Monkeying with themes The site might seem a bit bi-polar over the next few days as I test out a few themes and work a little CSS mojo.
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So I promised more updates on the MoneyHot Tub a while ago, but I’ve been so swamped with the thing plus a massive project at work that I’ve not had a lot of time to post. So, here is an update + more fun too!
 Plast-Aid Once we got things going with the tub, my ghetto sump pump + fishtank heater idea had saved major freezing damage from happening, with one exception – the drain pipe to the outside of the tub. In what seems like a completely retarded overlook, my spa manufacturer didn’t put a ball or gate valve in between the drain and the skirting. Oh well – problem solved. How you ask? By a finger-nail rebase!
What? Yes, I did say a finger-nail rebase. If you’re a dude, you probably have no idea what I just said, but that’s ok – it’s a chick joke (because, hey, I grew up in hair / nail salons…) The product I used is called Plast-aid. A local company (ish) from Estes Park, CO, which I think might be the hot tub capitol of the world, so it makes sense. Basically it creates a molecular bond on the PVC or acrylic that it is applied to if said piece is clean.
The next dilemma I had revolved around the diverters in the tub itself. After going through introduction to water chemistry 101, a good friend was using the tub with us and we decided to get the diverters un-stuck. Occasionally dirt / gunk / sand gets stuck in between the diverters and makes them get stuck in the barrel of the diverter body. So we took them out and started to clean them off, but the problem was that we had old faithful x2 once we tried to replace the diverters.
The problem? It seems that sometime in between assembly and it showing up at my house someone put franken valves in the hot tub. Unfortunately, this meant nearly two weeks of diligent harassment of parts dealers to find a compatible part, in which time the hot tub (and the crap that got washed off the bottom of the upper deck by the fountains from the hot tub pumps). Which then had to be drained out – whoops. Coincidentally the tub has a knack for needing to be drained in seriously sub-freezing temps..
Sometimes, you get awesome inside jokes at work, and mostly they are funny enough to share amongst your compatriots at work. You know the players, you know the scenes so it’s funnier. Sometimes, it’s so funny that it is meant to be shared with the outside world. It’s probably not nearly as funny to anyone else but me, but here goes:
We were experiencing some strange background noise on some conference systems, but it was really weird sounding. Everyone in our corporate office was hearing it, and had their go at explaining it to me. From morse code, to crappy cell phone service, this symptom was described to me. It was not until one particular supervisor with an unusually booming voice decided to tell me how it sounded. But he didn’t stop right away like most, he kept going for a good ten to fifteen seconds.
“Blaaah blah blah baaaaaaap blap blap blap baaaaaaaaap Duuuhhh blah blah blaaaaaaaaap” and so on.
“Is that what it sounds like to you” I was asked.
“Well, to me it actually sounded like a goat at a rave” I retorted.
In an uncanny and incredibly fast retort he said “I’m surprised you know what that sounds like. Things must be strange in Denver afterall”.
I had no comeback, because that was the most awesome retort I had heard from the gentleman. But wait! There’s more!
As if it was common terminology, I began combing our floors in the building testing various versions of the conference system testing connections, and was met with “Yeah, I hear rave goat” or “Nope, no rave goat”. As if it was common terminology such as “feedback” or “echo”. Finally we resolved the problem (silence suppression systems on a few adapters), but the terminology has stuck around, though it is mostly our figurative (and literal) scape goat for unknown network systems problems. So, just remember, if you don’t know what caused it, it was the rave goat…
There are days that I truly enjoy all my co-workers and compatriots at my company.
 Fireflight - For Those Who Wait I almost broke the cardinal rule I have for an album, which is to not tell someone what I think about it until I listen to it headphoned. And it was almost on this album that I did it, and that would have been a big shame, because this is a really good album. On a thirty thousand foot view of it, if I were to just rate the album simply, I would say it’s better than the “Healing of Harms” but not as good as “Unbreakable”. Mostly because the album isn’t (IMO) engineered very well, and sounds really washed out unless you have really good headphones or a powerful stereo system with good speakers. That, and I’m not sure why it bugs me so much, but I think the cover art is goofy looking – I’m not sure if they were going for fifties retro meets a little steampunk or what. Anyhow, on with the review…
Track 1 – Title track – ‘For Those who wait’. The album starts out with a really great song, both musically and lyrically. I really dig the bass tracks on this song, as well as the strings in the background.
Track 2 – ‘Desperate’ – This track definitely sounds like a Fireflight track, about average heaviness for them, it’s pretty good, once again the bass is really good, but you don’t hear it much unless you’re headphoned.
Track 3 – ‘Fire in My Eyes’ – This is probably my favorite ‘heavy’ song from this album, the bass and the guitar work are quite excellent, but it’s maddeningly hard to hear much of the bass in a car or from a computer, I think because of the engineering on the track. A caveat – this could be true only of the itunes version of the track, which I bought, a real CD might sound better.
Track 4 – ‘Core of My Addictions’ – This is a great song about reliance on Christ, it’s a good rally song.
Track 5 – ‘What I’ve Overcome’ – This song kinda confused me a little bit, it didn’t sound too ‘Fireflight’ – it sounded like an Avalon song with a guitarist from Fireflight in the background.
Track 6 – ‘Name’ – I love this song. I have no idea who or what prompted the writing of this song, but given what the casa-de-killur family has been through the last few years, it resonates with my soul. A lot. As well, the vocal work on the track sounds so real and raw, which is one of the things I love the best about FireFlight. Plus it’s a mellow song – I guarantee you this one will hit K-Love and be huge.
Track 7 – ‘New Perspective’ – This is the song that makes you go “Oh yeah, this is a FireFlight album!” It’s fast and quite well written and I think it’s better engineered than the other tracks.
Track 8 – ‘You Give Me That Feeling’ – If there is a “the fireflight” sound, it’s definitely this song. It’s a great track, and it’s upbeat without being cheesy, which I appreciate.
Track 9 – ‘All I Need To Be’ – I can’t tell if the vocals in this song are awesome and haunting or if that is what they were going for and just didn’t quite make it. Lyrically great content, but once again it just sounds washed out(ish).
Track 10 – ‘Recovery Begins’ – I was really struck by this song, because after an album that I halfway wanted to turn off because of what I feel is crappy mixing, there is this jewel at the end. My favorite lyrics off of the album are in this song:
“I search for stillness, But Worry Kills it… It all comes down to this – the quiet in the end.
I listen for your voice, Recovery begins… Whisper to me, oh whispter to me”
I’m not sure if any of you can relate to this, but have you ever been to a restaurant, and you have a “team” of waiters/waitresses? And one of them is OK, but the other is just freaking awesome? And you can’t help but be annoyed at the one that isn’t as good as the others, even though on their own merits, they would be OK? I think that’s the thing that annoys me with this album. There are 4 standout amazing songs, tracks 1,2,6, and 10. The other songs are good too, but they annoy me because they just dont “sound” as good, if that makes sense. I have half a mind to purchase it from Amazon and see if they sound any different.
In all, if you like Fireflight, I recommend the album, but try a different methodology than iTunes and let me know if it “sounds” better – as comparable as that may be.
Sometimes I really truly wonder about some the awesome financial “sources” trusted by the big banks. When you talk to super wealthy people, they typically always say the same thing: It takes a lot of long hard work, buy low, sell high. It’s not complicated to gain wealth, it just takes a long time…
But if you talk to today’s brokers it’s all about complicated strategies and reading market reports, blah blah blah. Enter in the kick ass reports they listen to. Fresh off the virtual presses today on realtime.finance.yahoo.com:
 Just choose one! So I have a friend who is consistently nymphing from one thing to another. Normally I don’t stick my nose into peoples business, because that’s just plain rude – AND I have learned that it’s very infrequent that one can “totally get it”. That being said, he is experiencing so much upheaval in his life that I just want him to stick with one thing and go with that one thing, whatever it is. Not wanting to risk it, I don’t say anything (he’s not a reader of ye old blogge, at least that I know of).
It’s just so freaking frustrating, because he’s really quite apt at what he does, but moves consistently from one thing to another, convinced that he will find more happiness in X-thing that he’s going to do, and finding out that, like everything else it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Why can’t you make people more optimistic and patient!!!! Arrrgh!
I catch myself trying to give the guy lame plattitudes like “When life give’s you lemon’s, Make lemonade” or “Fake it till you make it”. But the older I get, the more I see that I’m pretty driven. Certainly not psychotically driven, but I am driven nevertheless. It’s funny how when you are young, you expect that everyone is just like yourself, and that everything will be awesome as you progress through life. And that is something that I don’t think one can impart into a person, with perhaps, and just a perhaps, the exception of your kids. Even then I look at the attitudes of my boys, and sometimes I don’t know where they fall on the “let’s do this thing!” spectrum or not. Perhaps it was growing up with a family business. Perhaps it was listening to motivational stuff when EK and I first got married because she was in sales. Perhaps it was growing up for periods of my life NOT in American Abundance. I’m not sure. But I wish everyone were a little more driven, including me at times.
Getting stuck in where you are at is something that I have certainly experienced before, but through either faith or sheer personal frustration I have pressed onward. Perhaps, in some cases to my detriment, but usually to a better circumstance. I wish I could make this friend pick it up and keep going, but it just doesn’t happen. Life seems too scary and complicated to press through the issues and make the situation better. But, I’m at the point where I really can’t do too much without wading into the unhealthy seas of codependence. ARRRRGH!@!@!@!#@!@!#$!
Great thanks to JonasIllustration’s Flickrstream for the great illustration.
>>>>>>>BEGIN SPOILER< <<<<<<
OK, I must say that Modern Warfare 2 is intense and I highly recommend it to you IF you aren’t easy to get offended or easily pissed off by really bad endings. Firstly there is the highly offensive second or third level where you are russians pretending to be US spies who go around the airport and shoot people. Innocent bystander people. I started playing this level, seriously felt sick, and skipped it (you can skip this particular level for this reason). I’m not going to rail against this because if you google “modern warfare terrorists” you’re going to get thousands of results of pissed off people appalled by Activision’s inclusion (rather than exclusion) of this in the game. It could have much more easily been a cut scene rather than a playable level. It did not feel right to do something that actually happened (sorta) in the US to cause the invasion of Afghanistan.
The thing that really bothered me was the core root of the ending of the game. It felt completely empty in the last few missions. It honestly had more holes than Harry Whittington’s hunting attire…
Firstly your commanding officer comes down in a chopper to rescue you. His name is General Shepherd, he’s a holdover from Modern Warfare 1. But as you have just survived getting shot there is no “good job men, onto the chopper. He asks did you get it? You tell him yes, he then he shoots you and your partner. NONE of the other soldiers freak out or do anything. And again, what about Makarov’s soldiers that were trying to shoot you?? Did they just see Shepherd and think “Oh, ok, tea break! Vlad, how are the little commerades, ‘eh?”
 General Shepherd - Generally Evil, and sounds like Optimus Prime...
Then he douses you and he with gasoline. And lights you on fire with his cigar. It’s truly chilling, and while I know it was a game I was momentarily really concerned for my safety. Secondarily, there is the fact that I truly didn’t understand the storyline after this point. Did he kill you to get the info on the Russian guy and be a hero, or did he work for the Russian guy?? Apparently he does NOT work for him, because in a audio (during a firefight – stupid placement for audio!#!@#!) you talk to Makarov and say “An enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and get information from Makarov. Kinda sorta. I think. Maybe? Not really???
But at this point is strays into uncomfortable gray for me. Why am I chasing this guy down? Makarov makes sense – he’s attacking the US via influencing Russia to war. But I didn’t get the storyline at all from the point you get killed and lit on fire. The levels were freaking awesome, but it was seriously tarnished. Much like the graphics level jump in Matrix 2 was largely overshadowed by the rave / sex / pseudo orgy scene that was completely pointless.
To me it felt like an empty reason to create a MW 3, which I really think could have been accomplished other ways. Makarov could have escaped, much in the fashion of King Koopa or even other less ridiculous things like Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (honestly, who survives being crushed in a trash truck!!!). I see the entire Shepherd storyline as completely marring the brilliant game. It’s as if they started out with great ideas for visual effects and fit the storyline around it. Then, they couldn’t really figure out a good enough way to fit it in, but had designed admittedly amazing levels and said “Bah, it’s the storyline, no one cares!”
At the whole center of WHY it bothers me about the Shepherd storyline is the whole reason I don’t like a lot of video games. Why am I killing Shepherd again, and why did he kill my friends? Am I killing him to prevent another world disaster, or am I killing out of revenge? Because, I just played a whole mission about Washington DC almost getting carpet bombed, and I’m pretty sure there are some more Russians to kill, and unsuperfluously at that. It just seemed so freakin’ pointless to kill the guy. And it seemed pointless to have Shepherd kill Roach (the character who gets iced, or actually, fried).
Why wouldn’t you just GO with Shepherd, it didn’t make any sense for him to kill you. Once again quoting one of my favorite movie, ‘10 Things I Hate about You’:
“Not even a litte, not even at all.”
 COD - MW2
First off let me state the obvious: Yes, it really is that good.
>>>>>Spoiler Alert< <<<<< And if you haven't played the campaign mode and you want to, this is a spoiler alert - don't part 2 if you've not played the campaign and want to...
I could probably leave the review just as that – it’s really as good as all the hype and worth paying forty or fifty bucks for it.
It really is.
So, for those of you who aren’t as game savvy as some of my readers who are saying “Welcome to mid November, 2009 PKillur”, let me tell you a little bit about Modern Warfare 2. It’s a First Person Shooter type game (Halo, Doom (2/3/4), Battlefield 1942, … Duckhunt??) type game. Why does this game make such a huge leap forward in technology you ask?
- The AI is sickeningly evil when you crank it up to the top level. I am being completely honest with you – I started off in Hardened mode (medium difficulty) during the campaign levels (the single player mode) and had to back all the way down to recruit just to progress through the levels.
- The levels are amazingly detailed, very immersive, and never laggy.
After playing graphically insane games like Sonic and Bioshock, one gets used to things like momentary lags and jittery transitions. None of these exist at ALL in the game. There is the momentary loading screen between mission stages, but you don’t notice it because there is audio of the characters that is part of the story, or cinema transitions going on at the time. Doesn’t sound so cool? Let me tell you how some of the levels progress:
On one level you have to use ice picks and climb up a mountain, then run and jump a cliff, then crawl into a mongolian base to steal something. You are getting fired at if you tip them off. Then you hop onto a snow mobile and have to jump a cliff with it. All in all if it were “real” lands it would be miles and miles of terrain that gets rendered. No lag. No jittery bumps – I have no idea what engine Infiity Ward (the producers / coders) use, but it’s amazing.
On another level you are fighting Russians in Maryland and you have to move certain auto turrets, then shoot a bunch of people, then use a predator drone (perhaps my favorite part of the whole game) and then you shoot down helicopters that are trying to shoot you with a SAM. Once again no lag. To quote the movie ‘10 Things I hate about You’: “not even a little, not even at all”
Further on down the game you are evacuating from Russia (I think) and you get shot, so your buddy is dragging you to the evac chopper and as you are in and out of conscience – oh yeah, and during this time your vision gets blurry AND you have to shoot people or you die. The visual effects are brilliant and stunning. The destructible environment includes pretty much everything in the game (AKA if you shoot / knife / punch something it will be affected by your character). The most humorous of this is the Rio De Janeiro level where there is a market you are running through, and there are chickens for sale – you can shoot them in their cages and the one that dies turns into a puff of feathers and the other ones freak out.
Overall, this game WILL be one of the most memorable and fun that I’ve played in years. Enough to get me over my “I hate HALO and FPS genre” arguments and actually want to play them again, despite the fact that I’m constantly getting killed on Xbox Live by 14 yearolds with a fascination for foul language and overtly retarded smack-talk. It’s THAT good.
 Fire (I'm sure brimstone was involved) So I have been reading the book of Luke since my favorite “not-my-pastor-guy” Mark Driscoll has been leading his church through the book of Luke. Our church has been doing a non-expositorial series, so I generally pick a series that is expositorial and stick with it as well as going through what our church does.
That being said, I have been reading through the book of Luke, written (ironically enough) by a dude named Luke. Luke was a medical doctor who is paid by a guy named Theophilus to go and research Jesus, because he (Theophilus) really wants to follow Jesus but thinks that most of his followers must be on crack (Or it’s year 60-70 AD equivalent) because of the stories he heard, yet was intrigued nevertheless. So buried in the end of chapter 9, there is a little paragraph where Jesus wants to go to Jerusalem, but the Samaritans won’t let him stay in their town. His followers want to rain down fire and brimstone on them, but Jesus rebukes them.
That’s about all it says, and it was an awkward little paragraph that I never really noticed before. Then a few paragraphs later is the story of the good Samaritan. I’m glad Jesus loves people even when they are complete tools that I would prefer have a little carbon added to their person at times, and hope to be more like that every day…
So, we had the opportunity to get a SWEET hot tub and electrical hookups via all around santa-like in-laws. I will say that I highly underestimated the logistical nightmare that is moving a hot tub. Though, we DID finally complete the task, it required the following:
 SonriseG and I hanging electrical cable
- Renting a truck.
- Renting a Spa Dolly (which was FREAKING A-MAZING!!!).
- Taking out a section of fence at the pickup house and replacing it.
- Delivering the hot tub via a couple end-over-end-pkil-soiling-pants rolls and a hosslike 18 year old guy hoisting a gimongous cold-rolled metal dolly over his head as he scaled a fence.
- Taking out a section of decorative deck fence at my house.
- Taking out a section of deck supports with a radial saw at 8 o’clock at night.
- Placing the hot tub and filling.
 Man Eating Crawl Space!!! Then, we had to start the process of the hanging the electrical wire and my handy helper fishing it through the crawl space. My father-in-law bought me an autohammer for the job. I have absolutely no idea how the world has lived without these things. I wouldn’t build a deck with it, but I won’t ever hang a picture (or our wire) without one ever again! A tip – WEAR EAR PROTECTION! I have no idea how something so jokin’ small can make so much noise!!!
I also had no clue how difficult it would be stringing the wire through the crawlspace, that proved to be very arduous – it seems that my house has a gimongous I beam underneath it in the basement crawlspace (it’s tiered into a hill) and SonriseG generously offered himself to shimmy underneath it. I am a bit too… Well, I’ll just come out and say I’m to freakin’ fat to fit underneath it! Thankfully I have a skinnier than me friend.
And hooking up the GFI box to the main breaker. In single digit Fahrenheit weather.
It was hard core for sure, but this little light here was one of the most rewarding incandescent glows I have seen in years….
 Let there be light!!!
It is the 14th day of 2010. Of this year, there have been 11 working days. 11.
Banner on yahoo finance reads in bold:
Oil and gas prices tumble to lowest of 2010.
Seriously, it’s been two weeks. They tumbled by a whopping 1 dollar and 48 cents. Thats 148 cents. One third of a latte per barrel. The price of a king size candy bar at the gas station. The current spot price is like 78 bucks.
A 1.2% reduction is a “tumble”? Really?
So, I basically live in two worlds, and I have to admit that it’s kinda nice. The first world is that of Parker, CO. Because Parker is a haven for “Young and Rich”, and you can tell. Every single time I drive by the drive-thru Fivebucks there is a line of cars at a minimum of 4 deep. This includes odd times like 1:20 in the afternoon. You go to any store in town and with the exception of some of the eccentric boutique-y type stores, they are bustiling. However, when you look around you do see “a whole lotta stupid” as Dave Ramsey would call it. There is credit everywhere and I think it’s used with quite an affinity – I was even asked at HomeDepot if I wanted to open a credit card to save 10%. When I was buying a 2 dollar coupler for the money hot tub (more on this later… Part of why Pkil has been absent of the web lately). I have seen a slight dropoff when we go into restaurants, we don’t have to wait as long, but we still wait if it is a rush time. I know that people have been hit by layoffs around me, and sure, there are a crap-load of foreclosed homes around me.
However, when I leave “young, rich, and 92% homogeneous” Parker, and board the P-Line I see a different story when I disembark at Civic Center Station. There has been a 10-20% increase in the homeless population that I can tell, but I work in a pretty “uppity” area. As well, the stoners look less “hard” and like they are recent conversion to the runaway / homeless / drug user population. There seems to be a lot of little businesses closing down around here, and I think it is driven by some the gastly stupid energy laws that our fine state’s governor enacted this year (which added about 5 million more layers of red tape to drilling). That and the fact that Colorado is primarily Natural Gas driven and natgas is somewhere around $5.50 per MBTU as of this writing, but it bottomed out around $3.50 per MBTU. As a comparison, it was at $14 per MBTU is september 2007 before the crash. But, hey, adding more mandates to the increasingly small footprint of drilling will only make it more effective, right? (sarcasm implied….). So, I still wasn’t quite believing it until a few weeks ago on the *COLDEST* night of the year (something like -17 or -20 F) when I had to make a late night trip from my office in downtown to an office near Greely. Driving out I noticed a line of homeless people waiting to get into the shelter, and it was undoubtedly a block long. It was truly heartbreaking and I felt very blessed to be in my warm vehicle with a job to do and a warm house to go home to.
So, if you’re reading this somewhere warm, perhaps with a nice warm drink and heat like me, I wish you a happy new year and hope and pray our country strives on. That we as a nation and families curb our debt addictions and that we begin to return to a free society of generosity and work ethics. That we all have a greater appreciation for what we DO have, and strive for not more stuff but better lives and relationships.
 Owl City - Ocean Eyes I have usually heard of an artist before they blow up super-huge. I can only think of two artists that were mega huge that I’d never heard of in “medium exposure” mode (at least here in the US market): Evanescence and most recently Owl City. I had a friend say, “Man, I’m obsessed with that stupid fireflies song”, to which I replied “Huh? Fireflies? You mean Fireflight?”. He then educated me about this new guy named Owl City, who much like Falling Up’s Jesse Ribordy recorded a solo synthy type album. Surely enough, I listened to fireflies and saw the video of fireflies (below) and was hooked. I recently had the opportunity to purchase the album, and it is musically freaking awesome for it’s genre. To me it is remeniscient of a musical mash-up of Falling Up, Relient K, Imogen Heap, and with the upbeat happiness of a Rocket Summer.
I previewed the album on iTunes (which BTW is a new feature that I LOVE that they either licensed or stole from eMusic) and I was fairly impressed. On the first listening I was more than a little intrigued by the album itself, because it is quite honestly a wonderful soundscape, and I love this album. What intrigued me most about it is that a few albums here and there I look up albums because I don’t understand what a single song or two are talking about. Some albums like ‘Fangs’ from Falling Up are excellent but make absolutely no sense until you piece it together. This album makes sense on first listen, but only a bit. Delving deeper, the lyrics are quite biting and revealing.
So, as I’m listening to this album, I came across track 7, which is called “Meteor Shower”, a mellow ballad that swells in the middle with the lyrics:
“I am not my own;
For I have been made new;
Please don’t let me go;
I desperately need you.”
I was intrigued, these are not spiritually agnostic lyrics IMHO, so I started to look deeply into the lyics and I found that there are a few love songs, but nothing Raunchy. Overall, I really LOVE this album. Even my father-in-law (who usually doesn’t mind but definitely doesn’t like a ton of my music) loved it. I look forward to picking up some of this guy’s older stuff and seeing if it’s all the same quality (and I hope it is). If you want a fun and happy album GO GET THIS ONE!!!
 Departing Bus The picture to left is what I saw today.
The only exceptions were that I’m not a chick, it wasn’t double decker bus, it was dark, and it was snowy and icy. So really, it was nothing like that, it’s just the only Flickrstream photo that is public and that has a bus in motion that I could find!!! (BTW – thanks to ‘SDP’ for the Flickrstream).
Let me explain – the past week or so have been a bit taxing logistically. We’ve had to shift into single car mode as the ‘Rango was blow’d up by lack of radiator (which froze and caused an engine overheat – Irony – check the yes box.) So I have been taking the 410 feeder bus from my neighborhood to the P-line. The first couple of days it was no biggie and I caught it. The last two, I have missed the stupid thing. Why? BECAUSE IT RUNS 2 MINUTES EARLY!!! ARRRRGH! I missed it flat out yesterday, and today I calculated that I could get “extra” walking in if I hoofed it over to the next bus stop. I should have been a bump on a log, because at precisely 6:23, the bus blew past me. A sprinted for it flailing and shouting “wait, wait”, but no love. Dudeman trucks off at 6:24. I arrived at precisely 6:25 – at a bus stop PAST where it’s supposed to be at 6:25 AM. So I experienced a really nice 2 mile walk this morning…
Because it has run two minutes early, I have had the joy of walking in sub freezing temps on icy sidewalks to the P-Line P-n-R station. Uphill. Both ways. Did I mention it was snowy? And, no, I was not barefoot. My shoes aren’t cool enough for someone to beat me up over.
 Skillet - Awake - 2009 There are a few bands that I love and will perennially buy their albums. Bands like Relient K, Plumb, Third Day, etc. Skillet most definitely falls into the “ I’m going to get it because it’s band-x’s new album” category. I picked up their new album “Awake” a few days ago when I was lured into a sale on the deluxe version of the album. This (I think) completes their car-crash inspired album themes (Collide -> Comatose -> Awake). Although, maybe there might be another album named rehab, or motor therapy. All joking aside, I am quite pleased with the album, and I’ve got the track by track review below:
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‘Hero’, which if you listen to any alt/progressive radio station (PWG or other) you have heard by now.The album starts out very “Skillety” with this track. It is a good hard hitting song, complete with a good bit of chick rock lyrical backings. It was also on the bumper for Sunday Night Football, if anyone cares 
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‘Monster’, the second song is one of my favorite tracks on the album. I think the song flows really well, and I love the voice mod part of when he says “I feel like a monster” towards the end of the song – Little J and M love this part too.
‘Don’t wake me’ is a typical rock “I miss you baby” song. It’s a little bland for me.
‘Awake and Alive’ is a very “Skillety” song as well as ‘Hero’ and ‘Dead Inside’. Most groups that try and pull off synth and strings fail horribly. Red and Skillet are two standout groups that do this well, as well this song is lyrically spot on to living a life of faithful grinding against the culture we live in.
‘One Day Too Late’ is a little anthemy, and seems a little misplaced on the album. I would have put it above ‘Awake and Alive’ or ‘Don’t Wake Me’. Taken on it’s own it’s a good social justice-y type song, but it bugs me every time I get to it after ‘Awake and Alive’.
‘It’s not me it’s you’ is a song written to either Satan or bad self nature. This will be a smash crossover hit I bet, because if you were mad at someone, this would be a great song to play! I don’t think I’ve heard a song this vehemently awesome at “you suck” since Ugly Kid Joe’s ‘I hate everything about you’.
‘You should have when you could have’ is along the same lines as ‘It’s not me it’s you’, but clearly directed at being dumped and/or breaking up. It’s a great song for that. Well written Skillet.
‘Believe’ is the next song on the album list. On a scale of 1 to 10 on a “make-up” song list, this song is about a 9.73. It’s awesome, expressive, and well engineered. My only reason I don’t give it the extra .27 is that this would be the absolutely perfect make-up song ever is a sweet guitar solo. There are excellent 80’s metal band guitar interludes in it, it just lacks the melt your face guitar solo. I’m hoping there is a remake on a b-side sometime. I love this song – I think it’s dedicated to every person in a serious relationship that had a tool moment and let it all go in an instant of stupidity.
‘Forgiven’ is an overtly PWG song, it is an excellent song. If it was knocked down a bit the tempo it could easily be reworked into a worship song. Love it.
‘Sometimes’ is (for me) the most forgettable song on this album. It’s a good song, but I always forget it’s on the album when I’m listening to it (which is a lot lately). It deals with being corrupt. Perhaps it’s like a cliffhanger, the song doesn’t really address anything. It’s kinda depressing also, but the ending is awesome (musically at least).
‘Never Surrender’ quickly picks up from ’sometimes’. Thematically I think it leads into the next song on the album for a reason. I LOVE this song. This song is perhaps the top song off of this album for me. I have listened to this song something like 30 times. And I’m usually not OCD about one song . I think I just resonate with the following lyrics from the song:
“I don’t want to feel like this tomorrow.
I don’t want live like this today.
Make me feel better. I need to feel better.
Stay with me hear now, and never surrender.
Make me feel better, you make me feel better.
Put me back together.
Make me feel better I need to feel better.
I love this song. I feel this song often. I live this song often in my faith life. I need Jesus so much. I dig this song.
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‘Lucy’ is a great song if you’re experiencing mourning. It made me cry. I think it’s about a little girl (which is why it touched me so much). Ek thinks it’s about a chick. Either way it’s sad.
Bonus Song 1 – Dead Inside – This is another great Skillet song about a faith filled life. This song made it worth buying the bonus version.
Bonus Song 2 – ‘Would It Matter’ – This song is really quite good as well. I’m really surprised it got axed from the album and relegated to “deluxe” status. This song deals with the thoughts about wondering if you’re cared about at all. I have felt this feeling before, especially in my teens. If you’re buying this album for a teen – definitely get the bonus album for this song alone.
Bonus Song 3 – ‘Monster Radio Alt’ – It’s the same song without the “scary” monster voice. Which my boys love, AKA the K-love version. Don’t buy it single!
My overall thoughts about this album are “Bravo Skillet”. I have always felt like this group has had a really good handle on what a truly ‘real’ in but not of the world life looks like. I love how some of the songs don’t always answer a problem but at least address it. If you had 10 bucks to spend on a 2009 album, Buy Red’s new album. If you had 20, buy this one too.
I love how everything since the nineties has added a “gate”. Whoever named the Watergate complex must be getting royalties.
I love the idea of reducing carbon. I like the idea of reducing electricity and fossil fuel consumption. I like recycling (I’m actually a freak about it – ask EK, she’ll tell you). What I don’t like is crazy speculation about what MIGHT happen from the same branch of science that many times has not been more accurate than weathermen or economists. What am I talking about? Hacked emails, baby, hacked emails.
Every single released email I’ve read is pretty much what everyone talks about – smack talk, our contrarian opponents are troglodites, etc. But there are a few smoking guns, like one that outlines how some algorythmic data does not equate for erratic changes into their models (AKA, let’s make it do what we WANT it to, which is NOT science, but justification).
Now, I see TONS of emails on either side saying “AHa! They are idiots” and “Aha! You’re idiots for misreading this”. I think it WILL perhaps cause some people to ask HOW the data has been collected and assimilated. Which I think is good.
So far the biggest “gonna make me barf” science community spin is HERE on BBC.
Forget the Mayans, I have the inside scoop on why the world will end in 2012.
It’s because there will be civil unrest over the Oprah Show airing it’s final program in 2011.
Link Here.
 Phil Wickham - SingAlong - Click to get to his website One thing I love about the collaborative blogger community is finding out cool stuff that you’d have to wade through promo emails to find out. One such example was the release of Phil Wickham’s singalong Live CD. I love Phil Wickham’s music, but somehow haven’t gotten around to picking up an album of his (so many albums – so little time). This has to be one of the rarities in a live album that I really like how it’s done. They make up an amazing
In general – I tend to avoid live albums. A few exceptions to this rule are in the forfront of my mind – Garth Brook’s Live in NY, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds at Luther College, Eric Clapton Unplugged. But generally all live albums suffer from “Not quite as good as the studio, not quite as good as being there” syndrome.
The reason I think this album doesn’t is because it’s almost like he recorded a set in the middle of a bunch of friends and did a toned down almost-acoustic version of the songs. Phil Wickham has a wonderful voice – ala Shane and Shane and Mat Kearney with a unique falsetto that makes his voice hard to mistake for anyone else. In all – it’s free music – so if you even remotely like Phil Wickham, why not download it??
 Apple's Evil Genius OK, let me first state that my problem is probably few and far between, and I rarely experience this problem on “real” computers, E.G. computers that are not running in VM’s. You see, I am forbidden to install software onto computers here at work that my company doesn’t own. So I install them onto VM’s that are non-network connected (yes that is possible, I’m a network engineer afterall!) So, currently my XPIT virtual machine is running with iTunes 9.0.2.something on it. It’s a good and stable VM until about a month ago.
Every so often genius would steal the network connection to the internet and upload “genius data to apple” and “delivering genius results” to me. This really didn’t bug me so much because a: I’m at work and really don’t use this computer unless I’m turning on/off music, and b: I rarely have colided with the bandwidth it steals off the broadband connection.
So, what happened recently I’m not so sure about. Perhaps it was that I acknowledged genius’ evil side. Perhaps it was just that my time had come. Now about twice a day, my cpu spikes with genius rearing up on it’s evil hindquarters and pillaging my CPU for at least 10 minutes. Normally this would not be an issue, but it frequently nukes my VM and I have to reboot.
The positive to this is that I’ve learned a whole bunch of VM modification stuff for VMware Workstation I would not have otherwise learned. But still, it’s crazy that it crashes my vm so frequently. If it weren’t for the amazing music store and the fact that genius is an evil genius and not plain evil, I would swear off of itunes over this crazy issue. But, you can’t get a lot of what itunes does in other apps.
Apparently Genius didn’t go to evil audio school for 6 years to be called mr, thank you very much. (Seek Austin Powers reference here).
 Holy Water - Old Skool Non-IR dispenser - Props to CelesteH's photostream
When I think of things that I KNOW God loves, I am left with two stellar answers.
The first thing is Water. A quick search on Gospelcom’s Bible gateway turns out 620 results. Obviously – we’re made up of like 80% water, right? Rich with meaning, water is used throughout the Bible with stand out value and weighty metaphoric undercurrents (puncount +1, thanks).
The second thing I know he loves is Ifra-Red heat sensors. I know this because Catholic churches in Milan and basically all of Italy are installing IR monitored Holy Water Founts. Named the “Acquasentiera Electronica”, it was the rescue needed by churches to assuage H1N1 fears. From the BBC – Inventor of the IR Fount Luciano Marabese:
“Some people had stopped dipping their hand into the holy water font as they were afraid of infections,” he told Reuters. … “After the news that some churches – like Milan’s cathedral – are suspending the use of holy water fonts… demands for my invention rose to the stars,” added Mr Marabese.
Next step – Install soap dispensers and they’ll be good to go. Go here to look at the video – it’s quite hilarious.
 The Acquasantiera Electronica
 Voltron - Defender of the Universe, defeater of monsters with giant nipples. OK – so we love our Netflix streaming into the Xbox 360. Hardly miss having Television with a DVR at all actually because of it. But I have found a couple of things that open up doors that were more easily shut with TV. Like, for instance, Voltron.
I love me some Voltron, and it’s not that I’m like anti-voltron a lot, but I think it’s probably more appropriate for Little-J than it is for Little-M. Also – another sidebar about Voltron I forgot – ever noticed that the monsters Voltron fought had gigantic metal nipples? I didn’t realize this when I was a kid. Perhaps it was my limited robot anatomy knowledge…
The second thing is that they have a ridiculously high amount of non family friendly “children and family” shows in the “Children and family” section. Like for instance “Peter and the Wolf”, or Piotrus i wilk as it was called in Russia when it was clay-gi’d. Which starts up very darkly, and I finally shut it off after some kids threw Peter in a dumpster with a head wound and he was threatened with an AK-47 by a soldier. While I know these things are happening around the world, my 6 and 3 year old can’t process that. And that’s not “kids” material. Bleeding heads should not be labeled “family friendly”.
 Peter and the Wolf - Clay-gi
HOWEVER! much to my surprise, when I called netflix at 9 o’clock at night, I got a human in America, who pretty much agreed with me and forwarded my issues on and a manager responded back to see if it could get pulled from the family queue on xbox.
In all I’m digging it, but I see I can’t let the kids have free reign.
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