Buy Yogi albums!
half-pint demigod (2005)
at Amazon.com
at CDBaby.com
Salve EP (2003)
at Amazon.com
at CDBaby.com
Any Raw Flesh? (2001)
at Amazon.com
at CDBaby.com
Sister Sites:
HalfZaftig.com
Wonky-Records.com
MySpace
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The whole Twitter feed
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| 30 August 2004 |
| You Have Bad Taste In Music |
| This guy is my new hero. |
| 1:08 PM |
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| 26 August 2004 |
| Once Around |
| So it finally happened today: I got to the end of my "Never Played" smart playlist on my iPod. That means that I have listened to all 9,000 songs on it at least once. The last song? "Lost In The K-Hole" by Chemical Brothers. I don't know if there's any empirical wisdom to be found in this fact. |
| 1:46 PM |
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| 17 August 2004 |
| Down With The Sickness |
| From the Now You Know Dept.: President Bush went to Redmond Town Center last Friday because he was staying at the Mariott hotel that was recently constructed there. I woke up Saturday morning feeling vaguely out of sorts, something I'd love to blame on the President, but I'm sure it wasn't his fault. By Sunday I was pretty feverish all day, and yesterday I got to work, then sat at my desk for five minutes before I got right back up again and headed home. I had a whopper of a headache, with cloudy vision and an inability to focus - sounds like another fever to me! Put the fact that I drove myself home in that condition out of your mind and you'll be happier, I promise (I took back roads and drove slowly). When I got home, I collapsed with the dachshunds in front of the television, where I sort of watched two episodes of 60 Minutes that had gotten recently TiVO'ed in between fitful bouts of sleep. Once Beta Girl got home, she produced the digital thermometer that pronounced me Officially With Fever: 102 degrees. There was much rejoicing, and delirious appreciation of Olympic events. Today I felt well enough to come to work, even though I still had a raised temp. It's pretty expensive for me to not work right now, and I figured I could be dizzy and loopy doing nothing at work as well as I could at home, and even get paid to boot! And wouldn't you know it, there was actual work waiting for me to do when I got here today! Being sick in the summer time somehow sucks more than it does in other seasons. I just sat here for 10 minutes trying to think of justifications for that last sentence, without any success. Aren't you glad you aren't paying me to be useful today? Of course if YOU were my boss, you'd probably give me paid sick leave. You're nice that way. |
| 3:40 PM |
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| 13 August 2004 |
| What's The Dealey |
| Apparently, the President is is in my neighborhood this evening. For some reason, I guess he was planning to go to the Redmond Town Center, as I was over there this afternoon at around 2 PM today - and they had it secured like you won't believe. Cops every 50 feet or so, glowering at We The Governed, Who Must Obviously Be Murderous Terrorists. Entrances to parking garages were blocked by large dump trucks. Even as I drove back to the Redmond campus where I work, there were cops festooning every overpass that the motorcade would have to pass under to get to the RTC. I wouldn't have picked the RTC to be this year's Dealey Plaza, but apparently somebody else thinks it could be. I just don't get why the President would go there, especially as he's scheduled to be attending a private dinner at some (no doubt) rich Republican's house in Medina (that's Bill Gates' neighborhood) tonight. Maybe he heard in advance that the food at the dinner wasn't going to be to his liking, and wanted to stop in for a bite at Claim Jumper. All around the barricades set up every ten feet at the RTC, people were crowding, hoping to get a look-see at our Fuhrer President, who I believe was not scheduled to arrive for several hours. You couldn't have gotten me to sit out there in the heat like that, even if he was promising to show up and announce that he was resigning the Presidency, effective immediately. I'd rather have seen that in air-conditioned comfort. |
| 8:08 PM |
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| 12 August 2004 |
| The Long Of It |
I've been entering short, terse little .Blog entries lately. I suppose that's because daily life has felt somewhat short and terse over the last few weeks. As goes the day-to-day, so goes the .Blog, yes? All right, then, let's talk for a bit. Pull up a chair, no, the one over there with the big cushion on it. Right. Much more comfortable now.
***
I am less than a month away from the end of this contract assignment I'm currently on at Bill Gates's Monopolist Software Warehouse. September 10th is my last day here. In some ways I'll miss it, I'm sure - I'm sure I'll miss days like today, where I am currently being paid to write these words to you. My lead is out for the rest of the week and I have nothing of substance to do other than show up, so that I can bill time, so that I can get paid. I suppose the honest thing to do would be to go to somebody in management and explain to them that I have nothing to do, and as a lapsed Catholic, I'm feeling guilty about it. You know what? It wouldn't work. My last contract here ended in 1999, and it was the same back then. You have occasional weeks of being busy and working until you can no longer see, then you'll go six weeks without doing anything of use, since your project can't move forward until that other Group finishes their piece, and then we've got to hear back from corporate about that Thing, you know, so.
Amazing that they've made so much money. But I have a suspicion that most really huge companies like this one are really badly managed. I'm just one instance of likely thousands where inefficient management is causing the Company to hemorrhage money. I don't even really feel guilt about it anymore (I was just saying before). Now, like everyone else, I just shrug and cash the checks every week. I hear there are places in the world where people have to work hard for their money. I guess I don't have one of those jobs.
***
Half Zaftig, my teenage rockin' guitar combo, remains on hiatus. I think I've written on this .Blog about putting them into that state in May. What I haven't written about here is that in July I made the executive decision to part ways with bassist Brian Timpe, who, in addition to playing in the band had been co-hosting the internet radio show I've been doing, Poultry Of The Damned. It's not polite to get into nitty-gritty details of a sensitive matter like this in public, other to acknowledge that it happened, and that I'm sorry about how the situation came down. The radio show may be a casualty of these developments, as it appears that Brian isn't interested in continuing his old role on it (for which he can hardly be blamed), so I'm currently having an inner dialog regarding whether I want to continue doing the show all by myself. It's a lot of work, for one thing, and one has to be willing to give up one's entire Sunday afternoon and evening to get each show made and uploaded, playlists compiled, and whatnot. Right now I'm leaning toward ending it, though there will be a new show this Sunday. After that one (#14) I'll take a week off and think about it. Regardless, I had a great time playing with Brian the last two years, and I really loved doing the radio show with him, and he's a fabulous guy, and I wish him well.
As for the other remaining folks in the band, both Lizzy Daymont and Pete Johnston are going to continue on with me. To be continued on that score. We've been talking a lot lately about how to get out there on the road and play shows that are far from here. Anyone got any ideas?
***
Back when I found out for sure that my current contract wouldn't extend past the end of September, I had planned to take the rest of the year off when it ended. That was before the phone rang and a company named Corbis was on the other end. They had a contract they wanted me to put my name on, and after having a lovely interview (really!) with them, and after they offered an absurd sum of money that goes with it, I said "yea, verily," and now I won't be taking the end of 2004 off after all. Even though my planned-for poverty won't be materializing, the irony is that I still won't be able to afford to get the band off hiatus much sooner than I originally planned, due to the way that billing/invoicing for my services to Corbis shakes out. I had really been looking forward to all that time off, honestly, and all the songwriting that would have happened during it, but I had not been looking forward to the accompanying abject poverty. Things should be looking really good for the artistic budget in 2005 as a result of taking the Corbis work, especially if it gets extended to a possible year (the initial term is six months). Right now, my expectation is that Corbis, if they are willing to give me all that money, is planning on keeping me busy, unlike my current employers. So workday .Blog entries are likely to be fewer and farther between. Just so you know.
***
Good gracious, what happened to all of the people at the old .Forum? I start up a brand-new one with great features and nobody deigns to use it? Well, Edo and Witty signed up at least. Come on, kids, let's get back to talking about nothing again! Maybe I need to come up with some starter threads.
***
I have just under 9,000 songs on my iPod currently. Right around when I finally finished getting it loaded up back in February or so, I created a "Smart Playlist" on it that keeps a list of all the songs that I haven't listened to yet. Here it is, about six months after I made that playlist, and I have about 580 more songs to listen to. So it takes about six months of typical iPod use to listen to that many songs one time. That's something you didn't know when you woke up today. |
| 3:38 PM |
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| 12 August 2004 |
| Indecisive |
| In all of the recent election coverage, there's a recurring phrase, referring to an alleged group of people out there in the country: "undecided voters." Are there really people out there who don't know who they are voting for? Really? Huh. |
| 1:05 PM |
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| 09 August 2004 |
| Brand-new AMP |
| Sorry about all the techie geekery I've been writing about up here of late; unfortunately, it's what I've been steeped in the last week as I make the changes I need to make for this, the flagship of my Web site fleet; seriously, how did I end up managing five domains?
Since Wonky.Net got it's own domain name, which was around 1998 or so, it has been hosted on Windows servers. For the most part, they have worked splendidly for me. I've also been making a living since about then developing software that runs on Windows servers, and I've been happily developing in .NET land for the last two years. One of the reasons I just left my long-time web host is that they are currently refusing to upgrade their servers to run .NET; having some knowledge of how this is done, this strikes me as being unbelievably lazy on their part. The other major factor in my decision to leave was that they were charging me an arm and a leg per month to be on a Windows server. So, off to a new web host I've gone. This one uses open source hosting solutions, namely Apache Server, MySQL databases, all wired together using PHP code. I've never taken sides in the Open Source debates, and I don't expect to, but playing with these new toys is easing my pain of losing my ASP and SQL Server. While these technologies are not even close to ASP.NET in ease of use and efficiency as far as coding goes, they are pretty slick. I'm loving some of the features I have with Apache over IIS. And having a few more acronyms on the resume won't hurt me in future job searches. |
| 5:41 PM |
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| 06 August 2004 |
| Getting Better |
| Well, color me right chuffed about my new .Blog host... that would be Diaryland. I'm very pleased indeed that using their templates, I've pretty much been able to exactly replicate the look of the old .Blog pages. And this is with the free service. I may upgrade to one of their (cheap) pay services, just to show my appreciation. Dig it. There will be a new .Forum soon, but I have to go ahead and move my domain to the new name server before I can get that going. I think? We'll see. |
| 1:43 PM |
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| 04 August 2004 |
| Newness Abounds |
| Mmmmmm. Ch-ch-ch-ch-chan-GES. I've been moving Wonky.Net from it's old format of ASP with an MS SQL back-end, at least for a l'il while, and so now I am using outside software for the .Blog and the .Forum. Could be I'll leave things this way, I just have to see how much of a pain it is to maintain a site "the old-fashioned way." I'm going to have to jerry-rig some kind of means to view the ancient .Blog archives that aren't part of this new system, though. I shall persevere. So how are you? I am freaking hungry right this minute. I'm sorry, but I've really got to go do something about that. |
| 9:00 PM |
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