The Muse pictures are here.

What I'm kinda proud of is that I took about 270 pictures, and except for
about 15 of them (which for the most part had completely wrong exposures due
to lighting changes, or whatnot), they all turned out pretty damned neat.

I could do more of this, photography, mmm...

Woot, got to go see Muse last night. They really rocked. Got to take 
some pictures too, they will be up soon.
I'm kinda getting over a cold (as usual), but after going to the show last
night and crouching to take pictures a bunch, my legs are sooo weak feeling.
It's really freaky, even. I feel like I just packed a 90lb pack up a few 
thousand vertical feet trail or something. ugh.

Woot had a good weekend, Ian and Zoe came to visit and we saw the
Beastie Boys play... They were good, very good in fact, and on seeing
them come out in band form on a well lit float, I almost shat my pants.

I've liked using Firefox so much that I think I'm going to try using
Thunderbird for mail for a while, instead of mutt. Well really I'll
use a combination of the two, depending on where I am..

So I upgraded my XP laptop to SP2 today, which was alright. I figured
what the heck, and had it install WMP10, too.  Just for fun, I played
with WMP10 a little, and then I started laughing. It was just such a
joke of a product-- it actually makes iTunes look GOOD to me!

Don't get me started on how ridiculous it is that they are at version
10, either. What a joke.

Now I could go off on the 10 easy to reproduce bugs I noticed, or 
how it took it 10 minutes to scan all of my music (that WA5 would 
do in about 45 seconds), or how it got much of the metadata wrong, 
or how its music database was 20mb (vs WA5's 2mb database), etc, 
but I won't, instead:

I played with it a little more, and started messing with its 
visualization effects. These are even more pathetic! One of them was
even a nearly exact copy of the rotating 3d dot spectrum analyzer I
originally wrote back in like 1997, that did manage to end up as an
AVS effect. It just amazes me how shitty of a product this can be.
So I figured, there have to be some better visualizations out there
for it, right? So I went and checked out their site, and the best
thing I could find was G-force (which now they are trying to sell
G-Force Gold for $10), and I laughed even more. G-Force is such a
piece of crap. I mean really! Compare it to AVS or Milkdrop, and 
they just aren't in the same league. 

COME ON PEOPLE. I haven't touched AVS in over a year, it's been
out for over 6 years, and the only thing that I've seen that
comes close is shit that Geiss did (cheers, Ryan). OK so there
are some decent newer 3d accelerated plugins too, but those
really aren't the same if you ask me...

Today I was driving to pick up Al from the airport, and listening to 
the album 'Sneaker Pimps - Becoming X', and I started thinking about
how strange (albeit good) an album it is... now some of my impressions
may be incorrect, but:

It's an album written and produced by two guys, joined for lyrics
by a woman who sounds (and afaik is) fucking hot, and the lyrics are
clearly written by the guys. The lyrics are borderline crude, but
as a guy, I find a woman singing them to be strangely titillating.
To think, these guys temporarily add a woman singer to their band,
back in the time where it was the "in" thing to do, have her sing
ridiculous and offensive lyrics, and it all works really well. 

Who would have thought that it would work? 
It's too bad I don't find their newer albums (well, only heard "Bloodsport") any good...

We woke up to the massive amounts of rain which I can only assume were given
to us by hurricane frances. yum, flooding.
I flew back to SF today, which was a bit grueling, but after having a burrito
and a brief conversation with strangers at the taqueria-like establishment,
I'm now tired and feel like retiring to watch the daily shows I missed thus
far this week.

To the bastards who have been DoS attacking machines on this network: please
stop. it's way lame. really. i mean it, too.

The other night I saw a taped Nader speech on CSPAN. It was actually quite 
compelling. If I compared 15 minutes of what he said to the "big two" candidates
my choice would be quite clear. But keeping in mind the big picture, the choice
(for me) is just as clear (and it's not Nader). Sorry dude, I think you're
amazing and spot on, but I can't vote for ya.

Too much food! And just enough drink, I think.
NYC is always a decent place, though I get a bit bored here. Mostly because the 
things I should be doing here are the things I don't feel like doing. Had I thought
ahead, I would've tried to get tickets to the Daily Show or something. But usually
I just end up hanging out... which is OK, too... And I suppose I should've called
Daniel, though I don't have his number... anyway... home soon.

/me busts out his suit for the first time in a bit.
Steve was supposed to meet us at the airport yesterday, to fly out here
with us, but he called an hour before the flight and said "I'm an idiot...
which airport are you at?" I really hope he made it here. We'll find out
soon.

Woot got it resolved. Thank you kind admin at the university who's network
originated the attack. It was really lame, someone flooding my network
with thousands of 1 byte UDP packets on random ports, per second. And my
ISP (XO) said it would be 1-2 days until they thought it would be resolved.
ugh. but when I talked to the right person at ncsu, it was taken care of in
5 minutes. I should've done it sooner, I guess. bleh.

Argh lame DoS attacks. Hurry up my ISP and block them, or something.

This is not for people who are easily offended.
Well, the image on that page is worse than the music (ITS JUST YOGURT OK?). :)

Spent a lot of today (yesterday? since it's now 12:45am) working on my little
homemade microcontroller board. Seems when I put a AT90S8515 in it, it works great, but when 
I used a mega8515L, nothing happens. The mega8515 worked fine in the dev
board too, so finally figured out that my 3.69mhz crystal resonates correctly
with the 90S8515, but not the mega. They are apparently pin compatible chips,
though the mega has "slightly different electrical characteristics." Damn.
So now I'm thinking of ordering my own board from ExpressPCB.com. anybody
know any other good places? ExpressPCB has a nice simple free CAD product too,
so I got started designing (err, translating) my board, here. 
I know, that design sucks, reading up on it now =)

(this board is basically a many controls -> rs232 serial interface, that will
effectively be the foot controlling board, for the Jesusonic)

The last jams Brennan and I had last friday (040820*) were awesome. A couple
of good songs in there, repeated over and over, too.

a fun little project, which is remotely useful for if you are paranoid
in public places on your laptop:

tunnel vision (win32)

not sure what I'd do with it, let me know what you think.
left control+right alt makes the circle smaller
left control+right control makes it bigger
left control+left alt+right control+right alt quits it (as does selecting 
it on the taskbar and hitting alt+f4)

OK time for a new program, assniffer (formerly sniff or assniff):
http://www.cockos.com/assniffer/

This is an auto-saving-sniffer, that logs all HTTP transfers to disk.
Somewhat amusing, I suppose.

And PathSync, is up.

Woot had a great time in vegas this past weekend for dave b's party. 
so good. drank way too much, though. still recovering.

went to see a good band last night, built to spill. very good.

there have now been two times in my life, when I found out that there
had been a big, long lasting lie (of sorts) that I hadn't even questioned,
because I trusted the person(s). The more recent one I feel more badly about,
sadly. But maybe now shit will get better.

I think I'm going to get two smallish projects up on the web site soon,
Pathsync (slightly useful) and asSniff (kinda entertaining in a sort of way).
I've actually not touched them in a few months but are pretty usable now...