I want to post, but I don’t have anything specific to talk about. Ever since the last election I really haven’t cared about politics that much. I still have opinions, and I still love talk radio, but I just don’t care enough to post on here and try to convince anyone. Maybe I need some big issue/topic to come around that really lights a fire beneath me, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I’m working on my novel idea, and it’s an amazingly big project. Granted I’ve never written a 100k+ word story, so this is brand new territory for me. I started with a central theme which I could tell you in one sentence, but that has to turn into numerous characters and a lot more detail to be a full story. It’s been a slow process with lots of changes, but it’s gradually taking shape. I’ve done a lot of reading about port security and nuclear weapons, but that’s all I can tell you right now. Typing about it makes me want to go work on it, so I should finish this up.

MRI is moving to San Diego! Congratulations!

I played Wario Ware the other day at a friends house. It was actually pretty fun, but not for $50. If it comes down in price I’d get it.

Heroes on Monday was downright SICK! I believe that’s the new cool word for, well, “cool.” It’s so SICK, I bet it would even be cool in regular non-hdtv.

Ok, I’m outta here.

I haven’t posted any "new" music lately, but I’ve got one for you today! It’s called Honestly by a band named Cartel. It’s not exactly new (2005), but it’s still very good. Check them out over on the Blarg radio! If you’d like to hear more songs by this band visit their purevolume page.

This morning on the radio they said the Bears are 11-2. That means they’ve played 13 games already. I didn’t even know it was football season (maybe on my unconscious level I did).

As far as I’m concerned it’s still baseball season.

The last week and a half I have been consumed with finding a better multimedia solution for us here at home. The previous setup consisted of an HDTV, an HD Tivo-like machine, and a DVD player capable of playing some Divx files. There were certain limitations and annoyances though that spurred me on to find a better setup. The HD recording box we have is cool, but it can only record one thing at a time. The DVD player was nice because it could play downloaded television shows encoded in Divx, but it could only play files that stuck to a specific standard, so it was a crapshoot. Add on to that I would have to run upstairs, make sure I had a blank dvd, burn it, and run back downstairs just to find out if it would play in the dvd player or not. All of those reasons made me start looking for a better solution.

At first I threw around the idea of making a media center type PC. Basically you make a computer, hook it up to your tv, and you can use it to watch stuff. A very flexible solution, but also very costly and technical. Instead of building something I decided to go for an inbetween solution called a media server. I ended up buying the Snazio Net Dvd Cinema HD player. This is a networked box that sits below my tv and plugs into my home network. I’m then able to browse files on my computer upstairs and playback videos, images, and mp3s straight over the network (no more running up and down stairs burning dvds). It also is much better at playing files than the old divx dvd player. Not only can it play a much wider range of files, but it can also play HD files (no more crap shooting).

In addition to this I bought a couple HDTV tuner cards and a large hard drive. I went with the Vbox DTA-150 because my brother is using one and I read some good reviews. With both of those cards in the PC upstairs I can record two additional HD programs (for a total of 3). Not only does that mean we don’t have to choose between shows, but I can also record shows I was previously downloading like Smallville (goodbye low quality divx rips, hello HD captures). Recording HD takes up a lot of hard drive space though, so I added another drive to accomodate. If you’re getting lost in the techie aspects of this post, this means I can record on the computer upstairs and watch on the TV downstairs. I’ll most likely be purchasing BeyondTV to do my recording and scheduling of programs. My brother really likes it, and it’s worked the best out of all the programs I’ve tried.

This solution ended up costing about $500, but that’s a far cry from the $1200 media pc I had priced out. A big thank you to Angelo, Andrew, and the.Rumor for their help. It feels good to tackle a problem and come up with a solution. The next problem I will surmount is that of world peace. Please give me a few days for a resolution to this problem.

And while I’m endangering the focus of this post, there is a new song by New Found Glory in the radio to the right. Enjoy.

Antonio Villaraigosa (the toilet guy) has called out John and Ken for "dividing" the nation and said "shame on you, shame on you." This is classic liberal speak about how it’s ok to have an opinion…until a liberal disagrees. What Villaraigosa and all the illegals who marched in downtown LA did was great, but when John and Ken argue the issues everyday on the radio it’s "shame on you, shame on you." Instead of arguing the facts, he’d rather just paint John and Ken as bad guys.

I would say that I was bored this afternoon, but that’s not really true. I actually had a lot of things I should have been doing, but instead I was playing around with adding music to the blarg. Now I know what you’re thinking…"oh stupid music that starts playing when I go to your website and I have to search fo the dumb thing so I can turn it off!" That might be how it works on whorespace, err, myspace, but I think you’ll like this system.

Over on the right is a small button which will expand when you move the mouse over it. Internet Explorer users need to click on it first and then it will start working. What this button will let me do is post music for people to listen to. If you want to listen, you can. If you don’t want to listen, you don’t have to. If you don’t, it should sit over there and stay out of your way.

Currently you’ll find three songs by three bands you’ve probably never heard of. Two of them I scoured the entire internet (that’s right, the whole thing) to find. The third one, by Rehasher, is a side band of the lead singer from Less Than Jake, at least one of them anyways. In the future, if I come across new songs I find interesting, I will now have the ability to post them for your listening pleasure.

I love how music has an amazing ability to transport you to a different time and place, bringing back memories and feelings from different stages in life. Since I’m not that old yet, the only real stages I have to be transported back to are High School and early college. Listening to songs that were on the radio while I was in High School brings back memories like my Ghia, dating, all the girls I tried to date, and working my first job at the library.

So how do you find all the songs that were on during High School? Every year KROQ does a top 106.7 songs, and luckily someone has compiled them all. It was interesting to look at the lists and see when I stopped listening to KROQ (somewhere round 2001 or so). They have lists starting all the way back in 1980 for my old readers.