The irony in that statement will become apparent as you continue to read. It blows my mind how much effort and extra money all of this cost me.

Also it should be mentioned that the span of all of the following events took place over a week and a bit, because I was only at my home for about two days over the entire time-line.

Alright so where to begin? I’ve always sort of wanted an XBox 360, which would come to a shock to a younger version of me. I was always a huge fan of the PlayStation. Sadly since the PS3 has nothing on it that interests me, my loyalties have changed. That and I don’t think Blu-ray is doing very well, so I don’t need a player for them at the moment.

The issue with wanting one and owning one were two-fold. First there was the issue of my T.V. being almost comically small. I’ve had it since I was 13, and bought it with my very own paper route money. It’s colour, mono sound, has no AV jack ports, and I lost the remote so long ago that it’s nothing but a myth. The second issue is that in order to get a decent XBox, I’d be looking to drop anywhere from 350-500 dollars.

As I have a shortage of funds, these two points were a little more daunting than I would like to admit. I told myself that when I could afford a nice T.V. and an XBox, it would be one of those “for me” purchases and left it at that. Then my parents decided to buy a fancy new T.V., and I was given the older one from the family room. Now it’s nothing amazing, but it has two AV jack ports, stereo sound, and a remote (mind you, the 3 doesn’t work well on it). So I now had a T.V. that would service my needs. The XBox costing too much still put me off the purchase though.

So then Boxing Day comes around, and lo and behold I can get an XBox 360 with four games – Kung-fu Panda, LEGO Indiana  Jones, Halo 3, and Stranglehold -, and a 60 gig hard drive for 260 dollars. that’s roughly 130 dollars cheaper then usual, not even factoring the cost of the free games which average around 45 dollars each. Put it together and I could save 310~ dollars. This is not something I could pass up.

This is where things start to slowly go down-hill.

Day 1 (Friday)

So the flier says that Future Shop opens at 6 a.m. I make the decision to line up at 3 a.m. because they only had 20 or so of these deals. This may sound insane, but trust me when I say that there were people who were lined up there as of 12:30 that morning. The kicker is that due to some insane bylaw in Brantford, Future Shop could only open at 9 a.m.. For those unwilling to do the math, that’s an extra three hours of standing in the cold, hating myself. Thankfully I had a chair and my sleeping bag, so I was alright for the most part. Waiting around for 6 hours was… less fun.

In the end I got my XBox 360, brought it home, and only then did I realize that it is the only NextGen console that does not have built in wireless. Why? I have no actual idea, though “cash gouging” comes to mind. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just pick one up while we’re out! How expensive can they be?”

Day 4 (Monday)

100 dollars, as it turns out. Which is, of course, insane. “There must be a way around this!” I proclaimed. I went to the all-knowing Google and started looking around.

There is apparently a way to rig up your XBox 360 into your computer using Internet Connection Sharing. After following 3 of these tutorials, failing, and nearly killing my computer and network to boot, I decided to try a different approach.Well not totally true, I fished out my old laptop, and tried doing the same through that, but it was even less successful; something I didn’t even think was possible.

This whole thing took roughly four hours of my life away.

Day 7 (Thursday)

“I should be able to use a router as an access point, hook into the wireless network that already exists, and then connect the XBox to the router via Ethernet!” This is possible, as it turns out, only if you have the correct routers. D-Link, which was up until this experience my router of choice, does not actually allow this quite the way I want.

What I want:

• Router A is connected to the modem, and broadcasts the wireless network.
• Router B acts as a repeater; that is to say that it connects to the Wireless network from Router A wireless-ly (this is an important distinction) and acts as an additional hub, and/or repeats the signal from Router A.
• Things can then connect to Router B and they will attach themselves to the network, which makes my XBox go live.
• Alternately, allow my XBox to use Router B as an antennae, allowing it to connect to the Wireless signal broadcast by Router A.

What my D-Links can actually do:

• Router A is connected to the modem, and broadcasts the wireless network.
• Router B can connect to Router A with an Ethernet cable, and then act as a broadcast anchor.
• Things can then connect to Router B, and it directs the traffic back to Router A.

Since I cannot run a cable through my house, this effectively screwed me. Of course I only found this out after buying the router, trying, failing, and then finding the manual online (doesn’t come with one!). This took another couple hours of my life away. The router is of course non-refundable. The upswing to this is that when I move out, I have a router. Fantastic. For now though, it sits in my closet, mocking me.

“I know I’ve seen this done though! My friend has this exact setup!” I screamed, bordering upon hysterics at this point. It turns out that the only router that can do this the way I want is a Linksys router, which of course is what he has. This will teach me to leap before I look.

Day 10 (Sunday)

11:45 A.M.

At this point I snap. “Fine! Fuck all of this, I’ll just spend the 100 dollars and get the stupid adapter for the stupid XBox so I can finally get online!”

Totally defeated, I got into my car and drove down to the closest EB Games to pick up an outrageously over-priced Wireless Adapter. I decided against going to the Brantford Future Shop, which is about the same distance as EB Games (in the opposite direction, basically), because they specialize in video games and so the funding should go their way.

12:10 P.M.

EB Games is closed. Not a “back in 5 minutes” closed. This was a “Shutters are down” sort of closed. a Closed closed. No hours of operation in sight.

“Fuck you EB Games, I’ll just go to Wal-Mart” I proclaim as I dive back into my car.

12:18 P.M.

Wal-Mart carries every other XBox accessory, including Viva Pinata face plates, but no Wireless Adapter. It’s literally the only thing they don’t carry. There isn’t even a peg for it. Asking the mouthbreather working the electronics section says “if it’s not there, we don’t have it… I guess.” I hate Wal-Mart.

“Alright, fine. I’ll go to Microplay! They are a trustworthy store that can fulfill my request” I say, my knuckles going white from gripping my cars steering wheel too tightly.

12:29 P.M.

I enter the Microplay and wait until my general anger and distaste for the universe decidedly stops their conversation, and they graciously ask me if there’s something I am looking for. I scan the wall and do not see any wireless adapters. I figure they probably have some in the back, and so I ask.

Both employees look at the wall, then above their heads at the additional storage area and mutter to one another like some sort of synchronized pantomime of ignorance. My forced smile fades as I already know the response: “We’re sold out, I guess” says the less clean of the two. I’m already starting to move towards the door by the time they say this. I thank them and exit, my rage slowly starting to get the better of me.

“Fine. I will go to the Future Shop. The Future Shop I could have gone to in the first place.” This was then followed by a collection of curses, the details of which escape me. Suffice it to say, it was both colourful and creative.

12:45 P.M.

I arrive at Future Shop, park, and stride in. The greeter shies away from me, probably tasting the rage that pre and proceeds me. I walk into the XBox 360 section, and find three wireless adapters left. With 10 dollars off, no less. Lucky me, I guess. I spent about that much money in gas, so it basically evened out.

As I go to pay for the adapter, the check-out girl wishes me a good day with a smile, and I restrain myself from putting a hole in the wall. Thankfully my rage is slowly, slowly ebbing away.

1:05 P.M.

I plug in the Wireless Adapter, turn the XBox on, test the connection, and I’m up and running. The connection is horrid due to my dressers apparent lead physiology. This forces me to re-arrange my entire shelf to allow the XBox to reside on the top with the T.V.

1:20 P.M.

Connect to XBox live, download the OS update, and spend a good 10 minutes online trying to come up with a Gamertag that actually isn’t taken. This is harder than it seems. XBox Live asks me if I want to be a Gold member. To have this privilege (which expires every year) will cost me an additional 60 dollars a year. “Fine, fuck it, whatever,” I mutter as I attempt to explode someones head at the XBox headquarters via transferred telekinesis. I sign my life away and eventually the system is up.

1:40 P.M.

I decide to download Castle Crashers, a game that I love dearly, only to find that I must add Microsoft Points in order to purchase it. 30 dollars for 2000 points (that’s roughly 1.5 cents per point. Not a good exchange rate) later, I drop 1200 to own the game.

In the end…

So lets see: almost two weeks to get the Xbox live, and it cost me 240 dollars to get to that point. How? well 90 for the wireless adapter, 50 for the useless router, 60 for the online membership, 30 more for the points, and 10 for gas.

Good thing I got 130 off the Xbox eh? I would have been totally screwed there!

In the end, I’m glad it is up and running, but the shitstorm that I went through to get to this point almost made me murder someone.

Oh and in case anyone wants to friend me on XBox Live, my gamertag is “Jack Dutson”

Don’t ask, it’s a sort of inside joke with Theresa. She appreciated it.

Then I tried to create a Custom List. I had event receivers attached to custom lists (ListTemplateID=100 for those who care) and i got this:

Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘Name’, table ‘[somesharepointcontentdatabase].dbo.EventReceivers’;
column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.
The statement has been terminated.

Took me a good two hours of trying everything I could think of with my XML and code, only to be repeatedly thwarted by this database-level error! I tried commenting out different sections of my receivers and still got the error. When I commented the entire <Receivers> section, things ran fine, but not the <Receiver> items inside. What the hell is going on? Read on!

I’ll give an example of what I’m talking about here – the following comes from MSDN:

feature.xml:
<Feature
Scope=”Web”
Title=”Simple Updating Item Event Handler Registration”
Id=”A6B8687A-3200-4b01-AD76-09E8D163FB9A”
xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/”>
<ElementManifests>
<ElementManifest Location=”elements.xml”/>
</ElementManifests>
</Feature>

inside the feature.xml file (above) it references the following file:

elements.xml:

<Elements xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/”>
<Receivers
ListTemplateOwner=”ADDABAAA-1111-2222-3333-111111111111″
ListTemplateId=”104″>
<Receiver>
<Name>SimpleUpdateEvent</Name>
<Type>ItemUpdating</Type>
<SequenceNumber>10000</SequenceNumber>
<Assembly>SimpleUpdateEventHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=10b23036c9b36d6d</Assembly>
<Class>MS.Samples.SimpleItemUpdateHandler</Class>
<Data></Data>
<Filter></Filter>
</Receiver>
</Receivers>
</Elements>

This works fine. Here’s something interesting though: any comments – <!– Like this –> - you have in the <Receivers> node will be literally interpreted as <Receiver> nodes! That means whenever it tries to attach event receivers to any list, it treats the comments as actual receivers! That’s right, for whatever reason, the code that ties event receivers to lists literally loops through every node (comments are still considered nodes!) and tries to use them instead of using any sort of XPath. How hard is it to use “//Elements/Receivers/Receiver” as your node collection XPath? I really hope whoever wrote that code got the ruler or something.

The solution: Remove comments from your Feature xml file(s).

I say this because God only knows where else this is happening, and the odds of you realizing that it is something that should just work, like comments, are probably not that high. Remember folks, sometimes the most obtuse problems have the most simple answers. Try not to over-think things.

A huge thank you must go out to Janne Mattila for being the first (and apparently only according to Google) documenting this. I wish I had looked sooner.

I’m bringing this up from an exceptionally small thing I noticed while at work today. As I have previously stated, I work with SharePoint. Much of the time I am branding it (though not in my current project!) and so I have a rather intimate and abusive relationship with the program. I find myself constantly finding weird styling quirks put into the environment that prove that SharePoint was built by a large group of people.

There are many instances within SharePoint – and I’m sure within WSS as well – where certain styles that should be consistent end up being done completely different ways. I wish I had a screen shot as an example, but you’ll have to use your imagination here. Picture two dropdown buttons. When you hover over them, they glow, and a menu appears. No picture the HTML for both dropdown buttons being completely different, with no shared styles or markup whatsoever.

This happens all over the place. Hell, there is markup all over the place that is either broken, non-standard (don’t get me started on WSS/SharePoint and it’s default markup) and over 6 thousand lines of styles if you add up all the sheets. 6 thousand! There is no need for that, and yet it exists because of – say it with me now – the lack of consistency.This lack of consistency then cascades down to people like me, who are stuck styling the damned things. Had there been a discussion between the differing groups, or the markup left to a third group so that they could all be structured the same way other peoples lives would then be made easier.

Another example I can bring up is with code. My code, my co-workers code, random interweb code, it happens everywhere. It is far more frequent when you work on rapid products, or many projects that build off of their predecessor. I can speak from experience that unless you code with the future in mind you will end up patching things… usually more than once.

In a perfect world you’d be able to properly scope your work out, develop your use cases, figure out your flow, and develop in a modular, expandable way. This of course requires a couple things: Time, patience, and knowledge. I can assure you that even if you think you have all three you don’t. The only time this can ever happen is when you are developing something for yourself and even then more often than not you’re just throwing something together for your own use, and those tend to be the worst for patch jobs… at least from my experience.

In the end all I can say is plan things out. Figure out a system and stick to it; even if it’s not the best it will at least not be the best everywhere. This makes it much easier to upgrade/fix later on. If you come up with 5 different solutions for 5 different things when they could all share common attributes, you are just making more work for yourself.

Save your time, your brain, and your fellow workers from the agony of added work brought about by inconsistency. Get a game plan, stick with it, and for the love of god: be consistent.

P.S. I managed to spell consistency wrong every time in this post while writing it.

P.P.S. Except for the one in the first postscript.

Update:

Success! I have a screen shot of the dropdown menus in question!
(Technically this update happened before the post went public, but whatever)

Some people had to reset the time on their computer. Some had to un-check the starting options (Remember me, Remember Password, and Auto Sign-In) and then do it manually. Others had to go and delete things from their registry, and some even had to repair Messenger and its Sign-In Assistant. Then you had people like me for some reason or another Microsoft decided to totally cut off from their whole service. I mean a total cut off. I couldn’t access their service, I’d get a 404 when I tried to access web messenger. Even their Live Messenger Support website was cut off from me, so I couldn’t even get professional help. It kept telling my my proxy settings were screwed up, when in reality I don’t even use a proxy at all.

I took it upon myself to try and uninstall/reinstall the product and I got half way there at least. I couldn’t reinstall the program, because in order to install it the installer has to download the contents from their server. Since I was cut off from their servers I couldn’t do anything. Thankfully I recently brought my old laptop out of commission, and Messenger worked just fine there. I finally got it working over a day later when my Microsoft-induced ban was lifted.

The point to this rant?

Don’t screw your customers.

I can understand that what they were doing could have been really super, duper important. I get that they had to cut a good section of people off from the service in order to fix whatever it was. Hell a server could have gone up in flames, and we wouldn’t know the different and that’s part of the problem. They didn’t say anything, but instead let a good section of people go without a means of common communication.

This is bad practice.

If you’re going to cut off a good section of people from something that many of them pretty much cannot live without, you need to say something. The only information I found on the subject was what Google told me when I was trying to fix my problem. All it told me was that there were a bunch of others in the same boat with no idea how to fix it.

I’m aware they have a spotless image to try and maintain (whoever they think they’re fooling I have no idea), but when you screw over that many people by not saying anything, you cause more damage to your image than if you just came clean. Sometimes being honest will cause you less grief in the end.

Had they returned a new error number or had a post somewhere on the Internet that said what the hell was going on, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post.

I brought my old laptop out of commission (Toshiba A10, with a newly purchased wireless card and battery) and started off by re-imaging the thing to factory settings. This means I have Windows XP: Home Edition, and not much else. I figured that if nothing else I could have a laptop with windows on it for when I go around places. This was not the goal though, as I really want to get into some python coding. I don’t feel like struggling to get python and Apache running on my main desktop, and even less with fighting with them to run in Windows.

Enter Ubuntu, stage left.

I like free stuff. Ubuntu is free, so by defenition I like that. I like even more that it has a CD image that you can burn to work as a boot disc. The CD allows you to actually give the system a whirl before you install it by running totally from the CD. Granted you can’t do everything, but it intrigued me enough to actually install the OS (which is a link on the desktop. Convenient, no?) It gives you the option of having a boot system picker which was good since I still want Windows on a partition of the computer. All in all it’s an easy and straight forward installation.

I let it reboot, and once I picked my OS (Ubuntu in this case) I was presented with the following: Loading… Could not find region 4 of device 0:00:0 (or something to that effect) and then another Loading…

And then the screen went black. I thought that Ubuntu had shit itself on the install, and i decided to reinstall it.

Same thing happened. I was a little worried and upset, but I decided to exercise some patience and see what happens. Two minutes later, the login screen suddenly appears. I have no idea why, but there we go. First thing I wanted to get going was my wireless, since I want my laptop to once again be mobile (the A10 does have a built in wireless, but it’s only WEP and I don’t do that in my house.)

Ubuntu has a nifty feature that allows you to install any supported program right from the menu. No searching for the programs on the internet and having to do anything manual. What I dislike about what is otherwise a fantastic little program is that you need a connection to the Internet in order to have up-to-date lists, as well as download said programs.

Apparently in order to install ndiswrapper – a wireless card support program – you need to actually be connected to the internet in order to make it go in the first place. I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. In the end I whipped out my trusty Ethernet cable and hooked into the router, which was awkward given the fact that it’s on a shelf in the basement. Ubuntu was online in seconds, and so was the update manager. How the hell does one program have 188 updates off the bat? So I installed all of the updates, as well as ndiswrapper. Then after that I had to fight with the wireless connection for a good 5 minutes (2 of those were realizing that I missed a character in my wireless key!) and now I’m up and running.

One of the major things I’ve noticed with Ubuntu in comparison to Windows is the battery life. I just got a brand new battery (the A10 battery is notoriously short-lived) and I’ve run it down on both operating systems. Windows can run for 3 hours if I turn everything down to the lowest possible setting, and maximize the power saving tools given to me. Ubuntu also does about 3 hours of battery life, yet it does it without sacrificing any of my processing power. Granted it probably doesn’t have nearly as much running in the background, but I’m still impressed. On the flip side, my battery charges way slower in Ubuntu than in Windows. (6 hours to charge? What the hell?)
I am currently installing Apache server (one line in the terminal) and Django (a couple more lines and God knows what else), though it all seems fairly straight forward. Getting the needed programs up and running seems to take very little effort, usually two or three commands.

One thing that bugs me, though I’m not sure I can actually blame this one on Ubuntu, but there are certain commands and functions that I used to speed up my computer use. Things like using backspace to navigate to a previous page doesn’t work in Firefox running on Ubuntu. (Note: Shortly after writing this, I found out that Ubuntu has an installed modification for Firefox that you can remove) There are other things like quick keys to minimize everything and jump to the terminal elude me. I’m sure this is at least half of a training issue.

I’ll talk more about the OS as I get more and more into it, right now I have to figure out how to get DJango running in my environment.

PS, Why is it so orange?

As it turns out, customizing a Wiki Library to do anything isn’t just difficult, it’s not even a chore. It’s a goddamn mission of epically frustrating scale. Let’s start off with some over-all items:

1. I needed to create custom columns, some of which looked at lists.
2. I needed to create a content type that was based off of the Wiki content type.
3. I needed to customize the Wiki library to have said content type.
4. I needed to add custom-made web parts to the various views of the Wiki Library (History, Edit, etc)
5. I needed all of this to work through a feature

Where to start? Lets start from the bottom of the list, because as it turns out this was the easiest and where I started.

You want to edit those page layouts eh? Well have fun because as it turns out all of those files are system files, which means they’re on the hard-drive of the server and therefor shared. That means you can’t mess with one without causing a server-wide change. The solution? Copy those layout pages and rename them. Now add them to your feature. I’m not going to explain how to get the feature to deploy, that’s a different story all together.

That’s sweet! Now how do you make anything use those pages? Well in terms of all the little widgets (Versions tool, History Link, Incoming Link) You will have to build your own versions of those controls. Why? Well the URL of the pages that they point to are hard-coded. Simple enough to get around, though annoying as hell. Just to demonstrate, to the left is a screen shot of what SharePoints’ markup looks like just to recreate some of the controls in HTML. Seriously, that’s messed up. In the end each link was surrounded by two more tables. What the hell man?

Okay so you got all of the default pages redirected. What about when you edit an entry or make a new one? Those pages are tailored specifically for Wiki Pages (CreateWebPage.aspx) and so you’ll have to copy that one. As for redirecting it? Well you should be able to do it via an Event Receiver attached to the Feature that Installs the custom content type that this is all based from. please note my use of the word ‘should’ because I’m still stuck there.

Let’s move onto the library for a moment. Now I have not been able to replicate the Wiki library properly, without making my list type use the basetype of ’119′. As it turns out, this comes with a whole bunch of strings attached, like having hidden name columns and a lot of red-tape. I dare you to try and rename the “Name” column to anything with any sort of graceful code. I’ll leave that one there. For those that are wondering, the default Feature for Wiki Libraries is called “WebPageLib” or something of that nature. Try searching the 12 directory for the content type of Wikis. To find that, go looking for the ctypes Feature and look in there.

Creating the feature to house all of this turned out to be the easiest portion of it all, though all of the problems stemmed from it in some shape, way or form. I can’t bitch too much about the feature markup itself, because all it really lacks is some functionality that should… well really should just be there. I’ve had to rig extra code together just to get what I wanted, but read on and I’ll explain.

I managed to create the content type with little issues, though I had to add Remove references to the WikiPage content type (that does exist by the way, it’s just stored in the ‘_Hidden’ group which is why you can’t touch it via the site). Adding the new content type to the list template was fun too, because you have to do it via the feature, since Wiki libraries do not allow you to edit the Content Types of the list at all. Like I said, Wikis are sealed, and don’t like to play with the other kids.

The problems really started when I created the site columns. Just a note to everyone: if you ever feel like creating columns or content types, then using them, and then trying to remove them via a feature, good luck. SharePoint will not remove anything if it’s being used. Just a helpful tip there. This could be fixed via some EventReceiver code, but I won’t get into that.

Anyways, I had a column. It was a lookup column. It wanted to look at a specific list, so I gave it the list id (though to be honest this is a bad way to do it because what happens when you want to deploy this feature somewhere else?). I deployed the column, and it worked! Then I tried to use that column in a sub-site, which ended up failing miserably. Took me forever to find out that you cannot specify a web property in the feature. webid and scopeid, yes, but nothing generic (refer to my listId comment here). The solution to this was to add more custom EventReceiver code that would do this work for me. Which worked great until I moved the feature to another site.

This is where my night went bollocks.

I installed the feature onto another dev-site and activated it (all through stsadm). Worked fine. Then I tried to deactivate said feature, and it would just sit there. I could uninstall it fine, but when I deactivated it the process would just hang there and I’d be forced to end it via Task Manager. It took me 6 ruined dev-sites to realize that I was missing the lists that my lookups were pointing to. Apparently if you tie a lookup column to a list that doesn’t exist via code, it will cripple the server when you try and remove that column from any content types that it was attached to. When I say cripple, I’m not kidding. stsadm.exe ran up 50 Mb of resident memory, and 100% of the CPU. The best part was that no error would be logged, it would just hang there forever. I admit I toyed with the idea of letting it run all night and going home.

I kid you not, I laughed like a madman when I finally figured it out. I cannot explain why, but that’s just how it is. The lesson I learned from this really was that I shouldn’t have expected SharePoint to have any sort of intelligence sitting behind it, and code for stupidity. Anything you think SharePoint should probably just do probably doesn’t actually happen, or it happens with a hope and some duct tape.

Oh and for the record, I’m still stuck on how to change the Edit/New pages properly.

Highlights of the week include:

I hate InfoPath:
I know the idea behind the program is sound, and I’m impressed with the level of integration that Microsoft has managed to achieve with SharePoint 2007 and InfoPath. What I don’t like is all the very, very moronic design choices they made with the InfoPath GUI, the blatant limitations with the items therein (what program doesn’t allow tables to have id’s honestly) and the very depressing requirement of absolute URL references for important items. Items such as data sources, links, validation servers etc. I also dislike how trying to get a form from one server to another has way too many manual steps required. I shouldn’t have to upload the form, and then have to change the references in said form manually. There should be some sort of stream-lined upload process for that.

The concept of the product is great, but the execution needs work. Much work. I can only cringe as I see more work with this product coming down the line. At least I got it done on time, against the wire I should add. I didn’t even care if I got praise or not for this one. I just wanted it done.

A Half-missed Concert:
Richard got us some tickets to go see Spoon and The Ponys in Toronto. The tickets clearly stated that the show started at 10:15 pm. We whined because it was a late show and would be pathetic-looking at work but whatever. Suffer for the music and all that. We ended up getting there early so we decided to wander around Toronto’s harbor-front. It’s really pretty in a weird sort of way, especially at night. We found a whole wack of used book stores and had a look around. We both ended up buying copies of I am not myself these days: A Memoir. We made it back to the concert hall around 10 and walked in. We saw guys on stage setting things up, so we figured “great, we made it just in time. We’re so cunning.”

The band came out on stage and played… and played… and played. Don’t get me wrong: I love concerts and music, but an hour and a half set (without encores) is a little much. In any case they walked off stage and we waited for the next band to come out. Then the first band came out and played an encore. Richard and I were both rather confused by this taboo behavior but figured “it’s an indie show, they can do whatever the hell they want.” They finished up their three-song encore and walked off stage. Then they came on again. Now I’m getting annoyed. The lead singer had basically been masturbating with his guitar all night to the crowd and after nearly two hours I was getting sick of them. They finished their second three-song encore and walked off stage, this time saying they were done. Hurray!

Then the houselights came on, and everyone started leaving. Both Richard and myself were now suffering from a complete mindfuck, and it honestly took us like 4 minutes to realize we missed the first band completely. Apparently the time changed when they moved venues (originally at The Phoenix, they moved to the Kool Haus for reasons I don’t understand). On the plus side, we got a new book to read and got home about 2 hours earlier then we thought we were.

Coincidentally we don’t know which band we saw. We think it was The Ponys but we’ll never know for sure.

Oh and as an aside, I’d like to write a quick letter:

Dear Indie crowd,

Stop smoking so much fucking weed. Seriously. They didn’t have any smoke machines at that concert, and yet the air was hazy. And if you are going to smoke that crap, at the very least blow your smoke upwards, and not directly into my face. Actions like that tend to make me punchy.

Thank you.

Corey.

Friendsgiving:
Though not yet an official holiday, it was great to get so many of my friends together in one place. What made it even better was the fact that everyone brought something to contribute to the night, whether it was food or games or whatever. Dinner was fantastic, and the turkey was fantastic, the potatoes were great, and I did not know you could use maple syrup in so many ways. My pies were well received, and by the end of it all we were happy, stuffed little people.

Then the drinking started. And the games, and the Guitar Hero followed shortly after. The title of this post is actually the utterance of Bart’s brother as he played a game of Aliens vs. Spacemen, a game we created using a Jenga tower and some plastic aliens/spacemen. Believe me, there was much debate within the creation of the rules but I think we got something marketable.

I really hope this becomes a yearly thing, because it’s a great chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen much of, as well as an excuse to eat really yummy food.

I’m sure there were other things, but as my brain as the recall ability of a rock, this’ll have to do. Stay tuned for more reviews and the like. As an aside, I dislike the “More” tag. Don’t like how it works or looks on the site.

So i called up Marie; she’d have sex for free,
but for 10 bucks an hour she’d listen to me
Talk about rock stars and models on dope,
and why I can’t cope with this scene.

Every Monday – The Marvelous 3

Corey signing off.