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….

Redesign in progress

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In case you hadn’t already noticed by the dramatic change in the look of the site, I’m in the process of redesigning. No real reason, other than that I thought it was time for a change — I do this every so often.

Rather than do the whole site in the background and then replace it in one swell foop, I decided to just replace the pages as I get them set. As I’m typing this, the main page is the only one that’s finished so far…the rest will follow eventually. All this really means is that at the moment, the site will look pretty goofy as the pages switch between different appearances, but eventually it’ll all gell. In the meantime…well, WYSIWYG.

Mars and More

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Well…the Mars night didn’t go off as well as I’d hoped, unfortunately. Made it through Mission to Mars relatively unscathed, aside from the fact that it was a fairly amazingly hideous movie. I think if it had tried any harder to be 2001, it would have been truly laughable…as it is, it’s just kinda sad.

After M2M, I popped in Red Planet. This one started out much better. It was actually keeping my interest, and had been fairly entertaining…up until the halfway point (chapter 19), when the DVD I’d rented was scratched badly enough to completely freeze up my player, to the point where it wouldn’t even turn off! Ugh…so now I’ve seen the first half of Red Planet, and really want to finish it up one of these days!

Oh, the newest addition to the movie collection: Tank Girl, all around fun, great one-liners, and Lori Petty! Fun fun fun….

And, that’s all I can think of to put up here for the moment…more when I think of something, I guess.

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!

I love finding things like this…

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…I found this over on /. in the middle of a discussion about Mac OS X. While probably only of interest to my more ‘geeky’ friends, I think it’s damn cool….

Mac OS X is better than I could have imagined!

Let me begin by saying that I used to be a rabid, frothing at the mouth Linux/UNIX advocator. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for nearly two years.

Anyways, when I found out about Mac OS X, I was very excited. I wanted to try it. The interface looked so incredibly well done. Whoever says that Windows has a nice user interface must be joking; I think that the Windows GUI is extremely bland.

So I bought an iMac 233 for a steal over at eBay. I ran Mac OS X Public Beta for many months in anticipation of the final release.

The day the final release came out, I was so impressed with Apple hardware and the beta, that I ran out and bought one of the new iMacs just so that I would have the extra speed boost in running OS X.

Anyways, let me say that I have not been disappointed in the slightest! OS X is everything that Linux should have been. It’s powerful enough for the command line lovers, but elegant enough for the common desktop user. I don’t care what anyone says; Linux is not ready for the common user.

Common Linux scenario. I’m running KDE with some GNOME apps, along with Netscape 4.77 and emacs. Say I want to change my computer’s theme. That means I have to find a KDE theme, a GTK theme (and figure out how to install it from KDE), and edit my .Xdefaults file, testing new values for Netscape and emacs until everything is the way I want.

That’s just too inconvenient. In fact, after running OS X for a week now, I found that there were a lot of annoying inconveniences that I put up with in Linux that I don’t have to deal with in OS X. It got to the point with Linux where I was saying, “I’m so tired of constant sysadmin battles…I just want something that works.” You know what? Mac OS X just works.

Not to mention the fact that I find Apple hardware far superior. There’s none of the Intel Driver Hell that I’ve dealt with using other OSes. I plugged in my iMac (which was equipped with CDRW, ethernet, modem, etc…) and everything worked, no tweaking necessary.

What I like the best is the XonX program that a bunch of sourceforgers are working on. By hitting Command-Alt A, I can switch back and forth between my old XFce desktop and my new, spiffy Aqua desktop.

To those who say that Apple hardware is too expensive…yes, the powermacs and the cubes are still fairly high in price. If you’re looking to play around with OS X, pick up an iMac. They’re very reasonably priced machines that pack a lot of power.

— vorpal^

Wudicam down

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I’ve taken the link to the Wudicam off the page for now. I’m now running Mac OS X 10.0 about 95% of the time on this machine, and there aren’t drivers for the iRez KritterCam for OS X just yet. I can still turn the cam on if I really want/need to by booting into OS 9, but these days about the only time I do boot into OS 9 is when I want to watch a DVD on this machine…and if I’m watching a movie, I’m not likely to have the cam on. So…until drivers get released…no cam. Ah, well. Y’all will just have to satisfy your voyeuristic urges somewhere else for now. ;)

Renee…yum…

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Not much big going on today — other than that I was the only person in my close circle of friends who went to work today. Loren just got back from his job working on an oil rig for one of the slope companies, and Rick, Erika, and Miranda were all here at home sick. Bleah. I dunno who got the better end of the deal…probably me, though.

It was, however, something of a Renee Zellweger day for me — picked up two movies with her in it. Not really setting out to do that, just that they both got released today.

First off is Empire Records, a wonderfully silly little story of a bunch of kids working in a record store. Mark and Lucas are hilarious, the eye candy is nice, the script is fun, and a lot of the music is great. Unfortunately, the soundtrack for the film only featured music by today’s “hot” bands, so all the really good music is only in the movie…but at least it’s there.

The other I picked up is one that I consider to be one of the best, if not the single best movie to come out in 2000 — Nurse Betty. While it’s definitely a (very) black comedy, it’s one of the few I’ve found that manages to be a black comedy while still retaining a real heart of gold at the center and doesn’t just descend into full-out nihilistic cynicism — which a lot of black comedies do, much as I enjoy them. When I saw this film in the theater, I literally walked out of the film with a huge grin on my face — not because of the dark humor in the film (though I did enjoy that), but by the wonderful (and, dare I say it, sweet) ending that wrapped it all up. I really think it’s an absolute treasure of a film, and am all sorts of happy to have it.

In case you haven’t seen it, Nurse Betty is the story of Betty, a sweet and incredibly naive housewife (Renee Zellweger) who quite literally mentally breaks down when she witnesses the murder of her husband by a couple of con men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock). She retreats into a world where she is in love with the character of a doctor on “A Reason to Love,” the soap opera she watches daily, and sets off to drive to Hollywood to meet her long-lost lover. Now, read that last sentence carefully — she’s not in love with the actor who plays the doctor (Greg Kinnear) — she’s in love with the doctor himself. Meanwhile, chasing her on her road trip are the two con men, who want something her husband had put in the trunk of the car she’s driving. There’s a lot more to the film than that simple summary can do justice to, and the cast plays it to perfection — there is a scene where Betty comes back to her senses and realizes what has been happenig which is just heartrending, to the point where it’s almost painful to watch as the real world comes crashing back in to her. However, with all that, as I said, I walked out of the theater with a huge grin on my face, marvelling at the work I’d just watched. Well worth finding, in my opinion.

So, that’s it for today….