Government priorities, MJ, and your need to get somewhere in LA right now

i didn't want to make a second post about michael jackson, but...

aside from my simmering rage over the fact that purported major news agencies are spending 3 hours today on anticipating and/or televising the various commutes of the Jackson family on funeral day for every 15 minutes of reports on say, world leaders meeting about economic crises or civil unrest.....

...now we see from a handy helicopter camera trailing MJ's hearse to the staples center that it appears local Los Angeles transportation authorities have pretty much shut down to the public all parts of the route for the funeral procession.

the feeder roads are packed as the Jackson hearse glides alone over five wide-open emtpy lanes of highway.

as a coworker friend of mine was seen to remark on IM:
"what? you're in a hurry because your wife's in labor.... (forget) you, michael jackson's casket is 5 miles away. No freeway for you!"

using public funds to shovel aside thousands of drivers to make way for a dead person who did some great stuff in the 80s but died a mental basket case who, in all likelihood even though not technically proven, did some inappropriate stuff with children. and the funeral / memorial is going to whitewash over that last part.

related: i also saw a clip on The Soup last week showing how Entertainment Weekly had breaking news (the reporter actually called it "breaking news") that Barry Manilow would escort Liza Minelli to the memorial. that's not breaking news, it doesn't even count as plain "news" in the intended sense of the word. it's worthless garbage; for shame!


we live in a loony bin most days here in the United States.

Michael Jackson shuffled off this mortal coil

news from yesterday is that Michael Jackson, self-styled King of Pop, died.

i'm sure for many people my age that contemplating it results in a muddled middle-ground emotion.

cemented in my mind is the elementary-school memory of hopping into my family's van after playing a league basketball game at the local YMCA, whereupon my dad announced in his odd humor way that we were "going to have a guest stay with us for a while" , then revealing the Thriller LP record he had just bought. i recall being thrilled (wordplay!), as was my older sister. Billie Jean, Thriller, Beat It, all part of the MJ cultural storm that was sweeping the nation at the time.

had Michael Jackson continued on as a normal human being and either made more great albums or at least faded respectfully from the industry, we'd all be simply saddened to hear about a music icon's passing.

of course MJ instead had to go off the rails and get creepier in appearance and behavior (my dad's comment above was obviously crafted well before the touchy-feely controversies of the 90s) so now people of my generation are left torn between "man his ascendancy was a significant cultural imprint on my childhood" and "boy, he was pretty much a freakshow pedophile after the glory days"

Week 6: Strength Building for Babies

My son got to enjoy some playmat tummy time with his mom last week, working on developing a powerful trapezius muscle so he can hold up his head good and proper

netflix history

i am morbidly drawn to actually rent and watch at least one of the films by the Antichrist Duo of Filmmaking, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.

these guys are known for Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and Disaster Movie - if you've seen a commercial or trailer for any of these movies i don't think i have to explain why they are satan's offal splattered on celluloid.

don't get me wrong; back in the college days with my friends i ran through countless bad movies (Dolemite , Death Race 3000, any Van Damme movie, etc.) that provided hilarious entertainment, even if that wasn't the original intent of the people involved in their production. these Friedber / Seltzer vehicles, though, seem different in a disturbingly bad way - as if they're scraping the ultimate in lazy writing and directing, devoid of any real personality.



so i already know they're bad by reputation, why would i want to watch one? basically because i feel compelled to know just how bad they are - i suspect that secondhand accounts from friends and others who have seen them will not quite convey the full impact of having personally experienced one of the films.

problem is back in the old Blockbuster days i could have just waltzed in and picked up a copy of one of the films and, if given an askance look by the clerk, calmly explain why i was paying good money to watch an encapsulated reflection on the decline of civilization.

but now i live in the Netflix era where any rental is indelibly marked on your rental history for all time - sure i could rate the movie 1 star but someone perusing my history might be left wondering if the rental was a snarky hipster affair from the beginning or if i had been earnestly seeking a hilarious good time but was left disappointed due to my seemingly terrible taste in movies. not sure if i can risk my online reputation in such a way among the powerful, anonymous internet elite.

a one-month-old little monkey

hard to believe it's been a month already - the hospital stay is still rich and vivid in our minds, but now little Adam is officially one month old (and a few surplus hours as of this entry)

nappin' with mommy


















remembering that funny joke dad told him

everything in its right place

when you're an office cubicle drone like me, sometimes it's the little things that can provide a quick and refreshing uplift.

i may be more fortunate than most in that my employer provides everyone with at least two monitors - can't tell you how much that improves efficiency when you're working in multiple applications.

being a somewhat tall individual i need my monitors raised up off the desk in order to maintain a comfortable viewing angle; to that end i use the desktop computer for one monitor and an actual monitor stand for the other.

this setup has been in effect for a long time, the monitor stand for the left monitor in front of me and the desktop computer for the monitor on the right.

now, i also frequently listen to music at work; in the past pre-ipod days i connected my headphones to the headphone jack on the front of the desktop. this has always been fine but for the fact that the headphone cord would often get in the way of my mouse activities or generally laying on or about any papers in front of me.

(side note: you wouldn't guess how weird it feels when you try to click a mouse button while a cord is stuck underneath the button's edge; your mind expects an audio and tactile feedback for the "click" that never comes and it's in its own little way very jarring)

what's embarrassing is that it wasn't until the ipod came along this week that i had the revelation this minor annoyance could be avoided. the ipod connects via usb to draw power from the computer so in effect i'd have the same issue with it as with the headphone / computer media player setup.

let's recap: mouse is on the right side, cords connected to the front of the desktop interfere with mousing / paperwork typically interacted with by the right hand.

hey, idiot, why not stick the desktop computer under the left monitor and put the monitor stand under the right? elegance in the simplicity of the solution

now my ipod is tucked away safely at the left side of the desk where very little work goes on to disturb it and the mouse is once again unhindered by a tangled web of cords.

of course this has necessitated the relocation of my water glass to the right side of the desk so as to avoid costly and frustrating spill accidents with the ipod, but as i lack the fear of change it should be manageable.

my wife served me the Apple cult Kool-Aid, and I think i'm gonna like it

they say that parenting is its own reward, but my lovely wife and son very nicely and generously decided to enrich me further yesterday with the gift of a shiny new iPod Touch.

this brings to an end the long and arduous timeline of me every so often saying aloud "you know, i think i'd like a portable music player for my car rides / office work / toilet time"

this is my first product ownership experience with the iLifestyle so enthusiastically endorsed by my good friend and fellow blogger Steven and i think it will be a good one after i slog through the maddening swampy morass that is digital music management - file formats, libraries, etc.

about half a decade back i had a bad experience with iTunes; it ran slow on my computer at the time (still isn't a lightning-fast app on our new laptop) so i opted primarily to listen to music through Win Media Player which has always been a steady if somewhat dull application. at some point though i purchased a Marcy Playground album, ironically entitled MP3, that was only being sold through iTunes.

now, if the album format had actually been MP3s that would have been peachy because Win Media Player can play MP3s; however, the album was in iTunes infamous DRM - AAC format, abbreviations which basically mean a format that could only be copied a certain number of times and which could not in any way shape or form be played on Win Media Player.

the realization that i couldn't listen to that album on my usual Win player left a sour taste in my mouth and i kept a wary distance from iTunes from then on.

well with this sharp new Apple product at my disposal, iTunes is going to be a part of my life again and in the time since we last met Apple has claimed to mend its ways by offering downloads in the new iTunes Plus format which is higher quality, isn't hampered by DRM (limited copies), and a claim that they can be played on "many other digital players".

the problem is that Win Media Player isn't among those "other" players, so if i should somewhere down the line decide to kick Apple and the iTunes scene to the curb and i made all of my subsequent music purchases in iTunes Plus format i'll either be S.O.L. or at the least have to find and go through some conversion process to fix all 11+ GB (and counting) of music into some workable format for Win Media Player.

so for now at least i think i'll be buying music from Amazon and other places that sell in the universally-accepted MP3 format.

another adoption issue i had to contend with last night was re-introducing my music collection to iTunes - you see, also some time ago Win Media Player drew me aside and said seductively, "hey why not convert your mp3s to our wma format, which is better in almost every conceivable way" (how exactly it's better i can't now recall). so i said 'sure why not' and let win media player convert all my files to .wma .

now when i pointed iTunes in the direction of my music folder so it could create my all-important iTunes library, iTunes said "WMA? well, we at Apple certainly don't associate with that kind of scum" and started converting the files to the unwanted iTunes Plus format based on default "import" options. before i could put the brakes on the process, it had already converted most of my Alice in Chains and other A - B artists.

not sure what i can do about those at this point, but i was able at least to change the 'import' option to classic MP3 and let iTunes chug overnight converting all my remaining WMA back to the MP3s that they all were originally when i first downloaded them :P

so now the worrywart in me is silently wondering if the multiple conversions are going to have a noticeable effect on sound quality, though realistically if i wasn't repelled by the sound of the converted WMAs years ago i'm probably not going to detect anything amiss with the re-converted MP3s.

lastly i think i have to come to grips with discontinuing my use of Windows' My Music folder and get with the iTunes folder; since iTunes puts copies of the files it converts into the iTunes folder, it'll probably be cleaner in the long run if i just put all of my music in there.

lingering questions remain, such as the fact that i haven't yet found in iTunes any feature like the "monitor folder" feature in Win Media Player that periodically looks at your music folder and adds any new items found to your "library" (i.e. available songs for playlists); so far it looks like you have to manually tell iTunes every time you add new music to your folder?

and so it goes; the happiness of receiving a cool gift from my terrific wife, only marred slightly by my neurotic nature with regard to technology :)