Thought Sausage

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way...I've never really felt like Mardi Gras is something I have to take part in before I die. In fact I don't really give a shit about it. Nevertheless, I am intrigued by the message and overall sentiment in this movie. I went ahead and ordered it. I'll post a review once I get it (however, I also just ordered season 16 of Law and Order on itunes so it may be awhile till I get around to watching it). Now, we use and abuse Mardi Gras beads fairly religiously on RAGBRAI, but I think the message this movie is attempting to communicate goes a little deeper than the beads themselves.

My initial sentiment here is that this movie will (accurate IM oh so HO) show how the people partaking in Mardi Gras are ignorant spoiled little bitches. And go figure...that's pretty much what New Orleans (at least the parts of it that weren't members of the band Down) French Quarter was before the storm.

This is what happens when I surf the web alone in Florida on a beach. To be fair though, I gotta give this one to 'ol Hank.

This would have posed a much larger problem when I was living in Iowa, but since I live smack dab in the middle of down fucking town Chicago, its more of a nagging nuisance...but I went out to drive to swim practice after work, only to fine my battery was not capable of turning over. I hadn't driven it since Thursday and it seemed the cold weather zapped it. Ugh...so that nixed practice for tonight. Instead I did some lifting and then Horowitz came over with his big 'ol blue Impala and its big 'ol battery and once again we couldn't get the fucker jumped (this same thing happened a couple years ago). So now I'm stuck in the position of not having a car to get to practice. This shouldn't be that big of a deal since I ride there in the summer (and somewhat last winter) anyway. But I really got in the habit of taking the car, and even though its only a mile, it's kind of nice getting out and driving.

So...yeah...shit on that. This basically means I have to coordinate/engineer a truck over to the garage to do whatever the fuck it is they do. Ironically, my cell phone of all things comes with some sort of coverage for this sort of thing so I just call 'em up and they send somebody over. I'm RLY hoping this shapes up so they can look at it before 7-ish so I can still make practice. I certainly didn't take in calories today with the idea I wouldn't be swimming.

In other news, I'm digging the new Atomica Project single that just dropped this week....

I'm only one listen into it so far, but it's sexy-female-vocals-done-right make no mistake. None of that Evanescane wannabe bullshit so many bands cop. It's easily up there with Collide. Wade's a cool ambient/noisy-yet-melodic dude (save for Scanalyzer which is just plain fucking noisy). The remixes on here are pretty tasty as well...from my initial impression. Sort of sound like they were done in Fruityloops though...not that that's a bad thing persay...cos I do a lot of shit in Fruityloops (GASP). I like Bounte more and more though...kid has skillz and not in a Paul Oakenshit flavor either.

....heh, I only realized now that Fruityloops is apparently now called "FL Studio"...guess I'm not hip to the kids nowadays

Anyway...you can go grab this single for a measly 2 bucks so you're really only demonstrating your lack of perception for good music if you don't go grab these songs.

(patiently awaiting the full album release)

Actually listening to this makes me wanna program and go electronic more. It seems I've stumbled into a Hansel Und Gretyl kind of heavy (sans vocals, cos I don't have any yet). Kinda cool cos I always wanted to get 'that sound' but haven't quite gotten it yet. But despite not using a single amp, and playing fucking Parker Niteflys of all guitars, I got a pretty mean slammin tone. And I finally stopped being afraid of putting a 909 foot behind my "real people's kick drum" samples and the net result is....i dunno "modern"? Perhaps I've discovered what everyone else already knew, which is most heavy bands nowadays don't actually have a drummer "play" the parts in the studio, but rather sample the kit and arrange accordingly in pro tools. Oh wait...I knew everyone else was doing that...I was just too lazy to program percussion that heavily cos I always had a real live drummer with real live drums till now...

So my regular laptop is in fact fixable according to James. He has to order a few parts which should be here in "3-5 days". Whateva...so like, 3-5 days and 100 bucks poorer later, at least the thing will be back in order. It's a Compaq (shut up), and apparently the layout of these machines isn't particularly well thought-out.

So this week I'm on my work Dell, which is certainly good for surfing the web and so forth, but, well, it's tiny and gay. Not that that's a bad thing in of itself, but well, I don't do well with tiny keyboards.

Began piecing some music things in sort of a half-time thing I had together awhile ago, but finally worked out a somewhat tangible arrangement for. Problem? It's almost 13 minutes long (which, if left unedited, would be the longest thing I've ever done). Will revisit tonight, but I suspect this won't be usable for anything in its current state.

That is all.

Gary Busey is awesome

Well the past week flew by.

Went out for a brick session (run/cycle) up in Antioch on Saturday. That went alright...right up until I blew 2 (two!) tires. Jesus fuck this year is not being kind to my tires. The good to come of this I suppose is the fact I'm getting pretty good at changing tubes. It did cut short my cycle though. I also lost the pads for my aero bars (I'm guessing I left them on my trunk after attaching my bike). If the weather holds I plan on attempting this on lake path tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

Was GOING to head to Palos and mountain bike today, however the Earth didn't agree with me and decided to blast Chicago with a hefty massive downfall of rain mid-afternoon. Normally I wouldn't let that slow me down but Cambr has been bitching up a storm lately about people riding the single track when it is muddy and they show up and bother people on the trails whenever possible. So instead of that, I watched There Will Be Blood and ate too much food. Wheeee....

All in all, for a guy who didn't really go out Friday, I managed to spend a ridiculous amount of money. Couple that with the fact I am going to be getting a hefty bill from james to replace the motherboard in my main computer (which has to happen sooner than later, I've had it with this thing). That is really thrilling...

I'm two weeks away from my first Triathlon of the season. Hy Vee in Des Moines. I'm quite confident on my biking and my ability to clock that in at right around an hour. Running has been a bitch in these bricks lately. To be fair, my diet the day before isn't exactly ideal, but I was hoping to be around 7:30 miles and around 7:50 is about what seems realistic. Some of that is dependant on how hilly the course is. Since I had the tube problems on Saturday I'm goiing to try to get more multi-sport workouts in between now and the 22nd.

Found out this week that work is very likely going to have me spending a lot of time in Seattle in the month of July and August. I'm a little nervous about that as it will fuck with the bike time I have (I'll run anywhere I don't give a fuck about that). Shit...speaking of work, I owed a blog post on Friday and didn't git 'r done. The search industry just isn't engendering anything interesting, and I doubt people are interested in listening to me wax poetic about my workout regimes.

Boy howdy of all the customer support I've had to deal with over the years, American Airlines has to be on the ass end of the bell curve. Let me ask you this; if you are a huge company with lots of employees, why must the ones who can't speak a lick of english be the ones you put on your help desk? Surely there are employees of American who's command of our nation's majority tongue is sufficient to communicate concepts such as credit transfers and refunds.

Check it out. So I cancelled my San Fran trip from last week and was told I'd now have a credit voucher, but American would rape me to the tune of 150 bucks for re-booking. Sucks, but whatever right? So I hop my merry ass onto Expedia (as I was told when I cancel the credits would "show up in my account" - they didn't) to book a flight to Boston in October for my cousin's wedding. Seeing that these credits were in fact, unavailable, I called the support and the automated menu even had a choice for those of us that needed to use a credit voucher. This is where the fun began. Oh dear jesus. This fucker (I can't remember his name, but it rhymed with spaghetti) couldn't even understand numbers. NUMBERS! I had to read my itinerary to him no less than 4 times. Then when we finally made it clear I was calling to use credit, he ran through the whole rigamarole on the 150 bucks over and over because I kept saying "Sure okay, so can you use the remaining part of the voucher for that or do I need to give you a credit card (the flight to Boston is like 300 and the San Fran flight was 4 something or other)." At one point he put me on hold for 7 minutes (I spent the time staring at my computer clock) listening to crackly-ass elevator music (note to people who create hold music -how about something soft? the only necessary function of hold music is to let us know we didn't get cut off). When he came back, he informed me that I in fact, had to do this whole transaction through American as Expedia would not be able to book the flight directly so Spaghetti would have to transfer me.

The American Airlines person was nice. All the way up until I told her I wanted to rebook. She asked me why on earth I'd want to do that since I would be charged 150 bucks (I'm given to assume that staying put in Chicago for the rest of my life seemed like a perfectly viable option to her). As if pissing away the entire cost of the SF flight was somehow advantageous to using whatever credit I could get towards Boston. What the fuck?? Once we got the motives of my flight out of the way, she then informed me that not only would I be charged the 150 bucks, but the remaining difference of the flights would also be lost. So that difference between the 300 bucks (or something like that) for the Boston flight and the 450 or so the SF flight cost...yeah that 150 bucks...that part was going to just go away or something. According to her, I couldn't use that towards a flight in the future. I was also told that it was "not American Airlines policy to apply a credit voucher towards the 150 dollar mandatory re-booking fee". Somehow this equates to good customer service (I know this because the message told me while I was being transferred that American Airlines was going to 'record this call for quality assurance'). I finally just piped up and said "So how is it that you guys are just going to charge me an extra 150 bucks for a flight I didnt' even fly, when I'm perfectly willing to apply it towards another flight at a later date?" (I have the Disney World Marathon in January so I was figuring I'd use it then). I was told "If it's that big of an issue, I can talk to a 'credit voucher specialist' and was transferred to this person who I had to explain the situation to THRICE until I was told that there was no problem whatsoever applying the 150 mandatory re-booking fee on my voucher. Somehow it worked out that with fees/taxes I owed them another 15 dollars for the Boston flight. I literally had to ask "Okay can I just give you a credit card for that?" half a dozen times until she finally said 'yes" (prior to 'yes', she engineered new and different ways to explain to me that the differences between the flights and the mandatory fee came to 15 dollars).

So after damn near two hours I FINALLY have a flight on American Airlines to Boston in October and American Airlines got their 150 bucks to switch my flight (150 bucks?!! really??? Why don't they just go ahead and call it a gas tax or something?). The situation was such a clusterfuck I decided to compose a Haiku in its honor:

AA Can Fuck Off
Shitty Phone Support Bitches
Will fly Delta Now

Wow it's been awhile since I've posted what's been going on. Been a lot and a little.

Just got done doing an interval run out on the lake path tonight. I'm really trying to work at getting faster. the problem with working at getting faster is that it kicks your ass. I'm just beginning to ramp up for the marathon in January, but i want to do it in a way that I can actually finish under 4 hours. This summer was an eye opener to how shitty my run is. I'm looking at various training/coaching facilities in Chicago that cater to running. The Tri Club had a meeting last week where they introduced a bunch of them. Hopefully I'll have that hashed out by next week.

On another (sort of) downer...I've decided to back out of buying that Hummer. As it turns out, we got this here recession/crisis/hiccup thang going on gee gaw! You see, originally, the arrangement was that I would simply hand over my mustang, and they would hand me over the truck and the payments I was making on the Mustang would now go to GMAC and that would be that. In essence, it wouldn't really change anything money-wise for me. However, since said arrangement came to pass, GMAC seems to have drastically altered how they go about loaning money. That is to say, "we may require just a little bit up front in cash in addition to the car". How much is 'a little'? Oh you know, 5 fucking grand or so! Why is my definition of "a little" and the Hummer Dealer/GMAC so radically different? After mulling it over, I decided yanking that money out of savings (aka condo downpayment kittie, for whenever people besides Warren Buffet can get a mortgage) would not be wise given these times of woe and want. As a result I figured it would be better to chalk that $500 I gave them to order the truck up as idiot tax and keep on keepin on. The fact of the matter is that the Mustang is a perfectly good/stable/reliable/cool car. Doesn't exactly suit my needs, but whatever. Chicks dig it!

This weekend I'm going to Boston for my cousin's wedding. Good times...I havent' seen some of these folks in a few years and they are all good people. Good drinkers too...and Boston is a fun fucking down to party in. It'll be nice to go there and not have work going on.

Other than that...I'm back into lifting again. I want to see how much lean muscle I can build up in the off season (with respect to running of course). Getting up early is a bitch, but what the fuck ever.

Oh, and also...so Shelly and I are going to be going up to Milwaukee (and/or Madison?) for a couple days in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, this is occuring on a Saturday and Sunday. I have no idea what to do in those towns. Basically I'm up for anything (I haven't taken time away from work that hasnt' involved a race or cycling event in, like, forever, so just getting wasted and chilling seems great to me). Does anybody have any suggestions/ideas for things to do? And no fucking Paintball.