Sounds like a Stephen King title doesn’t it? Oh that was Nightmares and Dreamscapes… close enough.

Last night was Weight Watcher’s weigh in number 3 for me. Don’t ask me how, but I managed to come in down 3.4 pounds for a two week total of 8 pounds even. Huh? Didn’t our scale which last week was reading less than half a pound off of the WW scale tell me I was up two pounds yesterday morning? Huh? What?

Being down a few instead of up a couple doesn’t change the fact that I have to start taking the entire process more seriously. Two reasons, one: I am less than 6 pounds away from being at the lowest weight of the entire decade. (approximately, I took a physical in August or September of 2000 so I could restart taking classes at UMass Lowell. I remember the weight. I also remember flunking the tuberculosis screen. That was a fun day.) That’s a goal in my book. Of course, after reaching that goal I have to get the 5% weight loss goal, and the 10% weight loss goal, and then to get down to my recommended weight I have to drop something like 120 pounds total. That’s not my end goal by any stretch, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to walk up two flights of stairs and not have to worry about having a heart attack? The second reason to stick with it is that it’s expensive and I don’t want to piss away this money without any results.

Anyway, enough about weight watchers for now. What about RPM? How about nothing about RPM. We went to bed at a decent hour last night and I fell asleep quick, but around 2:30 or so I had a nightmare that woke me up and kept me up for over an hour. I changed the alarm clock to let me sleep as late as possible in the hopes I’d not be a basket case today.

The nightmare was weird. It started out with me walking home from the weight watchers meeting. (a short 15 mile walk) A few steps after leaving the building one of my teeth fell out. I was pissed. By the time I got home almost all of them had fallen out. I was completely paniced (in the dream) and completely freaked out upon waking from it. Could it be my subconscious telling me to stop being a moron and get my fat ass to a dentist? Or is it my subconscious telling me that weight watchers will rot my teeth? Hmmmm could be either one.

So the result was, no recording today. We’ll try again tomorrow.

Now for the lame ass ridiculous why-does-this-red-headed-doofus-keep-posting-lame-shit-like-this part of this morning’s post.

Camera phone shots!

Police activity on route 126 in Concord, MA, right near the high school. There were two police cars. One cop was searching the suspect’s trunk. Note the guy sitting in the dirt to the left of the cars. Is that the suspect or just a passenger in the suspect’s vehicle. I couldn’t tell.

Later, coming home from the meeting, we saw more police activity on 495 North. We couldn’t tell if this was an accident or a construction site. It was quick, and there were yellow lights and red flares, but we really couldn’t tell.

Totally unrelated note:

Yesterday was the Apple demonstration of the next iPhone operating system. I followed a couple of live blogs to see what they were going to do to make my awesome phone even better. There are a lot of things that other smart phones do that iPhones don’t, and we were hoping to hear that some of those features were coming our way.

They are. Some of them at least.

You can’t send/receive multimedia messages with an iPhone. Text messages, yes. Picture messages and video messages no.

Yet. OS 3 will support picture messages but not video messages. A humongous step in the right direction.

iPhones do not have text cut/copy/paste functionality.

Yet. OS 3 will not only let you cut/copy/paste text in text based apps, but across all apps including Safari. Very cool.

People have been hoping to get the ability to run processes in the background. In other words, multitasking. Not going to happen, but we will be able to get notifications when an app that isn’t running needs to be updated. The example they gave was an espn app trying to update you that a game you’re interested in had a score change (at least that’s what I think they were demonstrating… it was hard to tell over some one else’s blog).

Another addition is a change to the development tool kit that will allow for turn-by-turn GPS apps to be written. That is awesome. Ridiculously awesome. It wasn’t on my wish list at all, but as soon as I heard about it I was thrilled.

Another great addition is that Apple’s Spotlight Search applications will now be standard and work across all apps. No more paging through mountains of emails looking for the right one. Gmail does this better than anyone I’ve seen so far… far better… but that capability is not available when you port your gmail account into an iPhone like Jen and I do. Spotlight should be a big help.

There were some down sides though. A couple of things from the universal wish list were left off. Still not video messaging or video recording, and still no flash capabilities in the Safari web browser.

There was also a change to the app store that I am pretty upset about. Right now there are two types of apps. Free and not free. When the new OS comes out the not free apps can become subscription based. (I don’t know if all of them will, or if it’s just a third option. That wasn’t made very clear to me) Meaning instead of paying $X for the app when you install it you will be charged $Y per month through iTunes. That sucks. Good for developers and for Apple, but shitty for the users. I think I only have one or two paid apps anyway so I don’t think it will affect me much, but that doesn’t change the fact that it sucks. Oh and you know any turn-by-turn GPS apps will be subscription based… so it probably will affect me. Damn it.

There were other changes announced too that don’t really interest me. It seems they are trying to turn iPhones into the next big gaming platform. You will be able to play multiplayer games over a blue tooth connection. It sounds cool, but I don’t think I’d bother with that much. I don’t even play online with my playstation 3, I’m not going to suddenly do it on my phone.

Over all there were lots of good stuff for we iPhone users. We’ll have to wait a few months before the new OS becomes available to us, and that will probably coincide with the release of the next generation iPhone which will probably have some new hardware added as well. Jen will probably upgrade this time. I’ll try and wait a couple of years. Maybe by then they’ll have iPhones that can chauffeur us to work in the morning. They already do almost everything else. I’d go for that.

Happy St Patrick’s Day to all of the Irish including all of those who just act Irish one day a year. Also if you are from Boston Happy Evacuation Day!

First things first: The recurring series on this page, iPhone Astrophotography has taken a major step back recently. It seems that when you leave for work after sunrise and get home before sunset it is difficult to take bad pictures of big giant empty rocks in space.

I lucked out today though!

See it? The Moon? Do you see it?

Last night Jen did a kick ass job of finishing off the invitation printing by cranking out the reception cards and the directions. She is unbelievable. She also officially replaced her desktop computer with her MacBook by getting a new keyboard and mouse and hooking the lappy to her gigantic monitor.

We took it for a test drive by playing a little World of Warcraft. I managed to get it up and running on my laptop on Sunday (by taking the fully patched install from my desktop and just copying it onto my laptop. Why didn’t I think of that first?) but I played on the desktop last night. It was the first time seeing the game on my own super awesome monster monitor. It looked so good I kept ducking when the big cats jumped at me.

Later this week we are having an evening of invitation envelope stuffing, and then we send them out. I’m looking forward to that. I hope that once the invites are in the mail I can stop flip flopping on who we should or should not invite. We want to keep the guest list as small as possible, but it is continuously creeping up. We set a maximum number of guests to invite and have done a good job of keeping below that, but we’re at the point now where we are saying, if we invite couple A we have to not invite couple B. That’s a little stressful.

Of course once the invites are out and the RSVPs start coming back we have to set up seating arrangements. I expect that to be stressfully fun too.

Tonight is my third weight watchers meeting. I promised myself I wouldn’t weigh myself at home at all. I have broken that promise twice this week. The first time was Friday (I think… or was it Saturday? No, Friday) and I was WAY down. So far down that I got lazy and stopped watching myself. Sunday we had our St Patrick’s Day boiled dinner and I absolutely sowed on the corned beef. I broke my no-weighing-myself-at-home promise again this morning and I am two pounds over last Tuesday’s weigh in. Uh Oh. I need to get on track and start taking this thing more seriously. Starting right now.

This morning it took a lot of effort, but I did it. I kept the promise I made to myself on this page yesterday. I got up early and did some recording. Poorly.

The alarm went off at 5:00am. I snoozed twice and dragged myself up at about 5:23 or something. I had three reasons to get up early. 1: laundry. 2: it’s trash day and we had a ton of it to get out. 3: Recording guitar leads.

After starting a load of laundry I gave myself about 30 minutes to work, and that was it. After that it was takin’ out the trash time. I have tried to keep with the RPM spirit during this project and by that I mean, don’t get caught up in perfection. Just get it on tape. On the RPM message boards you often see people talking about struggling with their internal censor, specifically with trying to either turn it off or somehow ignore it. The lead guitar parts are where I have by far the most trouble in this regard. I strive for the perfect solo, but I am no where near good enough to come even close to it… so I re-record over and over again.

I told myself that if I could get through a solo without hitting any bad notes, screwing up any pick attacks, or falling badly out of time I was going to keep the take. Lame Song #1 is only about a minute and 55 seconds long and there is only an eight measure section that needs lead guitar. It took me three takes to get something I can live with. Check that song off as finished. (although there is a huge amount of ground hum on the guitar tracks and I may have to do them all over again using a different setting on my Pod. Probably not though, I’ll probably just mute the track on the few parts where the guitars briefly drop out so there is no noticeable humming… that’s going to be a bitch to do in the mix, but it should work.)

Lame Song #2 has a ton of room for lead parts all over the place. I started out working on the first eight bars of the song and must have re-recorded 10 times. My goal of ignoring the internal censor was obviously not met in that respect. Finally it was 6:00 and I had other stuff to get to so I just did a run through of the whole song adding leads whenever the vocals dropped out. Most of it sounded good, but there was one badly flubbed attack during the solo that can’t be left there, and there were about 16 bars worth of noodling around the vocals at the end of the song that were missing all together.

ADATs at their best have a bad reputation for occasionally just not printing to tape. It’s very much like a drop out on a cell phone. One minute it’s recording perfectly, the next it’s not recording at all, and then later it’s working fine again. That’s what happened at the end of the song. The track was in record ready, the signal was getting to the tape nice and strong, and the record light was very much red. But after about three minutes of working fine it just stopped recording. I need to do almost all of Lame Song #2’s leads again tomorrow.

I will do it. Oh yes, I will do it. While I’m at it I’ll crank through songs 3 and 4 too. I’m feeling it again folks, I am feeling it again.

Throwing Muses are once again reunited for a brief tour. They stopped at the Middle East over the weekend. We weren’t able to make it this time as we’re happily in money saving mode and are putting live music on the back burner for a while (with one exception later this month).

My love for this band cannot be understated. To me there is Rush, then Throwing Muses, then everyone else. I’ve been lucky enough to see them a few times and each show holds a special place in my memory. I saw them in ’89 (yes I am old) at Great Woods opening for R.E.M. and my rocker friends still look at me funny for being so into them then. I saw them for free at the Hatch Shell in ’95. I saw them twice the day their Limbo album was release. Once at an in-store at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square (my copy of limbo was duly autographed) and then later at the Middle East. I saw them a year later on what was more or less their farewell tour. They all sat down on stage and played requests all night. It was an amazing show. I then saw them a couple of years ago on their previous short reunion tour. Just a fantastic night.

(I took lots of pics)

The following (along with the picture at the top of the post) is copied from this Boston.com review of the show.

Staying in touch with her Muses

Kristin Hersh performed with the Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave on Saturday.

CAMBRIDGE – Never mind that Throwing Muses originally formed in Newport, R.I., more than 25 years ago with a different lineup before settling into its latest configuration as a trio. Boston (and Cambridge for that matter) has long claimed the mercurial indie-rock icons as their own, and Saturday night, a sold-out crowd packed the big room at the Middle East to welcome back some old friends who’d been away awhile.

It’s been six years since the last Muses album (word is they’ve got a new one due out next year), but you would never have known it from the band’s majestically brooding, viscerally arresting performance – a 90-minute whirlpool of dark dreams, darker nightmares, and poisonous beauty, with frontwoman Kristin Hersh’s voice at its vortex. It was a voice as sour as vinegar and venomous as strychnine – wickedly narrow in range, but labyrinthine in its ability to coil around the Muses’ baleful melodies.

From the first coalescing guitar notes of “Devil’s Roof,” whose opening moved from pensive and almost psychedelically pretty into a measured groove of stealth and sinew, Hersh and Co. – namely, bassist Bernard Georges and drummer David Narcizo – proved as bracingly magnificent as ever. A clutch of cool, strangely glittering selections – “Start,” “Hazing,” and “Shimmer” – from one of the band’s best albums, 1995’s “University,” followed (another, the full-blooded and furious “Bright Yellow Gun,” would come later).

Ultimately, coupled with Georges’s and Narcizo’s dense yet elastic sense of rhythmic thrust and predilection for off-kilter time signatures, the set – drawn from various stages of the band’s career and catalog, and spiked with two encores – offered potent proof of Hersh’s enduring, enigmatic power as a singer and songwriter. Her penchant for throwing her demons, as well as muses, into a stormy sky and letting the rain come remains undiminished, and at age 42 she continues to sound like no one else.

There also aren’t many artists who can open for themselves, convincingly or otherwise, but that’s exactly what Hersh did with her noisy punk outfit 50 Foot Wave. Also a trio, with Georges on bass but with Rob Ahlers on drums, 50 Foot Wave did not sound like a side project or Hersh’s new main muse, but rather something of a malevolent alter ego.

The songs? More like fiery blasts of corrosive energy, really: Hersh’s shredded screams, metallic guitar chords, and vicious stop-start rhythms felt like a Band-Aid being ripped from a fresh wound, and taking some skin with it. Its 30-minute set, sandwiched between the, er, headliners and kinetic openers Screaming Females (also a female-fronted trio, this time from New Jersey) was all about finding pure release.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Now… did some one mention an album next year?

I mentioned here once before that I have a fantasy hockey team in a free yahoo public league.

The regular season ended yesterday and the playoff bracket was officially placed onto the league home page.

Here’s a look. Remember, my team is named Neely is God. (click on the image to blow it up)

Yup, I won the fantasy nerd league equivalent of the President’s trophy for coming in first place in the regular season and I get a bye in the first round of the playoffs.

I’ll probably lose in the second round.

Fantasy Sports Nerd Pride!

This morning was a weird one. I guess seeing as it’s only about 9:00am it is still a weird one, but the weirdness appears to be over… I hope!

For the sixth consecutive business day morning my alarm went off at 5:00am and I failed to drag myself out of bed to work on my ridiculously late RPM project. I am so close, yet so far.

Each night I set the alarm for 5:00 knowing that I will be getting up (after maybe a 10 minute snooze) and heading down to the basement to work on finishing up the recording. I am 100% sure that I will do it. I pump myself up a little. I cheer for myself, “Let’s go Rob! Let’s go Rob!” but when that alarm inevitably goes off the next morning… I might hit snooze once, believing that my 5:00 appointment with music is only being pushed off to 5:10. But then at 5:10 I reset the alarm to 6:00 and go back to sleep.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will get up. I promise!

This morning was a little different though. I just couldn’t wake up. I can’t remember the last time waking up was such a struggle. I popped awake a couple of times during the night (stupid leg cramp) but generally slept really well. I just couldn’t come around this morning. I was on such a good roll getting up early. I hope I can get back on it. The plan once the recording is done is to go back to my older unfinished recording projects and start finishing those suckers off. Also, with weight watchers in full swing I am hoping to do a little exercising before work too. I need to cross over the lazy bridge and get back to the self motivated shore.

(thank you Talladega Nights.)

Wedding planning plans for this week: Print out the reception cards, finish up the registry, start stuffing invitation envelopes. Throw in a weight watchers meeting and Rob’s insatiable need to follow the imploding Boston Bruins and you have a pretty full week.

Now get to it!

I take it back about Steve Montador. I am watching the Bruins and Penguins in the third period and twice in the last few minutes someone from Pittsburgh made him look like a chump.

The other day I said something about Blasphemy…

This is just too fricken’ funny.

Who ya gonna call?

We’re going to have a boiled dinner in celebration of St. Patrick’s day today. Also known as corned beef and cabbage.

Although I do not like cabbage at all (bleck!) I do love me a good corned beef dinner. We generally only eat it once a year so as to save up the goodness.

Corned beef is traditionally supposed to be salted. By salted I mean kept from spoiling by burying it under a mountain of salt for months on end. The purpose for boiling the corned beef is sucking some of the salt into the water and thus making the beef itself edible.

I say to hell with that! If the corned beef isn’t crunchy then it needs more salt!

Could you please pass the salt?

If you like your rock and roll live and to some extent bootlegged, check out this site:

Wolfgang’s Vault Concert Vault

It’s streaming audio of a slew of bands playing live. It seems to come from a combination of archived Fillmore concerts as well as various syndicated FM radio concert shows like King Biscuit Flower Hour and Westwood One Concert Series.

I haven’t dug too deep into it, but it seems to have a decided bent toward classic rock. Right now I’m listening to a Yes show from ’74. Earlier I checked out a Procol Harum show from ’68, and the two Derek and the Dominoes shows that make up the Live at the Fillmore album.

It’s pretty cool. Search around and see if there is anything to your liking.

Two months in a row… yet only one of those months had a Friday the 13th movie open on Friday the 13th. March sort of seems like a missed opportunity when you look at it in that light, doesn’t it?

Two things from the road. First, from this morning…

So Rob, what’s so funny about that? Well I will tell you what is so funny about that.

The bumper sticker. Click on the image to blow it up and see if you can make it out. You probably can’t so I will just tell you what it says. I think it was taken directly from my gmail spam folder. It says, “For Penis Enlargement Call” blah at blah blah.

Some dude has a Penis Enlargement Bumper sticker on his freakin Ford SUV! I find that to be absolutely freakin’ HYSTERICAL! On his CAR!!! I kept looking at it trying to see where the joke was but I couldn’t. I suppose it’s possible that the phone number is the joke. Maybe it’s a fake phone number and you have to call to hear the punchline… then again maybe it really is an advertisement for penis enlargement done in bumper sticker form. Why not, they already bomb everyone’s email, why not branch out into reality. I almost pissed myself laughing.

The one question I had was his destination. He turned into the Billerica House of Correction. I wonder… is he meeting clients? Or (more likely) is the penis enlargement company his, and was he… how can I put this… checking in?

Okay… now that I have stopped laughing again…

Here’s picture number two. This one leads me to a serious question that can probably never be taken serious because it’s following a dick joke on the back of an SUV… but here it is anyway…

This is probably just me nitpicking, but here goes. We’re going to focus on the sign in the picture. This is a church on route 113 in Methuen. I pass it on the way home. You can click on the image to blow it up and you can probably make out the writing on the sign, but I will be nice and not make you do all of that work. (you’re welcome) it says, “Is this the sign you have been waiting for?” and it is signed “God”.

So… a church… put a sign on it’s property… and the writing on the sign is attributed to God Himself… But God never actually said those words… so… some one in the church is putting words into God’s mouth… and how is that not blasphemy?

No, seriously tell me. How is putting words into God’s mouth not a disgusting example of blasphemy? I don’t get that. It’s breaking a commandment to take the Lord’s name in vain… but putting words into his mouth and literally signing his name is just good advertising? I don’t understand.

Yeah… the dick joke was much funnier.