jon made a liar out of me and posted the hot snakes review shortly after i made the post about him not posting it.

post post post? post! post post post, post post.

still not getting the amount of sleep i would prefer. i don't know how to combat this early waking bullshit. i've started doing little things like shutting the cat downstairs so she can't wake me up…no dice. i still wake up. there's no cause, just bam! awake. it's driving me nuts. nuts, i say!

it appears paypal is having some serious issues. i'm really glad i found out about this yesterday, right after i won an ebay auction. great. two days now and i haven't been able to access the site, at all. splendid. keep up the great work, paypal!

blaine and i went up to spring street for some wings and a few pitchers of beer. this ended up leading to a long discussion about just about everything in life, but mostly fathers. as blaine is about to become a father, i can see why he was down to talk about that type of stuff.

other than that, i've just been watching a lot of tv…

i haven't been sleeping well, lately. i stay up too late and get up too early. it's not by choice, either. hell…today i woke up a couple of hours before i needed to get up and ended up just tossing and turning the rest of the time. it sucks. i hate this shit. i hate being tired all fucking day because my brain decided it didn't want to go back to sleep.

fuck you, brain.

and fuck you too, monday.

maybe it's just that lack of sleep, but i've also been feeling rather down, lately. i'm sure it's more than that. it's probably a combination of a lot of factors. a lot of factors that are all starting to drive me nuts.

we need to have some band practice, this week. i'm still waiting to find out when we'll be practicing, though. we have to get the songs straight with billy before we can go down to nashville to rock them out. not having a practice space has slowly been killing any momentum we had with this band.

i was digging through some old notebooks the other night. i'm starting to think i have two modes: angry and depressed.

i am no stranger to obsession, thought sometimes they run stronger than others. for the last… er… what, like 8 months? a year? almost a year… i've been singularly obsessed with politics. and not just politics, but with current events as well (though not with a broad scope). i have collected links to sites that i read on a regular basis, and in the past couple of weeks it has seemed that pretty much all i do anymore is read news sites/blogs and either store the information loosely in my buggy brain, or slip it softly into a "staging" folder in my bookmarks.

for quite some time i've used a "daily" bookmarks folder to house links to all those sites i visit (oh, this is good, you'll never guess) daily, with subfolders for sites i visit "frequently" and for the sites of "friends." before that it was just a huge dailies folder and a blogs folder.

about a week ago i finally decided to take some time and figure out what bloglines was all about. now, i've attempted to use RSS aggregators before, but never really found them to integrate well into the way i surf the web. plus there never seemed a good way to fold the results of all those RSS feeds in with each other. bloglines still doesn't integrate the feeds, but it does an adequate job of tracking entries that have been read, so that i just have to check periodically for new ones. since it's a browser-based aggregator, it's integrated into my regular browsing habits just like my daily bookmarks, but quicker (plus, i no longer have to remember–for the most part–which posts i've read and which i've not, not that it was that hard to begin with).

anyway, it seems to have streamlined my daily reading, but now i seem to have so many damned sites that i read, most of which are fairly prolific posters (or teams of posters) that all i seem to do is read.

The Daily Reads:

43 Folders
AmigaWorld
Bloglines | News
Boing Boing
Cool Tools
The Courier-Journal
Daily Kos
David Allen
Daypop Top 40
Engadget
Gizmodo
On Lisa Rein's Radar: Daily Show Clips
InfoWorld
Jabber News
Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting
LostInLouisville
Louisville, KY – Topix.net
MobileWhack
MoCoLoco
MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse
Quotes of the Day
Screenhead
Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
Talking Points Memo
Techbargains.com

i've actually managed to do a little work tonight (answered a few emails, updated old-man.net, and written this post) but i still feel like i'm racing the clock.

part of this continual feeling of overwhelmed ineffectualness has driven me towards things like Danny O'Brien's LifeHacks, 43 folders, and especially David Allen's Getting Things Done. i am now making a concerted effort to learn the GTD concepts, and research and figure out how to apply the principles in my life, and with the tools that i like to use. i want to figure out how to make that Handspring Visor i've been neglecting a vital part of the process for me. right now, my room's a mess of discarded envelopes (and, of course, their content) and i have a bad tendency to let things sit for too long or forget them altogether until it's too late. i've gotten my finances under control because i have A SYSTEM, now it's time to get the rest of my life in some semblance of that same control. i know i have the capacity, now i hope i'm finding the methods and the tools that will let me figure the rest of it out. we'll see, but i do have a good feeling about the whole thing.

oh yeah, bush sucks, kerry rules.

jon finally posted my new hot snakes review. i know it's short, but it's about as "to the point" as i could get it. if you don't own that record, go buy it now.

now…on to office politics…

dear customer service rep,

your pal,
brian.
high speed data department

other than that, i got nothin'. i've been watching too much tv, lately. i think it might have something to do with that fancypants cable box i just got installed. yep. i think that might be it. something tells me having every fucking channel our cable system offers and a dvr box to record shows that i would otherwise miss…yeah. i think that might be a problem.

yeah…looks like jon didn't get around to posting that review today. no big deal. it'll go up when it goes up.

i set the dvr to record the vice presidential debate, last night. i hung out for a little while after work and then came home to watch it. i noticed i had an unwatched episode of futurama on there, so i watched it first. after that, i started up the vp debate. 10 minutes in and i fell asleep. i guess i just wasn't up for it.

i spent $11 at the grocery last night and came home with lunch for the rest of the week. kroger plus…i love you!

have i posted a link to this yet? well…if i haven't, i should have. it's awesome.

no wmds in iraq? no shit! like there was anyone left that still thoguht there would be any.

i'm abviously just filling space with links. i'm calling time for the day.

that review of the new hot snakes record? in the can. expect it up on 75 or less tomorrow. jon didn't want to run it today because he was busy being a corporate whore.

i git my new dvr box all hooked up and running, last night. it's nice to know that the headache of getting all this cable shit hooked up and working is pretty much over. now we just have to sit back and enjoy endless channels of absolutely nothing to watch. excellent.

i had some thing i was going to write about yesterday and ended up going off in another direction. i made a mental note to post about it today, but i seem to have…ummm…misplaced that mental note. maybe i'll remember tomorrow.

congratulations to the winner of the ansari x prize. blaine and i are stoked about this. i wonder if they're taking bookings for virgin galactic yet…

the new hot snakes record comes out tomorrow. i better write a review of it, real quick.

the melvins were amazing on friday night. they rocked and rocked and kept rocking. joe and i were grabbing beers when he looked at me and said "they should just play until the sun comes up. i'll watch every minute of it." unfortunately, they didn't play until sunrise. as a matter of fact, they didn't even play an encore. oh well.

the less said about our show on saturday, the better. as a matter of fact, i don't think L&N actually played. i think europower did. that said, moirai and arch were fucking amazing. we're hoping to do the exact same line-up at a future date in a different venue with much more promotion. sounds like a plan.

i just spent the last few minutes reading through the first page of posts i eer made on this site, way back in may of 2000. i've been really nostalgic, as of late. i think it stems from seeing and communicating with people i haven't seen in a long, long time. i've been thinking a lot about "the good old days," lately. i feel like my best years are behind me. like my capacity to have fun has diminished. i mean…i guess i need to face facts that i'm a washed up old drunk.

wow. so how about that debate? bush came off like a little monkey hopped up on pixie stix, lying through his teeth and out his ass at the same time, while kerry came across as strong, calm and confident. i was quite pleased with it, really. that and angered by bush and the thought that so many people still believe his bullshit.

i've been listening to and digging a lot of early smashing pumpkins, lately. 10 years after the fact, i'm finally giving siamese dream a fair shake. good songs. lot of heavy guitar. right on.

tonight i'm going to see the melvins after work. i'm kinda stoked, as i've never seen them. i'm thinking of trying to slip buzzo a copy of the L&N demo.

other than that…i'm a boring individual.

here's the text of an email i just sent to several news organizations, in support of Kerry's victory in the debate last night:

needless to say, i thought Kerry did a great job, and i feel more confident now than ever that things will work out alright.

Now, don't get cocky Kerry! i'm betting it's your race to lose, not Bush's. Keep the pressure on, keep bringin the fight to 'em.