wow. it’s been 4 years (as of a couple of days ago) of thelocust.org. just thought i’d drop that little note.

he said “I need some ribs.“.

So my CapitalOne VISA card kept getting declined in the past couple of days (I don’t use it often, you see). The first thing that failed was an Internet purchase — so I thought maybe it was a faulty cart or something, but then I tried using it at a brick-and-mortar joint — no luck there, either! Go home, called CapitalOne, and they asked me if I had attempted charging $800 and $500 worth of stuff from Nordstrom’s Direct. I’m not a Nordstrom’s kind of guy, and Kelly doesn’t use this card, so I’d have to say that I certainly didn’t try to charge that sort of stuff.

The cool thing was that the charges never actually posted to my account — they were only authorized, and then CapitalOne blocked the actual charges, and locked my account. So, maybe all those commercials with the pirates and barbarians and such actually are somewhat true. It didn’t take but 10 minutes to get my account closed and a new one opened, but it will take 7-10 business days for me to get a new card. Ah well, I’m just happy I didn’t have to go through all the business of disputing charges and such.

Speaking with a friend of mine via the venerable AIM internet teletype service, we got to speaking about the computer acronym SAN (Storage Area Network). As per usual, I throw that term into Google. I pull up various and sundry unrelated links, but do see a “Sponsored Link” on the side for Broadcom — a network microchip manufacturer. The text of said “Sponsored Link” is as follows:

SAN Solutions

Free e-Book download: “Architecting Next-Generation Networks.”

www.broadcom.com

Architect.
ArchitectING?
“What do architects do?” I wonder aloud. They clearly don’t fricking ARCHITECT. They DESIGN, but they sure aren’t ARCHITECTING all damn day long. Man. I swear. I know that our beloved English language has morphed into what it is by relatively similar idiot moves, but here is to hoping that this unfortunate mutation of turning nouns into verbs gets EVOLUTIONED into EXINCTIONING itself.

…i apologize to you, Led Zeppelin. i had forgotten the rock that you brought by not listening to you in some time.

Just listen to the rhythm seciton on “Celebration Day” and tell me that John Bonham wasn’t the greatest rock drummer of his day and John Paul Jones the greatest rock bassist of his day — perhaps only matched by Keith Moon and John Entwistle from the Who.

this is quite geeky, but i’ve just completed a set of benchmarks for the webserver that this (and a few other) domains run on. I use Apache and PHP as the scripting language, and so I thought I’d try out Turck MMCache, a PHP optimizer. It did a good job with some of the slower sites on this box, like Louisville Soaring, but only showed marginal improvement on thelocust.org. Lost In Louisville is the reigning champ for speed, tho’, as it is completely static HTML.

Check out my results.

or so the internet would have you believe. kelly has recently become quite fond of The State alum Michael Ian Black, and whilst watching Queer Eye, I told Kelly that he was, in fact, “as gay as the day is long”. Of course, it now being winter, that was a complete and total lie. But, I figured I’d do my due digital diligence, and did a little research. Here is what I found:

Interview @ Kittenpants.org – a good one, too!

Michael Ian Black’s articles @ McSweeneys.net – McSweeneys is a great site, and the title of Black’s latest article is “Have You Ever Eaten a Baby?”.

Finally, go and check out StateMedia.net, where they have EVERY sketch by The State, organized by episode, and you can even download the stuff. Awesome. Also, the Kittenpants article hints at a DVD set! Oh my. I’m excited.

Oh, and Black *isn’t* gay, but he did play one on TV. Kelly just likes him because he looks like Jeff Davis, anyway, which is just weird, ’cause Black is WAY HOTTER.

(btw, did you notice that i said “played one on TV”. that’s an odd turn of phrase, really, like being gay is a profession or akin to being a different species)

I have made a short film entitled “the transformation of the dirtiest of hippies”. you may view it, if you’d like:

Smaller (181k)

Bigger (681k)

enjoy.

…so, the other day I decided to whip my MP3 collection back into shape with a better organization and naming convention, and to put good ID3 (v1 and v2) tags into them. The organization/naming convention I chose is as follows:

Artist/

 Album/

  Artist – Album – Track# – Title.mp3

Various Artists/Compilation/Soundtrack albums pose a different problem, so this file-level naming convention is a bit different:

Album – Track # – Artist – Title.mp3

I think that works out well. Any ideas?

I haven’t posted in terribly too long, but it’s been the holiday season, and I’ve been busy with family and work and some freelance stuff, and of course flying RC sailplanes! I just recented discovered slope soaring, and have had a blast the last two weekends down at the Frankfort slope.

I’m going to get a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40 gig MP3 player for Christmas, and I’m psyched! My nearly 4 year obsession with portable jukeboxery come to fruition!

Things coming up include my and Kelly’s Christmas Day Oasis at our house, and Gary returns from Japan for a short while, and I think I’ll HOPEFULLY be launching the newly redesigned thelocust.org soon. Don’t hold your breath, please.