the Refreshments

I was looking around on youtube. What a great place to kill time. Found some video of my new fav-o-rite band the Refreshments. Great guitar sound, lyrics are just off the wall. Fun stuff. I don't know if the internet audio/video is out of sync, or if they went to the Keith Moon school of "this is all fake so why pretend". Here is a link to Dead Hot Workshop. They are mentioned in the song and I had to google them to find out what that meant. "we could all wear ripped up clothes and pretend we are Dead Hot Workshop" Wonder if they are friends or rivals of the band.

I got sick of West Music in Coralville.

When my mom was up here we drove out to West Music to look at a midi to USB device for the mini that she is getting. I got a M-Audio unit that works well, but I remembered that they had one that had XLR inputs on it was well. That would be much better because she could run her keyboard sounds through there and her midi through the same device. She could also record vocals on it. I asked the girl working if they had one and she did not know what I was talking about. She got the expert and he did not know what I was talking about. But they said they were getting in a USB mic soon. WOO! That would limit her to one mic, and it would not get her keyboard sounds into the comp. He said he was going to the NAMM show soon and maybe they were coming out with something like that. Great. We left. I come home and look on the net and find the unit that I saw in that store 2 years ago. I called out there yesterday to see if they could order it in since they are listed as a Tascam dealer. They were all busy so I left a voice mail at about 4:00. After they closed at 8:00 it became clear that they were not going to call back. So today I called at about 4:00 again. She said they were all busy and I could leave a VM. I told her that I did that yesterday and am still waiting on a response, but go ahead. I waited about three or four hours and called back. After 10 min on hold a different guy actually answered the phone. I asked if they could get in the us-122. He said, "yes, we usually have them in stock." WTF? So I told him that I had been blown off yesterday and was thinking about just ordering the damn thing off of the net, but I would rather get it from them locally. He said they could get it for $200. I told him I was tired of them and was going to order it off of the net for $149.00 delivered and be done with them. MORANS!

Comcast tries to cover their own arse.

Remember the link to the video of the Comcast tech sleeping on the guy's chouch? Here is how that story played on Comcast.

carbage

I was reading Steve's blog tonight. He had a link to topgear.com. I really liked the section called carbage. It was a TON of photos of butchered/bastardized autos. Heres a few.

Bill Gates... visionary?

Here is an article on Bill Gates. It is from ZDNet. I quit reading their site many years ago because they were usually very anit-Mac. That may have changed. I don't know. I did agree with the intro to the piece......

A week or two ago I made an unguarded comment about Bill Gates being an opportunist rather than either a visionary or a programmer. That drew a lot of argument - on both issues.

The visionary versus opportunist side of this is pretty clear. Visionaries create new strategies, drive the public's understanding of new ideas through innovation, and generally lead the charge in new directions. Microsoft's record of innovation is a null set: just about everything they've done has been opportunistic, making money on other people's ideas or products.

Basically Bill Gates has made more money for himself and his shareholders selling Steve Jobs' ideas to the public than Apple has, but it's easy to see who's been the visionary and who's been the opportunist in that relationship.

wooden Caddy'

Here is a car a guy built with a body made of wood. It has 2- 500 cid caddy engines, and it is really easy to spot in the parking lot and the mini-mart.

etch o scetch

Some geeks put mouse control on an old etch 0 scetch.