and found entries dated last August. It turns out that she visited him last year in Chicago, and the lowlife flew up to Seattle to visit Lisa. He talks about it here, in the August 30th post of his blog. And yes, this is *before* we filed for divorce. Or should I say, I got the paperwork together for my divorce, because, like many things in her miserable life, Lisa didn't really want to finish what she started.

My friend Jake forwarded this to me. It's an awesome Blaupunkt ad.

Birthday was fun. Seafood for dinner, followed by three races at F1 race factory. It was great. Thank you Neil for putting it together, and thank you Neil P, Jeremy, Mrinal and Kari for coming out.

Today I turn 29 years old. Seriously.

I think I'm going to get myself one of those big ass stuffed Linux Penguins and put it on my desk at work. As for later today, myself, Neil K., and some other friends are going out to F1 Race Factory and racing around in golf carts.

As usual, everything and nothing at all has been going on. On Friday I went out and saw some bands play at Jughead's, a local punk house. We went there with the idea of seeing Girl Kicks Boy play, and in the process, I got to see some other great bands. A local band called Hall 13 played. They were a trio and sounded great. It was their guitarist's birthday on Friday. Another good band was Cellphish, which is a ska band out of L.A. One thing that I'll say for the evening was the guitar player for Girl Kicks Boy is a pretty cool guy; I went up to talk to him and he actually remembered who I was from the show that we played with them.

Played another show with Pigeon yesterday. We were sans the lead guitar player, so it was a little rough, but we made it through. We played a few more aggressive songs (by Pigeon standards) and I was happy to do that. Both of the bands that followed us were good. Broken did an all-acoustic set since their drummer was unexpectedly out of town, and they were good. The last band, Girl Kicks Boy, was simply amazing though. They were agressive, had a great singer, and the rhythm section was tight! It was definitely a show where it was worth it to wait and see the headliner.

Today is 4-20. Just thought I'd point that out.

Spent the last few hours watching the network guy at work build a FrankenPIX. Turns out that Cisco's PIX firewall runs on x86 hardware. Using instructions from this page, you can make a PIX out of fairly common components; the only special one being a flash disk card. We zipped down to Fry's at lunch and bought a bling-bling case (I wish it had been around when I bought my case; it is *nice*. Total expenditure....about $600 with the bling equipment. Obviously, you could do it much cheaper if you wanted. (The usual disclaimer applies; this is not really very legitimate. It's not my FrankenPIX, though, so not really my problem...) He's not planning on using it for real stuff; he wanted to make a box available for training purposes without spending $10k on one, so that's all good.

I just saw a commercial for Firestone tires in which the
Andrettis tell us that nothing is more important than trust in your tire, and that's why we should buy Firestone tires.

Am I missing something here? This is the same company that knowingly made piss poor tires that were sold to car manufacturers, causing unprecedented numbers of rollover accidents, requiring a mandated recall to fix, and I should trust them? Well, fuck that. Unlike the mouth-breathers overtaking our country, I actually have a memory. Do the marketing people for Firestone really believe that people have forgotten about this? (What's really scary is that they may be right; TV has eliminated our memory and any identity that we might have had. Thanks Neil for helping me kick the nightly habit. Now I just watch TV infrequently...doing real shit is much more fun.)

Damn. I had a pretty good size blog entry and I was looking at something in Firefox and it crashed, yet again. I don't think this is neccessarily Firefox; I use it on Windows when I have to at work and it works great, but something about my FC3 system causes it to misbehave. I don't think that it's the hardware; this is the second system that I've had it on, and it screwed up yet again. Maybe it's a library or something. But it's seriously driving me crazy.

Another 23 mile bike ride today; there is an awesome bike path in Scottsdale. Neil and I rode from North Scottsdale to Tempe and back. No killer pace; just chill, with some BS'ing and stuff.

On the way home I started thinking about music. I've been resurrecting a lot of seldomly used music in the past few weeks, since I've been grabbing many of my CD's and ripping them to mp3 for iPodifcation.