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Wednesday, July 30, 2008 |
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It's business time
I've been back from my trip for almost a week now. I keep trying to think of something interesting post about the experience, but every time I try I just feel tired. I'm sure that Singapore and Hong Kong are fascinating places but I didn't have any time to see any of it. The work schedule was relentless, leaving me little time to do anything of interest. I do gotta say, if ever you need to take a 16 hour plane ride, make sure you fly at least business class and under no circumstances take an American airline company. For some reason the US doesn't know how to make people comfortable on long flights. I had to take a United flight from Singapore to Hong Kong, the shortest flight of my trip at 4 hours. The trip was no uncomfortable, I had lots of leg room and the plane was also basically empty. But compared to the amenities on the Singapore Air and Cathay Pacific flights I took, it was like riding a bus across the ocean. Cathay Pacific in particular provided individual chamber-like seats that basically force you to lie down and watch movies for 20 hours straight, while stuffing you full of food and offering you a selection of whiskeys. If I win the lottery, I'm booking a series of consecutive flights, so I can spend weeks in this state, without ever getting off the plane. Even the turbulence felt pretty good. Anyway, now I'm back and have exponentially more work to do, plus I'm feeling residual jet lag effects, and the construction work on the floor below my office continues unabated, the pounding and drilling louder than ever before. I should have stolen those noise-canceling headphones they handed out! Labels: Job
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Friday, July 18, 2008 |
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We sail tonight for Singapore
I'm off to Asia for a week! What an exotic location to go sit in a faceless office building and share Powerpoint presentations! I am pleased to see it will actually be hotter here than this equatorial city. I have a side trip to Hong Kong that will also afford me much opportunity for board room-gazing and airport line-waiting. If anything interesting happens, I'm sure I'll post about it. If you don't see anything here for the next week, you'll know why. Labels: Business Trips, Job
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Monday, July 14, 2008 |
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I don't wanna live to be thirty-four
Buzz and I played a brief set at Club Europa last night, but not the club you might have seen many notable shows in the past (Shellac, Melt Banana, Lightning Bolt). No, our show was down on the ground floor. Turns out a couple weeks ago Europa renovated the lower bar and turned it into a little venue in its own right. Gone is the pool table, gone are the tables and tubular metal bar stools. The bar has been shortened, lights have been dimmed, red velvet banquettes brought in and a somewhat awkwardly-designed stage has taken their place. This came as a relief to me, I had been dreading the thought of our lil two-man operation trying to plug away in the cavernous upstairs space. Best of all they didn't charge a cover, marking 2 locations I now know of (along with GBM) that have free shows around here. I don't know if they'll keep that up there, but it was a fun time. After the show we scampered over to Club Exit, where the F Yeah Fest was winding up its tour. The headliners were the Circle Jerks, yet another reunited band from days of yore back on the sing-for-your-supper circuit. Keith Morris still has the voice, but those dreadlocks are nasty. I guess, better than a mohawk, extremely long, scroungy white-guy dreadlocks are the ultimate physical proof that you probably don't have a regular day job. They could still play pretty fast, though they played a version of "Back Against the Wall" that bordered on reggae, it was so slow. How odd. Odder, they closed the show by playing what I figure was every single song that Morris performed when he was a founding member of Black Flag. At first it was cool, but then it just got weird. Why so many Black Flag songs? They're awesome songs, and I like Morris' voice way more than I ever liked Rollins (though my favorite Flag vocalist is still Ron Reyes), but it became like a bizarre idol-worship move, having the Circle Jerks play backup to the "An Evening with Keith Morris" show. Perhaps the weirdest thing, however, to come out of this show was the revelation that the very fat, Cpl Henry Blake-style fishing hat, and mountain-man beard was none other than ZanderSchloss, whom geeks like me might better recognize as the character Kevin from Repo Man (the super geeky guy Otto works with at the grocery store). Labels: Bands, Motico, Music, Nostalgia, Shows
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Friday, July 11, 2008 |
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With the quickness
Today's office phrase I would most like to ban for the rest of the century: "Quick Question"Offense: It is always a lie, and an impudent lie at that, since in its two-word phrasing it defines the shortest possible time spent reasoning and responding. Yet, the questions and the people who utter this forbidden phrase always end up taking forever. A true quick question would be, "Should I get out of your face?" YES.Or, "Am I annoying you?" YES.Labels: Bad Stuff, Job
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Thursday, July 10, 2008 |
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This shit just dropped right out of the sky
On Monday evening, as we were winding down after band practice, Buzz was heard to remark, "Ya know, we should book some shows soon." As usual, the booking gods heard him and dropped a show right in our laps. Our pals in the bristling 500ma asked us to fill out their show at the mammoth Club Europa in Greenpoint Brooklyn. It's coming up quick, this Sunday at 7:00PM. More details to follow, but for the time being I'm trying to get Buzz to mention how badly we need a PA, new amps and a pony. Motico and 500ma other bands TBA Sunday, July 13th, 2008 Club Europa 98 Meserole Ave., (corner of Manhattan Ave.) Brooklyn, NY 11222 tel. (718) 383-5723 G train at Nassau 7:00PMLabels: Bands, Motico, Shows
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And I looked and I saw that it was good
One of the first times I took the J train out to the Halsey station, one of the many reasons I felt like I had stepped off the map was the station itself. All the stations prior to it (and after it if you get to Broadway Junction) have decorative colored glass panels adorning the platforms. Halsey had no such thing, favoring beige-painted solid walls, interrupted only by a small section of chain-link fencing at one end (and there's probably some code thing that insists on this). Because of this disparity, Halsey seemed especially forlorn, like the MTA just didn't care enough about our little stop. Of course, now that I've lived here a couple years, I don't even notice the walls, unless somebody's tagged it. I've seen far more depressing stations than mine (several on the M line in mid-Bushwick are particularly uninspiring), and I would rather the MTA spent its money fixing the inside of the station (where water tends to pool deeply around the Metrocard vending machines when it rains) rather than give us something purely cosmetic. But since none of that seems to be happening any time soon, I'm happy to see our station upgraded to the level of, say, the Kosciuszko station. The panels looks very lovely, and the other people on the platform seemed to be pleased by it as well. Is it a sign of increased gentrification here? Or did the MTA just have a lot of leftover panels lying around and they needed the storage space (I note that the panels are all different, unlike most other stations). Probably no special agenda here, I'll know gentrification has stuck on Halsey when the Rite Aid actually stocks things properly. Labels: Bushwick, Good Stuff, Mass Transit
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Monday, July 07, 2008 |
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Just the little sound of history repeating
 Did anybody else see this story about the tablet they found (albeit some 10 years ago), dating to BC times, that depicts a messianic figure who is sacrificed only to rise from the dead 3 days later? I don't know exactly if it will have any impact but I think it's pretty fascinating. But maybe it's just because I happened to watch The Last Temptation of Christ over the weekend, so I have Jesus on the brain. I'm still rather fuzzy on Jesus and what he supposedly did (ie, if he died for everybody's sins, well, why do Catholics still need Confession?) and who he was, but the exploration of his history is pretty nifty, when it's not totally obscured by dogma. This new tidbit is interesting in that it predates the whole Jesus/Easter weekend thing, which could either be seen as proof that the Jesus thing is mostly myth, cobbled together from various, long-established traditions (along with all the pagan seasonal celebrations that coincidentally seem to happen on days also sacred to Christian, go figure). Or you can look at it and say it was prophesied long before it happened. Folks love that prophecy stuff! I suspect the anti-evolutionary, ultra-fundamentalists will see it that way. After all, these are the same people who claim god planted dinosaur bones to 'test' creationist beliefs. So far my research indicates that Life of Brian is still the most accurate depiction of Jesus' life and times. Labels: Good Stuff, History
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008 |
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I got no reason to complain
I'm at the tail end of working 3 shifts over the past 32 hours. I had just enough time to get home, go to bed and then get up and come back to work. I have been overseeing the launch of a new corporate web site, every bit as exciting as it sounds. There's nothing like trying to string together several disparate tech teams to simultaneously launch various connected web sites, finding out the hard way that Rsync means the lynch pin of the whole project won't be published until everything else is done, totally screwing up the delicate ballet of timed launches we had scheduled. Plus we found that our server mirror suck bigtime, so people in New York were seeing something totally different than the people in Hong Kong. And the people in Singapore, well, they were seeing (or not seeing) things nobody else was seeing. Why? No one knows. And no one cares. Another boring web site has been launched and I'm kind of spacey. Tomorrow I'll be back to normal, and it'll be like none of this happened. Will my work schedule lighten? That has been my major motivation for the past couple of months, that once this is over I can go back to loafing, office-stylee. Of course, it's times like these I momentarily consider I should spend some time thinking about a career I might actually like profoundly, and how much more fulfilling that would be. Then I get an email marked URGENT (like 95% of the emails I receive now) telling me the URL redirection isn't working on an orphan page in Jersey (the old one, not the new one). And I can't even work up the energy to explain that the likelihood that anyone will ever notice it is so slight that we need not waste precious sweat glands over it, but they claim they're only upset because they're getting leaned on by the higher-ups, who no doubt are being leaned upon by their higher-ups, and nobody will admit to being personally invested in anything, only that they are totally not taking the blame for this one. No sireebob. Now, what was I thinking about? Oh yeah, that Britney Spears, she's like such a ho bag! N'est-ce pas? Labels: Job
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