The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard – Page 178

Blowing off some steam

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Prior to the announcement of the buyout I had made plans to see Southern Culture on the Skids at the Continental Club on Thursday. This band is hard to describe but imagine a trailer park version of the B-52’s and you come close. I make it a point to see them each year when they pass through town and they never disappoint.

As it turned out, the evening was a great chance to unwind and de-stress quite a bit. Plenty of good people in attendance and some I had not seen in a long time.

The show was as good and better than I had hoped.

SCOTS

More pics of the show in the gallery

I love the smell of acquisitions in the morning

There’s nothing like coming to work and opening your e-mail to find a message from the CEO announcing that the company you work for has been sold. The deal is for nearly $500 million in cash, not that any significant portion of that is coming my way.

This is my fourth buyout in 10 years. It’s never pleasant but at least I pretty much know what to expect in the coming months. For many of my co-workers this is a new experience. They’re all buzzing with questions and concern. You can smell the fear.

Time to spruce up the old resume and perk up my professional ears. It always pays to be prepared. Of course I might get to stay on with the new company. They have offices all over the world and who knows? Maybe I can move to another state or even another country.

As always, the future remains unwritten. For now I choose optimism.

Google-spike

I’m enjoying this while it’s still novel.

Today’s Helpline Blog item was a Q&A about Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer entitled Trying to eliminate Internet Explorer. Apparently Google News bundled this blog entry with the news release regarding Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer Beta 7.

This resulted in ginormous spike in the number of page views in less than 20-30 minutes and an explosion of comments that I am slowly but surely reviewing and publishing.

Forgive an old man his dated colloquialism but I have to say one thing….

NEAT!

Do do do lookin’ out my back door

Meet Ricky Handsomepants.

Click!

A man with a nice car don’t need no justification

The Art Car Weekend is coming May 12-14, the highlight of which is the Art Car Parade in May 13. We missed it last year due to our European vacation.

Looks like the annual Art Car Ball music line up has been set and it sure does suck. Don’t get me wrong, the bands unto themselves are ok, but they are more suited for a rockabilly/hotrod show than they are to this event (in my opinion). I say bring back the likes of Mojo Nixon or The Red Elvises.

A few years back they had The Paladins which was pretty cool if you have to do the rockabilly thing.

Ah well, there’s so much more to the event than the music anyway, so it’s fine. At least they have a venue suitable for the Thursday night crush of freakish humanity and cars.

My good friend David Jungen tells me he may be bringing my all time favorite art car, the Stereotype One, down from Austin for the festivities.

Clickity-click me!

Weather permitting, Cynthia and I should be at the parade this year. Not sure about the rest of the events.

The mind is a terrible thing to taste

The following conversation between Cynthia and myself as we prepared to go to sleep last night is just one the billion reasons I love this woman:

Setup: We are in the early planning stages of our next European vacation

J: I found a way to fund our trip!
C: Does it involve the sale of organs or blood?
J: How did you know?!?
C: I know you, Jay….
J: I figure we each have a kidney to spare
C: I seem to recall you giving away a perfectly good gall bladder
J: Perfectly good?!? It was full of gall stones as you might recall
C: Well? caveat emptor I say
J: For sale, one slightly used gall bladder, may contain some gallstones
J: [feigning the voice of a third party] Hey! This gall bladder’s no good!
J: No refunds

[much laughter]

C: We’re not selling our organs, Jay
J: I know

Here be dragons

Lot’s of hard work is paying off. The yard is looking really good this year.

We have the feeders out and the bird activity is really quite impressive.

We have the usual flock of sparrows that raid periodically along with the morning doves that wait on the ground for whatever might fall their way. I’m still waiting to get a picture of our mated pair of cardinals that have been around every year since I can remember. Cynthia named them Ricky and Lucy. The baby cardinal last year was named Jethro for his clumsiness.
The baby this year has only been spotted once and is, as yet, unnamed.

Of particular delight to Cynthia is the fact that we finally came up with a feeder that is squirrel proof. Not that the neighborhood squirrels aren’t trying. In fact, that is what amuses Cynthia the most. She laughs and laughs as the squirrels climb everything they can find in the backyard looking for a way to access the tasty feed that hangs so close, yet so far out of reach.

I had my first spotting of Lizardo this season. He was on the garage and really putting on a show. I think there’s another male lizard in vicinity and Lizardo was staking his claim to the garage and surrounding flower beds.

Late Saturday afternoon Cynthia and I were just sitting on the swing watching all the activity when a butterfly landed on her knee. It would fly away and land on the nearby bricks and then fly back and land on her knee again. It repeated this a dozen or so times.

Right now it’s still pleasant but you can tell it’s going to be a hot summer. We’re enjoying it while we can.

from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea

Technology Bytes is moving back to it’s old time slot of 8-10 pm. We had been moved to the 7-9 pm slot for awhile but it was just not the same so I lobbied for our old slot and they finally gave it to us. The change takes effect Wednesday April 19th.

This is part of a station-wide programming revamp. Many shows are moving. The new program schedule is online at the KPFT website and can be downloaded in PDF format directly from this link.

In other Tech Bytes house-keeping news; Groovehouse has been doing an awesome job as the new phone screener, following in the footsteps of the original Phone Girl, Leslie the Phone Girl, Phone Boy and David. And beyond that he has become the official photo-chronicler of Tech Bytes at the studio and at our events. You can check out his work in the on-air gallery of geekradio.com.

Some of my favorites:

Jay Lee, Barrett Canon, Lauren Steffy, Dwight Silverman