So now I'm the head of the "Color Department"

...Probably because how colored I am.

Anyways. I'm loading Photoshop onto the PC we're using for color scanning and printing, and aside from the TWO BUTTON MOUSE (Oh hey 1992 how's it hanging?) this is such an amazing computer, for instance, get ready to be blown away by these INSANE SPECS!HOLY CRAP! Intel III?! 499 MEGA(MEGA!)Hertz of CPU POWAH and SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY MEGA(MEGA!)bytes of RAM?! Watch out John Connor, I think I just found Skynet!

I wonder....

I wonder if, when I get old, I'll actually care how young people are dressed.

The answer is definitely.....yes.

I've really been putting the "blog" in "bologna" lately.

So to change things up, I'd like to announce the successful conversion of my laptop from Vista Home to XP Pro.
So far my memory usage is at 1% of its maximum capacity. This is in contrast with Vista's 40-60%.* So now I have the daunting task of reinstalling all of my programs and organizing files, but in the end it will be sooo worth it.

* everyone tells me that Vista just keeps that much RAM on standby in case it needs it, and gives it to other apps that need it, but when it tells me 40%, there's no way for me to tell if it's REALLY using 40% or if it's using 1% or 30%. So poo on you Vista, your pretty swishes and swooshes never won me over!

The Ziggurat...

...Nearing the heavens, by the Tower's command, it shall be destroyed.

The Tower...

...it casts a shadow that blackens the village.

Just checking to see if I can now post blogs from my phone, whhich would be rad considering I DON'T EVEN HAVE the internet.

[EDIT] Yes, I can. But I WON'T because Verizon appends Emails with all this bullcrap:

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit [link removed, don't advertise on my personal emails, jerks!]

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

........ACTION!

So, after hearing the Christian radio station in town promote it every ten minutes, I decided to subscribe to AFA Action Alerts, a newsletter that tells you what totally insane backwoods redneck evangelicals think you need to avoid. I've been so psyched up to learn what epidsodes of family guy not to watch, and what products I need to boycott because they target the gay community, but something has gone completely awry. Gmail has decided to block the Emails and list them as Spam, and in my haste, I never review the contents of my spam folder and just delete EVERYTHING. In the short span of time it takes from hitting the "Delete All Spam" button and all of the spam actually going away, I always see that "AFA Action Alert" right before it vanishes. A little bit of a warning: Ever since I signed up for the AFA A. A. emails, I've also been getting "Conservative Action Alerts," which I guess is the same thing, except for more about how Obama (who is following the same economic path as Bush Jr.) is running the nation's economy into the ground.

Just don't care...

I feel like I need to let something off my chest.
For about a decade now I've been let down by Snoop Dogg.
Once a G-Funk champ, Snoop and Dre would get me so psyched up with old P-Funk basslines, songs about being naughty, just really cool stuff. But then he went and turned into a little punk ass bitch who thought he was so cool because of his face hair. Nope, sorry bro.

But then something awesome happened. In a previous post, I espoused the Songbird Music player, and with good reason. The other day it automatically downloaded some mp3's from a blog called Mad-Decent, one of them being a new Snoop Dogg track.
The track is called "Snoop Dogg Millionaire," and is somehow related to that movie about some Indian gameshow, but I'll never know how exactly, because I'm never going to see that movie.
Here is the music!

Holy crap. Snoop Dogg dubstep. Maybe he's getting badass again.
Also worth noting: I saw that the track was produced by Wild Animals (John Legend, Kurupt, Murs), but also receiving credit is the Drum&Bass/Dubstep duo Chase&Status! I wonder who did all the work on this one...???

We went to the library today!

There was a big room full of old maps of Virginia, some of them are even older than ONE HUNDRED YEARS! Of course, the library knew that people would be so psyched about this that they would want something to write on about how blown their minds are, so they had a guestbook. I can never shy away from one of those!

OK PEOPLE

If you go out and buy an SUV that has OFF-ROAD capabilities, WHY IN GOD'S HOLY AND UNSPEAKABLE NAME WOULD YOU TAKE THAT SUV AND SLOW DOWN TO 5MPH TO GO OVER SMALL POTHOLES?!?!?!

WOTSOP

So in lieu of a hilarious anecdote, I figured I'd just tell you what I've been up to.
I recently figured I'd try out a music playing app I keep seeing around. It looked nice, but I've been a huge winamp fan since the late 90's. I can't say enough great things about winamp; it lets you totally customize things, from skins to little gadgets to letting you code your own visualizations (something I got WAY into for a year or two). And with Winamp's global hotkeys I could be surfing the web and changing tracks effortlessly. Winamp might still be my favorite as far as STRICT music player, but I've got to say, this new thing is a blast.
It's called Songbird, and it's based on Mozilla's Firefox. This is awesome because you can choose what songs you want to play, and then open up a new tab to browse the net. Of course, Songbird's browser isn't QUITE as awesome as Firefox, but for lazy browsing it's awesome.
Another really cool aspect of Songbird is the addons. Similar to Firefox, Songbird can be tricked out with some pretty badass janks, for instance, the pic above demonstrates the "Media Flow" addon, which takes all the album covers of all of your albums and allows you to scroll through and pick which album you want to listen to VISUALLY. There's also a plugin that displays the playlist in a bar to the right of your browser, making picky tune listening and web-browsing just about seamless.
But here's the part that I'm just getting into, and it seems like a real dealbreaker: Subscribing to websites.
Some websites have direct links to mp3's. These are most commonly just blogs that show off weird tunes that you've probably never heard of, and some gems that you thought you'd never hear again. For instance, one of my favorites it WFMU's Beware of the Blog. When you browse over to the site, Songbird has this tendency to show you all of the direct link mp3's in a panel right under the browser. You can click the download link to download the mp3 to your harddrive, or if you feel so psyched about the site you're on, and you know that it will be updated with more tunes that you TOTALLY NEED, you can right-click on the website and Subscribe to the site. It will ask you where to put the files, and how often you want to update your collection, and Songbird will automatically download subsequent updates!
Try it on my website! GAUTEKKER (or who knows, maybe I'll post some tunes here someday!)

Speaking of Music Blogs, there are hundreds of them out there linking to full albums hosted on sites like Rapidshare. Some of them are blatantly illegal, but a lot of them are dedicated to really unknown artists who (for the most part) get off on people sharing thier stuff. One that I've really browsed to death is Mutant Sounds, a really off the wall collection of odd albums.
Anyways, with this massive downloading quest, prepare to use Google Images a lot for finding album covers.
I just wish Songbird featured CD ripping and burning capabilities.
You can get Songbird at http://www.getsongbird.com

Peaceout til next time