There's a saying in boating circles.  It goes something like this:

'The two happiest days of your life are the day you buy a boat and the day you sell it.'

This Sunday will be the first happiest day of my life.  That's not actually true; I've bought a boat before, but I was 11 at the time and really, that's so long ago that I don't remember.  ( Read more... )

Metallica's ...And Justice For All has been one of my favorite metal albums since I was like 12. That said, it always sounded tinny and thin to me compared with other contemporary albums. Now, pointing out that AJFA is poorly produced is nothing new, but I recently happened upon this quote in Wikipedia:

The actual production of the album marks an ( Read more... )

So, lately, at the gym, I've noticed that in the best of cases, I've read every magazine I'm interested in within a week of that magical period when magazines arrive at the gym.  In the worst of cases, the magazines are stolen or never arrive at all.  While I will reasonably happily resort to reading women's magazines, sometimes I exhaust even ( Read more... )

So, Heather and I went to Casbah this weekend.  It was my first time in at least six or seven years, and her first time ever.  I feel comfortable saying that it will also have been our last time ever dining there.  I try not to be a complainer, but I figured it might be worth getting this onto my seldom-written-upon blog, in hopes that it might ( Read more... )

Recently, Joel Spolsky posted a transcript of a talk he gave at Yale, where he described two kinds of programmers: in-house programmers, and product programmers, and expounded on the differences between the two and why it's inherently better to be a product programmer.  I wholeheartedly agree with Joel on this issue, but I wanted to take a few ( Read more... )

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07339/839202-85.stm

"One religious member of the Knesset, Avraham Ravitz, told the Post that the environmentalists are "crazy people" and that "they should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead.""

Manbearpig strikes again!

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/index.htmlRead more... )

So I finally got the Velvet Revolver album today. It was the first time in my entire life that I have actually gone out and bought and album on the day it came out, and probably the first time in several years that I bought an album that I hadn't previously downloaded and evaluated first. (do note however, that I had heard live recordings and the ( Read more... )

The rant I posted last night reminds me of a snippet by Terence McKenna, with some inserts by me:

[Live music] "return[s] us to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience."

So I went to Ohio this Saturday with my friend Thomas, and we sat around for quite some time debating the issue of music sharing. We are both avid fans of band that allow free trading of live concert tapes, which include but are certainly not limited to the Grateful Dead and Phish. The origin of the discussion was sort of an introspection on ( Read more... )