Author: colter

“The Curse of Wikipedia,” Or “And We’re Back”

Oh Wikipedia. You are such a lovely thing to behold. You bring me traffic and I adore you but sometimes I am crushed under your massive girth. Indeed, yesterday’s featured Dogpatch article was too much to bear for our tiny adorable little server. We exceeded our bandwidth and were shut down for the latter part of yesterday and early today. I had The Man increase our bandwidth to 600 Megs (up from 300), so hopefully that will prevent this sort of thing from happening again any time soon. Ah the vagaries of Internet traffic.

Dogpatch Redux and Laptop Joy

Thanks to alert neighbor Rob Wolfe, I found out that Wikipedia’s featured article today is on Dogpatch, which contains a few links to my site. Maybe I’ll get inundated with traffic. Or not.

I finally got all my raw plog files transferred to the laptop from my desktop at the office. These are all the files from my digital camera, almost two years worth of stuff. All of which is now accessible to the random-picture-grabbing screensaver. This is the coolest little feature for someone like myself who has thousands of pictures to choose from. It’s a slideshow of my life for the last two years. When I’m dead I imagine something like this will run at my funeral. I get totally sucked in to watching it. I think I’m going to leave it on at the house whenever people come over.

Achewood Blogs and Yarn Lust

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the comic strip Achewood before, but I’ve recently discovered that each character in the strip has his or her own blog. What a weird world we live in where there are blogs written by cartoon characters. Roast Beef‘s blog today was amusing as it seemed to plug into Amy’s blog about yarn lust.

Uh huh so it seems a thing, based on my research, is that younger ladies are all into knitting now. It is like sort of a backlash or something, after all that 80s and 90s stuff where a lady had to prove that she was also a man.

Of course, Amy has always been a domestic engineer supreme. And software engineer. And poet. And writer. And amateur phrenologist.

The Laptop and Cake

Regarding the guitar cake in the post from the 30th, you can now contact the sculptress for all your custom cake-baking needs:

Casey Engelhoven
Kitkatta2221 @ yahoo . com
(501) 372-1863

I got a laptop on Monday!! Kevin at work got a free Sony VAIO for participating in some online promotions. He also got a DVD writer. I bought both for $900. I have been without a working CD writer for well over a year now. I’ve already made two CDs for Katherine’s upcoming roadtrip. All my free time will now be spent on making compilations for everyone, probably a two-volume set since I have accrued so many good songs over the last year, much of it a direct result of Jamie’s influence.

Scenes from a Changing Century

I asked my friend Michael to give me his address so I could send him this postcard I found in California. He gave me his three email addresses.

The virtual may someday entirely supplant the actual. I told him:

Postal address, you ass! Postcards go in the mail. It’s this archaic system whereby these people called “mail men” actually hand-deliver bits of paper to your residence. It’s retro chic.

In other news, I’m giddily excited to finally have in my possession the entire 39 episode run of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a French-Japanese anime venture that ran on Nickelodeon in the 80’s. It was a serial cartoon, so that the episodes combined to make essentially one long movie. I haven’t seen it since probably 1985. Last week I found a guy who burns DV-R’s culled from the out-of-print Japanese DVDs as well as bits from the US broadcasts. As with much of my nostalgia-glazed memories of 80’s cartoons, the show turned out not to be as amazing as I thought it was, but still it remains a great example of entertaining and educational kids’ programming. I remember it really got me interested in native South American and Central American cultures like the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs and Olmecs.

Oops I Did It Again

Another $150 black Ibanez 7-string came my way today. This time with hard case. How could I not get it? What a steal! I was having lunch with Natalie at Vino’s and she mentioned that her friend Clint was selling his, so I called him and checked it out. It’s in even better condition than the other one I’ve got. Of course this one was made in Korea rather than Japan, but who’s counting? [1]

We got my brother Trey married off yesterday. I was a groomsman for the first time. Tons of family members came in. Rehearsal dinner was Friday. The ceremony was at 1PM Saturday at St. Paul’s United Methodist in the Heights. Reception at the event hall inside the train station. Pictures soon. The groomsmen all had a lot of fun watching the sad, sad Razorbacks game in the church meeting room before the wedding. After the reception, Heather, my sister Mandy, cousin Leslie, and myself went downtown to find something to do, and found the Dave Matthews Tribute Band playing at Sticky Fingerz. I highly recommend this group. The drummer absolutely nails it. You can get by on sax, bass, guitar or violin in a DMB cover band, but you cannot front on Carter Beauford. You have to have serious chops to play his stuff. My old drummer friend Thelton came out for the show and we totally geeked out on the drummer’s performance. We talked to the guy afterward and he said this sort of thing wasn’t his usual bag – he has been a gospel drummer for 22 years (the guy couldn’t be older than 30). The sax guy sat with us during the break, too. His background is classical. Interesting bunch.

1.) For those of you playing at home, we have now hit the 17 guitars mark. Or 16 since the Turser tele is in Austin with Tara. Or 15 if you count the Atomic Strat being at Barry’s for the kids to bang on. Anybody want to buy the purple OLP?

Distilled Internet: The Haters

Digg.com is a fun site for tech/geek news headlines. It’s like Slashdot, but maybe not as esoteric. Also, the comments tend to lack the erudition of Slashdot, or the cleverness of Fark. A recent article caught my eye, MySpace Creates Own Record Label, and clicking on the comments revealed one of the quintessential examples of nerd loser/haters I’ve ever seen.

An important part of the Internet for many many people is dissing things. Whether it’s movies, music, technology or what have you, there’s invariably a cadre of people with apparently only the highest standards of taste. Reading through their incisive commentary on the relative merits of MySpace, I can only assume these are people who haven’t had the same fantastic experiences with MySpace that I have had: meeting amazing people, finding new favorite bands, and generally exercising creativity via virtual community.

Certainly for nerds, MySpace has its disontents. People who attempt to spruce up their pages with various HTML editing programs generally fail horribly. And the population of users tends to lean toward insufferably annoying teenagers, but that certainly is no fault of MySpace.

Lapdances for Everyone

My brother had his bachelor party last night. I say “party” but really it was five guys drinking at Sticky Fingerz and Paper Moon. I had never been to a strip club before. Not because I had anything against them, just because I never had any overriding interest in investigating them. It’s just another one of those things I had never gotten around to, like learning to bake a pie or ride a motorcycle. I wasn’t sure quite what to think; I’m sure, given my tendencies toward overly analytical sociological observation, I could write volumes on the experience, but I’ll keep it brief and say I was pleasantly surprised. From seeing their depiction in movies, I assumed a level of sleaziness was inherent in these places, but there was no “I’m too sexy” posturing or detached posing. The girls were very friendly and sweet. Obviously they’re getting paid to be nice, so they can solicit lapdances, but really that’s not too far removed from Wal-Mart greeters getting paid to smile and say “hi.” It’s just good customer service. It’s not a job you take if you’re not at least somewhat interested in being honestly friendly with people.

Maybe I’ll write more on the topic later; there are so many interesting layers of social interaction going on at a strip club.

Now I know I’m from another planet when I walk into a strip club thinking “what a fascinating sociological case study” rather than “mmmm, boobies.” However, the latter eventually did outlast the former.

October-November Romance

Saturday I played at my friend Amy Bennett’s wedding. For her processional she wanted “If You Want to Sing Out” by Cat Stevens from the movie Harold and Maude. I had never heard the song, so Jason let me borrow the DVD and wow, what a perfect song and movie. I love discovering older stuff that I never know about; it’s an increasingly rare occurrence for me, having been sired by a man who has more movie posters than wall space.

The song was easy enough, but I wrote out an EZ-baroque counterpoint version of it to make it more…matrimonial? It worked out well. Interestingly enough, Amy is marrying a guitar player. David Planchet is his name, and he brought his ’62 Gibson to the wedding with him. His groom’s cake was an exact replica of that guitar. I can’t tell you how detailed this cake was. Tragically I left my camera at home, but I took a pic with the crusty trusty camera phone.

Come back later and I’ll have the contact information for the sculptress who created this magical thing. I ate the headstock. I almost didn’t want to. The Gibson logo was perfectly rendered, the frets accurate, the tuning pegs made with toothpicks, and the piece de resistance…a pitch-accurate lead sheet of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” made out of icing!

Also Saturday was Hillcrest’s annual Harvest Fest. I ran into an old high school chum who’s running for State Treasurer. Vote for Mac Campbell. My friend Hal did his website. What a weird world I’m moving into when the guy who might be State Treasurer was the guy who ran Spanish Club, and the company that did his website is run by the guy with whom I used to watch WWF and listen to Ray Stevens tunes.

This Saturday is my brother Trey’s wedding. So this week promises to be even more surreal than the last.