monkeyplus1

I worked furiously all afternoon to reconstruct some sort of live-set. When I arrived at Pi-REM, I sat on a couch and worked some more, holed up in a corner with headphones, laptop, and keyboard like the procrastinator I am.

A lot of people showed up, which was a surprise, and the sound system there was indeed first-rate.

The DJ set opening the evening was all original ambient music, followed by Magnum PA who picked up the pace with a nice set of IDM.

I’m sure I was the odd one of the bunch, playing “songs” that start and end, where they mixed one song into another DJ-style. I couldn’t do that without it being a DJ set, since I was hand-playing instruments on every track, and because my tempos and styles are all over the place. I got applause after every short track, but there was a guy dancing to it who started heckling me towards the end for starting and stopping. He said I was killing his buzz, and admitted he had a pretty good sized buzz.

Anyway, I had fun, hopefully they recorded it.

MonkeyPlus1 is OFFICIALLY in hibernation for the winter.

Des, who assed out of coming to my show, may (or may not) need some help with a side-project, and I want to take up some writing, short stories to start with.

The original motive of having a blog wasn’t to tout my oh-so-exciting life, but just to get back into the practice of writing something other than code.

FOR x IN friends LOOP
SAY (friends.x, ‘ta ta for now’);
END LOOP;

It’s quiet. Working from home is quiet.

Have show tonight.

Booted my laptop, realized I’d inadvertently deleted the sequences prepared for my live show, thinking they’d been backed up on another computer.

Oops. I should have checked earlier.  Victim of my own procrastination.

There is daylight left, I’ll cook something up, but I have work to do, too.

Plans: work, lunch, work more, go to the gym, pick up kids from school, come home,  work on set, eat dinner, fill hip flask, pack-up, go downtown, play show, hang out, come home, sleep.  work tomorrow.

I’m in a funk now, but I’m just a little slow off the line this morning, pacing myself to rock the fuck out 12 hours from now. stayed up too late last night reading. always do.

mp1 out.

This is cool, there is a good post here about the Laptop Lounge show I’m performing at tomorrow. Hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago, I noticed Activision (ATVI) was unusually low. I’d been used to seeing their share price in the neighborhood of $23-$24, and saw it lingering around $19-$20. They hadn’t posted earnings yet, but everywhere I look (including my living room) I see Guitar Hero III.   It’s also one of the top sellers in game stores lately.

It said BUY! all over it, while it was still low.  I cashed it in this morning at $22.50 for a nice chunk of profit.

Though it’s price is a little too high for my taste, EA Games (ERTS) is also enjoying a bump this week, up almost $4.

Lastly, I’m recommending a buy on Take Two (TTWO), though it’s a long position. Right now it’s cheap, around $15/share, because aside from Bioshock, they don’t have much on the field.  With the fanatical hype that will surround next year’s Q2 release of “Grand Theft Auto IV”,  I’m banking on seeing that rocket up to at least $20, likely higher.  They’ve shaped up quite a bit, I think they’re done bleeding from all the accounting problems they had earlier in the year, and now they’re saying they are growing, and talks of an EA buyout are unlikely.

In other news, I wasn’t in a position to buy Nintendo last year before the Wii came out (but I wanted to!), when it was still around $15 a share, the last I checked, it’s now around $77.   If I’d bought $10,000 worth this time last year, I would be looking at a profit of $41,354 right about now. Retrospective can be a bitch!  I really don’t know why they’re sitting so high right now, though, this has been a miserable year for Wii games with only a couple exceptions.  And at 480p, the Wii still looks like shit on an HDTV. That’s fucking ridiculous, inexcusable. Oh well, easy to be bitter when I’m not cashing in.

this is a post where you can thank me for not including a picture.

last week my parents were in town, staying with us for the holidays.

they heard scurrying in the kitchen, that’s currently midway through a remodel. We had a couple mice invade last summer, and though I did catch a live one and release it (with help from my video camera’s night-vision mode), the other was finally caught by trap.

Mice in your house is not good. They can’t control their waste, so they walk around leaving trails of mouse-pee and mouse-turds. Gross.

My parents were convinced there was a mouse, but I didn’t see any tell-tale turds. Furthermore, they were hearing the noise during the day. Mice are very timid, I think they only prowl the house at night, certainly not while four adults and two kids are walking around in broad daylight.

On their errands, my parents picked up some mouse traps and set them in various places where the kitchen plumbing comes in from under the house. I shrugged, still not believing there were mice, and adjusted the traps (mice have poor eyesight, seldom walk in the open, instead stay close to walls).

Five minutes later, we’re sitting in the living room and my step-dad says he heard something. I grab a flashlight, and the first trap I’d set was sprung.

There was no mouse in the trap.

Instead, there was a big brown RAT, stunned, and laying off to the side, still breathing. A female one at that (male rats have HUGE, unmistakable nut sacks).

Not knowing if it was just stunned or really in death throes, I grabbed an andiron from the fireplace, and, well… yeah. Tried my best to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible.

Now I’m a vegetarian and buy cruelty-free products when possible, but varmints are varmints. I grew up in Texas, so I’ve gotten rid of snakes, possum, rock squirrels, lizards, mice and rats before, but with kids in the house, I don’t keep a gun. I’ve killed squirrels and rabbit that lived through a shotgun blast by suffocating them with the butt of the gun, but never taken anything out with an andiron.  (For the record, the bunny was for barbeque, the rest were vermin).

Not to say I’m proud of it, the whole events was sad and disgusting, but necessary.

Luckily my wife wasn’t around when all this happened, she would have pulled her hair out, but she was just as freaked out to hear the tale secondhand.

sorry ratty.