Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

By the way…

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…when did “Arrow” 102.1 switch over to 102.1 “The Buzz”? I just noticed this while riding around with Erica the other night in her new car, and was really surprised. Hadn’t tuned into 102.1 for ages — it, along with 100.5 the Fox, was one of the two bastions of old buttrock in Alaska — so I’m pretty clueless as to when the did the switchover.

What I really don’t get about it is why they did what they did, format wise. They went from being one of two “classic rock” (old buttrock) stations in town (Arrow 102.1 and 100.5 the Fox) to being one of three “modern rock” (new buttrock) stations in town (87.7 the End, 102.1 the Buzz, and 106.5 K-Whale) — basically traded in their old library of tunes that have been overplayed for 30 years for a new library of tunes that are just starting to get overplayed, and from competing with one other station to competing with two. I don’t get it.

But then, this is Alaska, and the music scene up here is really easy to compartmentalize. For grins and giggles, I’ll do just that — the following does not take into account people (like myself) who constantly bounce from station to station, and therefore don’t fit a definite demographic. Nor does it take into account the two underground scenes in Anchorage at the moment — the punk and the rave crowds — neither of which have a station focused on them, and have to grab the occasional show on 88.1 KRUA or pirate station to hear what they want on the radio.

Just hazarding a rough guess, I’d put Alaska’s listeners between 20 and 40 years old (at least in the roughly Anchorage/Valley area) at about 45% buttrock (87.7, 100.5, 102.1, 106.5), 30% country (104.1, 107.5), and the last 25% a blend of what’s left (87.7, 92.9, 96.3, 101.3, 103.1).

Under 20, things shift a bit…I’d put it at around 60% hip-hop/pop (92.9, 101.3), 20% new-buttrock (87.7, 102.1), with the remaining 20% everything else (87.7, 96.3, 100.5, 103.1, 104.1, 107.5).

Them’s my guesses, at least.

Reunions…ugh

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Hmm…don’t really have a topic at the moment. I’m just sitting at work, waiting for the headset to beep in my ear, and killing time until the end of the day. Of course, the end of the day today isn’t going to be for quite a while — while I normally get off work at 4pm, I’ve got training today that’ll keep me here until 8pm. Not entirely bad, training helps and I get paid overtime for it…just means I’ve got a while before I make it home.

Of course, I’m not sure why I should be in some sort of rush to get home. One roommate works out on a rig for one of the oil companies with a 2-on/1-off rotation that he’s in the middle of right now, so he won’t be home; the other roommate works evening hours that often stretch into the late night, so I hardly see him either. Lately I get more companionship from my two pet ferrets than I do from any of the people I live with or am friends with, it seems like. Not to make it sound like it’s their fault — I’ve got a pretty busy work schedule myself — it just gets a bit grating sometimes.

I’m looking forward more and more to getting out of here and getting down to Seattle lately. Seems like every time I turn around I’ve got more reasons to leave, and less to stay. This town just gets under my skin more and more often lately — it all seems much to small, and none of it seems to fit me anymore. I can’t say whether or not Seattle will be any better, but it’s a place to start, and if I decide that it’s not the place to be, then at least it’ll be a lot easier to get someplace else from there than it is from up here.

Okay, here’s something scary, which more than likely contributes to my slightly off-kilter frame of mind. In just about two weeks, I hit my 28th birthday, and just a couple months after that, the Bartlett High School Class of ’91 has its 10-year anniversary here in town. I’m really not sure what I think of this…some days I think it would be entertaining to hit, others there’s nothing I want to do more than to stay as far away from it as possible. I wasn’t exactly overly involved in my high school years — more of a social cockroach than anything else — and, while I’ve gone through a lot of changes over the intervening years, it often makes me wonder if I really want to meet up with these people again. Some of these people I’d been going to school with since elementary school days, and yet for so much of the time it seemed to me that I didn’t exist for them — we’d be in the same classes, know the same people, but unless there was some really compelling reason to notice me, most of them very rarely did. Even today, after years of dj’ing and being something of a public figure and losing a lot of my shyness through that, I’m still a bit overly reticent when meeting people. If I’m not in the spotlight, as I am when dj’ing, then I’ll usually hang back, keep my mouth shut, and not draw attention to myself — a hangover from the days when it seemed like it was better for me not to intrude on the lives of these people that I was forced to spend seven hours out of every day with.

So is this something I really want to do — after 10 years, see these people again? I’m really not sure. Admittedly, I’m hardly the same person I was then, and, most likely, few of them are either, but it’s still a strong enough reminder of how little I liked myself, my surroundings, or my environment back then that it gives me a serious pause. Hmm…well, I guess I’ll find out as it gets closer.

In any case, this is probably more than enough of my self-indulgent, slightly morose babble. Back to the phones….

Downtime, upgrades, moving to Mars

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Grrrr…frikkin’ bills. I dunno why everybody’s so picky about wanting their money on time.

Um…yeah. If you haven’t guessed, the reason for the recent downtime was nothing more than my own stupidity when it comes to billpaying. Sorry about that.

However, bills are paid, and everything’s back up and running again. I took advantage of the server going up and down to install the 10.0.1 update to Mac OS X that hit the ‘net today…and, have to admit, this is nice. Not sure what might be there as far as new features, but it’s a heck of a lot faster. Woohoo!

Anyway, not much going on at the moment — since Studio 99 switched me to Saturdays, I’m not dj’ing tonight…so actually have a night to relax. Went out and rented Mission To Mars and Red Planet to watch tonight. Going off to Mars this evening…see y’all when I get back!

Been a busy weekend

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Been going pretty strong all weekend long, so this is my first update for the past few days. I’m sure that there are just multitudes of people anxiously awaiting the next episode in my babble here, though, so I figured I’d try to get something up.

Right.

Anyway.

I’m rapidly discovering just how amazingly long Fridays are going to be for me for the foreseeable future — in essence, I’ve got a gauranteed minimum of 22 hours up every Friday. As my shift at GCI starts at 8am and I am hardly a morning person, my alarm starts going off at 6am. I work my shift at GCI, get off work at 4, get home, get some food, change, and get myself to the club around 7/7:30pm. The club doesn’t close until 3am, so I’m not likely to get to bed until around 4am — 22 hours. Uff-da.

However, it’s not something I’m going to give up…been anxious to get back into DJ’ing, and a little sleeplessness is a relatively small price to pay in my book.

Friday night went pretty decently — Samurai showed up to guest again, so he and I traded off through the night. We brought attendance up a few more — I think it was somewhere between 130 and 150 people all told — hopefully that number will just keep growing as things go on. Looking good so far, though.

Relaxation, upgrades – and furrets!

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Well, ended up having a very nice weekend. I’m afraid I did oversleep on Saturday — I was supposed to be at work at Suncoast at 10am, and didn’t wake up until sometime after noon — but they were kind enough to understand why. Not only did they let me take the rest of the day off, but they hadn’t scheduled me for Sunday…and they’ll be sure not to schedule me before 1pm on Saturdays from now on, so I’ll be able to get sleep after DJ’ing on Friday nights! Rock on.

I ended up spending most of the weekend working with my computers. I’ve been running this webserver off the Public Beta of Mac OS X since the beta was released, and Saturday was (finally) the official release date of the full retail version of OS X. Ran down to the local CompUSA and picked it up, came home, and installed it first on my main work machine. Everything went smoothly there, so I bit the bullet, backed up the website, and upgraded the webserver.

Luckly, everything went smoothly there, too — for the most part. There have been some under-the-hood changes between the Public Beta and the Retail release that took me by surprise and required some tweaking to get the webserver up and running correctly again (for the tech geeks out there, the Apache webserver, which had been named apache under the PB, is now named the standard httpd again, the various configuration files have been moved and renamed, and the logfile directory is moved), but I was able to find and tweak everything relatively quickly. I was able to bring the webserver down, completely reformat it, install OS X, put the website back, and find all the changes to get the website back up and running correctly in a grand total of three hours — I don’t think that’s too bad at all.

Then, since I was upgrading things anyway, I checked and found a new version of the software I use for my Messageboard/Guestbook, and got that installed and configured. Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t read the threads from the previous version, so things are looking a little sparse in there…but that’s a relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

The final big news for the weekend — furrets! :) Miranda had two ferrets that, unfortunately, she isn’t able to give as much attention as she’d like anymore, as she just had a beautiful little girl three months ago. Babies being the wonderful, but admittedly time-consuming creatures they are, she needed to find a good home for her ferrets. I gave it some thought, and figured that I could do that…besides, this way, she can have visitation rights whenever she wants. So, the newest additions to the family here at the apartment are Niko and Ash (otherwise lovingly known as Nikkerbokker and Assmaster). This should be a lot of fun — while my family has almost always had pets (usually cats), I realized a bit ago that I’d never had pets of my own — they’ve always either been my mom’s or my brother’s — so, for the first time, I’ve got little ones of my own. All sorts of cool.

However, it’s now Monday morning, and time to go jump in the shower and get back to the normal workaday week. Off and running like a herd of turtles….

Okay, so I’m a junkie

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Hi. My name is Woody, and I’m a DVD-aholic.

Hi, Woody!

Yeah, so…I went through and compared my actual DVD collection with the database program that keeps track of them all and provides the DVD listing that I have here on my website. Turns out I had a few of my roomie’s listed in there that I needed to delete…but I also had a few of my own that I hadn’t put in there. End result?

I passed the 300 mark a week or two ago, it seems….I now have a total of 308 DVD’s.

Boy, am I glad I’ve got a decent paying job!

Faith

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I have claimed to have faith in God before, but I didn’t always realize that faith isn’t faith until I can’t see the road ahead.

— Dan Sjoblom

Good tunes

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While I grew up listening to an incredibly wide range of music thanks to my parents, I’ve never really been much into country. My tastes always ran to the alternative, industrial, and for the past few years I’ve focused mainly on electronica, from deep trance and house to dance remixes of more poppy stuff, as long as it’s fun to dance to and well constructed.

However, over the past few years, I’ve been spending much of my time around women who listened to a fair amount of country…and I suppose that can only last so long before it really starts to sink in. It helps that much of what I grew up with was the music that today’s country grew out of — rock and roll, blues, r&b (back when r&b actually meant rhythm and blues) — all that good old stuff. So, more and more lately, I find myself keeping the car radio more on 104.1 and 107.5, the two country stations in town. Thanks to them, I’ve just stumbled upon an absolutely incredible band — Trick Pony.

Trick Pony’s currently got a single called ‘Pour Me’ that, in my mind, at least, absolutely demands to be cranked up to the threshold of pain every time it comes on the radio. Well, their album just hit the stores this week, I’m listening to it now — and for the first time in my life, I really wish this band was coming to Anchorage soon so I could see their show. Just a great album, pretty much solidly upbeat all the way through so far, and from what I’ve read on the ‘net, these three put on an absolutely incredible live show.

So, if you’re into country at all, or even just into really damn good music, pick this one up. Well worth it.

I’m heading out tonight (hence why Ben-Hur isn’t going in the DVD player right now). The reason my residency at Studio 99 doesn’t officially kick in until next week is because they already had tonight rented out — but it sounds like it should be a fun deal to go to, so I’m going to stop by that for a while.

Polar Productions in association with Dance Nation (Tuesdays on KRUA 88.1FM from 10pm-1am) presents an all-ages dance event: R E V E R B. DJ Panda, Michael Kalman, DJ Jasper, Planet Lush, Scott Lappi and a special guest DJ will be spinning at Studio 99 from 8pm-3am tonight. $10 at the door, $8 with a canned food donation — all cans to benefit the Food Bank of Alaska.