Feaverish

Whew. It’s been a busy week here at Feaverish Publishing. I’ve been working ââ�¬â�� entirely during my all-tooââ�¬â��ethereal free time ââ�¬â�� on a new project, soon to be unveiled to an unsuspecting and woefully underprepared world. Care for a sneak peek? Here are two. Make of them what you will. What’s that? You want more? Now, now, don’t be greedy. All in due time, dear reader. Believe me when I say the official announcement will be as overblown (in hype) and disappointing (in reality) as this entire site.

Moving on, the keen-eyed amongst you will notice that comments are back. For the dull-eyed, focus your cataract-afflicted peepers on the bottom left of the page. I thought briefly of calling them “Complaints” instead of “Comments,” but the suggested change pushed the site’s tone just over the precipice of unequivocal cynicism, and I’m not yet prepared to take that step. (Coming soon!)

I’m still trying to work out a bug wherein the comments link doesn’t appear on permalinked pages. If any of my readers are experts in the dark art of PHP programming, a lent hand would be most appreciated. I’m also styling the comments as I go, so let me know if you experience any problems.

And speaking of styling, I finally got this site to look halfway decent in Internet Explorer for Windows. The solution occurred to me months ago, but I have been too lazy to test it out until now. I am not self-motivated. As punishment for sacrificing to the Gods of Windows, however, the site now looks positively ghastly on Internet Explorer for Mac. Thankfully, according to my logs, neither of my regular readers uses that particular browser. There is still a three-or-so pixel gap on the right edge of the Internet Explorer for Windows viewport, which I suspect is due to this well-documented and easily overcome bug. As I said, I am not self-motivated.

As atonement for this especially lousy blog post, I point (or “link”) the reader to these delicious videos. Fans of music, beer, or bicycles are especially encouraged to indulge. Via hometown hotspot Orange Bicycle.

So a couple of weeks ago Airbag linked to a contest at Footblog where you could win $39 in iTunes for correctly predicting the Superbowl score. Well, I entered. And more than that, I won. Yes, friends and foes, marvel at my prognosticative superpowers. I’ll admit to not being the biggest football fan, and basic comprehension of most sports’ scoring systems is beyond my ken, but free music is definitely the kind of thing I can get my ass behind. And even if you’re not into football, you have to appreciate a site that opts for CSS over tables and runs free as in beer adverts (is that still even a word?) for Jewelboxing, Basecamp, and Apple.

Now, $39 may not seem like a lot to you, Richie Rich, but it’s a lot to me. $39 is what I have left over each month once the bills are paid. $39 is what I spend in a year on the damp newspapers I use to insulate my house. $39 is what I paid for arthroscopic knee surgery in the kitchen of that Thai place down the street. $39 is a lot of money to me. So, how did I blow it, you ask? Here’s what I got:

• The Decemberists ââ�¬â�� Human Behavior
• No Cars Go ââ�¬â�� Arcade Fire
• Ladyflash (Hot Chip Remix) ââ�¬â�� The Go! Team
• New Health Rock ââ�¬â�� TV on the Radio
• Walking the Cow ââ�¬â�� TV on the Radio
• Modern Romance ââ�¬â�� TV on the Radio
• The Commander Thinks Aloud (Future Mix) ââ�¬â�� The Long Winters
• Graceland ââ�¬â�� The New Pornographers
• Best of All Possible Worlds ââ�¬â�� Grandaddy
• I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure it Out ââ�¬â�� Elliott Smith
• Bottle Up & Explode (non-album version) ââ�¬â�� Elliott Smith
• Your Cheatin’ Heart ââ�¬â�� Beck
• Clementine ââ�¬â�� The Walkmen
• Fly Into the Mystery ââ�¬â�� The Walkmen
• Out on the Side ââ�¬â�� Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
• My Honey ââ�¬â�� Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
• The Girl I’ve Always Known ââ�¬â�� Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
• This Will Be Our Year ââ�¬â�� Ok Go
• Driving South ââ�¬â�� The Clientele
• Saturday ââ�¬â�� The Clientele
• An Hour Before the Light ââ�¬â�� The Clientele
• Green Imagination (entire album) ââ�¬â�� The Sunshine Fix & Olivia Tremor Control

Pretty sweet, no? Anyway, clicking on any of the above songs will should take you right to the iTunes Music Store, where you can buy them for yourself.

Also, I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 last night, and though the upgrade itself was super-easy, it seems to have broken a few things regarding the look of the page. You’ll notice, for instance, that you can now scroll off to the right edge of the image. Not too classy. I’m working on it, and look for a fixed page and lots of new features (comments! photo galleries! proper grammar!) coming this weekend at the latest.

Update: I fixed the spacing issues, so for most of you everything should look, um, as it should. Internet Explorer users on Windows will still see several layout problems, but if you’re still using Internet Explorer you probably don’t care too much how things look anyway.

Did I mention we got an office dog? Well, we did. Heidi. And she’s awesome. She’s some variety of Corgi, with that little clitoris of a tail that just kind of throbs back and forth when she gets excited.

Huh. That metaphor proved to be disturbingly appropriate.

Anyway, it’s been pretty fun having her around. She was initially shy, and would glare at you like you were crazy if you tried to pet her, but she’s gotten over all that. So much so that she feels free to take (surprisingly large) dumps in the most inaccessible indoor locations. She also peed at the entrance to my office, as though to mark her territory, but I showed her what’s what by peeing longer, harder, and in greater volume on exactly the same spot, rendering her comparatively pathetic emanation null and void. She still hasn’t really forgiven me. Nor have my coworkers, for that matter, even though I claimed to have learned the technique from the Monks of New Skete. So it goes.

As far as her performance as an employee, well, the verdict’s still out. She barks a lot, and there’s the whole indoor defecation thing, but other than that she’s shown little management potential. I don’t cotton to office gossip, but so far about all she’s been good for is blaming farts on, and that job’s already taken.

I do have high hopes, though. I’d like to rig up some kind of harness or something so she could, like, take messages around the office, or maybe bring me cold ones. Also if I could get her to bite people when they don’t obey my commands, that would be awesome. Here’s what I have in mind:

This is going to be a meta (read: boring) post of sorts, so feel free to tune out if you a) don’t know me personally, b) know and dislike me, or c) . . . well a) and b) should cover most of you.

First off, if you haven’t already noticed, visited links are now “highlighted” instead of crossed-out. A big thanks to all of you who complained (four of you yesterday alone! I wasn’t aware I even had four readers!), and please take this as evidence that your voice does matter here at Feaverish Limited. Anyway, it gives me a chance to steal from someone besides Inman. I will, however, continue to refer to myself in the first person.

More thanks to everyone who’s been asking about my bike. I’m happy to report that my transition from 10-speed to single-speed has gone swimmingly, and that I cannot see myself ever again buying a multi-geared bike (barring competition dans le Tour). In a word, I love it. The bike is as light and as fast as I expected, but I didn’t realize it would be so quiet. On a dry road, it makes almost no noise. The most sublime moment of my day is cruising up Ankeny, after dark and with no cars on the road, and the only noise the sound of the wind rushing past. These photos are from the eBay sale. Naturally, I’ve added some killer mods since then: streamers, spoke riders, sound system (no, seriously, there’s this dude who skateboards up and down Ankeny who has a couple of mini speakers attached to his backpack straps. The other day he was blaring [and accompanying on voice] “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture. It made my day.). Anyway, here’s a shot of me and my new bike. I think you’ll agree it’s pretty snappy.

Shifting gears (ah ha!), I think I’ve talked my boss into getting me a new Mac mini (this is the same boss who bought me a bike helmet because she was concerned about my safety. This place has simply capital management). My current G4 tower is, to put it delicately, past its prime. Case in point, I typed this entire entry over two hours ago, and the letters are just now appearing on the screen. I’m debating whether I should take my Stanley Kubrick hard drive icon over to the new computer, or just start fresh. The decision weighs heavily on me.

Finally, if you haven’t yet heard about Audioscrobbler, let me be the first to tell you: it’s awesome. Basically it keeps track of all the music you listen to and makes a constantly-updating web profile of your tastes. It keeps running charts of you favorite bands and tracks, and helps you connect to others who have the same taste. For instance, my closest musical neighbor (based on what we both listen to the most) is a big fan (as indicated on his profile) of the band Stars (their homepage appears to be experiencing technical problems), which I’d never heard of. Now I have heard them, and I like them. Kind of a Belle & Sebastian-meets-Saint Etienne kind of downtempo indie pop thing.

Anywho, that’s just an example. You can also listen to an internet radio stream of your musical neighbors’ music, which is kind of cool. It’s all totally transparent, too. You just install a plug-in for your media player of choice and it sends all the data automatically and in the background. Also, the plug-in can’t tell the difference between a song you ripped from a CD and a song you downloaded (il)legally, so there’s no way for you to get into trouble.

You can check out my profile here. Yeah, I know, Beck is my most-listenedââ�¬â��to artist, and here I am preaching the virtues of indie rock day and night. What happened is, I was “walking down the street” the other day and “saw on the sidewalk” a “CD” which, when I “inserted it into my computer” turned out to be the new, unreleased Beck album. Some poor record exec must have dropped it. Anyway, it’s really good, and I’ve been listening to it over and over. Hence all the Beck. It’s not that I’m embarrassed, either. I mean, Odelay is like one of the kick-assin’-est albums ever. And if you haven’t made sweet, sweet love to Midnight Vultures‘ “Beautiful Way,” well, you my friend haven’t made sweet, sweet love at all.

So alright. That’s that. The lesson today is go check out Audioscrobbler and take all the gears off your bike.

P.S. I just drew a big fat asterisk that looks exactly like a tarantula. It’s totally creeping me out.

Update:
Those damn slanty small caps in the title were not working for me so I got rid of them. Also, they were making me invalid. I hope you don’t mind.