So on the Rumor Forum, we’re running an NCAA tournament contest. Nothing on the line other than pride.

I have, however, nailed the first three games, including an upset by Manhattan.

This is a fun feeling … kinda like being able to hit any shot from anywhere. I hope it keeps going.

Huzzah!

The Indiana Jones School of Management is three years old today.

I think I remember why we joked about learning to become PowerPoint Engineers back when we were in college.

Would it be bad form to stick that on my resume?

PowerPoint Engineer: I make one mean mutha—-ing presentation … that’ll fit on a floppy. I pity the fool!

Oh well, at least I’ve had many other fun things going today. I will say this about my job—it’s very interesting! I love crisis response.

My job has me doing all sorts of funny things.

One of them is being detail oriented. I am not a highly detail-oriented person—I mean, does “The Indiana Jones School of Management” imply that I am, how you say, detail-oriented? Not really.

I can be detail-oriented. It is just not my modus operandi. I have to make myself do it, and while it’s taxing, it’s also stretching me and having me be more detail-oriented in my entire life.

For example, I now make grocery lists. I never really did that before—I just went in with a vague notion of what I needed, what I had to spend, and figured that was good enough. Now, I plan.

It’s actually quite scary.

The other thing about being detail-oriented is knowing where data is and what it means. My reaction is always to want to say, “Let me get back to you on that,” but not being great at follow-up, well, that’s a problem. Work forces me to do that, and as a result, I remember all sorts of minutiae. Does this mean that I can remember how old my grandparents are? Not really. [I have only been able to fix that in memory in the last year. Draw from that what you will.]

I just find it all very amusing.

Why have I been using MusicMatch all this time to rip and encode MP3’s?

I’ve had folks tell me better, but noooooo … “It works for me.”

:bangs head on desk repeatedly.

Mark Smiley has prevailed upon me to use LAME and Exact Audio Copy for some time now. I brought in a couple CD’s at lunch, and I decided to give it a whirl.

I now feel like the biggest buffoon in Huntsville.

Thanks, Mark.

I am Amy’s Friend Information Service.

[03/16/2004 @ 08:57] IJSMorg: Hey dude … insanely quick question and then I have to run … are you in your house yet?
[03/16/2004 @ 08:57] Jeremy: yup yup
[03/16/2004 @ 08:57] IJSMorg: Sweetness.
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] Jeremy: finally
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] IJSMorg: Amy asked me last night if I knew.
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] IJSMorg: I didn’t.
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] IJSMorg: I just saw you online, so I thought I’d ask. [03/16/2004 @ 08:58] Jeremy: I’ve been there about 2 weeks
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] IJSMorg: Spiff!
[03/16/2004 @ 08:58] IJSMorg: Thanks for the info … I’ll yammer later.

Now you know. Huzzah.

… because the Semantic Web will get you.

Just ask Stewart Butterfield, who now is stuck with the unfortunate moniker of being the “instant message question answerer”. He’s having fun with it, though, having started a Weblog full of the IMversations he has with folks.

Amusing, in that “dances with LiveJournalers” sort of way.

One would think that having Andrew Osenga’s Souvenirs and Postcards for almost two months now would mean that I’d written about it by now, but you’d be wrong.

Let me step through this, then, track-by-track. Andy’s written a wonderful, quiet disc, and I hope that my writing will do it a tiny bit of justice.

The disc starts with “I Miss Those Days”, a wonderful lament about missing one’s former life. Andrew did briefly attend Belmont University, but when the record company came calling, he chucked school for the rock-and-roll life, fronting The Normals, perhaps the best “Christian rock” band you’ve never heard. Andy missed out on the typical college experience, and when he went to his Midwestern roots to see his brother [I think] graduate from college, he was hit with nostalgia for the college life, for the time when “just like all the rest, I was looking around for me.”

Is there regret here? Yes, but it’s tinged with the happiness and gratitude that you heard in The Normals’ “The Best I Can” [from Coming to Life, one of the best albums I own]. Andy’s since met the love of his life, gotten married, and bought his little house in Nashville. The closing lines say all that need be said about this case:

but I am happy now,
oh so happy, since I’ve found you,
And I’m quiet now,
yes, quite content, since we’ve been living here,
and I’ve got everything I’ve ever needed,
and half the things I’d ever want.
and I may miss those days,
but if they came back, I would miss you so much more.

“Roses in a Dead Man’s Hand” may be my favorite of the songs on this all-too short [25:52!] disc. The poetic goodness of it all lends me to just quote the entirety of the lyrics and let them speak for themselves, but that always rankles me when I see it on other folks’ Weblogs. As perhaps best fitting for any well-written song that holds to the verse-chorus structure, the bridge is really what gets you there:

can I sing it hard enough that it will finally sink in?
the promise that I’m loved, and the promise I’m forgiven?
what I’m trying hard to say is that I’m wanting to believe in you again.

As my friend Mark Traphagen said in his review of Souvenirs and Postcards, “We know the promises of grace and forgiveness, but sometimes when we look in the miror, they’re hard to believe.” All we need is self to wonder why grace should be denied us, and Jesus to wonder at the power of that grace. We really are “nothing but a promise lying broken at the cross” many a time in our life.

“If I Had Wings…” does really set the mood of the disc well. Mark noted that the disc is very much autumnal, which reflects when it was all written. I’ve wanted to ask Andrew the significance of these lines:

climb an oak tree, and carve a pumpkin,
light a candle for its eyes,
Hello November, I need surrender,
I need to let October die.

The whole song haunts me in a way that makes me want to reach out and give my friend a hug. It’s accessible—Lord knows that we’ve all had these down moments. Unfortunately, none of us have the haunting vocals of Osenga and Steven Delopoulos [formerly of Burlap to Cashmere] to sing the despair of those dark doldrums.

“The Broadway Bartender” is classic Osenga disassociative songwriting. I remember asking about his previous solo project, Photographs, “How much of that is real and how much of it is fiction?” I think his reply went, “It’s all real, and it’s all fictional, but only some of it is biographical.” This is Andy telling a story that you know isn’t about him, but yet you enjoy it anyway. In an amusing story-within-a-story kind of way, you have the protagonist claiming to be fictional. All in all, it’s wonderful songwriting, and the production quality of it lends to the rest of the disc. [That's Jars of Clay's Charlie Lowell on accordion, with bgv's done by Andrew's brother Rob.]

“The Priest and the Iron Rain” is, apparently, an allusion to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. [Again, my lack of a solid literary background fails me. I had to have my boy Joe Bassett tell me that.] The repetitive but ever-mutable chorus is always an enjoyable writing device when well-employed, as it is done here. The bridge is especially tough to listen to in light of the current bloody stasis of the Iraqi occupation:

so what’s the glory of dying,
round here, it all just looks like dying,
and my friend, I can’t keep from trying
to believe it isn’t real,
but we all know that it’s real.

“Baby, Don’t Worry” is probably the song that possessed me to buy ten copies of this disc and distribute them to friends. [AO: "I take it that this means you like it?" GM: "Yes, I think so."] I’ll admit a slight tinge of guilt drove that purchase—it hurts to see a friend down on his luck!—but the folks I wanted to give this to will all have a great understanding. We all remember the broker-than-broke days when Ramen noodles became more friend than food.

this is just like the stories our parents told us,
Babe, you know they’re doing fine,
as long as we’re together we’ve got it all,
the rest will just take a little time.

Andy’s going to make it. I know.

“The Letter” is the last song on the disc, and I can’t help but think that the object has to be something that Andrew himself wrote. I’m almost entirely predisposed to scream “Innocence and Experience!” after Mrs. Richardson kinda hammered the corpus of William Blake into our heads my senior year in high school, and I really do think that the passage of life is wholly at stake here.

and everybody changes,
but there’s a part that always stays,
and I hope the writer of that letter
is still out there somewhere.

I think that we all have to hope that; without that hope for a brighter tomorrow, without a soul that can know joy and sadness, our lives truly aren’t worth living.

I’m looking at evening the score tonight, though.

I hate computers.

Ladies and gentlemen …

canspice.org is hereby declared “The Official Website of the Internet™”.

All other claimants can kiss Brad’s left foot.

I thought it’d turn out to be a slow week, and I was correct.

My life is quickly devolving into scads of meetings. The worst are Fridays, when it seems that all I do is attend meetings. Augh.

It all pays the same, though.

I can’t wait to get home for the weekend, where I have three computers to fix.

Maybe I’ve been reading too much about user interface design, but … God help me …

I’m still adjusting to life in the new building. The biggest change? The bathroom door. All the other bathroom doors are big, thick doors—perhaps even firewall-rateable–doors with stiff hydraulic arms on them. Go to enough bathrooms around TBE, and you’ll get used to putting your forearm against the door and leaning into it in order to get it to open easily.

The bathroom door in this building is an extremely light door with a barely-noticeable hydraulic arm. I barge right through that door every freaking time, and it unnerves me.

User experience is like that—change something that someone’s used to, and they’ll be greatly confused. It’s easy as a creator to say, “Get over it!” but, as a user, if you’re used to something, the new things in life will totally throw you.

That makes me think more about how to make changes around the .net.

I have some advice for you.

1. Please note that I did not call you “fans”. You are not fans. Buying a jersey does not make you a fan—and if you bought one of those ugly, mustard-colored third jerseys that are an abomination and an affront to all things holy, well, you can stop reading now. The pagan hockey gods do not appreciate those jerseys. Why they are letting you sniff the playoffs at the trading deadline is beyond me.

2. When you are urged to “make some noise”, please do so. Just don’t stop when the exhortations stop. The people that run the Public Address system are required by the NHL to stop pumping sound out of their speakers while play is in session. You, however, are unrestricted from making noise. There were 16,000+ of you last night, and at times, I could hear players skating. This is not a concert—this is a frickin’ hockey game.

3. Any time one of your players falls down, and one of the opposing players is near, please do not assume that the referee is an idiot for not calling a penalty. Chances are that you are the one who needs glasses, not the referee.

4. Um, you know, CHEER. Chant. Do something. I had some fellow Bruins fans near me last night, and I almost started a couple B’s chants for fun, just to shame you losers.

5. When the opposing goalie makes a big save, a brief round of applause is in order. That lets him know that he got lucky.

6. Understand that waiting in line is part of sporting events during the playoff chase. Don’t whine. You should be happy that so many people want to come watch your crappy hockey team.

7. Hey, I want you people to get fired up. I was bored. You only taunted the goalie when the Predators scored. Come on. Taunt him all game long.

You people have a good franchise. Support it, for Pete’s sake. This is hockey, not the theater.

I tilt at windmills—often.

A day in my mind is a day in Cervantes’s world of going after things that are different than perceived.

It always gets worse when I surround myself with people who are like-minded. Interacting with like-minded folk makes me think that we really can change the world, that we can shift the paradigm and turn the world on its ear.

Maybe we can.

Maybe we can’t.

It’d sure be fun to try.

Will we try? I don’t know if we’re that crazy.

I do know that we’re that pissed about it enough to give it a good, long think.

B: “Every time we talk about this, we get bolder.”

G: “One of these days, we’ll be dumb enough to try.”

M: “You mean smart enough to try.”

G: “Okay, both.”

If only I could, say, give up sleeping for the next year.

Wicked cool: DVD-burning technology that will burn a label onto the disc. [Hat-tip to Mark, who posted this on the RF.]

That’s just spifftacular.