drewmckinney.net

The new Tool album, 10,000 Days,  is a fine album to own and it totally redeems them for Lateralus. The packaging is pretty unique for a CD in that it has a built-in stereograph and, if used correctly with the art inside the album, really enhances the entire experience of the album. This isn’t an album that you rip onto your portable device and then forget about. No, this album is something more than that, it’s a personal experience that will be different for everyone I think.
I also picked up the new Ministry album, Rio Grande Blood, an album that kicks your head in on the first track and then proceeds to stomp your guts out, eat the carcass, and picks its teeth with your finger bones. I didn’t even know these guys were still around. I don’t want to put the label of “Anti-War Album” onto this but it seems as though that is what it is. I didn’t know music could get this heavy.
Gnarles Barkley’s St. Elsewhere is very different from the previous two albums. This album isn’t heavy but it’s pretty effin groovy. All sorts of genres come into play here but I guess you could call it a hip-hop album. I have to be careful listening to this one at home because I’m already hearing one song on the album everywhere I go and I don’t want to get tired of this album. My one complaint with this album is that it’s too short. Thirty-seven minutes is very short for a CD but the price is a bit lower than other albums that are out there. It still seems expensive but sometimes we must treat ourselves and throw money around for no other reason than to remember that we’re alive and life sucks when there’s no good music around.
What kick-ass music have you been listening to? 

Things feel like they’ve been extremely busy for me yet very productive as well. Busy can be bad for a lot of people but I’m really digging it right now, thanks to a few changes that I’ve made. I started using Kinkless GTD, a free set of applescripts that mesh wonderfully with OmniOutliner Pro to create a simple yet effective system of productivity based on the popular “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” by David Allen. All I can say is, Wow Bubba. The system works by taking every project you have and listing the next actions necessary in order to achieve the goal of your project. Simple eh? The power lies in how you group your actions according to context. By that I mean that if I’m sitting in front of my home computer, I can pull up the tasks that I’ve listed as “home computer” and I can work on all of those tasks regardless of the project they are for. As long as you are accomplishing next actions then everything gets done when it’s supposed to. With Kinkless, my projects and to-do list get exported automatically into iCal. Using Merlin Mann’s method of organizing in OmniOutliner and doing in iCal was the last step that I needed to get a hold of my multiple projects. Is it worth it for the price of OmniOutliner and GTD to be totally organized? Hell yes.

I’m off to read the 2864 feeds in my bloglines that I haven’t had a chance to catch up with. Got me some readin’ to do…

Cassandra Lewis, my special lady, has got her new website up. She will be visiting Ireland very soon and plans on keeping people updated with her site. Check it out, you know you want to.

I just finished my first week at my new job. I work for a company called PlayFirst and our thing is casual games. For those that don’t know, casual games are small, fun games that are played either in your browser or downloaded to your computer instead of played in a console like a Playstation or a XBox. Go check out SpongeBob Diner Dash, it’s a lovely combination of our hit “Diner Dash” with the hijinks of SpongeBob Squarepants. You can read a short blurb about it at GameZebo.

If you’re using my favorite browser Flock then make sure to upgrade to the latest version as there was a security update. Flock has worked flawlessy for me since I installed it and in fact I’m using it right now to post to my site. I had what I thought was a bug or something with it but it turned out that Flock’s Mac guy was right, I just had a large imported page file and everything is totally fine. Damn my impatience. Here’s my tip to you if you’re on an “older” iBook G4 (I’m on a 1.2 Ghz machine with 256 megs of RAM) - if you go to “Tools” and then “Clear private data” it might take a few minutes. I thought the browser was sitting there doing nothing but just let it sit for a few minutes, there isn’t constant feedback so you’ll just see the little beach ball spinning. THAT’S OK. Let it do it’s thing. If the idea of running a developer-release doesn’t appeal to you then just hang tight, the beta release is supposed to come out this month sometime with enhancements to the usability and what sounds like improvements all around. Rawk \m/.
I have finished physical therapy although I will need to continue doing exercises and stretches for the rest of my life, as should everyone! Just a little stretch every now and again helps. Do one now. Don’t you feel better? While I am still in constant pain it is not nearly at the level that it once was. I have sustained some nerve damage that is causing radicular pain in my leg and ankle but I’m confident that my nerves will heal eventually (yes, it will take a long time as nerves are slow at this sort of thing) and that once again I’ll be able to run marathons and jump out of airplanes. No, I’ve never run a marathon or jumped out of an airplane. Yet.
The Lady has graduated! She now holds a MFA in Creative Writing. This doesn’t mean that she’s through with school yet. She is in a class that is still in session but that should be ending soon, next week or something like that. She then has a couple of weeks to prepare for her trip to Ireland where she will be for six weeks studying Irish Literature through the University of Iowa. The University of Iowa has the most prestigious writing program in the country so naturally I’m very proud of her. Alas, I will not be joining her in Ireland.
That’s about all, I’m on deadline for a couple of articles so I’m hunkering down over the keyboard and won’t emerge for about 85 hours. Have a great weekend everybody, see you in the funny papers. 

How many of you thought that a self-heating can of coffee was a good idea? I was always wary because the heating was caused by a chemical reaction. Turns out that it’s a bad idea after all. I can’t understand who would buy pre-made coffee that takes a bunch of time to heat up…isn’t that why coffee shops were invented???

I had soda at work today because my eyes were all droopy around four pm. I’ve been trying to avoid drinking soda because it’s terrible for you but I have to admit that it was good. Nice and sweet and tasty. Man, I love cola.
In other news, I was updating my Jesus site and thought, hrm, maybe I’ll use Tagyu and see what tags it would give me. Interestingly enough, Tagyu thought my site was a photography blog and didn’t return any tags related to Jesus whatsoever. Has anyone else used Tagyu and what was your experience if you did?

The writing is going well. I am under deadline right now for two articles and I probably shouldn’t be posting to my site. Instead, I should be ankle-deep in wonderful facts about prosaic compages and waxing philosophic about the price of rum, grinding my words out forcefully on the old Underwood and cursing when the whiskey blurs what is probably the best sentence I’ve ever written in my life. But who has time for such shenanigans? Things must be attended to.

Today was the first day of my new day job. I’m a something-or-other at a company downtown. I want to find out the company’s policy on bloggering things before I say more so I’ll leave the details sketchy at best. I feel that things went well and I’m very excited to be working with them, and I don’t think any company would object to my saying so. It was strange to be working on a Windows machine after a solid year of OS X, my fingers have adapted to the Mac shortcuts and I kept trying to hit my “command” key. Old habits die hard though and I found myself launching my apps with the “run” command. I took one look at the START menu and shuddered a tad before my pinky found the Window key and my index finger hopped to the “r” key faster than kudzu grows in Georgia. I may have just made that analogy up and if I did you can quote me, keeping the Creative Commons license of this site in mind…

I just learned how to count binary (base two) on my fingers from this and with that I thought I would post the national anthem in binary code:

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The binary code above was ripped off from BoingBoing.