It's 7 AM on a Saturday and I've been awake for an hour minding the baby. She's eating apples and cheerios and watching tv. I'm buying video cards and checking up on the GameSpot servers. My housemate bought a video projector for the media room and we've got it set for a completely ludicrous 150" diagonal throw. Unfortunately it makes you acutely aware of the crappiness of every video format other than HDTV. We hooked it up to my PC (which has an HDTV card) for the Super Bowl and that was pretty impressive, except my PC kept rebooting itself. Hence the new video card. I probably need a new power supply too but I'm dirt poor right now so one thing at a time. I went to see Meat Beat Manifesto on Thursday. Probably the 37th time I've seen them live and it just never gets old. They're on tour now so make sure you go see them if they come to your town. I guarantee you have never seen a show like this one. My current favorite album is One Way Ticket To Hell... and Back! by The Darkness. It's like some ridiculous blend of Queen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Spinal Tap. Produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who is probably one of the top 10 rock producers of all time (Devo, The Cars, Queen, Bowie, Cheap Trick... loads more), it sounds huge and polished with millions of layers of vocal and guitar overdubs (very very Queen). It makes me laugh. How can you not love a line like "You're beautiful and busty / But I'm a little rusty / I've forgotten what to do"? Or, a song with those metal staples, the Tubular Bells of Doom, and a lyric about going bald (the ultimate rocker nightmare!) Speaking of Queen, if you have a surround system, there's a surround version of A Night At The Opera which sounds unbelievable. I played Bohemian Rhapsody for my housemate, who is not a huge classic rock fan, and he was totally gobsmacked. I've been playing around with mixing my own music in surround. Kind of a drag since I don't have a way to monitor it at the computer, but it's also sort of a neat challenge trying to imagine how all the placements will sound. Probably like drawing with your eyes closed. When you finally get to open them, did it come out the way you imagined it would? At work I've been making unglamorous but necessary improvements to our user signup and ad delivery systems. Sounds dull but the weeks are just flying by. Every time I actually stop to think about how long I've been working here, or how long I've been married, or how I have a daughter growing up faster than my brain can keep pace with, it just makes me dizzy.