brykmantra.com

Next up: I always enjoy seeing what Google does to their logo for holidays, and this year they didn’t disappoint:

Keep coming back, I’ll find more stuff …

Next up: The classic Irish “Danny Boy”, as sung by two of my three favorite Muppet characters:

(In case you’re wondering, The Count is the third.)

Stay tuned, there’s more to come!

Our Flickr puppy friend, Miss Sarie, is here to wish us all a happy day, and you can see all of her pictures (including her new Easter outfit) here.

This is just for starters, I’ll be back later for more …

Some quick things before I have to get back to the music (just 1 more day to go!):

I’m using the clover bullet point in anticipation of the Irish Festival this weekend!

I promised a shout to the fine folks at Hurricane Glass and Mirror, with whom I had an interview today. It probably won’t amount to anything, since I’m vastly overqualified for this particular job (I’m hearing that a lot), but on the other hand, they’ll be expanding their operations soon, and my skills can come in handy.

Anyway, it was a good interview, and the main reason I tried out is because the office is 2.5 miles from my house.

After almost 13 years of driving 27 miles to toil on the corporate minefield, it would feel like a paid vacation to work in a small office right here in my own town, even if I would be vastly underemployed.

In other news, I’ve been meaning to mention that William F. Buckley Jr. died this week.

Buckley was what you call a classic intellectual consevative — as opposed to what we have now.

RPM Challenge (my music project) progress report: With just one day left, desperate times call for wacky measures, thus the book you see at right.

Seriously, though, I saw this at the library and couldn’t resist; I posted a picture on the RPM message boards and got a laugh from some of my similarly desperate fellow challengees.

Hey Spook, tell your mom Happy Birthday for me tomorrow!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Tron footage remixed with the sounds of nerdcore master YTCracker.

Here’s how caught up I’ve been in the RPM Challenge: It’s only 3 days until the North Texas Irish Festival, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned it!

I had started to not go to it this year, since I’m still out of a job, but my wife insisted that I go, because it’s the only thing I look forward to all year, and I had to miss it year before last because I was freshly missing half a lung.

Isn’t she wonderful? (As if we needed further proof …)

I’ll probably go on Sunday this year, since I still haven’t finished my 10 songs (and since I’m not smart like Yay Kim, pacing herself last November when she did a similar musical project). I have to get my album postmarked by noon on Saturday, so Friday could be a late night for me if I don’t progress remarkably in the next couple of days.

Plus, there’s alot of peer pressure on the RPM message boards to do cover art for our albums.

Yes, I know I should resist, but it’s going to be bad enough that playing instruments and writing lyrics and singing on their albums (and some have even recorded in professional studios!), and now many of them have professionally designed album covers.

I had no idea the standards would be so high.

Anyway, I’m going to go back to working on the music thing now and try to leave some time for my usual psyching-up for the festival …

Except that we didn’t do very much … she was tired after work, and we hate fighting the Valentine’s night crowds, so I just went out and got some food from Mi Casa Tex-Mex …

The important thing is that Valentine’s Day always signals the beginning of …

The St. Patrick’s Day season! Woo-hoo!

So, listen to some nice Irish music, and let’s all start getting into the Blarney spirit!

We’ve only got another 32 days to get ready, ya know!

Let’s see if we can make this quick, starting with re-using my 5th Blogiversary bullet:

I was trying to run a boot-from-disk Linux distro on the computer I keep in the garage, and got this on the screen.

“Ok, booding dhe kebnel.” I thought the computer might be drunk …

Actually, it’s probably a corrupted RAM chip. I haven’t used the thing since last spring, so anything can happen with the temperature extremes we have around here. I’m sure I’ve got some suitable spare chips around here somewhere — what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t? — but they weren’t in any of my garage stashes, so I blew it off for tonight.

Anyway: “Gelcome do dhe KNO@@IH life Lineh-on-CD!” Click here for an easier-to-read view.

The reason I was trying to use the outside computer is that it was unseasonably warm today, probably close to 80F, and at least 20 degrees higher than the high yesterday. I finished raking the leaves in the back yard as my exercise (since my tendonitis was killing me from the fitness center treadmill yesterday). After I was done, it was still so nice out that I decided to sort out some of our (my wife’s) endless boxes of Christmas stuff in the garage so we could actually WALK out there, what a concept.

And by the time I was finished with that, the ABC News/Facebook debate was in full swing on TV and Thistle and Shamrock was starting on NPR, and since it was still a nice night and all that was still not enough stimulation (not that I have raging ADD or anything), I decided to boot up my “live” Knoppix games disk, since unlike some other distros I’ve got (like Ubuntu) it would work well on the 256 megs of RAM on the garage PC.

But alas, it was not to be.

Molly & Bristol “helped” me rake the leaves, and I got to show them off when a guy down the alley brought down his little girl who had begged him to take her down to see the two barking dogs. As a bonus, I also got some footage of Bristol bouncing like he’s spring-loaded as they were walking toward the yard, and it might be enough to make it worth editing a little and posting to YouTube. That new little Olympus of ours can do amazing video, as long as there’s enough light.

About 10 tonight we heard a police siren give a couple of blasts, like somebody was being pulled over, and it sounded very close. Then Molly started barking at the front door so I thought I’d check it out.

There was a fire truck, all its lights flashing, in the middle of the street in front of our house, an ambulance in front of it, and cop cars both in front of and behind those. Cars on both sides were forced to turn around and go back down the street from when they came.

It turns out that all the action was focused on the house to the east of ours, the family from Mexico. We never did figure out what was going on, but I’m going to ask around on our community bulletin board, because you just know there’s always got to be a Nosey Nellie monitoring the police scanner to be up on all the juicy goings-on.

Don’t you just love the Internet.

And finally some sad news today: I’m always mentioning the World’s Greatest Dentist, Dr. Mary; today her mother-in-law passed away. My wife was taking the news hard since her dad and Dr. Mary’s husband’s dad were friends from way back, and the families new each other well.

Sorry to end the day on a bummer note, people, but sometimes that happens.

It occurred to me that maybe, just for the rest of this month, I could try to post every day, just like in the old days — just not several times a day like in the first three years, and not taking an hour per post.

So far, we’ve got two days in a row, so far so good …

Anyway, today I’m getting back to my roots by finding and posting funny stuff that I find on the “Inter-nets”.

Let’s start with this BP commercial I’ve been seeing lately, with a cool song and cooler animation:

Next: I’ve previously mentioned the Jack-Black-produced VH1 series, Acceptable TV, and here’s one of their latest short parody pilots, this one kind of a cross between Profiler and the old HBO series The Hitchhiker:

And finally a short sketch from a British (or Scottish?) comedy show:

Okay, that wasn’t too bad, as long as I can curb my tendency to rattle endlessly …

More tomorrow, maybe …

I mostly missed all the fun last year, since I was only a week out of surgery, so this year I went wild with all the trinkets and other trappings. I’ve posted my Irish Festival schwag to Flickr, but I only took pictures of my older stuff this week, so I’ll post that today.

Keep checking back, and I’ll be posting more here …