Picked up a little pocket sketchbook, so I’ve been trying to draw at least a few times a week during lunch, usually while looking at other people’s stuff over on dA.  I’ve been trying to actually FINISH sketches rather than just have a big book of doodles.

It’s good heavy paper, so at some point after scanning the pencils I think I’ll go back and try my hand at inking things.

“Oh great,” I wonder to myself, as she approaches my window. She knocks on the glass and bends down to speak to me as I roll it down.

“There’s something wrong with this light, you’ve got to move!” she says.

I instantly recognize her.

“Frisch?!” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, as the light turns green anyway.

“Hi, I’m Ron Brown.”

“I know, honey.”

“Well, good to see you,” I say as I drive off.

Being told what to do by your high school English teacher after more than 13 years since graduation is a surreal experience, let me tell you.

Especially when you’re obeying the law and she’s apparently ridiculously impatient.

I suppose most casual blog posts are getting boiled down into 160-character blurbs and pushed out instantly via Twitter and Facebook these days. Do people even use their blogs anymore?

In my experience, it seems like most folks tend to have a single main site that they “hang out” at; whether it’s their blog, an online forum, or MySpace or Facebook or something along those lines.  When one finds an interesting link or needs to rant about politics, they tend to do it in that one spot.

My problem is that for, wow, at least 6 or 7 years now, I’ve run a forum for my knucklehead friends (no offense, guys), so I tend to spend most of my online time posting and reading there.  That’s where I know what I write will at least be read, and will usually be discussed or at least joked about.

So until I figure out exactly what it is that I want to do with this place, expect either randomness with no focus, or nothing.

Well that’s done.  Now we just have to see if this actually means I’ll update more often.

Doubtful.

And since the original Napster, I’ve hated finding and maintaining a library of digital music.

So over the last few years, I’ve played around with various streaming radio stations, and between the selections of music and audio quality, I’ve never been very happy.  That is until I stumbled upon Pandora the other day.  I couldn’t be happier.

Pandora takes all the guesswork out of things.  You tell it a favorite band, and it selects music with similar traits.  For example, the song I’m currently listening to was selected “because it features hard rock roots, major key tonality, mild rhythmic syncopation, electric guitar riffs and a dynamic male vocalist.”  I’m not sure what all of that means, but I like it!  Pandora found music I forgot about that I loved, and a few bands that I’ve never heard of and really enjoyed.  It’s quite impressive.

A side effect of this is that my productivity has skyrocketed.  Maybe it’s just the music selection, but I feel like I’m back in college in the basement working on my programming assignments.  I’ve been cranking out code and it’s been awesome.  Somehow, having background music keeps me from getting distracted by all the OTHER distractions around the office and lets me concentrate on what I’m doing.

Apparently Sam has known about it for quite a while.  He even uses it on his iPhone.  I’ll have to kick him square in the nuts for not telling me about it sooner.

That bastard.

I recently got FiOS, which meant a new wireless router.
I also recently got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which gave me a reason to fire up my Wii.

I was apparently able to get my Wii to find and connect to my 802.11g network with 64-bit WEP encryption, however any network operations (such as downloading a firmware update or connecting to a game’s Internet server) were failing.

I went into my wireless router’s settings, and saw that the channel (1-11) was set to “Automatic”.
I changed the channel setting to “11″.
I went through the Wii’s setup procedure again, and it worked flawlessly.

So, bottom line: Much like Nigel’s amplifiers, the Wiis go to eleven.

(Is that the plural of Wii? Wiis?)