well, it's been a week since my last post, and wouldn't ya know it, today is bipolar's third birthday!

there's been so much stuff going on since the last post, i'm not even going to try to fit it all into this one, instead, i'm going to attempt to make a real quick skim of the last year (i'm under time constraints right now) and attempt a recap of sorts.

of course, as with years past, i've been in somewhat of a posting slump, so the pickin's are probably kind of slim.

fortunately, after the whole movabletype thing, access to bipolar has increased by leaps and bounds–the archives are all still there, but now we've got category access as well. (and individual entry pages, which you'll get to if you go through the category indexes.)

anyway, without further ado, the year in review (abbreviated version):

1. Lucifigous Prick has our first show.
2. The Puffin returns.
3. My car continues to give me trouble
4. I went to Paris for my sister's wedding.
5. I started dating a wonderful girl though i wasn't prepared yet to talk about it outright (i just mentioned it in the first paragraph).
6. I bought a new car!
7. Found out i'm going to be an uncle.
8. Converted the site to MovableType.

and… there ya have it.

that's the quick and dirty version of the last year of my life. some things i'm sure i probably skipped over (either didn't blog about 'em, or didn't catch them as i skimmed through my old entries) , but i think those are the major events.

of course, the most major event has proven to be #5, and i can safely say that i am one of the happiest men in the world right now. And who said fate was a cruel master?

considering the recent discussions of Mr. Bungle and Mike Patton in the comments, i thought i'd point out this little tidbit that my co-worker pointed out to me earlier today. about the middle of the page there, they get a quote from Mike Patton stating that Mr. Bungle is pretty much over. for those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Bungle, i'll explain this revelation simply: This totally sucks. Mr. Bungle kicked ass. I am sad.

to continue the discussion of the movabletype thing, i managed to wrangle together some RSS 2.0 feeds yesterday, including a combined feed with my & brian's blogs haphazardly thrown together. in fact, here's some links (i'll be adding buttons to the main page somewhere for each theme in a bit): bipolar RSS :: brian's RSS :: matt's RSS

i'm still thinking of how to fix the permalinks to point to the new archives and yet still work properly. if anyone has ideas, knows how i might accomplish this in MT or with php/mysql or even javascript, throw those ideas this way. basically i need a way to *know* what old blogger post ID equates to which new MT post ID. i have some ideas, but i'm open for suggestions.

i also spent an hour or so last night converting the lucifigous prick news and news archives pages over to using movabletype. which has provided us with the Lucifigous Prick RSS feed

by the way, for those of you who have no idea what i'm talking about with all this RSS business, RSS is a document description language based on XML that is used to facilitate "syndication" of content. in other words, instead of someone simply linking to the site, they can can pull down the latest updates and display them (or excerpts from them) directly on their site. or, if you're using an "aggregator" you can pull down several RSS feeds and have them combined into your own personal internet newspaper (of sorts).

goodness, that went a little longer than it was supposed to. more another time.

so, if you've not noticed, things have changed around here… ever so slightly. (as seems to be the case quite often when things actually have changed quite drastically. i'll mark that up to my own poor planning and ability to… "improvise").

but yes, we've moved now totally (i was already on it for a couple days, but hadn't posted yet) over to the movabletype content engine. initially, you won't be able to tell much difference, but as time goes on, i'll add in more of the whiz-bang features that movabletype has opened up for us. (post searches, categorization, RSS syndication, anyone, hello, is this thing on?)

i still have some work to do on the archive links at the bottom of each side (the monthly archives for the past !!! THREE YEARS !!! goodness, has it been that long), and i'll have to try to come up with something to make sure that all those old "permalinks" that are floating around out there are still "perma". and i'm really afraid that that is going to be quite a bitch to accomplish. but, i'll probably just have to do it a month at a time and not try to do it all in one night.

nevertheless, the bulk of the work is done, so, sit back and enjoy what you will probably not even notice.

p.s. movabletype unfortunately carries no guarantee to magically increase or improve my posting habits. hopefully i'll just magically start getting 28 hour days instead of this 24 hour crap i've been having to deal with all my life.

so, there have been a whole slew of things i've wanted to post about the past few days, but i've been Biz-AY. i'll attempt to recap.

Sara's race went well… er… except for the whole knee-collapsing-almost-falling thing. but she was a trooper and finished the race anyway. she may not've gotten the time she wanted (it's not like she was really doing it as a competition anyway), but she finished, and that's the important thing. i'm really proud of her. she didn't even start training until January, and she did the whole Louisville Triple Crown. have i mentioned what a lucky guy i am?

our trip to visit the fam went well, also. the entire family, of course, was thrilled to see my sister (the frenchie) who gets to come home twice a year if we're lucky. i'd like to think they were thrilled to have me home as well, because they've probably seen my sister more recently than myself (she went with them to visit dad's side of the family at christmas, i believe). but this is, of course, because i'm just a bad son who never calls or writes or visits without some sort of prompting. i don't do it on purpose, really. i just allow my life to interfere with itself too much.

anyway, the trip went well. sara had a good time i believe, and likes my family, so that's good. they definitely like her, so that's good too. it was also very cool to get to take an extended trip (24 hrs, but still) with my girlfriend. i'm looking forward to many more road trips with her.

i was visiting sharon's site the other day, and she had a post talking about how some scientist in America was getting "boycotted" by a scientist from Italy because of his citizenship. basically, the italian scientist pointed to the questionable foreign policy of our government, and in fact, to the current American cultural climate as a whole as reason enough to entirely boycott American science. i many ways, i understand and agree with this Italian scientist. there is not much in our current political administration or in our current cultural mainstream that i would agree with or support in any way. our leaders are insane, greedy men. our people are needy, greedy, and largely self-centered. the "upper class" won't make an effort to raise the standard of living for the "lower class", and the "lower class" finds it hard to break out of the habits established by their predecessors. we all apparently want to be fat & lazy & get everything for nothing. (these are broad statements, probably too much so. there are almost always exceptions). anyway, go, read the post.

yesterday, i finally got the latest lucifigous prick demo tracks online. go check 'em out. these are definitely our best room recordings to date. we're really really pleased with them. they sound great for room recordings. i can't wait to actually lay some real tracks down.

today, i just uploaded and updated Old Man's site, for the sole purpose of adding their new demo track. they just got to play around with Pro Tools a bit over the weekend while i was out of town, and they really put together a stellar track for their first experiment with the new equipment.

i've a good feeling more tracks will be coming very shortly from both bands.

ok. i think that covers it.