... Check his Pulse

... then grab his shoes!
Long time no see!
I've had the desire to vent for the past few months and have forced myself to swallow the bile back a bit. My hope was to soften the bite through the lens of hindsight. Let the truly significant details stand as pillars in my past and the unimportant crap to fade into the background. And it worked. A little too well. It's amazing just how much of our day to day lives is relatively unimportant crap. A wonderful realization for a man in his thirties. I keep wondering if maybe I should indulge an existential crisis... meh, maybe later.
Work is... I sat staring at the monitor for a few minutes. I can probably sum up the biggest issues thusly: I miss the days when, while working late, I could finish up my tasks and head home. Now when I work late I stop when I'm out of time. There is no foreseeable end. People at work have noticed and their comment is "Well, at least you have job security." I usually smile and say "If THIS is what job security feels like then I'm not sure I want it!" We laugh and they turn away and head for the door. But enough about that. A work rant could fill this page and in the end it would resolve nothing. I'm still cautiously optimistic that things will even out, but at the moment I am hitting the leading edge of the storm and the waves in the distance are looking pretty intimidating.

Lots of minor stuff happening at home:
I haven't cut my hair in a while, my plan being to achieve a 'Crazy Hobo' look before winter.
I'm on my second week with contact lenses and am trying to decide if I'm willing to shell out for a year's supply. That plus a pair of glasses with my updated prescription is almost $600. It has been nice being able to wear actual sunglasses again.
3 year anniversary happened last weekend, so the Girlfriend and I headed to Kansas City for a few days. Hotel pool + spa on one day, and Oceans of Fun on the other. It was great fun, and the sunburn was nearly worth it.
Built a new computer. I finally bit the bullet and put together a brand-spanking new system completely from scratch. Did quite a bit of shopping around and found a great balance between performance and cost. Solid manufacturers. Solid warranties. Rugged parts. And lots of headroom for future expansion. BlackBehemoth. Next step? SSD drives. Sadly the current batch available is a mixed bag of performance and features with the clear leaders still in the enthusiast price-ranges. The prices have to come down soon, but manufacturers are hell-bent to squeeze as much profit out of their old tech for as long as they can before they obsolete themselves into a corner. Blazing fast access, no moving parts, a fraction of the power use, a 10+ year theoretical lifespan vs tried and true tech that has been in use for decades now. It will take a while.
Gaming.
The things I've sunk time into recently include Borderlands, Battlefield Bad Company 2 (these two include a chunk of time playing online with my brother, which was quite fun for a while!), and Just Cause 2. I'm holding my breath for Civ V. That may be the first game in a long time where I am willing to pay full retail. I've owned every other core Civ game and enjoyed them immensely.

I have been on a comedy kick for the past month and have spent quite a bit of time sampling and exploring the works of various stand-up comedians. Facilitating this has been the discovery of Marc Maron's podcast: WTF (wtfpod.com). It is lewd, crude, unapologetically self-indulgent, and a wonderful exploration of the personalities behind the characters that make us laugh. Every episode he interviews a fellow comic and explores the psyche behind those that dare to stand in front of a crowd to be laughed at. It isn't a 'funny' show, but it is real. A kind of "Behind the Comedy." There will be rants about relationships, candid discussions of past and present drug use and abuse, frustration, joy, happiness, pain... at times brutally honest and at others inspirational. My favorite discovery from this show so far is actually from the latest show (episode 98) a British comedian called Stewart Lee. He has no albums released in America, but youtube has quite a few clips both past (young and manic) and present (deliberate and self-aware). The pacing and tone of the show fits right into the space in my head reserved for funny. Then again I also enjoy Doug Stanhope, so maybe I'm not the best judge of 'funny.' But I know what I like! :D
A few months ago I decided to spring for a Zune Pass membership. Maybe I've mentioned it, probably not. For the past few weeks I have been trying to determine the cost vs benefit ratio, since Zune Pass charges me whether I use it or not. But my new comedy kick has made it all worthwhile! Lots of the comedy albums are available through the pass and I can sample them at will. (It also helped me find a Monty Python album that has been in my brain since before I could speak English! Monty Python's Previous Record. Bits of this album had been dubbed to a cassette that I found years and years and years ago in my parent's stash o tapes and listened to it obsessively. I have the tone, pacing, and skits printed on my brain to this day and finding the original to hear again is such a treat! "Stand and Deliver!" :D
Ok, well it is now 6 am and I'm faced with the realization that I'll probably not be able to go back to bed. Time to make the coffee.

Odds and Ends with some Recommendations.

A busy week has passed. I've tried assembling my thoughts coherently so that I could segregate the topics, but that just made me stare at the blank screen. So it is now time for a general brain purge! Find a tarp and take a few steps back...
First off... in the previous post I mentioned demoing an MSI Wind U100 netbook. Part of the deal for getting the demo unit was that our tech-team would write up some impressions that MSI could use for some internal redesign stuff. I won't bore you with the full review, since a quick google will give you many more qualified impressions. My take? I'm continually impressed with the agility of the Atom processor, but that is independent of this model. The newer netbooks all benefit from this tiny, hyper-efficient chip, and the possibilities for these improvements to begin affecting consumer tech in general feels pretty exciting. The U100 is a nice solid unit. The hinges are stiff, and you don't feel like you could break the thing just by picking it up. The touchpad is responsive and easy to use, the touchpad buttons feel a little mushy, but they seem to register consistently so I can forgive that. The keyboard kills it for me. The buttons are nicely spaced. A little compact, but we are talking about a unit that is barely 12 inches across. Touchtyping is possible, but a little tricky since the ridges between keys are fairly shallow. The killer though is the Ctrl key. For some reason the key under the left shift isn't Ctrl, it's Fn. Ctrl is next to it. Try telling that to my pinky finger. Nothing sucks worse than botching a simple Copy Paste routine. I found myself moving my hand off the keyboard to make sure that my fingers were using the right buttons. Not good!
I was also unimpressed with the battery, but the demo unit only had the 3 cell. Bigger batteries would be available. In the end I came away fairly impressed, but at the same time certain that these netbooks aren't designed for professional use. Small resolution screens and cramped keyboards outweigh cheap and portable if you're trying to use one of these buggers for an 8 hour work-day. On the other hand it was awesome having the little thing on my coffee table so I could look things up without having to switch away from what I was doing on my big screen. I'm definitely considering getting A netbook. Probably not THIS netbook, but I'm keeping my eyes open for a good deal. Recommendation: Netbooks are neat, but don't expect too much. They are cheap for a reason.

I've been spending a lot of time with my music collection lately. Now that Amazon sells DRM free MP3s I've done the unthinkable and actually purchased a few albums. The catalyst was a friend from Germany recommending a group she had seen: LaBrassBanda. An awesome little band using trumpets and tubas and such to make some excellent sound. A few minutes on youtube and I started hunting for a good place to pick up the album. One thing led to another and now I'm starting to go through my mind about albums that I miss or wish I had. My latest purchase was The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. I LOVED that album. I don't even remember how I ended up with the cassette, but the crispy, dark, industrial sound touched a part of my brain that was hungering for something and gave it sustenance. I'm burning the album off to CD at the moment so that I can give it a semi-permanent spot in my car. Recommendation: My experience with purchasing MP3s from Amazon have been positive and I would recommend it. Also, NIN is awesome and I recommend giving Reznor's latest stuff a listen. He has a distinct style which could be easy to dismiss at first listen. But give it another listen. The man has a way of weaving a tapestry with sound. Many of his compositions are bleak or angry, but they contain an emotional depth and raw energy that you rarely find in music.
Break.