i was right. finally getting the computers set back up again didn't affect my (unfortunate) posting schedule at all, it's pretty typical for me to skip, oh… 7 days. anyway, as i mentioned, i've got both machines up and they've been puttering along quite happily. i've finally gotten some real applications installed on a machine again. after all those crashes and reinstallations i'd left my old machine pretty bare in the software department for a while. well, no longer. i've got the itch to attempt a redesign of coffeemonk.com again, and who knows, i might try to come up with another theme for ye olde bipolar.

played music with the boys on Sunday, the boys having acquired some new strings for my guitar. amazingly enough, the new strings did the trick and i was actually able to play (mostly) in tune. then, amazingly enough, we actually successfully had a second practice again on Tuesday night. both seemed to go pretty well, we're trying not to pressure ourselves too much about writing new material. we've really gotta finish up the few songs we have before we start warping our brains with the creative process again. fun side note, i borrowed jim's 4-track and all the practice tapes that we could find, and i'm hoping to be able to go through them here soon and see if there's anything worth transmuting into the digital realm. if i come up with something, perhaps i'll put 'em up and link to 'em. y'know, get some feedback.

erg. it's way too late for me to be doing this. i'll try to take a few moments to write more tomorrow. i need all you joseph's out there to interpret some dream imagery for me. and well, yeah, i guess that's the bulk of the rest of what i've got to say. unless i come up with more tomorrow (don't hold your breath).

how depressing is it to be sitting at work for 8 hours with absolutely nothing to do? let me tell ya, it's pretty damned depressing. the only positive side of it is that i've been able to finally chat with nathan since his girlfriend convinced him to get on ICQ long enough for me to convince him to download a jabber client. now that Nathan's on jabber, we've also convinced paul to try it out so we can all do a group chat thing and seriously defeat any productive potential we have while at work.

not to mention the fact that, in the process of having an absolutely great time last night, i stayed up way too late, got a little tipsy, and today am just completely bushed. apparently, we're about to get our first home-cooked family meal in the new place, as paul's just informed me that brax will be fixing up some spaghetti. and damn, it's comics day! i've been frickin craving my traditional wednesday Denny's Big Texas BBQ burger all damn day.

anyway, went to see the Reverend for the sixth time last night, and as usual, they were awesome. i'd have to say it wasn't their best show, but since their shows have progressively gotten better and better each time, i'd have to put it just below the last time i saw them. which is probably considerably better than most of the bands out there. another positive thing was the opening bands, who pretty much rocked the house. Death on Wednesday opened, followed by the Gotohells. It was pretty funny, just before the Gotohells came out and started playing, we were standing around talking about old Van Halen and other "hard rock" that we grew up with and really like (in retrospect, at least for me). Three chords into the Gotohells' set, i was surprised by how "classic rock" they sounded. I was thinking, listening to their set, that they sounded a bit like a good sized helping of Van Halen and other classic rock, mixed in with a little pinch of Mudhoney and grunge sound thrown in. We were all pretty impressed with the opening acts, which is very rare for us. In fact, let me see if i can remember opening acts i've actually liked out of all the concerts i've been to… the Cows, Engine, Deke Dikerson (much better live than the album that i was able to find)… and… uh… that's about it. I'm sure brax and paul could remind me of some other openers that i liked, but hey, if i can't remember them, they weren't that impressive were they?

then the Reverend came on stage and just rocked straight outta the box from beginning to end. they played quite a few songs off the first two albums, some stuff off the middle few and last albums, and some new (unrecorded) stuff as well. i think the highlight of the evening for me was when they played "eat steak" which is one of my all time favorite songs. after the Reverend made a comment to some person in the pit complaining they couldn't hear the lyrics, saying "next time, maybe i'll be more willing to work with you if you bring up a shot of jagermeister." brax then got the idea that we should take him a shot right then & there (this is a normal RHH show occurrence) and he dragged paul along to take it up to the stage. i hung in the back and just enjoyed the show. a few songs before their first break, paul came back and grabbed me and dragged me up into the pit with them. (thus setting up the next highlight of the night) at the end of the encore the Reverend came out to the edge of the stage and shook hands with people, me include. so, i got to shake hands with one of my idols.

i finally bought a new t-shirt, and met up with brax and paul who were hanging out and talking with Jimbo (the stand-up bass player). so i actually got to meet Jimbo as well, exchanged a few words with him, bordering on a conversation. Finally, as we were still waiting for the Reverend to come back out to mingle, i got to meet Scott as well. We had a great conversation about Louisville, Lexington, girls, the karaoke bar he'd gotten kicked out of the night before. and in the end, he offered to put us on the guest list for the Lexington show. damn. it's so tempting to go, but as tired as i am right now, i'd never make it staying up until three again and facing an hour plus drive home.

so, aside from Brax nearly getting in a fight with some chick because he was drunkenly dancing to the music, and aside from the fact that idiot-jerk (yes, the same idiot-jerk from previously told stories relating to an ex-girlfriend) was standing in front of me through almost the entire Horton Heat set, i had a wonderful time last night. i did spend considerable time trying to figure out if it really was idiot-jerk standing in front of me, and then, once i had figured it out, i spent considerably more time debating the value of jumping over the rail that was in front of me and pounding his face into the floor. thankfully, propriety and the desire for personal safety (who knows how many of his friends were there) won out and i left him alone. this was also part of the reason i hung back when paul and brax moved up to the pit. i wanted idiot-jerk where i could see him… just in case. but, once paul came back to drag me up there, i enjoyed the act of walking directly in front of idiot-jerk (even saying "excuse me.") on my way down to the pit. overall, i'd say the move to the pit was worth it.

i had a great night last night, and again, if you ever have the opportunity to see the Reverend Horton Heat, don't miss out. if i hear of any of you knowingly skipping out on a Horton Heat show without a very good reason, i'll personally find you and kick your ass… or at least give you a stern talking to.

3 for 3 baby, yeah.

yesterday was the first day i actually drove straight to my new home after work. i've been living in the new place since Thursday, and there really hadn't been any adjustment difficulties at all. it didn't seem strange to be waking up in a new place, or altering established routines to fit the layout of the new apartment. but yesterday, when i didn't take the normal I-64 to Watterson expressway exit (the one i've been taking for over two years now, on an almost daily basis), that weird feeling hit me that i was living in a new place. it didn't last too long, but it was enough to color the rest of the evening. of course, then once i got home, i fixed myself a sandwich and trudged up the steps to the living room to sit and watch some TV with paul, and these actions again just added to the weird feeling i already had.

we're getting settled in. i got several boxes of books unpacked and shelved in the upstairs "library." i held back my extensive collection of star trek novels to put in my room so that (as i explained to paul) it doesn't "negatively reflect on you and brax." i figured i'd just keep my intellectual literature up there, and keep the trek stuff safely hidden away. i still have a few things to pick up from the old place, but since brian has his visitor here and i don't want to intrude, i'll just get them in a few days.

tonight at least brax and i will be heading to phoenix hill (a place i generally try to avoid) in order to catch the reverend horton heat show. if you're in the louisville area, you should definitely go check it out. i think it's a 21 & over show, so if you can get in, do.

themes

or something.

so, as you might have been reading, here and on the a-go-go it's been an interesting, pleasantly eventful weekend. where do i start? perhaps i should just summarize.

  friday: birthday dinner with brian and co. seeing as we were eating in an italian restaurant, i came to the realization that it would be really cool to be a mafia boss. someone pointed out that mafia boss's wives are almost always ugly, mean, and/or flamboyant nouveau riche hags. yet another point was made that mafia bosses quite often have a plethora of pretty young mistresses interested only in your money and power. and y'know, sometimes, that sounds like it would be really nice. and, in a flamboyant move of my own that played into the whole mafia boss feeling i was having, i bought dinner for everyone. yes, i am flaunting that, but keep in mind i also have only $30 left to my name until payday.
  afterwards, i worked quite a bit on some changes to bipolar. (oh, i'm not going to spoil it yet. you've gotta read on.)

  saturday: slept until 3pm. had lunch with brian. brax & i went to meet paul so they could get some dinner, then we hung out at the house for the majority of the night (later to be joined by my friend nicole), playing zombies ate my neighbors, watching saturday night live, drinking (me – beam & pepsi, brax & paul – beer), then heading to the twig later for some of the oft-mentioned "louisville paul brown" (a.k.a. ky hot brown).
  afterwards, i worked quite a bit more on some changes to bipolar. (ah… not yet.)

  sunday: as brian mentioned i was still up (working on those changes) when he went to work around 8:30am. i decided that since the sun was up, it would probably be a good idea to get some sleep. got back up at 2:00pm or so, lounged around the house in my bathrobe, sat out on the back porch and smoked, and… worked quite a bit on those changes to bipolar. indeed, with the exception of an hour and a half trying to sort my way through a convoluted thread about Amiga on slashdot, i spent almost the entire day until 3:30a.m. working on those damned changes.

and let me guess… you didn't even notice did you?

it is possible that the more observant of you will have noticed the addition of a couple links to that dropdown links box up there at the top… way down there at the bottom. see that? well, "webcam" you may already be familiar with, but that "themes" link… that's it. that's what i've spent the past unholy amount of time working on. so click it already.

or finish reading first, whatever. anyway, it's something that i mentioned a while ago–the ability to choose your favorite bipolar design, rather than having our whims and fancies foisted upon you. overall, i'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out and how it works. the only exception to this is the fact that for some reason, i can't get netscape to set the damn cookie. so those of you who are holding out, keeping the faith against the evil corporation, well, you gotta do it the hard way for now. (it's all explained somewhat on the themes page). but, if any of you are PHP gurus, please please please if you know anything about why netscape is being a bitch about setting cookies, please let me know. you have no idea how much i HATE having to say that a microsoft product actually does something better.

well, there's a bunch of other stuff i could write about, like all the great conversations i've had this past week, with co-workers and friends and what-have-you. but i've wasted enough "computrons" (as a co-worker likes to say) as it is, and you need to go have fun playing with the new themes (and breaking them and telling me about it). oh, and at the moment, it's not real obvious about how to get back to the main bipolar page, so just move that mouse up to the upper left corner of the page after you choose your swanky new bipolar theme.

peace.

well, after a thankfully brief, but very absurd struggle with some javascript code, i've finished adding the dotcomments scripts to bipolar. so, now you can tell us what you think without having to deal with all that messy email or aim stuff. just click on the word comments at the bottom of each post, and gab away. also, for those of you who've been with us for a while, the scripts have been applied retroactively (thanks to the magic of blogger), so you can go back through the archives and comment on your favorite posts from the past.

and thus, bipolar becomes less like a podium, and more like a circle jerk… er… community.

interact and enjoy.

here's what i was going to post last night, before that whole Mir/Taco Bell discovery.

update: go here, to voice your support (in an official Marvel forum, no less) for one of my favorite titles. (of course, i've just realized that you have to be registered for marvel's forums to post a reply, so perhaps one of the other options below would be better.)

Marvel Comics is getting ready to cancel one of my favorite titles–Spider-Girl. having heard that the EIC Joe Quesada is trying to figure out a way to save the book from the accountant's axes, it would really mean a lot to me if all of you could spare two minutes to respond to his post on marvel's boards. just write something simple, like "please don't cancel this awesome book!" or something along those lines.

you can also go to fandom.com's spider-man domain and take the little poll about halfway down the left-side column. be sure to choose "that sucks! it was a good title." (or, one of the other positive responses.) it would mean a great deal to me, and you can take pride in the knowledge that you have helped to make this crazy guy happy.

and again, you can go here for an online poll that will be submitted to marvel at the end of the month.

c'mon, do it for me. please?

welcome one and all to the official unveiling of bipolar 2.0. what you see before you is the glorious work of your friendly neighborhood (if your neighborhood happens to be hong kong) jessie hung (whose own site seems to be in a state of flux right now…), and also with some judicious scripting magic performed by yours truly.

a thousand thank-you's to jessie for this winning entry, and also to our other contestants (notably the greatest girl in the world), whose entries you'll also be seeing in the hopefully near future. as soon as jessie picks her favorite show from transmission3000, we'll be sending out her prize.

my task the past few days has been teaching myself rudimentary php scripting, and modularizing bipolar to the point where we'll soon be able to offer the option of selecting your favorite look. so, for those staunch goth/metal kids out there who loved the black & skulls theme of the old bipolar, you'll be able to choose that as your standard interface. notice, of course, that i'm saying "soon" and not really giving a specific date. in case you hadn't noticed by now, i'm a bit of a lazy bastard, and since i'm the one that has to do all this work, i'd rather not put myself under too much pressure.

also, due to this choose your favorite bipolar idea we're working on, if anyone still wants to get in on the bipolar redesign act, just whip something up and send it our way. we'd love to eventually have several hundred different designs available, if you guys think you're good enough.

anyway, enjoy the new design, and tell us what you think, or write jessie personally and tell her exactly how much ass her design kicks.

… glory be! the bipolar boy's actually got a little follow-through! …

wow, is it that time already? time for the weekly post from matt? oh, how far i've fallen.

thankfully though, it's nice to see that my sister, my best friend, my partner ( over there my favorite girl are all better at this than i am. despite my sister's newly overbearing workload (and the fact that she doesn't have access to the net from her home in the suburbs of Paris) she still manages to post on a regular basis. paul, despite his new computer and subsequent addictions to OmniComics and instant messaging, is still managing to post almost every day. brian, despite numerous hours doing those things that brian does, posts practically every day. and sharon (who's name i can now use, with her blessing, since she's decided to forgo the whole anonymity/hiding behind a persona thing), despite her apparently constant need to change her site's design and where she's hosting it, is also posting on a more frequent basis than yours truly. and she's also baking me brownies. did i mention that i'm still completely in love with this girl?

but it seems like, between busy times at work, fights with webcams, system wipes & reinstalls, and extended hold-out-until-my-eyes-dry-up-from-lack-of-sleep battles with House Ordos and House Harkonnen, i should be able to find some time, somewhere, to update this blog. it seems like it, but it's apparently not true. "we try to resist keptin… he put creatures… into our bodies… makes us do tings." but not "tings" like updating a blog.

i'm not exactly sure why that star trek reference is relevant, but i've not made one in years, and somehow felt it would fit. so sue me.

anyway, so i did finally manage to reinstall windows on my machine at home, get it back up and running, and "glory be!" the webcam seems like it may actually work correctly this time. i hope. of course, i forgot to take it to work with me today, so you don't get to see my practically immobile self sitting in my cube for 8 hours today.

and finally, today is the official last day of the redesign bipolar before we do! contest, so if you're working on an entry, you've got until 12:00 AM tonight to get it in. we've got a couple entries so far, and they're both pretty durn good. i can't wait to show 'em to ya. i think we'll have a few bugs to work out before we get the things up (after judging is done), but barring unforeseen circumstances or acts of god, we should at least have screenshots of all the entries up by the "no later than" winner announcement deadline of 9:00 PM on Monday evening.

12:00 AM tonight, Friday night, the 23rd. remember. and if you've got an idea but haven't even started on it yet, no problem, we're accepting any entry, from the most fully developed online bipolar "portal" site to the most hastily-drawn badly-scanned concept sketch you can come up with. so do it. 12:00 AM. that's midnight. Friday. don't forget. 12:00AM. twelve-o'clock. when the big hand and the little hand are both pointing up (for you analog people) and the sky is dark. that's the deadline.

well, this past week has been a big pile of crap. i still haven't managed to get my sleeping schedule into any kind of reasonable order, and my entire life seems to have been suffering. i can barely stay awake at work, my productivity level has dropped considerably, and i've just generally felt horrible the entire time. why do i always do this to myself… i mean, it's not like i've never treated myself this way before. it's cyclical… i'll do well for a while but always eventually end up running myself into the ground.

to top it all off, brian bought Dune 2000 last weekend in hopes that he & paul & i could play some networked games, and the damn thing has sucked out my will to live. for the last four nights, this game has contributed significantly to my loss of sleep. combined with the fact that the nice new web cam i bought has been fucking up since Tuesday night and i've been spending several hours almost every day since trying to get it working again. hopefully i'll be able to spend some time on it tomorrow so that you can all watch the exciting events a casa de bipolar.

speaking self-referentially of bipolar as i was, i should now point out that we now have our first official entry into the redesign bipolar before we do! contest. i've sworn to both paul and brian that our first contestant (who's apparently in the process of moving her site again) will not get preferential treatment from me. but it looks really nice, so anybody else planning to enter better have their shit together.

well, helped out paul a little more today, and it seems like he's well on his way to becoming a computer geek just like brian & i. he's catching on to some of the more esoteric aspects of owning your own computer, like file/directory organization, and desktop maintenance. he's a quick learner, that one.

while paul was playing around some more, checking out the napster thing and installing some more software, i headed out to compusa again today and took back that piece of crap Kensington web cam. (really, though, the Kensington had much better picture quality, it just wanted to crash my machine). the logitech (same exact type brian has) hasn't crashed my machine once, so i guess i'll take the quality hit. so, bipolar cam3000 is now truly bipolar. there are two separate portables right now, but we're working on a dual portable (most likely with a smaller image size) as well… it's not going to be that hard, we're just lazy.

speaking of being lazy. don't forget about our contest!