Gecko Bloggle

This evening I was bombing around Hintertubes looking for clues about a new album by Burial, and was reminded of how I found this weird little bubble of sound in the first place.  Rather, I was reminded how I did NOT find this artist.  I didn’t find them on the radio, or a magazine, or even through a friend, it was something I faceplanted into during a dig in the databases of a record label I knew nothing about.

I think it took me about ten minutes to figure out whether Burial was the name of the song or the name of the band, ’cause there was so little information about this song (it was Archangel, from the album Untrue).  What was really fun was that the person who is Burial doesn’t do interviews, and doesn’t really talk about the process, and probably doesn’t perform live very often (and if he did, I dunno if it would work).

I tend to become loyal to labels, which is odd for me, considering how I’m not really crazy about large corporations when it comes to their treatment of their lesser-known musicians.  Maybe it’s the whole sellout effect.  As soon as they become big, I’m like “ew, too commercial” or something, maybe.

Or maybe I just happen to like this one artist, and don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’m wandering around trying to find a way to get me from A to B, and instead of having some slick way to get me to what I really wanna talk about, I came off slightly snobby and pulled some data (or lack thereof) outta my butt.

Sorry about that.

Ignore the stuff about Burial, I have no idea what I’m talking about.  Burial’s good though, and there *IS* a new album coming, so I’ll be checking that out when it drops.

Here’s what I wanted to say.

About a year ago, Duncan tipped me off to an hour-long mixed set called GlitchBitch, and I was floored.  I’d never heard music like this.  It was different, it was broken, it was funky, and it often had strings in it.  All good things to cram into one set.  After a little digging, I found a playlist, and found out that about half of this amazing set was by edIT.  More digging turned up the album Certified Air Raid Material, which is a stellar piece of audio.  Not quite “all killer, no filler,” but about 75% of the tracks blew the top of my head clean off.

Turned out it was something being called Glitch-Hop, and that edIT was a member of the GlitchMob in California.  Crazy.  That album set up camp on both my iPod and my Blackberry so I was never without those tracks.  Around the same time I started trying to find more of this stuff, and found the wonderfully bent mix “Wonk Funk” by Kper, which had some edIT on it, but also had some interview talky stuff, mentioning J-Dilla, who I’d never heard of.

It’s been about four months of listening to Wonk Funk while cycling and commuting, and I’m still not sick of it, but I can feel it *finally* starting to become a little too comfortable, so it’s time to start digging into this mix, and see what bubbles to the surface.

It’s like finding the food of a new country, which at first is shocking, but once you get used to the flavours, you find that there’s one spice that you don’t recognize, so you figure out what that was, or at least what it might be, and then you try to figure out whether or not you enjoy a lot of it, or just a little.  Then one day, you meet a person who knows all about that sorta food, and they whip up a whole meal of stuff you’ve never heard of, and it’s delicious.

But after a while, you start wondering what else that spice might be in, where else in the world that spice might be used, and that leads to the next step.

I think I stumbled across what’s moving me on to the next step tonight.

I’m pretty sure I’m moving backwards in the timeline on this musician, but I enjoy doing that.  Figuring out how they fit into the audio cosmos is part of what’s so enjoyable for me, ’cause it means I get to find out what “country” that spice is used in, and that’ll take me to wherever’s next.

Next stop: Flying Lotus.  Maybe not new to you, but certainly new to me.  There’s a few albums out, but what caught my ear first was the EP “Reset.”

I’m getting on that bus.  Whee!

Latest Movember photos are on the Mo’09 photos (there’s a link to the page at the top of this page.)

So, a while ago (really? April of last year?) I wrote about Microsoft’s new toolkit for police to quickly gather everything they’d need from a Windows-based workstation, called COFEE.  I had a bunch of questions about COFEE at the time, and now that I know a little more about it, I’m going to go back and answer my own questions and see if there’s any clarification on some of the  (I hope).

(15 minutes go by while I read the documentation).

Are you serious?  Is this the right thing?

There’s like, it’s practically, I mean, c’mon.

It’s a nice big batch file that collects a bunch of information, fair enough, but it doesn’t actually DO very much.  No passwords are grabbed.  No filelist generated (at least, not that they documented), and it looks like all you’d need to do to make it pretty-much useless is disable your USB ports’ and/or mass storage device drivers.  The documentation for end-users tells us how to do such things as run the scanner with OR without the autorun enabled on the system.

(Heh, wait. What?)

I thought this was going to be a bootable thing – was I wrong?  I thought there was going to be this killer tool that meant you could walk up to a machine that’s OFF, boot from the stick instead of the onboard drive, collect the data from the operating system, and walk away, and as far as Windows knows, the machine wasn’t even powered on.

I’m, I guess, in a way, sorta saddened.  Don’t get me wrong – I don’t expect the average cop out there to be able to do a thorough job of collecting all the necessary data by hand, but I was sorta hoping that maybe they’d have something that would at least be on-par with Backtrack, which any person with a highspeed connection and a thumb drive (or a blank CD) could create, and it’ll let you do all SORTS of alarming things to a machine without actually “touching” the operating system (unless you want to, in which case you can pretty much set the thing on “Liquefy” and watch all of Microsoft’s security go away).

(That was a long sentence, woof).

I guess what makes me sad is that COFEE isn’t going to collect any data that isn’t obviously available on the system in the first place.  Seriously: is it common for prosecutors to bring forth evidence based on which local groups on the machine someone is a member of?

“He must have done it – he’s in the SuperElite Hacker Pwnz0rz group, see?”

I know the “no touchies” forensic methods for data gathering (like ENCASE, which I’ve used in a previous job) are a different class than what COFEE is meant to do, but it looks like it’s only meant to be useful for kicking the door in, pushing the alleged bad guy outta the chair in front of the computer, and then running the launcher to collect your data.

I can literally hear the hardware hackers out there trying to figure out how to set up something that’ll either automatically cram the drive with data that’s bogus, or simply melt it into a little plastic Hershey’s Kiss, or hey, maybe a virus that’ll wreak havoc back at the station.

Not that I want that to happen.  As much as my brain enjoys trying to figure out how to defeat whatever security system I come across, I want the cops to be able to figure out what’s real and what’s not about a given machine.  I want them to be able to nail the bad guys when the chips are down.  I want them to have the tools, I really do.

COFEE isn’t the tool they need (yet).  It’s better than taking the machine to the guys at the nearest Best Buy and asking “has this machine been used illegally?” but not much better.

And if any of you have ever had your USB stick’s data go “poof” when being moved from computer A to computer B, you’ll know why I don’t trust that the data will even make it back to the office (or even the cruiser’s laptop).

I just hope what I have is a red herring, and not the real deal.

Oh, and this time last year*? I was yammering about other stuff, but still lovin’ a good run-on sentence…

And now, because most people won’t bother going to my Movember page, here’s a picture of me rubber-facing because my normal face never looks good to me.

Neither does this, but it makes me giggle.

Helps if you imagine me going "Borkely-orkely-yobbley-bawk!"

* I’m tellin’ you? With the uptalking?

Oh man, I just sneezed, and now I instantly have a headache AND feel like I have a cold.  Yaaaaay.

Wow, today was a hardcore Vancouver rainy crapfest.  Welcome to Winter.  Last week was Fall, this week is Winter.  The way Vancouver works though, next week will be Spring, after our obligatory three days of snow (which then becomes slush, and then we’re done).

The moustache for Movember is finally starting to look like a moustache, BUT it’s almost impossible to get a picture of it because a flash washes it out, and NOT using a flash makes everything in the room yellow/orange.  The best part is that it looks sorta dirty-reddish brown to the corners of my mouth, but then goes completely white.  It’s like uh, what, it’s like Hulk Hogan or a two-tone biker or something, but with more crewcut, and less arms.  I dunno.  You guys tell me when you go check out the photos.  While you’re there, make the stupid moustache have a point and donate a few bucks to the cause, mkay?

Today I stumbled across the Bizarroworld’s version of FailBlog –  Succeed Blog, and along with something I Tweeted earlier about someone starting a dance party that goes from zero to 300 in three minutes.  Now THAT is what you call infectious dancing.  There’s also some insane juggling linked from there.  I mean, I can juggle three balls, and can do it pretty fast, but this guy can do stuff I can’t even track (and this is coming from a guy who has literally juggled oranges on acid*.)  I couldn’t even move my hands in some of those configurations, much juggle at the same time.

I think the thing that drew me to SucceedBlog was that it is all about the most insane, and amazing, and beautiful and truly awe-inspiring moments.  Some of the pictures are just sorta cute, which you could find at ICanHasCheeseBurger, or CuteOverload, but some of the video is just a big ol’ glass of freshly-squozed awesome.  The sorta stuff that makes you glad to be alive, glad to have a heartbeat today, instead of the kinds of things that just make you glad you’re not whoever that is in the cringe-worthy photo.

So yeah, a good find.  I hope they keep going, along with their ilk.  At least for the rest of the Winter.

Also, I watched Human Traffic last night, which is a movie about uh… a bunch of kids having a lost weekend (one of many) and all the stupid stuff they do, but it’s sweet somehow.  Think Trainspotting, minus any blood or overdoses, and a happy ending for everyone.  Two Word Review: Doesn’t suck.

OMIGOD, we’re watching a few minutes of Demolition Man before the Daily Show starts, and we just watched the bit with Dennis Leary going on a tear about having your life controlled by the man, which is fun, but just off his right shoulder is a very young, silent (and puffy-haired?) Jack Black, who looks like he’s maaaaaybe 22… could that be right?

* Hi Mom!

Life and all that good stuff seems to have pre-empted (is there a “post-empted”) me posting.  I guess that happens to about 50% of the NaBloPoMo types.  If we were the sort of people who could easily make themselves post every day, they wouldn’t need to make a special month for posting every day.

One of the things I did was quit the board at Mole Hill.  It’s been a really ugly two years that I’ve been on the board, and Arwen had a year or so before that, so it hasn’t really sunk in that I’m not going to run in this year’s AGM again.  So much stress.  It’ll be a bit before I can really see the place for what it was.  There’s a little of the community left there, but not much, thanks to some folks who were willing to throw people into the frying pan instead of admit that maybe they’d slipped up.

Last night was fun, ’cause the kids were at Grandma Beth’s place, so Arwen and I went out to Richmond to see Pirate Radio, which was pretty good, and had some beautifully charming moments, but overall was a bit of a letdown due to some tokenism (there was one woman on the floating station, and she was only allowed because she was a lesbian who cooked, and there was one black guy, who only had black women interested in him, it seemed).  A large chunk of the movie’s plot was based on our young protagonist losing his virginity, but it was all in this sorta weird “let’s find a girl and put her in the same room with you for five minutes, and you’ll be all set,” including a attempted setup of turning off all the lights and trying to swap sex partners before the girl notices (literally: “by the time she notices, it’ll be too late.”)

What. The. Fuck?

I know it’s 1966, but… what?

It’s right up there with the Sixteen Candles “Here have my girlfriend, she’s so drunk she won’t notice it’s not me, and then I can break up with her for cheating on me” plot point:

Jake makes a deal with Ted: If Ted lets Jake keep Sam’s panties, then he will let Ted drive home his inebriated, stuck-up, prom queen girlfriend, Carolyn Mulford (Haviland Morris), in Jake’s father’s Rolls Royce. Jake later uses the excuse of finding them together to break up with Carolyn (who had surprisingly fallen for Ted, and thus doesn’t mind the break-up very much).

Okay, so now tonight, we’re watching All Dogs Go To Heaven, and after noticing that the voice of the little girl is the same as the voice for Ducky in Land Before Time, I sorta-kinda watched this movie, and once again have been wondering what’s up with children’s movies having these weird moments of sexualization of little kids.  There’s a little orphan girl running around in a short dress and leggings for most of the movie, but during a montage of buying her a new outfit, she does a spin and kicks the back of her dress up, showing her underwear, and then the main character (a dog) howls.  A full-on “arooOOOooo…”

Um.  What?

There are/were some really freakin’ disturbed individuals working at some of those animation houses, I think.  Either that, or they decided that because it was Burt Reynolds doing the voicing, they needed to show that he’s attracted to little girls?

Hm.  Nope, that doesn’t make any sense, either.

Oh, and off-topic, but why would they let Reynolds sing (and I use the term loosely).

Heh, first time I typed that, I typed “uselessly” instead of “loosely.”

Also, what’s up with Dom DeLuise having to be in everything Reynolds is in?  Is it a family thing, like John and Joan Cusack?

Today was pretty good, relaxed.  Low-key.  I’m not on the emergency call number any more, after two weeks of being on, so it’s nice not to get calls at 2am asking about emergencies that I can’t really help with.  Shows me what sort of things I need to learn more about, and to understand about the two other sites of the company I work for.

So yeah, nothing to say today, ’cause it’s a rainy Sunday, I’m slightly hung over from drinking wine while playing our newly-purchased Beatles Rock Band, and I haven’t really been doing anything today…

Further news as events warrant.

So, today the phone rang, and it was my mom, sounding a little shaky, and she said “I’m homeless.”  I had visions of the roof of the house in Chilliwack collapsing or something.  We had a conversation like this once years ago when the University building she was staying in caught fire and she (while still not really awake yet) figured she needed to buy a computer, now, this instant.  I could hear the sirens in the background.  So when a conversation with my mom starts with “I’m homeless,” you take notice.

Turns out she was just between hotel stays with a checkout at Noon and the next checkin at 5 or somehing (geez, don’t DO that), and was looking for a place to kill a few hours, so we all got a free random visit, and a slideshow of elephants, giraffes, and South Sudanese folks in combat fatigues.  Yeah, really.

My mom’s become this total globetrotter, and she’s not doing the jetsetting “what a lovely hotel” thing, at least, she’s not setting out to do that during any of her trips.  Instead, she’s going to places like the South Sudan (Juba) and Bangladesh.  Who’da thunk it?  This teacher from Chilliwack zooming around the world.  Parents can be pretty surprising, given the chance, I guess.  I wonder if my kids’ll ever find me that surprising.  I sure hope so.

Her job now also means that instead of teaching some of BC’s natives to be teachers (so kids stop getting squeezed out before grade 12 because nobody understands why the spirit dancers get a little jumpy at certain times of the year), or teaching basic life skills to guys in prison (she had to convince herself they were all there for cheque fraud) she’s out teaching guys who have been soldiers for most of their adult lives.

That’s using the term “adult” loosely, as many of these guys were in their mid-teens when they were handed a gun (or had to get one because destabilizing forces were terrorizing their villages).  The stories she brings back home are beautiful and sad and uplifting and near-painful when you realize how much more work there is to do there, and that you can’t just throw money at the problems there, ’cause it’ll just be taken away from them.

You can’t take an education away from people, though, so that’s what she’s trying to help them do.  Educate themselves, and rebuild.  Civil war is totally alien to us here in a place like Canada.  Like North America.  Like a decent education and health system.

Like not being shot at, or threatened with death of your entire village.  Like not losing siblings and parents to violence before you’re old enough to go to a school, even if there was one to go to.

On a lighter note…

Nope.  Not so much with the lighter notes tonight.

That’s not as sexy as it sounds, let me assure you.

So, I rode to work yesterday without incident, but I need to invest in some of those slightly hilarous booties for cycling, ’cause here in Raincouver on Canada’s Wet Coast, we surely do love ourselves some rain, I tell you what.  So this means my 40-minute ride to work equals a pair of very wet shoes, but that’s fine, I have new clean dry socks to wear, right?  This would work if I was at home, and flumping around the house without wearing those same wet shoes, but NOOOOOO, I put the same shoes right back on again, and within 15 minutes, I’ve got wet feet again.  Doi.

Today was a good ride in, and a good start to the ride home, but about six blocks away from work, I got a quick flat, and had to do a tube change under the awning of a banking building.  The good news is that it only took me about five minutes to swap the tube, the bad news was that the little cool lookin’ pump I have in my sidebag is missing a piece, and while it made pumping noises, it wasn’t actually creating a seal to add air to the tube.

So I had to walk my bike six blocks in rush-hour traffic to fill the tube.  I got to play that fun game cyclists play at gas stations when you fill the tire in short bursts, trying to get some decent pressure, without turning the tire into a rock or blowing it out completely.  I did that once when I was a kid, and it scared the hell outta me.  Seriously, it was like a balloon-animal, and then F-PAKH!  Low became flat.

Also, people were way psychotic on the roads tonight, maybe due to the rain (which is odd, considering how often it rains here).  I wasn’t directly involved in any of it, but there was honking, there was yelling, there were jaywalking popped-collar d-bag pedestrians picking fights with drivers.  I was full-moon gonzo out there, and I think if I wasn’t cycling at the time, I would’ve been feeling sorta freaked out there.  For the most part, I was just trying to keep myself from getting punched, or run over, or cursed out.

The flat, swap, walk, and reinflate only added about 20 minutes to my trip home, so that’s actually pretty good, considering I was doing it in the rain, and using my headlights (on my helmet) for lighting.

Watching the Craig Fergusson show, which is charming as hell, but the ads are part of the show due to the whole “Here’s what this drug does, sorta, that we’re not going to actually promise, but just allude to”  and then there’s 24 seconds (or maybe 48) side effects.  They just go on and on.  I keep expecting them to go into a Mark and Brian (of KLOS in LA) side effect list that includes “line-dancing, swollen vowels, and particulate marsupials.”

After Craig Fergusson is Deal or No Deal, and just once, I’d like someone to try to make the counter-deal that they’ll walk away for free if they get to blow up a surgical glove on their head like host Howie Mandel used to do (by pulling it down to your lip, and then blowing it up with your nose), but then make him (a self-confessed germaphobe) WEAR IT afterwards.  Watching the over-excited contestants trying to hug him or shake his hand, and watching him do this weird “oh hey, whoa, nope, back up” thing is funny, and a little bit creepy.

With seven cases left to pick, the soon-to-be sister in-law just blew the chance at $500,000.  You cannot tell me she’s not gonna hear about that for the rest of her life.

“Seek the Yay. Avoid the Woo. Be Brave. Don’t Burn Yourself.” – The We Trip (1995 I think?)

Some of you are joining our program already in progress, while coming in from NaBloPoMo or Movember, so I thought I’d cop out on plot today and go for a little character development instead.

I work in IT for a film special effects company on Pender near Bute (after seven years of working for gaming companies), and generally try not to use any business-speak in anything I do, but it’s a proactive (not “reactive”) engagement of my skillsets going forward.

*FUCK*

I’m married (6 yrs?) to Arwen (you might know her: she used to hang at the Passion from time to time when she wasn’t working graveyards at Blenz on Robson or Blenz on Davie.  We’ve got two kids (boys: Ripley is 7 and Tate is 4) and Arwen’s working on her 2nd novel (no, not a NaNoWriMo, but she’s editing her latest, so she calling it NaNoEdMo).  We moved this summer form Mole Hil (right behind St. Paul’s) to Marpole (waaaaaaaay out at 67th & Oak), and I’ve been ramping up to cycling to/from work (25km, round trip) since we moved.

Right now, I just finished reading a moderately terrible young-adult book about a young girl whose parents work in a museum but don’t know she can *see* curses writhing on objects.  I’m a long way from being 13/14 any more, but I’m pretty sure I would have still snickered at this book.  To cleanse my palette, I’m reading a collection of short stories by Stephen King while trying to ramp up for either Anansi Boys or Anathem, probably the former first.  I started listening to the audiobook of the latter on my iPod during commuting, but the chapter/track order was hooped, so I have a slightly shuffled version of the story in my head.  I sort of enjoy that I have no idea WHEN anything happened in the timeline of the book, or indeed who half of the characters are, but know only THAT it happened.

I suspect my iPod was playing it in the order I’m most-likely to remember in a year.

My last two vacations were accidental, in that they were due to layoffs.  In 2008, laid off by Electronic Arts, which seems to be doing another round as as we speak, gentle reader.  A good friend who worked right next to me for a year died two weeks later.  2009 brought the very sad closing of Nexon/Humanature Studio in Yaletown, which is possibly the shortest job I’ve ever loved.

Scotch seems to have become the drink I enjoy if I want to nurse something for an hour, and wine if I want to share with friends.  Sambucca sometimes because it reminds me of my grandmother, but also because of the weird things it does if you put ice in it (blasphemy, I know).

I don’t use “Zen Render” in person any more, unless I’m meeting up with old BBS/IRC folks from waaaaaaay back in the day – an old friend of mine from my IRC days found my blog based on my pseudo, and I was glad for it.  (Hi Nemo!)

That pseudo used IRL is attached to a pretty sad and painful time in my life, actually.  Didn’t really have much that I enjoyed as “John,” so I let Zen drive for a while.  Hurt less, I think, to be someone else while my scars healed.  The “Zen” of me wasn’t afraid to say and do things that were that half-step past my normal comfort zone.  Wasn’t afraid to call people on their shit, or worry a little less about what others were thinking, and say what *I* was thinking.  Wasn’t afraid to tell off a heartless ex-girlfriend on the phone instead of thinking how to get ex back all the time.  Just wasn’t (as) afraid of life.  Not a dark side, just a slightly less wounded side.

I still have fear from time to time, of course, but it’s rarely for *me* now, it’s usually for those around me.  My wife, my kids, my family, my friends, my Tribe.

Mostly, I go by Burton (or, as some have remixed it, “Burtoin.”)  I think only Briana calls me Zen consistently, but that’s the only name she ever knew for me, and we’re friends on the ‘net only, anyway, and I hardly ever talk to her, so maybe it’s okay that Zen kept at least one friend out of the separation.

Oh, and for those of you following my Movember progress, lord help us, here’s what’s going on at Chez Moustache.

Up close and personal.

Sometimes the day is pretty straight-forward.  I’m not complaining.  Just saying.  Sometimes our job is just to do our jobs.  Was up late last night, but not too late.  Slept until a reasonable time, and then slept until an unreasonable time, which was nice but left that guilty hangover “I missed half the day” feeling. 

There was lots to do today, but since I’d decided some time in the middle of the week that this was how I was going to spend my Sunday, it felt good to be a homebody.  I spend so much time in transit and at work, or running around doing the stuff that requires a car and driver that I enjoy a day at home doing the stuff that needs doing.  I was also happy that Arwen was able to just relax and let me do stuff while she relaxed a bit before heading out for a dinner with her writerly friends.

I spent a good hour just helping Tate and Ripley clean Tate’s room, and then the kids were more interested in dancing to the music of stuff I’d made on what we used to call an “Audio Cassette Recorder” than cleaning, so I bailed out instead of fighting them against having fun.  Remember when mixtapes were things people did, instead of the audio resume of an up and coming DJ?  Remember getting those things as birthday or xmas presents?  Or maybe a gift from a secret admirer in highschool?  (Okay, I don’t think I ever did that last one while in school, nor did I receive one).  I did some weird shit when I was a young teen, but not that.

Oh hey, fixed my back tire today.  With a patch kit and everything.  Took about fifteen minutes, total.  I took the kevlar tubing thing out ’cause it didn’t seem to help last time, and where the hole was might have actually been caused by the pinching of the wrapped kevlar, so… I pulled out my itty bitty patch kit that I have strapped under my seat and was good to go after walking over to the gas station to get some decent pressure.  I have a pump, but the flip clip on it leaks now, ’cause the pin goes on a little angle which then leaks air back out once I get to about… oh, maybe 1/2 pressure.  Need a new pump, it seems.

Have to lay out my cycling clothes for tomorrow after Saving Private Ryan is over, to avoid that “stumbling around in the fog” feeling I get when I try to prep for work and I’m not quite awake.  Leads to me leaving the house three times because I forgot my water/keys/helmet and have to come back in for a minute to find it.

Also need to re-ziptie my “big” light (one of those flashlights the size of a roll of quarters with about a dozen LEDs in it) to my helmet, ’cause that’s my headlight when the sun’s not up yet (or down already).  Hope tomorrow doesn’t rain.

Let’s see if my legs have totally atrophied during my week of bikelessness.

I’m tired today, even though I slept through most of Spy Kids 2 this afternoon.

Spent two hours doing groceries, watched a movie, and then we went to Ikea for wandering (whoops, $100) and dinner before coming back, putting the kids to bed, and hanging with the beautiful and talented MoxieSnacks.

Today blew by.  Pweroom.  Zorp.  Flurm.  Ka-done.

Wide angle lenses do weird things to my eyes (and/or glasses)

Oh, and I’m starting to get the moustache that I’m going to be coping with for the next three and a bit weeks.  (See photo, attached).

(Right now, Arwen and Moxie are talking about holding their breath while underwater, and so they’re closing the backs of their throats and talking, leaving them sounding like Edith Anne from Saturday Night Live, or perhaps the Professor from the Simpsons, who’s actually Jerry Lewis.  So, to recap: the two women in my living room right now are doing Jerry Lewis impressions.)

Oh holy shit.  My blog.  The main page blog (I should probably pull that, since I’m not looking for work from the outside world), and the Podcast site were all GONE for the last 15 minutes.  The blogs were still there, but they were all asking me to enter the name of the blog, and my email address.  Total amnesia.  The good folks at Fused Network are freakishly awesome and fixed it up and I’m back.  I’m sure I’ll get a thing about my ticket in a bit, if I don’t close it first.

But first, I’m going to go back up the databases on all six of the blogs on this domain…  Just. In. Case.  *cough*

In music news, I’m nervously excited that Massive Attack has a new album coming out soon, and last night, without really trying, I managed to lock down some pretty tight beats using Torq and it was embarrassingly easy.  Maybe I’ll have to get one of them thar Torq Xponent things next time I have… oh… hmm… $750… whoops.  Maybe if/when I see one on Craigslist some time.  One day.

But yeah, “Housecleaning Mix” should be something doable in the next few weeks, for sure.

Went out for dinner tonight with Arwen’s mom & faux pa, and since Fridays are kinda special for us, we chose sushi at Downtown Sushi in our old stomping grounds.  They’ve got a little upscale on some of the fancier rolls, bucking the standard Vancouver “sushi places almost outnumber Starbucks” pricing of $3-$4 for your normal California roll, and maybe $5-$6 for the “fancy” rolls.

Well these guys have gotten all fancy and done some really interesting and tasty rolls, but um… $12?  Srsly?  Ripley (who’s seven, and yet can do some serious damage in an all-you-can-eat sushi place) got a fancy “Ocean” roll, and an order of gyoza, and I think his portion of the bill was probably around $18.

Woof.

But thankfully, Arwen’s mom was picking up the bill tonight, so Ripley didn’t have to make good on his offer to pay for himself (I think, if he’s lucky, he’s got about $4 in the whole world.)

It was interesting for me though, ’cause Ripley often offers to pay for something if he thinks he’s not going to get it otherwise, but tonight, I think he was honestly noticing that $12 was a lot for a single roll of sushi, and wanted to help out.  It was kinda nice to see that he isn’t entirely psychotic when it comes to sushi.  I think maybe part of it is that we don’t have as many restaurants, dollar stores, and drug stores (like Shoppers) near our house, so he’s not constantly bombarded with the need to spend money on a “thing.”

I get that wanting to buy things, too.  I’m like that.  If I don’t have a couple of bucks in my pocket for a few days, I start to feel meager, and that makes me do weird things in my head.  I start going into some odd form of hunter/gatherer, I think, and I start trying to figure out what I could do/sell/make that I could sell on Craigslist for $50 or something.

But if I find out I have a $10 in my wallet, I’m good.  I’m fine.  I don’t need to spend it, I just have it.  Weird.

Nanny 911 is on, and it’s the blonde lady who says “famleh” instead of family, and it makes me giggle and cringe at the same time.  I think Nanny911 and Canada’s Worst Driver should both be on a new cable channel called the “You’re Fine Dear, It’s Your Husband Who Should Be Voted Off the Island.”

Seriously?  I just.  These guys are… I mean…  Screw YOU, dude.  What the hell?  I guess that probably comes from growing up in a family of strong-willed people, and strong women in specific.  When my mom was 23, her dad died, and her mom became a widow with six (yikes – SIX!) kids ranging from 25 to 13 (I think), and so the entire family grew up watching a woman as the head of a house…

…so I’m always sorta flabberghasted when I see any of these shows that have a base premise (the kids are running the house, or people have been nominated as bad drivers), that invariably becomes (at least partially) a study in “Why the hell are these two people together?”

Of course, I’ve wondered that about a lot of people I’ve known over the years, and I’m sure there’s some friends who’ve wondered what the hell Arwen sees in me, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be editable by a television producer to make me look like such a… a… such a butthead about dealing with other people, especially your partner.

But what the hell do I know?  I’m just a person, too.  I’m sure everyone on those shows that was chosen because they “made for good TV” didn’t think there was anything odd about their own activities.  America’s Next Top Model has this down to a science – you can usually pick out the person who has no chance of winning, but is destined for a trainwreck of booze, crying, or just good ol’ batshit insanity before they are sent packing.

…and then I think of that sign – something about “There’s a {something} in every crowd.  Look around.  If you can’t find them, it’s you.” and I start looking around my circle of people to figure out who I can’t find – which role is missing, where’s the gap in the grill?

Whatever that gap is, whatever archetype is missing, I guess maybe that’s my line.  That’s the part I’m supposed to play.

Huh.