as i mentioned before, last night i saw
Chalk and
Ari Ari at Crush downtown. after a bit of delay, the show started.
Ari Ari were first. i didn't know much about them, except that jim (from chalk) said they were cool. their instrumentation was guitar/keys/drums, with a girl on vocals. i didn't get to speak to any of them afterwards, so if you want names, i'll leave that research up to you.
their set was sweet. it sounded much like the
mp3 on the
friction website: serious rocking out, with some nice keys in the mix, providing both bass end and fleshing out the upper registers. good times all around, and a good match for a Chalk show.
Chalk were Chalk.
more serious rocking out, with loads of dirty syths and loud bass guitar, with Dave's awesome vocals and Greg's cool-ass drumming.
not a
well-written review, but definitely a positive one. ;)
(and i need to go easy on the blur in those pics...)
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i'm finally getting around to trying something referred to (by at least a couple people) as the
dooce effect, wherein you make your digital photos all glowy and stuff.
check it out.
here's a photo of the band
Ari Ari, whom i saw play a great set saturday night. first, here's how i would have done it, with just brightness adjustment:
the photo has that "flash" quality to it, which i kind of dislike but can't really avoid.
now, here's the same photo, using the dooce effect:
i like it. it's a bit darker, but it's ok. i'm still getting the hang of it, but i think it's a far better photo now.
what do you think? be honest now. :)
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yikes.
ok, so i got this jeep because the hearse just isn't good enough any more. i knew when i got it that it would need new tires, so when the passenger-rear tire would get low every couple of weeks, i wasn't surprised. i would just fill it up and move on.
friday night, i stopped over at my friend lyndsey's place to hang out for a couple hours. (she caught the episode of Mr. Show with Tool on it, which was lucky for her, i guess. ;) when i went to leave, the passenger-rear tire was FLAT. i mean, no driving it the three blocks to the gas station, this thing was gone. lyndsey drove me home, since it was dark, and i didn't want to fool around with the friggin thing at that point anyway.
saturday morning, i went to brunch with sara, and when i got back, i went over to lyndsey's to change the tire. good times. (not really.)
i don't have a spare tire yet. see, my friend laura, from whom i bought the jeep, had loaned the spare to her boyfriend, and he still had it. i hadn't really gotten around to asking for it, so i was out of luck on that front. luckily, the hearse spare would work enough to get me to michel tires plus, and they'd take it from there.
at first, i tried lyndsey's jack, as i couldn't find mine in the jeep. of course, hers is for a car, not a jeep cherokee, so it didn't lift it up far enough. however, a renewed and more thorough search for my jack revealed that it was under the back seat, so i was back in business.
back in business, that is, until i tried my jeep's lug wrench. apparently, it's not the correct one for those lugs. cripes.
lyndsey's fit, though, so i went to town.
well, i went to town on the thing until i realized that ALL of the lug nuts on that tire were stuck. either they were corroded, or someone got all crazy with an air wrench. or both.
i got some crap from autozone called PB Blaster, which was described to me as "WD40 on crack". i sprayed it on the lugs and waited about 20-30 minutes.
i got lyndsey's lug wrench onto the first lug. after much trying, it finally broke free when i stood on it. finally!
next one, fine. next one, fine. one left: no good. naturally. i stood on it, and even hopped a bit, but to no avail. dammit.
i sprayed more PB Blaster on it, then waited some more.
(by the way, PB Blaster is NASTY! if someone were to capture me and force me to choose between drinking a shot of gasoline or a shot of PB Blaster, i'd choose the gasoline,
in a second. seriously.)
it didn't, help, though. still nothing, though i did notice that i'd bent lyndsey's lug wrench a bit, and rounded the corners off the lug.
shit.
i gave up, as by that time michel tires plus had closed.
this morning, after my friend katie from work stopped by to picked up some cds i'd burned for her, i tried again. i'd hoped that the PB Blaster would have worked its magic overnight, but it wasn't enough. plus, the lug wrench kept slipping off the lug, as the corners were all rounded.
long story shorter, lyndsey used her roadside assistance to tow me up to michel tires plus. they replace the two rear tires (and the offending lugs).
so yeah. i spent four hours changing a tire, and was unsuccessful.
what a great weekend. :D
i did catch a great show, though: Chalk with Ari Ari from Muncie, IN. they were both great, and apparently it's Chalk's penultimate show. i got some pics, which i'll post some time.
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is this thing on?
the blog is telling me it's publishing, but the page looks unchanged in the browser.
if you can see this, leave a comment on this entry.
UPDATE: it's fixed. guh. what a chore.
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a salute to Chuck and his
All Go Signs crew for executing an awesome event yesterday (saturday, that it).
among other bands, Infinite Number of Sounds rocked out, as usual. i also got to break in my new camera:
i'm liking it so far. (the camera, i mean.)
more pictures later.
oh, and DJ Empirical is now confirmed to be spinning at the Cleveland release party for the new Inifinite Number of Sounds album
Radio Whales on August 12th, at the Brachland Tavern in Cleveland. sweet.
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well, he's actually been in the states for a week or so. what i mean to say is that i just got a call from him out in moab, utah, from the home of Ambassador BC. sweet.
so yeah, they're going to rock the mic at karaoke tonight, then head to Vegas tomorrow, then back here by tuesday/wednesday of next week.
i'm excited.
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so, stAllio's
databending post finally inspired me to try my hand at it.
since the toast is on his way back here, and i recently rediscovered some old digicam pics (nearly two years old, some of them), i thought i'd use one of him for the experiment.
here's the original:
(no, no experimenting done as yet: that's how he looks! ;)
after quite a bit of futzing around, i got this out:
what i did was:
- open the jpg in photoshop
- save the image as a tif
- changed the extension to "txt" and opened it in wordpad
- changed a random character (i think a "K" to a "J")
- saved and closed wordpad
- changed the extension back to tif and opened the image in ms paint
- saved the image as a bmp
i was having a lot of trouble initally, but the key was to work with tif or bmp. according to stAllio!, jpg files are tougher to deal with, as they break easily.
UPDATE: syntax took a whack at it too:
sweet. i have to try this out some more.
UPDATE #2: i was just showing someone what i was talking about, and did this one:
it's just converted to bmp, opened in wordpad and saved. syntax was right; simply opening it in wordpad is enough to goof it up.
UPDATE #3: a couple more.
using Microsoft Word, i got this one:
if you can't see that, here it is in jpg form:
this procedure:
- jpg ยป bmp
- bmp open in ms word
- ms word saved as plain txt (with bmp extension)
seemed simple, and it opened fine in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (which i hate) but would not display in IE6, and so i couldn't be sure about uploading it for you all to see (it works in firefox).
i had to use WP&FV to save it as a jpg for the above image to show in IE6.
in addition to this, i used worpad on the bmp (before conversion) and, predictably, got this one:
as you can see, it's got the ms word warp as before, but with the additional "wordpad effect", as the earlier bends had.
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so, i've just discovered what i think are blogs with only ads on them.
i lost the first one, but here's the second one:
Tips to Gardening. each link goes to a product site, and the text of the post is the text of that page, complete with google ads and everything.
some bot must have set it up somehow.
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