So I saw the Crystal Method last night in Asheville at the Orange Peel.

DJ Bowie performing the opening act. He mostly just mixed a bunch of dubstep and drum n bass, which I don’t care for, but he wasn’t too terrible.

Hey, it’s Ken Jordan! He looks farther away in this picture than he really was. I was about 2 feet away from him at this point, but actually got to see him face to face later on in the show. Sorry about the terrible quality; it was really dark.

The visuals were pretty lame, but fun.

I’ve never seen anybody twiddle knobs as fast as this guy.

Ken answering a phone call on stage.

And my tasty linguine soup with hot sake.

Oh, I stopped at Wonderland before the show and found a vortex bowl. I’m excited to try it tonight because I hear the plumes it creates are crazy thick.

Yesssss. I’m going to try my best to go, so long as ticket prices aren’t outrageous. So far, the lineup is pretty sparse, but the current list is pretty good as is. It’d actually be fun going with a group of people. Anybody reading this want to come along? :D

I’ve been meaning to redesign the layout for this site, but I just haven’t had the time (or desire). I’ve been working quite a bit lately, so I’ve really not had much time to do anything. It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve had time to spend just checking SomethingAwful and my other slew of sites. I did go to Asheville yesterday and picked up some grape shisha from HookaH-HookaH, and I had a chance to try it out. It was better than I expected, although it looked pretty disgusting. I’ve never actually tried any that used honey instead of molasses, so it was pretty different. It certainly was easier to separate and there weren’t as many twigs as I usually find in Starbuzz flavors.

I finally bought a new server. Yes, Alice has been laid to rest and has been superseded by my new server, mogwai. Mogwai is an Acer Revo R1600 running Debian stable 64bit. I bit the bullet and built a kernel for it without CIFS support and I’m not even going to transfer files to it using SSH (I know, right?). Instead, I’ve found that NFS4 provides throughput speeds way faster than either of those two (why I even used CIFS before, I don’t know?), not to mention it no longer takes an hour to build a kernel.

This afternoon, I ordered a Bodum Santos.

I’m pretty excited because I’ve heard the coffee it makes is really good – not bitter at all, and there are no grounds left behind. Unfortunately, I’m just not manly enough to use it with a butane burner, BUT I’m going to be daring and bring a hot plate to school with me in the fall. If you look up a demo of one in action, you’ll be jealous. And you’ll want one. Amazon sells them for $50 and they retail at $120.

Also: of Montreal sounds like Phoenix. And I don’t have to work tomorrow. Sa-weet.

The new Crystal Castles album is really good. A lot of people are saying it’s not as good as the first; it doesn’t have as many bleeps and bloops, but it is pretty melodic, which I like. This one is definitely a keeper.

Passion Pit’s Manners wasn’t that great. I listened to it about five times and just never could get into it. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t feel the desire to listen to it anymore, much less keep it.

Something for a change, finally. I’ve been listening to Bibio, lately. It reminds me a bit of Boards of Canada, which is good. I’ve been trying to find some stickers for my laptop, namely GNOME, WordPress, Laughing Squid, and a few others. It’s kind of hard to find them. :(

Time for a story. Some time at the beginning of 2004, I received a box full of computer parts from a friend, including a case with a fitted motherboard. I built a server that I use to this day out of said parts. The highest capacity drives in there were a Western Digital 40GB and a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB. You read that right. A DeathstarDeskstar. I used it as the master drive (still do) and immediately noticed a clicking followed by a strange beep. I was still able to read/write to it (at normal times, too!) and ignored these strange sounds. Fast forward to now. I hadn’t heard about the woes of the Deskstar until this evening when I came across a YouTube video of a guy describing the “click of death.” In it, he demonstrated what it sounded like, beeps and all. So, sure enough, I’ve been using a bad drive for my backups for 6 years…and I don’t think I’m going to swap it anytime soon (I have no money, okay.). I have all of its data set to back up to that 40GB drive once a week. I’m sure I’ll wake up one morning to find that it’s completely dead, but until then… 0:D

Autechre’s “Lowride” samples Kool & The Gang’s “Summer Madness.”
Boards of Canada’s “Aquarius” samples the film, Hair’s, “Aquarius.”

Lady GaGa + George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” = Lady GaGa’s “Dance in the Dark”

Mind = Blown.

The hipster tastes so good.

I’ve felt so indifferent about a lot of things lately. I used to have so much care for the smallest things, but I just don’t anymore. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but almost everything seems trivial now. School has even gotten to the point where it’s trivial, although I’m doing better than ever and I’m not even trying. I’ve felt strange for the past couple of weeks and I can’t quite describe it. I’ve thought about all of this a lot lately and I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m depressed and I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve finally been able to sleep decently these past few days and my appetite hasn’t changed; I was able to eat three platefuls of raw spinach last night.

I used to be so sure of what I was going to do when I was finished with school and I don’t feel that way anymore – for certain reasons. I don’t feel that things are hopeless, but I feel like I’m walking down a corridor heading toward thousands of doors – some locked, some not. For the past two years I’ve not had to think much about what I’m going to do with myself when I no longer have school, because everything seemed to make sense then.

I once heard that a system administrator is the 21st century version of a ditch digger; it was something I scoffed at. Recently, I was told by someone in the industry that it’s not something you want to do your whole life; you’re supposed to have something else lined up. I don’t exactly have that, but the more I think about it, there seems to be some truth to all of this. That’s not to say that I’ve changed my mind about what I want to do when I’m finished (I sure as hell don’t want to program), but there’s always the question of “what if?” I think a lot of this worry stems from my fear of incompleteness. I came across this while talking to someone and it’s kind of strange. I realized that numbers ending in 9 really make me uncomfortable, so much that if I am able to control it, I will increment whatever it is just to make it complete. Maybe this will come in handy at some point. The way things work out is pretty funny.

This week is my spring break and I don’t have much planned other than to swap out my piercings – the bar in my conch for a hoop, and the bar in my tragus for a super-duper titanium one. Oh, I’ve been listening to Mujuice lately. He’s pretty good.