Best Christmas Present Ever

Sometimes you run across certain things that you know would just be perfect for someone as a Christmas present. Maybe you see the perfect snowman centerpiece for your grandmother, or the next great powertool for your dad, or that extremely tasteful picture of yourself in the nude for your next door neighbor. You know what I'm talking about.

Well, while wasting time browsing the internet this morning in an attempt to keep my mind from turning into work related mush, I found the perfect Christmas present that you could give to anyone you know -- five pounds of silly putty.

I used to play with this stuff all the time at my grandma and grandpa's place when I was a kid. There was just so much you could do with it. Stretch it out and press it against a newspaper to get the mirror image of something and then you could distort it to your heart's delight. When you get sick of that, you could roll it into a ball and bounce it off the walls. If that starts to lack fun, roll it out into a long, hot dog shaped cord and use it to whip your siblings. Once the novelty of that wears off, or once your siblings run away crying, you can... uhh... start all over again!

Now remember, I was having all this fun with a little nugget of silly putty. Imagine all the fun you could have with FIVE POUNDS of it. You could copy an entire newspaper and still have room to spare. You could make a ball big enough to break through walls instead of bouncing off of them. And you could probably break your siblings' legs with a five pound cord.

So if you can't think of something to get someone for Christmas, just go get them a big ol' piece of silly putty. They'll love you forever. I mean, come on, look at it!!

I Hate Myself

As I was out for my evening run (to help stave off the fatness that has started growing throughout my lazy ass body), I got to thinking about why I exercise.  It’s gotten to be so much of a regular thing I wonder why I keep up with it.  Some days… well, a lot of days, I really don’t feel like going for a run or lifting or anything else physical, but I still do it.

And I do it because when I look in the mirror in the mornings, I hate what I see.  Now I can already hear a bunch of you thinking, “You really need to learn to like yourself.  It’s not healthy to dislike how you look.  That isn’t a good thing.”  To you naysayers, I say you are wrong.

When I think about it, if I were to look at myself in the mirror and love what I see, where would the motivation to better myself be?  Sure, I might still want to improve my looks a little or keep myself looking like I currently do, but there wouldn’t be that drive to strive for more, to dig deep and run that extra mile, to do that extra set of push ups, or to actually get off your ass to exercise in the first place.

I know that if I liked how I looked I’d be way too complacent in my exercise schedule.  It’s the hate that drives me.  It’s looking in the mirror and seeing that I don’t have a six pack any more.  It’s catching a glance of ass and thinking it’s too round and jiggly.  It’s touching my arms and feeling that they’re not rock hard.  These things make me angry and my anger fuels the fire of self improvement.

The only problem that I’ve experienced lately is that I have the fire.  I have the hate.  I just don’t have the fortitude to do anything about it.  To say that my life has been a jumbled up ball of stress would be like saying Carrot Top is only kind of annoying or that Tara Reid is only a little bit of a whore.  As I try to deal with that stress, I often find that I let myself fume and/or sulk instead of applying the stresses of my life to pushing myself even harder.

Along with the above problem, I also find that I eat a heck of a lot more when I get stressed out.  It’s always been that way for me.  Finals week in college I could always expect to put on about 5-10 pounds because I’d dive into my studies so hard that I’d not exercise and then the added stress would lead me to constantly eat and eat and eat and eat… and then eat some more.

With basketball starting this week, I’m trying to make an active effort to be even better about exercising and trying to eat normal portions of good food.  The hate that I feel for my looks has grown and grown over the last few weeks and it’s starting to reach a point where I won’t even want to look in the mirror any more.  

It’s time to run that extra mile, put down that bag of jalapeño chips, and let the hate fuel me.  It’s time to look good again.  It’s time for me to get motivated and give the finger to the fat that so expertly infests my body.  It’s on.

Game Number One

And the season has started!  My winter basketball league is now underway. Our first game was last night and we closely pulled out a win.  The final score was 38-37 and it could have gone either way at the end.  Thankfully we managed to hold off a late surge from the opposing team.

Just by watching, you’d be able to tell that we’re all pretty rusty.  Shots were off, dribbling was sometimes sloppy, and our team dynamics definitely were not in sync, but part of the reason for that is we’ve never played together as a team before.  We’ve all played in the past, just not as a team.

Anyways, the first 5 minutes of the game were really rough.  I think there was a total of 3 points scored in that amount of time.  Things eventually got rolling, however, and we came into halftime with a 20-16 lead.  We had a strong showing coming out of halftime and put ourselves up by 6 when there was under a minute left to go.  A combination of our sloppy offense (I was responsible for one turnover) and a couple of good shots from the opponents let them slide back into the game.  It also didn’t help that we couldn’t make a free throw to save our lives.

In the end, though, we still won.  38 was a pretty low score, though.  Even high school girls basketball games sometimes score higher.  Personally I had an ok game.  There’s definitely room for improvement as I had a couple of turnovers and some dumb fouls, but I was surprised by the parts of my game that were still there.  I had 9 points, which isn’t exactly lighting up the scorebook, but if not for a couple of offensive rebounds and a steal, I’d have only had 3.  

I fired up 3 shots from behind the arc and hit 1.  Not terrible, but I should be hitting 2 out of every 3.  One basket I got from a steal that I took in for a layup.  The other four points came from two offensive rebounds I put back.  The odd part about that is I’m not even close to being the tallest guy on our team and the guys on the other team were at least as tall as me.  A little bit of luck to be in the right place at the right time always helps.

Well, let’s hope that the rest of the year gets better as we get going.  I know I have a lot of improving that I want to do and I’d like to get up into averaging double digit scoring every game.  I also wish that gym memberships around here weren’t so damn expensive so I could practice somewhere other than the outdoor court at the park in our subdivision.  It’s going to be snowed over pretty soon…  

What really matters is that I finally got back to playing some competitive sports here in Rochester.  Softball this last summer, basketball now, and hopefully volleyball in the winter/spring.  Man, I love sports.

It's the Ads!

I’m a bit of a nerd and dork at heart.  Right now I’m watching Earth 2 in my spare time (an underground sci-fi favorite), playing Doom III on Xbox, and every night before I go to bed I read a few comic books.  I sound more like a college or high school kid instead of the grown-up mid-20’s business person that I am.

Every month I throw down around $75 on comics.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  I’ve recently started moving more to reading original graphic novels and indie comics as opposed to comics that come from Marvel, the #1 comics publisher in the game right now, which I used to get most of my comics from. Part of me is doing this because I get a real kick out of the varied types of stories that indie publishers put out.  Another part is that I enjoy having an entire story in one volume instead of waiting for multiple issues to get the entire thing.  Lastly, I’m giving up on a lot of mainstream comics because of the ads.

That’s right, it’s the ads.  They’re getting to the point where they’re just utterly obnoxious and there are more pages of ads then story in your average Marvel comic.  David Hine points out in this month’s iteration of his Yakkity Yak column.  For a regular 22 page story, there is 27 pages of ads.  That’s just not acceptable.  And it’s also pretty damn hard to ignore.

I hate reading current Marvel comics because the flow is so scattershot and you’re constantly being bombarded with ads that it’s pretty hard to stay into the story.  At times it feels like you bought a catalog that has a small story in it to make your browsing for stuff “fun”.  

What’s really attractive about Image and many of the smaller indie publishers is that they have the story printed on 22 or so straight pages and then have advertisements at the end of the comic.  This way the story flows like the writers and artists intended and a reader feels like they’re getting a full story without having to suffer through ad after ad just to get to the next page of the story.

So in the end, I guess what I’m trying to say is that advertisements are fine and I know they are essential to keeping the price of comics reasonable, but it’s unacceptable to have more pages of ads than story, and to have stories so broken up by ads that they’re almost unreadable.  And Marvel wonders why people are switching over to reading trade paperbacks instead of the monthlies… they don’t have to deal with all the damn ads.

Shenoah - Bleeding in the Red CD Review

Upon initially listening to this five song EP, Bleeding in the Red you might not notice it, but Shenoah manage to cover a lot of rock and metal bases. I’m sure instead, when you first listen to this EP, you’ll probably let your ears go lax, focus on whatever thing you’re doing while listening to it, and inadvertently play these guys off as another wannabe radio friendly metal band. Don’t. Actually listen to them and you’ll find a band that could potentially go in any one of bunch of different directions.

Truth be told the first song is pretty basic. It follows your melodic radio rock template, but in the middle of it, to give the listener something a little different and slightly out of left field, the vocals change from singing to spoken word (much in the vein of MewithoutYou). It’s a bit jarring and doesn’t exactly feel like it fits, but at least they’re trying to do something different, unlike most of their peer group.

“Bullets and Numbers” and “Ashes to Ashes”, crazily enough, have an interesting Spineshank tone to them. Not the speedy, uptempo Spineshank that you’ll initially think of mind you, but instead the more slowed down, yet aggressive Spineshank that only showed up on a couple of songs on each of their releases. The songs have both energy and melody, combined in a natural manner, which comes in stark contrast to the majority of the bands in today’s melodic metal scene. Come to think of it, “Ashes to Ashes” would probably tear up on the radio if given the chance since it’s just that damn catchy and well crafted.

“Scent of a Dead Rose” is easily the most aggressive song on this release with its crunchy and punchy guitars and guttural screams. There’s still plenty of melody in the choruses, which is not a bad thing as a straight up, full on scream fest would feel pretty damn out of place on this record.

The final song “Telephone Bruises” has a punky pace, some hardcore inspired gang vocals, more screams, a lot of melodic vocals, and thick yet smooth guitars. This is the most diverse song of the disc and serves as the perfect closer to the EP. Basically it rolls together all of the elements that were on display throughout the first four songs and crams them into four minutes.

I’d be hard pressed to say that Shenoah are going to break the melodic nu-metal genre wide open again, but I’d also be speaking a complete fallacy if I told you that this isn’t one hell of a fun EP to listen to. In fact, it does exactly what an EP is supposed to do—it makes you want to hear more.

Working Remotely

Everyone hates to go in to work, unless you're one of the very few people who love their job, in which case you must be either a professional athlete or porn star (watch as my site hits now go through the roof just for mentioning porn). I know I usually dread having to make my way into the office every day of the week, even though it's only an 8 minute drive.

I would much rather still be on the college style of schedule. Only a couple of hours of set class time (these could be my client meetings and conference calls) and then the rest of the time is yours to use however you see fit, as long as you get your crap done. I really enjoyed that freedom and I wish I still had it.

With a job such as mine where most of what I do is not something that has to be done from the hours of 8 to 5, I would love to be able to just work whenever I want and from whereever I want. I love being able to just go to Panera or Caribou, order coffee, and work in an environment filled with people. Then I have other days where I'd like to work completely alone in the comfort of my basement with either death metal or punk blaring.

The office, in my opinion, is becoming an outdated concept. It is still needed for some things, such as meetings and team projects, but for the day to day stuff I really don't have a reason I need to be chained to my cubicle. Hell, I'd like to travel across the midwest and work from a new location every day. Can you imagine how awesome that would be? With internet hotspots just about everywhere it's not like this would be impossible.

I wonder what most managers would think of that idea--of working remotely from different locations. I wouldn't think it would matter as long as the employee still got what they needed to have done done, but I'm also guessing it's too progressive of an idea for most managers to actually contemplate, especially if they don't truly trust that said employee will be capable of getting their workload finished. It's a thought, though, one that hopefully I might actually be able to make a reality some day.

Alien Ant Farm Sucks. This is Truth.

I always get a big kick out of message board antics, especially since I'm a moderator and admin for Decoy's message board. There are always those people who use message boards to blindly perpetuate their point of view without even examining it, like the religious or political zealots that do nothing more than spew their opinions out at the viewing masses and put down anyone who has a sane and rational point of view.

I've found that over time, as I've moderated a music message board, that instead of religious and political zealots, you get the indie/obscure zealot and the mainstream zealot. They are two very distinct types of people that will clash at every turn, like two beta fish in the same bowl.

The first, the indie/obscure zealot thinks that anything that is even moderately popular is not good. It can't be good because the uneducated masses enjoy it and the indie zealot has such impeccable taste in comparison to the masses that it is then wrong to like music that is popular. I tend to tolerate these types of people more than the mainstream zealots because, for the most part, what is mainstream is usually watered down, manufactured donkey poop, but at times there is some good stuff that is popular.

The second, the mainstream zealot, is usually the most annoying persona on a music message board. They are the ones who openly digest all of the crap that is fed to them on the radio without exploring other musical sources. They're the Clear Channel zombies that buy into the ideas that are forced down their throats.

Since we're a rock/indie/punk/metal based music site, this means that we usually get the radio rock mainstream zealots. You know the type, the backwater hick who cranks Nickelback, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock from the factory speakers of their 1987 Ford F150. Either that or upper class, spoiled brats who think they've got the best taste in the known world if they pick up the latest feature band at Hot Topic because, man, that store is just so edgy.

Recently on Decoy we posted a track from the latest Alien Ant Farm cd. Needless to say, it was pretty bad. If you've never heard of them, let's just say that Alien Ant Farm are cut from the same cookie cutter mold as 9 out of every 10 bands on modern rock radio--rock just hard enough so that your grandparents will think you're a rebel, but catchy enough to be able to be listened to by your Abercrombie friends as you drive to the mall.

When we posted that track, most of the regulars on the site gave their thoughts on the song, which ranged from "this is pretty bad" to "oh my God, I'd rather listen to a cat hacking up a hairball". Lo and behold, though, eventually some Alien Ant Farm zealots found out we were ripping up their idols, and that could not stand.

So they started posting about how Alien Ant Farm is one of the most talented bands out there which, I can guarantee you, is undeniably false. They even got their undies in so much of a bunch that they started a thread on their fan board about how Decoy and, more specifically, yours truly had no taste in music, as well as just straight up insulting me because they lack the intelligence to actual tell anyone why Alien Ant Farm is supposedly so good.

I sure got a good laugh out of how much they got so uptight as soon as their favorite band of the moment got insulted, or more accurately, got adequately described. So, in conclusion, some people are just really, really dumb and will defend even the stupidest crap at times... like that sorry excuse for a band Alien Ant Farm.

Masters of Horror -- The CD, The Nightmare

So I’m in Target this morning picking up some Diet Coke to restock the work fridge with so that when I get sick of drinking coffee I have another caffeine source to turn to. While I’m there I walk by the electronics section of the store and see the Masters of Horror soundtrack on sale for $10. I had totally forgotten it came out this week. As I took a look at it and thought about it, 2 cds that contains 30 unreleased or new tracks from 30 pretty kick ass bands sounded like one hell of a deal, so without a further thought I grabbed a copy and put it in my basket.

Once I got to work I popped the first disc in, very interested to hear the new Norma Jean, Funeral for a Friend, Armor for Sleep, Bloodsimple, and Shadows Fall tracks, as well at It Dies Today’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”. After the cd was put into my computer, QCD tried to play it, but all of the tracks were garbled. Did I get a defective cd? Only then did I notice a little popup that had appeared telling me about the copy protection this disc uses. It turns out you can only listen to the cd using the proprietary player that’s included on the cd. Lame.

So I started listening to it using the media player it provided, which they tried to make cool, but in reality it isn’t. There’s no way to move it around on your screen—it’s stuck right in the middle of screen. I wanted to move it so that the now playing list could be in the lower left hand part of my screen, but that was impossible. Because of the stupid copy protection I also couldn’t rip the cd to my computer to put on my mp3 player. After looking through the options of the media player, I did find an option to copy the songs to your hard drive. Sweet, maybe they realized that people are going to want to play it on their iPods or other mp3 players.

I was wrong. It will only rip the songs to your computer in a copy protected version of Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. No MP3 option or AAC option or OGG option. Nope, just crappy DRM filled WMA. What also kicks you in the nuts is it tells you specifically on the help page for ripping the cd to your hard drive that the WMA files WILL NOT play on iPods. Do they not realize how many people use iPods to listen to music? It also says that standard mp3 players WILL NOT play the ripped files. Only “Windows Media Audio Protected Content Devices” will play the files that are created on your computer.

So in the end, the only way I can listen to this cd is if I use the lame ass media player that’s included on the cd while it’s in my computer (which has no shuffle or repeat options, I might add) or put it in my car stereo. I can’t listen to it anywhere else because those are the only two places I have cd players.

Now I don’t care how awesome of a lineup of bands and unreleased tracks you may have, this type of copy protection is just ridiculous. I feel like I got ripped off and I want my $10 back. Right now I’m seriously considering going back to Target and telling them the cd is defective so I can get my money back because, essentially, this is a defective cd since I can’t use it how I would a normal cd. I don’t want Immortal Records getting my money for a cd that I can’t do what I want to with and can’t listen to in many of the ways/forms that I listen to music, and you shouldn’t have to put up with that crap either.

What makes this really, really shady though, is that there is absolutely no warning on the package that this cd has crazy, crippling copy protection measures installed on it. If I would have known this, I sure as hell wouldn’t have bought it.

In the end, after listening to the two discs through using the crappy ass media player that you have to use, I found that there are some good songs on here, but it sure isn’t worth it to spend your money on a release that regulates how you can listen to it. Don’t buy this cd. Wait for the copy protection to get broke, the cd to get ripped, and then to get uploaded onto the vastness of the internet somewhere. Once that happens, download the hell out of it. If these two cds somehow never get ripped, then just pretend they don’t exist. It’s not worth it to put up with Immortal’s games to get to listen to the new tracks on this release.

[Note: This was also posted at Decoy Music and is causing a little bit of a stir... probably because most of the people responding don't actually buy cds. Check out the conversation here.]

Guild Wars Halloween

I've never been one to smoke from the massively multiplayer role playing game crack pipe since I really can't justify spending money monthly to play a game that I might only play for a few hours in that month. Also, I'll be at a total disadvantage against all of the uber-nerds that spend 8 hours a day running the game's level treadmill.

Games like Diablo, World of Warcraft, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies and the like just never impressed me simply because the concepts of the games are basically make a character, level up to get better stuff, get better stuff to level up, level up to get better stuff, get better stuff to level up, and so forth on and on and on. It just seems so boring to me.

Then, sometimes, a MMRPG does something sweet like Guild Wars did for Halloween that really impresses me and makes me think that playing it might not be so bad, assuming they'd do similar things on a semi-frequent basis. For Halloween Guild Wars totally revamped a ton of different aspects of the game from environments to enemies to NPC's to the background music. I was seriously impressed with some of the screenshots a friend of mine showed me.

If I knew that Guild Wars would somehow keep changing its content and modifying the game like that every so often I think it might just be the thing to get me to start playing and actually keep playing. If the content never changed I'm pretty sure that I'd get pretty damn bored just leveling up over and over again for no real reason. Sure, new content wouldn't alleviate that problem, but at least it would make for some nice scenery changes while I was on the level treadmill.

What Does My MP3 Collection Think of Me?

So I really never do blog memes, but I saw this one over on Jared's blog and thought I'd do it myself since I sit here and listen to music all day at work anyways... well, when I'm not in meetings, on the phone, or traveling.

So for this meme, you load up your mp3 collection or a subset of it, whatever you feel like loading, into your mp3 playing program of choice. Turn on shuffle. Press play. Each song that is played is the answer to each subsequent question (shown below with my answers and responses). It's interesting to see how a song could possibly relate to a question. Some don't at all, but I guess that's only expected. Anyways, below is what I got when I consulted my mp3 collection. Feel free to click on the names of the bands and check them out. They're all good.

1. What do you think of me, QCD?
"Anarchy OK" by Cog
--I don't know how to take this exactly. I'm guessing it means that QCD thinks that my haphazard ways of listening to music are just fine by it.

2. Will I have a happy life?
"This Sitcom Really Really Isn't All That Real" by Weerd Science
--So if my life were a tv show, a sitcom to be exact, my life would basically be fake. It gets even worse when I listen to the lyrics of the song in which a kid's life is described... and let's just say his life doesn't sound very appealing.

3. What do my friends really think of me?
"Pour Me Another" by Atmosphere
--My friends think I'm too uptight? Think I need a drink? Well, fine, I'll just have to start being a drunk!

4. Do people secretly lust after me?
"Long Coming" by Sunset Black
--Hmmm... this is interesting. So if I wait long enough people will? That's fine by me, I guess.

5. What does that one hot girl I know think of me?
"What You Need" by Self Scientific
--YES! A hot girl thinks I'm just what she needs. I know I'm somewhat twisting how the grammar of the song relates to the question, but who cares! Some hot girl thinks I'm what she needs!

6. How can I make myself happy?
"To Live and Die by Fire" by Still Remains
--Great, apparently the only way I can make myself happy is by playing with fire and getting hurt. Go me.

7. What should I do with my life?
"Jacques Molay Is Avenged!" by The Lucky Nine
--Be a bounty hunter maybe? Write really cheesy revenge novels? I don't know, but I need to go do some avenging. I'll make your life my motivation, Jacques Molay...

8. Why must life be so full of pain?
"Through Waiting" by Greeley Estates
--I don't really see the connection here. Maybe my life is full of pain because I never wait for things long enough? Or maybe because I wait too long? I must meditate further on this.

9. How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?
"Complicated" by Face to Face
--Hahahahahaha... that's really funny. Thanks for basically dodging the question, QCD.

10. Will I ever have children?
"War Profiteering is Killing Us All" by The Suicide Machines
--I'll take that as a no?

11. Will I die happy?
"This Feels Right" by Life Long Tragedy
--This sounds promising... at least from the song title. If I look at the band name, well, that's another story. It'll probably be a mix of the two and I'll just die ambivalent.

12. Can you give me some good advice?
"Something New" by Professional Murder Music
--Time to start buying myself stuff or finding new things to do or new people to hang out with, I guess.

13. Do you know where your children will be (if you have them)?
"Communion" by Killing Joke
--I must marry a really religious woman if my kids are always at communion. Either that or I actually find a church and/or religion that I actually feel confident and comfortable in.

14. What do you think happiness is?
"God Knows I Love You Kid" by Lorene Drive
--Knowing that someone loves me is definitely something that makes me happy, so knowing that people love me will hopefully bring me much happiness.