Ants on the Melon
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For the first time ever I actually agree with Donald Trump. He thinks that the proposals for the replacmentment World Trade Center are all lame, and that they should rebuild them exactly as they were, except one story taller. This is what I have thought all along, I hope it gets some consideration.

I drove up to Austin tonight to see The Gourds perform a free show at Scholz Garten. After a long day of training at work, I was pretty tired and I was not sure that I wanted to drive up there, but I am sure glad I did. Of the 5 times I have seen The Gourds so far, this was probably the best show yet, and they didn’t even play any of my favorite songs. There were lots of people dancing (to Gourds music?) and the crowd was completely into the show, which, I realized tonight, is a key ingredient for a great Gourds show. As soon as they started playing tonight I remembered why they are my favorite band. The songs are almost always upbeat, the type that your foot starts tapping to and you can’t make it stop. They played a lot of electric stuff tonight, which normally I don’t like but tonight it was perfect for the setting. (“electric” Gourds to me is when Kev plays the electric guitar ) They jammed on several songs, and hopefully the show will make its way on Casa Huevos Negros.

Around 10:30 I was following 2 pickup trucks down I-35 back to San Antonio when I popped over a hill and saw that traffic was completely stopped ahead in all 3 lanes. The trucks in front of me quickly shot over to the right shoulder, and, sensing what they were about to do, I followed behind them. We drove along the shoulder for about a quarter of a mile until we could see that an 18 wheeler was blocking all traffic, and the cops had arrived on the scene. At that point the truck in front of me turned right into the huge ditch/field that separates the interstate from the access road. Once again I followed behind him, which turned out to be an excellent move because I was back on the interstate in about a mile. It was a strange feeling to be on a completely empty interstate while there are 3 full lanes of traffic going in the opposite direction, but that’s ok because I made it home from Austin in a little over an hour.

I drove up to Dripping Springs, Texas this afternoon to see Hot Club of Cowtown play at the Legends of Texas Swing Music Festival.

I arrived about 5 minutes before Hot Club’s first set was scheduled to start. There were two stages set up at the festival, so I went over to stage 2 and sat my chair down in an empty spot up front before the show on stage 1 finished. They played their first set from 5:15 to 6:00, and it was amazing, as expected. After the first Hot Club set Asleep at the Wheel performed on stage 1 from 6:00 to 7:15. They are pretty entertaining, but I saw them a couple months ago at the San Antonio Rodeo, and it wasn’t much different this time. The second Hot Club set was scheduled to start at 7:15 and last for 30 minutes. When they went on stage they asked Johnny Gimble to play with them, so he did. We lucked out because the performer that was supposed to go on after them on stage 1 was not ready in time, so instead of playing for 30 minutes Hot Club played with Johnny Gimble for an hour. I was able to record all of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby on my camera. (That file is 101 MB, and is about 5 and a half minutes of video, just so you know. ) I also took some pictures of Elana, Whit and Jake on stage. Overall this was a terrific show and I was sad to learn that they will not be playing together for much longer.

Afterwards I drove up to Waterloo Records in Austin and picked up Hot Club’s Ghost Train and Two Tons of Steel’s Transparent, both of which seem really good.

Chris is in town for Edwin and Annalie’s wedding, and he called me earlier this evening to let me know that Two Tons of Steel would be playing at Rebar tonight. I saw Two Tons perform twice last year during “Two Ton Tuesdays” at Gruene Hall, and I remember being impressed. But wow, somehow I had forgotten how amazing their lead guitarist is. I’ve seen a lot of really great guitarist, but this Dennis Fallon guy has got to be one of the best out there. I stayed for about an hour of the show tonight, but my stomache was really hurting, so I left around 11:30. If you live in the south Texas area, make it a point to see a Two Tons show.

Back in early April I attended a California Guitar Trio concert at the One World Theater in Austin. During the show one of the performers pulled out a camera and took several pictures of the audience from the stage. As it turns out, they do this at every show and they post the photos on their “Road Cam.” In this picture you can see Avie, me and Dave on the fourth row back on the right side. Pretty cool

A serious security issue has been found in the Firefox web browser, so any of you who use Firefox should go to getfirefox.com and download the latest version, 1.0.4.

You heard me, go!

And if you aren’t using Firefox, why not?

I am feeling pretty bummed out right now for several reasons.

I’ve been using DarwinPorts on the Powerbook, but recently I have not been happy with it. Too many of the ports are broken or no longer maintained. I even submitted a nice patch to the php port to the project over two months ago, but nothing has been done. After dealing with this, and seeing some of the headaches that upgrading DarwinPorts has caused at work, I think it is time to go back to Fink.

Fink is a package system for Mac OS X that uses the Debian apt/dpkg/dselect package management tools to provide a lot of open source software to Apple users. I used Fink on my iBook, and the only real complaint that I had was that the binary distribution was always out of date. For example, “stable” Fink only provides binaries for Subversion 1.0.6, even though the much-improved 1.1.x branch has been out for quite some time. This is somewhat annoying to a developer, because we usually need the latest versions of, well, everything.

So I just spent the evening installing the “unstable” source Fink distribution, and although it took a while to compile everything, it all went very smoothly. That wasn’t really much of a surprise, but it was a nice change from what I have been dealing with using DarwinPorts.

After 7 years of exclusively using Linux on my desktop, I haven’t had a Linux desktop in over two months now, and to my surprise I have started to miss something about it, I just don’t know what. I certainly do not miss having Sid break KDE and X11 after every other upgrade, but I think I miss having complete control over the software on my system. With most software for Mac OS X you are stuck with whatever somebody else has packaged, and however they have packaged it ( I always dread seeing something go in /opt ). That’s the nice thing about Fink unstable; it’s the best part of open source software (latest greatest, often updated), without having to worry about the stability of your system. And you can have it you’re way, just like Burger King promised.

I went out to Floore’s Country Store on Friday night to see Eleven Hundred Springs put on a great show. There wasn’t a huge crowd, which is great because I was able to keep my seat at a table near the front and have a full view of the band for the entire show. My only complaint is that the (somewhat new) fiddle player kept cutting off the pedal steel player. Other than that it was a terrific show, and I can’t wait for them to come back. They are playing at Floore’s again on Friday July 8th, and on Saturday they are inviting anyone and everyone to join them to float down the Guadalupe River and afterwards there will be a party with the band. It sounds like it could be a pretty good time.

Back in 1982 my dad purchased then-small Burkeville Body Shop in Burkeville, Virginia. A couple years after he was in business he had some t-shirts made with a small logo and a slogan. He would give these out to customers, friends, employees, family members, or anyone else who asked for one. I haven’t seen one of these shirts in probably 10 years.

Yesterday my dad called me and told me to go eBay, type in “burkeville” in the search box and then click on the first result. Well, I did this, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Apparently one of these shirts made its way out to California, and some guy there is selling it on eBay! Go see the VINTAGE BURKEVILLE BODY SHOP SUPER SOFT T SHIRT.

This is so crazy! Only a couple hundred of these shirts were ever made, and they were distributed in a town with a population of less than 500!

There ya have it, you can by anything on eBay.

It’s been a busy few days, fun though.

Brandon and I got together on Wednesday evening for our regular ritual of pizza, cigars and beer on the porch, followed by a documentary/movie. Last time we finished watching the series of episodes in The Elegant Universe, so Brandon suggested that we continue the tradition with Band of Brothers, an eleven part series that follows “The story of Easy Company of the US Army Airbourne Paratrooper division and their mission in WWII France during Operation Overlord.” (quoted from the Internet Movie Database) Brandon had been telling that this was a great series, and after seeing the first episode I am anxiously waiting to see the next one.

Thursday I had to get a few cavities filled, which is normally not a fun thing to do. Dr. Ngo makes it all okay though, he is awesome. Chris recommended Dr. Ngo to me, and after having a bad experience at another dentist in town I decided to go see him. I was very impressed. If you live in San Antonio and do not have a dentist, you should consider making an appointment with Dr. Ngo.

Last night I went over to Pepper and Ethan’s house for dork card night. Ethan and I teamed up to out-dork Jason and Josh, although in real life our dork powers are no way near as strong as theirs.

Tonight I am going up to Floore’s Country Store to see Eleven Hundred Springs lay it down. I’ve been listening to their stuff a lot lately, so I’m really looking forward to the show.