The mama page is back up for parents (and/or soon-to-be-parents).

I was listening to more Fiona Apple and Jonatha Brooke on the ipod last night, thinking about how their songs are just beautiful, carefully-woven tapestries of sound—especially Apple—when it struck me: dang, they really need to stop dating assholes. Apple’s Extraordinary Machine is Jagged Little Pill without the screaming. She has some amazing skill, but it’s a little depressing to listen to. I still think it’s wrong for her record company not to release it, but I can sort of see their point about their claim that there’s not much radio material on it. And I saw a reviewer write somewhere that Jonatha Brooke’s voice is “thin.” Huh? Have they heard “Where Were You?”

I don’t listen to the radio at all anymore. I can’t stand all the ads, and in the last few years it seems like stations have substantially increased ad time (as if it wasn’t mostly ads already). So I am strictly adless internet radio and podcast now. Speaking of that, if you need a podcast to try out, you might try this one.

Yesterday was the grand Flickr meetup in SLO. I would have gotten more photos of Striatic for all the groupies, but since I was sitting right in front of the bright doorway, it was hard to get any pictures, let alone good ones. I hope we can all do it again next month. Set is here.

Striatic was, by the way, easily the most articulate 24 year-old I’ve ever met in my life. Obviously he didn’t go to school here in Leave Every Child Behind Land.

I bailed on the photo show I was going to do at the health food store this month. I just got too nervous, and the $$ it was starting to cost for prints and frames was hair-raising. But okay, a lot of it was stage-fright. The idea of everyone I know and don’t know judging my stuff up on that HUGE wall was more than I could take. I know they’re not masterpieces, and I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of being judged against people that have DSLRs and don’t have to buy frames at WalMart. I happen to be pretty good in Photoshop, which helps, but there’s a limit to what you can do when you only have a mid-range camera. Pictures can only be so big, for instance (programs like Genuine Fractals–which I have–can’t add pixels). It was stupid to think I could fill a 30 foot wall. And you know, taking photos is just something I do for fun, not for praise or profit–if those two things happen that’s great, but that’s not why I do it. I do it primarily because I like to look at nice pictures, I want my kids to have pictures of what they and this area looked like when they were little, and I have no time for my pre-kids hobbies, like painting and ceramics. And it’s affordable, sort of. I remember when my roommate was doing traditional photography in college, she was ALWAYS broke (my Flickr icon was taken by said roommate). That changed since digicams came on the scene. I laugh now when I think of how my photographer parents sniffed at digital cameras when they first came out. Now even they are 100% digital, and are spending more on digital stuff than they ever did on film equipment.

I obviously jinxed myself talking about the Frankenputer a couple of entries back. The client called last week and said it wouldn’t go into Windows anymore. When I got there, I saw that Windows was corrupted beyond belief and told her I would have to take it home and work on it. When I got it home, it still wouldn’t cooperate so I moved on to a complete reformat. I’ve never had such a bitch of a time reformatting in my entire life. Windows was definitely corrupted, but no matter what I did the reinstall of Windows couldn’t finish. I kept getting horrific blue screens of death and stop errors all over the place. Almost every stop error there is. I got desperate and ripped the HD out and hooked it up to mine…reformatted it that way, and even put the Windows setup on it. That worked, but then it was back to the same bullshit as soon as I put it back. Then I started getting these freaky stop errors, like “Memory_Management.” So I ran MemTest on it. As it turns out, one of the memory modules was bad and was causing all this freaky computer schizophrenia. And it wasn’t the cheapass generic stick I got on sale, either…no, it was brand-name one. Intersting. Anyway, I removed the bad one and I stayed up until 2am reformatting.

“That thing is killing our sex life,” Bruce said.

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Freedom isn’t free, it’s $1.99
Lookie, lookie somebody liked my Holga flag photo
Nooooo! No Sopranos until next year
I’m not entirely sure what the point of StuffGuppy is, and apparently they aren’t either.
The Fishman - I used to pass by this guy’s house in Laguna Beach all the time. You should see his bus.