How being a christian has harmed me

I agree with all 8 points of this article, and I was thinking about writing something very similar myself tonight.

Now I don’t have to.

Go read it.

Image from here, article found from here.

So…. I finally got a new guitar, an Ibanez RG Prestige. It is very nice. But I will talk more about it once I’ve played it more.

I bought this guitar today, but I played it on Friday and realised it was an awesome axe. Why didn’t I buy it then?

Poor customer service.

On Friday I was at Allans Music in the city, and I was there for at least 45 minutes before any staff member offered to help. At which point I did get to play the guitar I was looking at (thru a very nice Marshall Vintage Modern combo).

Of course, the staff member who I talked to, and had wandered off to find tools to retune the guitar and the whammy bar, never came back. Eventually after I had been noodling at quite decent volume another staff member approached and asked how I was, at which point I mentioned the tuning and whammy issues.

He actually went and got some allan keys and tuned the guitar…. well, actually just the bottom E string so I could see how it handled some metal riffage, since I’d spent a good amount of time showing off my 1337 shred and slow blues sk!77z (which had left quite a few bystanders with jaws on floor)

The whammy bar never materialised.

Eventually I’d been playing for what seemed like an hour, and was quite ready to buy the guitar, but no staff member was around.

I even managed to walk out, right past the second staff member who I’d dealt with, without a word being mentioned. This is what we call a retail EPIC FAIL…. And not unlike my experience a week earlier at Billy Hyde in Parramatta – who also may have had guitars I liked, but also just annoyed me with their lack of service.

At this point I went “home”* without spending a bag of cash on a new guitar.

So, today, I visited Turramurra Music and actually got served.

Sure turramurra music was a little weird…. one of the guys kept randomly singing “the cats of australia have made their choice…. snappy tom” at the top of his voice, the staff was having a chat about gum and comparing different quality levels to epiphones and gibsons, one of my ISYS123 students came in to get his acoustic restrung, they have way too much christian/religious music stuff – tab books, straps with religious themes and the like, and the guy who I dealt with used a reference to Andy Summers instead of the Hey Hey Guy when I mentioned my name….

But they actually had the same guitar I’d liked at allans, as well as some others I’d wanted to try – like the ESP LTD M-400, which is a great guitar for just metal…. but I wanted something with a single coil pickup to be able to indulge my slow blues side.

So at the end of the day, bad service lost someone a sale….

And in sad news, George Carlin passed…. and this is just a little tribute…. The classic MADtv sketch – Touched by an Atheist.

The BMI, aka the body mass index, aka the most useless statistical device in the long and boring history of useless statistical devices.

Why?

Because despite losing around 35kg, I’m still overweight.

I’m 72kg, and 1.6m…. which gives me a BMI of 28….

Which means articles like the one I read this morning about Australia being the fattest nation are nothing but scare tactics based on useless data.

Sure, there are a lot of people around who are generally overweight…. but it seems like anyone who does a decent amount of exercise, and has some decent muscle mass, is also counted as overweight.

And before anyone gets any ideas, yes I am thin…. everything I buy now is a S for Small…. So I’m not in some kind of self delusion….

Image from over there

“The technology is now at a point that we can grow a more perfect diamond than we can find in nature”

From a story on smithsonianmag.com about synthetic diamonds.

“Natural diamonds aren’t particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it’s a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.”

You are being ripped off, not me though. I’ll never buy non-synth.

Of course, at some point a chinese factory will get into this business, and then your toy doll will come with diamond accesories.

Well…. I’m a cynical pessimist by nature, so here are the ways that firefox 3 is annoying me so far:

• I find it slower, because it won’t accept key commands (at least to switch to next tab) if the page has just begun loading something new (like say, after you click a next page link or something). This is something I do all the fucking time, I click something in one tab, and switch to the next to read the stuff in that one while the other one loads or what have you instead it sits there like I didn’t hit any buttons and I keep having to hit it again, which is annoying
• It makes a new window full widescreen, which is not how I surf, I like to have a little space to the right so I can see things like chat windows, any kind of status or progress bar (like when downloading or uploading or copying or burning)
• The new dark chromey look makes the tab titles hard to read with my lcd screen backlight down on 1/3 (my normal surfing brightness)
• All the default fonts are slightly different, which just makes everything look odd
• Many sites don’t look right with the new version of gecko, for instance the text doesn’t wrap correctly around the in story flash ads on smh.com.au

This song is better than you.




And longer….

Go here…. trashparade.de

Vote for me….

Listen to the show if you want to hear my stuff being introduced in german…. Dr. Chaotica sounds kinda badass anyway, but in german it sounds totally fucking evil.

While you’re taking orders, head on over to chaotimusic.com and listen to my music and then go and tell your part of the world about it.

Today:

1. Garageband decided to crash instead of saving, destroying a days recording work
2. Half my lunch fell on the floor after I’d spent 30 minutes cooking it
3. I snapped and threw the plate in anger, getting the other half of the lunch all over my music gear
4. I snapped further and slammed my pointy blue guitar into the ground a few times – destroying the bridge and damaging at least one tuning peg – rendering it completely useless

Why do things always go wrong for me?