I'll · kill · you · with · my · teacup

I've gotta be missing something.

How do you perform noise reduction in Ableton Live?

This was like bread and butter for Cool Edit 2k and is for Adobe Audition, but it looks like Ableton doesn't have it stock and needs a plugin or whatever. Whah. I've got some wicked line hiss on this second hand mixer and my cartridges kind of suck. I mean, sure, step one is don't buy cheap gear, but failing that...

Customer: So what's the deal here I mean what's the real source of the problem?

Rep: Well it's just basically got to do with the way your Mac handles networking when you're logged in on the Windows side using BootCamp or Parallels.

Customer: Well what are you doing about it?!

Rep: I'm seeing a therapist.

Not sure if i'll have time or even energy to party. We'll have a little dog that may or may not get along with another little dog, so it could be a lot of time spent supervising dogs and/or just generally recovering from getting five hours of sleep and then driving 9 hours.

But what the hell! If you know of a Fun Thing Happening Saturday Night, spills plz.

Went to the IMAX by UT last night at midnight and oh, man, what a freaky line to be standing in.

The movie totally sucked. I don't get all the hype, seriously, and the Joker was a really total fucking joke. Heath who?

( Please... )

Way to fuck your candidate, folks. Highlights:

Obama Peepz: What the fuck, you guys? Are you with Fox News now or something?

New Yorker: Haha! No, no, sorry. This is actually a joke. You have heard of "political satire," Senator?

Obama Peepz: BULLSHIT.

At this point, there is only one thing that can fix this:

Obama himself needs to come out of the bathroom as if nothing had gone down at all and be like, "What'd I miss? Oh, DAMN that is HILARIOUS! Ha ha! Is that Michelle?! Hey, honey, come here and look at the New Yorker! Yeah you're on the cover. With a machinegun! Jew cartoonists are some funny bastards."

Seriously, Bill Burton. I don't know who you are, but who the fuck told you to say a thing?

And, as always, the scariest facts are at the end of the article as far from the headline as possible:

A Newsweek poll released Friday showed that 12 percent of those polled believed Obama was sworn in as a U.S. senator on a Quran, and 26 percent believed that he was raised as a Muslim.

Okay, that is not funny.

Shit that is the haps:

• Black belt: after some wailing, much gnashing of teeth, and many go-nowhere phone conversations, my black belt certificate is just about official even after a near-miss falling out with my instructor in Seattle. Does earning a black belt necessarily mean getting involved in organizational/intra-school fucking politics? Seriously, that was like pulling teeth. I'm very happy to be moving forward with a hard-earned credential...to a new instructor.


• New job: I gave notice today and start a new gig on the 21st. It's a slight pay cut but it's downtown, so the commute will way more than make up for the lost money. Plus it's more along the lines of what I actually want to do (which is not "stare at SQL queries all day").


• New car: My dad called me basically out of nowhere and offered me his 1998 Camry. He totally just basically up and bought a new one but wasn't satisfied with the trade-in offer he got. Nice!

That means you, enth and deusdiabolus:

I've been doing the bedroom DJ thing on and off for over a decade now and I've been balancing my tone arms pretty much the same way ever since I learned that it was Even A Thing You Should Do. But I was just having a bit of a time of getting the anti-skate set just right so I decided to look at some how-to articles.

I found a how-to that states DJ's who scratch or back-queue should leave the anti-skate set to zero.

What the fuck. Seriously?

I got the result I wanted by just raising the tone arm as high as it would go instead of the recommended setting plus one. But seriously I'm curious now, what do you guys do with your anti-skate setting?

I don't know about you people, but I'm already sick and fucking tired of watching Angelina Jolie lie down on top of a goddamned train every time Law & Order has to cut to commercial.

(There are also questions about the wisdom of releasing a movie before a wide audience which proposes that flinging your pistol (like, with your wrist) -- if done skillfully enough -- just might cause your fire to arc, hitting targets on the other side of people you don't intend to shoot.)

There's this guy I work with -- let's call him Mark. Mark is a pretty chill, relaxed guy. You might call him chillaxed. I am remarkably high strung compared to this dude, but we have one thing in common: we hate meetings.

In a meeting earlier today, I scribbled a note on a steno pad which read, "WHEN WILL IT END?"

In response, Mark turned a page and wrote, in block letters, "I QUIT." He spent the rest of the meeting fleshing out the words, doodling on them, making them pop. It was pretty sweet looking by the time he was done.

A couple of hours later, Mark goes off to another meeting. I've got my headphones on, grooving to whatever Pandora is throwing at me, when I notice people around the Tier 2 area starting to kind of freak out. There are panicked expressions. There is finger-pointing.

If you've ever worked in tech support, you know that a little wild arm-waving and some harsh words on the part of a few of your compatriots is rarely cause to pay attention. But this was, like, everyone.

So I took my headphones off just in time to hear, "No, dude, this is your fault. Mark is gone now and we're gonna have to pull the rest of this year's questionnaires out of our asses for [Huge Candy Company]."

"What do you mean it's my fault? I was just trying to tell him --"

"Yeah, well, you told him wrong."

Me: "What the fuck is up, people?"

Another guy, let's call him Charles, holds up Mark's notepad with what appears (to them) to be an extremely succinct farewell message.

I QUIT.

What was up, apparently, is that I was the only person who knew Mark was just in a meeting. Did I explain that and add that this message was just a friendly joke? Hell no!

"Well, what did you expect? Uhh...hey can you guys get this [Huge Candy Company] shit done without him? Oh, shit, you probably can't! Daaaaaaaamn."

The account manager for [Huge Candy Company] even got into the mix and started stomping around a bit. Right before it went to his boss, though, Mark showed up and we all totally lost our shit. The I QUIT note has now been taped to the wall and someone is talking about having a plaque made of it. No lie.

I hate commuting to this place every day, but I gotta admit I don't hate being here. That shit was lols.

How many, exactly? I don't know. I could find out -- all the information I need is right here -- and later I just might. For now, it's enough for me to know that I could know, you know, if I ever want to know.

No, sir, I'm not a rich man. I'm not a powerful man. But I am a happy man*.

*Occasionally, a happy man becomes a bored man and starts poking around in the databases he's paid to support...

I'm frustrated that Best Buy ran out of Wii Fit and isn't getting any more until who knows when. Meanwhile, I propose that we get together and create our own independent Wii game -- we might even release it through their online distribution scheme.

I propose a british-themed dating sim for the Wii. We'll call it:

Wii Fit & Loaded

HELL YEAH man let's do this thing!

Features:

• Use the Wii's unique motion sensor controls to brush your teeth, apply designer scents (careful you don't grab the shaving cream by mistake!), get dressed in the morning, and a host of other hygiene-related tasks that make your character more attractive to the opposite sex.


• Minigame: strike alluring poses while waiting in line for "chips and drinks" and then try to guess "what the shrapnel in your back pocket will afford."


• Keep your "flat" neat and tidy -- it's like you're really sweeping!


• Male characters try to impress the ladies at "football," while female characters can "go shoppin'." Wii Fit & Loaded is fun for boys and girls!

We will be in Seattle this weekend for a wedding, and that means some of you lovely people get a chance to hang out with us. Woah! Here's the general plan.

• Friday: Landing late this morning, taking care of some errands, and heading to Bow to visit G's dad for a few hours. Tonight there is a great possibility of hanging out. There's also a distinct possibility of the X/Detroit Cobras show at the Fun House.


• Saturday: Wedding, dinner with G's mom. Another chance of making it out to some bars, some clubs, or maybe just Charlie's. Who the hell knows.


• Sunday: 100% chance of brunch, be it at Linda's on the hill or at the Original Pancake House in Ballard.

We're sort of making this a computer vacation as well, mostly since neither of us feel like humping our laptops through a couple of airports, so I'm not going to see any comments on this post. Instead, you folks should totally just call me if you want to get together, and I'll certainly be sending a ton of text messages myself when Shit Is Imminent.

Can you recommend a trustworthy and excellent pet sitter who operates in 78704? Please do! We have a small dog and a cat that will need some potty relief and a little attention a couple of times a day friday, saturday, and sunday.

We could board the dog and just have a neighbor check on the cat, but we're pretty sure the little guy would be much more comfortable at home for the weekend with his feline housemate and his own bed.

So I decide to give this new station on SomaFM a shot, right, and I kind of dig the first track I hear and I sort of space out...

...then I come to and suddenly realize I'm listening to a fucking Postal Service song. Yes, yes, you guys -- everything does look perfect from far away. Come down now, I say!

ETA: now it's playing something by The Notwist, which is frankly a bit more the speed I'm looking for.

I don't know from SQL so much but I guess TRAN must be short for transaction. I'm going through this stored procedure line by line and I'm seeing the damned thing everywhere. BEGIN TRAN. COMMIT TRAN. ROLLBACK TRAN.

Wow. This is a hot TRANny mess. :O

Somebody bought all my shuttles! talshoe, the shuttle game is officially on. They cost about 10,000 to produce and will sell reliably for 18,000 to 20,000. Please join me in taking advantage of an unstable market.

In other news...

My parents are in town! They came bowling last night with us and a great many of our neighbors from the Courtyard, and let me tell you, even with an eyepatch on my dad can roll some fuckin' rocks. It's disturbing to think I have that man's genes, and to see me bowl next to him you really wouldn't believe it. To take him down a peg, I told him about how I used to roll his league bowling ball down the hardwood stairs where we lived when I was 7 years old.

He wasn't fazed. I got clobbered.

The bowling adventure was part of the Big Lebowski party which my parents elected not to attend -- our neighbors downstairs set up a projector and speakers outside and provided booze and grilled edibles.

The whole thing was pretty stupid. And by stupid I mean AWESOME. Several people wore costumes. Our host, for starters, was dressed exactly like Walter (John Goodman's character). Seriously, not a detail was missing. He's even proportioned like the guy. It was basically fucking awesome.

The cops got called, k? 'Nuff said.

I know you folks love captain's log style posts, so here is what's on tap:

Today it's Gospel Brunch at Stubb's and perhaps a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. In between those, maybe the LBJ Museum/Library, maybe Mt. Bonnell if it's not too hot.

Allow me to commend to your attention this little gem of the intertron. After two weeks of G insisting that I just sign up and friend her, damn it, "What is wrong with you why can't you just take two seconds to click a thing?" I have become completely addicted to this shit.

If you listen to music all day at work, you will, too. Seriously. I sit there on Pandora or whatever, hear a song I kind of dig, look it up, and then do a quick two-sentence writeup about it.

It has a little wish list component too! I'm actually using it to help me keep a list of records I want to buy.

Check it out and friend my white ass at this link right here.

In fact I am going to name talshoe, batboymaxx, and wraincloud so I know at least you three spot this post.

"Yeah well we did what you suggested and it just blew up!"

Man, I swear to God, if I have to hear about a database "blowing up" one more time today I'm going to flee the building screaming a scream that will curdle any blood, sour any milk, and spoil any eggs within ten blocks of this here piece. Then you can talk to me about shit blowing up.

Like okay fine so it blew up, huh? Are you sure it didn't just wet the bed or shit itself? No, it actually fucking blew...up? Are you sure it didn't blow...chunks, maybe?

You're saying there was a fuckdamned explosion?

I call bullshit, mister, because your teeth and eyeballs still all exist within roughly the same cubic foot of space. My cube walls are clean -- there are no little bits of skin dripping down from them. There is no blood, nobody died, nothing is on fire, so we need you to be calm now, please, and just explain what the fuck actually happened.

Msg 239, Level 999, State 1, Line 1
Invalid assessment 'oh holy shit we're all gonna die kaboom'

What is it about tech industry geeks that makes them want to use this kind of hyperbole to describe basic fucking support issues? And why do they tend to accompany it with Dilbert-esque arm-waving?