okay…this shit is getting old. when i come into work, i expect to be able to sit at my desk. not some ghetto-ass disk with a fucked up mouse and some jacked ass phone that doesn't even let you know when you're getting a call. i call bullshit, shenanigans and foul. maybe i should just get a job laying tile or some shit.

kevin and the gang were supposed to get back from japan, last night, but i haven't heard from any of them. they must have gone into hiding, or something. probably jetlagged out of their minds. we'll see when they finally emerge, i guess.

i didn't do anything, last night. i hung out with brooksie for a few minutes, cooked a gardenburger on the foreman grill and then sat around reading until i went to bed. i tell you what…i lead the most exciting life known to man.

blaine said he finally got his power back at about 7pm last night. that means his power was out for a full seven days. a goddamn week. and he lives right down the street, in the middle of the fucking city. that's crazytalk, man. crazytalk.

another shitty thing about my new schedule is that i can't even get to the comic shop until saturday. no more picking up comics on wednesdays…that's crap! i really need to find a schedule that gets off earlier than this, or i'll go insane.

is anyone out there going to the san diego comicon? anyone? does anyone actually read this fucking thing?

holy shit. i feel like a circus dog who's been performing three shows a day…

i went 10 rounds with my employer and the various intermediate companies between me and my health insurance today, and damn, am i pissed off.

first off, the policy that my company offers (and on which my acceptance of the job hinged) is complete and total shit. well, let me qualify that—everything about the policy seemed pretty good except for the fact that the bastards won't pay out more than $5,000 per year (which point they did not elucidate during the enrollment process at all). so, if all i need is preventive care, i'm golden, but the moment i have an accident or fall deathly ill and require any kind of hospital stay or any involved procedure, i'm bankrupt. it's completely ridiculous, and the single worst medical insurance plan i've ever seen.

and now that i've signed up to have it taken out pre-tax, they say i can't cancel it. and the private insurer i've talked to in the last couple days says she's not sure if i can have two insurance policies at the same time, so not only can i not drop the worthless policy, i also can't sign up for one that will make sure i'm actually covered.

so, i'm going to have to get back in the ring tomorrow, and see if i can convince them to let me cancel. i'm debating restarting the job search right now, and just get the hell out any way i can. if anyone has any ideas, i'm all ears right now.

wish me luck.

wow. matt accepted the challenge. he's gonna try to post once per weekday. for the foreseeable future. my return to daily writing about nothing is inspiring! it inspires!

this list is hilarious. the vengeance scale, indeed. 10.0 on the scale was kinda a given, though.

after probably a full year of not even loading the page, i've spent the past couple of months on the hollywood stock exchange. my buddy brent and i are in friendly competition to see who the biggest movie nerd is. i'd say he wins, but i'm putting up a good challenge.

this sounds good. i can't wait.

i got nothin' else, right now…

well. the show. where to begin?

it was hot out. we sweated a lot. there seemed to be one bottle of water for the entire band to share. the vocals were so loud in my monitor that i heard myself breathing over the guitar. and apparently…my guitar wasn't loud enough.

but: we went over really well. we were instantly booked for another show next month. indoors. l&n developed a new rule, this weekend: no more outoor shows. check the l&n page for more info.

thanks to all of our friends that bothered to show up, none of which actually read this thing, i don't think. oh well…thanks to them, anyway.

sunday was spent lazing around the house and playing baldur's gate dark alliance ii with billy. we beat it. i can now whip through the game with drizzt. this means absolutely nothing to anyone but me and about 73 basement dwelling nerds who…also probably don't read this site.

and then drinks out at the bar with blaine, who still didn't have power. he had his fingers crossed for power to be restored today, so we'll see how that goes.

short update, but i've been busy, here at work. all day long. busy, busy, makesmewanttokillmyself busy.

now i'm going home.

for some reason i'm always suprised when news from Louisville finds its way out of the local scene. now, obviously, we (and the rest of the area) just made headlines because of the craziness of the past week, and there are certainly enough idiots and looneys wandering about that someone surely should be able to hit the national news circuit at least once a week. nevertheless, i'm still surprised.

as it turns out, i just read about this particular idiot (or collection of idiots) in the CJ the other day, but to see it on a liberal progressive rallying center like the Talking Points Memo makes me grieve the tarnished reputation of my beloved city. it's not like the rest of the world didn't think we were a bunch of barefoot imbeciles already…

don't get the wrong idea, world, Louisville's is a very diverse population, the majority of which are thoughtful, involved, caring, and mostly intelligent. even some of the conservatives. we're mostly bad drivers though, it seems (myself most decidedly not included), so if you decide to come for a visit be very very watchful. and be assured that idiots like the ones mentioned in the above articles are thankfully few & far between.

my buddy dan just reminded me that i forgot to mention our entries in this week's photo friday. the theme is "cool." mine is entry #371.

man…i've been listening to nothing but queens of the stone age and neurosis for the past month or so. every time i climb into the car and think about switching the cd out, some kickass rock song comes on, and i change my mind. i guess you can't fault them for rockin' so fuckin' hard, really. it's what they do, man. it's their calling.

i'm really starting to embrace this bipolar rebirth of mine, if only to flex some muscles and make myself find a way to write about the sheer amount of nothing that happens in my life on a daily basis.

nothing diary – 07.16.04:

last night i went out drinking with my buddy blaine (again). we had a good time. i ate dinner at the bar. it was a really good grilled cheese sandwich. they've started giving you a whole fucking order of poppers when you sub them for fries. this is something i will never complain about.

okay…maybe not.

practice went well, last night. everything really came together and the set is now a brutal hammer to the skull. we should have one hell of a time tomorrow. word is we're gonna have more storms tonight. i hope mother nature isn't thinking about fucking with this show…

i keep having these ideas to enhance different things around here, and i've always got a thousand projects running around in my head, begging to be let out, so sometimes i get a little caught up in them… some might say obsessive about them.

the first thing i want to point out (and the thing that kind of triggered the whole landslide of enhancements i'm going to tell you about in a minute) is that, in my galleries i've added a directory for images taken with my phonecam. the directory is called, appropriately enough, "phonecam".

this is all the result of, after having fought with it for a while, i've finally managed to get a cable and software to sync my phone to my PC (since Sprint refuses to supply such things in order to make you more likely to buy their PCS Vision services). anyway, i finally got it working, so i'm attempting to be dilligent about taking at least one photo with it every day. now, i'm not promising i'll get a new photo uploaded every day, but i should at least be able to take five seconds to take a picture every day. i've debated creating a sub-folder within the phonecam gallery to house the shot-a-day pics, where i could pick just the best photo from the days with multiples, but i've decided not to do it for the moment. if anyone wants to weigh in, input would be welcomed… i'm not a good decision-maker.

so, anyway, the ability to upload phonecam images brought a couple of gallery script bugs to light, so i spent some time fixing those. fixing those bugs reminded me of some of the little enhancements i wanted to make, and the enhancements reminded me of entirely new functionalities i wanted to add. so, a couple weeks later, i've got the bugs fixed, the enhancements done, and the new functionality added. all while streamlining the code so that i've got a single code-base that works for the bipolar galleries as well as brian's joycamproject.

the bugs were boring, and inconsequential. one of the enhancements was simply adding a pagination function to the gallery pages so that you can now navigate directly to a page, instead of having to click "next" or "prev" to go through all the pages in sequence. nothing really groundbreaking, but a very useful enhancement. the other major enhancement was adding a "fit image to screen" link, so that if the image is larger than your screen resolution, you can force it to resize to fit within your screen dimensions—cool.

the new functionality is much more fun, though really nothing quite groundbreaking either. i noticed on heather champ's site that she's got a "send as ecard" link… well… i thought that was a cool idea. so, a little searching online, a little download of open-source code (phpPowerCards), some judicious yet extensive re-writing of that code, and voilá— x:13design postcards are born. basically, you can just browse the galleries, view an image, and if you want to send a postcard, just click the aptly named "send postcard" link down there on the bottom left.

i haven't taken the time to add any anti-abuse code to the script yet, as for one: i'm not quite sure how, and two: i'm running out of free time at work to do it… but, if anyone has any specific ideas as to an easy to implement anti-abuse bit of PHP code, please let me know. also, if anyone gets spams sent by this script (i'm not anticipating it, but it's possible) then please let me know ASAP, and accept my most sincere apologies.

anyway, get thyself to the gallery and check it out again, like it was the first time.

so…we rescheduled band practice for last night, but it ended up getting cancelled. so now we're running down to the wire. we have one more "scheduled" practice tonight, and i think we're gonna have to practice again saturday before we load out and head over to the show. nothing is ever easy with l&n, i tell ya…we always have to cut things as close as possible.

in other show news, we'll be playing a new song. this new song doesn't have words yet. that oughta be entertaining. i was hoping to get another new song ready, but with the cancelled practices (damn you, mother nature!), it doesn't look likely. i guess it doesn't matter since we were only given 15 minutes to play. but, hey, we're not bitter. arch is playing right after us, so it should be a good time.

work has been driving me nuts, lately. since i changed my schedule, everything has been crazy around here. now, whenever i come in, there's always someone sitting at my desk. sitting there, spinning around in my chair. wasting time, refusing to move. they did this new schedule and then realized they didn't have enough desks for all the new full-timers they hired. way to go, people. way to fucking go. now i have to suffer, sitting at some chick's desk that's packed with all kinds of weirdass my little pony bullshit.

my friend mike still doesn't have power at his house. he doesn't expect to have power for another couple of days, as there are multiple trees laying across the street in front of his house. he and i decided to go out for some drinks and shoot the shit, just to keep him from having to sit around, doing nothing in the dark all night. so we spent a few hours and a few dollars wettin' our whistles down at the outlook. i've decided i really like the outlook…on weeknights. i can't stand the place on weekends, though. come friday and saturday night, the place is packed with the most amazing assortment of dickheads and douchebags ever, playing dave matthews and pearl jam all fucking night long. good times, good times.

75 or less is back up. looks like jon posted my neurosis review.

time to go back to staring at that freaky fluffy thing sitting on top of this monitor…

wow. mother nature spit some serious fury onto louisville, last night. we spent close to 12 hours with no power. there was one block of the main strip by our house that had power. that block happens to house my beloved q'doba and the liquor store. as you can imagine, we made the best of a bad situation. q'doba was packed, but that burrito really hit the spot.

band practice was cancelled because joe's power was out, as well.

so we grabbed some booze and went over to a friend's house and shot the shit with everyone else we know that lives in the neighborhood. it was a good time, really. the power should go out like that more often.

the funny thing: both times it's stormed in the past week, i was listening to the new neurosis record in the car. title of that record? the eye of every storm.

maybe i should get back to work.