I have, in my hot little virtual hands, all the tracks from Rough Draft, the album that my former band, Ryan, recorded back in high school, freshly digitized by Michael. I put them up on a file hosting site to spare my poor home connection. I posted one of these tracks last month. They're here, or if you're reading this on my blog instead of Facebook, you can listen to them below.

The previous post still has a smokin' live version of What Price Love.

The people responsible are:

• James Rider - vocals
• Michael Norton - lead guitar, production
• Charlie Arnold - bass
• Adam Schwitters - guitar
• Tony Gambone (me) - drums
• Alyssa Lowe - guest vocals on We're All Mad Here

Michael just sent me a couple of recordings of our erstwhile band, Ryan. James on vox, Michael and Adam on the guitar, Charlie on the bass, and yours truly on the skins. Ah, good times. Have a listen:

What Price Love - Live (download):

Update: The second track, which is from our album, Rough Draft, has been reunited with its brethren and is available here.

Update 2: Moved the track from this server to a file hosting service.

Apparently I got old while I wasn't paying attention. Observe:

• It's been more than ten years since I graduated from high school.
• I am now older than every single college basketball player in the country.
• Yesterday, my wife asked me if my hair was turning gray (it's not, at least I think it's not).
• Also yesterday, my back was sore after dancing around with my daughter on my shoulders. My back has never been sore before.
• The baby on the the cover of Nevermind, which was released when I was in middle school and essentially defined my high school existence, is now in high school.
• It's recently become clear to me that I have fathered two entire people and am partially responsible for maintaining their well-being.
• I was born closer to Jimi Hendrix's death than my daughter was to Kurt Cobain's death.

Another ominous sign is that the long-standing magical equilibrium between my eating habits (lots) and my natural metabolism (adequate) appears to be slipping. Things are rounder than they used to be. My wife and my mother were in the same room together recently and convinced me to start exercising. So instead of rolling out of bed to check Reddit or tag Flickr photos, I am now on day three of taking the dog for a morning walk.

I actually kind of like it. I don't have to get up any earlier because I had already allowed time for geeky stuff before work. The morning is a nice time to be out - nice temperature, no people, no bumping into things. This morning I saw three stray cats, including one cute little tabby kitten.

I don't think I'm getting much exercise, though. Right now I'm focusing on the will power part of things. Maybe once I've established the habit I'll actually try to get the heart rate up a bit.

Lately I've been trying to force myself to do things that I know are good for me but that I don't like or that haven't been important to me, such as blogging (which I like) and listening to my voice mail when I get it (which I fucking hate, by the way. Email me. I have two in my box right now from Monday, so that's not going very well).

It's not that I feel like I should act a certain way now that I'm old. I enjoy a challenge, and lately I've actually been interested in self-improvement, which hasn't always been the case. I'm running out of computer languages to learn (at least, languages I might actually use, ever - apologies to Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, Smalltalk, C/C++, and the rest of them; I'm sure you're very nice, but I've pretty much got it covered, thanks). As a matter of fact, I think I still managed to avoid being dignified nearly all the time.

Life's too short to be dignified.

From the New York Times:

Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, "Ratatouille" is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

I am so looking forward to this movie.

Just to brighten your day a little, here's a slideshow of photos tagged "inexplicable" on Flickr. Enjoy.

Lately, with the TV season over, my wife and I have been perusing the networks' websites for episodes of shows we hadn't seen before. We do this instead of, say, reading, or talking, or other, more productive activities. It's bad enough that we watch good TV; watching shows we don't even care about is just an exercise in self-loathing.

But our latest find, October Road, has been entertaining. Not because the show is entertaining (which it is, mildly), but because it features some of the worst TV writing we've ever heard. Hearing some of the strange, awkward phrases that come out of the characters' mouths is an endless source of amusement.

Consider the scene where our hero, Nick, decides he's really in love with his old flame, Hannah. We're treated to a montage of Nick sprinting along a picturesque Massachusetts neighborhood street, interspersed with shots of "the other girl," Aubrey, packing her bags and crying. Cheesy enough, but nothing surprising. Nick arrives, out of breath, at Hannah's door.

Now, what does a guy in this situation say? He just sprinted to his true love's house. He's going to put himself out there. He's going to make his feelings known, right away, in no uncertain terms. He's out of breath, so he's going to be blunt, monosyllabic, and brief. Basically, it's going to be the Jerry Maguire "you had me at hello" speech, the one that makes your sweetie's knees weak. Right?

Wrong. Nick belts out this gem:

Everything about this place reminds me about my mother; everything. Her memory haunted it all, and when I left here, and put some distance between myself and the Ridge, it got easier. But just the thought of me coming back here, the pain of it, kept me away. It's indefensible, I know, but I was a kid, I was grieving, and I was dumb. I lost my way.

Huh? You sprinted halfway across town to talk about your mother? Then:

What I remember is you, barefoot, in your prom dress, pumping gas into my truck, laughing beneath the lipstick sky.

Yes, he actually utters the words "beneath a lipstick sky."

Now, I'm not a TV writer. But I know that there are things that look all right on paper, but that no one in their right minds would ever say out loud. I'd have to put "beneath a lipstick sky" in that category.

October Road is full of this purple stuff. The story is actually pretty engaging, with a good mix of characters. To their credit, the actors do a reasonable job of getting through their lines with straight faces. But I'm constantly feeling sorry for them because of the ridiculous things they're made to say. That gets old.

Here's another choice bit from the same episode:

Eddie: And then I was thinking about you, and the way you smile, and the way it starts in your eyes and spreads across your face like a rush of ink. I was thinking about how, when I see you, or I hear your voice on the phone, I think to myself, "Oh goody, now the fun begins."

Goody. Just for a little perspective here: Nick is a writer, so you could argue that he has an excuse. Eddie mows lawns.

Imagine my amusement when The Daily WTF happened to post this excellent screenshot today. It was meant to show how programming can go wrong, but as any software developer will tell you, sometimes bugs are actually features.

(An aside… my original comment on the Daily WTF post mentions Dean Koontz. When my wife and I lived in Germany, we used to go to the library and look for novels in English. They didn't have a lot, but they did have Dean Koontz. So we picked up a few, took them home, and read them. We still chuckle about that. I've long since forgotten the particulars, but Dean Koontz has this habit of overanalyzing his characters. Most novels would describe someone's behavior and allow you to reach your own conclusions as to their motives and mindset. Dean Koontz lays it all out - you get the action (say, X punches someone), the generalized mindset (X is an angry person), and the relevant back story (X's dad was a drunk and punched people), all in one or two convenient paragraphs. This gets the character development out of the way so we can move on with the plot. Handy, no? October Road reminds us a lot of Dean Koontz.)

Honestly, as weird as the dialogue is, we'll probably still watch October Road. At its core, it's driven by its characters - it owes a lot to Ed, Dawson's Creek, and similar shows - and they're likable, believable, and well-acted. They just need to stop with all the pseudo-Shakespearean speechifying.

Note: because I couldn't bear to watch the episode again, I ganked the quotes from TV.com. I'm not sure they're verbatim, but the important parts are.

How can you not be amazed at this:

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac's spiral-bound journals for "On the Road"; and Ezra Pound's copy of "The Waste Land," in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: "For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E." Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of "Comus," containing corrections in Milton's own hand? Or the manuscript for "The Green Dwarf," a story that Charlotte Bronte wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of "Ulysses," on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center's archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

Read more in The New Yorker.

Former deputy attorney general James Comey testified before the Senate on Tuesday about how he and FBI director Robert Mueller prevented Alberto Gonzales (then Bush's lawyer) and former White House chief of staff Andrew Card from ambushing then-AG John Ashcroft to get him to agree to Bush's original domestic wiretapping plan.

Card and Gonzales were on the way over to get his approval for the plan. What the plan was hasn't been revealed yet, but it's clear that it was scary. Comey and Mueller heard Bush's boys were coming, so they "rushed" over to warn Ashcroft, who was hospitalized at the time. That's right, he was sick and in the hospital. Comey and Mueller got there before Card and Gonzales, and when they arrived, Ashcroft refused to endorse the plan. As we now know, a later, more limited version of the plan was approved in collaboration with the Justice Department.

Judging from how scary the actual warrantless wiretapping program turned out to be, imagine if the original plan had gone through.

I couldn't help but notice the similarity here to the hospital scene in the The Godfather, where the ailing Vito Corleone's police guard has disappeared and Michael and Enzo stare down the hit squad sent by Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. It's unnerving. I can almost imagine the film noir shadows, the darkened street, the trembling hand reaching for the jacket pocket…

When you'd stoop to taking advantage of a sick man to support your illegal activities, are you really any better than a common gangster? At least now the White House doesn't have to intimidate the attorney general to get what they want. They just have to ask.

We almost always watch TV shows online. There are fewer commercials, and the quality has improved a lot since the early days of online offerings. Lately, I heard that NBC would be revamping their online video player to better compete with ABC's. I've used both, and NBC's is a sad caricature of ABC's. Only a few shows are available (not including The Office, which is unforgivable), and the audio and video quality are terrible.

ABC's player, on the other hand, has many more shows plus some online exclusives. The video starts almost immediately, and although it is blurry at first, it transitions smoothly to a very sharp, large image after a few seconds. You quickly forget that the video is streaming at all.

There's only one problem with ABC's player. After every commercial break, you have to click a link to start the next segment. This is aggravating… haven't remote controls been around, oh, I don't know, since I was born? I'm lazy - once I get comfortable, I don't want to get up, dammit. Please don't make me click something every five minutes.

So it was good to hear about NBC stepping up to the plate - I'd like to see what they come up with. But this morning I see that ABC is (to mercilessly mix sports and gambling metaphors) upping the ante. They'll be streaming their shows in high def. That's a bold move, but it's pretty exciting… as long as they don't add more commercials, which is why I watch TV on the Internet to begin with. NBC will probably have to meet the challenge too… who knew providing free TV over the Internet could be so competitive?

Why are there no services where you can pay to download a movie, burn it to DVD, and watch it on your TV? Ars Technica has a rundown of the problem. It seems that since there is no end-user license for CSS (DVD's copy-protection system), there's no way to legally allow end users to burn CSS-protected DVDs. Without protected DVDs, the movie studios won't buy into any scheme, for fear of people using the system for piracy.

I'm shaking my head as I write this. How ironic that CSS, a copy-protection system, is actually preventing copy-protection measures from being put into place. How ironic that CSS has been trivially circumventable for years, and that anyone who can put a DVD in a drive with the right side up can rip a movie.

These are the kinds of tangles you get into when you become a purveyor of DRM. Eventually, it's going to trip you up somewhere - content that protects itself and limits its own usage is by definition not portable, and DRM schemes can't keep up with people's ideas about how content can be consumed. And you lock yourself in to an ever-escalating battle to create the next generation of "uncrackable" DRM, which is in turn cracked in days, weeks, or months.

How sad that so much mental energy is spent on this dead-end technology. Once a DRM scheme is broken, it may as well not be there at all - it doesn't stop the real, financially damaging commercial piracy, and it doesn't stop the casual pirate either. All it does is artificially limit what the average consumer can do with "their own" content.

When you discover that your $1000 iTunes library won't play on the new shiny brown Zune you bought, you get frustrated. You haven't done anything wrong - you bought the music fair and square. So maybe you return the Zune to the store. Maybe you give up. And maybe, just maybe, you turn to piracy. And that's ironic.