bobafred

In the spirit of 2007’s exhaustive list, I give you 2008’s Top 1 Album of 2008, posted in 2009:

Gojira - The Way Of All Flesh.

As the band’s name might suggest, this stuff is heavy. The Art of Dying is definitely my favorite of the 12 tracks. It’s nearly 10 minutes of punishing awesome for my hearing holes. Other tracks to watch out for are Adoration For None, Esoteric Surgery, and Wolf Down The Earth. As proof that this was my favorite album, check out this screenshot from last.fm. See, most listened to, and it even came out halfway through October. Imagine how many hundreds of listens it would have had if it came out in April or something.

Honorable mention has to go to The Sword for Gods Of The Earth, which continues in the grand tradition of Age of Winters.

As for the other music thing, my favorite live show of 2008 was seeing Early Man at the Earl. I arrived 5 minutes before they went on, which means I didn’t have to wait for some crappy opening band — awesome. They were pretty great live too — heavy and loud. They played tracks old and new and pretty much just ruled. It should also be noted that this show ranked higher than seeing The Sword twice, one of which was when they opened for Clutch.

That’s it. I’ll be back in six to eight months with another update.

I noticed an awesome bug today while looking up directions on Google Maps.

Do this:

1. Using Firefox, go to Google Maps.
2. Click the Print link just above the map. This will pop a new FF window and a modal print dialog.
3. Go back to the original FF window and type something somewhere, like in the address bar, or some web form or wherever.

Did it type in reverse? No? Honestly, it would sometimes not work for me either. But, between Lori and I we did see it happen in both Win XP and Vista with either FF2 or 3, including my new laptop (which doesn’t have Linux installed yet, or I would have probably checked there too).

.spets evoba eht gniod retfa siht depyt tsuj I

Anyway, I thought it was a fun bug so I wrote a blog post about it.

Tags: backwards, bug, firefox, google, google maps

There were some real heavy thinkers at the Thai restaurant tonight. I was trying to enjoy my Pad Thai and do some reading. They were changing lives:

“Believing that God doesn’t exist because his followers do bad things is like…” [pause while dude realizes he has to actually come up with something] “…believing skateboards don’t exist because there are bikes.”

Well, count me as a believer. In skateboards. But not bikes.

Tags: bike, food, God, pad thai, restaurant, skateboard, thai

Yesterday I took The Butt out to make number 2, like she likes to do from time to time. We went out the front door and down the steps of the front porch. We started to cross the front yard when out of nowhere something fell from the sky with a loud thud as it hit the ground. Whatever it was, it landed about 4 feet from us. It startled both of us.

We looked over and there was a squirrel lying on the ground. It got up, a little dazed, and dashed back to the “safety” of the nearest tree. We have giant old oak trees in our front yard, and the lowest branch on the tree it fell from is easily 30 feet in the air. I’m not exaggerating either. Our house has to be at least 15 feet tall, and it’s at least twice as high as the peak of our house. See look, I made a drawing on a photo:

After Molly realized what had happened, she lost it — barking, pulling, etc. This is probably the closest she has been to a real live squirrel without a window between them. She has this desire to eat squirrels. We think she might think they are mini-cats or something.

And, I don’t feel bad for the squirrel either, because:

1. Either this squirrel or one of his buddies throws spiny seed pod things at me when I walk under this tree sometimes. It would really hurt if I got hit by one.
2. The squirrels in our yard keep digging up our veggie garden. Assholes.

Anyway, it was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Tags: 9.8 m/s/s, fall, falling, fell, gravity, molly, not flying, oak, squirrel, tree

To read about the previous Secret Date Night, go here.

This time, I was the recipient of Secret Date Night, so that was awesome.

We began Saturday evening at Fritti. To start, we ordered the Calamari Fritti, which was light and crispy and delicious. There were super large tentacle clusters and perfectly tender rings. Really delicious. For my main I had the Frutti di Mare. It’s a cheeseless pizza topped with shrimp, scallops, calamari, and mussels. It was a little watery, most likely due to the water content of the seafood and the lack of cheese, but I loved it. Lori had the Crudo e Rucola, a pizza topped with arugula and prosciutto. Again, so good.

After dinner we headed across the street to Dad’s Garage for a performance of Song of the Living Dead. It’s a musical about love and zombies. The show was great — funny, bloody and totally inappropriate at times. Pretty much everything you’d expect. And who would have guessed that zombies could dance? If you get a chance to see this, you should. I had so much fun.

It’s awesome to have someone that knows me so well and can plan a perfect evening like this. I’m very lucky.

Tags: calamari, dad's garage, fritti, musical, pizza, secret date night, song of the living dead, zombie

I have a need to edit/update an MS Word .doc file. OpenOffice works mostly for this task, but I’ve found that when I save as .doc, it blows up the file size by about 100kbs. Also, some things just don’t seem to work right. For me, table dimensions and layout seem to not be saved correctly. I have a Windows XP partition with Office, but it’s a hassle to reboot whenever I want to do something Windows based.

Enter VirtualBox. I’ve been meaning to see if I could setup my already installed winxp partition in VirtualBox without too much work, so today I did some Googleing and found these resources:

Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox.
VirtualBox (virtualbox): How to boot from an existing Win XP partition under Ubuntu.

Follow them closely, especially the first one, and everything should work. Of course, if this destroys your machine it’s your fault and not mine.

A few things I found:

1. Don’t install what’s in the apt-get repos. You need the non-ose version. Get the .deb or whatever binary for your os from the VirtualBox Downloads Page.
2. Make sure to add yourself to the disk and vboxusers user groups. I missed the disk group at first and received errors.

Good luck.

Tags: 8.04, hardyheron, Linux, ubuntu, virtualbox, windows, xp