One day sunny is another day... snow

Living in the highly fluctuating, climatic state that I live in, it's a wonder than the population isn't lower than it already is. It's almost a trip on borderline depression! How the hell is it possible to go from taking a country-side hike with a short sleeve t-shirt and sunglasses, writing some melodies with my acoustic guitar on the deck with a cup of tea all in the sunset balance of a warm, soothing 59 degrees, to digging my winter garb out of the closet to cope with the four blistery inches of snow and a -10 degree air temperature (not counting in the wind)?

*Sigh* Where else on the planet could you get such sweet diversity?

Heroin Addict Heroes on my iPod

Over the last couple of months, my iPod album playlist has kind of evolved with my recent rekindling of acoustic tonal love. The downside of only having 8GB to work with on my 2Gen nano is that I can't house the entire coffee-house spectrum of music I want to listen to without putting a sizable dent in my rock repertoire.

I can't help but express another one of my complains: The music arena this decade sucks total shit and I don't see it getting any better any time soon. I grew up on way late 70's, 80's, and early to mid 90's pop/rock/metal side of the tracks; when bands had their own image and weren't cookie cut out to fill a marketing gap and hellbent on polluting the airwaves with more scr(emo) and shitty power chord thrashing.

So, perhaps my album highlight is overpowered by the fact that every one of the lead singers in these bands have died of heroin abuse.

Here's the top three this week:

1) Mother Love Bone - Apple

2) Blind Melon - Blind Melon

3) Alice in Chains - Sap

...these bands need no explanation. They just a very small example of what was good in the music industry when I was growing up.

Another affirmation Social Networking is G-A-Y

Yet another credible blog article on the dark facts of social networking and it's infinite stupidity and misconceptions surrounding your so-called "network of friends":

Are you a Facebook friend padder?

Lame.

White-space removal goodness with Linux

I've been recently putting together a massive backup of all my digital wares on my network. Problem is, over the years, when I've converted any CD I had over to digital mp3's or made a copy of one of my DVDs, a lot of it was done without a lot of thought that I'd be backing it up to a UNIX box 9-10 years down the road; so a lot of the filenames by pure convenience to the application(s) I was using, uses white-spaces as delineations between fields on a filename.

Is that a real problem? Kinda because white-spaced named files are a hooker to work with under *NIX platforms. Case in point, it does cost me some sleep at night.

So where does Adam go when there's no where else to turn? the *NIX command-line.

sed example: sed -n "s/\s/_/g"

tr example: tr [:space:] _

...quick and dirty solution.

Yet Another Reason Social Networking Technology is... gay

It happened again...

Fears of impostors increase on Facebook

I'm not a fan of social networking. Never have. Never will be. To me, social networking is nothing more than a self-dwindling, sick, unrealistic sense of friendship, popularity and most importantly: a false impression of listening ears of people who give a shit.

There's plenty of excuses why people use social networking. Any worthy excuse I've ever heard usually boils down to "keeping in touch". Stupid reason, at best. If you want to keep in touch with your friends, try 'human contact'. Any one I know who I've befriended has my personal home telephone number. I don't see how you can get more personal than that considering everyone on the planet in any urban-type area has a cell phone.

Perhaps I'm old school or I just don't want to adopt douche-bag adaptations of so-called "great technology", but what happened to e-mail? *Everyone* has it. There's no way you can't have e-mail and even register for any social networking service. Last time I checked, e-mail attachments still worked and most of the working, urban world uses some sort of broadband connection, whether is be wired or wireless, or at home or know where to get access to it. To me, social network sites have pretty much reinvented the already turning wheel that message boards, newsgroups, e-mail distributions and instant messaging clients already have done for MANY years.

I, myself, prefer my privacy, seclusion and "me" time. I don't give a shit about your twitter notification telling me where you are every 5 seconds of the day. Nor do I care if I hurt your feelings if I didn't "shout out" to you on your MySpace message board. I could care less what your likes and dislikes are; your favorite movies; the music you like; what damn high school you came from; why you can't relate to mommy and daddy anymore; what your sexual orientation is; why you choose the religion you do. To me, it's all a sick cry for attention, bragging rights and to get some face time on the internet.

Insecurity makes you embrace social networking. If you had *real* friends, they'd already know the answers to all the intricate questions I mentioned above or that MySpace asks you in your profile. You wouldn't have to leave yourself bleeding in the wind for the whole world to see.

On top of all this, think of all the depressed, confused and spastic people who spend hour after countless hour typing, posting, uploading photos, and keeping their profile up-to-date in hopes that they'll get one "virtual" nibble of friendship. Yes, virtual. Not *real*. I swear that social networking is in a close damn second with NCAA tournament in amount of time wasted. Take all that lost effort and put it into real, tangible friendships instead of a thumbnail photo and a lame profile I wouldn't trust any farther than I could throw it.

In conclusion, on a internet social networking medium, my condolences. I think it's the worst technology this century has created.