And the Treasure Planet trailer looks to kick ass as well.

Oh and I don’t care who you are or how much you like/hate Disney animation, this latest Lilo & Stitch trailer kicks ass.

Last night I watched Aerosmith ICON on MTV, or rather the last half of it. A much better choice than last year’s ICON special, Janet Jackson. Aerosmith kicks ass, always has, always will. One slight thing I take issue with last night, however, was the assertion that Aerosmith is the “only band to make three decades”. Umm, hello? Rolling Stones? Even if you count the album they did (either 1997’s Bridges to Babylon or 1998’s live No Security) as the end of the group (the Stones have not broken up, though the members are currently engrossed in solo projects) that’s still 35 years easy. Still, that Aerosmith is consistently good and even topping their former achievements, as opposed to the Stones which was quite possibly the greatest band in the history of Rock & Roll in the mid 70’s and has been decline ever since, is quite an achievement. Ironic that due to showmanship and Steve Tyler’s lips Aerosmith was originally labeled the “American Stones” or “The Poor Man’s Rolling Stones”.

As far as longevity is concerned, I guess the Stones do hold the record (provided they can be considered “not broken up”). The Grateful Dead came close, but then Jerry Garcia died. KISS is still around, though since they’re currently on a “Farewell Tour” it seems likely that if they do make it to the 30 year mark (2004 I think) it’ll be the end anyway. Besides, KISS has a problem keeping their lineup the same. AC/DC’s been around quite a while, but it’s not really the same since they had a lead singer change (drug overdose).

It still blows my mind that groups I grew up with are celebrating decades. They Might Be Giants started in 1982, Bad Religion’s been around slightly longer, and GWAR even has longtime fans bringing their kids to the show now. Hell, the grunge music I listened to in High School is over a decade old now. When I listen to Appetite for Destruction, I start to feel old.

The other end of the spectrum is the “burn out” artist. Jimi Hendrix recorded for four, maybe five years, but to this day new material is released. The man must have never left the studio, except of course to die of the occasional overdose. Perhaps if Led Zeppelin had not broken up due to the alcohol related death of drummer John Bonham they might have gone south and released imperfect albums – as it stands now their nine studio albums are still brilliant. Had Lennon not been killed we might have seen Beatles reunions and that group would have not enjoyed the legendary status they do now. The Eagles seem less mythical since we know they got back together. Like Denis Leary said, had Elvis died in 1958 we would have been spared the polyester jump suit years.

Therefore, the fact that Aerosmith is still here, still kicks ass, and still has the original lineup is all the more impressive.

One of the most annoying things about being a programmer in a “periodic” environment is that sometimes you’ve made an error in a program and by the time it becomes a problem you can’t even remember why you did it that way anymore, let alone if you were in fact the one to do it in the first place. Today we ran up against a problem wherein people were unable to add a fee option for the summer. Turns out the program had a bug in calculating the timeframe in which this option could be added. The bug was placed there by me in August. After Summer in other words. Actually the section of code it’s in is in two places, one for summer and one for fall & spring. The fall & spring code worked fine and has been working fine. Why I would have dickered up the second section is beyond me – I’m 100X smarter a programmer now than I was back in August, and compared to a year ago when I started this gig, I wasn’t even an amoeba back then.

This is not to say that this bug was a big deal per se – my Boss isn’t losing her hair over it and no one’s mad or anything, but it’s still annoying to wonder why I would have made a seemingly obvious mistake like this back then. On the other hand, I identified a pretty nasty bug that’s been broken for some time now, and people are just now starting to complain. I guess it happens to everyone.

One Tony Jimenez points to another reason the headlights in Canada were out more often (besides being on more often). To wit:

Cold weather causes the lights to go out more often, which would explain why you saw it all the time in Canada, but very few times in Texas. My wife was from Minnesota so there were many there. My guess is that the constant freezing and thawing makes causes the vacuum seal for the light bulb to fail more often, thus requiring a local law forcing people to get them fixed.

Works for me.

This evening was full, lemmie tell ya. We loaded down my Wife’s credit card with crap from Lowe’s, then we discovered the two large plastic lawn chairs were in fact too large to fit in my car. After a few failed attempts to flag down friends with trucks, we just tied the trunk down as best we could (as it turns out, Lowe’s gives you free string to tie your trunk down with, along with those red plastic flags). This killed most of the evening.

Because my wife had things to do I volunteered to go to the grocery store for us, as well as picking up this evening’s dinner. I wanted to hurry up and finish the shopping since I was hungry and I wanted to get some coding in before the night was shot. I got nine of the ten things on the list with no problem, then I hit the problem point: Velveeta. Crap. Without going too deep into Seinfeld mode, I have a mental block against Velveeta. That is, I can never remember where it is in the store, no matter how many times I get it. Plus, the stores tend to move it around. Once, at a different store my wife and I finally found some, and the clerk actually complimented our ability to find it, which she told us was rare for that store.

The key problem with Velveeta is that it’s not a defined food. It’s not in the cheese section (usually), since it doesn’t have to be refrigerated. However, there’s not a really logical section for “unrefrigerated cheese”, so it’s a crapshoot where the Velveeta is. I was happy since right off the bat I spotted small boxes with “Velveeta” on them. But when I got there they were Velveeta Shells and Cheese dinner. Shit. I even walked past a large can (tub is more like it) of Nacho Cheese, the kind they spread thin at band booster concession stands. Cheese? Hello? No Velveeta to be seen.

Supermarkets are laid out in such a way that you can usually narrow it down to where your food isn’t. At some point in the store, the items stop being food and tend to be things like mops and detergent, until you hit the wall where the frozen stuff is. Then on the other end of the store tend to be things like produce and the deli/florist/pharmacy. So I had the Velveeta narrowed down to a subset of rows, but I went up and down these rows repeatedly. Add to this the fact that I’m getting more hungry, tired and flustered and the situation started to really suck.

Finally I found it. In the snack section. The snack section. Who in the hell is eating Velveeta as a snack? I mean, I’m making a snack out of it, but the Velveeta itself is not a snack. Good grief.

After getting home, eating and assembling a VCR thingy (more later) I was too frayed to get any coding in. Oh well, there’s always tommorow.

Bastard Mac users, getting a new Virtual Boy emulator while the old PC ones go unupdated for years now.

This post is kinda weird, so bear with me.

When I was in my latter High School years, the ones when I was driving, there was a popular thing to do while driving at night. I was in the car with a friend of mine and he suddenly punched the ceiling of his car and shouted “SEX!”. Suffice it to say, this stopped the conversation cold. He told me, “whenever you see a car with one headlight, you call ‘sex’. If you call three in one night, you get laid.” The when, where and who of getting laid he didn’t specify.

Soon after it became a trend amongst me and my friends whenever we were driving in a group. It became a game – who could spot the one-headlight cars first. It was just like “slug bug”s, only no one had to get punched in the arm. I can tell you this much from my High School days, however – the “getting laid” portion didn’t work – not for me at least.

Suffice it to say that the game went a little bit nuts on our Senior Band bus trip to Canada. A few years prior Canada had passed a law requiring that all cars sold/manufactured in the country have their headlights on when running, even during the day. Consequently the law of averages wasn’t in the favor of a lot of Canuk headlights.

About a month back I noticed a car with no headlights and I instantly thought “SEX!” but I didn’t say or do it (it would probably have freaked out my Mother-In-Law in the back seat). And it occured to me – I was last in High School nearly seven years ago. Since then I’ve been to College, graduated, gotten married, gone off to the “real world”, an entire lifetime. And yet, I think I can count on my left hand the number of one-headlight cars I’ve seen in those seven years. Back in my High School years I saw dozens overnight, but few if any since. I don’t know why, and I don’t even know what to point to to guess about. I started to wonder about some theories, however, during a recent car trip back from Dallas – you can do some good thinking in a car with two sleeping women.

1. My first two years in the Corps (Black Belt years) I wasn’t allowed to leave the dorm at night, or not very often anyway. These last few years I’ve been married and so when I come home I’m “in for the night” and I don’t go out. This would explain a little bit of the phonomena – if I don’t go out at night, I can’t see any cars – headlights or no. However, I didn’t notice it those three years in between very often, either.
2. It was a stupid thing I did in High School. I was lucky and didn’t have a job in HS, so I didn’t have to worry about a whole lot. College was rough, academic wise, for me, so perhaps I just didn’t notice the cars. Same goes for today – I work for a living now. Perhaps I’ve just become unobservant on non-important matters.
3. Perhaps local law is more stringent on burned out headlights. Odd that I would have never heard of this by now. By this token, isn’t it a bit odd that I owned a 1990 Lumina for eight years and never had a light burn out on it?
4. Perhaps headlights have just gotten better as of late. Headlights may outlive the engine these days. By that logic, in my hometown people tended to have cars because they got them to their job and back, most of the people in this town are College Kids and many of them have nice new cars their parents gave them (as was the case for me).
5. College Station, TX is mostly centralized – I live five minutes from my office, for example. Want to go to a kickass restauraunt? You could almost walk. Perhaps what kills headlights is extended uninterrupted use – short trips are fine on them (but murder on batteries). In my hometown where people have to drive thriry minutes to get to the neighbooring town because that’s where the Paper Mill is at (like my Dad, for one) you’re more likely to burn them out. When you’re hopping across town to go get liquored up, the tax on the bulbs is less. Having written that, I realize I never see too many broken bulbs in Dallas, but then I’m usually having to drive like a madman on the highways, so perhaps this is another “observation” issue.
6. By the centralized logic, my trips are shorter. I don’t drive clear across town to go visit friends anymore – I go home to my wife. I make a quick occasional jaunt to the Albertson’s. The odds of me running into someone with a broken headlight is slim because I don’t drive much at night and when I do, it’s not for long. Even when I do drive at night for an extended period it’s usually on long highways in Texas, where there’s nary a soul around and if you are going to go driving, it won’t be with one headlight.
7. Maybe people are just more prideful of their cars here.
8. Finally, maybe I never would have noticed broken headlights at all if someone hadn’t pointed them out to me.

I don’t know what’s up with the broken headlight issue and why it went away, but I have a feeling as soon as my Wife reads this post she’ll have a quick, simple explanation for it – one I would have never thought of in a million years.

There’s a change a goin’ on with PC Game Packaging. Essentially, most of the game publishers of the world are putting them out in smaller boxes. I forget the dimensions, but it’s roughly the size of a DVD, and about an inch and a half thick. The first stores to get these were Wal-Mart stores and originally I was against them – I liked the big PC game boxes and I figured the change was aimed at the “redneck idiot” mentality that tends to populate Wally World and was designed to confuse them into thinking it was basically a video they were buying. These were literally smaller versions of the boxes in other stores.

But then Electronic Arts came out and said that they would start supporting the format universally, initially in the game Medal of Honor. I was against the idea, but I realize it makes more sense – the boxes don’t need to be that big and it makes for more shelf space. However, I do feel sorry for any game that comes out until all new games are like this, or until most of the old games on the shelves are the same size. Until they do, the games in these boxes are going to look cheap and rinky-dink in comparison. Medal of Honor ships in a tiny little box sitting next to its full-size direct competitor, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Serious Sam: Second Encounter makes sense at $20 in a small box, Jedi Knight II in a tiny box seems like a ripoff almost.

How is it that Stephen King has made $100-$120 Million over the course of his life but he still insists on living in this weird, creepy house. Yeah yeah I know – he’s a horror writer and it’s only fitting he lives in a haunted house – but come on, what’s the point of being rich if you don’t live it up a little?

I’ve embarked on an experiment recently, and the results are interesting.

I’ve always liked the Rolling Stones. I’ve had it on my to do list for some time now to amass a complete collection of Rolling Stones material, preferrably on CD of course. Rather, this has been on my “to do once I’m rich” list, since devoting the type of funds neccessary for that type of excercise has proven elusive. Besides, in this day and age, we have MP3.

Prior to, say, November, MP3 was a neat thing to me – free music, who can argue with that? However, MP3’s were a pain, and not just in the acquisition process. I would download 650MB or so of MP3 and burn them to a CD-R. Then I would burn CD’s of the albums on those CD-R’s to more CD’s. For a CD-R with 11 60 minute albums, this would take up 12 CD’s. Besides taking a lot of time and resources, it was disheartening to only then discover that a lot of the music wasn’t even worth the $.25 a blank CD cost. This all changed when I got my car MP3 player – suddenly my CD consumption was divided by 12 and my entire music collection could fit on a spindle in that island thing between the seats.

So I figure several months back (even before the car player, back when it was just an idea) that I can download the entire Rolling Stones discography on MP3. This is daunting to say the least. For starters, you have to define how narrow a discography you’re referring to. In the late 1980’s a German individual wrote a book on the Stones discography, chronicling every single, every album, every release in every language and every country ever released – it clocked in at 530+ pages of Bible-sized print. Obviously you wouldn’t be too interested in what “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” looked like when it was released in Korea, but it gives you an idea of the mass of this material.

For example, I have a CD-R of every Led Zeppelin song ever made. Led Zeppelin released nine studio albums and one live album during their career – ten releases in all. Four songs found their way to boxed set releases (only one of which was a true studio track) and a 2-CD BBC Sessions was released a few years back. That’s it. Short of bootlegs, nothing else was ever released, so collecting a complete collection of Zeppelin is easy. In fact, I owned all of the CD’s involved and ripped them myself. Zeppelin was only around from 1969-1980, so they spanned one paradigm – that of releasing albums and not placing extra content on singles (very often).

The Rolling Stones, however, have been together since 1962 – this year marks their fortieth anniversary, and makes them quite possibly the longest running group ever. Back when they started out, however, you didn’t release albums. The business model back then was to release singles – 45’s to be exact. These records were cut on wax instead of vinyl. There was literally a clause in the contract for the artist to give up 15% of their royalties as a “breakage fee” to cover the 15% or so of the records that would be broken by the time they got to the stores (maddeningly, this clause is still in most new recording contracts, despite the problem having gone away close to thirty years ago). Any albums that were released back then were merely compilations of the singles that sold well. Consequently the Stones didn’t have an album release until 1964, and the first albums that were released were named things like Profile: England’s Newest Hit Makers! and 12 X 5 (12 hits by the 5 members of the group), so they don’t really work as “albums” so much as “smatterings of random songs”.

In addition, different versions of the same album with slightly different song lineups and running order were released on the opposite sides of the pond in those early releases – it wasn’t until 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request (yeah yeah I know – the title) when the albums were the same in the US and the UK. Some songs on UK albums were never released on US albums and vice versa, so the only way to get them is to also have the compilations that do have them, meaning lots of overlap. In addition, sometimes slightly different mixes of songs existed in various regions, making the collection bit more complicated. And only in 1982 or so did they start releasing CD’s.

The Stones were signed to ABCKO Records originally, they jumped from them in 1970. ABCKO decided to shove most of their Stones content onto CD’s, but at that time the process was far from perfect and most of these releases were considered terrible. They have since “done it right” and have released “proper” CD’s, but many of these original releases still exist in stores (they weren’t defective per se, so they were never recalled – you’d be surprised how long CD’s linger in record stores). “The Rolling Stones” own everything they’ve done since 1970 and they’ve been on several labels over the years. Nearly every time they change labels the label decides to take advantage of the fact that they now have access to a good catalog of old CD’s and they go re-release all the old Stones albums. Since they don’t neccessarily get to have access to the digital remastered version the previous label put together (at that label’s expense), they remaster it again themselves – this way they can put that “newly remastered” label on their release. The problem with this is that it leaves a lot of room for songs to sound different from remix to remix, and – get this – many affectionados have noticed longer (or shorter) fadeout times on many of the songs, meaning for any given studio track there are dozens of possible versions, depending on whom you listen to. On the plus side, the 1994 Virgin (the current Stones label) re-releases featured neat “mini vinyl” recreations of the original packaging – the Sticky Fingers packaging even had the zipper back, though obviously way off scale.

The down side of all of this lies in the fact that it’s impossible to tell which version of any song you’ll get when you download an MP3 version. But oh well.

Some songs have never been on CD – they’ve only been on vinyl. 1996’s Rock & Roll Circus (companion piece to a long-shelved Stones TV show) was the first ever Stones release to not have a vinyl counterpart. I was able to download some albums from newsgroups, and some others from FTP sites, but for the longest time I was unable to get anywhere near a complete collection. Newsgroups are OK, but rarely did anyone actially fill my requests.

Then recently I started downloading KISS albums, spurned upon by a recent fascination with them due to their excellent boxed set and a Behind the Music special where I decided Gene Simmons was too cool to live. Suddenly, I got very close to a complete collection of KISS albums, where the main problem was the fact that KISS has simply had too many compilation albums over the years, so collecting any of them would be foolish. In my quest to download the rest I found a fairly good FTP site with a decent ratio – he had the early albums, I had the late albums – we worked well and he didn’t kick me off. Then I also noticed he had a ton of Stones albums, so I kept on trading.

Last week I finally had a complete enough collection to burn to CD, so I did. Interesting to say the least – I now have hours upon hours of music. I made all the MP3’s 128k, since that’s good enough for me and it allows for more songs per CD. I went through with Renamer, the coolest renaming utility ever, and renamed each file en masse to properly work in my car player. I also named the directories with a year number first (and a dash and a number for years with multiple years) to make the entire experience chronological.

It’s weird to hear old Stones when I’ve heard so much of their recent work. It’s also weird to have less knowledge of when one album begins and the other ends. It’s disappointing to not have the aesthetics of the packaging/cover art, etc. But it’s great to have the major discographies of the Stones and KISS wherever I go.