[ music | Monty Python – Accountancy Shanty ]

Well, New Orleans was spared 20 feet of standing water in the downtown area – this time. They really need to get some better preparations, and hopefully this close call will spur some movement on that front. There was a bar on Bourbon street open quite late into the night last night, and this morning, Jackson Square saw folks welcoming the calm with a drink. You have to love that town. 🙂

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[ music | Dick Dale – Tidal Wave ]

Hurricane Katrina is now a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds above 160mph (258 kph). And she’s headed right for New Orleans, one of my favorite cities. New Orleans is primarily below sea level, which means, like Holland, it depends on dykes and pumps to keep the ocean out. A giant storm like this somewhat defeats that idea. Here’s hoping she decides to take it easy on the Big Easy.

[ music | Depeche Mode – Precious ]

I have it, and it’s awesome.

This has an awesome sound, you can hear a lot of Violator influence in it again, and if you heard the “Enjoy the Silence 04” remix you can hear the influence from that too. It’s a lot cleaner like Violator and less dirty/distorted like SOFAD and subsequent albums. Now, I LOVED SOFAD, Ultra was great, and Exciter was good, but neither lived up to SOFAD. It’s good to hear the older sound back though. I can’t wait for the full album.

[ music | Radiohead – Sulk ]

Yep. Another whine post. This is basically why I hate having certain conversations with certain people, because it makes me think about things I try to ignore. I was asked, “Do you think you’re a little too caustic sometimes?” I answered, “Yeah, probably.” The reply was, “No, seriously.” “Yeah, seriously. I’m sure I am too caustic at times.” The follow up question, “Why do you think that is?” “Because I’m frustrated with my life to a degree I never knew possible. I know that this is my last chance to start getting back on the right track, or I’ll wind up out in left field forever. I’m 27, and if I don’t get this working now, I’ll be 45 and stuck in the same damned rut. I don’t want to wind up like that. I don’t think I could take that.”

And that’s what it boils down to. With everything that’s been thrown at me, not a lot still strikes fear into me. The idea that I’ll wind up missing that last exit, that still scares the hell out of me. And I just can’t seem to figure out quite how to make it happen.

Time to get a little sleep…

[ music | Dido – Do You Have A Little Time ]

Several weeks ago I sent in a proposal to MoFo about licensing, and still haven’t recieved an answer back. Rather than let all this time continue to go by wasted, I’ve decided to at least test the waters, as it were. A long time ago I took several old Mozilla.org images, and recreated them in Illustrator so they would scale better for large printing. Turns out it’s rather expensive to do these on a one by one basis. So why not leverage the economies of scale? If we sell a thousand of these things, we get them much cheaper and better quality than you could swing at Kinkos.

So, to find out if this is feasable while I wait to hear about licensing rights from MoFo, why not take a 45 second survey? It’s in an iframe right here. No personal information is collected. Please be nice and just submit once, so I don’t get over inflated numbers. If there’s a big enough interest, and MoFo greenlights me with licensing, we can make this happen! I’ve tried to guesstimate the price at around $20-$25 tops, but it could be less depending on the response.

Thanks.

[ music | Radiohead – Let Down ]

Yep, only eight hours left in that auction. I will admit it’s been significantly less successful than I anticipated. Less than 500 pageviews according to their counter. I didn’t entirely expect it to sell, but I DID expect more viewership…

[ music | Nirvana – The Man Who Sold the World ]

Well, this is it. I’ve put my ad-space offer thing on eBay. With any luck at all someone will notice it and spread it around the world, and even buy the damn thing. I started it at $1,000 because it’s more honest than a reserve price with a starting bid of $1, and the Buy It Now price of $5k because that’s my pie in the sky dream. We’ll see…

[ music | Cursive – A Disruption In The Normal Swing of Things ]

When I told the telco to cut the DSL, they somehow assumed I meant the whole damn phone line. So I’ve spent the past week getting my phone back on since tuesday morning. They’re so cute, they cut it at 4:50pm monday.

I would have been online THURSDAY (the turn-on date), but there was a line fault, and then friday the service ticket somehow never got entered on thursday, so I had to be up NOW on saturday for the telco dude. Me being up at 8am on a saturday should be illegal. I’ll be blogging again as normal soonish.

[ music | Duran Duran – To Whom It May Concern ]

If you are reading this, then one of two things have happened: either I forgot to pull this entry (in which case you won’t see it for long) or I am currently offline for the next few to several days. Nothing catastrophic or sinister, merely very inconvenient. I’ll be back soon folks, I promise.

[ music | Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek ]

I just can not keep from sharing this. Imogen Heap is absolutely the most brilliant artist I’ve found in a long time. She’s like the best of Tori Amos fused with the best of Depeche Mode, with a little bit of suger stirred in for good measure. The latest album, Speak for Yourself, is just astoundingly awesome. I can not give it high enough marks. The track “Hide and Seek” is the best use of gang voices and a vocoder in history, bar none. The fact they also use Antares Auto-Tune in this track does not bother me at all, because they use the effect brilliantly, unlike the nerve-grating “Believe” by Cher a few years back. Check out I Megaphone too, it’s almost as good, but still a 9. If you’re a completist, check out the band Frou Frou for more of her. Incredible.