Jul sent this to me today. I swear to God, these should have been our wedding vows:

1. When you are sad — I will help you get drunk and plot revenge against the sorry bastard who made you sad.

2. When you are blue — I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3. When you smile — I will know you are plotting something that I must be involved in.

4. When you are scared — I will rag on you about it every chance I get.

5. When you are worried — I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be until you quit whining.

6. When you are confused — I will use little words.

7. When you are sick — Stay the hell away from me until you are well again. I don’t want whatever you have.

8. When you fall — I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.

9. This is my oath…. I pledge it to the end.

‘Why?’ you may ask; ‘because you are my friend’. Friendship is like peeing your pants: everyone can see it, but only you can feel the true warmth.

Julie will be happy to learn that she’s the star of my lame attempt at timelapse animation.

In yet another attempt to be all responsible and stuff, Jul and I have recently decided to go ahead and try to learn how to cook. For us, cooking has long meant one of a few things:

• Breakfast for Dinner
• Stuff I threw on the grill
• DiGiornio
• PBJs
• A plate of random brown stuff

So, you can imagine our general shape. (The word you’re looking for is “lumpy.”)

Anyway, we’re going to try to cook better. That’s not to say my wife can’t cook. Quite the contrary, if she has time to do it well. Enough time to make, say Thanksgiving dinner and I assure you…her turkey kicks ass. But cooking a turkey the Julie Way™ means rising at 6:15, also known as “way too fuggin’ early for me” to start the prep. You can imagine this doesn’t work for your average Thursday night meal.

Tonight, however, we tried something new: we made a quiche. And it was excellent. And it was easy to make, and didn’t take all that long, which is important when you don’t start making dinner until after 7 p.m. This may also explain our aforementioned lumpiness.

We have a lot left over, though. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, as two people can take several days to eat a whole pie, and four-day old baked Egg Beaters sounds like a good breeding ground for salmonella.

Microsoft Enters the Digital Music Player Arena

Tomorrow I’ll be getting my hands on a Zune. This is Microsoft’s new digital music player, their long-awaited *ahem* iPod killer. We’re looking at it, along with other mp3 players, for a show we’re working on.

I don’t know how much I’m going to like the hardware. I’m sure it’s fine, and I don’t expect it to have the polish of an iPod, but it looks rather clunky to me. I hope it’s slicker than it looks. Sure, the first generation iPod was that way too. But Microsoft has had the benefit of watching five years of continuing iPod improvement. Granted, they can’t put a click wheel in their player because of those pesky patents, but they should have done better. The worst thing of all? They make a brown one. BROWN. And not a good brown, either. Insert your scatalogical jokes here.

The worst part about the Zune is the DRM (digital rights management) nonsense.

Microsoft has set up an store much like Apple’s iTunes store, which they call the Zune Marketplace. The Marketplace sells music files only for use on the Zune or in the Zune player on your PC - much like music and videos purchased on the iTunes store only play on iPods or in iTunes for Mac or Windows. But the two begin to diverge fairly quickly.

Apple’s model works like this:
You pay .99 for a song. You can choose to buy just one song from Apple, charge it to your credit card, and never go to the Store again. The song is yours to play forever (technically, you don’t “own” the song, you own the rights to play the song). You can elect to share that song with four more computers - each of which would have to be validated over the net via your Store login. You can load that file on numerous iPods. You can burn that song to an audio CD. You definitely should burn it to a data CD or save it to a hard drive somewhere on the change your computer’s hard drive dies, or you’ll lose your purchased song for good.

Zune’s, on the other hand, works like this:
You choose from one of two purchasing models. There’s a plan much like Apple’s, though you don’t use money to buy songs. You use “points,” which Microsoft sells in $5 increments. Songs start at .79 and go up from there. So if you only want the one song, you’re out $4.21. Okay, this isn’t a deal killer for me, since I’ve paid $70 to hundreds of dollars for stock music to use in client projects. But I’m surprised at Microsoft’s goofy points setup.

The other purchasing model is a subscription. Pay a monthly fee, and Microsoft will give you the right to download as many songs as you like - 10,000 in a month, if you like. Sounds like a good deal until you read the fine print.

These songs cannot be burned to audio CDs (those purchased with points can, I’m told). You cannot play them anywhere but in Zune player or on your Zune. You have the right to listen to these songs forever…as long as you keep paying that monthly fee. Stop paying, and the songs stop playing. I called Zune support today to ask a few questions about the device and the licensing agreement, and the tech came right out and told me the points system was a better deal for the consumer.

Screw Your Partner, Microsoft Style

Microsoft’s earlier attempt to define the online digital music business consisted of DRM called “PlaysForSure.” On their site, it’s marketed like this:

Sounds great, right? As long as I buy music using Windows Media Player and the PlaysForSure system, I’ll be able to load it on most of the Windows-based music players. Right? Sure, as long as the player isn’t a Zune.

See, Microsoft hooked all their “partners” into adopting this DRM model. Then they decided to hop in with the Zune, but start using different DRM that only works with Zune.

This not only screws the music player manufacturers, it screws the consumer. If I had a Creative Zen or one of those ugly-ass Dell players, I’d have been loading it up with PlaysForSure music. But those songs won’t play on the Zune.

I realize Apple’s DRM is restrictive as well, and I know the RIAA has much to do with all these draconian anti-theft measures, and I’m certainly not surprised that Microsoft figured out ways to make it worse. Having rambled on this long, I’ll finish by saying that I’ll type some more after I’ve had a chance to play with a Zune tomorrow….

My wife and I saw Nacho Libre last night which left us twenty bucks light and robbed us of two hours of our life we’ll never recover. Anywho, before the show started we endured the usual gauntlet of ads and previews until just before the main attraction (the end credits, yay! Just kidding) when they showed the Dolby sound bit featuring the talented kids from Stomp. Of course we’ve seen this dozens of times in the past but this time I noticed something odd. You’ve seen the piece, right? The brooms, the keys, the boots, the garbage cans: stompity stomp, left speaker right speaker, jingle jingle woosh woosh, above and behind, oooooh how do they do it, clickety clack boom boom, I’m so glad there’s dolby digital in the room. So yeah, it’s all there to show off the precision Dolby Digital enhanced audio performance you’re so glad you plunked down twenty bucks to see. But wait! Half way through this audial orgasm, one of the Stomp kids is on his feet leaning back and windmilling two garbage can lids about his head. No sound. Just the windmilling garbage can lids. To demonstrate the awesome Dolby Digital experience. I mean what the fuck? Didn’t someone tell him to make some noise? Was he given autonomous free rein to do as he pleased: to interpret the needs of the fine folks at Dolby as he saw fit? Off with his head! Off with his arms! Not necessarily in that order! And give us our twenty bucks back. Nacho Libre sucked (except for the part where he climbs the cliff to eat the eagle egg yolk).

Okay, first of all I have to confess at least 62% of the reason I’m doing this is because Joe seems to have an aversion to memes.

Without further ado, nor any form of explanation*, I give you my list of four.

Four jobs I’ve had
1. Meat market whipping-boy. I did exciting things like use a band saw to cut up chickens. I also ran the sausage making machine; attach the pig intestine to the “out” thingy and shovel meats and unidentified bits into the big hopper on the top. These are probably two things one shouldn’t trust to a 14-year old. I think I lasted three weeks, because I moved on to…

2. City Park Dept. Maintenance. They’d load 15 or 20 of us young teenagers into the back of the city trucks and drop us off in pairs and threes at the various city parks, along with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and “pick sticks.” Pick sticks were basically tool handles that have had a nail driven into the end and sharpened to a point. We used them to pick up litter. They’d leave us for an entire day in the park, from 7:30 until about 3 p.m. If it was a small park we’d be done with actual work by lunchtime and spend the rest of the day goofing off.

Two vivid memories: being stuck at Jindra Park in the pouring rain. Maybe 15 minutes after they dropped us off, it started to pour, and there was no place to seek shelter. We sat on a picnic table for about an hour, waiting to be picked. Unbeknownst to us, the ancient metal gas can sitting on the table with us was leaking. We thought our jeans were getting wet from the rain. They were, but we were also soaking our asses in gasoline. Turns out gasoline doesn’t have to actually burst into flame to burn your skin like a sonufabitch.

Second memory: it was a rare treat to be assigned to one of the trucks instead of a park. On a few occasions I had the honor of being on the park garbage detail. This basically meant we drove to all the parks in town emptying the 55-gallon drums that were used as trash cans. It also meant we were the ones who were called out to pick up any animals that had been killed on the streets. There’s nothing quite as fun as scraping a flattened skunk off hot asphalt in July. We’d take all the trash down to the city dump, which has a very large, very disgusting pond in it. Any animals we’d picked up, we would wire a hunk of concrete or something to it and toss it in the pond, for reasons unexplained.

3. Burger flipper at Wendy’s and two McDonald’s. Bathing your teenage face in burger grease does wonders for your complexion.

4. Production Manager at the BG News. This was in the days of waxed galleys, X-acto knives, and non-repro blue pencils. Thankfully, we were beyond the days of optical typesetting. I did learn how to shoot halftones in a big damn hurry. The best thing about the job was my usual after work activity: after we’d put the issue to bed (at 1 a.m.), John Nemec (the copy editor and a KKPsi brother of mine) and I would head across the street to Myle’s. We’d put back a large pizza and a couple pitchers of beer before they closed at 3. We were both smart enough to have no class to get to before noon on Friday.

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. The Fifth Element (I have absolutely no idea why.)
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3. Band of Brothers. Yes, the whole damn thing.
4. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Four places I’ve lived
1. Apparently I lived in the projects when I was a wee small child.
2. An apartment in college with my friend Jim, an evil bitch named Renee, and Frodo the paperwad-chasing cat.
3. My grandmother’s house, with my brother Jim, after she was too frail to live alone and moved to a nursing facility. I was moving back to Cleveland from Cincinnati and her house was sitting empty. Worked out well for my mom (worrying about the empty house) and me (happy to live rent-free for five months).
4. Our very own Money Pit, a bungalow built in 1925 with a leaky basement, racoons living in the eaves, and an inch of soot falling on our faces when we tore down the original kitchen ceiling. That’s the short list of character-building challenges Jul and I faced.

Four TV shows I love watch regulary. (I had to change that one; “love” is too strong a word for anything on television.)
1. Lost
2. Mythbusters
3. This Old House
4. South Park

Four places I’ve vacationed
1. Kauai
2. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
3. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
4. Vancouver and other parts of British Columbia

Four of my favorite dishes
1. Lasagna
2. Chicken Bryan at Carraba’s
3. A bucket of chicken at the beach with Julie
4. Key Lime Pie!

Four sites I visit daily
1. Clan Robot
2. Fark
3. Dad Gone Mad
4. Daily Dose of Imagery

Four albums I really dig
1. Boston. The first one. For my money, one of the best rock albums ever made.
2. Collective Soul, “Youth” I dig just about everything by these guys, but this album is my favorite.
3. Maroon 5, “Songs About Jane” A great collection of songs. It’ll be interesting to see if these guys can do it again.
4. Evanescence, “Fallen” Amy Lee’s voice is just amazing. That, and it’s playing on the stereo right now.
That’s the first four off the top of my head. There are plenty more.

Four places I would rather be right now
(a moving target, depending on where I am at the moment)
1. Taking Julie to Spain
2. In the pilot’s seat
3. In a movie theater with Joe, James, or my brother Jim (and of course Julie)
4. Some place warm. NE Ohio in mid-February pretty much blows.

I now challenge Joe to waste forty minutes writing up his list of four.

*Okay, one note of explanation. These things are in no particular order of preference, just the order in which they came to mind.