EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Wow, first off, much thanks to Adam Michela AKA soopa for providing the Flickr Pro account that I won. Of course, I couldn’t have won it without Erik running his Flickr giveaway. So ginormous thanks to both of those guys. I haven’t really gotten to use Flickr a whole lot yet, but I hope to as soon as I can. I’m definitely going to carry my camera around a lot more. Watch for updates!

Posted in Life, Rave | No Comments »

This May 24th, the new album from my favorite band comes out. It’s titled Crimson and it’s by Alkaline Trio. They’re a great band, originally from Chicago and they’re what I think emo should sound like. They’re angry and depressed at times, happy at others. Sometimes they want to kill people. They have a great style to ‘em, too. Very melodramatic and…well, lately they seem to have a fixation on being evil. Oh well, they pull it off well with great lyrical puns and catchy music.

Last night was telling Ray about how Alk3 was coming to play near him soon. Made me think about the time I got to see ‘em play…for a whole 30 seconds.

This was back several years ago, I think around the release of From Here to Infirmary but I’m not sure. They were playing in Denton (a suburb of a suburb of Dallas) and it happened to be on a Friday or Saturday night and I was home from college. My best friend Jacob called me up, let me know, and off we went with another friend, Bryan. We were riding in Jacob’s car, which wasn’t horrible but wasn’t that great, either. I don’t remember how many times it died on us on road trips. Three or four for sure.

Anyway, off we go down the highway, speeding along to get to the club in plenty of time. Don’t remember who they were playing with (did it matter?) but I’m sure we wanted to catch the opening act, too. It was at the club Rubber Gloves.

We get to a town just north of Denton, Sanger, and somebody has to pee or get a sandwich or something. Gas, maybe. We pull off the highway at a gas station. Just when we hit the bottom of the ramp BAM! hit a big pothole. Whole car shakes. We all jump and yell and suddenly the car doesn’t move so good. Something’s wrong.

Limp into the gas station and look at the tire. Busted. Rim was bent, too, from what I remember. Shit. Never going to make it to the show; what a total fuck-all; Jacob why the hell did you hit the hole?! Not like he could have avoided it, but I’m sure we ragged him for it.

Station was about to close or something so we went to another station just across the highway (via the underpass). I think the first’s air pump didn’t work. Why did we need the air pump? You guessed it, the spare was bad. Little bitty donut thing that would have never taken us home, but that didn’t matter at the time.

Go to the second station to see if their pump works. No. Of course it doesn’t. Jacob pulls out his cell phone to call his dad. His dad was a trucker but he was on his way home. Problem was that he was still a good hour north of home and we were almost an hour south of it. Hurry as fast as you can.

Gas station attendant was about our age. “Hey, man, give us a lift to Rubber Gloves?” Nope. What kind of moron gives a ride to three punk kids he doesn’t know? “OK. Guess we’ll be waiting in the parking lot, then.”

Cops show up a bit later. Nothing bad, just checking on the station or getting gas or something. Ask if they can give us a ride. “No. Sorry. Can’t ride in the car unless you’re under arrest.” Try to think of a way to be temporarily under arrest and taken to the club (times three, remember). Give up on that idea.

Apparently space-time decided to warp in our favor. Jacob’s dad pulls up an hour or so later. Checks the car and the wheels and all that. Just like we suspected, not going to work. Well, leave the car here, take us home, come get the car tomorrow with a new/fixed wheel. Sounds alright, let’s go.

Jacob wants a t-shirt, though. Knows exactly which one. Let’s just check out the club and see if he can get a shirt. His dad agrees and off we go, down the highway again towards the club and Jacob’s t-shirt.

Pull up to Rubber Gloves. Hmm, still a lot of cars. I can hear music. Hey, sounds like Alkaline Trio. Get to the door. “Is Alkaline Trio still playing? Or have they not played yet?” Doorman says they just started, but they’re the last band. No cover, go on in since it’s so late. Awesome.

Rubber Gloves is/was laid out kind of odd. The front is a traditional bar with booths and tables and, well, a bar. The back is an open room with a stage at one end. The band was obviously playing back there. We wind our way through the crowd, definitely sure it’s Alk3 playing right now and we can’t wait to get up there and see ‘em. Man, this is gonna be so awesome. I’ve been wanting to see these guys for years!

Push and shove past half-drunk punk kids and people who just came for the booze and get to where we can see the stage. Dan’s playing bass with his cigarette tucked into the neck of the guitar, a beer sitting on the amp next to him. Matt’s there, his voice hoarse from singing already and several beers on the floor next to him. Guitar in hand, he’s finishing up a song. It’s the song “San Francisco.”

I was drinking you goodbye / A heart floats in the bay / From sour home Chicago / I hear it beating far away / There’s no telling what I’ll do / If I don’t return to you

The “you” fades out and the next thing I hear is “Thanks, guys. Good night,” and they leave the stage. Everyone turns around and starts to leave the club, there’s a last rush on the merch booth. I stood there, kind of stunned. Thirty seconds. I had caught the last chorus of their last song. That’s it. Nothing more.

Jacob got his shirt and we left. For all the trouble and the fact that we didn’t actually get to watch them play, that’s still one of my favorite shows I’ve ever been to.

If they’re coming to your area this summer, try to catch their show. At least more than the last 30 seconds of it. And if you’re close enough, try to get ‘em to play “San Francisco.” It’s a great song.

Posted in Life, Music | No Comments »

Hey all. First off, I want a way to show more than just the Blather articles here on the front page. I can’t decide how to do it, though. I feel like you guys need to know when I update Music, even though it’s usually every Sunday and as grown, responsible adults you should be able to remember that on your own. Anyway, if you have a suggestion, let me know, thanks.

This past weekend and this week have seen me exploring the world of Linux again. Of course, it wasn’t that simple…

I bought a wireless card for my Linux box. Got a good deal on it, too. I forget to make sure it would work with Linux, though. Yeah, yeah, I know. I should do research FIRST. Anyway, thinking it was more important to use the card than to use the computer, I deleted Linux and installed (shudder) Windows.

The card worked great! Fast connection, better than my iBook even. But I was running Windows. I had been over 2 years without that rickety OS and I didn’t really like the feeling of being back on such unstable ground.

Ray and I were talking one night. He was saying he wanted to get back into Linux ’cause he’d never picked it up all the way and I was thinking that myself as as way to get rid of Redmond’s influence. Ray stumbled across Ubuntu somehow. I had seen the distribution floating around the Linux world before, but had never given it a second thought, being faithful to my old distro.

One of the awesome things about Ubuntu (besides running a good kernel, Gnome, and being Debian based, and damn fun to say) is that they’ll mail CDs to you. I know, I know, with high-speed internet and CD burners on the cheap that’s kind of a moot feature, but it’s pretty unique in any case. I signed up for two i386 and two PPC copies (I have family interested in Linux that can use ‘em). They haven’t arrived yet and I was a bit anxious once Ray had his download installed and running, so I snagged a copy of it for myself and installed on Sunday.

The install was perfect. Took me about an hour total to go from Windows to Linux with no real hiccups. I’ve been working on getting the Mac to play nicely with it for the last few days and it’s almost there. I can connect through SSH and FTP and the Linux box is running an install of Apache and MySQL (and PHP of course). VNC seems to be working, too, so all I’m missing is direct disc mounting through Samba or AppleTalk. I’m happy with FTP most of the time, though, so I’m not too worried about it.

I know that was all a bunch of gobbledy-gook to many of you, but it’s very satisfying to get my system back up and running. Anyone else out there had such experiences with Linux?

Posted in Life, Linux | 4 Comments »