Carmen send me this incredibly weird, somewhat funny video/music tribute to my old home town. I’m still not sure what to think.

Wow, no posts in a month. What a terrible blogger I am. I think I’m justified this time. Frankly, January completely sucked. Hear now my saga.

On the Friday before New Year’s Eve, I woke with a terrible toothache. Despite it being her “busiest day of the year,” my dentist was nice enough squeeze me in. She determined that I needed a root canal. Yay! Unfortunately, she only had time to perform half a root canal – enough to alleviate my pain until the week after next when her schedule was more open.

That seemed to go fine until a couple of hours later – when the root canal got infected. I can’t describe how painful this was other than to say it felt like a kindey stone in my mouth (I’ve had kidney stones several times – it doesn’t get much worse). I called her emergency line, got her directly, and before too long I had some penicillin and was good as new.

Or was I? The Monday after I finished that course of antibiotics, I started to itch. I noticed two mosquito-bite sized bumps on my arm, and I couldn’t stop scratching them. By lunch time, there were three bumps. An hour or so later, there were eight. Hives! I realized that something was seriously wrong with me and went straight to the doctor. She determined that I was probably allergic to the penicillin. She told me to take Benedryll and gave me a perscription for a mild steroid in case they got worse.

I went home and rested, feeling comforted in my nice Benedryll haze, but by bedtime the hives were way, way worse. Imagine a five inch raised, red bump on your thigh that itches like nothing else. I had those in at least five or six spots on my body. Taking the steroid seemed to make them mostly go away by the next morning, and by Wednesday I could barely tell they had been there at all.

Feeling energized by that, I decided to finish the painting that Amy and I had started the weekend prior. I didn’t mind the work, and I sure liked the results: transforming the hideous aquarium-themed nursery into a nice, relaxing home office. I was painting without a mask, and with the doors and windows shut no less. It’s great how they’ve paint not smell bad anymore! Must be fine for you…

Or so I thought. The next morning, the hives were back worse than ever. Itching like crazy! Doc gave me a stronger steroid, and I had to take that and Benedryll for the next two weeks, leaving me in a terrible haze of dizziness, headache, and nausea – all mixed together with a strangely huge appetite. You’d think that’d be the end of it, but the hits just kept on coming. And this just raised a mystery: was I allergic to the penicillin or the paint?

Returning to the dentist to finish my root canal, I figured I might as well get my long-overdue schedule cleaning. In that process, they found two more deep cavities that “might also have to become root canals.” Great. Both had formed behind old fillings (like the first), so there was little I could have done about them. That evening, one of said fillings broke off, leaving a big scratchy hole in one side of my mouth to go along with the scratchy temporary crown on the other. Having the cavities filled in the end was actually more miserable than the root canal in the first place.

All that and I lost $65 at my first poker game of the year. I think I’m back to normal now, and I’m incredibly grateful for Amy’s wonderful care. On the bright side, I have a great excuse to never paint again.

With my fantasy football winnings (regular season champion, yo!), I picked up Rock Band for the Xbox 360. What a great purchase that’s turned out to be. Over the holidays, we put bands together a few time, and it’s always a blast.

My favorite moment came when Amy, singing Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” belted out, “I’m a cowboy… on a seahorse I ride….” She’s getting new glasses soon.

With singing, drumming, guitar and bass, everyone can have fun with Rock Band. Check this video out from Conan O’Brien. Halfway through he does the Beastie Boys as Edith Bunker. It’s priceless!

Here you go, “Baba.” While investigating used guitars on Craigslist for a coworker, I found this priceless listing:

I have an Oscar Schmidt 6-string acoustic guitar, Model# OG-2N. It is like new and in great condition. It was a gift from an ex, he was supposed to teach me how to play, but like every other part of our relationship, he was lazy. Also included is a molded SKB case, (price tag on it says $104.95), KORG chromatic tuner, and a lovely maroon-flowered strap. I am told that this is a great guitar for beginners, but honestly I really know nothing about it. I did a little ebay research and similar guitars are listed at this price…seems fair to me.

I can not provide you with a picture because I threw the camera at him during a fight. Maybe with your money I will buy a new one.

Please get this thing out of my house. Makes a great gift for the right girl, just not me, I wanted to learn the banjo.

Cash only please.

Cash only indeed.

After watching the fantastic An Inconvenient Truth over the weekend, it’s great to read news like this. I feel much safer knowing that the world’s scientists are leaving no stone unturned or animal’s anus unexplored in the search for global warming solutions.

Today, we celebrate one year of wedded bliss. I love you, Sugarpop!

And I’m already done moving my blog. That was easy.

I’m moving TCOB to Dreamhost after experimenting with GoDaddy for several months. GoDaddy was fine, but it didn’t allow for as much technical experimentation. Furthermore, several of their processes seemed convoluted. I’m looking forward to trying out Subversion on Dreamhost as well. I’ll post again to this blog when everything seems moved.

Today’s post on Scott Adams’s blog is hilarious. It refers to this article in The Telegraph about a man caught and prosecuted for fornicating with a bicycle.

Yeah, that’s right.

What kills me about the article is the photo of the culprit. You’d expect a mug shot or a frantic paparazzi capture of a shamed man hiding from the press, right? Wrong. It almost looks like he hired a publicist and scheduled a photo shoot. He’s not hiding anything. I’m looking forward to showing my support for him at the one-man Bike Pride parade, certainly just around the corner.

Being such a big fan of his bands Superchunk and Portastatic, it’s great to see Mac McCaughan telling the man what’s up about important issues like non-commercial radio and net neutrality. Tell it like it is, Mac!

The latest “discovery” in my continuing search for MP3s I can pay for is eMusic. While I really like it, eMusic is sort of a mixed bag in the online music world – half subscription service, half store, providing a strange experience at first.

Most subscription services give you unlimited access to a large library of DRM-ed tracks which all expire when you close your account. eMusic, on the other hand, is a subscription service that lets you download a limited number of non-DRM, totally standard MP3 files that are yours to keep even after the your subscription ends. You pick a service level, like $10/month for 20 songs or $25/month for 100 songs. That’s about $0.25 song – pretty amazing considering that other services tend to charge around $1.00 per song.

eMusic’s catalog tends toward the indie, which while great for me might not suit everyone (I’ve certainly found tons of music I like.). The quality also might not please audiophiles – VBR targeting an average of 192k. My only gripe is this: if I have 9 songs left on my account and I grab a whole album of 10 songs, I’d like to be able to complete the album at my currently monthly song rate of $0.25. It’d be great if the library were more vast, but that will come with time.

All in all, I love eMusic, and I’m sure I’ll be a long-term subscriber. I love buying music, I love doing it cheaply, I love generating no plastic waste or needless shipping, and I love getting standard files that will play forever.

Moreover, and my real reason for writing: if you think you might like it too, let me know. If I refer you and you join for at least a month, we’ll each get 50 free songs! That’s like four free albums. What more could you ask for? :D

I’ve said it before, but bottled water is evil. Kari sent me this link to the Carbon Concious Consumer, an organization working to reduce the usage of bottled water. Click on it and sign up!

Whether you’re a fan or not, go and buy or download the new Radiohead album immediately. Why? Because doing so will help decide the future of how you get your music. Do you want to continue to pay needlessly inflated prices to unnecessary corporations? Do you want to collect more useless plastic boxes? Do you want to marry one company’s devices via their locked-down file format?

Or would you rather pay a reasonable price directly to the artist for a simple, open file that you’ll be able to play on any device, forever? That’s exactly what Radiohead is offering. The album they released today, In Rainbows, is offered directly from their website as a zip file of standard MP3s. The price is definitely reasonable… whatever you decide to pay. Pay nothing, pay $1000, pay anything in between. I “voted” with about $7, because I know that’s way more than they’d by selling me a CD through a label, and it’s way less than I’d pay in the same situation. You can also pay nothing and try the album out. If you like it, pay later. Or don’t.

As far as the music itself is concerned, I’m far from disappointed. I’m a fair-weather Radiohead fan. While The Bends and OK Computer are among my favorite albums and belong in some epic rock hall of fame, the rest of their library varies from really good (Pablo Honey) to intolerable (Amnesiac). This is largely a result from their tendency to vary style and experiment. Each albums tends to have its sound, from poppy rock to noisy techno art school nonsense. In Rainbows is a nice blend of all those soundscapes, and it’s already my third favorite album of theirs after one listen. They had certainly earned my £3.48 by about track 4.

I hope Radiohead’s experiment is hugely successful. The big labels have ignored consumer demands for way too long, and their preference for litigation and prosecution over innovation is disturbing. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to lead the way with non-DRM music. If In Rainbows is successful, they’ll be forced to change their ways or ride them in to the ground.

The new MP3 store from Amazon delivers a perfect modern music retail experience, at least as I’ve imagined it over the years. I like buying my music, but I don’t want more CDs – chunks of plastic that do nothing but sit on a shelf. I like iTunes, but I don’t want DRM, and I don’t want to be limited to one device. Buying MP3s is the perfect solution, and Amazon provides a fantastic user experience to boot.

You first install a small application on your machine. Then you simply browse the extensive online library. Songs are reasonably priced, usually lower than $0.99. Better yet, full albums are usually priced from $7.99 – $9.99. When you find what you like and click to buy it, the Amazon Downloader automatically puts it in your designated music folder, nicely organized, and adds it to iTunes or Windows Media Player if you like.

While they don’t yet have the selection that iTunes offers, at 2.3 million songs and climbing they have tons. The files are high quality (~256Kbps, VBR), standard MP3s. I bought several albums there this weekend, and the whole experience has been incredibly pleasing. I love knowing that the music I paid for will be easily playable on whatever device I happen to have in the future, and I love that iTunes finally has a powerful competitor.

In the past week, I have found four half-empty (or half-full if you like) containers of Coca Cola near the end of our driveway, one 20-oz bottle Vanilla and 3 12-oz cans of Classic. Coke is among my favorite beverages, and as such I’m left to wonder why they aren’t finishing them? And then, why are they leaving them neatly standing on my property?

This week’s edition of Basic Instructions is hilarious.

“Cats do not provide milk or wool or meat.” – Dwight K. Schrute. I love The Office. That line from last night’s season four premiere is so funny, but it’s also the perfect nonsense response to people who ask you if you like cats. Just a couple of weeks ago, Em asked me that very question, and I wish I could go back in time with that line in mind. For the record, I do like cats, I just do not want to own one.

I have not written in a while, but not for lack of things to write about I’m sure. Foremost, Amy and I are finally in our new house. All the boxes are unpacked and things are put away, and it really does feel like home. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of projects to take care of, namely repainting the Spongebob room or the stucco-on-interior-walls bathroom. But doing those projects should be fun and enlightening, while making the place even more ours.

While unable to quickly sell, we found a great tenant for the condo, and he moves in this weekend. I probably should have listed it for more rent than we are charging, but I’m not disappointed. Within three days of posting it on craigslist, I had shown the place 10 times, turned others away, had three definite offers to rent it, and could have had more. Landlordism is not a mentality I thought I’d take to, but so far so good. Fingers crossed!

I’ll try to post more frequently now that we’re less busy, but if I don’t, you know where to find me.

It’s clearly a slow news day.

Rock stars more likely to die prematurely

I finally had the pleasure of a Fountains of Wayne concert on Sunday. Originally slated to open for Joan Jett at the State Fair, they ended up playing a free show when she canceled. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since the first time I heard they’re infections “Radiation Vibe.”

They played a very tight set featuring almost all my favorite songs (“Girl I Can’t Forget” was probably wishful thinking anyway). Unfortunately, there were quite a few silly frat boys in the party who knew nothing of FoW except for their huge hit single, “Stacy’s Mom” – a great 80s/The Cars tribute. They kept yelling “Stacy’s Mom” throughout the show, going so far as to chant en masse.

Eventually, they played it, and the crowd went nuts in a big pogo party. It was actually a really cool scene, very excited crowd, great music, my sweet sugar on my arm. It was then I noticed the American flag waving through the smoke machine in the distance behind the stage. It cemented it all together for me.

Anyway, the moment the song ended, about 30 of these plaid short/Abercrombie wearing dudes just filed out, missing the best song of the night – “Radiation Vibe” with a medley of 80s classic over the guitar solo. What a bunch of lame-os. I was immediately a reminded of the Homer Simpson moment below, which you know I love especially at tcob.com.

Thanks again to Scott Adams for another great laugh. His post today introduced his readers to a great web comic, Basic Instructions by the soon-to-be-famous Scott Meyer. In particular, he directs readers to this incredibly funny strip about disguising a yawn.

I have this problem all the time. I think it started in college where I was very frequently too tired for my 8:00 AM classes. Lecturing became a mental cue for me to yawn. Now whenever I’m in a situation involving someone talking to me at length, I’ll have the uncontrollable urge to yawn. It’s a frequent problem in meetings.

I must be terrible at hiding it, because Amy always catches me trying and says, “Just let it out; you look ridiculous!” I feel just like the guy in the strip.

Update: He must be getting more traffic than he’s used to, so the site is slow. Wait for it; it’s worth it.

Check out the video below to take your mind off of yesterday’s disaster.