Neil Gaiman’s ‘Goliath’

I just wanted to throw this link up really quickly before I crash for the night.

If you enjoyed the movie The Matrix at all, you really should check out the official website. Rather than just using it to promote the movie and its upcoming sequels, they’ve got a whole section of the site devoted to exploring the universe of the Matrix, primarily through online comics, with a few short stories.

There’s a lot of really neat stories in there — while not dealing directly with Neo or the other characters from the movie, all the authors have been given free reign to explore the possible storylines of this fictional universe.

The one I’d like to point out, however, is ‘Goliath’, by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman has in recent years become one of my favorite modern authors — as well as the Sandman comic books (which are just incredible, by the way), he’s written some fiction, both on his own and with other authors (the book Good Omens was written with Terry Pratchett, and is just hilarious). With ‘Goliath’, he contributes his own take on the Matrix with a short story that I find to be one of the best contributions on the Matrix site.

In any case, if you’re at all into The Matrix, Neil Gaiman, or just really well-written short fiction, I highly suggest you take a few minutes and give it a read.

So, I’m curious…

What’s up with all these DJ-friendly themed songs hitting the radio lately? By ‘DJ-friendly’ I don’t mean they’ve all got 32-beat drum-based intros, or anything like that (though they might, I haven’t listened quite that closely) — just that, well, they’re all thematically very similar.

  • Madonna’s “Music” — “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on…”
  • Black Eyed Peas feat. Macy Gray’s “Request Line” — “Hey DJ…hey DJ…just one desire from a hip-hop fan…”
  • Jennifer Lopez’ “Play” — I just heard this one on the radio today, so I don’t have lyrics running through my head, but it’s along the same theme.

I know songs like this have come out from time to time in the past, it just struck me as I was listening to J-Lo’s song how closely these three came out to each other.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you! ;)

Relaxation, upgrades – and furrets!

Well, ended up having a very nice weekend. I’m afraid I did oversleep on Saturday — I was supposed to be at work at Suncoast at 10am, and didn’t wake up until sometime after noon — but they were kind enough to understand why. Not only did they let me take the rest of the day off, but they hadn’t scheduled me for Sunday…and they’ll be sure not to schedule me before 1pm on Saturdays from now on, so I’ll be able to get sleep after DJ’ing on Friday nights! Rock on.

I ended up spending most of the weekend working with my computers. I’ve been running this webserver off the Public Beta of Mac OS X since the beta was released, and Saturday was (finally) the official release date of the full retail version of OS X. Ran down to the local CompUSA and picked it up, came home, and installed it first on my main work machine. Everything went smoothly there, so I bit the bullet, backed up the website, and upgraded the webserver.

Luckly, everything went smoothly there, too — for the most part. There have been some under-the-hood changes between the Public Beta and the Retail release that took me by surprise and required some tweaking to get the webserver up and running correctly again (for the tech geeks out there, the Apache webserver, which had been named apache under the PB, is now named the standard httpd again, the various configuration files have been moved and renamed, and the logfile directory is moved), but I was able to find and tweak everything relatively quickly. I was able to bring the webserver down, completely reformat it, install OS X, put the website back, and find all the changes to get the website back up and running correctly in a grand total of three hours — I don’t think that’s too bad at all.

Then, since I was upgrading things anyway, I checked and found a new version of the software I use for my Messageboard/Guestbook, and got that installed and configured. Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t read the threads from the previous version, so things are looking a little sparse in there…but that’s a relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

The final big news for the weekend — furrets! :) Miranda had two ferrets that, unfortunately, she isn’t able to give as much attention as she’d like anymore, as she just had a beautiful little girl three months ago. Babies being the wonderful, but admittedly time-consuming creatures they are, she needed to find a good home for her ferrets. I gave it some thought, and figured that I could do that…besides, this way, she can have visitation rights whenever she wants. So, the newest additions to the family here at the apartment are Niko and Ash (otherwise lovingly known as Nikkerbokker and Assmaster). This should be a lot of fun — while my family has almost always had pets (usually cats), I realized a bit ago that I’d never had pets of my own — they’ve always either been my mom’s or my brother’s — so, for the first time, I’ve got little ones of my own. All sorts of cool.

However, it’s now Monday morning, and time to go jump in the shower and get back to the normal workaday week. Off and running like a herd of turtles….

First night at Studio 99

I had so much fun tonight! I’m up way, way too late (it’s 4:28 AM as I type this), and work is going to suck tomorrow (I open…10am…really shouldn’t be posting this right now), but it was worth it.

I was a little nervous going in to this — while I used to have a pretty decent fan base around town, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything — somewhere around a year and a half or so since the Eclipse closed down. Plus, in that time, most of my money has been going towards living, bills, and movies, so I haven’t been picking up a lot of new music lately. So, I wasn’t entirely sure how the night was going to go.

I really shouldn’t have worried.

I got there and got set up, and Samurai showed up not long afterwards to set up his turntables. We ended up switching off over the night — I took the first couple hours from 8-10, he took about an hour from 10-11, then I went from 11-12, he went on again from 12-1:30, and I took over again from 1:30-3.

While we don’t have a definite headcount for the night, we’re guestimating somewhere between 75-100 people…maybe a bit more. While that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, I’m actually quite impressed — considering our radio ads didn’t hit the air until Thursday, and most people just found out through word-of-mouth, it was a pretty good crowd. Besides, I’ve seen clubs who were happy to break into the double-digits on opening night, so this was really nice.

Everybody who was there seemed to be enjoying the night…I saw a few faces I hadn’t seen in a while, and apparently there was a lot of good word going around both about the place and about the DJ’ing — woohoo! We ran out of flyers, too — I’m hoping to have more printed up to distribute tomorrow (Saturday), but if that can’t happen I’ll definitely be getting them done early in the week.

Okay, that’s all the babble I can squeeze out of my overloaded little brain for tonight…time to see if I can get at least a few hours sleep before work tomorrow.

Okay, so I’m a junkie

Hi. My name is Woody, and I’m a DVD-aholic.

Hi, Woody!

Yeah, so…I went through and compared my actual DVD collection with the database program that keeps track of them all and provides the DVD listing that I have here on my website. Turns out I had a few of my roomie’s listed in there that I needed to delete…but I also had a few of my own that I hadn’t put in there. End result?

I passed the 300 mark a week or two ago, it seems….I now have a total of 308 DVD’s.

Boy, am I glad I’ve got a decent paying job!

Faith

I have claimed to have faith in God before, but I didn’t always realize that faith isn’t faith until I can’t see the road ahead.

— Dan Sjoblom

Drugs are bad

Wintel users often start when they’re young and ‘experimenting,’ because it seems like a cheap and readily available high. Unfortunately, it’s just the first hit that’s free; before he knows it, your average Wintel user has spiralled into an insidious pattern of expensive aggravation, lost time, and severely declining fashion sense. Just say no, kids!

As the Apple Turns

Bueller’s giant rabbit gladiator

Three additions to the collection today, as it was a pretty decent paycheck from Suncoast this week. Here’s what we’ve got….

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: probably the quintessential skipping school film. There really is no excuse for not having seen this one — so if you haven’t go find it. So there. Bleah. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller…?

Harvey: I’d actually never seen this one until last year when my friend Marc introduced it to me. Probably one of the single sweetest films I’ve ever seen, this story of a good-natured man and his best friend — a six-foot tall invisible rabbit — is a true classic, and one of Jimmy Stewart’s best performances. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

And finally, the last for the day, one I actually haven’t seen yet, but am looking forward to finally watching: Ben-Hur. One of the most famous and truly epic films ever made, and a cornerstone of Charleton Heston’s career, this film actually had the all time record for Academy Awards (11) up until some little film about a sinking boat came along a couple years ago. The only trick with this one is going to be finding some time when I can set aside three hours to watch the full thing in one sitting…when in my life do I have that much uninterrupted time? Ah, well, I’ll find it.

Good tunes

While I grew up listening to an incredibly wide range of music thanks to my parents, I’ve never really been much into country. My tastes always ran to the alternative, industrial, and for the past few years I’ve focused mainly on electronica, from deep trance and house to dance remixes of more poppy stuff, as long as it’s fun to dance to and well constructed.

However, over the past few years, I’ve been spending much of my time around women who listened to a fair amount of country…and I suppose that can only last so long before it really starts to sink in. It helps that much of what I grew up with was the music that today’s country grew out of — rock and roll, blues, r&b (back when r&b actually meant rhythm and blues) — all that good old stuff. So, more and more lately, I find myself keeping the car radio more on 104.1 and 107.5, the two country stations in town. Thanks to them, I’ve just stumbled upon an absolutely incredible band — Trick Pony.

Trick Pony’s currently got a single called ‘Pour Me’ that, in my mind, at least, absolutely demands to be cranked up to the threshold of pain every time it comes on the radio. Well, their album just hit the stores this week, I’m listening to it now — and for the first time in my life, I really wish this band was coming to Anchorage soon so I could see their show. Just a great album, pretty much solidly upbeat all the way through so far, and from what I’ve read on the ‘net, these three put on an absolutely incredible live show.

So, if you’re into country at all, or even just into really damn good music, pick this one up. Well worth it.

I’m heading out tonight (hence why Ben-Hur isn’t going in the DVD player right now). The reason my residency at Studio 99 doesn’t officially kick in until next week is because they already had tonight rented out — but it sounds like it should be a fun deal to go to, so I’m going to stop by that for a while.

Polar Productions in association with Dance Nation (Tuesdays on KRUA 88.1FM from 10pm-1am) presents an all-ages dance event: R E V E R B. DJ Panda, Michael Kalman, DJ Jasper, Planet Lush, Scott Lappi and a special guest DJ will be spinning at Studio 99 from 8pm-3am tonight. $10 at the door, $8 with a canned food donation — all cans to benefit the Food Bank of Alaska.