Poo tee weet?

I had just invoked Vonnegut in conversation tonight, too.

He was to me what Tolkien was to many of my friends. When I was in high school and my head needed rearranging, Breakfast of Champions was there to help.

Fiddle dee dee

I have a doctor's appointment next month. I was hoping to fit one in at the start of this week, but there were some insurance registration hangups that ended up with the completion of my 2006 tax return as a dependency, so I had to kick it forward. (They wanted to see my Schedule C as proof of self-employment, but they didn't want to see my 2005 Schedule C with its ~$1.75 in O'Reilly royalties, which doesn't appear to be the tax filing of an independent software contractor).

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MICHAEL: I almost had Pop-pop in Reno.
GEORGE MICHAEL: [Sadly] Yeah, me too.

On the third and final season of my Arrested Development download bolus. I feel almost bad about laughing at jokes that are only there as rewards for long-time viewers, but then again "long-time viewer" for me means that I started with the pilot episode only four months ago.

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Finally got around to gluing graphics (via <itunes:image> tags) onto my two podcasts. Hmm, and now that I look I see that the Gameshelf one shows up in iTMS but not the Arcade's pretty graphic. I tried to go with the rectangular one with old-skool screen dimensions. I guess Apple insists on squares. All right then.

I also got an email from Apple, asking us video podcasters to start exporting at 640x480 because that looks nice on both AppleTV and iPod (which scales it down). Very well.

There's a Gameshelf shoot in less than two weeks and I still don't know what's gonna be shot! I've been on such a Volity jag that I really haven't thought about the video-production pillar in weeks. No complaints from me, mind, but I nonetheless must figure out what I'm doing there.

Hard Read

I finally just got the joke in this PBF comic after encountering it for the third time. It's pretty funny, but it should have emphasized more that the book-people aren't looking at each other in the middle panel. In fairness, I suppose this is tricky to do if your characters lack faces.

(At first I thought maybe the man-book was apologizing for impotence or something, but that didn't really explain why they're books in the first place. I found myself feeling a whisper of 6th-grade anxiety that here was a dirty joke that all my friends were laughing at while it only perplexed me.)

I spend all the money now.

The super-cheap Apple refurbs that keimel linked to a while ago seem to be long gone, sadly. So with that temptation gone, I have commenced to beat up on my debt in earnest, laying $2,200 into it just now. Contrary to initial plans, I split this first payment across my credit card and personal debts. The latter involves a significantly larger total, and its interest rate is less financial than it is psychic. Taking a chunk out relives the pressure quite a bit.

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Lately I've been shopping at Amazon a lot. I ordered some audio equipment from it yesterday, including a Blue Snowball USB mic with tripod and pop filter. I haven't been happy with the results from the cheapo Logitech mics I've used in the past, but I didn't want to splurge on an XLR-based mic/board/amp setup either, not just yet. The snowball seems to have received a lot of appoving nods from podcasters as a good middle-of-the-road solution.

The trouble with Amazon is that at the same time I find myself pre-ordering Mario Party 8 at the same time, and I'm like, what? This kind of links in to the fact that if you're a gamer and you're dating a gamer, you can easily get into some real trouble. You can rationalize every purchase of a new game by convincing yourself that you're doing it out of self-sacrifice. It's pretty gnarly, man.