never knows best...

dry as toast

Happy Thanksgiving! Many things to be thankful for, but all too hard to articulate, so a blanket thanks goes out to anything and everything, Thanks.

And that is what I would have posted Thanksgiving morning if Blogger had not been acting up. Anyhow, I am back from my family road trip and rearing to go back to the grind.

Inspired by random forum reading, Nick's paycheck by the approximate percentages... Tax: 23%, Health: 2%, 401(k): 15%, Net: 60%. Bwahaha... fear next year when the 401(k) cap is lifted to 30% of base pay! And even if I do contribute that much, with tax weirdness, I might still be able to get about 50% gross pay. Of course, if I did that I would be really broke (maybe I could try to live off 401(k) dividends?).

Slashdot PT Cruiser owner works at the same place as me??!! Very scary. He seems to park in the basement (I park on the 4th floor, cause I need the extra exercise?), so I should go try to grab some pictures sometime.

In equally disturbing news, mostly because I really should not be finding such girly things like this, but it is still interesting: Noah's Ark finger puppets. Fun as they may be, it is probably too hard to type wearing them.

Probably a far more appropriate song for the previous post. Téléfrançais is of course the foundation of all things French. At least as far as I and maybe some poor Québécois are concerned.

"Double-V C", or WC in French as I like it. I have always found it funny, and I still find it funny, even if I never say it out aloud. I can imagine in a couple more years, that and "Je suis ananas" will be the only lasting impression my 5.5 years of French will have left on me.

Cal wins the Big Game and much rejoicing is to bad had (a day late?)! Ya, of course I watched it, does not mean that it was all that fun to watch, though it was nice to see Robertson get a touchdown at the end, even though it was kinda rubbing it in the face of the 'Furds (or maybe it was all the better because it was).

But in other day late, Saturday related news. I am now the proud owner of a Patrick Star cuddle pillow! Why? Mostly because there was nothing else to get at Kohl's and that $10 discount card would go to waste without a purchase. So it was Patrick or a Xbox game (still kinda confused why they were selling Xbox games) or an Oxo ice cream scooper. And Patrick won out in terms of pure desire, and for $5.40 impulses win out over reason.

Yay, my new stereo came in today! My vaguely fancy, hopefully vaguely hifi Sharp SD-EX111. Right now I have it hooked up to the cheap speakers that came with that TEAC bookshelf system I talked about a while ago, so the next step is to go and get those $200-300 speakers (probably Paradigm Atoms or Axiom M3tis, depending how flush with funds I am feeling). Anyhow, now I do not have to rely on my clock radio for snooze functionality, and there is a remote too! Double win!

MP3s on disk: 318 (1.8 GB). And that is with a lot of paring down from CD purchases, but then it also includes a lot of stuff I do not really listen to anymore. Case in point: I have all of Olivia's albums and all of Ellegarden's albums and a couple of The Brilliant Green's albums (all are Japanese bands with English songs that rock?) that I am not putting much time into listening to. So I guess I should either burn away as audio CD and not worry about future lossy format conversions or delete away and keep the cream of the crop. Either way, it will bring me one step closer to that MP3 frugality of the past.

I used to go and reevaluate all the MP3s I had, and delete the cruft, which almost always were additional songs by artists. Now, I say that I probably should, but then just leave them there to rot digitally until a hard drive failure... But space is cheap and it is still the case that I am still living comfortably within my awe inspiring 20 GB of total diskspace. So, no worries.

25 days, ~$10,000 in repairs, ~$650 in car rental later, the Civic is back and mostly fine. A couple niggling issue is the right tailight does not light up when I lock/unlock the car with the remote, plus I am missing screws to mount my front license plate (hopefully no tickets until I get around to getting some). Either way, it is nice to be rid of the renter (whose door locks continued to confound me up until I returned it) and back in the "new" car.

Lohan sings and dances? I guess it is good that I say my teen idol of choice is Amanda Bynes? Well at least until she tries singing and dancing, maybe.

In other news, there is almost nothing nicer than a box of grapefruit, except maybe getting a couple of boxes of 鳳梨酥 from Taiwan all for myself. I wonder if they sell grapefruit flavored ones.

Nice day in SF, thankfully without too much rain. Yay for veterans!

The Venture Bros. The only show on Adult Swim that is watchable other than Futurama and to some extent the anime and Family Guy. I am glad that they are now showing it on weeknights, so I can actually catch it without having to be too loser'ish with watching it on Saturday nights.

The funny thing about the previous post was when I saw the post time I thought "Huh... time is off by an hour again," and not "Huh... what the heck am I doing up so late?" So now, my reaction is what the heck am I doing up so late, anyhow last Sunday I donated some cash to the local college radio station (KSCU) and will supposedly get a T-shirt out of it. Though looking at the swag list they have up now I would have sprung for a M83 poster and pin. I still feel kinda gyped by the fact that they did not have squat to buy at the M83 show. Oh well, I will try to bug them about it tomorrow, but for now sleep.

Saw a recorded live performance of this on Fuse today during my TV surfing. So many memories of listening to this 10 minute super-song on repeat, studying my life away. Top songs to listen to while studying: Konstantine [Something Corporate]; It's Too Late [The Streets]; The Scientist [Coldplay]; Dakishimetai [Jungle Smile]; Gibusu [Ringo Shiina]; Their Story [Valen Hsu]. But Konstantine in particular got me through about 2 years worth of tests.

Rolling up a 50' ethernet cable reminds me of manually rolling up a 100' garden hose. Except not nearly as heavy nor dirty. Stupid hose cart and it's frequent breakages, though of course I did treat it like crap (what with my bad hose reeling).

Pointless week lag in putting up photos.

Interesting internet wanderings.

Since Nintendo has the longest history of the bunch, it was tough comparing the GameCube to a young pop diva. So I had to pick a diva a little bit older than the other girls: Rachael Yamagata.

from GameSpy

And furthering the analogy a little more, Rachael Yamagata only has 1 good song (or so it seems from the audio clips I listened to, "Worn Me Down" is really, really good though), Nintendo likewise has a limited "good" game library. Still bitter about that N64 purchase...

I am really missing Berkeley record stores. Sure, there is a Tower Records and a Rasputins near work, but even then they pale in comparison to the Berkeley ones. Plus, no Amoeba, and now that I am feeling like I should try to buy Sia's album (after listening to Breathe Me for the hundredth time or so), I would even go to the slightly intimidating/shaddy looking Mod Lang. Well, at least Veteran's Day is coming up and you know what that means? Bank holiday and Nick holiday, so off to probably spend the day doing record shopping and maybe hunting down my new stereo.

Take out Captain Kirk and it is almost an okay song.

But in non-Star Trek related news, the Live 105 Not So Silent Night lineup is out, and it actually looks pretty decent. I would definitely go to see Muse and The Killers, and Interpol and Modest Mouse should be good live as well. I will see if I cannot win me some tickets because otherwise I am too cheap to spend that much on a concert, ~$20 Muse concert notwithstanding.

Slowly pulling myself out of post-election slump.

6:45, got up. 6:55, walked to polling place. 7:05, voted. 7:15, back at home. Boo, no paper trail!