I'm not anti-DJ, I just wish they'd shut up.

It's bad enough that the local clubs can't host a show with fewer than four or five bands most of the time, but when they have DJs in between the bands that play music at the same volume as the bands, it really ticks me off. Heaven forbid you should want to actually talk to the people you're there with in between acts or order a drink at a reasonable volume.

There's nothing wrong with DJs playing loud music, but I only want them to do that if I'm there to see a DJ. I also have nothing against DJs playing in between live acts, as long as they keep it to a reasonable volume. It's the five solid hours of loud-ass noise that make me cranky when I go to shows these days. Five hours of loud-ass noise interrupted by relative quiet is much more sane. Eardrums need a break every now and again.

This came up because I went to a show on Friday. The Bugs of Lightning ruled as usual, but DJ Dance Attack can suck it. His music way too loud -- it didn't help that none of it really grabbed me. Romanteek wasn't my cup of tea, but the woman singing has an amazing voice, and they did some reasonably cool things. We left right after Mannequin Makeout started playing. There were parts of the two songs we caught that I liked, but I don't think they're my favorite new band. Then again, if I wasn't cranky about the DJ in between bands, I might have liked both them and Romanteek a whole lot better.

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Snippets of literature

At the cafe, the decaf had just been dumped out. As I waited for a fresh pot to brew, I sat in a relatively unpopulated corner of the cafe. There was me and, a few tables down, a guy with a long red ponytail reading a book. I wouldn't have noticed much about him, really, but he began to read out loud.

It was difficult to hear over the Michael Jackson on the stereo, but it sounded like he was reading bits of dialogue. He was then silent for a time before speaking the words of the book again. I wondered if he was only reading dialogue until he switched to narration.

I decided I would ask him what had prompted him to read aloud. I decided against it.

Once my coffee was ready and the exact right amount of half and half had been added, I turned to leave. Walking out, I glanced over at the guy with the book, who was no longer reading. He looked lost, like a puppy.

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An inch and a half

On Friday, the sky directly above my sister's house dumped an inch and a half of rain. In 33 minutes. The water, unable to seep into the ground that quickly, had nowhere to go. Seeking to level itself out, the water rushed down her driveway, which unfortunately slopes toward the house, where it pooled up so that it was almost to her husband's knees as he stood in his driveway. The garage doors buckled and in the water rushed. After filling the garage, it seeped through into the family room and finally leveled out. There was three feet of water in her house.

Almost as amazing as the destructive power of water were the reconstructive powers of her friends and neighbors. By the time Ransom and I got there around noon on Saturday, a veritable horde of kind people had already cleared out the garage and family room, removed the carpet, and scrubbed the floors with bleach water to sanitize. Brooke said her garage floor had never been cleaner, and I believe her. It's sparkling!

We spent most of the afternoon with about ten(?) other people cleaning the bottom three feet of table legs, chairs, and other things that were salvageable but had been sitting in the water. As of yesterday, all the damaged sheetrock and insulation has been removed and everything that was in the flooded areas has either been thrown out or sanitized and piled in the garage. So long as the sky behaves itself, the worst is likely over. Of course, there's the small matter of insulating, sheetrocking, carpeting and painting the family room again, but that should be significantly easier now that all the water's gone.

Also unfortunate is the fact that their insurance doesn't cover flooding "if the water touches the ground first." That sounds like a load of B.S. to me, but there was a rumor going around that flood insurance can only be purchased from the government. I haven't done any research on it, so we'll wait until the insurance adjuster can get out there and give the actual explanation, but it sounds like this is going to all be out of pocket money.

So, the morals of this story are: Insurance companies suck, Ransom totally rules for giving up his weekend to clean and carry things, Brooke has awesome friends, water is amazingly destructive, and I forgot to mention this in the rest of the story, but my nieces and nephew are probably the cutest things ever in the whole world. Which isn't so much a moral as another train of thought, but I'm tired and my brain refuses to act in a linear fashion. It's laundry time.

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Website downtime

Over the past month or so, it seems that this site has been down rather a lot -- usually just for 10-20 minutes at a time, but I find it bothersome. I've contacted my web host to see what the problem is and have been told that this sort of thing is usually due to an abusive user who is hosted on the same server. If it keeps happening, they'll move me over to a more stable server.

Long story short, please send me an email if you notice that the site is down. Obviously, it didn't happen this time, but for future times, it would be great if you can drop me an email or come back later and let me know via the comments.

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Stuff, things

Those are some totally excellent (and crazy) endings y'all have provided. Thank you. Because of your efforts, I have a rough draft of a story that I put together on Sunday. I'll clean it up and post it here soon. Honest. Here are some other things I'm planning on doing soon, in no particular order:

• Build soapbox derby car (hard to be motivated at spot 19 on the wait list)
• Have yard sale (so much crap!!)
• Clean the crap out of my house and fix up the yard so I can...
• Sell my house
• Buy new house
• Move
• Rebuild computer (it's never been the same since the evil virus, and Ransom's going to help me with a Linux partition so's I can know what all the kids are talking about)

There are other, lesser tasks like "redesign web site," but my ever-shifting priorities tend to put those things toward the bottom of the list. And now you are privvy to the thoughts running through my head. It's a thrill a minute, I assure you.

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The crazy ending game

Something I haven't been doing much of lately, is write. You may have noticed the dearth of blog posts around here. My journal that you don't get to see has had one entry in the last six months. My folder of short creative writing is virtually empty. It's not because I don't think of stories. I think of the beginnings of 2-4 stories a day. I just haven't been making the time to write them down. Also, I've learned from experience that beginnings don't always turn into anything.

One of the things that makes me a good programmer is that I'm good at troubleshooting. I can look at a desired end-result and come up with a reasonable way to get there (usually). I've decided to attempt to combine this with writing in order to get my creative juices flowing.

That's where you come in. I need crazy endings. Then I can imagine some sort of logical (or illogical but amusing) path that led to a particular ending, and write the beginning of the story. The stories will be posted here, on the assumption that at least one person will be interested.

Here's a sample crazy ending: "So there Shiela was, running through the airport with an enormous stuffed giraffe tucked under one arm and the door from her glove box in the other. She had never been happier."

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People watching

With the arrival of the sun on a more or less daily basis, Portland has changed dramatically. Busy people with smiling faces are everywhere. I call them "worm people," because they're like worms after the first rain: suddenly, you can't avoid stepping on them.

At lunch today, I sat in Pioneer Square with the intrepid Kenna and watched the people. There were a bunch of school kids around. As two of them passed in front of us, one said, "Hey Jason, I know what will cheer you up." They moved away before we heard the answer. I don't know which is the more compelling question: how was this kid going to cheer Jason up? Or why did Jason need cheering up in the first place?

Sometimes, people-watching just raises a lot of fruitless questions.

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Pimping my friends, part three

Josh, of Aural Times fame, has a new project -- and yet another domain. Whilst talking to fellow musicians on Metafilter, he conceived the idea of creating a compliation album with submissions from fellow Metafilter geeks. And then he actually began to follow through on that idea. You can preorder a copy, or just keep track of the album's progress. Or, I suppose you could ignore it completely, but that's not as much fun.

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19

Because I am a lazy slacker and I don't normally get out of bed until 8:30 or so, I felt I was doing well by showing up right at 8:00am to sign up for the soapbox derby. I was wrong.

On the waiting list, our team is #19. That means 19 of 42 teams need to fail to make their vehicles. Or maybe just eight teams need to fail to make a derby car and then 11 of the people on the waiting list ahead of us need to bail as well. It could be any combination of numbers, really, so long as it adds up to 19 or more.

Fucking snooze button.

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