Sunday, January 25, 2004

Oh my!

The dealer with the Antigua finished Telecaster sent me some better pictures. This thing is awesome. I'm feeling the urge to splurge:

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Wow! I finally found one

My first "real" electric guitar was a used 1978 Fender Telecaster with an Antigua finish. I remeber my dad paid $175 for it - seemed like a lot of money to me back in 1979 or so. It probably was. Any how, it's worth 10 times that now. I was an idiot and traded it away and have prety much regretted it for 20 years. I've never run across one again in that finish. A few have come by on the Internet but they were beat to hell and the finishes had turned a nasty color over time.

In 2003, Fender reissued the Antigua Telecaster and Stratocaster. I bought them both. They're decent guitars but not the same as the originals. The paint jobs are all wrong. I already sold the Stratocaster (thank goodness for Ebay).

Then the other day I found a real one:

[link]

The dealer swears the thing is practically mint. The color is right and not the nasty avocado green most of them turn into. I've asked about the dealer and he's apparently a straight shooter - pricey, but that's to be expected for this guitar.

I want this guitar!

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Welcome to Bush's new Middle Ages

What a fucking dipshit. I started to catch the State of the Union address and it was so depressing I had to walk away.

This asshole drags us into a war that neither he or anyone in the foreseable future will be able to get us out of. I love how he and his lemmings have declared a "do over" on our reasoning for starting the war. Along the way he manages to drag down the economy. Fuck, I could have done that.

I love it when he says he's created new jobs - like that's hard, you could employ thousands of people just to deal with unemployment.

Now tonight he brings up his medical plan squarely aimed at giving big businesses a break so they won't be too interested in providing quality benefits.

Once again we have a backwards-country-fuck-thinking leader that wants to impose his Bible thumping sense of medieval morality about what marriage and family is all about. ASSHOLE.

He wants to teach abstinence to our youth? More of his jackass morality. People have real problems making ends meet and schools have no money to pay teachers and this idiot wants to waste money trying to convince teenagers to wait. What a dork.

You know...

...everytime I see him it appears that his eyes are closer together. I wonder if they actually touched at one time and he had plastic surgery to spread them apart so he wouldn't look like such an inbred little shit. So what appears to be happening is that his inbred nature is overpowering the plastic surgery. I bet he goes in for another operation soon and they'll be space better soon. He's basically like Cher in The Deliverance.

His talk on drugs was good. I have to admit that. Of course he's got a lot of experience in that department so he's got a lot of credibility.

In terms of defeating terrorism - what has he done? Seriously, Bin Laden is still out there. Americans are afraid to fly, we're giving up civil liberties left and right, and the rest of the world hates us like never before. Oh yeah, that plan is working.

this blog was a stream of conciousness so it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense - it's rather difficult to articulate ones feelings when one is utterly fucking disgusted with ones wretched little troll of a leader.

Not that I have an opinion.

On a lighter note

I picked up The Rolling Stones Stripped CD the other day and it is really quite good. It's a live CD with a lot of acoustic numbers from their '95 Voodoo Lounge Tour. Love in Vain is beautiful.

So Dorothy says to George Bush...

"...what would you do with a brain if you had one."

Don't watch About Schmidt

What a crummy movie. I'm an idiot for watching the whole thing.

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

When are MSDN and MSN search not going to suck?

Crap. What a pain in the ass. The most effective way to search MSDN is to go to Google and search. Why can't MSDN search its own content and present it more effectively than Google? I know they have more domain knowledge about the content and at least some additional metadata that Google isn't privy to. What gives?

Then there's MSN search. It's come a long way but it still doesn't touch Google. MSN search result seem to be far more motivated by revenue than quality of results.

Sigh.

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Snow days RAWK!

Western Washington is comically unprepared for snow. The news reports last night said we'd get 4-12" depending on where you live. We live just oustide of Seattle in a suburb called Issaquah and got about 4-6". There was no point in driving to Redmond for work because nobody was there plus they don't clear the streets so it's driving on ice around here. So I slacked off at home. Connecting to e-mail remotely was painfully slow with 20,000 other people doing it so I said the hell with it and just enjoyed the day at home with my boys.

We took my eldest sons' bike ramp that Santa brought him and buried it to make a huge snow ramp. That and some innertubes from Schuck's auto supply were the hit of the day.

As the evening rolled around, some of the neighbor mom's and dad's gathered for some spiced wine while the kids continued on their sleds and innertubes. Naturally, I went and grabbed the brand spankin' new bottle of Jaegermeister from the fridge and proceeded to get blitzed with the neighbors around an impromptu fire. Heck, I can barely type right now.

Life is good...