Weblinc (my very cool place of employment) bought everyone 8gb iPhones the week after they came out. Combine this with my laptop's power supply's sudden lack of ability to charge my battery, and this is part of why I haven't really been interacting with anyone beyond email. Work excluded.
I think the iPhone is about as good as the hype. Email's a little bit clunky, and there's no auto-dial functionality (Yeah, I used voice-dialing on my old Nokia), but everything else on it completely makes up for that. The only other downside is the attention it gets me on the train. It's like a really cheesy commercial. "Excuse me, but can you surf the web on that and listen to music at the same time?"
On my way to that train station yesterday, I spotted a Google Street View camera car (and snapped a photo of it with my iPhone -- yeah, yeah, I'm that guy. Look, I don't own a Mac nor do I dabble in Linux.)
I sent the photo in to Gizmodo and now they want everyone to send photos in.
NIN Hotline shirts arrived in the mail a week or so ago -- nice quality, although the printing company in charge botched the logos on the black ones. They still look alright, but not as cool as they were supposed to look. Shirts are so much more hassle than they're worth. Part of me thinks it would be fun to break down and get my own silk screen set (finally!) and just do short-run one-off designs of, say, 10-25 shirts at a time. But even that would be kind of overwhelming.
What else. Destroyed the first floor of the house a week or two ago (lots of horse hair plaster & old wood lathe), and have since rewired the first floor lighting and second floor electrical, and replaced most of the ceiling with sheetrock. Good times.
Been reading "TOUR:SMART" by Martin Atkins and several dozen (hundred?) contributers. A good read, should be required reading if you're just now starting to play shows as a band, or even if you've been doing it for a while. It's probably even better reading if you're interested in managing a band. I do miss playing out with Slow Andy, but all the musicians I know out here play classical instruments, and with the house, I'm not sure I'd even have time to play out. On that note, Tony came out two or three weeks ago and we worked one of a handful of tracks that he's been playing with for a while. Added a new section, laid down some drums, but that's about all we accomplished. I think it's pretty good, but still has to be fleshed out. He's definitely made a lot of progress over the past few years, maybe in the next month or two I can coax him back out here to work on it some more. (Did you read coax as co-axial too?)
Three or four of the houses on our street are undergoing renovation of various degrees. This is very good. I'm quite pleased to see our little neighborhood between the park & the church undergoing some upscaling.
On the downside of things (WARNING: HOMEOWNER BLATHERING AHEAD), the awesome deal I got on a circuit breaker panel has been downgraded to a muttered-under-breath "goddamnit" upon researching and discovering that this Sylvania/GTE box is a rebranded
Zinsco panel, which, from everything I've read online so far, is probably a worse fire hazard than our fuse box. Fuck! Maybe we can make our $40 back on eBay :p Upgrading the electrical will have to wait until some other day...
Finally -- Myspace messaging is completely retarded. Why is it I cannot select messages from my inbox and mark them all as spam/abuse? I don't want to read robo-Natatia's bot-greeting, encouraging me to click on her photos. Fuck off!