okay. mother nature? are you there? could you do me a favor and calm the fuck down? seriously…this warm, cold, warm shit is getting old. quick. first it's warm out. then we have a big crazy storm blow through with insane winds and then it's cold as fuck out. then we have a little bit of rain and all of a sudden it's warm enough to go outside without a jacket. what the hell is wrong with you, woman? that is all. thank you.

moving right along…the new schedule is ace. i love it. it still boggles my mind to be off work as early as i am now. then again, it also still boggles my mind to have to go to bed by 1am every night and get up again at 9am. i'm not used to seeing the world at that hour. it's like i up and moved to some other country or something.

after about a week without any caffeine, i've started phasing it back in. i'm now drinking about one coke a day, never any after lunch (2-3pm). it seems to be working out pretty well, so far. i cheated on that big time over the weekend at the girl's house, but hey…it was the weekend.

speaking of weekends, the girl may come home this weekend, which is great. seeing her two weekends in a row will never be considered a bad thing.

we went up to see the twilight singers in cincy, last week. the show was awesome and came dangerously close to being a full-blown afghan whigs reunion. they played quite a few whigs tunes and were actually joined on stage by the original whigs bassist and their last drummer. sebastian was sufficiently jealous. paul probably will be, as well.

check out raj's blog. he's a great guy. really.

shit. i meant to post an explosions in the sky show to transmission3000, last night. guess i better get on that, huh?

i was kind of surprised to receive an email the other day from MP3.com stating that, since they'd just been purchased by CNET Networks, Inc., they'd be shutting down their service on Dec. 2nd. now, it'll be replaced by a new service of some kind, though what that entails remains to be seen.

the reason this surprises and shocks me is because it seems that so many independent artists used MP3.com as their primary "website", or at least as a hosting server/controller for their online MP3 tracks. from what i can tell from the email, none of the existing information will be transferred to the new mp3.com, forcing thousands and thousands of artists to completely re-create their web presences and to track down and ensure that anyone linking to their former mp3.com pages updates to the new links.

my first thought when i read the email was "whoa, it's going to be a firestorm!" subsequent searches for info indicate that the storm hasn't been as big as i thought so far, but it's only been a couple days. we'll see what happens.

sticking to the music theme, WinAmp 5 has slithered out of the dark hole of the pseudo-public beta (AOL users only) with beta version 2. WinAmp 5 is small and resource conservative like WinAmp 2.x was, but incorporates some of the better features of the (largely) failed WinAmp 3. unfortunately, one of the things 5 has dropped is the WinAmp 3 plugin APIs, so i've had to switch back to DoSomething as my plugin of choice for the "MP3 of the moment" feature that closes the most recent post (and which is also viewable in the "remote" webcam windows).

finally, you might remember me mentioning way way back when about the SyncIT utility i'd found. it was and always remained the single most awesome tool i've yet used on a computer. it fulfills its purpose without compromise or extra unnecessary crap. well, unfortunately, this tool also ended up switching from being a freeware thing to a subscription based thing, and i was just kind of morally opposed to it. especially considering that when they started charging for it, they'd not updated the client in over a year. so, i had to quit using this awesome piece of software. well, now, as it turns out, after struggling with their economic model and hardware problems for a while, they've decided to release it into the wild world of open source. the new bookmarksync project has updated the client and the server software, and is providing a version that can be run on php/mysql setups. i managed to get it set up on x13design.com in about 30 minutes, and am now, once again, quite a happy camper. a happy camper with impeccably synch'ed bookmarks.

well…at some point it was decided that my life needed a bit of an overhaul. it was suffering from some severe schedule issues. so now i work mornings. i come in at 10 and i'm off in the evening by 7pm (which will be awesome in the summer, i'm sure). this will enable me to have band practice any day of the week, which is nice. trying to cram that in on saturdays was starting to suck, big time.

of course, now i have to deal with the fact that my body doesn't want to go to sleep by midnight. i figure staggering through this week all tired and stuff will eventually train it to shut down a bit earlier. i hope. fucking god i really hope…

this all leads to another decision i've made, recently. no caffeine. at least not for a little while. it's making me nutty. it makes me miserable. i stopped in to get a mocha, yesterday morning. i thought i'd make a ceremonial return to proper "life." cue the misery. i was jittery and my stomach felt like shit all day. then, of course, i remembered when i was working in the coffeeshop and i came to this same realization and started drinking non-caffeinated herbal teas all the time. so from here on out it's water, juice and non-caffeinated bubbly beverages like sprite. i'll stick to that for a little while and then re-evaluate where my beloved coca-cola fits into my life.

saturday was one of the most kickass days i've had in a long time. i got knocked from sweet slumber by a phone call telling me that i got the new morning schedule i asked for. i went back to sleep and stayed there until probably about 3pm. maybe 2:30. either way, it was late. when i finally drug myself out of bed, i decided to go out and get some lunch. i went down to the local deli where one of my friends worked. i figured that i could get some conversation to go with my lunch and everything would be cool. he ended up hooking me up with my sandwich and soda, gratis. super deal. i then rolled out to circuit city to see about getting my car stereo replaced. i've been trying to get them to replace the thing for a few months now. i don't like the sony model i ended up getting after the car was broken into, last year. it has a problem playing some of my cds (mostly stuff burned in itunes on the mac). it's ugly. i just don't like it. i wanted the pioneer model, but at the time, circuit city didn't carry it. well, the other week the girl and i were in there, just looking around, and i noticed…the pioneer model (not the same one i wanted originally, but the new model of the same thing, which is actually a bit cheaper). so i went in on saturday, talked to them about it, explained that i've been waiting for months to get the damn thing replaced. they just said "okay," took the old one out, swapped it even for the pioneer model (which was about $40 more), installed it and gave me a new two year warranty on the new stereo.

total expenditure for the day: $0.00.

will someone buy me this? I wonder if there's a way to add that to my amazon wishlist…

oh…a new (old) rodan show has been posted to transmission3000. i'm just sayin'.

so we still have painters banging on the side of our house every day. this has been going on for what seems like a couple of months now. they were even out last sunday, which completely drove me nuts. sunday morning, i want to sleep in and i have a "painter" ripping the side off of my house at 10am. not my idea of a good start to the day.

we ended up not playing the halloween show. things didn't come together, which is still something of a sore point with me, but whatever. there's always next year.

the girlfriend is back out of town, so i've been moping around the house, missing her. i'll probably see hernext weekend, though, so that's always good.

i'm trying to think of an amusing story, but i'm coming up empty.

this morning, i and around 485,000 other Kentuckians will wake up to accept begrudgingly that, after 32 years, the highest seat in the state government will now be occupied by a Republican. around 594,000 will rise with grins and self-congratulatory glances as they bask in the reality of their improbable victory. The other 73 percent of this state's citizens will… well, they'll… well, who knows what the fuck they'll think, because they couldn't be bothered to GET UP OFF THEIR LAZY ASSES AND VOTE!

honestly though, i just say that because i finally can after having been one of those lazy asses for almost 10 years.

still, Fletcher has won, and yet another layer of the government that directly affects my life has been peeled away and replaced with something i don't agree with.

at this point, i will refrain from making any direct comments about the circumstances of his victory, but rest assured, it'll be eating at my craw for a while so i'll probably throw some crap out there at you from time to time. despite my total opposition to Fletcher, i think that he has the ability to be a fine governor, as long as he can accomplish the goals he's set out for himself and also get a damned budget approved. i fear for some of the conservative agendas he'll push, i fear for some of the agendas he won't push because of his indebtedness to special interests, and i fear for his ability to fight for the betterment of kentucky outside the state–against the policies of an administration to which he has proved so blindly loyal.

i hope that he can pass his medical malpractice damage cap agenda, and that he can actually do something to shore up medicaid and reduce prescription prices in the state as he's promised. i hope that he can work to protect the individual liberties of kentucky's citizens, and that he can improve the state of the educational system.

i hope that he understands that, especially in light of the platform he campaigned on ("democrats are dirty filthy amoral people" — paraphrased) that he will endeavor to keep himself and every member of his administration scandal free; because i know that if the Democratic Party gets even one whiff of scandal off him, they will be on him like a pack of dogs. and even more so, they will be digging for it. hopefully though, they will be gracious enough to not actually hinder his efforts. the last thing this state needs right now is political gridlock.

there's also an interesting/amusing/ironic/sort-of-sad anecdote from election day relating to yours truly, but in the interest of drama and me getting to sleep, i'll postpone the actually fairly short tale until later.