So, I've got a few things that I've really wanted to write about but you'll get none of that right now. Instead, what you get is a link to all of the episodes of Mastodon's "Making of 'Blood Mountain'" series on YouTube.

Entertaining insight into how this particular album has been made.

I've also been watching some live Massive Attack and Iron Maiden on YouTube as well. Mostly appearances from both on the "Live From Abbey Road" TV series. In the US, it is airing on Sundance channel. I've only seen it via YT.

I uploaded a new user pic, so I had to test it out by posting.

I thought of this while I was on my way home from work. We'll see how long this effort lasts...

Here's my week in review:

• I got tired of the Bluetooth headset that came with the BT accessory bundle I picked when I got with my LG enV.


The Motorola H505Z isn't a bad headset. The sound quality is actually pretty good. It's just that there are two things that I really don't like about it. One of them is the deal breaker. The minor problem I have is that it's hard to differentiate where the main button for this headset is when you're wearing it. The button (as you can see from the picture) is pretty much flush with the rest of the headset. Makes it hard to differentiate when you can't actually see it in front of you. The other problem, and the reason I'm looking for an alternative, is that it sits on your ear instead of going in your ear. Whenever I put this on, I can feel it flopping around on the side of my head. It's not like I'm running a marathon while wearing it or anything. So, out it goes.

The replacement is the Plantronics Discovery 640E.

It's a nice headset. I bought it at Best Buy. One minor issue I had was that I couldn't get any ear piece to fit snuggly in my ear. But, it fits just fine if I use the ear loop. I'm returning it to Best Buy, though. I found it at Amazon.com for almost half what I paid for it at BB ($99.99 vs. $57 w/ free shipping).


• While I was at Best Buy, and mainly because of a discussion I had with sugarfreak, I finally bought a copy of Guitar Hero 2. I haven't played it yet. But, now that I have access to co-op mode, I'll get my wife involved.


• An acquaintance recently gave birth prematurely to fraternal twins. They're such early arrivals (15 weeks early, I think). I think about the three of them quite a bit.


• The other day, I was driving home from work and as I was merging onto the freeway, I was passed by this:
  
  
  
  It's a Mercedes Benz SLR McLaren. I didn't know it at the time (it's not like you see many of them in MN) so I sped up to follow it closely enough to read the badging on the rear of the car. MSRP is $452,750. Yowz! Gorgeous.

So, that's about what I remember of this past week. Well, that and the fact that baseball season started (w00t!!!) and that it's as cold as January right now. The weather gets the "gas face".

Word to your mother.

I've changed the Last.fm chart in the sidebar to reflect my recently played tracks. Yes, what you see listed currently is the new Deerhoof album, Friend Opportunity. It's good. Really good. But, it's also short. Like, less than 40 minutes. The CD is worth picking up because it includes twelve versions of cover art by David Shrigley. It's out now. Pick it up!

I've been watching the anime series (what else is new there?) Gilgamesh (official ADV page is here) courtesy of Netflix. Another enjoyable series. The first link I included will take you to a page with a plot summary. What I really want to see is Ergo Proxy. It's in my Netflix queue but it shows as "very long wait" for availability. This sucks. I was just at Best Buy and saw that vol. 2 is already out. I was hoping Netflix would curb the need to buy some of this stuff... Patience is a virtue, right? Right.

I've also found the next watch that I'd like to own. The Oceanus 5 Motor with a blue face is a watch that looks classy (in terms of chronograph watches) but has enough high tech features to satisfy my nerdy side. It's got atomic timekeeping, a perpetual calendar, it's solar powered (kind of like my current Citizen Eco-Drive chronograph watch), and a titanium case.



Watch Report has a review of this watch. (That's where the image came from as well.)

Oceanus is an upscale line that Casio is bringing to the US. About twice what I paid for my Citizen but I'd probably part with that kind of money if I had it. My watch has gotten all scratched up (stainless steel case). So, I'd like a new, wear-to-work watch that isn't all scuffed up.

Firstly, happy birthday to yellokitty!

Secondly, thanks to a recent enhancement to LJ's S2 styles, I can now add an HTML-based item as a custom sidebar item without creating my own custom layer. So, I've added a listing of the top weekly tracks from my Last.fm page. You can see it if you scroll down a bit.

The only thing I don't like is that it's too wide and gets a scroll bar. I may eventually get around to figuring out how to add some custom CSS to fix that problem along with some other minor quibbles I have with the layout as it is. But, I'm just happy that this happened. I'd spent some serious time in the past trying to hack this in without much success.

...some of the new LJ themes so I redesigned it.

The only thing I don't like is that you can't change the background color for the entries and sidebar area with out making a custom layer or whatever (that I know of).

I've been going through and adding tags to my posts.

For those of you reading this via the RSS feed (most likely only me), this may mean that your RSS aggregator may show a bunch of "new" posts that really aren't new.

EDIT: Of course, I forgot to tag this post originally. Haha!