Alrighty then. Yes, I'm going for a new record for most ramblings in a one week span. (I may already have it. I wouldn't know without checking.)

So... when I awoke, it was around 1300. I did the email thing, and then proceeded to make some minor additions to the current Bitscape's Lounge. (I was going to hold them for the redesigned site, but version 2 is still probably going to be a while in coming. I'm following the Mozilla philosophy. It might take forever to finish, but everything will be done Right(tm).)

I decided it was time to relax for a bit, and wandered over to propaganda.themes.org to... well, read some propaganda and download some backgrounds. :) (Lately I've modified my philosophy regarding desktop backgrounds. Pictures, especially those depicting attractive females, make it way too difficult to focus on anything. Plain or tiled patterns are much better for everyday use.) I also stopped by Slashdot briefly, but didn't bother to read any of the comments or articles linked to.

At this point, I was feeling fairly grubby, so I proceeded into the shower. (Is this just way too much detail or what? That's why I don't call it an online journal, nor do I attempt to make it one. When I'm in a certain mood like now, I might feel like reporting such things, but not day in and day out, as other, more persistent souls can do.)

1620. Well, I was gonna see if I could apply for a job today, at a place I've sometimes considered before, but getting late it was, so I decided to procrastinate that until tomorrow. That's the problem with real jobs. They generally prefer (or require) such ridiculous things as rising before noon. The tough breaks life throws you sometimes... ;)

So I decided to do a little catching up with the Slashdot news of the last couple days. I had virtually never looked at it during the fest, and was feeling slightly out of touch as a result. Oh yeah! Moderator points. I had 4 leftover from the ones awarded me on Tuesday. I set my threshold back to -1, and loaded the comments on the latest story. Some troll had decided to polute the board by trying to see how many content-free replies (s)he could make to the first post. I zapped as many as I could. Well, that was easy.

I then started to progress through Tuesday's stories at a threshold of 3, and almost made it to Wednesday by supper time. I take back the statement about being unable to have a real life when following Slashdot at -1. Trying to get all the stories at any threshold precludes having a life. No wonder there's so many trolls around there. Real coders spend time on their projects, and non-geeks wouldn't care about Slashdot anyway. Well, at least some of them are amusing; so much so that they manage to develop cult followings of their own. Insane freaks, I say! (As I have said before, so says the pot to the kettle.)

After eating, I inquired to Bouncing about getting the receipt for the Metallica S&M cd he had purchased as my Xmas present. (Say it like they do in Futurama. "X"-mas.) He searched for it, but was unable to locate it, so he offered to just keep the cd for himself in exchange for cash, which I could use to buy a different one. I agreed, and he proceeded to hand me US$25, which I thought was on the generous side, but certainly wasn't going to argue. :)

I received authorization to use the car, and wandered over to Best Buy, where I purchased Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe, and Queensryche's Q2K, which had come out a couple months ago for a total of US$27.94 after tax. (And no, I'm not planning to make a publicly accessible online record of all my financial transactions, for the same reason I don't do an online journal.) I consider Zombie to be mostly shallow ear candy with a psychotic twist, but what it does, it does well.

Historically, Queensryche has been one of my favorite bands since a friend introduced me to "Empire" after it came out nearly a decade ago. After seeing their Red Rocks show on July 5, 1997 (I still have the ticket stub from my first rock concert), I completed my collection of their albums by getting the really ancient stuff -- the self-titled lp re-released in cd format, and The Warning -- which I didn't have yet.

The only reason I didn't make getting Q2K a higher priority when it first came out was because: a) I wasn't all that impressed with the mp3 snippets I downloaded from their web site, and b) other fans on various newsgroups gave it bad to mediocre reviews.

Well, I decided to buy it tonight, because I remember not being all that fond of Promised Land until hearing it a dozen times and reading the lyrics. Ever since I became familiar with it, it's been second only to Operation Mindcrime as far as I'm concerned. So anyway, I decided to go for it and make a buy on faith. (the only other time I did that -- having never heard a single bit of music from the album, or the artist for that matter -- was when I got Tori's Boys for Pele, and we know how that ended.

Swap full. EOF