Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

Many things...

Complex, brilliant music
Learning new things
Leading a fulfilling life
Good company (in friends and family)
Tasty food

There are others, but for the most part, I'm pretty easy to please.

Anything heavy, fast, and intense (usually Scandinavian metal bands).

Real musicians are not necessarily a dying breed, but I'm finding that musicianship must walk more hand in hand with entrepreneurship. If you are a good musician but cannot market yourself, you will not build a career. Though, conversely, if you are a good businessman, then regardless of your musicianship, you will probably succeed (N.B. Ashlee Simpson, and all other performing monkeys).

P.S. HUGE fan of Steve Vai as well. :)

I use CuteHTML Pro 6 (propr.) and Visual Studio Express (propr., $0), depending on the project.

I hardly ever blog about my personal life and make it available to the public eye. Professional reasons.

Bill Hicks. Without question, the most brilliant stand-up comic ever.

If you have a MONSTER machine and are not an audiophile with a home studio, check Vista out. It's admittedly a pretty neat OS, even if they mostly copied OSX. It is WORTHLESS for audiophiles, but a nice home office machine (and gaming machine if you have a top-of-the-line computer).

Pidgin is good for minimalists. It is an all-inclusive messenger client with support for pretty much every major protocol, and even some I've never heard of. If you only want the basic feature of chat with minimal usage of system resources, go with Pidgin. Otherwise, stay with the first-party client. :)

Good question. Influential musicians of the past 25 years...

- Andrés Segovia
- Miles Davis
- Frank Zappa
- Ella Fitzgerald

There are certainly others. Those come to my head first.

Your being upset at the commercial has many good reasons. Perhaps we disagree on these reasons, and that's fine, but this is my opinion.

I have no problem with the word "fuck" being used on network television. If I think it goes overboard, nobody is forcing me to watch it or listen to it. To me, government censorship is unnecessary. As a person who was raised by responsible parents, I know contexts and social situations in which the word may or may not be appropriately used. Why should we shield our children from the language they will use every day? Does that somehow take the burden of setting reasonable boundaries off of our shoulders as parents? I guarantee you that they are not learning anything new by seeing or hearing the word on television or anywhere else (TRUTH campaign included), and they are not going to refrain from its usage because it's a "bad word." My point is that the usage of the word "fuck" in the way that the TRUTH campaign chose to use it is not what upsets me, and I really don't think that's what should be upsetting about it for anybody.

Aside from the fact that the FCC allows them and very few others to get away with it because -- well, it's propaganda -- my problem is in their presentation and in their use of language, both in an exploitive and self-defeating fashion. First, they are exploiting the use of language that kids and adolescents tend to use with their friends to insinuate that they are within that circle to which (in reality) they do not belong. "Yeah, homie, whudafxup wit' dat?" That doesn't help "relate" to kids and teens, or whatever these people think they're trying to do. Another issue is that the language also implies a certain anti-authoritarian attitude that is reflected by the urban counterculture that they so poorly attempt to emulate. Thus, to me, they almost defeat their own purpose in using it. (Don't smoke, kids! Crack and hoes is better.)

Most people aren't going to read that much into it, but in doing so, I find it irritating and ineffective. Patronizing our kids and speaking to them like they're retards is not the way to approach it. Just keep it simple. "Smoking is deadly to you, and it's rude to blow smoke in other people's faces. If you choose to smoke, know the consequences and be prepared to face them, keep it in moderation, and for gods' sake be polite about it." With that approach, it's not just another buffoon trying to boss them around and telling them what to do. If kids think it's their idea and their choice, they will more often than not choose the better one if they're given enough guidance. ;) Television can never replace good parenting.