I was working on mind-numbing code last night. I took a quick break, and stumbled across the multi-tracks for Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher (not saying where - don’t ask).

As I was already loopy from lack of sleep, I decided to go “full crazy”, and mash Van Halen up with…Jay Z!?!?

This is merely a “proof of concept” hack/joke. Diamond Dave is time expanded WAY too much to be truly usable/listenable…but it is funny.

Van Halen vs Jay-Z - Hot For 99 Problems (excerpt)

Instead of trying to explain this to every person who is contacting me (Twitter / Facebook / email / IM / et cetera), I will explain what is going on right here…

Last year, I had a kidney stone. Yep, my little baby is over a year old now (see above).

This year, I had a larger kidney stone. The pain was so bad, I had to go to the hospital…twice! Each time, essentially, the doctors said “Yep, you have a kidney stone.”, and sent me on my way with a prescription and huge bills (five figures, people!).

When I went to the hospital the first time, the doctor made the following comment: “Yes, you have a very large stone. You also have two more on deck.” Yikes.

The first stone made its way through my kidneys, but never fully left. The second stone: same thing.

Now, I have the last of three stones on the move, and fuck it hurts. As I can not afford another $8000+ hospital bill for some overpriced quack to go “Yep, that’s a kidney stone”, I have been just taking the remains of the Vicodin from the first trip this year. Sadly, it’s not really easing the pain. The Vicodin worked earlier this year, but not so much now. I mean, seriously, for the Vegas Depeche Mode show, I was barely there. I had to pop a Vicodin before the show started, I was in so much pain. Ugh. At least the footage looks great.

So, to sum up. I had a BIG kidney stone last year (that I passed naturally). This year, I went to the hospital TWICE for just one stone, but found out there were two additional stones “on deck”. What I am in agony with right now is the third of those three stones.

I stopped drinking about 90% of the soda I used to, dammit! Stones, leave me the fuck alone!

Oh - and the picture above contains some of the many “funny sayings” that my friends have come up with lately. Thanks for cracking jokes while I have fucking Alien trying to emerge from my kidney. Bastards.

I had always been a fan of U2, but U2 lost me with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”.

It wasn’t the huge live shows. It wasn’t the activities that the band did outside of creating music. U2 lost me when the music simply starting sucking.

Nowadays when you hear a new U2 song on the radio, you know it is a U2 song by the vocals of Bono, the guitar of The Edge, and the limp, phoned-in quality of the song. Every song sounds like every other song. They sound like songs that were being worked on, but with album release dates and impending tour plans approaching, they just rushed them out, incomplete. There is no amazing U2 hook. There is no powerful vocal. There is no stunning guitar work. It’s just…there.

Honestly admit the last time you thought to yourself “I want to hear a great U2 song” and you put on tracks like “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”, “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” or “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own”. Excluding the Trent Reznor remix of “Vertigo”, nothing that U2 has put out since 1997 has fucking mattered, and that makes me sad.

U2 played a huge show at the Rose Bowl tonight (a big deal, if you ignore that Depeche Mode did that 21 years ago, or The Cure did it in 1992). The fact that their show has a “360 degree” stage was the huge selling point in the article in the October 25th edition of the L.A. Times. The article didn’t mention the music. The article just highlighted how many additional people the band can play to due to a 360 degree stage.

The music doesn’t matter anymore, as long as they can play to a huge crowd.

I can hear the U2 fans reading this blog entry, and getting all bent out of shape. My question to you is this: Why the fuck aren’t you getting pissed off that the band hasn’t put out anything good in over a decade!?! You are willing to pay $251.50 (PER TICKET) to see them pay a set list heavy with shit songs? Why? Just because it is U2?

I watched the webcast tonight. I endured all the shitty post-1997 songs. I enjoyed the good pre-1997 songs (when the webcast feed wasn’t glitching). Am I sad that I didn’t go to the show? Not at all. I don’t get off on standing with 90,000+ people, and hearing only half the songs I like (and especially not for over $250!). I don’t care how big the damn stage is.

Blackberry loves U2. I stopped loving them when they stopped putting out music that I wanted to hear.

Bono, Edge, Adam, Larry. I have a plea. Stop rushing out new records. Go back to the drawing board, and put out an album that is worthy of your name. I don’t care how long I have to wait. I don’t care if the stage doesn’t have a huge “spaceship” that looks like a bad clone of the spider creature from “Wild Wild West”. I just want to hear a fucking good U2 song again. It’s been too fucking long!

U2, R.I.P. - 1979 - 1997

UPDATE FROM END OF WEBCAST:
LiveNation, Universal, Blackberry. Seriously? Did he just name check the fucking sponsors!?!?!? Is Bono seriously thanking people at the end of the show? Even worse - is Bono reading prepared corporate “thanks” from a fucking teleprompter!?! UGH! I give up!

For close to a week now, I keep going to my Facebook profile, only to be greeted by text saying “The page you requested was not found. You may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive.”

Seriously?

For a week now, people have been complaining on the Facebook site. Half of the time, when you try to even report the error, the page times out. Good luck finding a direct email address to contact Facebook on their site. There isn’t one.

There’s no feedback from Facebook at all on this matter on their site, other than a post days ago saying there was a small database bug. Squash the damn bug already. One would think that you have to be employing enough people in your company that it should not take a WEEK to fix a “small database” bug.

I even tried the email addresses I have for Facebook through some clients. Five days. No reply.

#facebookfail

UPDATE: October 10th - The profile is now online again, but trying to log into the site in general seems to take three or four attempts. The page either times out, or says my password is not right. And forget about actually having the “remember me” box actually work. Someone at Facebook needs to learn how to program a cookie.

“Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life”…eventually.

I’ve had this mashup kicking around various hard drives for a few years now. I never finished it…until now.

While you can read the backstory on this mashup in the Mashup area, I am choosing to use the blog space to rant.

In between the 9-to-5 work, I found the time to craft a video for the mashup. After seeing the success the last mashup video had, I made a video for the new mashup, and uploaded the file to YouTube. Damn thing didn’t even get through processing before I saw the “blocked worldwide” warning. Wow.

Now, I do see the irony here, as I handle the copyright account for one of my clients. But - this is different. When I delete videos for my client, I only delete straight uploads of released content. I do not delete fan-made content, which my mashup video is.

As I am proud of my little video mashup, I’m eating the server cost, and hosting it myself. Screw YouTube!

I hope you all enjoy the mashup. Be sure to download the video as well!

Nine Inch Nails vs Peter Gabriel - Closer To Your Eyes
(both mp3 audio and mp4 video files are available in the link above!)

Final NIN show. Four-plus hours of standing in lines. On the floor. On the rail.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I witnessed history.

Enjoy a bit of audio from the night (courtesy of the LS-10):

Nine Inch Nails - Down In It
(Live, The Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA., September 10th, 2009)
(unprocessed audio recording direct from my Olympus LS-10 - mp3 file)

Cars - Nine Inch Nails with Gary Numan
(Live, The Palladium, Los Angeles, CA., September 2nd, 2009)
(unprocessed audio recording direct from my Olympus LS-10 - mp3 file)

Today seemed like a normal day. Woke up (still in pain from the kidney stone, dammit), checked my email. Nothing significant until I hit my YouTube folder. What the hell!?!? Why is my NIN/Rick Astley mashup getting so much traffic!?!?!

One word: Digg.

And to think, this was a throwaway mashup! I should go make videos for the better ones (Billy Joel vs Jay-Z, Cure vs Commodores).

Gotta say, that was a cool way to wake up. Thanks to everyone for the hits and comments.

Thanks, Kevin Rose!

The burn marks from the Moxi Box. Read on…

I’m still alive. I have a roof over my head. I have food available to eat, and clean water to drink. In the grand picture of life, I am ok, but I think what I have gone through in the last week allows me a few minutes to complain…

Sunday
I drank nearly three quarts of liquids between Saturday night and Sunday (early) morning, but no liquid came out. All I had was extreme pain. After rolling around on the bathroom, bedroom and hallway floors in agony, Nora had to drive me to the hospital (for the second time). Classic moments from the hospital trip include:

* Me yelling at the nurse that I had no intentions of filling out forms again. I was just there less than two weeks ago. It’s 2009. You have a computer in front of you. Pull up the fucking file!

* I was on my second 1000ml bag of IV drip before I finally “went”. UGH!

* The x-ray tech, the nurse and the doctor all said the same thing: “We normally can’t see a kidney stone on a normal x-ray, but we can see yours.” Great…what do I win?

Wednesday
Around 2:10am, I awoke to the smell of burning electronics. I immediately jumped up, and started frantically walking around the bedroom, trying to find the source. Nora noticed the Moxi (crap TiVo clone from Charter) was not displaying the time on the front as usual. I hit the reset button, and heard “sizzle”. Bad. I went to touch it, and nearly burned my hand. I yanked the power cord, and moved the unit into the kitchen, allowing the unit to cool down. I will now summarize the next 17 hours:

* Run down to Charter Glendale, and complain on how their shit DVR started to catch fire. I also mention that I was actually supposed to be in San Francisco at the time, so I am lucky I was home, or else my entire apartment would have gone up in flames. Do they care? No. I get a one-day credit for the Moxi box not being used. I lose three years of DVR recordings, and had the risk of my entire apartment burning to the ground, and I get about nine bucks. Damn, Charter. Don’t hurt yourself now trying to please the customer.

* I get handed a temporary non-DVR HD box, and a slightly hollow apology. I come home, and of course the box doesn’t work. I then head back to Charter Glendale, and proceed to wait nearly an hour in their damn office lobby, before being told a tech would bring me a replacement Moxi.

* The tech shows up with a Moxi…the wrong kind. After he comes back with the right one, and sets it up, he leaves, and I plug in my 1TB external hard drive from my old Moxi. The new Moxi doesn’t recognize it. Great…I just lost three YEARS of DVR recordings! Does Charter care? No.

* The new box doesn’t pick up the channels I pay for! What the hell!

I am screwed. The day is wasted. I am tired, and the stone hurts.

Thursday
I get a bill in my mail. The first hospital bill (remember, I have gone twice to the hospital in the last two weeks due to the extreme pain of the 7mm kidney stone). How much you ask, dear blog reader, is the bill? A few dollars shy of $8,000! Fuck! For the money I am having to shell out for this damn stone, when it ever does pass, it better come with winning lotto numbers written on it! Two cat scans, some blood work, and fluid, is $8,000? Fuck.

Friday (tomorrow)
This shitty Moxi goes back again. If I can’t get my three YEARS of DVR recordings, why bother using a shit box that won’t even let me watch all the channels I pay for!?!? Then, at Noon, I am off to San Diego (hopefully) for the Depeche Mode show. As far as I know, it is still on.

Poor Dave. Cancer, torn leg muscle, and a vocal injury. He’s got about as much luck as I do lately.

(no picture - piece of crap isn’t worth promoting)

Charter had a DVR, and Moxi was it’s name-o.

Crappy DVR. Reboots when it feels like it. Flags content incorrectly. Buggy. Hated it.

Around 2am this morning, I woke up to the smell of burning electronics. The damn thing caught fire! Circuits inside the box literally were smoking!

I will not even start on all the TV recordings lost (1 TB external hard drive is now a brick, containing TV shows I legally recorded, paid $150/month to have, and yet now CAN’T HAVE!?!?!?).

I will say that it’s a good thing Depeche Mode cancelled their Shoreline show, or else I could have come home to a burnt out shell of a former apartment!

I hate Moxi.

Off to replace this crap!