New Kings of Leon Album Out Soon

Have you heard Kings of Leon? I've always had a sweet spot for The Allman Brothers and Lynrd Skynrd, and KOL's first album had a great southern take on the garage rock thing.

Their new album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, is due out in the US Feb. 22, and I can't wait.

The import reviews on Amazon have said it is even better than their debut album, Youth & Young Manhood, which I thought was pretty great.

Another great thing about KOL is that their music is pretty simple. I can stumble my way through a few of their songs, and they're quite fun to play. The best tab site I've found for them so far is Happy Alone.

Listening: Ray LaMontagne

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

So I'm pretty fired up about The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. Douglas Adams was one of my favorite authors, I'd heard rumors about a movie for quite a long time, and now they've finally announced it is due out on May 6. I can't wait.

The title of this page "Digital Watches are a Pretty Neat Idea" comes from the introduction of The Hitch Hiker's Guide.

Listening: Beck - Sea Change

The Rise of "Worse is Better''

I just read a great little essay called The Rise of "Worse is Better".

I think it hits the nail on the head. At work my to-do list always grows much faster than I manage to remove things from it, so it always seems like getting things done trumps getting things done prefectly.

It's very white outside

Snow. More snow. And then more snow after that.

We're getting dumped on with snow here in the Midwest. I don't have to travel anywhere today, so it looks like a good day to sit in my pajamas, drink a big mug of hot coffee and watch it fall.

Regarding all this snow, why is it that we've had a really wimpy winter until the last week or two, and now that it has gotten cold and snowy all of the stores are putting winter things on clearance and they have spring items out? It doesn't make much sense to me to sell shorts when there's snow falling outside, but I guess that's why I'm not a retail manager.

The Joy of Loose Tea

So I was out wandering around stores and I picked up a Bodum tea infuser for making loose tea yesterday, and I tested it out this morning. I'm not to picky about decorations, I have hand-me-down furniture, but I am a sucker for well designed culinary items.

For my first at home journey into loose tea, I made some Twinings Irish Breakfast tea. I've read before that tea elitists prefer loose tea. I'd like to think that it tastes better. I'm not really sure. I just enjoy the process. That is the same reason I make coffee using a french press (plunger pot) instead of having a drip coffee maker. It is a little more putzy, but I don't mind it.

Well I'm at it, Linux and backwards compatibility

Nothing for two weeks, and now two posts in one day.

I've recently had the enjoyment of figuring out how to migrate our web server at work from Redhat 7.3 up to RHEL 3.0. It actually started out as an upgrade to PHP, but building a recent version of PHP required so many upgrades to Redhat 7.3 (including obtaining a newer version of glibc, which means trouble) that it turned into a complete distro upgrade. More than anything else, it taught me that you can never assume anything about backwards compatibility when it comes to Linux.

I love playing with Linux, but it seems like the Linux motto is "Backwards compatibility stands in the way of progress", whereas Windows (in many cases) works hard for backwards compatibility through the efforts of people like Raymond Chen. Anyway, if you're ever testing things under Linux, never assume things will work unless you've matched the version of every tool you're using.

I can't just have one post on my blog, or it's hard to get back on the computer after work

I popped on the computer to do some banking stuff, and I realized I still only had one lone post on my blog. It is awfully hard to get back on the computer after sitting on it for eight hours at work, but if I'm going to have this space setup, I suppose I should write in here once in a while.

I recently went on a CD spending spree a few days ago, and I'm really happy with my purchases.

Here's what I picked up:

• Jem - Finally Woken - A little bit of electronic, beats, acoustic guitar in some places, reggae in others, and great vocals.
• Rhett Miller - The Instigator - Finely crafted alt-country pop songs about girls.
• Jack Johnson - On and On - Good mellow grooves. His first album is a lot of fun to play on the acoustic guitar.
  

A cold, and a blog again

I came down with a cold, and I've been cooped up in my apartment.

After watching several hours of "Wild West Tech" (oh how David Carradine has fallen), I felt a little bored so I decided to put up a blog again, and revamp the look of the rest of my web page.

My HTML knowledge is a little rusty (getting a better grasp on CSS is on my to-do list, which is too long as always), but I managed to reformat the rest of my page to match the formatting of the "rounder3" theme that is one of the defaults from Blogger.

I feel like things look a lot better than they did before. Maybe now that I have it looking pretty, I'll even add some new content one of these days. I got a digital camera for Christmas (Cannon PowerShow A75 - it is great!) that I've been playing with alot, and I suppose I should put up some of the photos I've been taking with it.

Back to eating comfort food, pushing fluids, and watching mindless TV.