Quote -o- the day;

"[14:14] patrickb1031: I should start tanning, so when I go to hell the heat won't bug me so much."

Public Service Announcement.

Holy Crap!

Check this Out

That guy is a mutant of a different sort.

Well as many of you already know the semi-monthly-when-ever-enough-people-yell-at-me-about-it meetup for my twisted stepchild site KCBloggers is tonite at Harry's Country Club. Hope to see you there and if not there will be a hit squad of trained ninja monkey's sent out to greet you at your door.

And on a side note since I have my audioscrobbler deal working I'm amazed I haven't gotten any chuckles from the unwashed masses... I guess my aura of intimidation broadcasts even into the ether, wow lets hear it for mutant powers! And if you make fun of it those ninja monkey's are on retainer.

Okay so I've got to figure out how I can make it to one of these shows, it's rare I get all giddy about seeing a band live, but these guys I would die to see.




JUNE 12 : Atlanta, GA • Music Midtown Festival
AUGUST 4 : Anaheim, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 5 : Anaheim, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 6 : West Hollywood, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 7 : West Hollywood, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 10: New York, NY • Hammerstein Ballroom
AUGUST 13: Washington DC • 9:30 CLUB
AUGUST 14: Washington DC • 9:30 CLUB
AUGUST 17: Atlantic City, NJ • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 18: Cleveland, OH • Scene Pavilion
AUGUST 23: Englewood, CO • Coors Amphitheatre
AUGUST 25: Chicago, IL • HOUSE OF BLUES
AUGUST 26: Chicago, IL • HOUSE OF BLUES
SEPTEMBER 2: San Diego, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
SEPTEMBER 3: San Diego, CA • HOUSE OF BLUES
SEPTEMBER 5: Seattle, WA • Bumbershoot Festival


I think I might be making a trek to Chicago for my birthday...

And in today's news;

Laura Does the Holy Land - which is much further than she went with Dubbyah on their first date. (link is dead.. I think someone figured out what they had written)

Star Wars Smashes Records - I'm pleased that you all could line Lucas's pockets yet again!

Researchers Pinpoint Brain's Sarcasm Sensor, I wonder which government grant paid for this?

So Star Wars Ep. III is out, finally! Now I just have to wait for all the costumed people to be done with it before I go... I have this fantasy about punching a stormtrooper, and I don't wanna bust the poor geeks nose ya know?

In other news, Will directed me to some of the funniest stuff I have seen in a long time, same topic, but tilted in a different way...

These folks were actually protesting the movie!

Here is some of the creative propaganda.

Okay so I'm about to be a complete idiot and lay out my thoughts on the TV I followed this year...

Deadwood : Holy Crapula! If you haven't seen this series, please do, if you can't stand profanity your sh*t outta luck here. Swearengen is rapidly becoming my hero, and Farnum has gone looney, what is up with that? Bullock needs to dislodge the rather cumbersome stick that is planted between his bun's and lighten up, he looks like he is having issues in the ass region all the time now. This series is just plan amazing, every week I cant' wait to catch up, sad next week is the finale... I hate this time of year.

Lost : talk about another series that has me by the short and curlies, besides Kate is a friggin hottie. Well last night the handful got off the island on thier little raft / boat thing. Then a coworker comes up to me today and say's... "They are going to find the people that were in the tail of the plane"... grrrr... this series keeps me because it's impossible to predict anything about it. Oh and Kate is a hottie...

24 : How can they possibly find another plot that will seem even remotely possible for next season? This season they have irradiated Northern California, and at the moment there is a nuke about to land somewhere in the U.S. What next, Dr. Evil show's up with sharks and lazers? Jack's daughter get's kidnapped and ... oh wait that was last season.

Battlestar Gallactica : I heard a retarded coworker go off on this series, and I have to disagree. I really enjoyed the lack of shoot-em-up in it, and the focusing on the relationships. The idea of having Starbuck be a female was alittle off to me, but because I'm old enough to remember the original, which was probably a slight mirror of Han Solo. But I hope this series lasts awhile, I really do like the way they have taken it.

White House says Newsweek report damaged U.S. image

*ahem* Shouldn't that say, "Whitehouse say's, Newsweek didn't help the US's image" since it's screwed anyways? You know sometimes I wonder what type of person believes all the crap the Whitehouse spews to cover it's own ass... then I just have to go to the grocery store right here in the midwest and I find lots of them... sad really.

This weekend was pretty lazy for me, I spend most of my time cleaning, catching up on my Netflix, and playing WarCraft (I'm 60 now by the way). But yesterday Jen and I went to go see Hitchhikers Guide, and I have to admit it really wasn't that bad. Yes they left out some character developement, Yes they left out some other portions of the book, but how much can you expect them to actually get into the movie from the book? All in all it really wasn't bad, and an enjoyable movie.

Last night sucked! The storms that rolled though, the wild problems they caused and annoying idiots that I had to deal with make for a grumpy and sleep deprived R.G. today.

7:30 PM or so : Power goes out, winds pick up, to the point I'm watching my windows bow in towards me and seeing misc. debris go flying through RiverMarket.

8:30 PM or so : Power is back, winds have calmed, rain has all but stopped, even is much better now.

10:30 PM or so : Cute College Chickies next door decide having a party on a Thursday night is a good idea, but it's "early" so I'm gonna see how late it lasts before it becomes smashing time.

11:30 PM or so : Lightening strikes! Storm has gone from light rain to sheets of blinding rain and complete bone jarring thunder. The lightening either hit the building or close enough the the fire alarms went off, oh well... so much for sleeping.

12:30 AM or so : No fire, the Fire Dept has come out and checked everything but can't find the key to turn off the alarms... rage level is orange. Neighbors come out into the hall (AN HOUR AFTER THEY STARTED GOING OFF) and say "Oh the fire alarms are going off!", I wish you would have burned... burned.... burned...

1:30 / 1:45 AM or so : Manager finally shows up... how nice of her! She figures out she doesn't have a key to shut the alarms off either! I'm figuring at this point that killing isn't out of the question, then using her skull to break open that damned box and turning off the alarms... I would be a hero in my building, and would probably get some kind of casserole from the older lady sitting with her dog outside all this time...

2:00 AM : Manager calls in the maintenance guy who, you guessed it, has the damned key... they get it turned off and I get THE F'N PARTY STILL GOING ON!

2:30 AM : Party has calmed, at least enough that I can sleep... which I finally do....

6:15 AM : Alarm goes off.... Ugh Work!

UPDATE: Since I go home usually for lunch I found out the lightening killed the elevators as well. I knew they weren't working this morning, but I figured they would be working by lunch... well it turns out one of the main circut boards was fried from the same strike that turned on the fire alarms. I guess on the bright side I wasn't in the elevators when that happened.

I know it might come as a suprise to some of you that read my blog but I'm a sports fan, I do enjoy certain sports and have a good time when I go to see a live event. On that note is today's rant...

Guess what Kansas City, you have a champion soccer team! I know it must come as a suprise to the normal K.C. sports fan, but it's true, the 2004 MLS Cup champs are your Kansas City Wizards! It is discusting to me how the last place team in Major League Snoozeball, and the Kansas City "We are the best... well second best... oh wait third... wait... where's our defense?" Chiefs get more press coverage than the friggin champions. So what gives? Well it's the stigma of soccer, which in all reality in the U.S. is a way to *not* have your children running around the house on a Saturday in summer, or time filler when your kids blows at baseball (usually a football player in the making). I know I'm just one guy in a sea of mouthbreathers here, but give it a chance, I am!

Get a couple of tickets, go see a game, sit outside for awhile, have some fun yelling for the player you like the best. You may suprise yourself when you have a good time!

Andy Roddick lets his morals got the best of him . (it's a Canadian link because I didn't find anything on the story specifically in the states.) So Andy goes against the umpires call on an out ball, not of his own, but of his opponent's, and the ump goes along with him costing him the set, and ultimately the match.

WTF!!! Let me get this straight... So the guy is actually a good sportsman and he gets shit for it! Gimme a break folks. Are we really just a population who celebrates the cheater? Oh wait... WE ARE! And not only that, we seem to worship the steroid soaked, hot headed, over paid, taking swings at the people paying to see them, crying about the media, raping, and generally distasteful cretins and we invite them into our living rooms every single night of the year, and to top it all off they are role models for the nasty mouth breathing children of NASCAR breeders. It's time to wake up and change people, if the sports figure you like is and/or has been a criminal of some sort STOP LIKING THEM! I don't know about you but I'm not one to make drug using rapists my best friend, nor do I even want to know about them, so why do you?

Now after this rant I'd like to say that I'm not going to stop watching sports, I'm just waiting for that one NBA player to bust a cap in the fat beer swilling bastard in the 5th row for calling him a lazy ass who couldn't guard his mom... it's gonna happen and I'll be watching... or I'll atleast TIVO the SportsCenter.

Okay so I figured it out pretty quickly for my windows machine at home, as you can see from the NOW PLAYING box on the right. But getting it working through the Mac seems to be much more of an excercise in futility. For the PC I used an iTunes plugin called Now Playing which outputs a nicely formatted XML document and transfers that to the server, which I then just use PHP to parse and display, which if your wondering the program does the image link and amazon (or iTunes music store) links before it generates the XML file so you can easily suck them out to display.

As Eric and Bruno both mentioned below AudioScrobbler has some plugins which from what it sounds like do pretty much the same thing, so I might spend some time looking at that today as well, and maybe figuring out a dirty way to parse the RSS from Netflix as well... Then on to my Flikr account and pretty soon I won't have to post anymore, it will just be my life without words.

I must warn you, every once in awhile you will see something really odd show up as Now Playing, and you are allowed to give me shit as needed. But remember we all have our secret's and if mine happens to be some really bad band from the 80's then so be it.

Well the weekend was filled with food on Friday night, cleaning on Saturday (as well as soccer on all day long, because I'm becoming a fan, which will also mean that the KC Wizards will prolly fold after this season is over... thank you Outlaws), and Sunday was more of the same, with some rain tossed in for good measure.

And the time has come to figure out a new design for this monster, or atleast some new content, so my first question is this, and I only ask this because I know someone has tried it. Is there a way to have a playlist from your iPod (aka iTunes) auto update to your blog? There was a way at one point with WinAmp, and to be honest I haven't dug that deep on this one, but I figured I'd toss it out there just to see if anyone had any ideas.

One of my favorite places to go and see some truely offensive but funny as hell t-shirts has bowed to the idiots who can't look at things as a joke and get a laugh out things, yes T-Shirt Hell has removed thier Worse Than Hell category which had some of the best shirts poking fun at things like the recent Tsunami, 9/11, and the "School Shooting Tour" shirt, which I wanted but never seemed to come to mind when I had money to blow.

Sadness....

So who knew the Red Vine down in the Jazz district had a dress code? I know I didn't... so off to Good Old Harry's we went last night. By the time I made it home I was dead, dead, dead... my body decided I was the walking dead somewhere around Thursday so I slept like a rock last night, only to awake this morning with many things on my mind to do this weekend.

Today grocery shopping since before the cruise I threw out most things that would go bad besides I didn't have much anyways, but today it was a run on the fruit stuffs to make some smoothies with my smoothie maker I got last Christmas. I also am mentally getting ready to start skating again, while I'm not planning on playing hockey very soon (even though the Line Creek Tuesday nights are starting again soon according to Chill) I am going to start going back to the public's and working on getting my dumb ass back into hockey playing form. Oh and laundry... laundry... laundry.

I also got the speech from the Toast last night about getting a KCBloggers meetup happening soon, so that is a brewing now as well, stay tuned.

M a n... I am peeling like a lizard who has had way too much eat here. The Sun and I have had this glorious deal for the last few years, I don't mess with it and it won't mess with me. Well I kinda broke that with my cruise and I have paid... Damn you "Sol" you win again! Someday I tell ya I'll have the SPF 150 on and you will pay! I'm also in the midst of vacation hangover, that time where you come down and start feeling how *not* energized you actually are. Why do people lie and tell you they need a vacation to "re-charge thier batteries" when you know better because you have tried to use that lie yourself before?

Oh well... I'm almost out of the office for the day, I have spent the majority of the last couple of day's messing with OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) and I have to say that the upgrade until they fix a few things is a waste of time, don't do it if you value anything on your curreny install, or if you want things to work right after you upgrade within a reasonable amount of time.

I'm back! And Oh do I long for last week all over again.

I'm back and alittle burnt around the edges, but that is well on it's way to healing, Cancun got me... it is alittle closer to the sun you know.

So now all I can think about is what my next adventure is going to be, while I get buried yet again at work... doesn't take much time now does it?

Well I'll drop some pix up before to long, I want to get my Flikr account up and running and maybe start doing some regular photo posts as well but until then suffer monkeys!