Jared’s Blog

A little reference for you Tarintino freaks. Anyway, I’m sitting here working overtime and it’s dead. Why they needed extra people tonight is beyond me, but if they want to pay me time and a half to sit here and blog, that’s cool with me.

Last night I was a “model” for Laura’s salon. One of their trainees needed to give some one an all over color. I said what the heck, I’ll do it. So I went in and got bleached. What was nice is he cut my hair too. I haven’t had my hair cut by someone else for so long. I think it was sometime during the summer between my freshmen and sophomore year a college. It is SO much cheaper cutting it myself. For awhile I just borrowed a roommates clippers, but eventually my mom bought some for me for my birthday and I haven’t had a professional cut since.

This weekend I’m going to head up to St. John’s for the LAN party. It should be good fun since Justin, Mike, and Brandon are all going to be there as well. I’m sure I’ll get drunk and play lots of video games and then come back and complain about how quick my weekend went.

For tonight I’ll be hanging out with Burns for his 24th birthday. Wow, I just realized it’s his golden. Guess I’ll have to make it extra special. Which means buying him some good beer and then drinking it with him. Yep! Sounds like a plan

After toiling away at my code and several rewrites, I concocted a working pagination script in PHP for my reviews, albums, and videos. Check it out right now. Since I’ve finally locked that part down, I’m going to move on to adding more robust features to the site as well as finally cataloging all of my music. Lots of work for me, lots of stuff for readers to look at.

P.S. If you find anything that’s broken on my music page, let me know by comment here or email.

Wordpress, the content manager I run my site with, has released version 1.5 of their awesome software. I dropped the update in yesterday so you may notice a few glitches here and there while I adapt to the new features. Hopefully this will clear up a lot of the spam I was getting.

This may seem like a flashback to last September. Today Gary Bettmann announced the NHL season is officially cancelled. When I first heard about this whole thing at the start of the 2003-2004 season, I thought there’d be no way we’d lose a whole season. As it got further and further I still had hope that someone would crack and we’d see at least some portion of a season. It is really sad that some of these players can’t just buckle down and play some hockey. I know it’d be hard to take a pay cut. You get used to a lifestyle and that’s hard to break. But if I can live off of a 20k/yr job, then they can certainly stand to lose a million off of a multimillion dollar contract. Hell, even the rookie no names make $400,000 - 500,000/yr. Just get out there and play.

The idea of another hockey league stepping in was pretty hilarious a year ago, but right now it seems like a good option. Sure you’d get a ton of amateurs to begin with. But eventually some killer players would come out of the woodwork. You might even see some former NHL names show up to play. I think the hockey fans would embrace it quite quickly and any dissenters would probably jump ship after they saw the NHL was going nowhere. Please someone do something. I want my hockey!

My previous post was all about me getting some free stuff. This one is most certainly not. I am now the prowd owner of a new Alpine CDA-9847 Yep, I finally decided to drop some cash on an MP3 deck for my car. I was fed up with using my ancient portable CD player and tape deck. The CD player was my first ever. I probably got it in about 94 or 95. It doesn’t have any skip protection and it’s never been cleaned. Add to that it was being routed through a crappy tape adapter which only worked halfway. I had to fumble with the cord to get it to play through both channels and sometimes it would fade in an out. All around annoying.

To fix the issue, I dropped $250 on the new deck and installation hardware. I even managed to put it in myself in about 2 hours without blowing my car up or breaking anything. I was surprised at how smooth it went considering I’d never ventured into the car audio world.

I wasn’t initally going to buy the deck I did. I was looking at a JVC deck because of its front aux input. I was thinking when I eventually got an iPod I could’ve connected it directly to the front instead of using FM modulation. I’ve heard that the sound isn’t that great when using those type of things.

Anyway, I picked up the deck I did because it has a port for a special iPod box. I wasn’t too pleased to hear that the box will cost me an extra $99, but once I get that, it will let me connect my iPod to the deck directly. The real cool thing is you can control the iPod right from the deck AND it charges. So there’d be no need for a car charger.

That being said, now I just need to save the cash up to buy an iPod. Hopefully I can do that in the next few months, but we’ll see. I’ve got a few other things I’d like to buy and some other big bills coming not to mention my normal fill of monthly stuff. The good thing is I’m actually able to put some money away. It really is sad how much I make. I think I’m worth more

Well a few days ago, Rick and I got to see Snocore 2005 for free. Ahh the perks of the music business. I haven’t done street teaming for a while now, but this is almost as good. Free tickets to shows, free t-shirts, free CDs. And you don’t have to bug people by trying to hand them stickers.

The show was ok. Rick and I hung out in the skyways to avoid the chilly weather before heading out to the line. I guess that was a bad idea because we missed one of the only bands we wanted to see, Strata.

I was looking forward to being 21 and going upstairs finally. Too bad it was an all ages show and they just let anyone up there. Guess I was wrong. The rest of the show was ok. Futre Leaders of the World was the first band I saw. I never was a huge grunge fan. I can’t see these guys being the revival either. On the plus side, their drummer hit like crazy. I always like a guy who works hard.

The only analogy I can come up with for Crossfade is that they are the new boy bands. Right up there with Good Charlotte and Simple Plan. While they may have not been prefabricated, they certainly are taking the place of boy bands. I had to laugh when they have a guy who plays samples of guitars on a turntable. How hard is it to find someone to play backup or rhythm guitar for a signed band? Then there’s their look. No kidding, they look like a boy band. Well, at least the turntable guy. He had the whole look going. It was funny when their guitarist came and stood right behind me and Rick during Chevelle’s set. I’ll get to that later though.

Helmet was up next. Knowing these guys used to be huge, I was pretty sure they’d put on a good show. I’d never actually heard a Helmet song before though. While they weren’t really the type of music I’d listen to now, I’d probably have liked them in their heyday. They also put on a really energetic show. They probably were the best of the night.

Finally a band I wanted to see. Chevelle! Thinking back, I’ve been a Chevelle fan since about ‘98 or ‘99. I think I first heard them on the radio when their first album Point #1 came out. People were saying they could be the next Tool back then. Well, they aren’t quite Tool, but they are a pretty popular and well known band. It’s always more fun to see a band when you know their songs. Chevelle put on a decent show. They were into it and very thankful for the response from the crowd.

How could this week get any better? More shows! Saturday I checked out my favorite band last year, Break the Silence for only 7 bucks! Yea, it wasn’t free, but it was damn close. Rick was supposed to come up and go with me, but he got sick and stayed home. Being the trooper and live music junkie I am, I went anyway.

Rise or Rust opened followed by CJF and then 715. Rise or Rust looked like they were about 16, but they were damn good. They played a kind of political style punk ala Anti-Flag with a heavier edge to it. One of their guitarists actually had a few impressive solos. I rather enjoyed them. CJF followed. I had actually met their their drummer at the Nehemiah show the week before. He seemed cool and so I was somewhat curious to see what they were all about. Straight off, their sounded reminded me a lot of Alexisonfire. Their vocalist was equally talent at belting out melodies as he was at pulling up demonic screams. I probably would’ve spent some money on their CD had I rememebered to hit the ATM after work.

Speaking of work, that was another free thing. I found out the parking lot where I normally park for work is free on weekends. Yay! Anyway, back to the show.

715 from Madison, WI was third in line. I wasn’t impressed with them at all. Their vocalist was kind of flamboyant and obnoxious. He kind of pissed me off, so I just waited paitently knowing BtS would kick some ass pretty soon.

Finally, Break the Silence came on. I had been standing towards the back for most of the show, but moved right to the front for them. I forgot to mention earlier that there was only about 20 kids there when I first showed up and by this time it had maybe grown to 75. Suffice to say, there was plenty of room front and center. They played through most of their CD, leaving off maybe 2 or 3 songs. I was going off the whole time. I felt bad for them though because not many other people were. The drummer from CJF was next to me and he was going off just as hard, but except for a few moments, the rest of the crowd stood still.

After the music was over, I ran back to my car quick to grab my BtS CD cover. Mr. Precision was the only guy around at their merch booth, so I had him sign it for me. He was even nice enough to refold it the “correct” way. He said they messed it up at the factory. I chatted for a couple minutes before the big bouncer guy said “everyone out!” I wouldn’t pushed the issue if he hadn’t been about 400lbs and holding a very menacing looking drum stick.

On my way home, I grabbed some Subway from the closest one to my place. There was one guy working. Let’s just say he didn’t look too American. He took a good 10 minutes to figure out what the couple in front of me wanted. They spent about half that time trying to explain to him what extra crispy bacon was. My turn came up and he was able to fix my sub the way I wanted. We got to the register and I handed him 2 Sub Club tickets for which I’m supposed to buy a large drink and get a free footlong. I knew I was in trouble when he got this scared/confused look on his face. The next 15 minutes was spent with him hitting buttons on the register screen and making groaning noises. I tried to offer help a few times; he didn’t seem to understand. Finally, he calls someone up. I don’t know if it was his boss, a buddy who worked there, or a Subway in Mexico, but he was speaking Spanish fast. After a couple minutes on the phone he handed me the sub and my tickets back and said “Here, just go. They free.” I left before he had a chance to figure it out. Something tells me he was in for a long closing.

I capped off the night by drinking some beers which were sold to me by the guy at the liqour store. Why is this of interest you may ask? Well the guy decided it was appropriate to be talking on his cell phone to one of his buddies about how he couldn’t get off while having sex with his girlfriend that morning. Like I really need to hear the trials and tribulations of your sex life while I’m buying my beer. That about concluded my interesting encounters with stupid people for the day. Like I said, I drank some beer and went to bed.