Sickest Bass Groove

I like the bass. Can't play the instrument but I really like the bass when it is used to drive a song. Some of my favorite songs are because of the bass, not the guitar. The bass in Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" is underrated, for example. The bass in 99.9% of Metallica's music is unheard. I don't necessarily like that about their music. Listen to this bass groove from Death Cab for Cutie. The song is called "I will Possess Your Heart." The drums in this song are awesome too as they are right with the bass. This video is a 8:00 commitment so you need to have time to take it all in.

---

Now Spinning

I've fallen into a bit of a rut lately. I've been spinning a lot of Five Finger Death Punch, a lot of Lamb of God, and even more Death Magnetic. If I were to make a life CD, these would be my current favorite songs.

1. Demons - Bayside
2. No One Understands - Bayside
3. Your New Twin Sized Bed - Death Cab for Cutie
4. You Can Do Better Than Me - Death Cab for Cutie
5. All Summer Long - Kid Rock
6. So Hott - Kid Rock
7. Indestructible - Disturbed
8. Inside the Fire - Disturbed
9. The Bleeding - Five Finger Death Punch
10. It's Never Enough - Five Finger Death Punch
11. Stranger than Fiction - Five Finger Death Punch
12. The Bleeding (acoustic) - Five Finger Death Punch
13. Wasted Years - Iron Maiden
14. Run to the Hills - Iron Maiden
15. The Judas Kiss - Metallica
16. My Apocalypse - Metallica
17. Grace - Lamb of God
18. Set to Fail - Lamb of God

Call it a Wrapper

The end of 2008 is upon me like a wet blanket.

This year was pretty good for me. There were a lot of ups and downs. One of the ups was seeing Rush in May. That rocked. Another up was getting some extra freelance moonlighting technical writing assignments. I am uncertain if they will be repeat customers but I hope they will be in 2009. I also got to mow the neighbor's yard. Of course, one of the downs is that all that extra $ was used for one thing or another. It doesn't really matter. Another sad thing is the disappointing losses Alex's Dudes basketball team went through.

Musically, I am still entrenched in Somehow Hollow, Spitalfield, Ten Foot Pole, and Metallica. Count the Stars also got a lot of listens. I liked the new Offspring and the new Puddle of Mudd. I liked the new Bayside release and I also liked Death Cab for Cutie. I also got a Who DVD and listened to more of their material than I ever have before. I'm not rushing out to buy their releases, but I probably have a deeper understanding as to why Keith Moon is considered such a legendary drummer. On the opposite end, I heard a lot of crappy death bands that couldn't play a decent riff if they were taught it.

2009 looks to be a good year for me. I am hopeful that I will continue to be happy at work and make good decisions there. I am hopeful that I will actually get to do some tech writing the first week of January. I have about 8 weeks stockpiled up and I think my next cut is going to be early February so there's not a lot of time to do a lot of things. I just have to make the best of it.

So with that, and a glasses prescription to be filled tomorrow, I bid farewell to 2008. No crazy plans tomorrow night, which is kind of strange.

Best website of the year still is: http://www.freearcade.com/SuperCrazyGuitarManiacDeluxe3.flash/SuperCrazyGuitarManiacDeluxe3.html

Published, Weekend, and the Future

First, the cool news. Two big pieces posted today @ Dailyvault.com & a hint re: my next review.

1. Death Cab for Cutie review
2. Rush in Moline, IL, concert review
3. My review of Queensryche's CD of cover songs is coming later this week!

Second, we returned from Dubuque today after the funeral for my wife's aunt. She was 89 and died of natural causes. When we went through the wake receiving line on Saturday night, I was asked to be a pallbearer, an honor I accepted. It's an odd feeling when you know you are lifting someone who worked her entire life to lift the people in her life around her. She was a great woman and there are many who are sorrowful tonight as they envision a world without her. She will be missed and her memory cherished.
Third, this week is busy but it doesn't start until Wednesday.
Tomorrow night, unless it's raining, I'll be mowing. It's hard to believe that is the only scheduled activity.
Wednesday, though, is when the fun begins. Alex has a baseball game in Coralville and Megan has 6:30 practice.
Thursday, Megan has a double-header, starting the first game @ 5:30 and Alex has a game as well.
Friday, we leave Cedar Rapids when I get off work @ 5 for Cedar Falls to see my brother-in-law's band play at the Hub. His band is the The HooDads and my brother-in-law is the one with the Fender shirt. Guess what he plays?!?
Saturday AM, we are going to the hotel that my mother-in-law and her sister are staying at so that the kids can go swimming. Then we are leaving for CR to drop off the kids at my parents' house to spend the night. Then we are going to get ready. Ready for what? I am the designated driver for the father of the bride for his future son-in-law's bachelor party. Karen is going out with the girls.
Sunday, I'll grab the kids from CR and prepare for another week of work, baseball games, and who knows what else.

Weekend & Raymond... again

As it gets closer to 8 AM, I haven't really solved any problems. I did just find out that there are two houses near where my parents live. House A is my folks and Houses B & C are for sale.



It should be a time for solving things, though. It is, after all, finally the weekend but it doesn't allow me a chance to slow down. Alex's coach added practice this AM @ 10 and that's fine. Alex's team has lost its last 3 games. In his league, it's not really a life or death. I think the coaches want the boys to be successful and to learn the game. There are times when, I'll admit, it is frustrating to see a player struggle, whether it's throwing a ball when the count is full or when a ball that is going directly to a kid doesn't go in the glove. There's nothing, in those situations, a coach can do. The helplessness feeling is what is discouraging. Yet, at the same time, the boys seem to be having fun, which is the number one priority. Practice today will consist of a lot of batting practice as we, as a team, haven't been hitting the ball when we are up to bat. There is a lot second-guessing.

The other major event that is happening this weekend is the printer. I replaced 2 of the 6 cartridges last night and now it still won't print b/c it claims the other 4 are empty. I should have just bought all 6 last night at Best Buy. Now I need to make a stop on the way home from Mass. Of course, Alex has a paper he has to turn in on Tuesday and it has to be typed.

I wrote a review of the new Death Cab for Cutie. I wrote about how I must be living under a rock b/c the buzz on this band is huge and, well, I had never listened to them before. I think the review is running on Monday.

Karen's aunt's funeral is on Monday as well. We are missing graduation party tomorrow to go up to the wake in Dubuque. We'll leave @ 1 and be to Dubuque by 3, stay for the vigil, and then go to Balltown for the night. The next morning, I'll pack the van so that when we leave to attend the funeral, we'll be able to leave from Dubuque to NL. Alex has tutor @ 3:15.

When I went to pick up some vegetables in our former neighborhood, when my former neighbor's mom saw me, she said, "You look like that guy on TV." After some further discussion, she was thinking of Raymond on Everybody Loves Raymond. What's funny is that when I first started dating my wife, my wife's cousin's wife thought I looked like Tom Cruise. I'm no Tom Cruise. I actually am closer to a hybrid of Robert and Raymond. Take Robert's height, not being the favorite child, and not having a good relationship with his mother and melt it with Raymond's love for golf, his desire to be a good father, and the way in which what he does is not exactly what everyone else thinks he should do. My brother-in-law in Cedar Falls thinks I look & act like Raymond as well.

Speaking of jerks... no really, I really like my brothers-in-law. We are going to see Mark's band play next Friday night. We are going to be leaving CR @ 5-ish, u pto Cedar Falls by 6:15-ish, drop the kids off, and then go downtown to The Hub to see the Who-Dads. The Who-Dads used to be called "Drop Everything" but went through a name change. I saw them play before and they are good. They have an insane lead guitarist and a killer rhythm guitarist (Mark). The drummer uses electronic drums so that is good as well. On top of all that, their set list is very good. My personal favorite is when they launched into the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun." Ah... college. One last note, tentatively, one of my best friends and his wife that live in Cedar Falls may be coming down to check it out too. I hope they do.

So while we were going to get the camper loaded for the beginning of our camping season on Friday, June 13, it doesn't look like that will happen. Additionally, we were going to lay down some mulch in our backyard and it's doubtful that will happen either. The mulch project is kind of interesting. About a year ago, our neighbors down the street rented a sod ripper upper because they were expanding their patio. Karen says to me, "Don't you think we should use it so we can plant some plants along the fence in the backyard?"

"No."

Well, we now have plants along the fence. We laid down mulch last year but it seems to have not been thick enough. I know we need to put down more and to put it down heavier. Yet, starting June 13-July 13, we won't really be home at all. Between baseball/softball games up until shortly before the first of July and camping all five weekends in Elkader, we won't really be able to enjoy the work we would do. I'm leaning towards putting it down this fall. Yet, I don't want it to look bad so maybe within a week or so, we'll tackle that project.

Another project that I'm sure will get tackled sooner than later is the storage room. When we load the camper, all the camping stuff in that room must come out. You'd think after all these years there would be a system and you'd be wrong. For the most part, things are organized. We ultimately have too much stuff. Ideally, I'd be able to leave my drums set up all the time in this storage room but... there's no way right now. We have never really come up with a system for keeping the room organized. When we purchase something, I ask "where should we keep this?" "Down in the storage room." Hence, we accumulate and accumulate. I used to think that some shelves would make things better, but I'm not convinced of that any more. We need a warehouse like in the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The obvious answer, if you don't want to go the warehouse construction route, is to ditch stuff. Believe me, we've had our 'I'm ready to ditch stuff we don't need" cleaning days. I don't know if one is on the horizon. It'll really depend upon whether I can find the things from the camping season that need to be found.

Okay, enough about the messiness of my storage room. How boring.

Work? Oh yes, I went to work yesterday. I think work is really going well. I have a lot to do - which is a recurring theme in this blog - and that is good. I have been converting from a table-based layout to a CSS-based layout. My table-based layout uses qdshelp.css and my non-table layout uses qdshelp_new.css. When all of my files point to qdshelp_new.css, I am going to rename qdshelp.css to qdshelp_tables.css, rename qdshelp_new.css to qdshelp.css, and then do a find qdshelp_new.css and replace it with qdshelp.css in all of my HTML files. Then... I will start the process all over again of deciding what to change in the HTML files. I'm not sure, exactly, what I will change. The awesome thing is that with CSS, I can make a change to a single file and have the changes ripple through to all the HTML files. CSS is very powerful and I don't even understand all of its capabilities. I am learning, though, and that's good.

Outside of a pet project like that, there is a long list of projects that are going to require doc changes to the system. The system has grown very complex over the last 9.5 years and, as I approach a decade of working there, I think it will get even more complex in the next decade. I am one of those fools that don't exist much anymore that really thinks I will spend the rest of my career at a single job. I have no desire to go elsewhere. My (cool) manager is awesome, I like my work, and I enjoy the people with whom I work. It's a good environment for me.

Alex just came downstairs and needs help with his tutor homework so maybe I'll write later. He asked if I got the printer working and I said no, it needs more ink. He said that they're just trying to get me to pay more money at Best Buy. Smart kid.