while it is true that we've had a few, very pleasant 60'ish degree days, we've also had some effin' cold ones too. and some miserable ones at that.
yet again, we've gone straight from winter to summer. :(
we're due to have several 80+ degree days this week, followed by more fairly warm days.
why can't this region EVER have spring? like when i was a kid? 60's and 70's ... mild ... warm, but not too hot. cool, rainy days ... i miss that a lot.
i know it's fairly trite to talk about and/or bitch about the weather, but ... i can't be the only one who is bothered by the fact that we haven't had spring here in, like, a decade.
as some of you know, i've begun to play guitar again ... only this time, i'm re-learning how to play left-handed, because my left hand is pretty messed up. back in january, while visiting my pal paul d., i played guitar for all of 10 minutes, and my left hand hurt for 2 months afterward ...
strangely enough, in a sort of twisted, sadistic way, the experience made me really want to play guitar again ... for the first time in many, many years, i felt like i had missed playing that instrument. but i knew that the only way i'd be able to do so is if i re-learned how to play, southpaw-style, due to my left hand being messed up. i figured -- if i can write with my left hand, i can play guitar left-handed too! so it was time for me to join the dark side ... er ... lefty side ... ehh ... yeah.
in march, i found a lefty epiphone les paul special.
and i hate its little bastardly guts ... :(
it was a lefty guitar that i found on craigslist, and it had (and STILL has) some problems ... its basically one of those "kit" guitars (ie a guitar that would be included with an amp and all the acoutrements, a'la guitar center). the guitar is kinda tiny and the neck is very thin. i was really excited to get it, because hell, it was a lefty guitar. but now ...
its basically a little kid's guitar. something a 10 year old could probably play with gusto. made for tiny fingers.
i feel like the iron effing giant strumming a ukulele when i play it.
when i got it, the guitar had no bridge, only the tailpiece. and when i got it home, i discovered that it had been smashed against something or dropped, because the fretboard was cracked and starting to peel away from the neck itself at the first and second frets. i had that repaired, but discovered that there was a loose piece inside the neck -- when you play certain chords (and really commonly used ones too, like A, D and G), the loose piece resonates and rattles inside the guitar.
the fact that the guitar had no bridge was a big hassle, but i figured that because tuna-matic™ bridges are a dime-a-dozen, i wouldn't have trouble finding a replacement bridge.
WRONG.
the bridge posts had big holes instead of small ones, which made it very difficult to find a bridge for it. luckily, the luthier / repair tech i take my guitars to had a spare. but, of course, it was the last place i looked -- figured i'd get the parts i needed before i even talked to him. i even took a trip to a guitar center down by pork meadows, where the kids there don't know a tuna-matic from a tuna-salad. it pissed me off that i drove all the way the hell down there after i was told over the phone that they had a bridge with large holes only to find out that the kids at the guitar center there didn't know the difference between the tailpiece and the bridge for a les paul. wtf?
needless to say, i told the manager that he needed to get better help (in much sterner words, mind you).
when i took the guitar to my luthier/tech buddy to ask some questions, he fished around in his box-'o-parts™ and viola! a bridge.
i facepalmed. you could hear the slap 3 counties away.
anyway ...
i ended up having to get new tuners for this guitar as well, because the tuners that were on it (made by some unknown company called "Jin Ho" or "Jun Ho" or "Juno's a Ho" or something like that) didn't hold the guitar in tune for more than about three strums before the guitar's tuning was lobbed 3.4 semitones down, way back into 1876.
this guitar is defo not one that i would recommend to friends. and especially not for re-learning how to play. i haven't found one thing i like about it. it doesn't sit in your lap very comfortably, the frets are on the thin/small side (i like medium-jumbo and jumbo frets), its easy to go sharp/flat just by leaning on the body of the guitar (and not very hard leaning, mind you, just a little bit knocks it sharp or flat) ... its just not comfortable. or very well made.
but, it'll do for now i guess. altho i dislike this guitar enough that i'm tempted to have the very first guitar i ever bought converted to left-handed play. when i mess around with it, it actually feels more comfortable, despite the fact that the beerbelly-cutout is not present on the bottom of the guitar. it probably feels better because the neck is of a slightly longer / larger scale. and its got jumbo frets. and it makes me feel human-sized when i play it. my brain is still wired for jumbo frets, no matter what side i'm playing on. :D
ahh ... there's nothing like re-learning a few sex pistols tunes to make you feel like you're truly getting back in the game again ... :D
i've decided that if i can ever get up the bread, i'd like to get a left-handed fender jazzmaster. because i've ALWAYS wanted one. the jazzmaster was my 'eleanor' as far as guitars go. goddamned albatross. i had a hard time finding one, and when i did, the person or store who was selling it always wanted way too much for the guitar or the guitar was too trashed and needed too much work to make it usable/reliable for gigging (which is something i did regularly a long, long time ago).
these days, lefty jazzmasters are as rare as hen's teeth in the US. fender america doesn't make 'em, but apparently fender japan does. in spades. and they're readily available over there. brand new. and in beautiful colours too. and they're pretty much exact replicas of the originals.
my birthday's coming up soon... anyone wanna get me a left-handed Jazzmaster from japan? :D
speaking of jazzmasters ...
SWERVEDRIVER is coming to town this week!
all aboard the last train to satansville, everyone. :D \m/,
someone decided to bust out some orangey-smelling airplane glue in my apartment building a few hours ago, and despite my best efforts to vent the stank outta my apartment, it still smells like orange-flavoured testors.
unfortunately, instead of the all-dizzy/all-guts/all-fun version of orange-flavoured testors, its the all-crappy/all-headachey/all-noserunny version. and i already have a cold on top of it.
i shouldn't be able to smell it at ALL.
yecch.
i hate apartment life.
at least my next-door neighbour isn't an axe murderer this time.
i actually think it's something that the maintenance guy used on the apartment downstairs -- some sort of curing agent. it fucking stinks to high hell though. awful. and again, see "headache" for details. :(
anyone got a house they'd like to loan me for the next ten years?
when you're ready, watch this. in its entirety. and don't hit pause. watch, listen, and take note of the following:
finished?
ok, good.
here's the deal.
something is horribly wrong with the world.
horribly wrong.
and this brilliant song proves it in a few very big, very poignant ways.
i mean, wtf? the B-52's are a band that are all about delivering the party straight to the world. bar none. but at this point in time in the world, there honestly is no party to be delivered. and this song proves it. this band should not be giving us biting, sardonic, but oh-so-close-to-home commentary on how fucked the world is right now; it should be giving us the party, and lots of it. with a rack of martinis, margaritas, bitchin' beehives, seriously sexy stilettos and a side order of unbelievably raw abandon.
if the b-52's aren't giving us the party, but rather, pointing out that there is no party, that it ended quite awhile ago, and we're never going to get there, then we aren't truly on the road that leads to hell.
we've arrived, ladies and gentlemen.
we're at the bottom of the shitpit. looking back up.
essays will be written about this song. because it's effing deep. and please don't misunderstand. i have nothing but supreme love for the b-52's, and i really love this song. what i don't love is the world around us. what the world has become. and that the world has forced the b-52's to do the unthinkable. i don't love that the world has forced the hand of the b-52's and made a band that has ALWAYS been ALL ABOUT THE PARTY experience the ultimate comedown -- the buzzkill of the third kind. a harshed mellow of heinous proportions. the world has caused them to leave the party -- stop, look around, and say something of an extremely socio-political nature.
congratulations, everyone.
the world climate has turned the b-52's into the dead kennedys.
it has taken a band that was once all about the happy twist their faces in disgust.
FINALLY! people are beginning to see the overzealotry!
over the last couple of years, i've sort of fallen in love with what the mac platform can do. there are certain things that this platform is just SO GOOD AT that the pc world still needs to catch up with.
but, as a company, apple still falls a little short in my eyes. altho admittedly, they HAVE been trying to please me a little, knowing that my track record with apple as a company has been less than exemplary, especially when dealing with getting their hardware fixed or replaced.
last may, in fact, i went back and forth between my apartment and the apple store with my mac mini all month, trying to prove that it did indeed have a random crashing issue. while at the store, it never crashed for them, but at home, i could leave it running doing absolutely NOTHING and it would crash within anywhere from 10 minutes to a day, depending on how it felt. i even brought a friggin VIDEO TAPE showing the problem, but they still wouldn't believe me. several calls to a very important office underneath a certain CEO later, after a month of not getting ANYWHERE, plus calls to the manager of the apple store i had been taking my computer to, and they FINALLY remedied the situation with a brand new mini.
this is a month of my life that i'll never get back. a month where i literally had their so-called "geniuses" telling me my mac mini had a variable-speed hard drive in it, that partitioning the drive could slow the machine down (what is this, 1982? its not running an effin' miniscribe brick, fercrissakes!), and other various things that basically told me that they treated me like i was a "Housewife with an iPod". dealing with those so-called "geniuses" was an insult to my intelligence. i may not be the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, but i do know computers fairly well. it is especially bad when they think that EVERY customer is a housewife-with-an-iPod, even if that customer has put together very expensive servers, dealt with weird raid arrays, and all sorts of technical this'n'that, the likes of which these geniuses couldn't deal with if they were confronted with problems to solve.
now, since that time, apple has turned itself around a LITTLE in my eyes. they're not completely outta the shitbox just yet, but they've done some things for me and some old hardware i recently acquired that was great (read: SONY BATTERY ISSUE). i did appreciate that. so they're on the track to redeeming themselves a little. but i think that their customer service needs to go a bit above and they need to figure out that a portion of their userbase is actually fairly proficient in hardware. they need to treat people with a little more respect and dignity. at least i was able to convince them, partially, that i do know a little more than the average bear.
in light of this, i've gotten another very nice piece of hardware to add to the collective. hopefully going to get back to music production shortly. thanks j+e. you rock! :D
anyway, i saw this particular article on slashdot a little while ago, and i felt like it was appropriate reading material. mac zealots need to open their eyes, because they're not treating people with the whole ideology that the company stands behind.
this article made me HOWL in justfication. why? because unfortunately, a lot of the apple EMPLOYEES act the very same way that these particular fanboys act. unreasonably. as if apple could do no wrong, the rest of the world is actually at fault, and PARTICULARLY, the non-apple people. you say one little thing against the platform (that might be a scathing truth), and suddenly, instead just having an opinion like everyone else, and pointing out a shortcoming that the platform needs improvement on or something that a machine apple is selling could really use work with, and you're suddenly "bill gates' personal ball-licker" in their eyes. wtf?
that's just lame. a very juvenile response.
and all because someone would give a mostly positive review of a product that is made by a beloved company?
people who respond like that are no better than the guys i used to ride in the back of the school bus with when i was 6 years old. everything was "this is gay, that's gay", blah blah blah. i still don't understand the etymology for a homophobic slur and its' transition to being a word that applies to everything that irritates a person. but its a similar concept i think. and there's been this resurgence of people using that slur and i just can't figure it out. other than that maybe homophobia is SERIOUSLY on the rise. :( and that's just sad. :(
if the fanboys would stop being zealous over their platform, more people would be keen to convert.
right ...
i'm off to do some schtuff.
before i sign off for awhile ...
i must apologize for the lack of updates here over the past year. i've not felt good, been busy, and just over the last few months, have dealt with some very sad, scary, and horrible things. :( i've been depressed, exhausted, and just generally fatigued in general. some bad things have happened and i'm having a hard time coping with it. my poor mother has been dealing with worse, and i feel really bad for her. something also happened last monday that was VERY sad. :( i don't wish to post it in a public forum but anyone who knows me and wants to know can contact me to find out.
lots of love to you all.
p.s. this entry was written on my mac mini. eat that, zealots.
over the last couple of years, i've sort of fallen in love with what the mac platform can do. there are certain things that this platform is just SO GOOD AT that the pc world still needs to catch up with.
