The Journal of Sir Cloister Maximus III Esq

Getting your Affairs in Order

Stephen Kozik — 2010-03-01T10:00:00-05:00

Now that my week off of work is over and I have a sense of renewed energy and accomplishment from writing and recording a whole record in one week flat, it's time to focus on the more mondane.

For one thing, I seriously need to ramp up my off-season workouts and get to the same point I was at the beginning of last year when I rolled into the first softball game hitting two homeruns and feeling great. It became clear to me after I started to lose power towards the end of the year that if you stop working out when the season is going you will eventually lose your gains. So this year I want to start out at an even higher level and keep it going by forcing myself to get off my ass and do a bit of work even when games are going on.

A painful (so to speak) example of how far I still have to go before mid-April was how winded and sore I was playing a pickup game at Irving last week. I remember feeling great at the start of last year, and I certainly didn't feel that way last Sunday. Granted, I felt good about my batting eye after a bad session of cage work, but I wasn't in very good shape for sure. Even my buddy Dan whom I play with in the country band said he jogged by the park that day and noted all the "out of shape guys" playing Softball. Yes Dan, I was one of those guys.

My next set of goals include some spring cleaning, a little work on the house, and making sure everything is in order for when I start having less free time because baseball starts and sucks me into it's prison-like-grip. A guaranteed 3 hours of my day will soon disappear as I watch games and discuss them on vivaelbirdos. I just can't quit you major league baseball, no matter how much time you steal from me.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Snow Training

Stephen Kozik — 2010-01-25T10:00:00-05:00

After spending the weekend installing Snow Leopard and re-installing all of my apps, I think my system is finally back up to a usable state. In addition to 10.6, I also upgraded my version of Logic, Final Cut, and Creative Suite. Logic was the only upgrade I was actually looking forward to as the prospect of Vari-speed and multiple takes on one track were pretty enticing. I plan on trying the new Logic out on re-mastering an old recording like "Trans-oceanic" and then doing some fresh recordings on my up coming vacation. One would imagine Dark Horse III is on it's way.

The off season training is going well so far, although I have yet to hit the pool. I was planning on going for the first swim of 2010 on Friday, but I was feeling lazy and hadn't fully recovered from a set of leg presses a few days before. From what I remember, the first swim really kicked my ass last year so I want to try to ease into it a bit more this time. My jogs are getting less wind inducing and I'm up to three sets of 20 reps on the free weights, so as long as I can keep at it I should be back into shape by April and start tearing the cover off the ball again.

Things are slow at the moment as one would expect in the middle of January. Looking forward to getting out of the winter and back into warmer, and less wet, weather.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Some thoughts on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

Stephen Kozik — 2010-01-08T10:00:00-05:00

After finishing "Great Expectations" (which seem to take over 6 months for me to read for some reason), I was reminded of some thoughts that had occurred after watching the 1970 Albert Finney adaptation of A Christmas Carol "Scrooge".

First and foremost, like all of Dickens' novels, the plot is impossibly coincidental and all too convenient. All those lose ends tie up a little too neatly, and there is no question that all little Tiny Tim needs is a better doctor, which in 19th century England means a bigger dose of bread pudding and some better trained leeches. Scrooge, apparently, only needed to be threatened with some heavy ass chains and being the devil's clerk to change his ways.

Let's start with Scrooge. To begin with, the guy isn't all that bad�he's not going around stealing the presents of whoville (including the roast beast) or any obvious transgressions. He just wants to be left alone about all this Christmas nonsense (and no one seems to get the hint) and collect debts owed to his business which is, you know, good business sense. Because he doesn't celebrate Christmas or just let you slide on your late payment he's suddenly a bad guy. He didn't make you borrow money from him, nor did he ever give any indication that he really wished to by merry and give to charity if you only asked him 40 more times. Bob Cratchit seems to have the sense to drink a cup of shut the hell up, but no one else does.

Speaking of Cratchit, much is made about how he's overworked and underpaid. While that is a shame, no one seems to stop and ask two important questions; One�If his job is so awful in contrast to everyone else's, why doesn't he get another job? Two�Maybe the reason he's overworked and underpaid is because he's not a very good clerk? No where does it ever state that old Bob is any good at his job, and in my experience people that can't get better jobs or raises usually can't do so because they're not very good employees. He may work late (or come in early the day after Christmas) because he's behind in his work due to him being slow.

Let's just skip all the ghost business because that fantasy part of the story could easily be attributed to a bad nightmare, some ergot laced bread, or a bad bit of cheese as Scrooge suggests. It is 19th century England after all. On to Scrooges transformation.

First, let's discuss the kid who is given a large sum of money to fetch the prize winning Turkey from the window. Say you had a 100 dollar bill, gave it to a random boy on the street and told him to buy you a Turkey and keep the change. You think you'll see that boy again? Not a chance. He'd just take the c-note and blow it on pop rocks and porno mags. Screw you old man!

Secondly, where do you suppose Scrooge has gained all of this wealth that he then bestows on the town after his change of heart? By (as the novel suggests) being a complete dick to everybody for decades! If he was a decent guy, it's pretty much a given that he'd be as broke as the rest of the sad sacks in town, perhaps selling soup or running puppet shows for shillings a day. The only reason he can afford that goddamn turkey and the dolly in the window is because he hasn't given Cratchit a raise since Marley kicked it 7 years ago and that his interest rates are of payday loan levels. Gee, thanks a lot, dick.

Finally, let's get to the matter of Scrooge making Cratchit partner, just after he tears up his debt ledger and declares everyones accounts settled. Who the fuck wants to be a partner in a bank that just declared they would have no further income? That sounds like a cracker-jack business plan. Better hope Tiny Tim's medical bills can be paid with good will and puppet shows.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Top 50 Records of 2000-2009

Stephen Kozik — 2009-12-30T10:00:00-05:00

You're free to disagree, but you'd be wrong.

Akron/Family - Love is Simple
Oxes - Oxes
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther
Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance
Wilco - A Ghost is Born
Dustin O'Halloran - Piano Solos Vol. 2
Smog - A River Ain't Too Much Love
Blitzen Trapper - Fur
Shellac - 1000 Hurts
Jay-Z - The Blueprint
Dungen - Ta det Lugnt
Cave - Hunt Like Devil
Ben Kweller - Changing Horses
Minmae - 835
Feist - Let it Die
New Year - The Newness Ends
Royksopp - Melody AM
Oxes - Oxxxes
50 Cent - Get Rich Or Die Tryin
Deerhunter - Microcastle-Weird Era Continued
Jag Panzer - Thane to the Throne
Juana Molina - Un Dia
Blonde Redhead - Misery is Butterfly
Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
Akron/Family - Meek Warrior
Loose Fur - Born Again tin the USA
Radiohead - Hail To The Thief
Squarepusher - Go Plastic
Luke Temple - Snowbeast
Kanye West - Late Registration
Broadcast - Haha Sound
Microphones - The Glow II
Darkness - Permission To Land
Godspeed! You Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
Unicorns - Who WIll Cut Our Hair When We're Gone
Breeders - Title TK
A.C. Newman - The Slow Wonder
Stinking Lizaveta - Scream of the Iron Iconoclast
Celestville - Malamo
Patrick Watson - Close to Paradise
Dead Meadow - Feathers
Destroyer - Streethawk: A Seduction
Baptist Generals - No Silver, No Gold
Royal City - At Rush Hour the Cars
Papas Fritaas - Buildings and Ground
Dianoga - Battle Champions
The Chrysler - Failures and Sparks
Songs: Ohia - The Lioness
Spoon - Gimme Fiction
Apollo Sunshine - Shall Noise Upon

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

2009 Year in Review

Stephen Kozik — 2009-12-27T10:00:00-05:00

Recapping a rather milk toast year that is almost in the books.

Web revamp. Family photos. Winterball. HD Flip Camera and shaky videos. 14 dingers and improved defense. The Full McCracken. Dermatology. Promontory Club. House and Senate work on watered down health care reform. Give in to the power that is FACEBOOK(TM). BNJ Holiday song and video. Pacman. PAF super freakout. Broadcast, Stereolab, Blitzen Trapper. Swine Flu. Cards win division, get to NLDS, and Matt Holiday can't catch a fly ball. LinkedIn Recruiter Demo. Portland Retro Gaming convention. Dark Horse second album compiled on two week vacation with new guitars, keyboards, and hand built baffle. Epicor Timeline. AAA All Star game comes to Portland and PGE park. New podcasts: The Retroist and Stuck in the 80's to help ease the pain of a workday. Sun Flash modules. Brett Wallace is spotted in Portland, then is traded to the Athletics. New MLB.tv that is actually watchable. Moon. Dated gameballs that reach the roof or the bush. Custom chopper posters. Wang performance at Reed college. Jen's gallery opens. New 1541 drive for work. BNJelly. Two wisdom teeth removed with the aid of Xanex, Nitrous Oxide and a very quick dental surgeon. Boo Berry Cereal. Mac Mini fix-up and Macbook Pro replacement. Hosford Baseball cards. Concepts that go nowhere. WynnAnderson.com. Dark Horse. Ross House Party '09. Sick with brutal cold. The glory that is Roy Harper.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Time to Hit The Refresh Button

Stephen Kozik — 2009-12-19T10:00:00-05:00

Far too much time has passed since I made any sort of major renovations to my website, so I plan on addressing that this weekend. My first order of business is to put a bit of new content online in the form of music an videos, and my second is to update the flash video player with a custom one I wrote in AS2 a few months back with a nicer interface. That is pretty much all I can tackle this weekend, but I plan on using the holiday break to make some more ambitious updates. Look for integration from the wall soon.

The country band played it's first show and it went about as well as one could expect from a first show. I had some trouble picking up the count-ins over the ambient noise of the hall and made my share of mistakes, but nothing of an apocalyptic nature. The suits were dynamite and the Norse hall is the coolest place in NE Portland. Next steps include learning some new songs--I think I'll suggest 'There Stands the Glass' or 'Cocaine Blues'.

As the year winds down it's nearly time to take stock of what had occurred in 2009 and begin the yearly 'in brief' journal post. I'm certain a portion of that will be devoted to complaints about a serious lack of portfolio worthy projects completed at work as I don't have any special feelings about anything that was cranked out in 2009.

The softball season is also winding down and will most likely have seen it's last game played unless a miracle sweeps all of the rain headed our way tomorrow away from our dear Hosford field. You can play in the cold, and you can play in the rain, but you can't play in the cold rain. Looks like 2009 will close with me merely tying my 2008 performance in extra base hits, despite getting off to a hot start and working our a bit in the off season to try and hit for more power. At least I feel better about my defense this season and am quasi-comfortable playing short stop now. I can catch the ball just fine...throwing it with any authority or accuracy to the first basemen is a different matter.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Merging two online worlds

Stephen Kozik — 2009-12-01T10:00:00-05:00

Nothing like a four day weekend to make you feel even more busy that you felt before the time off. Thanks to the holiday and floating day I accomplished a good deal of the things that were on my to-do list for the past month, although I never really had any true down time.

I finally gave in a created a facebook account last week so I could take advantage of all the wares that are being posted in that exclusive club. I am, however, attempting to seamlessly merge the all the facebook nonsense and my site here to make sure that what I put there is still accessible outside of the club, as well as make sure I actually have a copy of all that stuff. Once facebook sells out to Microsoft (or Google) I will still have all of my photos, videos, and posts elsewhere.

Running out now to bowl. It's been far too long.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Quick Update. Cadinals are Champs!

Stephen Kozik — 2009-09-27T10:00:00-05:00

Just a quick entry to keep things somewhat up to date. New music and photos uploaded to the site today, along with a small update. St. Louis Cardinals are 2009 Central Division Champs and are going to the playoffs. The country band is playing well and will gig in December. I continue to play the hard 9 in softball. That is all.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Wisdom Teeth and First Pitch Home Runs

Stephen Kozik — 2009-04-12T10:00:00-05:00

I'm currently recuperating from having 2 wisdom teeth yanked out of my head on Thursday. I attempted to have it done last year, but had a big time anxiety attack that didn't let me go through with the procedure. This time the doc prescribed me with some Xanex to take before the extraction and gave me Nitrous Oxide which helped big time. I was still a little panicky, but spaced out enough to not let it bother me that much. On top of that, the dentist was lightning fast, yanking out the teeth in 20 seconds flat and not fooling around with the needle too much when loading me up with Novocain.

So I'm on day 3 now and I'm still sore and still have big gaping holes in my gums preventing me from eating anything substantial. Lucky for me I didn't have too much pain overall (not needing any painkillers sans some Ibuprofen) and was even able to get some things done this weekend. My hope now is that I've avoided dry socket (I'll know in a day or two) and infection. I've been trying to swish with saltwater and brush my teeth good to avoid it, but you never know.

Last weekend was the first softball game of the year and it was absolutely perfect weather. 70 degrees and sunny, I had a fantastic opening day. I drilled the first pitch I saw for a home-run, made two good dig-out-of-the-dirt plays at first, and completed my hitting going 5 for 6 with 2 home runs and hitting for the cycle. Not too bad.

Disaster did strike this weekend when I took my external work hard-drive home for a backup only to plug it in and hear the click of death. Not sure what I did to break it, but it will need to be replaced. I plan on getting a new internal terabyte drive and taking 2 of my old external 500 gig drives into work as replacements. I don't mind it so much, but it's bad timing.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Fixing a Dead Mac Mini

Stephen Kozik — 2009-02-15T10:00:00-05:00

A few weeks ago my Mom called because my old Mac Mini (1st gen) that I had given her as a hand-me-down up an died. Every time she would turn it on it would bring up a flashing finder/folder with a question mark. My first instinct was that it had just encountered one of those weird mac hiccups and it just needed a good reset of the NVRAM or a zap of the PRAM. Neither of those worked, nor did trying to boot up from a CD restore disk (which not only didn't boot, but also promptly got stuck in the drive and wouldn't eject). After trouble shooting it as much as I could over the phone, I just had her send it out to me in the mail so I could see what I could do with my set of tools.

Once the mini had arrived I had a few aces in the hole I could go to. For one thing, I still have an identical Mac Mini in the house that serves as Jennifer's non-mobile computer. When I say identical, I mean we bought them both on the same day--I even think they may be only a few digits apart from each-other in the serial number department. I figured I could cannibalize parts from the working Mini to figure out what was wrong with the broken mini.

My first attempt was to try and give the Mini a bootable device and seeing if I could at least get into disk utility and see why the Mini wasn't booting. Unfortunately (as I soon learned) you cannot boot from a USB device, which ruled out all my spare USB drives, USB keys, and USB CD-rom drives. I didn't have any firewire storage devices to test, so I tried the old Firewire Target mode with another mac, but had no luck.

Without the ability to get the mini to boot without opening it up, my next move was to pull the CD-rom drive out of Jennifer's working mini and put it in the broken one. I thought my mom had just had some unfortunate luck in having the hard drive get corrupted and her CD-rom drive die at the same time since it wasn't accessing the CD restore disk. However, once I had placed a known working CD-rom drive in the mini and attempting to access it through the open firmware (option-command-o-f) and getting no response, I started to fear the the IDE controller might have crapped out. That would be bad news, since the IDE controllers are embedded in the main-board of the mini, and a main-board replacement would be almost as much as a whole new mini.

The next day I was reading some posts on Apple's help boards about minis with the same symptoms as mine when I stumbled across some great insight for someone wondering aloud if the a dead hard drive could prevent the CD-rom from booting. The answer was yes--the master/slave relationship in the IDE chain meant that if a hard drive (master) is unresponsive, commands will not reach the CD-rom drive (slave). Once I read that, I knew what my next move was--to remove the hard drive, keep the CD-rom drive connected, and see if I could get the mini to boot from the CD-rom drive. After about an hour of disassembly (The Mac Mini is incredible difficult to take apart as it's build like a laptop) I got the mini to boot from the CD-rom drive. Theory confirmed: the hard drive was dead and needed to be replaced.

The next step was a little weird. Finding a replacement drive was a little unclear since a post I read about the 1st gen drives said the hard drives were 2.5 laptop Ultra-ATA/Parallel-ATA drives (NOT serial ATA). Now, the strangeness comes from the fact that no one manufactures Ultra-ATA/Parallel-ATA drives anymore. BUT, as I soon discovered from deduction and a quick confirmation from a Geek Squad employee at my local Best Buy, "EIDE" and Ultra-ALA are interchangeable. So, with that knowledge I purchased a new EIDE 2.5 drive (160 Gigs) and put it in the mini. From there, it was a cakewalk. Re-install OS/Software, ship it back to mom.

So if anybody gets the flashing finder/question mark on booting their mac mini and can't get the CD-rom drive to boot, replacing the hard drive is most likely in order. Just disconnect the hard drive from the chain and confirm you can boot from the CD-rom drive to make sure the logic board isn't toast. There is a great video online on how to swap a new drive in too.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

A Busy Month Indeed

Stephen Kozik — 2009-02-11T10:00:00-05:00

I had wonderful intentions to get my act together and update the site, however the year started up with a few monster projects that are either done or close to being done.

Project One: Finish up collection of songs I've been working on for almost two years. I wrapped all that up in a brown paper bag stamped with a trident stencil and handed it out to some chums of mine at Ross's annual winter house party. Not too much word on if it doesn't completely suck, but I also put it online in the music section of the site. 11 songs ripping off Pink Floyd. Nothing new there, although I did lean heavily on synths and piano, which is a little different.

Project Two: Create an online portfolio for an apparel designer. This one is almost finished. Most likely it will only need a few tweaks to bring it live in a few days.

Project Three: Revive my conked-out Apple TV. The new year started with my Apple TV mysteriously getting it's boot partition corrupted, requiring me to do a software restore. The complication in that was that I had to re-apply all of my original hacks to get it to connect to my Mac Pro and play xvid/divx files via Sapphire. Lucky for me, the new "patchstick" usb hack method works like I charm. In no time I was back up with an added bonus of Boxee support and the Take 2 Interface. Sweet.

Project Four: Grow a nasty beard. Check.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

2008 Year in Review.

Stephen Kozik — 2008-12-26T10:00:00-05:00

Portland snow storm of '08. A.whole code library. Blagojevich spoils the party. Zelda clone. Economic crash. Directors Cut. Punch-o-matic. Multi-homer games, over-the-shoulder grab. Perfect Pitch. Dungen. Baseball cards. iPod touch mania. America comes to it's senses, ends 8 years of ignorance (Yes we can). Dems get House, Senate, Executive. Dom-jot hustler. Vinyl in the office. Palin scares the nation. Level (3) Quiz. New Year. Cubs swept in NLDS (TJ and Nicole married). DS9 marathon on trimet. iDug. Keith visits. Fullers, Roccos, Qudoba, Red Coach. A Dog arrives, cats trapped upstairs. Above the Fold in the Battle of the Bands. c64 light show. Baseball via VMware fusion. 1080p. Mac Pro. Dental freak-out. Periocronitis of the wisdom tooth. Stain the fence like Tom Sawyer. Valentines Day at a Cannon Beach resort. Gutterfest. Surprise last performance at the 1st song symposium. Cephy. Completion of All come from one nothing. ISPP Movie Trailer. Barrios gets hitched, procreates. Polycom Phil hates the Buzz. New years furnace blowout.

Cleaning up Shop

Stephen Kozik — 2008-09-01T10:00:00-05:00

I'm taking advantage of a 3-day weekend (which translates into a 2-day weekend once you subtract the 8 hours of work I have to do on Monday to stay afloat) to get somewhat ahead on a couple of house, computer, and website things. I started by making a few updates to the old website with a new cool blue theme, and potentially a few extra enhancements later today. There isn't a pressing need to really keep this up to date in any way, but I like putting in a touch of effort to change things on occasion and keep it somewhat relevant. I'm rambling.

On the house front, I went to trim the front hedges a bit and discovered I'd need a bit more help than my old school manual trimmers could provide, so I popped off to Lowes to buy an electric trimmer which helped immensely. Now the front hedges are tidy to coincide with the re-emergence of the front lawn--something that just happened a week ago after we had a bit of rain that helped spring it back to life.

I'm just trying to make it through this month and finish up my huge project for Punchstock so I can take a well deserved week long break. Working every weekend is getting tedious.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq

On snake oil, psychedelic gems, and sports hernias

Stephen Kozik — 2008-07-13T10:00:00-05:00

I recently picked up a fantastic record on 185 gram virgin vinyl while walking about downtown on a lunch break. I read about it on a post listing the top 25 psychedelic records of all time, and somebody had it ranked number 2. That is a bold ranking, but the record holds up. It's by a virtually unknown group of college students in 1968 called "The United States of America" and it is witty, beautiful, and pretty cutting edge ala fifty foot hose. Some home-brew tone oscillators are used very tastefully. I recommend picking it up if you can, although I couldn't find it online. I'm not sure if it's #2 on the all time psychedelic list (as I'd put Saucer Full of Secrets in the 2 slot, after Peppers at #1), but it is really good.

On the house front, I've been trying without much luck at getting some iron stains off of my driveway and sidewalk after a mishap with loose Ironite that I put on my lawn. I had tried everything I could buy at the store and none of it worked. Finally, I broke down and ordered this stuff called Singerman Laboratories Rust Stain Remover for Concrete online. I figured it was pure snake oil, but after trying everything else I figured I'd give it a shot. You know what? The stuff worked. I'm not sure what kind of evil stuff is in it, but it almost looks like it transmogrifies the iron into some green goo that washes away with water. It's like a philosophers stone for iron stains. Scary.

My body seems to be breaking down from softball already in July. I typically don't feel the injuries until about September, but the right side of my body is already pretty banged up. So far I have a sprained wrist, elbow impingement, slightly pulled groin, and my bottom right foot smarts like the dickens. On the upside, my usual injuries (stiff neck, shin splints) aren't with me this year. Yippee.

Some changes are coming down the pipe here soon. I've had some plans in the works to add titles to all of the journal posts for easier sorting (for example, when was I talking about a bar-b-que that went awry--april 3, 2003 or april 5th?). I plan to see that to fruition, as well as re-vamp the content areas to allow better tagging and bigger photos/videos. I'm not certain I'll have this done any time soon, but it is in the works.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Vacation Time

Stephen Kozik — 2008-05-03T10:00:00-05:00

I'm on vacation for the first time in about a year. Last year I made my typical pilgrimage back to St. Louis to check out a ball-game, eat a Steak n' Shake burger, and visit the family. This year I'm keeping it low key and cheep by just staying home. Part of that is due to the fact that what I really want out of a vacation is simply not to work. Compared to Centerpointe, my brain is working at 100% 12 hours out of the day now at Babcock and Jenkins, requiring me to just have a little bit of down time to recharge and clear the noggin.

I've been doing this by kicking back and not doing much of anything. Just sitting outside, reading a book, doing a touch of painting, housework, and watching baseball. So far this is much better than how I had anticipated starting my vacation–by having a wisdom tooth extracted. About two weeks ago I came down with a gum infection around my lower wisdom tooth (Pericoronitis), and after the antibiotics had cleared up the infection I was scheduled to have the tooth removed to prevent future infection. However, on the day before the scheduled appointment I got a voicemail telling me the dentist's father wound up in a coma, delaying my appointment. It's good and bad. Good in that I wasn't looking forward to that and think that I may be able to just have the gum tissue removed instead of the whole tooth (much less invasive). Bad in that now I'm out of vacation time, and the doctor is only in Monday-Thursday–preventing me from scheduling something on a Friday so I have the weekend to recover. As it stands, I'm seeing a specialist on Monday to see if they can perform the simple gum tissue removal on a Friday some time that I can take off work again.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Microsoft's Zune is not very good

Stephen Kozik — 2008-03-30T10:00:00-05:00

It seems that getting around to updating the journal is a pretty big chore these days. There isn't much motivation for me to write new posts, except for the calendar in the sidebar that is tied to the last post. Between working up to 70 hours a week and all the housekeeping things I try to do, there just is no time.

So I guess some of the funnier things as of late that have happened to me are getting a gift Zune from a client. The player itself isn't half bad, but the software that Microsoft expects you to use with it is about the worst piece of garbage I've ever had the misfortune of using. It really is quite terrible.

We also have a puppy now--a 9 week old golden retriever named Seamus. I'm not a fan of dogs in general, but I'm doing what I can to be a good owner.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

2007 Year in Review

Stephen Kozik — 2007-12-24T10:00:00-05:00

2007 Year in Review. Christmas Eve potluck. Laurelhurst. Erased CIA tapes. Covert album. Lockjaw. PS2. Vinyl mania. Writers strike. Riding the MAX to work, Charlie Mcalister. Hit for the cycle. Death of Evel Knievel. Akron Family. Midlake. Paul visits. Lawn-care extreme. Beavers vs Redbirds. Ankiel. Play Clean. Company Softball. Apple TV and 1 TB drives. Grilling. Inside the SSO. Rove and Rumsfeld bid fair-well. Mariners game. Back to work at bnj. Fantasy baseball. Josh Hancock 32. Ping-pong. Why do they race, they race for taste. Saint Charles bachelor Party, Saint Louis trip III. Clean and fix up house. First house purchase. Carpet fiasco. Final TMTR record. Digitize and organize.

Dusting off the Journal

Stephen Kozik — 2007-12-19T10:00:00-05:00

I know, I know.

A big update is coming soon. I obviously have a good reason for neglecting the website. Two actually. Number one being the new/old job back at Babcock and Jenkins which leaves me with little free time unlike my former Centerpointe gig, number two being that nobody reads this thing (as they shouldn't).

However, I have a bunch of new photos, music, videos, etc to upload that I plan on doing during my holiday break. Stay tuned.

(Booyaka record in '08? Anything is possible.)

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Minimum Wage Scam

Stephen Kozik — 2007-06-04T10:00:00-05:00

When the Democrats took control of the house and senate, they passed a long overdue raise to the federal minimum wage. It had been stuck at an insulting hourly rate since the Republicans took control back in the 90's. I was initially elated by this, since I can appreciate how ridiculously hard it is to pay the rent and bills when making next to nothing. However, I've now realized that the upper 1% isn't going to let the lot of us 99% get away with improving the quality of life.

What has become clear to me now is that things aren't so simple. Instead of just maning-up and paying employees a wage the treats them more like humans rather than down-trodden serfs, they've cut into the ever shrinking middle class. By raising prices to compensate for the minimum wage increase, the excessive salaries and stockmarktet incomes of the elite are protected while the middle class foots the bill. The stockholders and CEO's of the Walmarts, fast food chains, and other abusers of unskilled labor will make sure that their share of the pie (all 90% of it) doesn't shrink at the expense of those that only had a sliver to begin with. It's like a fat kid stealing the lunch from a kid living in the country in the middle of a famine. What a bunch of douche-bags.

My case in point has been the gradual increase in prices at one of my frequented lunch hot spots (Wendy's). If you haven't been paying attention, prices have gone up by 10 cents nearly every month since the minimum wage bill was passed. It's been a slow trickle (as so the consumers wouldn't notice it), but all in all the cost of a "combo meal" has risen by about 15% in the past few months. I don't know about you, but I haven't noticed inflation kicking up that much lately. Also, my salary certainly hasn't gone up by 15% (or any percent) in the last few months.

The last time the prices were raised, I joked with the employees there about the rise in prices asking, "So, you all got raises, right?"

"Nobody around here got a raise man."

I wonder where my extra buck fifty is going.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Back from the STL

Stephen Kozik — 2007-05-16T10:00:00-05:00

If I can ever get caught up on everything I have on my new mini todo list, I might be able to get into a grove of updating the journal on a regular basis again. It's unfortunate that I've become so lazy about keeping it up to date considering I wanted to avoid the trap of starting it off strong, then failing to update it for years and ultimately forgetting about it all together.

Just getting back from my yearly trip to Saint Louis, I feel melancholy about the whole affair. That city is truly decaying around itself like a rotten apple. In the midst of two Cardinals games (they won one against the Astros–Hurray!) and other steak n' shake burger goals, I was driving around Saint Charles and getting creeped out. Some of the city is reminding me a little of Newark these days. That is not a good thing. It's one thing to have suffocating economic conditions, but when you start throwing trash out on your yard and the streets, you've obviously lost all self respect for yourself and the place you live.

Speaking of losing hope, I did, in fact, play my last show ever last Saturday. Jake commented that those that were there would be the folks who might attend my funeral–a real 'see who your friends really are' sort of situation. So to them I say Huzzah! To those that couldn't be bothered, I submit to them the Gas Face(TM) (or in the parlance of EPMD, the Bozak(R) if you will).

Pictures from the trip to Missouri up in the photo gallery for those curious. Time to plan for a house warming cookout.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Weekends are Gone but the Pop Tommorow Comp is here

Stephen Kozik — 2007-04-13T10:00:00-05:00

I obviously have been neglecting the old journal for a while, but I've had good reason. No later than a week from my last entry back in January, we found a house that had what we were looking for, made an offer, and got the house. However, that explanation is incredibly lacking in details on how much work all of that was. The work continues, of course, as making repairs, decorating, and getting things to a generally livable state are going to take a while. As some of my home owning friends have said, "Weekends will no longer exist. You live to work on your house, and you can kiss having fun goodbye". It may not be that extreme, but it sure feels like it at the moment.

I will be sneaking away from installing toilets and pulling ragweed for a bit in the beginning of May as I make my yearly trek back to St. Louis to catch a baseball game, ride some roller coasters, and eat some Steak n' Shake. Right after I get back I'll be rocking out acoustic style over at the Hawthorne Theater to celebrate the release of the POP TOMORROW! comp that comes out soon featuring a tune from yours truly.

Once things settle down a little more I plan on taking some photos of the place and placing them in the gallery. I also have some plans to do a little work on the site and get some new business cards printed up. I found a pretty cheap place to get them done and make it worthwhile.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

House Shopping and Nintendo Power

Stephen Kozik — 2007-01-22T10:00:00-05:00

Jen and I went out this Sunday to look at some open houses and cruise some neighborhoods around the area to see how much houses are going for. Most of what we saw was pretty overpriced, or flawed in some way. The last house we looked at was a bit out of our price range (the asking price was 350k), but man oh man was it sweet. Forty-foot ceilings, four bedrooms, 3 baths, nice neighborhood down the street. I can't really describe why it was so neat, but suffice it to say it was a dream house. Too bad it is a dream-house that I can' afford. We were supposed to see someone at the bank about the home loan on Saturday but it didn't wind up happening. I know it will take at least six months or more to do this house thing, but I feel under the gun to get it finished as quickly as possible since the whole process seems like a pain.

Today while poking around on Usenet I accidently discovered that some total stud posted about 50 old issues of Nintendo Power from 1988-1991. I just love it when I find things like this since it's so weird, but yet completely cool. I mean, it's obviously not the sort of thing you can buy anywhere outside of an overpriced vintage comic book shop where trading insults with the Simpsons-esque owner seems like a necessity. There is nothing like seeing the original fold-out strategy guide and map for Kid Icarus again. Seeing as how I just picked up that cart from Ebay a few months ago, it should come in handy.

Tonight before bowling I'm apparently going to a home buying class at PCC. I can only assume it will be as un-awesome as it sounds.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Checking off 2007 Goals at Breakneck Speed

Stephen Kozik — 2007-01-12T10:00:00-05:00

Two weeks into 2007 and I'm already checking things off my 2007 Goals calendar in iCal at breakneck speed. So far I've recorded my acoustic record (titled Amnesty), ripped my un-ripped cd's to mp3 format, backed up my aging cd-r's full of classic jflc-esque material, digitized all my VHS tapes full of commercials, and even located a second commodore 64 to use at work as a dumb term. At this rate I'll have all my goals accomplished in a month and can glide the rest of the year.

One of the goals that I'm sure will not be accomplished any time soon is number seven on the list–buy a house. It's certainly ambitious, and may not even be accomplished, but I'm going to try this year. I'll just have to go into debt for the rest of my life and give up my ability to purchase things on a whim, sticking to a strict budget from here on out.

Considering some of the cheapest houses selling around Portland are going for 300 grand, it really makes me think I chose the wrong profession. I obviously should have been a financial adviser or some sort of asshole that screws people out of money to make a living. Then maybe I could afford a starter home. As it turns out, this whole 'work with computers' thing you heard would be the wave of the future and make you rich when you were a kid in the 80s turned out to be a bunch of lies. I may as well be flipping burgers for all intensive purposes. At least I didn't go into extreme debt trying to get a degree to do this. I know a lot of folks that aren't as lucky.

Outside of that, I've also gotten around to updating the code that drives the music section of the site to display multiple records. Since I have to make database entries for each album, and it isn't simple matter of uploading some mp3's, I only have about 10 records online so far. More will follow shortly. Until then, I highly recommend downloading Wussyboy's Transoceanic. It will change your life.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

2006 Year in Review

Stephen Kozik — 2006-12-21T10:00:00-05:00

2006 Year in Review. Commodore VT100 term. Portland Blackout. PSP homebrew madness. Barrios birthday party. Sunglasses. Rumsfeld fired. Brother and Calvert thanksgiving. New hardrive. Mazda 3 and no more walking. Democrats take control of House and Senate*. Katherine Harris, George Alan, Rick Santorum's children cry and we smile. Hosfard season two. Fungo EP recorded. Thresholds. Cardinals win World Series. Yadier wins NLCS on homerun. Wainright as the greatest closer ever. Playoff beard pays dividends. Hit homerun as Belliard ties NLDS game 4. Family visits. Rooftop show. Gary Bennet. Worlds greatest teachers. ACME hangout. Mount Saint Helens and Bigfoot. Minor Thirds record. Vaccination update. Extra Innings entertainment. Excommunicator CD released and reviewed. Ask a ninja. Lose faith loosing streak. St. Louis trip number two. Walking. Gameday. New Busch Stadium. Belagios. Six Flags. Circleofthunder dies. Pujols' Easter Sunday miracle. Beachouse party. Birthday parties. Holgate party. Recording at Bens. UNICEF. OPB. Bowling and Softball websites. Stuck in a Rut. Puppet Show. Train rides. Beavers forth of July. Northwest Classic Gamers Expo. Retrobits interview. Romantic beach new years eve.

*Pending Tim Johnson's fate.

An Alternate Universe where Everything is Awesome

Stephen Kozik — 2006-12-13T10:00:00-05:00

So much has happened since I've last posted. The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series. The Democrats took back the House and Senate. I bought a new car. I moved my site to a new domain and gave it a facelift. It's like another time and place, or a mirror universe where everything is totally awesome.

The move to a new domain (stephenkozik.com) as well as a new hosting provider allows me to do all kinds of things–namely upload way more stuff to the new server since I'm no longer constrained by the tiny 100 meg limit that was enforced from my old host WazooWeb. Now that I have all this space, I can let my ego run wild without consequence. I've started out by uploading videos in flash format ala Youtube!/Gootube!, and following that up with the transfer of mp3's of nearly everything I've ever recorded. The mp3's will all be online once I get a chance to revamp some of the code on the server to allow for multiple albums (right now it is limited to only one), but I assure you some of the worst music you have ever heard in your life will be available for download shortly. Why not? I have over 50 gigs to fill.

For those of you trying to reach me and find my old circleofthunder.com email address no longer works, you may email me at the same address, but replace circleofthunder.com with stephenkozik.com. I will write a proper eulogy to circleofthunder.com later on when I have some spare time. Right now I have much to attend to–such as preparing my 2006 year in review post.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Chicks Dig the Long Ball

Stephen Kozik — 2006-08-28T10:00:00-05:00

Nearly on cue, as soon as I begin to openly complain about my lack of home-runs while playing softball this year, I finally hit one the following week. What I couldn't have predicted was how hard I hit my first round tripper–I certainly caught the left fielder by surprise. I might have to give credit to Sean, who noted that I was undercutting the ball during batting practice. Explaining that I might not be keeping my head level during the follow through, I adjusted and started smacking the crap out of the ball. With any luck, I may have discovered something that serves me well from here on out. And I thought it was my batting stance causing me problems-–Oh how wrong I was.

So now that I can check off "hit a home-run" from my yearly to-do list, I'll move on to the next task of writing some new songs. Since Jen is on vacation and I have all fear of annoying anyone out of the way I've been penning some tunes down. One is my first song about baseball. The home team doesn't win. It's not a very upbeat tune.

-Sir Cloister "Bennett!" Maximus, Esq.

Writting to Write

Stephen Kozik — 2006-08-23T10:00:00-05:00

This nearly feels like an update for the sake of making an update, although I'm sure I have plenty of thoughts worthy of penning down (so to speak). I'll get into these funks once and a while where I won't make a journal entry for months at a time, and then suddenly I'll get really bored at work and make one practically every day for a few weeks. I'm not saying daily updates are on the way, I'm simply recognizing my slack over the past few months that has prevented me from the occasional written observations.

Observe this, oh hungry internet audience–the 2006 Cardinals aren't a very good baseball team. Sure, they might make it to the post-season–even the Padres managed that last year. Any hopes of seeing them win rings, however, have about as much of a chance as me sitting on a statue of Jerry Seinfeld made entirely of Fusilli pasta. A million to one shot doc, a million to one shot.

The band is out and about playing shows again which feels pretty good. There was a real good one last week on top of a parking garage in downtown Portland last week. In fact, I'd venture to say it was the best show I've ever played. Mellow rocking out in front of 300 people while looking down into PGE park from above is going to be a 2006 highlight for sure. I felt like Slash in the GNR video where Axl gets married and Slash goes out into the middle of the desert during the ceremony to play a wicked solo while the wind blows at his back like a mighty sail in the ocean. It was that radical. To balance that out though, our show at the Acme the night before stunk. We played bad, and it was late, and I was overly intoxicated, and most everybody had left the club. Pretty lame, but it's all karma, and the chi balanced itself out the next day. We have another one tomorrow at The Know, and friday I'll play acoustically at the old Red and Black off of division. I wonder what moldy oldies I'll bust out with my strings cut free of concerns that the band won't know the songs.

I'm still chasing the elusive first home-run of the season in softball. The best XBH I've managed this year has been a double (although I've hit about 15 of them so far) and I have a feeling my best chance will be the day an unsteady hand plays left field when I hit it out there. I've been hitting the ball to the fence, but mostly it's been caught by a fielder that doesn't play me as shallow as they did last year. We're in late August and I'm running out of time to smack a dinger before the rain begins to fall and we shut it down for the year. To add injury to insult, I've sustained more injuries this year too. Last week I jammed the fingers on my right hand so bad I couldn't even bowl the next day and I'm still recovering.

Some reviews of the record are out. Mostly positive stuff. That's nice. Too bad nobody in Portland gives a damn, really.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Hot as Hell

Stephen Kozik — 2006-06-26T10:00:00-05:00

It's a good thing the science on global warming isn't in yet as I sure wouldn't want to do anything to curtail the current 100+ degrees of sweltering heat outside. And this is Oregon–I can only imagine what kind of horseshit weather will be rocking places like St. Louis this year. My oh my, I do believe I've got a case of the vapors.

Despite the heat I took the field of glory yesterday and learned a terrible lesson about playing short stop–I suck at it. After looking like an ass-clown on 4 ground-balls hit directly at me, I opted to move to right field where the only balls coming my way would be in the air. It's a good thing I switched because as soon as I did I went 4 for 4 with the bat. Funny how playing good defense helps you hit the ball with some level of confidence.

It's more than I can say about my beloved Cardinals who got their asses handed to them by the American League this week posting an 0 for 6 against two teams that have a collective 80 percent chance of playing in the world series this year. I hope for the sake of the birds they don't make it. Somebody representing the National League will look like fucking fools against the opposition this year.

This heat has gotten me into a do-nothing funk. My list of accomplishments for the weekend were attending a party, hitting a softball, reading 40 pages of a book, and taking about 8 naps. I'm sure I spent more time on the naps than the previously mentioned activities.

The record is out. I Hope somebody buys it.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq

(AKA General Baby Champagne)

Flying Back from Seattle on a Buddy Holly Plane

Stephen Kozik — 2006-06-06T10:00:00-05:00

I'm on a plane on my way to Seattle at the moment and I have a terrible seat at the very back of the plane right next to the engines. It's so incredibly loud I have my iPod on full blast and can barely make out lyrics. Lucky for me I only have about 50 more minutes before we land.

So, after my trip from St. Louis I have a few things checked off my "things to do in 2006" list. I saw two Cardinals games at Busch Stadium III, went to Six Flags and rode mad roller-coasters, ate a Steak 'n Shake burger, had coffee at Bob Evans, and visited the family. I don't have very high goals set for myself this year evidently.

The baseball games were fun, although the one on monday was a real heartbreaker. All of the things I wanted to see happened as Yadier Molina picked up his first homerun of the year and future left fielder Chris Duncan hit a monster shot to right center. Unfortunately all the joy was lost as Izzy melted down and threw a 3-2 meatball down central that Ken Griffey Jr. popped into the bleachers for a 3 run game winning home run against the birds. It's the kind of loss that makes grown men cry. And I was there.

There were quite a few snags I ran into during my trip that made it less that what I hopped it would be. One of those snags caused me to be on this flight to Seattle as American Airlines had a problem getting my originally booked flight out of St. Louis to depart. This wasn't the first American Airlines blunder as my flight to St. Louis on Saturday was a good 40 minutes late causing me to get to the airport after the Enterprise rental office closed forcing me to have Keith give me a ride to the airport. All of that coupled with missing keys, mo-dot traffic issues, and the loss of the superstar baseball player I came all the way from Portland to see caused the whole trip to be a bit of a downer all in all.

Time to fire up MAME and get a few games of Gyruss in before the plane lands.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Back to St. Louis to see Busch Stadium 3.0

Stephen Kozik — 2006-05-30T10:00:00-05:00

In a mere four days I'll be on a big old jet plane headed back to the place of my birth, St. Louis for a weekend (and more) of family, baseball, and possibly roller-coasters. I'm especially excited to see a Cardinals game in the new Busch Stadium 3.0 as it should be quite a treat. Although they are right field bleachers, I'm brining my glove anyway in case Pujols decides he needs a few more RBI's and belts one to the opposite field.

During the in-between days while I wait for my vacation to start, I've been keeping myself pre-occupied with writing a 40-Column VT100 compatible term from scratch in 6510 assembly for my Commodore 64. I'm pretty surprised nobody has written one before (Although there are a few 80-Column terms such as Novaterm) but I'm almost glad there aren't since it give me an opportunity to take on a fairly challenging programming task to keep the old grey matter logic circuits firing in synchronicity. I feel that programming is a use-it or lose-it skill and sitting around all day reading Cardinals blogs makes my skill level drop to the point where I forget how to write code.

Decoding VT100 escape codes in assembly is hard, but not as hard as getting a simple base hit in a clutch situation: Bottom of the 9th, 2 out, bases loaded, defensive gap between first and second. I'm up to bat. I hold it down on the knob. I dig in. The pitch is outside. I swing and hit the ball hard–right into the first baseman's glove. Now I know what Juan Encarnacion must feel like. It's not good.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Biking Home

Stephen Kozik — 2006-05-12T10:00:00-05:00

My legs are still in pain from yesterday's bike ride home, but I'm pretty confident that the pain will go away by the end of the weekend and I'll be recharged and able to bike 3 out of 5 days next week. With any luck I can get rid of the need for a car and get to work and back without throwing any more cash Haliburton's way. Sure, it doesn't make much difference, but it makes me feel better none the less.

The turn towards muscle based transportation isn't just a principle based decision, however. The mighty 1990 Honda CRX is going to the graveyard as last week's attempt to pass inspection failed miserably, and I don't have the patience to try to fix all the things that are wrong with it. 220k miles is a pretty good run, and if I was a gear-head I'm sure I could have gotten another 75k out of it. Alas, with being so close to work, it's not worth the effort nor the cash. Plus, I could bear to drop a few LB's from my frame as I've started to look suspiciously like Senior Cardgage since I quit smoking 2 years ago and turned to sweets instead. Not that I'm in a danger of being fat, but I certainly don't have six pack abs. More like a one pack.

The good news of this week is that the Mouse that Roared Excommunicator CD's are finished! I picked up about 50 retail, 25 promo from the label office and am giddy as a schoolgirl over them. Looks like we'll hit that June 13th date no problem, although we won't have any reviews out for the street date since I doubt one month is enough lead time for anyone. Such a shame. We will however, have a few fancy ads in some pubs in time for the release date. Now, selling them on the other-hand...that might take some work.

Brad Lidge sure is lights out this year. Ever since NLCS game 5, there's been nobody home.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

I Have Discovered the Lost Ark!

Stephen Kozik — 2006-05-08T10:00:00-05:00

After 23 years, the impossible has happened. As of yesterday at 3:32 PM I have finally, once and for all, found the Ark of the Lost Covenant. What seemed like an impossible task has now become quite possible. I'm speaking, of course, about Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Atari 2600 game that came out in 1982 and was known as one of the more vexing and hard to beat games of the Atari age. Thanks to the Internet FAQ I found, and the cartridge along with manual I purchased from Ebay last week, I finally dug up the ark after avoiding the Valley of Poison. And the ending? The lamest in video game history. After all the hard work you put into finding the Black Market, bribing the raving lunatic with gold, and finding the correct mesa from the map-room, your reward is the title screen with a blocky representation of the ark at the top. If I had spent more time in my youth and had achieved this lofty goal, I surely would have thrown my joystick at the television if I had won. Lame.

Speaking of throwing things, after nearly throwing out my arm again during an infuriating Cardinals vs. Astros' game I watched last week I am now Zen. I can calmly watch baseball games without throwing socks at the TV or punching the wall because that damned Berkman and cheap ass Minute Maid park makes me so damn mad. I realized I was getting too emotionally involved, and now I am Zen. Serenity now. And the baseball gods have rewarded my tranquility my allowing the birds to sweep the Marlins and let the Astros be swept by the Colorado Rockies. Now that is some tasty justice.

The lack of softball or bowling last week has put me in a position of suspended animation as I patiently await things to unfold this week. And if that doesn't work out, I'll be heading to St. Louis in a few weeks for a little mini vacation. I've earned it.

Where are my damn CDs at, stupid pressing plant?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Bowling and Softball Websites Launch

Stephen Kozik — 2006-04-24T10:00:00-05:00

Spring has officially sprung as the first softball game of the year took place yesterday. It was a pretty short game that only lasted 2 innings (although they were long innings with each team batting around the order twice per inning) but it was a good start for the year. So far it seems that my light exercise and stretching has paid off big time as I feel almost no pain or stiffness the morning after. I was hitting the ball with serious authority during batting practice but tensed up too much at the plate and didn't put a good swing on the ball during my 4 ABs, grounding out and hitting a line drive right to the short stop in the two outs I made. The only hits I got were weak grounders that somehow I got to 1st safely on. The arm seems stronger and without the pain I had during the end of last year and it feels pretty good to wing the ball to another fielder. Oh the joy.

The bowling website is done now and has proper stat data in it along with the softball site now that official recorded games have been played for both. I seem to find bugs here and there and make adjustments and tweaks when I have a good idea, but for the most part it's a done deal. All my freelance work is finished, and I'm sitting pretty at the moment as I can take a relaxing break and try to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Along with a nifty little raise at work I'm ready to enjoy the summer. Big time.

I have a dentist appointment at 2 PM today. I'm getting ready for the typical lectures on how I don't floss enough and maybe should see a specialist about my gums. Bleh.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Working on the Sports Websites

Stephen Kozik — 2006-04-12T10:00:00-05:00

The softball website is pretty much finished now–and linked to from the landing page of circleofthunder. There will be some tweaks here and there in time along with real statistical data, but it's pretty much a done deal. I also had a great idea to take the same code and tweak it to make a sister site to keep track of bowling stats for my Monday night bowling crew. It shouldn't take much effort to get that up and running in a week or so. I'm not so much interested in calculating my sad 105 bowling average–but I am interested in keeping track of our by game themes. There have been some real good ones in the past, such as what your porno name would be (mine is Lady Victoria, incidentally).

Right now I'm running an application called Corripio that automatically finds album artwork for your iTunes library and enters it into your ID3 tags. It seems to be working well so far, although I don't understand what sort of crazy order it's using as it's hopping from Van Halen to Alan Parsons like either of those are alphabetically or stylistically next to one another. I've been looking for something like this for a while and thanks a Wired Blogs I found it. The only downside is it looks like it might take 3 days to complete it's process since I have about 100 gigs of jams to catalog.

Word on the streets is that this Easter Sunday will be game one of the 2006 Hosford softball season. Now, if it can only stay dry enough for us to play.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Softball Stats!

Stephen Kozik — 2006-04-06T10:00:00-05:00

I've been working a lot lately on my softball stats website in preparation for the coming softball season that should be right around the corner. The general idea is that to make the game even more fun, I'll let everybody (who wants to participate in this) write down their stats for the day (at bats, hits, extra base hits, rbi's) along with recording the box score for each game. From there, I'll enter it into this sql database I've created and have a dynamic website where you can see all that statistical data aggregated into digestible information. As an extra bonus I've built in a poll, news, photo galleries, and a primitive message board. I'm sure I could have used a pre-boxed solution for the message boards but I really wanted to write one by hand to get a good learning experience. It won't be as robust as most of the slick boards out there, but it will have an added benefit of security through obscurity. I always see hits in my logs from bots trying to use exploits to cookie cutter message boards to oW3n sites. This will make things a little harder for them hopefully.

So now that I have the code-base 90% finished and the front end ready to be cut to HTML tonight, all I need to do now is populate it with stats. The outlook isn't very good for those stats to be birthed this weekend since there are ominous rain-clouds in my weather widget. I am so ready to play but it doesn't look like Portland's weather wants to cooperate.

In addition to curtailing my potential monster hitting display on Sunday, it will most likely rain out (or make very unpleasant) the Beavers game I have tickets for this Saturday. It's like the rain wants to ruin my entire weekend. At least Baseball is on the tube now that the season's started–and the cards are playing the cubs. Classic.

I still need to take care of some work that I've been avoiding. That and those pesky 2005 taxes. Guess I can take comfort in knowing that my money goes to blowing somebody's brains out so El Presidente can feel smug and righteous in the lord.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Softball spring training and the Portland Beavers

Stephen Kozik — 2006-03-23T10:00:00-05:00

I'm looking at my weather widget right now and cursing the fact that the happy clear sky sun icon for thursday has miraculously turned into a sad grey rain cloud icon overnight. What this means is that my great plans to take advantage of the 65+F temperature listed for today will most likely be a bust. I've been waiting for a while for the perfect day to walk home from work and get some exercise, but it looks like it isn't to be. I had an opportunity Monday, but unfortunately I was feeling lazy and took a pass. Maybe next week will bear fruit.

I did, however, take advantage of the freakishly sunny and nice day Sunday and got some softball work in at the old Hosfard field. I was somewhat surprised that nobody else decided to show up and see if maybe there was a game or something, but it was all for the best as I was able to get a lot of work done with my swing and getting my arm used to throwing a ball again. My hope is that with that in combination with some walking I'll be able to get my muscles nice and stretched out so the first game of the year doesn't end with me soaking in a tub for 3 days unable to walk because I over did it. Also, with any luck, I'll have a leg up and be a better player this year since I got in a little practice before I make a fool of myself in front of others. April is just around the corner, and I'll be ready this year for sure.

I continue to be able to check things off of my todo list for 2006 as I purchased a set of tickets to a Beavers game in a few weeks. They are right behind the visitors dugout so I'll be in yelling distance of the players. If only Kerry Robinson still played for them–man oh man what a time I'd have.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Random Mouse that Roared Thoughts

Stephen Kozik — 2006-03-16T10:00:00-05:00

My Hogan's Alley NES cart finally arrived today, and with any luck I'll be cleaning up that digital town with my trusty six-gun when I get home. Clearly I'll be on the same level as Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future II–except I don't plan on getting into any drag races with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers over being called "chicken".

It looks like once again this year I'll be heading back to St. Louis for a few days as I was lucky enough to get tickets to a Cardinals game at the new Busch Stadium. Sure, they're bleacher seats...to a Reds game.. on a weekday...in right field...but still, from what I understand I was lucky to even get those seats since most games were standing room only after a mere 3 hours of tickets going on sale. So June 3rd through the 6th I'll be back in hot ass Missouri and try to see everybody I know and take in the whole midwest thing. June should be a pretty busy month all in all considering that's when Excommunicator is scheduled to be released and will obviously require some sort of CD release show. I'm working on getting some folks to eat fire and present a flea circus. Seriously.

Speaking of the Mouse that Roared, the band minus Chris and plus Ross Beach rocked a 3 song set lasting less than ten minutes at a going away party for the Holgate house we used to practice at back in the day. All things considered it was pretty successful for being the most by-the-seat-of-the-pants thing we've done (having Ross sit in behind the drum kit without even HEARING any of the songs we were going to play) and Piuma playing on a borrowed Moog that he had about 10 seconds to figure out. I can honestly say it was the best show we've ever played without Calvert. Looking at the Minmae tour schedule for the next couple of months I think we should be prepared for that to happen again though.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Grapefruit Leauge Watchin'

Stephen Kozik — 2006-03-03T10:00:00-05:00

Baseball is back in the form of spring training and grapefruit league games. I haven't had the chance to listen in yet since yesterdays tragic exhibition game against the Mets wasn't covered for whatever reason, but I think that tonight's game will be on MLB's gameday audio stream. It's timing conflicts with SG1, but maybe I'll just wait for the 8PM airing of SG1 and listen to the game–unless there aren't any regular starters by 5PM, then I don't really care.

Now that I've pretty much recovered from whatever wacky pulled muscles I sustained last weekend (presumably during the long day of standing and walking around Ikea) it's time to buckle down and get ready to get back in shape. I guess throwing the work "back" in that sentence isn't entirely forthcoming since I've probably never been "in shape" in the first place, but I digress. I plan on doing something to make myself a bit more athletic and prepared for softball when it starts in a month. This will be my breakout year–I can feel it.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Classic Gammers Conference in Seattle

Stephen Kozik — 2006-02-27T10:00:00-05:00

This weekend I traveled up north to check out the Classic Gammers Conference in Seattle. I went with some friends of Jen and a supply of cash that afforded me the ability to pick up some NES carts I've been looking for. I still can't seem to find Hogan's Ally so I'm going to have to buy it from Ebay I guess. No big deal really. The con was a bit smaller than I was hoping it would be, but it was packed to the gills will a lot of neat stuff. I got to play with a Vectrex machine and obtain a splitting headache and nausea from the Virtual Gameboy they had on display. I took some pictures that I will upload soon, but I need to clear some space on the server first.

Excommunicator is pretty much a wrap now. The only change that could happen to it is the possible dismissal of the troubling third track. It will be somewhat of a shame if I have to drop it since it's sort of a load bearing song for the record in terms of lyrics (it sets the table for all the ghost stuff really) but it's a song that was unfortunately written in a way that my voice sounds very unflattering on, so it might have to take one for the team. It would be the third song that was written and recorded for the record but just couldn't make the cut. Pity.

Now that the record is pretty much out of the way I can concentrate on a bunch of stuff I've been putting off. Things like exercising in preparation for spring softball, as well as finishing some freelance work and doing my taxes. Then, and only then, can I take it easy.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Interviewed on Retrobits for the NTSC Demo Scene

Stephen Kozik — 2006-02-14T10:00:00-05:00

Someone that runs a Cardinals blog that I routinely read posted a complete clip of the top of the 9th inning from the 2005 NLCS Game 5. It was fun to re-watch the monstrous moon shot off Lidge again, but it just sparked my jonesing for baseball to start. I think I need some sort of countdown clock for the 2006 season. Maybe that's out of control.

Besides my continuous mixing of the soon to be released Mouse that Roared offering, I spent a portion of Sunday doing a sort of off the cuff interview for one of my favorite podcast's (besides the amazingly funny Ricky Gervais show) Retrobits. The interview revolved around my young geek experiences hacking 6510 assembly code under the effeminate handle "the daisyfarmer". As a bonus for throwing in my two cents about the NTSC demo scene I finally acquired copies of the XL/XE transformer software that will let my Atari 130XE run XL games like Miner 2049er. And isn't that what life is all about really?

It is, of course, the holiday of love and the wife reminds me that 10 years ago today I first alerted her of my romantic intentions. While it's a noteworthy anniversary, it also makes me say, "Ten Years?". That's a long time for sure.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, esq.

Waiting for Baseball and Hosting the Family

Stephen Kozik — 2006-02-09T10:00:00-05:00

It's unseasonably warm and dry today, and apparently for the next 5 days according to my dashboard weather widget. It's normally accurate so I have no reason to doubt it now I suppose. It's certainly a welcome change from the normal chilly and wet that goes on in February around these parts--but I can't help but feel like it's teasing my body into thinking that warm weather, iPod assisted walks home, and baseball is just around the corner (which they are not). So in a way, I'd almost rather just have the wet and cold so I don't pine so heavily for April.

The main tracking and most overdubs for Excommunicator are done and it's currently being reduced to stereo Mix A. Although it's certainly head and shoulders above the past Mouse that Roared offerings, there are some weakness exposed by my increasing microscopic inspection over the project. Nothing major mind you, just the realization that we could have maybe laid down some tighter takes and I could have gotten the bass guitar to have a bit more low end gunk if we had more than 3 days to record it. So really I'm just thinking that maybe you can't really make a record in 3 days as I've come to believe. Not, at least, an album with any sort of complex overdubs.

My mom and my youngest brother are coming for a visit in a few weeks to check out schools and get a little Pacific Northwest tourism in. It's going to be strange having more than 2 Kozik's in Oregon. Will the fabric of time/space be destroyed in the process? It's hard to say at this point. I've taken a few days off of work and offered to donate my good car so they can get around. Even if I'm not hanging out with them the whole time it will be nice to have a few days off of work just to sort of kick back and relax since I've been so ridiculously busy lately with the record and all. Then there is always the freelance project I need to finish... and 2005 taxes. Damn

Anything is better than having a stone though. If I knew what a customary gift for having ones gall bladder removed was, I would get it for Jake. That stuff is for sucks.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Preparing to Record Excommunicator

Stephen Kozik — 2006-02-01T10:00:00-05:00

Only two more days until we start recording the new Mouse that Roared offering "Excommunicator", a twelve song CD about ghosts, leading a useless a non-contributive life, and essentially being ignored by your peers and heroes. This has absolutely nothing to do with my own life, obviously.

Of course, the album won't be completely coherent ala Dark Side of the Moon or Operation Mind Crime (shivers) since there are a few older songs in the tracking that were written originally as part of my aborted song cycle about finding true love and letting your true love ruin your life. However, it might be at least as unified as say, Band on The Run or Red Rose Speedway, and to be in the musical company of a former Beatle and Knight of Britannia isn't bad at all I guess. One could do worse, like be in the company of Queensryche or Rush.

There is a lot to be excited about when it comes to this weekend of course. Since this will be the first time recording with this particular lineup and will be actually pressed to a real honest to goodness CD, It really feels like the first Mouse that Roared release ever. With a bit of luck I'll look back at all the crappy cd-r's I've put out over the past 6 years under that moniker as mere demos--or perhaps as just some strange form of homework done to bone up on song-writing techniques. Excommunicator will be like, my thesis or some horseshit. Now I'm making this seem retarded.

So pack up the bags and get ready to go. Let's make a record.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Way to Go, Neocons

Stephen Kozik — 2006-01-26T10:00:00-05:00

The reports coming in from NPR this morning are that Hamas has the majority of the vote in the Palestinian Elections. Normally, middle eastern politics bore me to tears with the whole "We'll bomb you, you bomb us, our hats are blue and yours are red" religious bullshit that goes on, but for some reason this struck a chord with me.

What the neo-cons have done here in attempt to spread democracy in an unstable middle eastern region by invading Iraq, is the equivalent of hitting a hornets nest with a baseball bat. You don't kill any hornets, you just piss them off like you wouldn't believe.

This imperial movement has had an obvious radicalizing effect on the already quasi-nutty inhabitants of the area. With Mr. "The Holocaust is a Jewish Myth" running Iran while developing nuclear capacity (something that would never have been tolerated if the US didn't already have all of it's troops spread between Iraq and Afghanistan), growing insurgency, and Sharon (who is a mass murder, but one who might have been the most sane in Israeli politics lately) being out for the count, you can guarantee some balls out war on the horizon. One, that of course, the US will feel the need to get involved in and cause even more death, destruction, and turmoil. Fuck.

I guess I can't even move to Canada anymore. Why is the world becoming MORE insane and conservative? Maybe evolution is bullshit. We sure as fuck don't seem to be evolving as a species.

-Sir "Political Pundit" Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

New Features and Working on Excommunicator

Stephen Kozik — 2006-01-22T10:00:00-05:00

Some big changes are coming down the pipe for Circleofthunder as I work on a whole new content management system and consider giving it the yearly facelift that it normally receives in January. Some of the things that will change will be purely superficial, but one of the key things I really want to do is update the markup to be xhtml. The current state of the HTML for the site is totally 1998. That has to change.

Besides the website update, February will be pretty busy with the the recording and pressing of the next Mouse that Roared offering. This is the album that has been in the works for almost two years now and will be the first full band effort since the Mount Saint Helens EP way back in 2003. It's also going to be the first album with Chris Piuma from the Minor Thirds tickling the ivories, as well as the first record pressed to cd at an actual plant. Funny how a stable financial situation and a lack of modesty makes things turn around. Needless to say, it should be quite the event.

So while I wait for the end of January, I try and wrap up all the little things here and there that I need to do. Things like the Stuck-in-a-Rut project, preparing my computers and gear for the big recording event, making preparations for all the things that come with that. If I'm lucky I'll get some spare time and hit the batting cages sometime soon.

-Sit Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

2005 Year in Review

Stephen Kozik — 2005-12-31T10:00:00-05:00

2005 Year in Review. Low poll Bush. Sore neck and right arm. Divinci school mudball. Loveharder. 6 day vacation of laziness. Stuck in a Rut. Avian flu scare. Old shows on DVD. Larry Walker retires. Alito nominaton. Toni Iommi Halloween party. Carpenter wins Cy Young. Retro computers arive. Pakistan quake. White Sox win world series. Harriet Miers. Big Lebowski party. Cardinals make it to NLCS. Albert wins MVP, ruins Brad Lidge's career. Aunt Inge visits. Rove. Libby. Abramoff. Delay. Ken Tomlinson. Podcasts. Dermatology. CRX Troubles. Bowling at Interstate. Q-Link Reloaded. John Roberts is handsome. Practice in Bens basement. Fillibuster fight! Testement Party. Katrina. Shellac at Berbatis. Hosfard near cycle. 30 Years old. Smashed Guitar at ACME. HDTV all-star game. 4th at the Beach. New Glasses. Civic. First Homerun. Jackson buys innocence. Imeldas Shoes. Trip to St. Louis. Morris complete game win against Red Sox at Bush Stadium. Love Harder. Cruise boat. Fight for survival at Wired Cafe. RSS Feeds. NPR Streams in. Psychodelic Tea Party. Switch to Mac. Keith bails on p-town. Enterprise.com. Pepboys. New job at Centerpointe. Netflix. Redesign of COT. Terminator X Dragon Fly New Years Eve.

No Big Deals for the St. Louis Cardinals

Stephen Kozik — 2005-12-12T10:00:00-05:00

Times like these make me think of the first verse to the Kinks song Low Budget:

Cheap is small and not too steep
But best of all cheap is cheap
Circumstance has forced my hand
To be a cut price person in a low budget land
Times are hard but we'll all survive
I just got to learn to economize

I am, of course, referring the Dewitt's propensity to tying Walt Joketty's hands on issues of budget in hopes that He'll pull off more miracle deals ala last years Eckstien and Grud signings. While Walt has been a miracle worker in the past, you have to wonder when the luck will run out and this whole Cardinals discount philosophy will come and bite the team in the ass. Let's see, a guy (Grud) turns a record number of double plays in club history and you can't afford to pay him the meager (in mlb terms) 2 million a year he wants? That's just dumb.

So the birds loose Reggie Sanders, Mark Grudzielanek, Matt Morris, Abe Nunez, John Mabery, Julian Tavarez. Meanwhile Larry Walker and Cal Eldred retire, Al Reyes is out for the year. What has been done to plug the holes? We trade Ray King for two Rockies bench players and sign a Mendoza line reliever. Yikes.

I know it was similar last year with the late year deals after Renteria left, but I'm hungry for just ONE big deal. Something that says, "Don't worry, it will work out".

I keep putting off working on a freelance project that I really need to get done just so I can move on to some fun little project I want to work on during the weekends. Stuff like a new COT, and a softball tracking system for next year. Who wants to work though?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Last Game of the Season

Stephen Kozik — 2005-12-05T10:00:00-05:00

Yesterday obviously marked the last day for softball this year as only 5 people showed and we had to settle for batting practice. As I lament about the passage of the 2005 season, it is also good news to my various pulled muscles that winter is here and I can begin to rest up. I am also pleased with some major upgrades to my skill-sets this year after I added the long ball (4 home-runs this year), better OBP (The last month has seen a .500 clip), and improved fielding (fly balls CAN be caught). I even nearly hit for the cycle in a game that I hit my 2nd triple of the season. I can only assume that next year I'll be an acceptable player if I can only do something to improve my throwing arm. We'll see in April I guess. That Tommy John surgery HAS to pay off.

Now that winter is here, what sport can replace the void that softball has left? Bowling has come back on as we've moved our games to Monday nights at Powel Bowl, but that is a streaky sport that is on/off all year anyway. I'm trying to think of something indoors to escape the rain and cold. If only Portland had a place to play Demolition Ball at. Maybe I'll just have to settle for the sport of rock n' roll. Or hunting the ultimate prey. Humans.

Since I had my little sabbatical last week and had the opportunity to write some new songs, I now have enough material for a whole new album with the mouse that roared. If all goes well I can teach the crew the new jams and we can record it sometime in the next month or so. That could be a fun winter project for sure. I think this is going to be the record I finally enter my Johnny Thunders phase and hire a sax player–and somebody that plays the squeezebox.

I need to buy a suit. But just for the sake of irony. That would be punk rock, right?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Cortisone Necks, Hotstove, Halloween Parties and Retrocomputers

Stephen Kozik — 2005-11-07T10:00:00-05:00

This may have been the biggest lapse in blog entries ever. I mean, does anybody even read this thing? I guess it doesn't really matter since this is supposed to be a time capsule that I can look back to 10-15 years in the future and say, Oh yah! I remember when Larry Walker played for the Cardinals..man that dude's neck was fucked up.

Speaking of fucked up necks, I have one. It sure isn't as bad as Larry Legend's (No 8 cortisone shots here) but it does get pretty stiff on the two days after softball. This coupled with may nagging shoulder soreness ala Jimmy Baseball makes me pretty much worthless on Monday and Tuesdays. The end of the "season" is getting close (mid-December) so I'll just play through the injuries and let myself heal up over the winter. Mudball is pretty exciting, actually. You get to slide in the mud and even if you don't make it to second safely, you look like a real stud doing it. Take that, nerdy and slightly effeminate outward appearance!

The hotstove is on now that the Birds bowed out in the NLCS and the Astro's got oW3n3D in the Dub-S. There is a lot of talk about getting another class A starting pitcher. Forget that noise, pitching didn't let us down this year–if anything it was the one highlight in the NLCS, sans Albert's choo-choo-train jack in game 5. What STL needs is a stud in Right to replace Larry. What will it take to get Giles in a red uniform for 2006? If it's under 11M we should pay it. I'm not saying we should sign the guy for more than 3 years since he's not a young buck anymore, but that sexy OBP in front of Albert could be the thing to give those guys their rings next year. That and keeping Rolen from breaking any bones next year. Hee Seop Choi, you son of a bitch!

The Mouse that Roared played a last minute Halloween party last Saturday. We played with varying degrees of excellence to outright slop that embarrassed me. We opened up with Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath" and I was dressed as Tony Iommi but didn't quite get those Hammer-on's down quite like he could. Then some jackass puked on my car. I can't say I had a good feeling about the night on the drive home. What kind of dickhead pukes on a car? Can't you turn your head slightly to the right?

My classic computer/console collection is nearly completed. Amiga 500, Vic-20, TI-99/4A, C64, Sega Master System, Nintendo NES have all arrived in my latest ebay marathon. I still want to acquire an Atari 130XE and possibly an Apple IIe if I can find one for cheap. My office is getting a little crowded. I need to develop some type of shelving system to minimize the space all this stuff takes up.

Emulators are for punks. Real geeks use hardware.

And I am a real geek.. that much is certain.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Luck of the Redbird

Stephen Kozik — 2005-08-15T10:00:00-05:00

I had to make decision on Sunday whether or not to wear my lucky Cardinals t-shirt. On one hand, wearing this shirt the cards have won 8 for 8. On the other hand, I don't want to wear it in a sketchy game and give it bad juju. Well, the Cardinals lost a see-saw of a game to the Cubs (who don't even have a winning record, but seem to play like it's game 7 whenever the Cardinals come to town), but that day at softball I got my first Home-run of the year, so I guess the good luck juice has a way of flowing one way or another.

I'm also a total sellout now that I have an iPod. I'm only a few steps away from buying a house in the suburbs driving my SUV on the way to Starbucks. Way to go, old guy.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Getting the Band Back Together

Stephen Kozik — 2005-05-23T10:00:00-05:00

I've been getting lax about posting to the journal as of late, and it certainly isn't for lack of things to write about. I've finally purchased a new car (Civic LX Coupe), gotten the ball rolling with Mouse that Roared shows (Next one is May 30th, Monday, at the Acme in SE), almost finished up my latest freelance job (www.imeldashoes.com) and booked a flight back to St. Louis (June 4th-7th). Here are some thoughts I've had as of late in no particular order.

The Cardinals. First, let me say that it's pretty much a lock that the cards will be the NL Central champs again this year. Not so much because they are a great ball-club (they are), but because everybody in the NL Central... uh... stinks. When the Brewers are in second place and 7 games back from the birds, then the division is in some sorry shape. I've been subscribed to MLB.tv and MLB.radio so I've been catching every game. I'm not concerned with Roland on the DL since Mabery, Sanders, and Nuneiz all seem to be able to take up his slack without any problem. It isn't like Rolland's been a particularly hot bat or living up to his Gold Glove standards lately, so I'm not worried. The only complaint I have about the birds this year is this–Stop using Roger Cendeno! Roger has always choked in clutch situations and is continuing to strike out and hit pop-flys at nearly every at bat he's had. I'm sure he's a great guy, but I don't want to seem him at the plate with 2 out and bases loaded anymore. You hear me LaRussa?

I'm hoping I can get everybody I know to come out to the first Mouse that Roared (full band) show of the year the coming Monday. I've had a couple of solo shows this year, but I can't wait to take the full band out for a night on the town. Since I've fallen in love with electric guitar and don't play much acoustic anymore, I've really tuned myself more to a band situation than just playing by myself. Julia hooked me up over at the Acme in Southeast. I had a chance to check it out this Saturday for a Minmae show at it seemed really sweet. One dollar domestic beers, free admittance, easy parking, big space, and foot traffic. Shit, that's everything I could ask for in a club. And S. Brooks claims the monitors are perfect and audible so it should be a pleasant experience.

I'm all geared up and ready to visit back to STL in the beginning of next month. It's been about 3-4 years since I've been in the midwest, so I'll have a lot of catching up to do for sure. I plan on trying to get a hold of as many people as I can, and roll around town with the digital camera and take some snapshots of some old stomping grounds like my old house in St. Charles and stuff like that. I can almost taste that Stake n' Shake burger now. Holy crap.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Softball is Here Again

Stephen Kozik — 2005-04-24T10:00:00-05:00

Finally, I get to play the first game of softball this year after waiting for nearly two months during inhospitable weather. Not that today was perfect, but the rain was light enough that it was at least possible to play. Although I'm pretty sore in a couple of places, it seems that walking home from work and doing some stretching should prevent me from totally blowing out my quads like I did last year. I fell face down in the mud, couldn't get a base hit, and jammed my thumb on a double play at second, but the pain and dirt is all part of the fun of baseball. With any luck it will be clear skies next week and maybe I can hit a line drive into a gap and beat out a throw to first next week.

One thing that has been annoying me lately is this new trend I am seeing where people who post to web based built-in boards and have cookie cutter blog pages seem to be stealing photos from circle of thunder. What I mean by stealing is that instead of using google search, finding a photo from my photo gallery and downloading it, they just outright link to it, so MY web-server has to serve up the image to to their shitty forum. I know some web-servers have a way to block outside links to images but I can't seem to find it inside wazooweb's control panel. For the time being I've been renaming these linked files and serving their dumb asses up with a cold and unsympathetic 404. However, if it keeps up I'll start replacing those images with giant tubgirl photos. If that doesn't discourage this phpbb linking, I don't know what will.

It looks like Tiger was accidently shipped out a week early from some software stores, so now pirated copies of the gold master are spreading like liquid hell on the net. I've queued up a copy on usenet out of curiosity. I doubt I'll install it any time soon since I was burned by upgrading to 10.3.9 last week when it broke my copy of pithelmet. It's best to wait for all the bugs to get worked out and everybody update their software. Damn those new widget things look cool though. I'm such a sucker for Konfabulator type apps.

I got a new scanner for cheap down at the depot while shopping for dvd-r's and spent a portion of the weekend scanning in some old photos that were previously only living in the analog domain. It is one of my goals to digitally archive everything I have this year and store it on some dvds placed in a vacuum sealed safety deposit box. I'm a step closer today.

Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Fight for Survival at the Wired Cafe

Stephen Kozik — 2005-04-18T10:00:00-05:00

Blogging after work like my name was Captain Kirk.

So Saturday turned out to be a pretty fun night down at the Wired Cafe in SE with my Battle for Survival show working out on all accounts. Ross played some new nifty songs that seemed less political and more exploratory. People showed up and hung around to watch all the music. The sound was spot on and for once I could actually hear myself very well which always helps in the singing department, so I felt good about my set. The Nest became even creeper and more interesting than usual with renditions of his new water suite. Brooks brought a sax player with him in an ever on-going quest to up the ante; and let me tell you sir–that was one magical performance. I'm happy that the Mulvinator captured it all on Sony(TM) MiniDisc(R). If it turns out as good as I remember it maybe I'll make some dubs and pass it around.

I finally got a gig of ram for my mini, so now my Mac is happy and I can finally have Photoshop and iTunes open at the same time. In the process of upgrading some software (10.3.9) I found a need little app that Panic makes called Stattoo. It's pretty much like the konfabulator esq. widgets that will be part of Tiger, but a little more trimmed down and connected to other Panic stuff (such as Audion). This was all helpful, of course, since I had to work all weekend on Imelda and Louie's shoes website. Nothing like putting the 40 hours in at the jobby job then coming home and working some more. Sigh. Oh well, my new 2006 silver VW Jetta will appreciate it I'm sure.

Is it ever going to stop raining on Sunday's? I'm dying to start playing softball again.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Baseball Season Begins

Stephen Kozik — 2005-04-03T10:00:00-05:00

Baseball season is upon us once again. This tuesday will be the Cards opening game against the now de-clawed Houston Astros. The cards, of course, have been picked this year to win the NL Central – although it should be noted that last year the Cubs were picked, so I suppose it doesn't mean much. Is this the year that Pujols wins the MVP? Anybody that has seen him during spring training will know that this really should be his year. I'm still trying to figure out how to watch the games since I'm subjected to FSN NW and can only watch Mariners games on the tube. I wish that the closest team in my area was at least a National League team so I could catch the occasional Cards game on the tube. I guess I'll have to subscribe to MLB TV or something. If only I wasn't currently paying off my taxes for 2004 and saving for a car.

Today is apparently Daylight Savings day, so I loose an hour on the clock. This is never the fun time change, but at least it will still be light out around 6PM, and once the rain finishes it's cycle we can start playing Softball out at Irving park on Sundays again. The official opener happened 3 weeks ago but I missed it and it's rained every week since. I also haven't been able to do any of my other routine things like have band practice or bowl since something has been preventing that from happening in a while as well.

At least last week provided a good reason to not have practice–The Oxes were playing portland for the first time in 4 years. The show was amazing, but I have to give a big thumbs down to the solid state. What kind of a club charges 8 bucks and doesn't even have a godamn sound system? And to add insult to injury, the space is so small it felt like seeing a show at the blackbird again, and not in a good way. It was so crowded I got trapped in the back of the room after I used the bathroom. It certainly wasn't as fun as the show they did at the Satiricon back in 2002 (One of the first shows I saw in Portland, BTW). Anyway, I'm not too sweet on many PDX clubs these days since they all have serious flaws that make it aggravating to see shows at.

Man oh man do I need to upgrade the ram in my Mac Mini.. 256 Megs just ain't cutting it.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

My new Shiny Mac Mini

Stephen Kozik — 2005-03-27T10:00:00-05:00

Goodbye windows, hello Mac OS X.

I've always sort of wanted to switch to a mac, but have been held back by both financial considerations and too much invested in legacy hardware. There were two things that recently happened that pushed me over the edge and forced me to take action.

The first of those are the introduction of the new mac mini's – those marvels of Apple engineering at a price that I finally said, "Yah, I can afford one of those". The real key to it all working out is how it seems that Apple read my mind. Every time I would look at buying a mac (besides the old iMac in my kitchen that Jen used) it was always the same thing; I don't need ram, big hard-rives, built in displays, or mice because I already HAVE all of those things. Why would I want to over pay for things I already have? I always just wished I could by an iMac sans display and features – just a bare bones mac. Well, the mac mini's are about as close as you can get to that. For 500 bucks you could hardly do better, and of course it works with all my old hardware that I used on my windows box. Oh the bliss.

The second was my new job. You see, in the past my employers would always give me very old out of date hardware and refuse to upgrade my software. However, at my new job I actually got a G4 with some juice in it and experienced OSX in a working environment for the first time (At my last I job I was STILL using OS9). The kicker is that I was also supplied with some state of the art horseshit P4 4 Ghz blah blah blah PC that I use side by side with my mac for reading MS Office docs and browser testing – and my old dual 800 mhz G4 SMOKED it. I mean, when you compare them side by side like that it becomes painfully obvious that macs are more than superior. It's just unreal. I used to have the philosophy of "Oh, well, windows may be as ugly as sin, but at least it's utilitarian." Now that's I've had the pleasure of working with a real operating system that wasn't just flung together by a 100 monkeys randomly typing I see that's not the case. Windows isn't utilitarian. It's just shit. I'd come home to my windows box and just hate it so much. The long pauses, the freezups, the random resets, the buggy software that leaked memory and caused my swap disk to balloon to over 2 gigs.

So that was it. Jen and I marched down to the Apple store and picked up two minis. One for me, one for her. I have to say, besides the somewhat inadequate memory on these things (stock 256M), this little 5" x 5" cube is performing as smoothly as my old Athlon 2000+ system. I mean, CPU speed is junk science... no really. It's all ram and disk performance. What are you doing that really requires 2 ghz of speed? Even Photoshop and Illustrator never make my CPU peak over 40%. Once ram prices come down a little I plan on getting a stick of 1G and making this mac mini into a mac biggie. With my 300GB usb 2.0 drive I'm rocking' and a rollin'. The only PC dependency I have is my old Layla 8 in 10 out HD recording system (PCI bridge. d'oh) and the DVD-R drive. That could obviously be replaced with Firewire versions, but I'm in no hurry. As long as I don't have to deal with windows 90% of the time I'm happy.

Now, If I could only find an MP3 player I like. iTunes is far too bloated for my tastes, and all the lightweight players (Audion, Macamp) seem a little... uuh.. unstable. Nobody's perfect I suppose.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Buying a new Guitar Amp–Let's go VOX.

Stephen Kozik — 2005-03-06T10:00:00-05:00

I keep telling myself the reason that I'm working every day, even the weekends, is because a new shiny car is in my immediate future. To tell the truth, I'm not sure that's enough. I want toys. Lots of useless, non-practical, self-gratification oriented toys. Lucky for me I fulfilled part of that order earlier this week when I went and finally purchased a new solid state amp from the g-center in Tigard. It was a coin toss between the Fender, Kustom, and Vox. The Fender and Vox were both 30 watts with a 10" speaker, and g-center didn't carry the Kustom I was looking at so it was narrowed down. I walked out with the Vox.

It's incredibly un-nerving to try out an amp in that place with the Zeppelin bass solos, nu-metal drum masturbation and too friendly but somewhat condescending salesmen surrounding you. First I was given a fender strat that even the cocky g-center employee couldn't tune, and then when I had a guitar that was in-tune I didn't really feel like I could crank up the amp because, you know, I didn't want to be one of "those guys" that need to annoy the shit out of you with crappy guitar playing while you're just in to pick up a pack of cheap strings and picks. Regardless, from what I could tell at the store the Vox seemed more sturdy and had less tin sound than the Fender I tried out. Plus Vox amps just look cool. It feels very British.

I'm almost finished putting together the next Mouse that Roared offering titled "Laws of Physics" that will be put out on Barrios' new label "Love Harder". What a great fucking name for a label. My love is hard. Hard as a rock. I've ditched the plans for that pretentious song-cycle and am just going to release most of the songs from the cycle sans-story and in raw form without the help of the band. Granted, most of the songs were done with assistance from Calvert and Casey, but not playing their instruments. I figure I'll just start working on all new stuff with the band and we'll record something band-like mid year sometime. Since we have a new practice space by the "Fat Cobra" in North Portland, that is possible now.

Looking for something to do this week? On Friday at the White Eagle I'll be there drinking Hammerheads and watching Xila's second show, and finally get to see Nick's band the Draft play.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

A Practice Place for The Mouse that Roared

Stephen Kozik — 2005-02-27T10:00:00-05:00

It seems that I have just about recovered from the cold that I've had for the past five days. I think it might have been a week version of the one that I had last year since the symptoms and the order that they manifested themselves in were similar. I suppose it's good to have gotten it out of the way since everybody at my work has the bug. It was ... inescapable.

It looks like Casey has secured TMTR a place to practice finally, so that is some exciting news. I have been feeling the need to get things moving again since I have a batch of new tunes and would like to set up some shows here pretty soon. It would also be a bonus to be able to record them with the band, and now that we have a place to play that seems at least possible.

Other items of interest include the new RSS feed I've added to the old blog since I'm all about that now. I also have been getting some new goodies now that I have a little spreading around cash again and dumped Verizon in favor of T-Mobile for my cell provider. I have no brand loyalty whatsoever. Whoever has it for the cheapest amount gets my business. It's all the same junk as far as I'm concerned.

Is baseball season here yet?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Netflix is Bliss

Stephen Kozik — 2005-02-08T10:00:00-05:00

"Don't worry, that wasn't a real person. That was a stunt double" - Leather face, Summer School.

Today I got my first shipment from Netflix – 5 episodes of the HBO soft core porn/thriller "The Hitchhiker", Testament (The nuclear holocaust movie I had mixed up with the Day After), and Summer School. So far I gotta say I'm pretty impressed with the 'flix action. The discs were shipped in 1-day, and the no-hassle self-mailing envelopes are pure genius. I don't think I'll have much of a problem getting my $17.95 a month out of them since as soon as I get the discs in the mail I'll just copy them to the hardrive (Thanks DeCSS!) and mail them right back for my next batch of goodies. That, of course, means that Friday or Saturday I should be getting 3 DVD's full of The Twilight Zone: 80's (The ones Wes Carven directed) in the mail. Bad ass.

Besides being inspired to sample the Hitchhiker theme song and make a leet Booyaka cut, I start work in cubicle land tomorrow. Lucky for me I found a place that will let me pretty much pick up where I left off last year minus vindictive creative directors and just so happens to also be a few blocks from my place. Well, maybe more than a few blocks but I could theoretically skateboard there if I was in a jam. Anything that prevents me from having to drive on 26 is considered a good thing. So I'll throw in the towel on the freelance lifestyle again in the favor of Dental Plans and stable paychecks that afford me a new car. I'm such a godamned sellout.

If all goes according to plan, I'll be recording the new Mouse that Roared LP this weekend over at the Kelly Haus with my boys from the Minmae Research Institute of Punk Fucking Rock. I've only been working on this whole song cycle for like 6 months. I'm totally excited to finally be able to record it the way I want it to be. My sweet drum machine and juno versions are nice and all, but I'm about the rock now... and wank solos.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Internet Outtage and a Ross Beach Party

Stephen Kozik — 2005-01-30T10:00:00-05:00

Well, I suppose I missed my window in being able to call Comcast today to find out that the story is with my net connect that seems to cycle on and off every 15 minutes for the past 4 days. I called them yesterday and they claimed they were aware of a problem in my hood (Beaverton) and it was being worked on. They also told me that it would be fixed in a few hours. Either they haven't fixed it yet or maybe something is wonky on my end – like my modem on the verge of dying or something. See, I can almost buy that there is a problem with my modem since Ivan has decided it's a good place to warm himself and has been perching on top of it last week. Maybe some stray cat hair has gotten into the housing in caused chaos. Any way you slice it, I'm having a hard time doing anything since my connect seems to drop out every 10 minutes.

So what do you do with no net connect and time to kill? Go hang out over a Ross's crib during his second house party. That's what I did at least. Although there weren't rouge fireworks and stolen DJ equipment from KPSU that triggered a freestyle battle between Big Money Brooks(TM) and Booyaka(TM) it was still a good time.

Nothing else much doing lately. I've had a chance to complete my "Rubble" collection with the 6 discs I was missing as well as get in on a good psych/pop flood on a.b.s.m.1960s. Somebody also had posted the Faces box set the came out last year that is totally rocking my world right now.

One other thing I suppose is that I believe the bowling crew has found our new home to bowl at over in Interstate Bowl since the untimely demise of Grand Central Bowl and it's dollar a game Mondays. Interstate doesn't have dollar games but they are still pretty cheap (2.25), the lanes are good, it's not crowded, and drinks are cheap cheap cheap. Now I just need to buy some bowling shoes off of ebay so I can stop renting them every week.

-Sir Cloister Maximus

Cash for Comps

Stephen Kozik — 2005-01-23T10:00:00-05:00

I spent pretty much all of my weekend working on comps for a pitch I have to make next Monday. The comps are turning out pretty good but I'm feeling pretty spent – almost like I'm wasting my time and that there really is something that I'd either rather be doing or something that I SHOULD be doing. I'm not sure what that something is for either option.

Perhaps it's partially because it's been a while since some cold hard cash has come my way. I have what seems like an infinite amount of gigs, but none of them seem to want to start. That equals some bad news as it will most likely all come in at once and swamp me beyond belief. What's a fella to do?

I guess I'm just bored. Sure would be nice to not live on the ass end of town so I could visit peeps without driving for 40 minutes. But cash would help.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

New Circle of Thunder and the Y2K5 Bug

Stephen Kozik — 2005-01-17T10:00:00-05:00

As you can see, my earlier idea of re-vamping circleofthunder.com has come to fruition and things are all nice and simple – or at least as much as they can be with the amount of content on this site. Since this is a new design, there are bound to be tricky things here and there that need to be ironed out. Of course, if you see a glaring browser bug let me know and I'll try to fix it.

Speaking of bugs, I can't seem to locate the one that is causing the journal's calendar to think that it's 2004 still. Piuma calls it a "Y2K5" incompatibility. At least no planes crashed or nuclear ICBM's launched from their silos. But with four more years of "fuck countries that don't believe in Jesus" politics, we may yet see that event.

2004 New Years Party and a Hardrive Meltdown

Stephen Kozik — 2005-01-09T10:00:00-05:00

So this is 2005 I suppose. So far I'm not very impressed. The year started off on the right foot I suppose. Calvert, Julia, Sean, Reyna and myself all went down to a ham party where the guest of honor was a glazed ham covered in Pineapples. The hosts of the party had obviously intended it to be kitschy (they were all vegetarians), however Calvert and I called their bluff and ate of the sacred pig and washed it down with Bridgeport and PBR. We also walked across the street to another party where there were projections of dragonflies hovering mid-air to the backdrop of Public Enemy beats. Needless to say, we spent the last few seconds of 2004 at that party.

As enjoyable as January 1st was, the year began it's typical kicking of the nuts. My 100 gig HD that holds all my mp3's up and died so I had to reluctantly replace it. Lucky for me I was able to recover my jams from the old drive before it was too far gone thanks to a nice freeware app I found online. This is the first Maxtor that's ever grinded to crap on me like this. I've had like 4 Western Digital drives eat themselves but this was the first problem I had with a Maxtor. I hope my other 100 gig will be OK (It's the same model). Knock on wood.

Over the past two days I've completed my Tetris port that I've wanted to do for a while. The game is in the design work section of my site and the source code to it is over in the downloads section. Enjoy.

Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Sorting a Warez Collection

Stephen Kozik — 2004-12-31T10:00:00-05:00

I have about 30 minutes before I have to drive Jen to the airport and I have some time to kill (It's 3AM) so what a better time to make a journal entry. I have so many little personal projects that I'd like to start on, but as always I'm having a hard time figure out what I want to start on first.

I'd like to start work on a new Circle of Thunder and give the old girl her yearly facelift. I'm thinking that 2005 should be the year of ultra-minimalist. No flash, no fancy javascript, just a nice plain white page filled with sans-serif info with tiny red highlights. I've reached that point in every designers life when there's only so much BANG you can put into things and get real tired of super busy designs. Whatever. I think my work should provide the area of interest and the access to the work should be as simple and non-interfering as possible. So the site re-vamp is one option, although I did add a couple new portfolio items from this year's best in show (although I was a bit short of stuff I liked a lot so some weaker entries slipped through the cracks).

The other thing I've been thinking about is starting a fun project like a game or maybe some sort of database driven app like a movie/TV show sorting db. As far as games I have had and idea for a Zelda-ish translation of some old 80's cartoon like He-Man or Voltron. However, recently I started thinking about maybe doing a pure Tetris clone that get's as close to the feel of the NES version of Tetris (since that is clearly the most superior Tetris port). Who knows? Any one of those would be fun and give me a warm fuzzy that I did something kind of cool in the year 2005.

Of course, there are always non-computer adventures I could embark on. Like painting. I've been thinking about busting out that empty canvas I have in my closet and seeing if I have any linseed oil left.

My painting of "The Last Breakfeast of Christ" will become a reality yet damnit.

Oh, happy New Year, you pukes.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

100

Stephen Kozik — 2004-12-16T10:00:00-05:00

100 journal entries. Shouldn't a mass of balloons, glitter, and confetti drop from the ceiling like at the end of Dirty Dancing when Kevin Bacon says "Let's Dance!" in defiance of John Lithgow's belief that dancing will bring the apocalypse?

Anyway, wish it was a more interesting entry being 100 and all. Recorded some Prof K tracks that should be making the rounds. Finished up the demos for the new TMTR experience. Christmas... bah humbug!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

What's in a Name?

Stephen Kozik — 2004-12-05T10:00:00-05:00

William Shakespeare and Rodney Dangerfeild both posed the question, "What's in a Name?". The answer is pure stress, at least when it comes to dealing with Network Solutions. For the past three years I've let circleofthunder.com be renewed by the most expensive domain register out of pure laziness. What Verisgn banked on, the laziness of mankind, is what I paid in full.

This year I was determined to be different so I went and found a register that was 5 times cheaper. Everything looked like it would be smooth sailing when my 6 wasted hours began. See, Network Solutions likes to make it harder than filing a tax return to transfer a domain away from them.

First there was the wasted time trying to recover a password that even my credit card, social security number, and email address couldn't seem to get out of the level one service people. After I got very lucky and found my password in a piece of mail (not email) I received from them about four years ago, the real fun began. There is a little thing called REGISTAR-LOCK that is meant to keep people from hijacking your site – the problem is that it also keeps you from legitimately transferring your own site as well. This wouldn't be a problem if the netsol control panel would actually let you turn it on or off. Another call to tech support seemed to fix the problem–but wait–it takes 24 hours for that change to show up.

So after all that wasted time, my domain is still in Network Solutions un capable hands. We'll see in a day or so if circleofthunder.com winds up going off the map or if it actually gets transferred and continues on for 2005.

Besides filling my days hunting down 1981 bootlegs of Joe Jackson concerts I've been doing the yearly re-install thing. It's always good to not only do a little spring cleaning to get the system running tip-top and orphaned DLL free, but also try out some new software and see if there are any applications that can outperform what I'm currently using. This years new goodies award goes to: Fillezilla (Server and Client), Outlook 2k3, Winamp 5, Trillian Pro, Blender, Putty, TMPEnc Xpress, and Newsleecher. The "Still hanging in there" award goes to: Grabit, Ultraedit, Sysrest, AdAware, and Virtualdub. It seems my timing on getting things back in order couldn't have been better since my Pepboys Kiosk project kicked up into high gear out of nowhere.

Red states and my own personal "Crazy Joe Devola" can of course, meet me at the Satyricon with a broken Corona long neck shoved in their face.

www.fuckthesouth.com

Waiting on Destiny

Stephen Kozik — 2004-10-14T10:00:00-05:00

Cottelston, Cottelston, Cottelston, Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottelston, Cottelston, Cottelston, Pie."

Great words spoken by the master taoist, Winnie-the-Pooh. That old Pooh bear's words have to have some centering force on me as some stressful and exciting times are ahead. Only 2 1/2 weeks until the thief is evicted, or riots in the street begin. Only 2 1/2 weeks until I know if the baseball team I've banked on as being the ones to take the crown, truly are world champions. Now I'm starting to feel Eeyore here. Oh worry is me!

The redbirds took game one in the NLCS against the 'Stros today. That was a good start since I'm terribly worried about the crazy ability that the astro's seem to have as the ONLY team in the NL that had a winning record against them. A good strong start was needed to give the cards the momentum they need to take this sucker to the slug fest against, I'm sorry to say to soxs fans, will most likely be the Yanks. I really do wish the Redsox could get the magic fairy juice that could give them an edge over baseballs most overpayed and over medicated team, but I'm not seeing it. Stupid Jeeter! Stupid A-rod! Your all stupid heads.

Word on the streets is that Disjecta is closing. Not that I go to shows much anymore, or have even played there in a year but it's a downer to see it going. It seems like every club in town I have some sort of sentimental value attached to goes the way of Homo Erectus. If only the Blackbird was alive again. The bird may have sucked for big popular touring shows (with the crowding and the smoke and whatnot), but for small shows it was great. Cheap drinks, nice mood, great sound. It was also the first club I went to when I moved to p-town 3 years ago, so I'm extra sappy to it.

I need to go to the mall to pick up a STL cap to support the team. Damn malls. Wish there was one next door so I didn't have to drive down 217. What a mess.

Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Sick

Stephen Kozik — 2004-10-12T10:00:00-05:00

As I stumble over "the cold" that has struck so many loved ones in the past few weeks and has finally hit me, I re-examine the important things in life. Things like:

* Finally identifying the Simpsons home state by extrapolating the blurred initials in the mail that Homer receives from Mr. Burns in "Blood Feud" (Springfield, IL on the top, Springfield, RI on the bottom.. Make up your mind Groening).

* Coming the conclusion that life without the Daily Show is no life at all.

* Pseudoephedrine is the Shiznial!

* To doubt my genius is to doubt your own!

If you have to question me, then sir, I question you. You will all perish in flames!

Meow Meow, this Thursday. Be there. I'll be all indie-rock-headcolded-out

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Fate's Fickle Hand

Stephen Kozik — 2004-10-05T10:00:00-05:00

If things had gone peculiar in my life, a small event changed, I could easily be working as a short order cook for Denny's trying in vein to support my fat wife with 2 year old kid and another one in the oven. Instead, I have the glamorous fortune to photoshop fucked up looking people in front of mountains and devise new ways to "convey the core message of the brand while remaining on target with collected demographics".

The St. Louis Cardinals won the first game in the National League Division Series in a near blowout over the LA Dodgers today. Walker himself hit two out of the park as a sort of "Hi, I'm new here" to the roaring St. Louis crowd and Busch stadium. If this team doesn't take it all the way I'll be ALMOST as angry as I would be if say, a certain rich spoiled prince and his evil bond-villain like master were to be re-elected. I have faith though. As Rod Stewart once parroted, Faith of the heart.

I need to locate a Betamax player. I have this betamax tape of Not Necessarily the News that needs to be converted to watchable form in a BAD way.

Today's snigglet is "Halliburtoned"

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Usenet is Pure Radical

Stephen Kozik — 2004-09-22T10:00:00-05:00

"America needs the wisdom of Herman's Head now more than ever."

- Comic Book Guy, The Simpsons

So last week I finally gave in and got a Usenet account again. It has been about 4 months since I canceled my Giganews account to save a little cash (20 a month) and because Usenet was becoming pretty predictable and boring with all the reality show postings and little "vintage tv" postings (the stuff I live for). This time around I went with usenetserver.com, who offers UNLIMITED Usenet access for 15 bucks a month and has decent retention and speed. Although Giganews' retention and speed was top notch and better than anybody else, that 20 gig a month download limit seemed a bit daunting at times. Particularly when something good would hit the net and I'd use all my credits up in a hurry. Now with my new provider, a week into it, I've mooched 30 gigs so far. I hope comcast doesn't send me one of their abuse letters. As soon as I get caught up from the last months posts I'll taper it off a bit and try to keep my monthly down bandwidth under 100 gigs.

I also recently purchased a DVD-+r burner, and boy is it sweet. I had to buy a new DVD player too since my old Mintek doesn't seem to like DVD-R's too much, but the new player was only 40 bucks, and that's a pocket change in the world of consumer electronics. It wasn't specifically just because of the dvd-r playing situation, but also because the Mintek's been kind of flaking out lately. SVCD's have gobledy-gook all over them and sometimes commercial DVD's hiccup, so it's because my office room SVCD player for when I'm burning CD's (and DVD..Tee Hee!)

The Cardinals are the National League Central Division champs (with 2 weeks of regular season play left, 15 games up over the Cubs in second), and I've been living off of that elite MLB TV stream that the Professor hooked me up with. Man, the play offs are going to be exciting as all hell. This is the team I'll put all of my hopes and dreams into. It hasn't been since 1982 that the St. Louis Cardinals have had such a good shot at the World Series. The Odds are in their favor. The question is, can Scott Roland come off the DL, nobody else get injured, and their luck remain favorable?

Finished up with two work projects, one lame, and one quasi interesting. I have a so-so one left in the mix. Recorded Minmae for the 10th time this weekend, and am starting to do some mixes. Stuff sounds pretty good. I've really hit a barrier on the kinds of recordings I can make without buying some new gear. I mean, it's a good barrier, but it's still a barrier. Kind of makes the whole recording process seem a little bit boring and unchallenging when you know what to expect and know the limitations of your gear so well. At least I got some good games of Tetris in.

What's up with America? Why is Bush still high up in the polls? Don't people watch the news?

(5 Hermans Head episodes were posted to alt.binaries.multimedia yesterday. I nearly wet myself)

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Pretty Vacant

Stephen Kozik — 2004-08-31T10:00:00-05:00

It's funny how when Jen goes on vacation for her yearly mecca to Jersey to visit her family, it's sort of like I go on vacation too. I tend to let things get lax, stop working very hard, and devote much more time to the pursuit of my rock and electronics fetish(s).

On the rock front, I recorded 7 new songs in a burst of fury using direct-in guitar, bass, drum machine, and occasional acoustic guitar. The end product sounds much less home brew as it would seem from the description and much more 80s pop. You see, even when I do things somewhat half assed (like recording without amps and real drums), I'm still in the mind set that others may hear it and think it should sound as professional as possible (whatever that means). Casey came over and put some nice backup vocals on some cuts and it's really my latest Lindsey Buckingham obsessions come to fruition. It may not make it's way into the domain of the Mouse that Roared and stay in the domain of the Cloister Maximus 3, but we'll see. Perhaps the songs will sound a little less mac-ian once I stop playing the muted guitar parts and using that big nasty gated-reverb snare on everything.

On the electronics front, I've gotten my reel to reel into alignment, and cleaned the heads up pretty well. Now that it is working I've turned my attention to trying to get this crazy old Powerbook up and running that I picked up for a paltry $3 at the meth-lab goodwill. My big problem is finding an adequate power source to run the thing since those old powerbooks take a slightly irregular power signature (7.5V at 2 Amps). I'll tell you, that 7.5 volts is a hard beast to feed. Every power supply I can find is outputting either 12,9, or 5 volts. 7.5 is a little odd. And to further complicate matters, the closest power supply in terms of voltage I have (6V) only is cranking out 300mA. I wish those universal variable PSU's that radio shack sells didn't cost 50x what I paid for this crappy old powerbook. Damn, I want to play Maelstrom real bad. Maybe I'll just fire up my old 128k Mac classic for my fix.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Alien Versus Terrible Movie Making

Stephen Kozik — 2004-08-15T10:00:00-05:00

DISCLAIMER: I'm a hopeless Alien and Predator fan boy with extensive knowledge of both universes and have even read some (gulp) fanfic in the past.

Let me first get this out of the way; AVP is better than Alien 4, but worse than Predator 2.

All of the negative reviews that are out there about AVP are both right and wrong at the same time. Sure, AVP is not Citizen Kane or Casablanca. Hell, AVP isn't even the Terminator. What AVP is however is a fine extension of the dark horse comics and novelizations that depict that fan boy universe where Aliens and Predators not only co-exist, but also kick each others asses.

First let's talk about the bad things (that make this worse than Predator 2):

1) The Facehugger to Chestburster to Full Grown drone time is completely fucked.

To say that the time it takes a facehugger to land on one of those poor dumb humans to the time a drone runs around is short is the understatement of the year. By the movie's account, it took a total of 10 minutes (I'm not joking – the nerdy "anthropologist" looks at his watch and declares ten minutes have passed) for a facehugger to land on a chicks face, knock her out, put an alien embryo in her chest, have the alien bust out of her chest, and become a full grown alien drone ready to kick ass. Now, my complaint may seem a little fan boyish for sure (Dude! It's alien cannon that it take 4 days for an alien embryo to mature!), but we're also talking common sense here. I don't give a shit how "alien" something is, nothing can go from embryo to 7 foot tall acid for blood armor platted killing machine in 10 minutes. Not without, say, some really big ass steaks to chow on. It's painfully obvious this was a lazy ass plot device to get some aliens running around messing up the party without the movie dragging a bit, but damn. Throw me a bone here Paul Anderson.

2) Dumbest Queen Alien of the franchise

You'll never see a more inept Queen Alien, I stake money on it. Not only is she unable to defeat an unarmed, unprepared female human who I guess is a mountain climber or something, but she also tries to kill a predator with a alien baby inside of it.. Something that we've seen before in the Alien 3 – Aliens don't kill you if you have an alien inside you, because, like, that would be dumb. Alien's want more aliens running around to perpetuate the species. First rule of survival. Damn.

3) Worst "surprise" ending since Species.

I mean, dude. DUDE! I don't want to spoil the way awesome surprise but holy shit is this bad. Paul Anderson had me for a second where I thought he'd try to be all class and bring both franchises full circle by showing that the predator with a chestburster inside brought on board was in face the same "alien" and ship the crew of the Nostromo finds in Alien 1. But no. It had to be completely retarded. The chestburster comes out of the predator... to show it has a predator fucking face. Jesus Christ, my describing it doesn't even sound as dumb as it was.

Some of the good things (that make this better than Alien 4):

1) The Alien drones (except when their are 100 of them in a flashback and when the free the queen) look pretty bad ass.

I'm amazed that there was restraint to make the alien drones (I guess) real puppets/models/whatever. I mean, if they were CGI, they sure didn't look it. If the technology has come that CGI can look real to me, this is the first time I've seen it. But I suspect for the battle scenes they used rubber suits or something, because CGI looks.. well... lame. So kudos to them, because the aliens in Alien 4 looks way fucking fake. These guys don't (hurray!)

2) True to the comics and books:

I've seen a lot of moaning from people about the friendship between the human and the predator. Let me tell you, if you've read the comics and books, this makes sense. See Predators, even though they are REALLY good at killing humans, need love too. They have a honor system. You know, kind of like Klingons. Except they don't drink bloodwine and sing songs to praise Kay-less. I better shut up now.

3) Plot wasn't TOTALLY bad:

For all of it's lamness and predictability, at least it was much more engaging than Alien 4. I mean, Rippley does it with a bunch of aliens in that movie. How much fucking sense did that make? At least there are no Predator/Hot chick makeout scene in AVP. They just kill some aliens together and burn each others faces with acid blood. Damnit.

All in all, if you go into this movie with low expectations, an understanding of the established Alien Vs. Predator universe, buy cheap candy and hide it in your underpants, and hit the rush hour show to save some bucks, this movie ain't all bad. At least, if your a total nerd like me.

Still would have loved to see Arnold and Bill Paxton in it....

-Sir Cloister "I CAN MAKE IT!" Maximus III, Esq.

Officially Oregon

Stephen Kozik — 2004-08-04T10:00:00-05:00

Where oh where did all of the good design work go? It seems that as of late the only thing I have to show for my countless projects is a smattering of perl code and cleverly constructed MySQL databases. Every time I start to get excited about doing some actual nice design, somebody who thinks they know what looks good steps in and tells me to turn their web site to shit. I mean, I wouldn't bitch about it if it weren't for the fact that the last 6 design projects (and by all signs written in the sky, the next 6 on my plate) all involve no design and all instruction from someone that wouldn't know aesthetic if it bonked them on the head. I provide, while perhaps not stunning, handsome and clean designs with a hint of cleverness and get back somebody's grandmas ideas on color theory. Maybe I'm just too self centered and worried about the ability to add something new to my portfolio that I didn't think looked like crap to see that the rent is being paid and I should shut up and be happy. But I digress....It sure would be nice to be a part of that didn't make me feel like my design knowhow wasn't wasting away under a cloud of thongs, #ff0000 red's, pink text on lime green backgrounds, and inappropriate use of flash. World, I'm really sorry about all the crap that's been leaving my photoshop "export for web" button lately. Truly I am.

Back to lighthearted quips on my daily routine.

I am an official Oregonian as of today; I now have an Oregon drivers license. It was pretty sketchy there for a bit during the "knowledge test" when I had gotten 5 wrong as sweat dripped from my fingers and smeared the touch screen with a smattering of excreted caffeine and adrenaline, but I made it out alive with a B- 82% score (Or, in DMV terms, a D). Those damn trick questions and questions involving feet (40/60/100 feet? Who gives a fuck man! If you can see a fucking car, that should be good enough. No need to get all Tycho Brahe about the location of the next vehicle to your immediate right). Then, after the close call at the testing facilities they almost didn't give me a license due to my lack of an apartment number on my voter's registration card. Those picky bastards. In the end, and $58 later, I have proof of Oregon citizenship and can shred my Missouri license (A bit of a misnomer: they confiscate your old license at the Oregon DMV to deny your clever plans for dual citizenship).

All in all an average day. I picked up two VHS tapes from the Methhead goodwill down the street. One that had an old Gallagher special from 1984, another with "The Wiz" staring Fred Savage and Christian Slater. That Gallagher and his watermelons, I'll tell you. Now THAT's prop comedy (Carrot top, you fucking poser). I also watched Vice Versa (also staring Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold) because I picked it up on the last goodwill run and forgot about it. Touching 80's comedy.

This Saturday, at Mississippi Pizza around 8'ish we throw down with Ross and his beautiful hellpets. Grab some pie, a pitcher of PBR, and let the good times roll. I'll be dressed up as the gay spaceman (part of our new Village people concept that Barrios concocted over pizza and beer last Sunday).

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Not Recording, Per Se

Stephen Kozik — 2004-08-01T10:00:00-05:00

Funk upon a time in the days of the Funkapus, the concept of specially-designed Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies was first laid on man-child, but was later repossessed and placed among the secrets of the pyramids until a more positive attitude towards this most sacred phenomenon, clone funk, could be acquired. There in these terrestrial projects it would wait, along with its coinhabitants of kings and pharoahs, like sleeping beauties with a kiss, that would release them to multiply in the image of the chosen one: Dr Funkenstein.

And funk is its own reward.

I spent most of the week working on Anne's Per Se record, and Cloister Maximizing it as well – you know, the typical treatments of brass sections, mellotron, theremin, etc. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive all around. There are some tempo issues that pretty much stem from beginning with acoustic guitar and building percussion on top of that, but they may be things that only I would really notice since I had to shift drum takes around to accommodate the flow of each song. The recording sounds slick and tight though. I'm pleased.

Today I helped Barrios move into his new place off Belmont down by Prof K and the Post-Step-House. It was pretty easy and we all were treated to Pizza and Beer, so it was a swell deal. His new place is also across the street from a Methadone clinic, so that's pretty elite I suppose.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

House Party

Stephen Kozik — 2004-07-21T10:00:00-05:00

Are you doing anything Friday? You are now:

This Friday, July 23rd: Minmae, Terrene and The Mouse That Roared @ The Kelly Haus (3944 SE kelly St., corner of 39th Ave.) This is of course a show/party, so bring your own beer and beer bongs, and party like it's 1999. The fun is going to being at 9PM so show up early if you want to see TMTR get down and dirty (We're playing first). If you haven't been to one of the Kelly House parties before, your in for a real treat. I give a 100% money back guarantee on fun. Chris and I also recorded a one off 4 Song CD called, aptly, "4-SONG-CDR", and I'll have copies to give out at the party of that.

In other news, I'm fully over my ebola cold and pretty much back to normal. Ross and I bowled a couple of games down at the Grand Central on Monday (everybody else had something better to do that day I guess), I hit a double and caught 2 pop fly's at softball on Sunday, and Mulvey had a stoned experimental nerd prog/drone summit at his new place in SE on Sunday, where we recorded what may be a one off drone Minmae cd to come out next year or something. Don't ask me, I barely pay attention to details like "Where am I?" anymore.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

So terribly sick

Stephen Kozik — 2004-07-13T10:00:00-05:00

I am in the current death throws of one hell of a nasty cold. It started innocently enough on Saturday after I had gotten back from CompUSA to buy a new Heat Sync/Fan for my Audio workstation and video production box (the one that lives in my living room right now so I can watch xvid's on the old tube) when I noticed my throat was feeling scratchy and I wasn't really enjoying the fried rice Jen made me. Once I had went to sleep that night I had THE worst night of sleep as far as I can remember.. I kept waking up feeling my throat closing in and being completely painful to swallow.

Sunday morning I took action and ran down to Rite Aid to pick up some generic benzocaine and menthol tablets to make my throat bearable. I also picked up a box of Ludens because they were 99 cents, and De La Soul suggests they do wonders (PS - they do nothing, but taste way good). I was feeling a little less torn up by mid-day, but still decided I should skip Softball to not make matters worth.. My throat actually started to no be in so much pain till I went to bed. That's when a new, rad pain hit me. Oh man, it felt like the part where my nose connects to the inside of my mouth was on fire. That woke me up even more that the scratchy throat the night before. It was then I realized I didn't just scratch my throat up yelling or something but had the bug.

Now, I haven't had a cold bug (the kind with mucus) in a long long time. There is one somewhat fun aspect of it, and that's that all cold medicines are just pseudoephedrine, witch is the same gas-station speed I used to take as a young'in.. so you can sort of ignore your stir fried shit feeling and embrace the outer-space head feelings of some good cold medicine.

So that's where I'm at today, nose buried in a box of tissues, swallowing orange juice and sudafed like no tomorrow, and laid out on the couch watching VH1's special on the 90's. I'm getting hit with some serious 1993 nostalgia today.. MMMmmmmm.. Ren and Stimpy.. so funny for it's time.

Rico, Suave.

-Sir "Sick as hell" Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

In the Meantime...

Stephen Kozik — 2004-07-05T10:00:00-05:00

It's seems that every few months or so I find out that another one of my teen-angst years musical choices was recorded by Steve Albini.. it seems that there is virtually no record that I've either taken open or guilty pleasure in that he hasn't engineered. Today it was Helmet's "Meantime".. Damn.

Jen and I went to the beach for the Forth of July this year and met up with Keith and two of his friends. Jen took the camera along and took some spooky looking photos you can view here. As always the fourth is that special time of year for us pyromaniacs, when it suddenly becomes socially acceptable, to set tons of things on fire and blow stuff up. I had some leftover fireworks from 2002 in St. Louis when TJ and I had decided to go hog wild and buy 100 bucks worth of stuff (including some amazing class A Esq mortar shells). Man do I ever love setting things on fire.

Some other new photographs in the photo gallery since my last journal entry are also some very nice and quasi-psychedelic pictures from the White Eagle last Thursday. Before that show it was pretty apparent that I may have over Hammerheaded myself when I tumbled into Piuma's chair while attempting to lean over and yell something into his ear during Ross's rock n' set. None the less, I thought it was a fun show even if Calverts expression turned to that of bewilderment when I dropped to my knees to play a drunken solo over Apples and Oranges. Really, I'm not sure how this drunk and solo thing got started really but perhaps I should pull back on it a bit.. or maybe push forward? I should cobble together a poll and let the world decide. So far I have two verbal yay's from Mulvey (Who has recently coined the term "nerd-prog" and pined it on us) and Anderson, and about 20 non-spoken "nays" from the rest of the band and friends.. They are plotting against me I tell you!

Now that the party is over, everybody goes home. The music is turned down low and I have to hit the grindstone hard this week and get all caught up on my projects. It looks like Insignia should be able to be wrapped up by Wednesday if there are no serious changes, and a new photographer's site is in the boiler. With any luck I'll score this cakewalk flash gig that should keep me fed for 10 weeks. That would be sweet. I'm tired of trying to pry money out of peoples hands. Feh.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Good Design Work

Stephen Kozik — 2004-07-04T10:00:00-05:00

Back to lighthearted quips on my daily routine.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

A Whole lot of Work and Rocking KPSU

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-31T10:00:00-05:00

Another day, another dollar...Hova you holla?

The old noggin is currently melting away with a barrage of work coming in the door. So much so that I'm actually paying pretty close attention to my task list in Outlook. You see, that's how you do it. Let machines tell you what to do and when you are supposed to be doing it – that's why I carry my pocket PC with me everywhere I go so it can blink it's little orange light and say "Ehem...12:30 Meeting, Skidmore Fountain, Take the max you dolt.". Ouch.

My roller coaster set of two weeks is almost over however – the last of the big events are occurring in the next few days. One more Mouse that Roared show over at the White Eagle as part of the Portland Rock Collective on Thursday the 1st with Ross, A drive out to the coast to set off fireworks on the 4th, and some sort of wedding anniversary plans. Then, I breathe a sigh of relief and start making plans for the next batch of crazy weeks to hit me in a month or so. Damn.

Angelo (AKA DJ De Beers, AKA DJ Diamond Cutta) had the mouse play a live set on KPSU 1450's Hurray for Tuesday segment and it was absolutely smashing. Brandon, the tech director at PSU did a nice job with the sound as always and we walked out of the Sub Basement studio and PSU with a compact disc recording of our improv noodleings. Worth nothing was the new song "Into the Silence (Lies are all we know)" aka my tribute to the Depeche Mode and the loose improv segment titled "Falling from the vine" that Piuma and I now play tacked onto the end of Apples and Oranges. And of course, we played "Careful with the Axe Eugene" for the first time since we played it in LA on tour last year. Roger Waters lawyers should be contacting me shortly (and also take issue with the chord progressions of "Homecoming" and "Play the Fool Again" I'm sure. That asshole.)

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Party Non-Stop

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-26T10:00:00-05:00

Cheers to everyone that came out to Nocturnal on Thursday for Minmae's CD Release party, and the first Mouse that Roared show in a year. There were some faces that were missing from the crowd that I would have liked to see, but it was hella swell to see everybody who did make it out. Long and short of it is that Nocturnal is my new favorite club. That place is so nice, clean, and the sound is the absolute best in town with the absence of the Blackbird. 10 Godamn stars.

I've uploaded some pictures from Nocturnal that I snapped. I wish there was more light on Barrios so you can see that he has gigantic angles wings attached to his back as he rocks the guitar; and Piuma's all but invisible lurking in the shadows droning out on the organ. However, the liquid light projector showed up pretty nice although if the drapes behind us weren't dark red we could have projected the oil on a much larger scale. We'll save that for this coming Thursday when we play the white eagle I guess.

This party train just won't stop. Last night I went over to Mr. Beach's half birthday/half housewarming party that he had, and it was a hoot in a half. Angelo appropriated two turntables and a microphone from KPSU and was spinning tracks from the Greatest American Hero to a 10 minute instrumental version of "Word Up". Brooks brought a bag full of fireworks that we set off and woke the cranky old neighbors up with, Charlotte and I had a 50 minute conversion on Tycho Brahe and Kepler that resolved into the assertion that Brahe was the worlds greatest Pimp because of his golden nose. None is more pimp that a gold nose... get that gold tooth out of here, amateur.

Tonight I'll be heading out to the Red and Black to see Julia throw down a "Happy Hour" set, and the promptly go over to Billy Ray's Neighborhood dive to throw down my own special acoustic set with Anne Adams. It should be a hoot – but don't forget there is a Minor Thirds performance this evening as well.

Maybe I should stick to pure water tonight? I've never tried a dead sober performance before. It could be interesting.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Short List

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-22T10:00:00-05:00

Is it wrong to listen to the Eagles and think, "Hmm.. this isn't too bad... I kinda like New Kid in Town"? If so, I'm going to hell.

This certainly isn't a dull week, that's for sure. Today is only Monday and I already feel like I'm falling behind on all the stuff I'm going to need to have done and all the par-tees I'm going to attend this week. Here is short list: Book Show/Mail CDs/Practice/AlloyRed/Insignia/Thursday Rockshow/RossBeachParty/MinorthirdsShow/Softball. I'm going to have to down some whisky and put ice packs on my legs by Sunday night.. I'm sure of this.

Just got off the phone with Brooks who claims that in Nevada a truck with a radioactive symbol was swerving all over the road. That makes me feel real safe.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Reviewing the Past

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-16T10:00:00-05:00

Since I started keeping this online journal last year in April, it has never occurred to me that I had over a year of entries made and that I could actually look back exactly one year from the current day and see what I was up to. That was, of course, until today when that exact thought took place in my head and what I found was astounding (sort of). That was of course, that my life was nearly exactly the same this day last year as it is today.

Allow me to draw a few parallels:

1) Last year, I was complaining about having a problem with the exhaust system in my Honda CRX (an event that came to a head last year in August when my whole fucking exhaust fell out on the way to play a show at the blackbird). This year, same date (June 16th) my CRX is at it again as today Jen and I had to replace the front breaks, some router ball bearings or something, and a new tire.

2) Last year, this same time, I was jobless (until July) and on the hunt for freelance work. Full circle.

3) Last year I was days away from a string of Mouse that Roared shows all bunched up in two weeks. Same thing this time of year again (The 24th at Nocturnal, the 29th on KPSU, The 1st of July at the White Eagle, and a coming Saturday at Billy Ray's).

4) There was a full page article in the Williamete Weekly about Minmae's newest CD (Microcasette Quatrains) last year next week. Next week this year? Word on the street is a full page article in the Willy week on Minmae's newest CD (Ya Te Vas?).

5) I was sitting in traffic on US-26 for hours at a time, on both days.

Perhaps I'm looking far to hard for connections between the two like a drunken James Burke connecting the atom bomb to the fall of the great library in Alexandrea. Or perhaps, I have acquired the intuition to know where people are, and what they're doing.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Making Flash work like HTML

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-14T10:00:00-05:00

While working on a project last week I came up with a rather creative solution to a pretty tedious problem. You see, the project demanded that I make a flash based site look and operate the same way a static HTML site would using the same 1.0 based ideas of user interaction as hyper links embedded within paragraphs (under the old familiar and played out "click here!" guise). Normally I would handle that sort of thing by the old standby hack of overlaying a button with it's alpha set to zero over the line of text that required linking with a bit of action script that would simply simulate the hyper link experience by loading/placing/positioning a movie clip on the stage once the user had clicked on the "word". Now, besides that fact that this is a flawed approach to a flash site, the real problem with doing it that way was that not only were there 100's of these links (the would require individual buttons for each link), but the paragraphs of text these links were embedded in were in scrollable areas – something that is completely incompatible with my idea of placing invisible buttons.

The first idea (and an insane one at that) was this: Use XML files that contain the content; Load the content from the XML files and place them in a HTML text-block; Wrap each pseudo-hyper link in a real HTML hyper link, but have the hyper link call a javascript command that would send data back to flash. While this initial idea actually worked (by creating a JS function that sent data to flash using the SetVariable command) – it only worked on windows machines. You see, as it turns out, Flash for the Mac doesn't allow you to pass data back and forth between Javascript and flash. Once I found this flaw I figured I was doomed.

Low and behold, I found a work around to my problem! A little know ability of flash to internally handle a hrefs and accept commands for user defined functions. Here's an example:

(From the XML file)
Marketing and Advertising are right for you, %3Cu%3E%3Ca href=%22asfunction:_level0.ashtmllink,popuppage%22%3Eclick here.%3C/a%3E%3C/u%3E

(From flash action script)

function ashtmllink(iput) {
flink = iput;
}

Basically, I can pass a variable back to flash (those variables being XML nodes that the flash app must load and parse, acting as a hyper link) using the asfunction: command and my custom function defined above. It's certainly one of those things that from the users perspective is a "Huh? So what.. what's cool about that?" and from a programmers perspective is a "I'm a freaking genius.". An "aha" moment. Like when i finally understood how a 5th is calculated in a major scale (The "5th" in 5th means it's the fifth note.. eg: A goes to E . B goes to F .. and so on... duh).

Did I mention I'm a little slow?

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Photos

Stephen Kozik — 2004-06-03T10:00:00-05:00

My body has almost gotten back to normal from the bit of a workout that I got on Sunday playing softball. My left hand looks a little bruised but feels back to normal and I can get up from the couch without trying about five times. In other words, I'm about ready to play another game this weekend. I've been thinking about taking the camera with me and taking a couple of snapshots. Maybe I can catch Calvert hitting another triple.

Speaking of pictures, I sort of re-arranged the photo gallery on Circle of Thunder and added a few new photo collections including some pictures from a couple of Tuftees shows, Me and Jen at the ocean, and even a photo of my brand new liquid light projector. Truly radical.

What an exciting week it's been for TV. Nickelodeon aired an episode of You Can't do that on Television during their U-Pick live "Old Sk00l" segment, and Trio's been running re-runs of Cop Rock. Tell me that's not totally rad? I've been trying to fill in the gaps in my Seinfeld collection (I have all 9 seasons complete, but 50% of my episodes are super crappy looking). I unfortunately can't automate the process since I have no way of controlling my Direct TV box. A shame.

-Sir Clositer Maximus III, Esq.

Softball Playing Tips

Stephen Kozik — 2004-05-31T10:00:00-05:00

Before I begin, you may notice that the journal has a new feature. I'm proud to announce the new Baby Google where you can search all the past journal entries for specific keywords. Try it out, it's fun. Just enter a word into the search box on the bottom left of the page and see what comes up!

I am in so much pain today it's unreal. Every muscle in my body is stiff as an Amish teenage boy at a strip club, and I'm having a hell of a time moving at all. This is all worth it of course, because yesterday I played a softball game for the first time in maybe 15 years over in Irving park with Calvert, Ross and a bunch of Powells employees. Granted, I couldn't catch a ball to save my life and I made a poor decision to be the second baseman, but I had so much fun it's unreal. I even got pretty seriously injured when a ball chucked in from a dude with a rocket for an arm nailed me on the wrist – all worth it.

So many lessons were learned that I feel the need to list them out:

1) Don't drink beer if you intend on doing any running. That beer will make you suffer.

2) If you think you might get injured just to make a play, don't make the play. We're not paid a million to play.

3) Catch balls with the glove up, rather than down.

4) Bring water. Lots of water. Or gatorade if possible. That water fountain in Irving park is way way way too far away.

5) Aluminum Bats. Don't think your 130 pound ass can hit anything with a wooden bat.

6) If the ball is being thrown in from deep right, let the shortstop handle the play at second. Your not catching shit man.

7) Did you tag second on your way back to first on a pop-fly?

8) Keep that hit on the ground. Your strength won't get you into the outfield, weakling.

9) Bring your sunflower seeds and your BASEBALL HAT to a BASEBALL game. That's why you own them.

10) Maybe 10 years of smoking wasn't such a good thing after all, Einstein.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Digitech Effects Pedal

Stephen Kozik — 2004-05-25T10:00:00-05:00

I recently purchased the most glorious guitar pedal, the Digitech RP50. What I needed was actually a simple delay pedal (after playing around with Ross Beach's insanely cool Analog Delay I had to have one) but all the delay pedals at Guitar Center were out of my budget currently. Then I found this little guy for a lot less that happens to do a ton of other cool things like double as a tuner, distortion pedal, phaser, flanger, and vibrato unit. I've been playing with it pretty much non-stop since I got it and can't wait to use it at a show. It's drone-a-licous.

In other musical news I'm starting my quest for a very cheap overhead projector. I think I'll hit a few goodwill's and other thrift stores this week. My goal is to only spend $20 if possible. However I have a feeling finding one, let alone one that is that cheap, is going to be pretty freaking hard. The purpose of acquiring this piece of public grade school technology is, of course, to build a liquid light display for use at mouse that roared shows. I mean, were some pretty boring people to look at, so why not fill the eyes as well as the ears with some late 60's psychedelia? Dig it, man.

Some cool things are going down that I'm looking forward to – like a drunken softball game with some of my favorite folks, and the continuing work on my Actionscript based Haida Language Tutor I've been working on (Under the GPL and getting paid no less!) for the University of Ohio. If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do is save drunken Sunday's.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Recording the Minor Thirds

Stephen Kozik — 2004-05-12T10:00:00-05:00

It's been a little while since I've done a update, considering all the sitting around doing squat that has blessed my lifestyle lately. All things considered, however, I've been incredibly busy just over the past 6 days or so.

I spent the weekend recording the new Minor Thirds album titled 'The Dishwasher Thief'. Much fun was had recording some rather unusual instruments and styles I haven't handled before. Conducting, recording, producing the 2001-Esq choir on the song "Alabaster" was gobs of fun as you will have a chance to hear once the CD comes out.

I've also put up the entire new Mouse that Roared EP up on the site titled Dies Accideres Nox. I've been a bit cautious about declaring it a complete product, but so far the people that have heard it think it's decent enough so I figured I'd let everybody take a listen that would be into it. I'm really working to bring TMTR out of retirement and have a few shows booked for us in a month or two after we get our chops as a band back. The practice we had on Sunday was pretty promising. John's new place is a sweet little rock spot with the blinking lights, beer, and roommates that seemingly don't give a shit if we're louder than god. Working on a more experimental free form version of the band is defiantly where things need to go I believe. I'm pumped.

In other news, I'm working on getting a web site or two churned out here this week so I can make a little bit of scratch. In a perfect world I would have a little bit more work so I could afford to buy myself an analog delay pedal, but some things are just not meant to be I suppose. Oh well.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Per Se at BIlly Rays

Stephen Kozik — 2004-04-18T10:00:00-05:00

Last night I headed out to Billy Ray's Neighborhood Dive out in NE to catch a show featuring the Minor Thirds brand new album played in it's complete state, Mr. S. Brooxx of Minmae fame, and Per Se – whom I've never seen play before – although I've seen her sing last year while recording the "Rad" sessions. All good stuff for the price of a $1.50 PBR. You can't get a much better deal than that.

Looks like I'm going to have to get off my ass and do the promo thing again to get TMTR out of the gates and playing shows again. There is such un-joy in mailing out packages it's silly. However, what has to be done has to be done.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Feeling Terrible

Stephen Kozik — 2004-04-15T10:00:00-05:00

I've never felt so terrible in all my life – even the time that I had samanila poisoning from a bunk piece of chicken at a Bob Evans restaurant in Springfield Illinois. The problem however isn't physical, it's purely psychological. I got to find something to do that will make me happy.

Fuck. 2004 sucks nads.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Australian hackers documentry

Stephen Kozik — 2004-03-31T10:00:00-05:00

The global community is amazing to me. While it is true that we live in a time of serious homogenization of the entertainment industry (a quick flip of prime time television will easily confirm this), there are some interesting aspects of living in the 21st century. One of those perks is the ability to have a peek into the productions and thoughts of other cultures in far off lands that were seemingly unimaginable to lame Americans such as myself just a decade ago. I now have access to the writing, television, and music of places far off in the imagination as say, oh, Australia. I've really been getting into what those crazy ex-cons have been up to, thanks in part to the usenet group alt.binaries.tv.aus. I watched this documentary on Australian hackers that may have been one of the most entertaining thing I've seen since those amazingly produced BBC documentaries I watched last month. I'm such a sucker for documentaries. It's a shame American television is so lifeless and boring.

Also on the entertainment front, I have rough mixes completed for the (possible) new Mouse that Roared offering tentatively titled "Dies Accidere Nox" (Loosely translated from Latin as "Day Becomes Night"). The track listing is: I Won't Give up on You // Sunshine // You and I // Not Funny but True // Apples and Oranges (Acoustic) // Quiet Passage // Play the Fool Again // The Village // Tracing the Path // Somus Cantus. It's a fairly fragmented affair being half folk-pop and half late 60's/Early 70's psychodelia ala Pink Floyd meets Caravan and battles Canned Heat. Ok, maybe that description makes it sound pretty crappy. I have still to pass final judgement on the project to decide if it's worth putting effort into. I'll be handing out copies to some of my musical genius friends to get their option on it. Perhaps I've overstepped my bounds and entered into the realm of the corny and mundane. We shall See.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Or g00z, whatever floats your boat.

Trying to make a great record and why I miss playing in Minmae.

Stephen Kozik — 2004-03-24T10:00:00-05:00

A week or so ago Calvert and I began work on what will most likely become the new Mouse that Roared album, if you consider 10 copies of a cd-r given to friends as an "album" – but that is a different rant all together.

I had made a decision to do things a bit differently than I normally do. You see, the way that the whole process usually works is that for 6-7 months I write a couple of songs on the acoustic guitar, then bring the band together to record those songs along with 2-3 I wrote the night before in about a rushed two day recording session. I can't say that the results are bad per se, but maybe boring at least. I want to do something better so I decided to change up the process a bit.

The first thing I wanted to change was the writing – instead of just coming in with songs I banged out on a acoustic guitar and recording them in a hurry and without any concern for each songs individual structure or instrumentation needs I have been writing the songs during the recording process itself. Normally that might be a dangerous proposition but I figured if the recording spans a month or so and I focus on one individual song per recording session it might turn out better.

Secondly, I decided to try and get some variety in the recordings by using different people on different songs, and recording them in different places. Last week I started out with just Calvert and myself in his basement putting together a few songs. Next week I'm moving the gear over to John and Casey's to work on songs with them at their house. The idea I think I have here is that different players will bring different strengths to different songs, and that different recording environments might bring different vibes and sonic qualities to each tune.

The bump in the road that I think I hit was that I can to the conclusion that I need to put much more thought into the lyrics than I usually do. I was blaming the process for the blandness of some of the songs I recorded in the past, but I think I've overlooked that boring lyrics, even with a decent melody and instrumentation will just wash off you anyway – and that is the root of a mediocre songs.

I've turned to my own criticisms about music in this regard. I'm pretty picky when it comes to music. A few things in particular bother me immensely about most music I hear.

Number one is the vocals – There are certain voices (generally those that are less dramatic, more down to earth, more natural) that resonate with me, in contrast the minute I hear a voice that is full of overcompensating vibrato and belting out an inhuman range I'm immediately turned off. I can't really help the way my voice sounds (I think it's pretty boring and at times off-key and grating), but with more attention to the recording of the vocals I can at least get them to a state where they aren't as bad as most.

Number two is production. I've heard so many schlock records that have been so fucking overproduced it's retarded. A prime example of this is the recent Bonnie "Prince" Billy record that came out. Now, I haven't enjoyed any of Will Oldhams music since he became the Prince of Darkness (Post Arise Therefore) so I don't really pay attention to anything he does anymore. However, Calvert mentioned that this new album was a remake of old Palace songs with Nashville professional players and how it was completely awful. Morbid curiously steeped in and I decided to take a listen. The first song, was a remake of "New Partner" (the most fantastic song in the world off of Viva Las Blues when I heard it back in 1996 that version featured non-drummer Jason Lowenstien, Diamond Jim, a couple of other indie luminaries). This new version with studio musicians from Nashville is an abomination of god and all that is holy and good. My mouth literally drooped open wide enough for a complete foot to fit into. I've never heard something more contrived and terrible and all my life. And I've heard some bad shit man, trust me. I took this in stride however – Let this serve as a warning to myself and anyone else – the more "professional", the more polished, the more produced your music is, the lamer it is. This is good, since I felt that some of the songs I was working on might accidently veer onto the highway to hell. Time to remove those godamn strings from that 10 minute songs dudes.

Now number three – that's the big one. Lyrical content. Have you ever heard an "OK" band before? You know, where the band isn't really bad, but not really good either? Competent musicians they may be, but can't write a good song to save their souls? I know a few. One of the things that always strikes me about boring bands is how much of their lyrics just bounce off of me like a rubber ball thrown at a brick wall. I'll listen to a whole 3 minute song, with maybe 50 lines of lyrics, and say to myself "I didn't understand a godamn word of that. I can't recall one line." I used to blame that all on enunciation, delivery, and the possibility that the words were wrapped in such un-catchy melodies that they just didn't register in my brain. I'm here to say that's not the case. Bad lyrics man. If your saying nothing (not even as much as a clever line here or there) then nothing registers on the old gray matter of the listener either.

It's strange because when I start thinking about great lyrics I really think about some of Sean Brooks' words – Some of his lines are so witty and book smart (and yet relevant in context to the songs theme) that it freaking hurts. That of course got me thinking about what a bad deal it was that things didn't work out for me in the drummers seat with Minmae, since I think I would be completely happy not trying to write songs of an amazing lyrical nature if I was just drumming for somebody who did. Vis-a-Vis, the pseudo-title of this journal entry. Double pun fuckwad.

So where does all these thoughts lead me here? Well, I think I may have had the wrong theory about how to spruce up the Mouse that Roared record. Perhaps the ideas aren't totally for not – there are two songs we've finished (out of the 6) that I feel are good on all 3 levels. Once of them even has a clever line or two and references to events that maybe only I remember well, but perhaps will strike a chord with someone else. The problem however is that I need to re-evaluate what I'm doing here.

I need to read some books. Lots of books. Then I will be clever too.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Brian Green on Time and String Theory

Stephen Kozik — 2004-03-11T10:00:00-05:00

Time has no direction, and is just an illusion of the mind. A farce, a scam, a shenanigan. At least according to string theorist Brain Green.

Last night Jen, Keith, Chris and myself all went down to Powells books to see the man behind the elegant universe himself speak. It was standing room only, filled with Physics geeks like myself. There is something about somebody that can explain, in an entertaining way, string theory without math that is amazing to me. Granted, most of his lecture was a dubious ploy to get people to buy his new book that just came out (I plan on downloading my copy from Undernet tonight), but most of the talk was pretty interesting stuff. He also dropped some details on new idea's in particle physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory that augmented some of the juicy stuff in his elegant universe book. Oh, and there always has to be some nut in the crowd. Last night was no different. Some lady during the q and a section had to throw angels and heaven into the mix. Brain dissed her without her knowing it I think.

In a related note, inspired by some of Carl Segan's Cosomo's that I just watched I downloaded and am now running SETI @ Home. It looks cool, and searches for aliens from the Arecibo Radio Observatory's data. Bitchin'

-Sir Cloister "No Absolute Time" Maximus III, Esq.

New Ice Cool look for Circle of Thunder

Stephen Kozik — 2004-03-09T10:00:00-05:00

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine. Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.

You may notice that the journal has a new "ice cool" look for 2004. This weekend I went ahead and finally did a redesign of circleofthunder.com and ditched the old dark and brooding halloween look that I had going on for a few months. The photos were nice and all, but I wanted a look that was a little more friendly and a little less type-o-negative. Plus, my portfolio was starting to get painfully out of date. Some of that stuff from 2002 just had to go to the wayside.

It's oh so warm here in Portland – and uncharacteristicly sunny as well. I'm starting to think the earth shifted some plates around and Oregon moved itself into California's sweet spot. Damn continental drift theory. At least I know Atlantis is located at the south poll now, at least according to SG1.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Rocking at the Red and Black

Stephen Kozik — 2004-02-28T10:00:00-05:00

Last night was the first Mouse that Roared show in about 6 or 7 months. Talk about rusty.

The set was sprinkled with problems ranging from large to small. For starters, the Red and Black Cafe was the loudest I've ever heard it. I don't want to say the crowd was un attentive because they did indeed clap and cheer at the appropriate times, but godamnn, they would not shut up. On a crappy recording I made of the show the people talking in the crowd is louder than the music is. Besides the chatty audience, the PA was wack and the vocal mic kept cutting out (forcing me to scream lyrics off-key to be heard whatsoever) and chris's guitar was out of tune for half the set. Multiply that with a bit too much beer and you get... well.. a pretty crap set. Just as well, I should work on getting my club legs back and setting up some more mouse that roared shows to bring it out of retirement. Last night we can consider a test run.

The other people that played, S. Brooxx, Tuftees, even the jam-jam REK were great what little I could hear of their sets over the noisy ass crowd. I felt bad for John, Casey, and Ross because the Mouse set went on much longer than it should and cut into their set time. It was pretty ego-retarded of me to cut into their time, but John didn't seem to mind. At least, I hope he didn't and wasn't just being a buddy by playing it off like he wasn't annoyed. No wait, scratch that. John's too honest to be coy like that.

Still living with a hole in my gums where a tooth used to be. I have a sweet tube I have to squirt salt water into the hole with to clean out food particles. Yuck.

I've uploaded some pictures from last night. Enjoy.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Toothless in Portland

Stephen Kozik — 2004-02-21T10:00:00-05:00

I've been out of commission for the past 2 days from my wisdom tooth extraction I had on Thursday morning. I haven't been in any pain really, but it's been hard to eat anything but total baby food mush (applesauce, cream of wheat, pudding, shakes) and I've felt a little run down. On top of that, there were a set of rules I had to follow that prevented me from living my life in a normal way. I couldn't spit, swish, smoke, drink from a straw, drink beer, or engage in any physical activity as all of those things could dislodge the blood clot in my socket and give me the dreaded dry socket. It was real hard to avoid all of that since the more you think about not doing something, the more you want to do it. Every time I'd go to brush my teeth I'd always swish a little on accident as it's a natural reflex to having a mouth full of toothpaste and spit. And to get it out, I had to just drool the toothpaste out. It was pretty gross, as you can imagine.

I'm on day 3 now and I think I can finally rinse my mouth out good tonight, and I'm looking forward to that. I feel like my mouth is an 80 year old's denture trap right now with that gaping hole that used to hold a whole freaking tooth. I've been prescribed antibiotics that I have to take 4 times a day, and some pain killers that I didn't need at all. The whole thing was more annoying than it was painful.

I think I'm in the clear now, and am getting back to work. I've watched enough TV to last me all year now.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Networking the iMac

Stephen Kozik — 2004-02-15T10:00:00-05:00

It's Valentines day, and I'm catatonic.

For the past few days I've been struggling to get a portion of my apartment wireless. The real problem I ran across is that it's near to impossible to acquire a USB wireless ethernet adapter that works with an iMac. The only one that CompUSA sold that "claimed" to have mac drivers was this D-link model that had some of the worst drivers I've seen in a long time. The ones that came with the adapter in the box were flaky at best (crashing the system/applications randomly) and the update ones at D-link's site just plain didn't work at all. After searching around the web I found I wasn't the only one. It seems that almost every mac user out there couldn't get the adapter to work.

After taking the adapter back to the store, I discovered that was the ONLY one they had in stock that "worked" with macs. My only other option was to buy a wireless ethernet bridge, and those suckers aren't cheap. It was pretty irritating since I got my wireless hub for only $30, and I knew the wireless hub did essentially the same thing, except with more features, hardware, and software. What a racket those network hardware manufacturers are running.

The network is up and running now after about 3 days of hair pulling. The last thing that stood in the way is that my old RCA cable modem bit the dust, so I had to take it back to Comcast and exchange it for another newer model. Since I'm not a Comcast fan I was ready to get into an argument with them, but the whole process was surprisingly painless.

I recently submitted "Cloisterblog" to freshmeat, and my approval came in today. Now you can downloaded the source for my Journal application. Check it out. Now you can run your own blog like this assuming you have a server to run it from. I've already gotten some good suggestions from some people on ways to improve the journal, although most of them are more of a customizable sort of thing. Regardless, my first open source project is out there in the wind. It feels good.

Spent the 14th with the wife. We ate Thai food, chocolate cake, watched Krull (no kidding), and were generally lazy. It was like a day off. And I stayed far away from the old work set. But now it's back to work for me.

-Sir Cloister Maximus II, Esq.

Comment System Online

Stephen Kozik — 2004-02-11T10:00:00-05:00

Welcome to Slashdot, without the moderation.

I don't remember exactly when, but some time ago I was sitting in the Ash Street Saloon sipping a PBR and talking with one of the dudes from the Key when we got on the subject of Blogs. I had mentioned that I had one and wrote it myself instead of opting-in for one of the cookie cutter solutions or using a (yuck) off site deal. His only question was, "Well, that's cool. Can people make comments on your entries?". At the time I answered no because I hadn't thought it was important. Today I can answer a boastful YES.

So here's a little experiment for everyone – go ahead and make a comment to make sure this new bit is working right. I know it isn't very elegant and could use some work, but it's a start. Just click the "COMMENT ON THIS" link below to add your 2 cents (Canadian, of course.)

I started the day off wrong. I went to the dentist and had 3 cavities filled. Nothing like a mouthful of Novocaine and two people digging around in your mouth for 2 hours while accidently dripping gag inducing glue on your tongue to put you in a bad mood. That isn't the worst of it however, since in about a week I have to go back and get 2 fillings replaced, and a whole freaking tooth pulled out of my skull. It seems that one of my wisdom teeth that I should have had removed 10 years ago like everybody else needs to come out. It goes without saying that I'm freaked out as hell about this. I don't like dentists. I don't like surgery. I sure as hell don't like parts of my body permanently removed, no matter how much they need to leave. Son of a....

Everything else is peachy. Wussyboy 2004 complete, money in the bank, and healthy teeth on the way. Jesus.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Trans-Oceanic to be Leaked on the Internets

Stephen Kozik — 2004-02-05T10:00:00-05:00

For those of you who were deeply concerned, the 2003 journal entries are back online. I know you were just dying to reference that one entry ridden with spelling errors for your master thesis. As it turns out there was a little bug that came up once again from the 2003/2004 year hack that I wrote in the beginning of the year. It's all fixed up now.

In other news, I have intelligence from a reliable source that their will be a new Wussyboy EP tentatively titled "Trans-Oceanic" that should be hitting the streets in about 2 weeks or so. You all asked for it, and now you'll be sorry. Calvert and I laid the groundwork down this evening (with a baritone guitar and 3 distortion pedals) and will continue to build our house made of twigs tomorrow afternoon after I have a lunch meeting in Clackamas. Who would have thought I'd be in that hood again?

If you don't believe in magic, think again. Mouse that Roared show, Red and Black Cafe, February 27th. With good people like s. brooxxx and rich from REK at might side, I'll stab you with a British Flag. Take that!

-The Royal Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq of Hillsboro.

Quitting Babcock and Jenkins

Stephen Kozik — 2004-01-29T10:00:00-05:00

Changes. Time to face the strange (ch-ch-changes). Going to be a better man.

So as of Tuesday I am no longer an employee of Babcock and Jenkins. Risky? You bet. Foolish? Perhaps. Necessary? Absolutely.

You see I started getting serious stomach pains every day I would go into work – all pretty much caused by just one person. I could deal with them to an extent because I knew at the end of the day if things got real bad I could take it to a higher authority. What changed? That person became the higher authority. Since I didn't want to have a heart attack or stroke at the age of 30, I decided to quit. My blood pressure is now returning to normal. And I'm back on the dole.

So what lies ahead? Who knows for sure, but my first plans are to get my life back. I've begun to build up work and make sure that everything is going to be in order. Once I feel secure in that I'll start doing the things I love again. Writing music, hacking code, maybe even get back to painting. But above all else, I plan on breathing easier knowing that I made sure that my integrity was in tact and I didn't bend in the wind.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Y2K4 Buug fix and a new Circle of Thunder

Stephen Kozik — 2004-01-02T10:00:00-05:00

So this is 2004 huh?

First thing I should mention is that my blog is NOT Y2K4 compliant – that is that the calendar bit is hardcoded for 2003 and doesn't have data to handle 2004 just yet. I know, it was a stupid thing to do, but it saved me time. It's the same thing the programmers in the 70's were thinking when they shaved off an extra byte by representing the years in two digits.

Ok, so a new COT is here. I spent a little time on Xmas revamping the sucker to make it seem like I hadn't completely forgotten about my site. I rearranged a few things and went with a black like death look. Rich as some would say.

New pictures are up from the old digital camera.

Pictures of cats, Fun in the Snow (In Portland), New Beach Pictures, The new (now old) apartment

Besides all this fun, I also have some new space rock up too.

End of line.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Collecting Compute Gazettes

Stephen Kozik — 2003-11-30T10:00:00-05:00

Sharper than a wizards tooth and a dragons cloak.

I want to be painfully out of touch. I want someone to say, "Have you listened to the new wizardmonkeycake record?" to which I would reply, "Nope, never heard of em." You see, the grand masters of time and space are the Beach Boys. I just got a $25 gift certificate from my work for working a 80 hour week, and I spent it on "Listen! Look! Vibrate! Smile! – The complete story of the Beach Boy's Smile sessions". I can't wait until it arrives. I want insight into why Mrs. Olery's Cow is such a profoundly fucked up song.

That and collecting my issues of Compute Gazette from 1985-1990 has kept me pretty busy. I'm starting some work on the backend for a freelance job today, as well as putting some finishing touches on some new TMTR songs I've been fooling around with. They aren't very good, but in the land of blind songs the one eyed song is king.

I have three days off this week (Monday - Wednesday). I may get some productive things done, but most likely I'll just watch Family Guy and try not to use my brain too much.

Cha-Cha-Cha!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Kicked out of the Band, and back in the Grand Stand

Stephen Kozik — 2003-11-22T10:00:00-05:00

I thought I was Ringo, but it turns out I was just Pete Best.

I'm getting all too lazy about this journal thing. It was fun back when I had gobs of time on my hands, but now that I have a full time job it seems more like a chore than something to do for the hell of it.

So, lets see. I need to wrap up a month of stuff in one entry. I was kicked out of Minmae, joined the Tuftees, discovered the glory that is Lindsy Buckingham, and was introduced to "The Darkness" – The only rock band since 1989 to battle a squid in outerspace.

Last night at the Red and Black some homeboys made some noise. I snapped some photos with Jen's new digital camera.

Does this seem like long enough of a journal entry? Let's hope so.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Theives

Stephen Kozik — 2003-10-09T10:00:00-05:00

So I was running a little late today on my way to work (Forgot to shave before a meeting with Intel) when I went to get in my car. Low and behold, so asshole(s) stole everything out of my car. My stereo, speakers, amplifier. I will give them this – at least they didn't break a fucking godamn window. Cock gobblers.

I'm all shades of moved into my new neighborhood of Compton/Watts. Besides the crackheads that are stealing shit from me, everything is going smooth. I picked up one of those fancy Digital Satellites yesterday so I can get my entertainment fix on without giving Comcast any more money. If you weren't aware, the fine people of Comcast are complete whores. To reward me for my fine loyalty to the only cable and high-speed internet provider in town, they wanted to charge me 50 bucks for installation on cable (not counting the 50 dollars they charged me to transfer my internet service here). You know what I say to that? Fuck you. You lost a customer.

Oh, by the way; Fuck.

- Sir Fucking Cloister Godamn Son of a Bitch Maximus the Fucking Third.

Rocking the NW Music Fest and Hunting for an Apartment

Stephen Kozik — 2003-09-03T10:00:00-05:00

Well, this is a first. Making a journal entry on a worknight hasn't been something I've been able to do, but I have a little time before I hit the sack.

Friday Minmae will be playing a show down at Tonic for the Northwest music fest thingy that is going on. I won't try to persuade anybody that isn't going to this deal to shell out the $20 just to see us play, but if your going already you should try to pop in and catch the set I suppose. We play at 9PM sharp (reports Mr. Brooks). It's been a long time since I've rock n' rolled and I'm sure it's going to be fun. Last weekend at practice I seemed to have a good deal of work related angst to get out and played much faster and certainly more furious than I usually do. I'll tone it down for the show because Minmae isn't a heavy metal band, although the levels of nudity might suggest otherwise. But I digress...

There are so many things that I'm finally caught up on that it seems unbelievable. For one thing, I'm totally squared away on all my freelance work – so now I can enjoy some quality me time. Work has also been much kinder to me this week and I've actually had time to, gasp, eat a decent lunch and cut back on the coffee (down to 3 cups at work now). My files are organized, software reinstalled, and I've made some updates to the old journal. Oh yah, the wife has a journal now too; although I think she just wants a blog to make fun of blogs.

Tomorrow we start our hunt for a new apartment so I can cut down on this obscene 1 1/2 hour drive home. Also I plan to get away from a seemly cranky neighbor who must have lit himself on fire as a child or something. The STL crew has dubbed him "Smokey". Not like my friend Jim, or even the laid back hippie bowler from the big lebowski, but smokey as in smokey the bear. He likes to remind others not to be careless with fire. I'd like to remind him not to be careless with being a dick. I'm too hard on the guy. I'm sure he's swell. I just miss my old upstairs neighbor who was never home and I never said a word to. That's the kind of neighbor I dig.

I started work on a new Cloister Maximus III tape this week. Tentatively titled "Concentric Circles II: The Empire Strikes Black". Some songs that I have recorded so far include "Cartwheels and Drug deals", "Every Breath you Take (I'll be laughing at you)", and "I'll leave it up to the blind to pass judgment on your workaholic tendencies you self involved fuck". It's been a hard month. H.A.T. as they say.

Nighty night.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Stick

Stephen Kozik — 2003-09-01T10:00:00-05:00

Poop on a stick.

Game Cubed

Stephen Kozik — 2003-08-31T10:00:00-05:00

Sometimes Sunday morning isn't as forgiving as it should be.

Went out last night for the first time in a while with the calvertrosotope to check out the musical ramblings of the Key over at the Ass Street Saloon. Actually, the Ash Street isn't that bad I guess. The drinks a reasonably priced and the sound was decent. It's just a vibe thing. I also discovered that the Ash Street has a back porch last night and that took me by suprise big time.

So this is a three day weekend eh? I've been taking full advantage of it. Friday and Saturday day I finally got around to cleaning up my hard drives, getting my new room decked out (more on this later), and organizing my files that I have been neglecting forever. I feel so nice and organized now – ready to take on the world; or at least another week of work.

So now that all the dirty work is out of the way, I have two full days here to CHILL THE FUCK OUT. The caps and obscenity are entirely necessary since I haven't had a chance to really unwind and relax in forever. I plan on playing a lot of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker, watching some TV/Movies, and perhaps pud around with a few personal web projects I've been putting off.

So obviously if I can play the new Zelda game, I went out and did the deed and purchased a Gamecube. I'm not a huge video game nut like most of my friends, but I am super addicted to the Zelda Franchise so this is something I've been planning on buying for a while. I just had to wait until I came across a good deal – one that was provided to me buy the Toys R' Us corporation (Most likely a subsidiary of Viacom or something goddamn evil). 150 Clams got me the super spiffy silver game cube, a 256 block memory card, and the new Zelda game I've been lusting after. The nice thing about my 'cube is that it matches my new room decor lovely. I recently sort of remodeled my chill zone with a brand new metal and glass l-desk, a new cell phone (silver), and a new lava lamp (silver). I'm into silver now. It feels so 22nd century.

One other thing today I need to is have Minmae practice. We haven't been practicing much lately with both myself and Sean's crazy work lifestyles. Last week I may have put in about 55 hours or so – It was pretty out of control. I hope that things chill out and I don't have to work 12 hour days for a while because that shit was melting my brain. I just plain lack stamina what with not being in an office environment for about 3 years. Plus, I've got much more to my life than my work. It's my downfall I guess. That and being a fully fledged member of the Church of the Subgenius. J.R. Bob Dobbs says I need more slack in my life and I agree with him.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

28

Stephen Kozik — 2003-08-19T10:00:00-05:00

Whoa. An update to the old blog, who would have thunk it?

Anyway, if it hasn't been painfully obvious I've been more busy this past month than I have in about two whole years. I've been putting in long hours at the jobby job, doing a bit of recording, taking care of the cats while Jen was on the dole, and even squeezing in a freelance job. Phew.

So many crazy things have been happening it would be futile to try to mention them all. I'm 28 now as of last Saturday – a sorted affair where I spend most of the day working, and during the night went to go check out Ross and The Hellpets at the blackbird. John and Casey offered a birthday drink that I had to decline. I played my first show at the Blackbird with my new shiny kit, and the exhaust system of my car fell out the same night. TJ and nichole moved away – broke up – and now apparently got back together. Keith is bored out of his mind. Jen could deal with us having a second car. And I'm tired... oh so tired.

My life is almost back to a reasonable pace now. Hopefully I'll get a practice in tomorrow with the 'mae. This weekend I hope that I'll have time to finally burn a bunch of CD's, re-install all my software on my main machine, and configure this new fancy pants router I just purchased.

I dunno guys. Sleep is good. In the meantime you should go download the new Mouse that Roared EP: Mount Saint Helens. Blood sweat and motherfucking beers.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Officially Oregon

Stephen Kozik — 2003-08-04T10:00:00-05:00

Back to lighthearted quips on my daily routine.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Haircuts, Drumkits and Moving

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-27T10:00:00-05:00

It's about time for a little update I suppose. I'm such a slacker.

Let's see. Today I got a haircut – perhaps one that is a wee bit to short. I kind of reminds me of the haircut that Arnold Schwarzenegger wore in the Predator/Running man era. I'm sure it would look good if I had a stoney face and were really buff, but on me it looks kind of geeky. Oh well.

During the week lots of things went down. I bought a fancy new drum set. A very pretty Wine Red 5-pc Pearl Kit< with all the trimmings (Throne, Hardware, Hi-Hats, Ride/Crash) for a cool $575. Not a bad deal at all. I have yet to actually play the damn thing since our show at the Blackbird on Friday was unexpectedly canceled, and we haven't had practice since I bought it on Wednesday. I'm excited to get a chance to take it for a spin, so to speak.

I've been finding that I need to expedite the process of moving closer to work out in the Beav-er-ton since I've been sitting in some seriously shitty traffic these past few days. One day it took me 1 Hour and 45 Minutes to get home. That is just not cool. With a 9 hour work day and 2-3 hours of drive time, that leaves me with only about 3 hours a day to myself, and that is no kind of life. So perhaps in 2 months I'll be all moved in at a place that is only like 25 minutes from work tops. That would be nice. Plus, I've never liked how damn thin the ceilings are in this apartment complex. You really shouldn't be able to hear the dude above you sneeze. Peace out Twin Creeks.

What else to say. TJ's now living the high life in St. Louis. That's a bummer. Both Josh and Sean have been going through a crap week that has them both in poor spirits. I haven't really gotten the chance to kick it with anyone since I got back from tour, so hopefully next weekend I'll work in some chill time.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Catching Up

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-20T10:00:00-05:00

After a somewhat long period of inactivity, I've gotten the chance to make a short journal entry. The past few days have been crazy with a Minmae show pretty much every night, starting a new job, doing some last minute changes on some sites, and kicking it with vaeg since he is about to jump ship and run back home to St. Louis.

First, I finally got the cream of the crop tour pics up in the =photogallery that everybody can check out (Since photoswap is dead as bell bottoms). Secondly, I encoded and uploaded the elusive Audio Tour Diaries in mp3 format on the album of the week section. All of this stuff should be pretty boring to everyone that wasn't on tour, but if you want to hear me curse like a sailor and see pictures of me drunk and sweaty you should check that stuff out.

Yesterday I put together a little bar-b-que for TJ and Nichole, one of my finest yet. The coals were just the right amount of heat and everything from the bronto burgers to the garden burgers were excellent. We ate and sat out in my back yard talking conspiracy theories. It was so much fun. I'm going to miss those guys.

Friday I had my first day at work. I actually can say that as I did get thrown right in a the fire and actually had something on my plate the first day. I didn't get to set up my workstation yet witch is a downer, but I did learn a lot about where things are on the server/building because I was continually needing things during the course of the day. At night Minmae played a house party that was OK. I need to get a real drum set though. I feel stupid playing frankenstein. The day before, we had an instore at Ozone East that nobody save my friends and John Mullvy showed up to. This town doesn't like us I think. I'm on a mission to change their minds.

That's about it. The old Journal will be pretty sparse for the next week or so. I have so much to do it's insane.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Homecoming

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-16T10:00:00-05:00

Tonight we played our homecoming show at Berbati's Pan. Berbati's, having the nicest sound in town is a real pleasure to play, especially after a long tour of questionable sound systems. A good amount of people showed up and I got to see a lot of friends and some area hipsters like Angelo from KPSU and Larry Crane from Tape Op/Jackpot Studios.

The Mouse that Roared opened up the set with a good pace. We played our new drop-d Mount St. Helens/Apples and Oranges melody that we had worked out on tour. I swear, not only are those songs fun to play, but I always seem to get a good response from people when we play it. Sometime in the next week or so I want to have the band come over to Sean's so I can record a 5 song EP with those songs since they don't exist in proper recorded form yet. After the two bombastic songs, the set got a bit weird as my guitar went out of tune and I didn't have time to re-tune, so I just kicked back and let John play most of the guitar while I closed my eyes and sang. That's the ultimate bonus of having 2 guitar players in a band – if something goes wrong with one the other can take the helm.

Viva Voice played next. These guys were totally on and I was glad Leah recommended them for the show. It was like Curve (Pubic Fruit Era) meets Helium meets sweet Male/Female harmonies ala Low. I was digging these guys pretty hard and they played a solid and, dare I say, professional set. I wish I had some CD's left so I could have done a trade with them, although I think Sean might have traded a Minmae CD with them.

Minmae played last with our least inspired and somewhat lallygagging set. Most of the folks in the club might a b-line for the door after Viva Voice played (it was late and on a Wednesday so I couldn't blame them). There were still about 15-20 people left to watch our set, but it was hard to get amped up when the claps and cheers were so quiet due to the low amount of people. Everybody gave us a high-five on the set, but we knew we had played much better on tour and put on much more energetic shows. It was a combination of being tired, uninspired, and hungry. We still haven't played "It's Easy the Way I Care", and I'm hoping we will do that some time in the future.

After the show Calvert was off drinking and hanging out with his friend that's a girl (not to be confused with "girlfriend"?) and TJ got a little sad that he was moving back to St. Louis where he won't have that many people to hang out with. I empathize completely. It's how I've felt everywhere I've lived except Portland. Portland, Portland, Portland. Majestic art thou – with thine high unemployment rate and cheap everything.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Back in PDX, You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-15T10:00:00-05:00

This won't be elaborate as it should be because I am dead tired and there is just too much to say.

First, I'm here back in beautiful Portland. I mean that. I love this town so much, and it took the tour for that to really sink in. We stayed in some nice places, got to hang out with good friends, and made new friends, but it feels great to be back home. I got in at about 8AM and just crashed out till about 2PM. It's going to be hard to get back to a normal schedule.

Secondly, the last show of the tour was weird on many levels. It was in Arcadia California (The middle of nowhere) and was only 200 feet from the ocean! My dream came true of playing a rock show close to the edge of America. Mouse that roared played the best set I think we ever had and I felt great about it; Josh video taped the whole set so I'm anxious to see it. I think we finally found the secret – play slow slow slow. We played super slow and it finally tied together and sounded way good. Minmae's set was a little waco but I think we made a few fans. 10 minutes after Minmae played we had everything loaded into the truck (Speed pack!) and hit the road. We spent 8 hours getting back to Portland, but it was worth it. All in all we were on the road for 20 hours yesterday. It was pure insanity.

Back on Saturday night we went to this insane party in LA. It was an LA party 100%. Everybody was tweaked out and insane. Totally not our scene, but it was fun to be our normal selves watching these insane people. There are some pictures and video that I will post later from this.

Now that I'm back in Portland, I have a busy week. We have our homecoming show at Berbati's Pan tomorrow (Wednesday) that I expect everyone I know to be at. Thursday I have to meet up with somebody I've been doing contract work for to pick up a check and Make sure their next batch of work is taken care of somehow – I also have an in store at Ozone Records to play. And on Friday – I start work! That's right y'all, I have a job now. Your looking at the new Senior Interactive Designer for Babcock Jenkins in breezy Beaverton Oregon. I'm super stoked to start work. I love first days too – Setting up your workspace, meeting people, getting acclimated. I am also looking forward to sinking my teeth into some hardcore work.

So tonight I'll be taking it easy, sitting in the cool Portland night air. I love this fucking town so much it hurts.

-Sir Cloister Maxiums III, Esq.

Eating Class C Hamburgers and Sweating

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-12T10:00:00-05:00

The tour is coming to a close. Last night we played our second to last show on the tour (Unless you count the house party we are playing in LA on Sunday) at Casa De Pueblo. The space was a little small to say the least, but the kids were in to it pretty hard as far as I could tell. Mouse opened up the night with a set that started off a little bit awkward, but pulled together nicely at the end. It was the first Mouse set that we didn't play any drop-d songs, and played a couple tunes we haven't played on the tour yet like Bird in the Sky. It was very hot inside the club – the heat of LA seemed to be amplified by the small quarters and body heat off all the people packed inside like sardines. Calvert warned me at the end of the Mouse set that I might loose about 20 pounds playing drums in the heat; he was right.

CP played next laying down what I considered to be music that makes you feel like your in a Nintendo video game. A video game in witch you are being chased by zombies and just got the power up item. It was fun and the crowd was into it. After their set, Rose for Bohdan took the stage to rip it up, and rip it up they did. The finest R4B set I have seen for sure. Their new drummer is a spaz and reminds me a little bit of myself, except this guy had the machine gun fills mastered. On the last song, Calvert played drums along with them to make some two drummer goodness that rocked the house royally. Everybody danced like maniacs.

Being some hard acts to follow, Minmae took the stage next in attempt to keep it moving. We started off cooled and collected, but by the fourth song started to turn the rock up. We played all of our rocking-est tunes, and amped them even further. During Future Levelers, Sean lost his guitar somehow and barreled into the drums, making the snare hard to hit and knocking over the mid tom. I kept playing like a man on a mission. By this time, my entire body was soaked in sweat – I must have lost about 2 gallons of water in the heat of the club. Sean started to strip down to his underwear and we played our grand fanalie of Handshakes 98. Loosing our minds, it got even crazier than the Bush Gardens Minmae show last year did (if that is possible). Josh climbed the top of his amp and jumped, nearly smashing his head on the ceiling. It was pure chaos, witch is the only way to be when Gang Wizard is about to play after you.

We sold a little bit more merchandise. I sold another Mouse that Roared CD (I Sold 4 in San Deigo the night before), and Sean sold two Minmae discs and a T-Shirt. Gang Wizard began to set up and I knew it was time to leave the club. You see, the only comfortable way to watch gang wizard play is to watch from outside the club. They are that loud. I sat outside with about 25 people just watching the chaos inside the club. I wandered in for a minute, but I kind of like my hearing so I abruptly went back out.

The night winded down. We downloaded all the pictures from the camera's on my laptop, drank some wine and Brian and Grace provided, and watched all the goofy movies that Josh had been shooting with his digital camera. It was good fun. Now I'm awake. Today is our day off. I plan on buying a few groceries, maybe do some laundry. I think tonight we are moving the caravan over to John's friend Chuck's house, where we play a house party at on Sunday.

Can't wait to get back to Portland.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

You Know Where You Are? You're In the Jungle Baby!

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-10T10:00:00-05:00

We are now back in LA after a short detour to San Diego – and what a detour it was. Possibly the weakest leg of the tour as a number of setbacks hit us in droves.

First, we arrived in Ocean Side (About 20 miles from San Diego) in the middle of the night Wednesday. Once we woke up all the fun started. Four kids running around screaming, a dog licking our toes, and the next door neighbors jack hammering, yes, jack hammering woke us up. Josh went to go to the store, and on the way back got a huge hole in his front passenger side tire. He put a doughnut on it and we drove it up to a discount tire place to get it replaced for a whopping 65 bucks, witch josh charged to his emergency tour credit card.

We spent most of the day down at the ocean. We all (except soft batch) went swimming, and I did a little body boarding. It was fun but entirely exhausting as a could do nothing but lay on my back and get sunburned after swimming. We constantly had to keep an eye on these four kids running around and almost killing themselves.

Once we were done swimming and surfing, we went back to josh's car, but he forgot to take his keys out of his pocket when he went swimming so the car alarm device wouldn't work and he couldn't disarm his alarm (and drive his car). Josh, John and Casey went back to the house to get his spare, while Calvert and I fooled with the alarm until we had fixed it.

We got back to Mike's, where all of a sudden we found ourselves without a place to sleep! Harsh. We just got kicked out. So, we just drove to San Diego, got a motel at the Travel Lodge for $75 (Once again charged to Josh's credit card). Checkout time was noon, so the whole day we just stood on the corned of 10th and E in San Diego waiting to play our damn show. To kill some time, I went down to the library, and later Chris, John, Casey, and myself all went and saw the rush hour showing of T3. Good movie with lots of stuff blowing up. Robots and Nuclear missiles. What more do you want.

We played our show at the Rosary Room in San Diego. A good amount of people showed, but they didn't seem to be totally in to it. At least, I was expecting a better response. TMTR played a slightly out of tune and long set. Once again my paranoia told me it sounded bad, but as it turns out we sold all 4 CD's I had left with covers. That means I get to eat this weekend!

Minmae played a layed back set that was a little slippery, but executed well I think. Tuftee's also played that night, albeit to nobody since after the Drop Science played everybody bolted, but man they were great with Calvert on drums. I'm sure you can read more about it on John's Blog.

We drove back with $85 in our pocket. Not bad, but that was the cost of our motel the night before, so we broke even in San Diego. Let's hope that LA treats us well tonight. We are playing with Rose 4 Bohdan and Gang Wizard. Intense!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Burbank Bake

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-08T10:00:00-05:00

Just woke up in Burbank California at Brian Millers house. It's a warm 85 Degrees and I am in desperate need of a shower. Yesterday was the radio show at KLUX, and today we have a "house party" to play. The word is this house party is being thrown by high school students graduating so it should be super intense. Kids just know how to go berserk.

After our radio show last night, we came home and I went to work on the laptop. After stripping all the wires (that were no more than 1/2 an inch long) with my teeth, a re-attached them together and used some electrical tape to hold them together. During the process I accidently ripped out a yellow wire. Convinced that the yellow one wasn't important I decided to go ahead and plug the sucker in. To my surprise, the laptop's screen works now! I mean, it was some straight up mcguyver shit. Some spit, bubblegum, a bobbypin and I fixed the tour laptop. Amazing.

The crew went down to drink some marguerites at this bar that had a big whale with a gun hanging over the door. The weird thing about this bar was that you could apparently smoke in it, witch I thought was just plain illegal in the whole state of California. I guess these guys thought they could bend the rules. I wound up going back before everybody else with Brian and Grace and we settled into the living room to watch Ring 0. One of the creepiest Japanese movies ever made.

I sort of just passed out around midnight and woke up when everyone came home. I called the couch and got it for the first time on tour.

I don't know when the next time I will have an internet connection since we leave for San Diego tonight after this party, so it may be a few days before my next entry.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Laptop Disaster

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-07T10:00:00-05:00

I just got the chance to get connected to the internet thanks to Brian Miller from Rose For Bohdan and Deathbomb Arc Records. It's been a crazy 24 hours as we had the big party at the sleephouse to send us off (Where Booyaka made a special guest appearance, but that punk couldn't remember any of his rhymes.) Josh got some video tape of the event so we have documentation of me being foolish and Calvert doing an amazing cover of a Celestville Song.

Right as we were leaving the The Bay a disaster happened – My laptop finally was delivered a fatal blow. I dropped it like a total goon and the wires to the TFT display just ripped in half like the incredible hulk shredding his shirt. I'm bumbed. The laptop still works, but only if I have access to a monitor since the TFT screen doesn't work anymore. I will try to fix it tonight with speaker wire and duct tape.

Today we got settled into our new home for 2 days – Los Angeles. Actually, we are staying in Burbank witch doesn't really feel like L.A. We played on KXLU here today and had some fun, although the event was somewhat stress laden. The kind folks there had a CD-R deck I could record it for a keepsake.

I would type more but it's slightly uncomfortable using someone else's monitor and having the laptop propped at an angle.

Wish me luck in fixing my laptop. Tomorrow night we play our first show in L.A. at some house party.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Best Show of the Tour

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-06T10:00:00-05:00

The fifth of July was my sixth year anniversary, and like a complete bum I was out on tour. It wasn't for naught those as we played our second show of the tour in downtown San Fran. The show was at the Voodoo Lounge in the mission district. The club sort of reminded me the rocket bar back in St. Louis for some weird reason. Maybe it was the stage setup or the size of the club, but it was very cosy. It was actually a half rock club and half sushi bar. There was something really cool about that.

So we played with the amazing Show Me State again, who besides being some of the nicest godamn people I've ever met, are an amazing band. We all traded our CD's and swag and talked about the proper inebriation levels you have to reach to play a good show. They did their sound check by playing a verse from the Cure's "Boys don't Cry" and I knew the night was going to be a real good one. People slowly started filtering in the club, and at one point there was even a line to get in (Can you believe that?). Show me State played a concise and amazing set. I don't know any of the names of their songs yet but there were one or two song that they played that just blew me away. I can't stress how good this band was. If you live in SF you should go to one of their shows and buy their disc for sure. We also invited them to come up to Portland and play some shows with us and that they are welcome to stay with us any time.

We came up next to bring the Minmae noise. I felt a little awkward since Show Me State kept building us up as the greatest band ever witch I thought set every ones expectations high. We opened up with the slow version of handshakes in the landscape, and played that well enough. John was videotaping with Josh's camera from the back of the club, and Calvert was taking photos. After that song we started playing what might have been our worst set so far. My vocal mic kept getting in the way of doing fills and I couldn't seem to land anything to save my life. Seans guitar just "Died" during I will Protect you. Josh was too sober (?) and was perhaps getting freaked out by both Sean and I playing a little sloppy. It was all good though because everybody loved it and said we sounded amazing. I think that has a lot to do with our showmen ship as we put on a show more than anything. I lost my shirt again, Sean started jumping in the air, Josh swaggered around like Paul McCartney, and we turned up the rock. Calvert came up on stage and sang some real sweat harmonies on "I will Protect You", and played tambourine on "Your beer is next to the Fire". It was great having him on stage with us because he defiantly has a stage presence (anyone that has seen any of his bands can testify to this) that grabs your attention. I may have been a sloppy set, but it was the most fun so far.

Once we got off stage I had to work the merchandise table. To my surprise we did real well on Merchandise that night selling $70 of stuff. That combined with what we made from the door (Witch the Show me State was super super cool in letting us have their cut. Damn those guys are rad) we now have enough cash to pay for gas the rest of the tour! That's right. Anything we make from here on out becomes food money (And that is good since I'm already through half of my cash supply on day 5 of a 2 week tour).

Cubby Creatures came on next, who are cool guys with a slick early Camper Van Beethoven sort of sound. They make neat little space sounds before each song, have a violinist who rocks, and write nice cooling songs that are like cold lemonade. I'm real glad I had the chance to play with these guys. The whole night was so much fun and I got to hang out with a lot of friends. Tymm, Anthony, Kevin, Reif were there with their respective crews. At the end of the night we were going to go to a party that the Show Me State guys were having, but we were all hungry and tired and just wanted to get the gear back safely.

I'll upload more pictures soon.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

ID4

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-05T10:00:00-05:00

Yesterday was Independence Day, July 4th. We started the day with the ritual of writing journals, drinking coffee and washing our faces in Rich's sink. We headed down to an internet cafe so Sean could check his email and get directions to KALX in Berkeley and in the cafe they we're playing some old school hip-hop tunes. I not only got to hear Salt n' Peppa's "He's a Tramp", but also Digital Undergound's "Humpty Dance". I could tell it was going to be a good day.

Once we were situated, we all hopped in Josh's car and headed down to Berkeley. We got to the university and saw Bill from the Cubby Creatures, and he knew where KALX was so our job was simple. I turned on my handheld tape recorder and Josh fired up the video camera to do some documentation. The interview lasted about 25 minutes and Minmae, The Mouse that Roared, The Show me State, and the Cubby Creatures had a roundtable interview. We took callers and gave away some free tickets to the show at the Voodoo Lounge, and the DJ "Spanky" played two Minmae songs. Someone called in and asked who they were playing. That's a good sign. I'd like to think that doing that interview was a productive thing and might drive a few people out to the show today, besides the ones that we are letting in for free.

After the interview we all went down with The Show me State to chow on some curry at an Indian restaurant down the street. I abstained as not only did I just have breakfast, but curry and me wouldn't have quite agreed at the time. We hoped in Josh's car and headed back to San Fran.

Once we got back at the Sleepyhouse I made arrangements for Calvert and I to go down to Aarons 4th of July super blowout party. We were initially going to take Josh's car (witch means I would have had to drive a stick in San Fran's insane hills) but we found out that parking would be impossible so we opted to take the bus instead. The bus didn't really go to Aarons, but it dropped us off about 7 blocks always, so we just hiked it the rest of the way.

Aarons was a blast and a half. As soon as we showed up Aaron shoved huge steaks into our mouths, witch will most likely be the best I eat on tour. We cooled out and got to chat with Reif, Aaron, and Kevin. It was a lot of fun and Aaron had some new super huge TV that was more than 5 feet tall. I also got a chance to use Aarons internet connection and upload the previous days entry and some pictures from Calverts camera.

As the night died down we went to the top of Aarons apartment building that overlooked the entire bay. Calvert took some real nice photos that look like postcard material. We watched the bay's amazing fireworks and they were great. Once the fireworks were finished we went back to Aarons apartment where he cooked MORE food! Calvert ate yet another Steak, and I had a burger and some watermelon this time. After another beer we decided to head back to the Sleepyhouse, but this time we took the muni (part of the bart) home. We nearly got lost since the Muni dropped us off in an unfamiliar part of town, but we managed to find height/ashberry thanks to the map I happened to have with me. If it wasn't for that map we might have been screwed.

Once we got back to the Sleepyhouse it was time to retire. Barrios was there since his plane landed about 2 hours earlier, and we were all stoked for today. I think we'll go down to the beach, maybe have lunch with jonathan and Aaron, and play our show at the Voodoo. I have a feeling there will be some real nice turnout at the show tonight and we should get paid rather well. I would be nice to make some more cash.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Treat Yourself Right--Day One of the Tour

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-04T10:00:00-05:00

Yesterday I learned an important lesson while on tour. The body is a temple and must be treated as such. If you just eat half a taco, a breakfast bar, and coffee and beer you will feel like complete garbage. I've decided I need to make sure I eat better and drink more water so I don't get dehydrated so easily. It's important.

We all woke up yesterday and walked down to height-ashberry to get a cup of coffee. There should be a pretty amusing picture of me standing in front of the street sign on height-ashberry up on photoswap. Here I was, the granola mecca, keeping it punk rock. We made a couple of jokes about how awesome it would be if I rolled back from tour wearing a grateful dead t-shirt and some love beads and sandals. Found a music store up the street that I can buy a pair of sticks at (more on this later) as well as a camera store that should sell a battery for my miniature microphone I brought with me so we could record shows with the laptop.

After everybody had all woken up and got some breakfast (or coffee) we hoped in Seans truck and headed down to the tenderloin – a pretty sketchy part of san fran for sure – to visit my friend Tymm. Tymm's place, while being in a part of town where at least 100 crack deals go down a day, was actually really nice on the inside. He offered us internet connections, so I busted out my laptop and plugged into the hub, I uploaded the journal entries that Sean and I had typed up earlier that day. I tried to get both Josh and Calverts (Soft Batch) digital cameras' to work with my laptop with no luck. I downloaded the drivers but the laptop still didn't seem to recognize the cameras. Oh well. Instead we synched Calverts camera with Tymm's laptop and I had him upload the pictures to his web space on booyaka.

Since we were running out of time on our meter we had to run. We then went to get lunch at some Mexican restaurant and I had the best but spiciest pollo taco I've ever had. It was so hot I couldn't eat the whole thing without dying. However, it was very very good. We ran back to the sleephouse and got ready for the first show of the tour. We loaded up the trucks and sat in traffic of the bridge.

We got down to the club and were pleasantly surprised. It was a pretty nice space with a million barbie dolls on the walls and Christmas lights everywhere. We had a considerable amount of time to kill before we played, so we ran down to get some coffee, and Casey went and got a slice of pizza. Calvert and I played a game of pool, and I was tempted to get a game of miss pac man in as well, but then the soundguy showed up and I had to get ready.

The Mouse that Roared played a short but sweet set. We opened with the drop-d melody of Mt. St. Helens/Apples and Oranges, and I think it was received well. I taped the whole show on the handheld (I don't have the batter for my mic to use the laptop yet) and although it sounds pretty harsh, it still is listinable. We also played a few older songs like Homecoming, Fashion Show, and Pine Cone Honey. We also played Scarecrow and the Wolf witch is coming together nicely. The monitors were fine and I think I sang OK for the most part.

Once we finished most of my friends in the bay were there and came up to say high. Anthony (Aquamann) was there with his roommate Betsy, as was Aaron and Reifer, and their friend David. Later on Kevin from Mellonmoon showed up too witch was a trip. Aaron bought me a New Castle Brown Ale that I happily accepted. We watched the Show Me State play (Whom we are playing with on the July 5th show at the Voodoo Lounge in SF) and they were pretty damn good. They actually reminded me a little bit of Darling Little Jackhammer with a twist of Pavement. I'm pleased that we're playing with such good bands so far as on Saturday we play with the Cubby Creatures who I am excited to play with. I plan on getting some CD's from both of those guys before I leave the bay.

Once Show me State finished playing, the club sort of cleared out a bit, but there were still a decent amount of folks there. Minmae took the stage and we opened up with the new and completely bombastic "I Was Buoyant". That song is a total opener if I've ever heard one. It's so loud and rocking it's insane. We played most of the same songs from the disjecta show, and while I don't think we played as good as we did at disjecta, we freaked out more and had even more fun. We closed with Handshakes in the Landscape. I lost my shirt, Josh showed off some chesthair, and Sean pointed to an old white trash woman in the back of the club, looked her in the eye and said "I love you. Be my wife". Amazing. Calvert jumped up on stage to chime in with "I believe...I can...See it now!". Fun fun fun. After we got done playing the poor eating and drinking took it's toll and I was dehydrated. I felt completely terrible, but buy the time we had everything loaded on the scary ass streets of downtown Oakland I felt better. Josh and I dropped off Casey at her friends house and drove around for what seemed like a full hour looking for a parking spot by the sleepyhouse. I rolled in, ate some potato chips and fell the hell asleep.

Now it's the fourth of July. We are going to do an interview on KALX and then go to Aarons apartment to eat steaks and watch fireworks from his apartment that overlooks the bay. Now that is living proper!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

SEANS Entry Ways to keep a journal entry. Last night I thought I'd jot down highlights, notes, and then put it all together when I got back. Highlights would be something like fireworks, explosions, drunk friends, coffee, etc. Maybe bees, deer, homeless, Billie Holliday, etc. I finally caught up on some sleep last night, the 4th, that is. Josh and I met with Bill of the Cubby Creatures at the Shimmer Kid's place in outer Mission.

There were about 25, 30 people in attendance. We mixed and mingled with people we'd seen the night before in Oakland at the Stork. At about 7:30 a loud cazll went out, "fireworks!" We all walked single file to the adjacent school and were treated to insanity in a bag, all fireworks from Tenessee, I believe. I think I heard someone say that. It got crazy. More on this later. Josh and I were a bit tired from not getting in until 5am the night before. We hung out and decided to make our way back, not before giving Cubby Bill a ride to the Phone Booth Bar up the street.

Its about 1pm now, Saturday, July 5th. Going to call Jillian here in a sec. I do wish she was in attendance. Perhaps she went to work this morning. I talked to her last night and she said she might as she needed the money. Overhearing presently Steve aka Cloister talking on the phoen about the steaks he and Calvert had the night before: "watermelon, steaks, it was coolin' really..." We're kicking it today, its cold and windy out today, not much to do, maybe get something to eat. Tonight we'll be at the Voodoo Lounge. I hear its a sushi bar, which is cool, kind of unusual. Not much to say. Coffee's pretty good here, I like the brown sugar. Its hard to write with all the talking going around. I'm sort of ready to move onto the next thing, get to Los Angeles, hang out with Brian and Grace. Um, that's it...for now.

The Tour Begins

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-03T10:00:00-05:00

Just woke up on the floor of the Sleepyhouse in San Francisco. We drove for about 12 hours from Portland down to the bay yesterday in what was a fairly uncomfortable ride. Half of the trip the sun was beaming down and the temperature of the cab of Sean's truck seemed to rise to temperatures matching that of the surface of Venus. The other half it became incredibly cold for some reason, so I was glad that I brought my hoodie and had it in an arms reach.

We stopped at a T&A gas station and ate personal pan pizza's from Pizza Hut Express, although Calvert, or should I say "Soft Batch" (As is his new nickname for the rest of the trip) opted to buy a pack of cookies for lunch and dinner. That's tour living I suppose. During the drive on I-5 We saw a deer jump out of nowhere and get hit by a car. The deer's legs broke off and I hope that it pretty much died instantly as it would really have sucked if it survived, even for a short amount of time, with it's legs in pieces. The car looked nearly totaled but I think the driver was fine. This was fairly disturbing as this was the car directly in front of us. It wasn't as if we saw this happen from a distance, it happened 20 feet away from us while we were driving and had to swerve out of the way.

We have all the toys to make the trip comfortable. I brought my laptop, my Gameboy advance, Palm Pilot, etc. I'm writing this journal entry in hopes that I can find someone with an internet connection later today that will let me upload this to Circleofthunder.com. My best bets are Aaron, Reif, or maybe Anthony. If I had a dial-up account I could just plug my modem into the wall, but I don't. I would rather wait for the opportunity to use a fat pipe anyway as I will try to VNC into my computer at home to download some things I forgot to put on the laptop (Namely my booyaka instrumental cuts for that elusive booyaka show). Booyah!

Tonight we have a show at the Stork Club in Oakland – a place that Tony from Norfolk and Western described as "Weird". We'll see about that. In the meantime I just ate breakfast (One of those new fangled breakfast bars) and I will try to meet up with Tymm during the day today, and give Anthony a call to see if he can make it down to the show tonight since I'm sure he is working during the day. Both Sean and the truck are gone. I suppose he stepped out for a bit. Soft batch and Pizza Pants (Josh) are still asleep. Creepy. I'm the only one awake.

It's sort of cold here.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Seans Entry:

Waking up to Television, Fell and Oak, Riche's swank pad, The Sleepyhouse. But I didn't sleep much last night, crammed in a room with Calvert, Kempa and Kozik. I made my way into the band room and slept there, and it worked. I couldn't sleep with all the snoring, but that's ok because I snore too. It had to be somebody, the last person to fall asleep that had to take the burned. But this is all beside the point. The trip, the day started out with death, the death of a deer, a bumblebee, smashed all up on Steve's hand, brains and shit. Not making much sense here, legs crossed uncomfortably, making a journal entry on the laptop. Today is the 3rd of July. Fireworks! Fireworks! 2:07pm, year 2003.

Leaving on a Tour Bus

Stephen Kozik — 2003-07-01T10:00:00-05:00

I leave in just one day. Tomorrow I have to pack, and I'm going down to the Blackbird to check out Tony's band Norfolk & Western who I've heard good good things about. They are playing with the Decemberists whom I respect a great deal. After I get mellow-rocked, I get a few hours of shuteye, and this is my schedule. Hope to see some of you there. We may have one or two "bonus" shows that Sean is working on. Anyway.

I have mp3's up in the album of the week that I would consider a "best of" for both the mouse that roared and minmae. Call it our tour support mp3(s).

Anybody have a cellphone I can borrow?

Thursday July 3rd, 2003
Oakland, CA @ The Stork Club
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ The Show Me State
2330 Telegraph Ave.
9PM 21+ $5
510.444.6174

Friday July 4th [2PM]
Berkeley, CA @ KALX Radio
Minmae Interview
Free to Those to choose to tune into www.kalx.org
90.7 FM Berkeley

Saturday July 5th
San Francisco, CA @ The Voodoo Lounge
Minmae w/ The Cubby Creatures & The Show Me State
2937 Mission Street
21+ 9:30
415.285.3369

Sunday July 6th @ The Sleepyhouse
Houseparty
San Francisco, CA
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ Booyaka & the Tuftees
1665 Oak Street (@Ashbury)
Free and lasts all day(?)
SF, CA 94115

Tuesday, July 8th, 2003
Los Angeles, CA @ The Smell
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ New Bethel
247 South Main St.
(Between 2nd and 3rd St.)
All Ages $5

Thursday, July 10th, 2003
San Diego, CA @ The Roseary Room
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ The Tuftees and THe DropScience
947 E St San Diego
21+ $5

Friday, July 11th, 2003
Los Angeles, CA @ Casa Del Pueblo
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ Rose for Bohdan & Gang Wizard (Awesome!)
1498 Sunset Blvd. #2
Echo Park
All Ages 8:30PM

Sunday, July 13th, 2003
Los Angeles, CA @ Chucks
House Party
Free / Etc
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ The Tuftees

Tuesday, July 14th, 2003
Arcata, CA @ The Placebo
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ RP Vogelbaucher (of Thee More Shallows Fame)
1611 Peninsula Dr. Manila
$3 - All Ages

Wensday, July 15th, 2003
Olympia, WA @ The Voyeur
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared (Acoustic)
404 4th Ave E
21+ $5

Wensday July 16th, 2003
Portland OR @ Berbati's Pan
(The Big Homecoming show. You better show up to this)
Minmae & The Mouse that Roared w/ Viva Voice
231 SW Ankeny
21+ $5

Wensday July 17th, 2003
Portland OR @ Ozone Records (In Store Performance)
Minmae
701 E Burnside
Free (Duh)

Thursday July 31st, 2003
Portland OR @ Kelly's Olympian
Minmae
426 SW Washington
21+ $5

Monday August 4th, 2003
Portland OR @ The Blackbird
Minmae w/ The Potomac Accord, Wow & Flutter and Transmissionary Six
3728 NE Sandy Blvd
21+ (Most likely free since it's a monday)

Saturday, August 9th, 2003
Portland OR @ Kelly's Olympian
The Mouse that Roared w/ The Tuftees and The Minor Thirds
426 SW Washington
21+ $5

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Two Days Until the Tour

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-30T10:00:00-05:00

The final countdown has begun. Two more days until we embark on our two week tour. I've been doing a lot of work in the past week trying to wrap up all my projects, so now I'm getting to the nitty gritty of preparing to leave. I've completed a few of my tasks already including re-installing software on the laptop (So I can write blog's from the road!), Burning all the stuff on my hardrive so I have a clean slate (I will be VNC'ing into my main machine from the road to take care of business), and contacting all my friends down in California. I still have to clean up my office as it's being converted into a flophouse for Jen's mom and sister who are visiting here in Portland while I'm out on the road. I have to buy a spare set of strings for my guitar, a new pair of sticks, and some munchies for the road trips. Oh yes, and I have to make some merchandise to sell as well as pack the old bags.

Susans site is now finished. I can crank out the work when I need to. I mean, I essentially pumped out two medium sized websites in 5 days. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

Had a bar-b-que yesterday that nearly ended in disaster if it weren't for Nichole's quick wit and optimism about re-lighting a seemingly dead grill. I was full prepared to order a pizza for everyone but as it turns out everything was cool and the burgers turned out a-ok.

During the bar-b-que we started to reminisce about bullseyeart and some of the cartoons they used to have (ratchicken, the internet: the series, porkchops, etc) and how much it sucks that they took down all their cool content and became rawpower (lame). Lucky for us, not only did we find some mirrored copies of ratchicken, Jen also found a VHS tape that I made of a few of the old Internet cartoons and the best episode of Porkchops ever. That was a good trip down memory lane. I really wish I could find some more mirrored copies of those cartoons. Maybe they are floating around kazzaa or something lame?

I also began a little experiment with the IR port on my laptop. I figured that it may be possible to run a piece of software that will interpret IR signals from a standard remote control and use them to control winamp for the trip. Well, after fooling around with it for what seemed like hours I discovered that you need to remove the built in Microsoft IR port manager and get it to act like a standard COM port instead for it to gel with all the software that "learns" remote controls. After all that work, I still haven't gotten it down 100%. It seems that I have no problem detecting a button being pushed, but it can't seem to tell the difference between the buttons. Oh well. Perhaps if I have some more time in the next day or two I can fool with it some more.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

AKA: g00z

AKA: Cloister the Stupid

AKA: Stephen Kozik

AKA: The Daisy Farmer

AKA: The Iron Doctor.

Etc..

Playing with the Potomac Accord at the Blackbird

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-25T10:00:00-05:00

Ok, so this is pretty funny. I noticed that the Potomac Accord was coming to the Blackbird here in Portland in August. For those that don't know Calvert used to play bass for the Potomac Accord, and Andy Benn (The Piano guy) used to be in the Mouse that Roared many moons ago. Well, I told Sean he should get ahold of Chantelle and see if we could get on the bill. Guess what? We're in. Monday August 4th at the Blackbird will be the big showdown. Old meets new. Minmae and the Potomac Accord. How twisted is that?

I also set up an acoustic Mouse that Roared show at Kelly's Olympian on the 9th (Saturday), witch will be a sort of a first. I kind of like the prospect of just rolling in with not much prepared and play the show by the seat of my pants (Something I can't do when other people are involved since they might not know the songs). I'm looking forward to it. Then again, I'm looking forward to all the stuff coming up. I'll be playing a hell of a lot of shows in the next two months, what with playing in two separate bands going on tour.

I'm getting a little bummed about the prospect of TJ moving. I really wish he and nichole could stay here in good old p-town, I just know that Nichole wants to get back to a close proximity to her family, and TJ can't pass up some cash. It's a shame because I know I could get TJ a job in about a month. I could at least give him enough freelance work (with my current overflow) to keep him busy for a long time. But those are the breaks.

Saw the Tuftee's rock a bowling ally tonight. That was fun. John swaggered around and had a definite Roy Oberson thing going on. I'm going to buy him a pair of shades to wear when he plays. Oh, and I could hear Casey's vocals real well on a song tonight. I need to figure out a part for her to sing on a Mouse that Roared song. She's hiding a real nice voice. I need to get the mofo used.

I'm thinking about buying a new Mac in a month or two. Basically, I want to replace my main box (AMD Athlon 1700+ XP) with a nice dual G4 system and make the switch. I think it's gotten to a point now with OS X that all the software is finally there so you wouldn't have to bounce around with OS 9 anymore.

I'm not buying an iPod though. It isn't like I leave the house or anything.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Tour Anticipation

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-23T10:00:00-05:00

The anticipation of the tour grows. In a hurry to wrap up all my loose ends I've been working pretty much non-stop for the past few days.

First, I'm pretty much finished with Susan's new fine art site. It's what I would call 90% done. All the code is finished and everything is pretty much in place, now we just have some missing content to fill in for the most part. Oh, that and test the sucker. I do some testing as I go along, but I haven't tested it on some different platforms I would like to yet.

Second, I started a new gig today. So far I have two comps finished. It seems to be turning out well so far. My game plan is to finish the comp process up tomorrow and start cutting and writing the HTML on Wednesday. Should be pretty straightforward for sure. I plan on having this sucker wrapped on Friday.

Third, I have a bunch of miscellaneous stuff I need to attend to. I have 3 more records I need to ship tomorrow from my big ebay auction a few weeks ago. Then I have to do some prep work before I leave like fix up my laptop, put VNC on my main box, contact all my friends in California, kiss my wife an pack.

I can't wait to grow a big old mountain man beard while I'm on tour. Of course, I'll have to shave it as soon as I get back, but maybe I can put it off so I have it at the homecoming show at berbati's. Woo-hoo!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

I am a Zeppelin

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-21T10:00:00-05:00

"It's Beautiful!"

- Rene Belloq

So last night was the show at Disjecta. After all the promotional stuff we did with interviews, write ups, flyering, and multiple plugs, for the most part the only people that showed up were friends of ours and friends of friends. This isn't to say that the turnout sucked (It really didn't), or that it was a bad show in anyway; It's just that I expected to see a couple of faces in the crowd that I didn't know. So I suppose mucho thanks to all the people who showed up and checked out the new incarnation of Minmae, and got the chance to see The Mouse that Roared a bit more on our game than we were the last time we played. I say thanks for the support at showing up, as well as thanks for the fact that the door fee they payed buys us quite a bit of gas for the tour. I feel a little crummy knowing that most of that money came from friends of mine, but I do appreciate it.

A quick re-cap of the nights events. The whole crew rolled down at about 7PM or 8PM to Disjecta where we got everything set up and tweaked. To my surprise, Disjecta did have a functioning (and decent) PA. This meant that the PA that we brought (or rather that Josh brought) could be used as a monitoring system since Disjecta lacks that. The last time we played there we did not have the luxury of monitors (that is, we couldn't hear ourselves at all) so the performance was a bit scary. I just took a line off Disjecta's mixer's Aux Channel and piped it into Joshes PA, placing the speakers from our PA in strategic locations so the singer could hear him/herself and the drummer got a little taste of that for the sake of song cues. Once we had that set up, we all ran down the street to get a beer, chit chatted, and ran back to Disjecta to start the show.

Right before the mouse played I didn't see some of the people I expected to show. I got a bit flustered by this so I said forget it and we just started playing. Launching into my new "segway" song that I start all of the drop d tunes with, we started rocking out Mount Saint Helens. I think it was the best we've played it so far with the tempo being perfect and Calvert destroying the drums in his circular descending drum pattern that he and I had worked out a month ago to mimic the digital delay clicks I put into the original Cloister Maximus/A Nude Hope version of the tune. From there we played a bunch of somewhat new songs (new to the mouse that roared, old to me) and I think we did a respectable job on them for a band that never even practiced. I definitely felt good about things for the first couple of songs. Things got a wee bit loose as they normally do later down the set, but we pulled a late recovery and played an oldie "Hot Air Balloon" that people seemed to like. I ended the set with an incredibly miserable version of Wolverine that I really shouldn't have played. Especially last as I think it might have left a nasty taste in peoples mouths. Perhaps it's my imagination.

Next up was the Tuftees, who are a band comprised of half of the Mouse that Roared players. John's vocals were a bit inaudible and quiet on the first song; I tried to compensate by juicing up his mic, but the mic started to feedback so I had to back it off. I think the whole issue is that both myself and sean are loud sons of bitches, where as I think John has a much more timid voice and therefore wasn't cutting through as well as sean and I. No matter, because they sounded on point and layed back. That is, until John went to try out his new toy: a big muff. It was pretty funny – when he first turned it on it was 10 times louder than anything else (albeit way awesome) and had to fiddle around with the nobs to get it back in check. They played a cover of a Minmae song, witch is funny since Minmae played after them, as well as a Rolling Stones Cover. I know that saying a band did a Rolling Stones cover SOUNDS bad, but they pulled it off elegantly as spinning the Tuftees' style on it made it less.. Umm.. Bar Bandish. Anyhow, since John and Casey are friends of mine I can say this and get away with it – You can tell their drummer had been out of time and they hadn't had a good practice in a while since there were quite a few weird moments where not everyone was in complete sync. That's OK however, since they were good anyway and bands that play "perfect" aren't as down to earth and relatable as bands that add the human touch of being fallible. I enjoyed it.

Lastly, as the night started to wind down, it was time for Minmae to bring the rock. We wandered in while everyone was outside still and I sat behind the kit. I started to play some test patterns to get the feel for how the kit was arranged. Oh my god. I sounded like fucking John Bonham. I played the beat to "When the Levy Breaks" to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I was right. It was the perfect amount of bass, reverb and panache that Disjecta's space offered to make the whole kit sound very Zeppelin. Amazing.

After the show TJ made this comment about Minmae and Sean Brooks:

"Man, I think I finally know who Sean is. Sean is the Babe Ruth of rock n' roll."

I like that a lot. I think Sean should add that quote to the Minmae bio, and is it ever true. As soon as that dude steps foot on stage, he knocks one out of the godamn park every time. Minmae proceeded to do just that, as we rocked so hard by the 6th song I felt like somebody dumped a bucket of water over my head. I felt like we really put 110% into the show and pushed it as hard as we could without loosing our heads totally (With the exception of Sean's break dancing at the end of Sound of One Hand Clapping perhaps). I put little flairs from Wussyboy songs into each song we played and looked like I was having an aneurysm the whole time, drinking 3 cups of water during the show. We played some oldies but goodies including the Future of Lint, and some newish songs like Straight From The Box. What a good feeling the whole show was. It was like running a marathon, and coming in at first as your chest bursts the finish line ribbon.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Willy Week Interview

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-19T10:00:00-05:00

First, if you haven't seen it already you should check out The Willamette Weekly. I knew about the interview and such, but I had no idea there was going to be a photo along with it. Not just a photo, but a real goofy one.

Last night I went down to the bonfire to meet up with Calvert and Prof, when out of no where I bumped into my old friend Steve. There is this crazy thing where no matter where one of us moves to, the other one eventually winds up there for some reason. So far I've run into him in New York, Santa Fe, and we may have missed each other by a day or two in Toronto once. Very crazy stuff. He bought me a shot of Tequila that I tried to get down, but could only finish about half of, since me and Tequila don't get along very well. Fun stuff though.

What else is new? Vaeg finally finished up the video of us camping last week. There is a segway where he mixes shots of my flying a kite, an eagle soaring overhead, and America's "Ventura Highway" plays in the background. It might be the goofiest thing ever. He put it up on Bit Torrent so we could all get it via that distributed model. Since I was late in the game it came in at a whopping 100 k/s for me because everyone else had it already. Very nice.

So today is my day to get things done. I don't have anything that I need to do except get some work done. It seems pretty imperative to me now to wrap things up this weekend as I may have a short little contract job next week that I want to finish before I hit the road on the 2nd of July.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Come down to Disjecta (116 ne russell – right off MLK Jr. blvd ) on Friday night to join in some fun. Door charge is $5 according to sources. You get 3 bands, two of witch I play in. Now that's silly.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Problem with Stray Cats

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-17T10:00:00-05:00

Does anybody want a cute cat? I seem to have a slight problem. For the past 3 days there has been this light gray furry cat that has been hanging around my back porch, just peaking in the window and crying. I feel bad for her, but I've already got 2 cats. Maybe I should put up a sign that says "Sorry, we have enough. Please move along. No loving home here." I tried giving it a little cat food today to maybe get it to go away (in case it was just hungry), but that didn't seem to work. What to do, what to do.

Gearing up for the first Minmae show this Friday. We are well practiced and ready to rock. Hopefully with the write up in the willy week and the buzz around microcassette quatrains we'll get a decent draw. We sure could use an extra bit of cash to hit the road with. I can tell you, I wish we could play for like 2 hours, since there are so many songs that are so fun to play and I think we are ready to play any of them. I recorded practice yesterday just so I had some sort of record of how all my parts go and whatnot, and it sounds pretty good. I mean, the recording sounds awful and my playing was a wee bit sloppy yesterday, but it still rocks. Tomorrow I'm going to go over to John and Casey's to hash out the Mouse that Roared set and get a little no-calvert practice in. It should work fine. Calvert is a big boy and just has to play either 4/4 or 3/4. No big deal.

Had my second interview at this place I'm hoping to get a job at today. It was all butter. I was a little jacked up on caffeine, but I don't think anyone really noticed. I really should learn to decline coffee when I've already had a whole pot to drink in the morning. Such is the life of a caffeine junky.

There might be something wrong with the old Honda CRX. I think I may have acquired a hole in my muffler since it is running really really loud. I seem to recall having the same thing happen to my old GEO Metro, and I needed a new muffler. Besides it being extraordinarily loud, it's apparently bad to drive around with a whole in your muffler as it does damage to your engine. At least that's what a mechanic told me once. And they wouldn't lie to me, right right?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Cleaning up after Camping

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-15T10:00:00-05:00

I have returned from the camping experience. Completely exhausted and felling a little yucky (I think I got too much sun), I'm glad to be home. It was, however, a barrel of fun. I now know I can set up a tent, and had the opportunity to cook a hot dog on a stick over a fire and eat the hot dog right off the godamn stick. I felt like a barbarian and it was rad.

It's a shame I feel to tired to do anything productive since I have quite a few things to do. I still need to get some more work done on a gig I have, need to get prepared for the Disjecta show this Friday (Have to make some new holiday covers and cases), and I was thinking about making some new portfolio cd-roms for the heck off it. I still have 1 case/folder left, but I don't have any cd's pre-burned. Frehel.

You should all keep your eyes out for the Williamette Weekly that comes out this Wensday. There is going to be an interview with Sean about Minmae, True Love, and the tour. My name should be mentioned in the article as the resident Minmae drummer, so I'm stoked.

Well, I'm going to watch some TV or movies. I'm too out of whack to do much of anything else except zone out. Some pictures should be up on photoswap soon from the experience.

-Sir Cloister Maxmimus III, Esq.

Upgrading the Blog

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-13T10:00:00-05:00

Did a little bit of much needed housecleaning today. By housecleaning I mean, of course, fixing things up around the old COT.

First, you may notice that the Journal/Blog got a little bit of an upgrade today. I added a "stats" section that I can fill with some of the recent things I've watched, listened to, etc. Less obvious is that I finally fixed the last journal entry / next journal entry switch at the bottom. Previously it was just going back or up one day. During the first month I had the old journal running this worked fine since I generally made an entry every day. These days I'm much more laxed and can go a week without making an entry. So now there is a database of entries that the blog can pull from and if you hit the "last journal entry" link it will take you to the last journal entry made, not the previous day. That makes going through archives much easier if your into that sort of thing.

I also fixed a few broken links I found (In the wake of post at&t stuff) and fixed a bug in my interactive portfolio. I was wondering why my CPU usage was going through the roof and as it turns out I had a loop (goto frame A) that was dead square on a motion tween, so flash was spinning it's wheels and chewing up CPU for no good reason. All fixed now.

Not much else is new. I took it sort of easy today; burning cd-r's of some junk on my drive, watching episodes of SG1 as well as the Filth and The Fury (I've seen it before. It's still good). I'm also gearing up to go camping this Saturday (I was going to leave Friday night but it is supposed to rain. Pity.).

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Comps Chosen and Bars Rocked

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-12T10:00:00-05:00

A quick re-cap of the past days events. It's been busy busy busy around here. And I'm sleepy.

Susan settled on a comp so I have started work on her new fine art site. I haven't got much done save saving out some PNG's of the elements from the winning comp and placing them in the library for flash. I think tomorrow I'll take the time to actually do some real meat and potatoes development on this thing so I can have it done once she gets back from Mexico next week. Then I think a few tweaks, an invoice, and that project will be neatly wrapped. I hope that her husband is going to need some work done in a few weeks so I can get a little bit more stuffing in my nest egg. Of course, it doesn't hurt to get some new stuff in the old portfolio. I think much of the new stuff I've been doing blows away what's in my hauppauge of a portfolio right now.

Played a show Tuesday night with the peeps from the Minor Thirds down at Dale Ann Lad's Inn in SE by the penguin pit. I brought my hand held and taped most of the show, and I put it up as this weeks album of the week if you are curious. I should warn you that it sounds pretty bad. It's almost all guitar for the mouse set, and the pitch kept shifting around on the minor thirds set. Suffice it to say, one practice does not a good show make and we were loooooooooose. More so than usuall. But I did live out my Syd Barret dream and we played a 8 minute cover of "Carefull with that Axe, Eugene". I opened the set up with a new song that seemed well received. Too bad it went downhill a little after that as the rum in my blood was sending me into that familiar territory of forgetting my own damn songs. Sigh. The Piuma was pretty wasted too – but to a good effect as we all got to hear a cover of James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" with a 5 minute monolog about midgets or something at the end. And a very "Rick Wakeman/Yes" version of one of their other tunes. Yes, they played moosejaw. Most excellent night. Free drinks, and we even got payed. What more do you want? Oh, and it was good to see some of my friends at the show. Pitty I didn't get to talk much, but I was supprised to see them. It's just my Eor stage.

Today I ran around like chicken with my head cut off. In the morning in a hurry I digitized and cut up last nights tape and FTP'd it up to the site. Then I went off to an interview (Doesn't it seem like I have one at least once a week?). Place seemed cool and on the ball and I have a second interview. But, don't I always have a second interview? Seriously. I always breeze through the first interview without breaking a sweat, then after the second one I get either the form rejection letter or they don't even bother to tell me they went with somebody else. All I ask for is a little humanity and common curtesy. After the interview I rushed home, ate some dinner, then immediately ran back out the door for Minmae practice. I felt like I was little off today but it didn't matter. What is important is that I know all the changes and counts now so the only touch up work before the tour needs to be minor timing things. That will also certainly be helped by playing on a kit that isn't so.. Ummm.. Shitty.

It's 2:30 AM. Damnit, I'm getting off schedule again. I woke up at 10:30 today. I feel myself slipping. I need to force myself to go to bed at a human hour so I can get up before 8 AM again. That feels so good. You don't feel like a bum if you wake up when everyone else does. I need to set the coffee maker to brew me a pot automatically at 8AM. Then I'd get out of bed for sure.

And the snooze button MUST be banned in this house.

I'm going camping in 2 days. Rad.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Bad Luck

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-09T10:00:00-05:00

I had this dream last night where I went to see Smog play. After he was done with his set, Bill Callahan came over and punched me in the face.

Some guys have all the luck. I'm not one of those guys. Friday, my primary hard drive in Medusa just up and died. I lost all of my email, my settings, and a few design files. It was a very uncool way to start the weekend. Just today on Monday have I essentially gotten my box back in usable condition. One thing I did change this time was I unisntalled MSN Messenger. I hardly see anyone online anymore because I think everybody switched to AOL or something. Whatever. I figured there was no point in letting it take up resources. If people want to talk to me, they can always call. Or stop by. Although that never happens.

I think I have monkeypox.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Rejected

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-02T10:00:00-05:00

Dear Stephen,

Thank you for applying for the position of Web Developer. We appreciated the opportunity to meet with you to review your background and experience.

After careful consideration of your qualifications and the needs of the firm, we regret that we are unable to extend an offer of employment at this time. We will keep your resume on file and should a position become available in the future we will review it again at that time.

Thank you again for your interest. We wish you the best of luck in your job search.

Best regards,

xxxx xxxxxxxx

Looks like I'm going on tour.

Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Battle of the Earwigs

Stephen Kozik — 2003-06-01T10:00:00-05:00

It's June. The earwigs are amassing an army that the world will bow before. Today, the ultimate violation occurred as one was waiting for me in the shower, hanging out on the inside of the shower curtain. Yuck.

For those that don't know, I'm at war with the earwigs. It's transformed itself from "Earwigs are gross.. there are thousands outside and they are crawling over everything" to something personal. That's right. It's personal. I'm pretty sure they know I don't like them so they try to defy me a purposely try to jump on me when I go outside on the back porch. Armed with a squirt bottle filled with soapy water and my lower east sides I intend to kill as many as I can. Karma be damned! I hate those freaking things.

The past few days I have been doing all the mundane things I've been putting off for a while. I cleaned up my room, burned the 30 gigs of stuff I had on my hardrive, cut and glued 25 mouse that roared holiday covers. I even organized my Beatles bootleg collection. Speaking of the Beatles, I've now watched all 5 DVD's in the Beatles Anthology Box set that Josh loaned me. It was OK, but didn't delve into as much studio stuff as I would have liked to have seen. It mainly seemed to focus on their live performances witch I have little interest in. And all of the interviews and stories on the discs I've heard or read elsewhere. Oh well. Such is the life of a Beatle maniac.

Went out on Friday to the Blackbird to see "Fields of Gaffney". Amazing. They even did a cover of Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston's "I did acid with Caroline". And they did it well. Delving into Devo covers and sloppy versions of old Sebadoh songs. Worth the 7 bucks. Why the godamn Joggers were headlining is beyond me since the Gafster definitely deserved the top billing. Perhaps it was at Eric Gaffney's request so they could get some sleep early. Who knows. Regardless, I left right after Gaffney played. Ha.

On the todo list: Have an interview tomorrow, make some flyers for the disjecta show on the 20th, get press stuff to sean for the tour, work on a minmae site, and watch End of Days. Sonova...

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Getting the Tour Together

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-29T10:00:00-05:00

"Why do you say this to me, when you know I will kill you for it?"

-General Zod

So the month seems to be coming to a close here. Only 2 more days until we close out moody May and move onto jumping June. It's been full of it's ups and downs, but I'm glad it's over with. I feel like a new month will be a clean slate to work off of. Plus, it's just one month away from all the good things I've been waiting for to start happening. I'm serious.

First, a bit of band news. In a world wind of dumb luck that stuck at once we got confirmation on the elusive homecoming show at Berbati's Pan. I can't wait to tear it up there, since they have one hell of a nice sound system and a big wig vibe. We also got our confirmation on a show in Olympia right before that – although hearing reports from both Jake and Calvert on playing Olympia I'm not nearly as excited about this as I was before. It's still cool, however. There is also some big weird stuff that will be happening in September with the Mouse that Roared.. something with playing on an island run by K records dudes. I need to get K to put out a mouse record, then I'd get all the chicks. Wait, no I wouldn't. Long and short is on the TMTR front all is a slice of cherry pie and a fresh cup of coffee. Couldn't ask for better things to be happening with a music project I haven't had much interest in lately.

Minmae is rolling like a steam roller. Had practice number 2 yesterday and it keeps getting better. I'm learning the limitations of the kit and finding my groove with everything. It doesn't hurt that the songs are unbelievably good. We're re-working an old number from Since Before Inertia (and My Quiet Life) called "The Sound of One Hand Clapping". It's the most fun I've had playing a song ever. We made it kind of mathy stop/go sorta thing and I go ballistic at the end. Fun fun fun. Minmae, being booked for all these mouse shows too also has an in store at Ozone set up that should be a good time too. Who could ask for more. Oh, and my hands bleed every time we play. I love it.

On the work front, things are going well too. Hard to believe, but rays of hope are shining in. First, my interview went well last week (although I'm not sure if that means anything yet). Secondly, I have a backup plan interview on Monday. Third, I have a few freelance things coming in. Susan Seubert (who's site for her photography I did a few months ago) wants to do up a nice site for her Fine Arts stuff, so that should be fun and make a bit of scratch to cover some of August's rent. In general, I'm feeling much more confident about the whole situation. It doesn't seem so hopeless anymore. I've been doing a good deal of interviewing and comps for prospective clients. May was just a dry spell I had to work through I guess. I'm still sorta broke; But I don't feel it really.

You may have noticed that connectivity to circleofthunder has been...umm..spotty at best the past few weeks. I'm contacting my host this week to say, "Uh, get your shit together or I walk." It will be a pain to switch my junk over, but I've been thinking it would be cooler to give my cash to some local Portland folk who need it. Fuck the rest of the US, what is it doing for Portland? I plan on keeping all my money I spend in state, thank you very much.

There has been a rousing discussion about Clear Channel on the PDX Pop list the past few days. Lots of good ideas and all, but I think the best approach is to make sure you never, never, ever give any money to the many headed hydra that is Clear Channel. This means boycotting their advertisers. Oh, and the RIAA scum they support. Please, just download that AC/DC record from soulseek. Friends don't let friends spend money on major label music.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Not a Dead End? Flying through the fields of Gaffney

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-27T10:00:00-05:00

I believe in second chances, because second chances believe in me.

As it turns out, I have a second interview tomorrow at a place I interviewed at last week and thought was a dead end. I suppose I shouldn't have taken the whole "We'll set up second interviews on Friday" bit so rigidly. Also, Jason, a friend of John's (who is doing our super cool tour posters) said their is an opening where he works and could get me an interview there if I wanted. So all in all, I have a few backup plans and am not keeping all of my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I have a potential freelance gig that will pay about 5k a month that I will hear back about in two weeks. And I have two interviews. I'm ready. Bring it on! I've read the interviewing bible and am prepared to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

That's not the only good news. Today Jake came by and let me borrow his ride cymbal and stand, so now I have all the parts to rock the drums. It's a sad ass kit; Sean and Josh were cracking up just looking at the monster that I created. However, let me tell you, I play the fuck out of that beast. The Floor Tom is small, has no legs, no bottom skin, and it's top skin looks 50 years old. The bassdrum has no legs and is propped up by bricks. I forgot to ask for my throne back from c-train so I played on a very high chair. I don't have any other cymbals save the ride/crash. In spite of all this, I turn it out ringo style. We (minmae) had our first practice as a new band today and although I'm a little rusty and my kit was an eyesore I think we sounded pretty damn good. We also took some pictures of ourself – err, Jill took some pictures of our dumb asses. It was great. We wore sombreros. I wore an Eyepatch. We ran down the street in a "race". We staged a 3-stooges esq "Hello...Hello...Hello!" scene where we popped out heads out of a shed in Sean's back yard. This is all in line with trying to put together a new site and press stuff announcing our new found Beatles bond. I get to be a combination of Ringo and George. Awesome.

All in all, it's turning out to be a pretty good week. Everything is going smooth. Right now my only nagging concern is that I *might* get a job, and because of that job I *might* not get to go on tour – But we'll see. Either I wont get a job, I'll get a job doing contract based work (optimal), I'll get a job and won't have to start working till I get back from tour, or I'll get a job and they will let me have 2 weeks off (no pay, of course) in July to live out my rock phantasy. It's all right, it's MY rock n' roll phantasy.

Oh yah – anybody wanna go to see FIELDS OF GAFFNEY this Friday at the blackbird? We can throw rotten tomatoes at the joggers and see the "gaffster" rock the mic. I haven't felt this good about a show since I planned to see enemy mine back in 1999. Most excellent.

-Sir Cloister "Way out of the godamn closet" Maximus III, Esq.

Frustrated with the Job Search

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-26T10:00:00-05:00

Gee, guess what? My interview last Tuesday was a waste of time and money. Imagine that?

The frustration level of the whole job hunting thing is rising to an all time high. I've been able to pin some key things down however. From what I can tell, there is nothing at all wrong with my portfolio and resume, since I do get interviews scheduled. Granted, the percentage rate is fairly low (Around 5% of all jobs I submit my resume and portfolio to get back to me to talk/set up an interview) but this can obviously be attributed to the fact that for every design job that gets posted, 1000+ designers apply, so for an employer going through all those resumes/portfolios can be a crap shoot and mine can easily be lost in a sea of 1000. Another fact is that according to things I know/read, about 75% of all jobs posted are "bunk" – that is a company is posting it to make it look like they are growing (To get their stock to rise and trick investors), or they are just covering POTENTIAL jobs (Job's that aren't open, but they want a stack of candidates ready in case somebody leaves a cosy position). So by my calculations, I'm pretty successful on the portfolio and resume front.

Where am I going wrong? The obvious answer is the job interviews. Perhaps I'm going up against potential employees that are better looking, have better clothes, better breeding (Read: Come from rich white republican families). In that case, there is nothing I can do, as I am who I am and am broke as I am. The other possibility is my job interviewing skills are rusty (witch they obviously are) and I need to improve them. So I took some time last week to read a big book on how to con job interviewers. Yes, I said CON, because that's exactly what you have to do in this crap pile of a job market. You have to pretend to be brilliant, a social genius that was in a fraternity, and mimic the personality of your interviewer. It's sad, but it has to be done. So to my resolve, the next interview I have I promise to be as fake and plastic as possible. No more Mr. Nice guy. I'm turning into robo-employee.

The other option is for the next interview I have that I feel will be pointless, is to go in totally drunk, in my pajamas, with a bomb box on my shoulder blaring fight the power. I won't get a job, but at least I'll piss off these assholes that won't give me the opportunity to work. Plus, it would be funny. I'd take pictures and post them up on COT so everybody could have a good laugh.

In other news, I'm selling a bunch of stuff on ebay once again. All you indie dorks with money still should go buy all my super l33t rare 7"'s and tapes I have for sale up today. Check it out here.

Trying to get a mish-mash drum set together. So far I've got: A snare, snare stand, throne, bass-drum, bassdrum pedal, floor tom, tom stand, and half a cymbal stand. So I'm all set on the drum front, but I desperately need cymbals. I could get away with just a ride/crash right now until I have the means to obtain hi-hats/stand and a crash. Word on the streets is that jake from tapemountain has a beat up kit he never uses. I'm going to try to see if he'll let me borrow a cymbal (if he has any?). If that's a bust I'll have to break down and order a ride/crash from somewhere, but that will cost some serious money. Well, serious money to me ($50).

A couple of shot-outs. Thanks to campcalvert for the spare drum parts he could find. Thanks to john/casey for the chicken dinner last week (as well as the new tuftees discs). Thanks to sean for the wicked minmae pin and hard work getting the tour together. Thanks to tj/nichole for helping me look for drum crap on Saturday.

End of line.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Devil's Advocate

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-20T10:00:00-05:00

Bored and dejected.. So what's new, right?

Had an interview today at a place downtown that does technical consulting for law firms. Defiantly one of the more spit and polished interviews I've been on lately – although that's not necessarily a bad thing. You see, professionals are well, professional. Considering I've been dealing with a lot of people that don't have their act together as of late, wouldn't it be nice to work for somebody that has it together? I mean, really together. Plus, it feels so sly – punk rock boy makes good with the straight and narrow day job, then rocks out by night? Of course, that could backfire and I could find myself in that horrible Keanu Reeves movie The Devils Advocate, shooting myself in the head to keep from producing the spawn of Satan with my sister. But I digress.

Speaking of good old Keanu, I saw the Matrix II on Monday with Jen, the professor and vaeg. I tried to sneak a candy bar in the theater so avoid paying $20 for a Dixie cup of pop corn but my dumb ass let it melt to syrup in my pocket. Foolish mortal. Unfortunately, nobody can be told about the Matrix II: Reloaded. You have to see it for yourself. Ok, not really. It was ok. Not great or anything, but compared to the rest of the junk Hollywood is pumping out these days pretty darn good. It's Worth five dollars I suppose. It looks cool at least.

Much more entertaining (and much more free) is homestarrunner.com. Specifically, the strong bad email's section. There are about 100 of them in there and each one is the kind of funny that would make Keith laugh so hard he'd pass out and wreck his car. Strangely, I'm so out of the loop apparently everybody has known about this for a while and I just found out about it Monday. Man, I'm slow.

What else. Oh yes! I'm on a normal dude schedule now. I woke up at 8:30 AM today and plan on going to bad around 1AM. I think I've finally broken the habit of staying up till 6AM and sleeping till 1PM. Now, this doesn't do me much good since these days I haven't had the need to be up at a decent hour – but it is however more of a morale sort of thing. You feel like less of a looser.

I have some more, err, personal things on my mind right now but they seem out of place in a blog. Seriously. I'll spill my guts about what I ate for lunch, but other things are too weird to discuss in front of a live not studio audience. And balls to that.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Meditating to SG1

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-18T10:00:00-05:00

As much as I like hanging out at Holmans in SE, I've discovered that every time I go there I come home smelling like the place. Perhaps it's the poor ventilation system or general scummyness, but my jacket smells like a 90 year old mans house every time I go there. Oh well. That's what washing machines are for I suppose.

I've updated the album of the week, so how about downloading some tracks from last weeks rad() session to be wisked away to the land of rad().

It's been a slow couple of days for sure. There haven't been any potential jobs posted, and I've been siting around the house watching he-man. Not that new fangled 2k2 junk that cartoon network airs, but the real mccoy 80's show. I've also taken up a new hobby – the 7PM nap. I just start watching some boring show like SG1, sit back in my chair, put my feet up, and doze off for about 40 minutes. I wake up feeling refreshed and ready for another 8 hours of doing diddly squat.

The plan for tomorrow is to see The Matrix II at the rush hour show. I'm thinking about making up a fake student ID to shave a couple bucks off the price of admission. Might as well put those design skills to use, right?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Internet Woes

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-16T10:00:00-05:00

Internet woes have been striking in droves the past couple of days.

First, some people have mentioned the fact that circleofthunder.com has been unreachable and applications that depend on the cot domain haven't been working correctly. From what I can tell this seems to be a symptom of bad DNS lookups. The problem is that I'm not sure who to blame for this. It could either be my current host (who shall remain nameless) is running a fly by night operation and their name servers aren't working 100%, or perhaps the domain name itself isn't being propagated correctly (so I could blame either Verisign/netsol or bad luck with people's name servers).

See, this whole ordeal wouldn't bother me that much if it were not for the fact that I depend on cot being available so companies can look at my portfolio (as well as potential clients). I just cannot have this – not in these times of economic strife. So I'm debating on switching hosts just to rule out the possibility that it could be my host's fault. Right now I think I'll play a waiting game. If it happens again any time soon, I'm switching hosts. I cannot have ANY downtime here. You might call cot "mission critical". That is, it's critical to my mission of paying rent.

Another unfortunate side effect of this has been that google (which had sort of indexed cot and had it in it's roster) has removed me from the search results. This is because the googlebot most likely came along to index my site, it was unreachable, so it removed it from the google list (thinking it was gone). That sucks since I think there is a lot of content on cot that might my valuable or interesting to people. How will they find it if my site isn't searchable from google?

So why not just switch hosts now and get it over with? Well, right now all seems to be working fine. If I was to switch hosts right now, I would have about 3-5 days of downtime while the name resolves again, my email works, and the setup time involved with that. As I have important stuff coming to my email address here, and need my portfolio available, this is unacceptable as well.

The icing on the cake is that comcast (formerly at&t broadband) has been sucking like nobody's business. I've had more downtime lately than I ever remember having before. Last night my net connection was down for about 6 hours. It's a good thing comcast bought at&t broadband to serve me better. Fuckers.

In non-internet news, it seems that I may be playing with Minmae full time (so to speak). Details are still to be worked out, but the long and short of it is that after our tour in July, The Mouse that Roared will be on hiatus. I would actually rather spend my energies on the whole Minmae thing. After playing together last weekend I think we all came to the conclusion that the 3 of us make a pretty kick ass team, and that together we can crank out good stuff in mass quantity. I think we all click together well – and as everybody knows I think that Minmae is where the rock is at right now. Also, I really like the idea of three guys being REALLY focused on one thing and one thing only. You see, the problem with the Mouse that Roared is that it's essentially my little side project with people that act as a back up band. Everybody else in TMTR has their own thing going on and I'm sure they would like to focus on their own music more than mine. With Minmae, Sean and Josh are both dedicated to Minmae, and only Minmae. That's way cool. So, I figure I should be dedicated too. Long live Minmae! Death to the oppressors!

Other cool happenings (that are somewhat in line with the last bit of rambling) is that Belloq is going to be on a comp. The very spastic and generous Brian Miller from Deathbomb Arc/Rose 4 Bohdan is going to put the first song off the Belloq CD on a comp he's putting out. I'm not sure when this will be done, but as soon as it is, you should go buy the comp. Or download it from soulseak, you cheap fuck. Brain will also most likely be putting out a Minmae 7" sometime in the next month or so that should include a few tracks from last weekend's rad() project (witch is now under the Minmae name, of course). I'm stoked about that prospect to because It's been a long time since I've had anything I've done pressed to vinyl. And I'm a vinyl nut.

My current future plans involve the following:

Go out drinking with Calvert/TJ/Keith/Nick/Etc sometime this weekend
See the Matrix II sometime next week (Monday/Tuesday)
Have dinner over at John and Casey's Wednesday night
Play mini-golf sometime next week with Jen. Mini-golf ownz j00!

End of line.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Working on Jams at the Kelly House

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-13T10:00:00-05:00

Well, it seems that my original idea of making a journal entry every day is a bust. I do have a good reason for not making one in a while; I've been insanely busy (as opposed to my normal regiment of being bored and sitting around the house).

Where to start.

Most of the weekend was spent over at the Kelly house working on some songs. I teamed up with Sean and Josh to work on what was, for all intensive purposes, new Minmae material. Working under the pet project name Rad() we cranked out 10 songs. They are all great songs. I'm not just saying that because it's something I was involved with. They really are pop gems. Most of them only clock in at 2 minutes a pop (miles apart from Belloq's laborious 10 minute drones) and are mind bending.

I've been kind of hoping somebody would pop on messenger so I could send them the mp3's to get some feedback, but no dice. I think this is mainly due to the fact that all the "yos" are switching yet AGAIN to another client (AIM). It's getting pretty annoying. I think I'll just go back to ICQ, so at least I don't have to see microsofts lame fisher price people in the bottom of my screen. Or maybe TJ's jabber server is squared away now?

Still trying to figure out what we'll do about the homecoming show, since Berbatis seems to be giving me the blow off routine and the Blackbird said they couldn't do it. What the hell? We had no troubles booking shows out of town, but to play in our own town is an ordeal for some reason. I guess my tits aren't big enough.

What else – Oh yah, I attended the Minor Thirds CD-Release party (for a disc I hit a key on the casio SK1 and played some sloppy guitar on). It was good. The Tuftees played and I got to see them throw down with their new monster drummer, who did it up nicely coffee house style with brushes. I also got in for free somehow, but wound up giving them three dollars anyway on a super weak glass of Canadian wisky.

Thats about it. Other than that it's all status quo.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Flash Sandbox

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-07T10:00:00-05:00

...The last thing I saw was a big long saw – I got the cut in half blues....

Bloging for Jesus...

The day started off with such lofty goals. I was planning on cleaning up my home office, organizing my copies of 2600 Magazine, and finishing a whole level for my new video game.

Then TJ came over.

Needless to say, I got sidetracked by one of our typical uber-geek ideas. I was telling him about my woes with the new Macromedia Flash Sandbox, and how I could do great things with Jabber and XML sockets if only flash let me connect to a Jabber server outside of the Circleofthunder domain. TJ then figured, "Well, why don't I run a Jabber server on my FreeBSD box at home, and then you place your flash apps on my server; problem solved, right?"

Right!

So we fiddled around with getting a Jabber server up and running on his BSD machine at home via SSH sessions on my crummy busted-ass laptop. After about 9 hours of head scratching and confusion, we got the sucker up and running 100%. It's a beautiful thing to behold. Today I think I'll spend some time writing a quick demo application to test things out. I was thinking of either writing a multi-user version of Battleship or Tic-Tac-Toe that allows two players on different machines across the net to play head to head in real time. Oh, and there will be a chat window too! Once your running your own Jabber server, the world is your oyster... so to speak.

Another cool thing, in case your out of the loop, is TJ's new Photoswap 1.0. It's some neat stuff. It's a little bit like COT's photo gallery from back in the day, with the cool exception of allowing joe schmoe users to upload their own pictures on the fly. There is a bad ass picture from the Mouse that Roared tour of South Vietnam. I'm not kidding. They love the hell out of me over there.

Nothing else new here. Might do a little recording this weekend, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Typical Day

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-06T10:00:00-05:00

So I spent most of the day working on the mario game. Funny thing is that I didn't get much of anything done on it. I think I may have a slight case of design block right now. Every time I would try to draw a piece of scenery for the first level, my brain just locked up and I couldn't get anywhere with it. Weird.

So instead, I just did the usual. Checked usenet, downloaded some movies, read the job boards 100 times, got mad, moved on.

Would you believe, bored?

-Sir Cloister Maximus, III, Esq.

Re-creating Super Mario Brothers in Flash

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-05T10:00:00-05:00

It's just another manic Monday.

I've been high tailing on my newest flash project. It's going to be a game that operates on much of the same physics of super mario brothers. Why do something like this? Well, for one I have tons of time to kill. I could either sit around watching TV, or I could try to keep my skills on par by giving myself little projects that will keep me alert. The other reason is that it's fun to try to recreate the workings of a classic game with the smallest and most efficient use of code you can. It's pretty nice actually.

I was going to post up a alpha of it on the site, but right now there are really no graphics. The code works brilliantly, but I haven't built a demo level or dome any preliminary designs on look of the game or anything. Perhaps in a day or two I'll put something up everybody can take a look at.

I also had an idea for a new music side project today called "rad()". I've been listening to all these mega pop hit's from the 60's and a lot of seeds have been planted in my head that primarily revolve around the idea of minimalist. I think most of the stuff I've done recently has been to crowded and doesn't give songs any breathing room. Like, for instance, why does the guitar have to come in right away? How about a whole verse of just bass and drums? Guitar bands are wack. Is that the best we can do with rock music? Play guitars? Why not have an accordion as the main instrument? Or a harmonica? Or the Bass? I'm all about thinking outside of the box now.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Hasselhoff Review

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-04T10:00:00-05:00

......The songs of Daunting Hangover send trembles down my spine the way too much chili greets the toilet with happy tidings of corn husks. My CD-player/alarm clock wakes me up each bright, sunny morning to the breathy rasps of the most talented singer/actor/songwriter/vacuum cleaner salesman of the 90's, and immediately I know that if I stay in bed much longer, Darwin Hockenfogle's lyrical barrage will stun me into utter immobility, so thanks to him, I have a long, full and productive day, as I'm perpetually wary of going to bed lest I wake up once again to the melodious dog-chants of Doobie Horkleblarble as he without fail stimulates me to rise from the bed the same way moist mushrooms and adolescent larva rise from month-old haggis in the basement.....

- A review of the Looking For-Best of David Hasselhoff CD.

For a total of 600+ reviews of this CD, all apparently written by the same genius, take a look on amazon.

So you hosers – Jen and I watched the Strange Brew DVD I got yesterday. I tried to get a little party together to watch it with a couple of amigo's, but as it turns out nobody wanted to come over and watch a classic. Coo-Coo-Coo-Coo!!

I also spent a little time working on a new game project. More on this later.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Hogtied at a Party

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-03T10:00:00-05:00

My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the time.

Prolific words from one Eddie Murphy. I didn't know he wrote that song, did you?

Went out to a little party tonight. It was a good time. Lots of beer. Lots of mind altering substances floating around the room that gave me a little bit of a contact buzz. Some funny things that happened: When I set my beer down on my leg and beer shot out on my crotch and made it look like I pissed my pants – John being so baked his eyes were only 3 microns wide – Sean singing "hogtied" without accompaniment to a room full of stoned people.

I tried to get some people to come out to the party, but everybody seemed to have plans that didn't involve leaving the house. I can't blame them, as I'm not a big fan of parties myself. But I had a good time none the less. Also, I was talking to somebody at the part that had actually seen the Mouse that Roared play live. How freaky is that? A guy I didn't know, none the less.

Nevermind the Bullocks, here's the Mouse that Roared.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Top 10 Reasons I Hate/Love Flash

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-02T10:00:00-05:00

What an uneventful day.

I had the best intentions of working on a few things today, but as it turns out I did nothing. I couldn't even tell you where the time went. It seems that I woke up, read some actionscript documentation/whitepapers, and next thing I knew it was 3 A.M.

Just to vent a little bit, I really hate flash sometimes. There are so many things that make it a pain to deal with, it's not funny. Yesterday it was the sandbox issue where flash can't access data outside it's own domain, and today it was the realization that flash is just too damn slow to use for fast paced action games. Here is my top 10 reasons I love and hate flash:

Top 10 Reasons I Hate Flash:

10. Poor buffering of streaming mp3's

9. Inability for projectors to launch files outside of the root directory of the Flash movie

8. Lack of "onload" feature for Loadvariables()

7. Lack of video support

6. Separation of Movieclip and Button class objects

5. Unexpandable work area

4. Usage of flash in advertisements

3. Even after you set line to none, it goes back to black once you click something

2. New "sandbox" security protocol in Flash MX that is retroactive

1. Extremely slow screen re-draw

Top 10 Reasons I Love Flash:

10. Easy to understand

9. Built in sound mixer

8. Scalable vector graphics that can be drawn on the fly

7. Ability to stream mp3's and pull JPG's in on the fly

6. Ability to pull/push data from server based applications

5. Ability to export as a stand alone executable

4. XML Socket support

3. Support for PNG's and TRUE alpha channels

2. Most cross platform multimedia development tool there is

1. Actionscript, Actionscript, Actionscript

On this whole note, here is an open letter I wrote about a year ago on the adoption of flash for front ends to new web technologies. It's fairly venomous, but it was so into a hostile email I had gotten from a company I was freelanceing for at the time.

Flash Findings: Debunking the Myths by Stephen Kozik

What follows is a slightly modfied rant that I sent as an email to a client concerned about using flash for a front end interface to their flasgship product as opposed to DHTML. Hopefully this can provide some insight to people that don't fully understand the potental uses for Flash and are currently believing some common myths as truths:

.....

Most of the things that concern clients and other developers about the prospect of using Flash for a project are either untrue or not of concern. Please excuse the rant/angry tone of this – but there are alot of misconceptions about Flash that make me angry. I've been hearing them a while from people on slashdot. There is alot of ignorance surrounding Flash and I'm here to debunk this.

1. Closed source

Not entirely true. The Flash file structure is actually quite open and the specifications are available freely from Macromedia. Anyone can write a program that creates flash files or a flash player. As example, there is Adobe Livemotion (www.adobe.com) that creates flash content. If flash is closed source in a traditional Microsoft sense, why does Macromedia's biggest competitor, Adobe, have a flash authoring tool? There are also other open source flash authoring environments available, just poke around freshmeat.net and you can see for yourself. It may not be full on GPL/BSD open source, but the specifications are available – unlike almost every other closed source format/application out there today. This is a non-issue anyway. Is your project itself open source? Didn't think so.

2. Breaks Browser paradigm

o Back/Forward buttons

You shouldn't even have a need to hit back in a browser any more. The web has seriously advanced since the days of HTML 1.0 and Mosaic. If a site is laid out correctly, all desired information should be availble to the user with one mouse click, removing the need for a back button. People need to stop thinking so linear and look at a site or project on an interactive three dimensional level.

For those that need this functionality, one can easy write some javascript that will make the back button on browsers inoperative and even bring up an alert dialog that blocks those buttons, or passes variables to flash to allow flash to acutally go "back".

o Printing

Untrue. You sure can print from flash.. I've built this feature into a flash application before. If the developer isn't a 16 year old script kidde, Flash is an EXTREMELY powerful tool. It amazes me sometimes.

o Scroll mouse

I think Macromedia has addressed this in Flash MX that just came out. We can move to that version if this issue is that serious.

o Cut and paste

Once again, a good programmer knows how to code his own routines.

on (key press) if (key.down="X" and key.down=CONTROL) { mdm.clipboard = this.selection; this.selection = ""; telltarget ("alertbox") goto and play ("selectedtextcut"); end telltaget } end on

Easy as proverbial pie. What I'm saying here is, yah. You can cut and paste in flash.

3. Performance

Ok, this is an area I make no excuses for Flash on. I hate how slow flash can be myself. I try to push the envelope with all of my flash work, and envelope is constantly pushing back on me in terms of available processor power.

Make no mistake, Flash is a poorly written app in terms of optimization. Sometimes I wonder if the damn thing was written in Java it's so godawfull slow. But, when you have been working with it as long as I have, you begin to understand it's shortcomings, and develop around them.

o CPU

The CPU performance on a well designed interface shouldn't be that bad. I say this because we are talking about minimal animation, and limited use of the things that make flash chew up cycle time (Alpha channels, extreme scaling, raster images). I am aware of the trials and tribulations involved with getting a flash application to run quickly. Been there, done that.

o Memory

I never saw flash as a serious memory hog. It's memory payload is downright microscopic in comparison to Mozilla. One time I had a session of Mozilla that was eating 115 Megs. And I was just viewing a text html page. I don't think this is a concern.

o 56k modem concerns

You should bless that saints when it comes to file size in flash. This is the one thing flash excels at over HTML. Think about this for a second.

WebSite (HTML Version): ––––––––––––––––––- Average HTML size generated per page: 40k Size of entire image directory: 120k Number of pages: Infinite (All data is refreshed and re-loaded) Average number of pages per session: 34

34 x 40 = 1360 k + 120 k for images ––––––––- 1.5 Megs Total

WebSite (Flash Version): Average data size for XML socket: 10k Size of entire flash application: 140k Number of pages: Infinite Average number of XML sends per session: 34

34 x 10 = 340k + 140k for flash app –––––––––– 480k Total

Hope this clears things up. Besides the fact that flash streams, and can have pre loaders. Man, HTML is weak.

4. Mozilla support

Umm, this is a non-issue. If it has a flash plug in available to it, it will work on that browser. This includes Konquerer, iCab, Opera, and any other browser that supports plug ins you can think of. Since we are using XML socket connections, this overrides the old technical problems with browser/plug in communication (See Netscape 4.7's POST problem for details) You get a %700 increase in compatibility when you ditch cross-platform DHTML that is dependent on everybody's lame idea of a DOM, and got with a plug in, that in it's own way, is it's own browser.

5. Security

o SSL

If you can establish as SSL session in HTML, you can do it with flash as well. Also, on top of this, you can easily write in IP range filters into a Java server like Websphere to only allow XML socket connections with clients that are in a specific IP range (I.E. the range of the companies Intranet). I don't know much about encrypting XML socket data, but I'm sure it can be done, like most other things.

o Session/Cookie

Flash can set and read cookies just like HTML/javascript. Amazing.

6. Development

o Internationalization (no Unicode support)

Everything you are currently doing with a HTML version, you can do in a flash version as well. If you can write out HTML that is in a specific language, you can do the same thing with XML. Remember, the flash application is just a UI shell –- all the data (text and such) is populated by the XML data the server sends over the socket. Viola! Problem solved.

o Lack of libraries (you have to build your own scroll bars, etc)

To a normal person, this is a downside. To a graphic artist, this is a godsend. I LOVE the fact that I can design my own UI elements (Scrollbars, Buttons, widgets, menus) and not have to use the "default" look and feel the users browser/os/window manager/toolkit provides. It's a beautiful thing. It allows uniformity where none once existed. It's elegant. I can't come up with enough adjectives to describe how neat this truly is. It's pretty much what all developers (The professionals, at least) have wanted since day one of the web's existence.

–––––

To sum up, there are so many positives to using flash over DHTML for this sort of thing that, as I've said before, you would have to be crazy NOT to write the front end for an application in flash. Points in case:

1) Real time (And I mean REAL TIME!) updating of data – possibly even to the second. No ugly re-draws, no "page refreshing", no table tricks, no waiting on pages to load. Using XML sockets in flash provides the best way to present ever changing data tables.

2) Constant UI to what the user is used to – Sure, there are DHTML hacks to present data in nested trees and the like, but they are just that; hacks. Flash provides a way to present the user with a common ground, an application that mimics their desktop. Explorer/Mac OS style tree navigation, windowed data that is movable, re sizable, minimizable. Drop-down menu navigation like common windowed applications. Effortless data updates.

3) Graphical data that seems alive – In our current method we have graphs and such that are drawn out of images and HTML and are "refreshed" to represent the change in data. Visualize what that currently looks like. Now image those graphs and charts moving fluidly, and an alive and animated nature. This is what that data will look like under flash.

Basically, when talking about flash vs. html, we have one major problem.

Amateur Flash developers make Flash looks bad.

From the sound of the comments I hear often, it looks like somebody has been burned by flash before. Let me tell you, in the hands of an amateur, any tool will look amateur. In the hands of a professional however...

Many of the things that give users grief over flash have nothing to do with flash at all. Their grief is with the developers, not the application itself. Here are a couple points:

USER A) "Man. I hate flash. These damn flash sites. I'm not going to wait for your 700k flash file to load. go to hell"

Damn right. I wouldn't wait for a 700k flash file either. There is no reason flash sites, or ANY site, should be bigger than 250k or so. If the designer has no concept of optimization or bandwidth, I bet their HTML site would be 700k too! "Poor usage of bandwidth does not a bad tool flash make", says Yoda.

USER B) "Flash sucks. I hate sites written in flash because I cant bookmark a damn page in the site! Grrrr! And my back button just makes the page reload!"

Well, two things here. Number one, if the site was developed along the old-school model (AKA: Section A- Content/Navigation/Section B- Content - sub content B.1) and you can't bookmark it - go back, you should be mad. There are ways to develop and deploy a flash site that is modular and allows for bookmarking and back tracking.

Number two, if the flash site does not follow the old model of third-generation www sites (See above) and uses a new convention - AKA dynamic content as generated by user input (See Application) then, bookmarks and the lot become irrelevant. Can you hit the back button in Quake III Arena when somebody shoots you? (Oops! I didn't want to die. Take it back please. Im a baby) Can you "bookmark" a spot in a Q3 map because you think it looks neat?

USER C) "SKIP INTRO! Dumb animations. I just want the content, not some lame choppy animation. Flash sucks"

First, I can't remember the last time I made a "intro" for a site. It might have been 1995, but I can't remember clearly.

This is just a case of people not understanding what Flash is capable of and only seeing it's MISUSES, not it's potential. With Flash, there are ways to truely enhance the user experice and allow the retrevial of actual content much easier, not harder. Once again, don't blame the recipe of the stew because a bad cook made it.

I could go on forever about this. Maybe I'll write a book someday called "Debunking Macromedia Flash Myths for Dummies". Until then, you have this to read and digest.

Cheerio.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Habbo Hotel

Stephen Kozik — 2003-05-01T10:00:00-05:00

OK everybody. Forget Messenger – This is where we need to hang out:

Habbo Hotel

I actually knew about this for a while, but I sort of filed in the back of my brain and forgot about it until I started working on this Q-link project and have been thinking about how cool Club Carribie was. Essentially, it's virtual world where you have an avatar (icon representation of yourself) and you can walk around the hotel that is unimaginably large, chat, play games, and do things like dance. It's pretty darn impressive. I'm recommending everybody make an account there and take a look around.

The first public beta of my Q-link simulator is uploaded. It's pretty basic right now – you can create an account and joining the public chat forum that uses a Jabber server located in England. If your wondering why it's in executable form, it's because of this blasted new "sandbox" policy with Flash MX that doesn't allow flash movies to access data streams outside of the originating domain. It's seriously a pain in the ass for developers and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Thanks a bunch Macromedia. You sure do know how to make your customers hate you.

If you're not running Windows or MacOS X you can always download the zip that contains the swf and html wrapper. It will allow you to access the Jabber XML socket from your browser. It's just when it's on a "site" (not local) that it won't connect.

I'm sure nobody will understand why I've been working on this once they see it, but I'm an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Or something.

Sitting around the house, watching my facial hair grow. I need to shave. I need to work. I need to leave the house. I think once this check from Aaron arrives I'll have to go out with the yo's. TJ gets a check to, so he justified in splurging a bit too. It's a sad state of affairs.

Still no word from Berbati's. Will the homecoming show be there, or will we have to book it at the Blackbird instead? Who knows what bookers want. Besides a shtick I guess. I think my honesty gets in the way of business.

Still no word from this potential steady freelance job. Perhaps the logos I did for them are flawed in some way? I don't know. I'm just playing the waiting game on all fronts.

I hope the Journal works right, seeing as how it's a new month and everything. Yikes.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

PS - Fuck you Google. Index my site already. I've seen your robot sleezing around in my logs, but you can't seem to get something as simple as circleofthunder to show up in a search query. At least Slashdot is on the ball.

Quick Notes

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-30T10:00:00-05:00

Quick notes about the 30th.

I didn't put in a entry for this day since I was so involved with writing my Q-link clone using Jabber. It was fun fun fun. More on this tommorow.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Re-creating Q-Link Day Two

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-29T10:00:00-05:00

...Really love your peaches want to shake your tree...

Not knowing when to leave well enough alone, I delved back into the twisted world of q-link today. My brain is starting to melt, seriously. But I made some progress – just don't know how much more I can make before I'll have to give up.

I put up a screenshot of my desktop today. You can see from the vice window that I've got q-link tricked into greeting me while it "logs on". The key to this whole mess was a simple reverse engineer of the logon procedure via Telenet/Tymenet/SprintNet. Here is how it works:

Give modem a carrier:
Modem output = "TERMINAL="
(Send this to the client. It's your typical telenet prompt)
Qlinkink output="d1"
(Qlink set's terminal mode to D1 – no idea what this is)
Qlink output ="set? 10:0,15:0,0:33,51:1,63:0"
(Qlink client sets some wierd mode.  I assume this is stop bit, parity, etc)
Qlink output ="connect 70339.87"
(Qlink client asks to be connected to node 70339.87 - Q-links mainframe)
Modem output = "connected"
(Tell q-link, "Cool, your connected. Go nuts)

And that's the extent of it. The rest appears to be driven by machine language. I still haven't found the code that communicates with q-link. I've tried nearly everything; Looking for JSR's to the Chkin kernel routine, LDA pulls from the RS232 Buffer, etc. No luck yet.

Some interesting notes I've taken down so far in my search:

Junk that q-link client spits out of the modem once connected:

X.4.gQLINK
QUANTUMLINK
IDENTIFIER
A
.

Wha?

once connected, basic loops on this line: 650 sys39616:gosub15000:p=peek(782):ifp<>0andp<10then650:rem

call code at 39616
gosub (cycle colors in logo)
loop if y register is less than 10

$30e > 9 to continue (the y register)
$cedd is SPECIAL (TK goes into it???)

A memory dump that looks intreguing:


>C:0200  89 36 36 30  41 49 54 49   .660AITI
>C:0208  4e 47 20 81  20 41 43 43   NG . ACC
>C:0210  45 53 53 20  a4 20 ab 49   ESS . .I
>C:0218  4e 4b 21 00  d1 00 cc 49   NK!....I
>C:0220  4e 4b 21 00  49 4e 54 3a   NK!.INT:
>C:0228  52 45 54 55  52 4e 00 00   RETURN..
>C:0230  4e 45 58 54  3a 4e 45 58   NEXT:NEX
>C:0238  54 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   T.......

$4000 - Looks like some stuff (text modem junk)

$4500 - Has messages that go to screen from ml proggie (Welcome to Q-link! Your account information is being verified // Disconnected hit f5 for basic)

sys39616 $9ac0

.C:9ac0   A5 01      LDA $01     ;load bankswitch into A
.C:9ac2   A2 24      LDX #$24    ;load X with $24
.C:9ac4   86 01      STX $01     ;store X into bankswitch (switch off basic)
.C:9ac6   AC B5 B9   LDY $B9B5   ;snag the y value from $b9b5
.C:9ac9   85 01      STA $01     ;restore bank switch
.C:9acb   60         RTS         ;hop back into basic


fill $b9b5 $b9b5 $0b -  Causes "The Attemt to Reach q-link has failed, f5 for basic"

$9e00 RS232 Output Buffer (Good)

$9f00 RS232 Input Buffer (Good)

There is code/text under both the basic and kernal roms, witch makes things – uh – difficult to say the least.

In other news, I sold all my ebay junk today for a total of $350. Not too shabby. I think in a day or two I'll put up some of my 7"'s up for auction (The rare ones worth about $20 a pop that I payed $2.50 back in 1995. Indie Rock Fools!). And if my ebay karma is up I'll try and sell some of my bootleg video tapes I bought from ebay last year. I obviously don't need those anymore.

Still need to add new functions to journal.pl. Damnit.

Lovey-Lovey-Lovey-Dovey all the Time...

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Q-Link Memories

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-28T10:00:00-05:00

....I met you in somebody's island, you thought you had known me before. I brought you a crate of papaya that waited outside your door...

Jungle love is driving me mad, it's making me crazy.

Time is running out before I have to make an update to the perl program that drives the Journal here. I have to add a "month" feature so when April is over you can flip between months as well as days. Tomorrow is that last day in April (d'oh!).

So I've made some progress on the q-link project, but came to a dead stop. I've come to the conclusion that option C is the most viable now. Here is why:

First, the good news, I've got some good documentation on the files on the q-link disc and how they work. Some of this is disassembled 6510, so you have been warned.

* (QUANTUM) - 6E Bytes (110) - 02CD Load (717) - 51 Bytes is code: DSC DER2 (At end is ASK)

DSC - 4k - 9ff8 (40952) End of Basic Memory - ASM - Possibly the Fast Loader / De-Compressor? (when this is called (jmp $9ff8) I would assume a filename (or group) is set in memory somewhere, and then a jmp point is queried? Perhaps it decompresses them too?). Lets assume the filename is put into 821 - 827 (Free user space) ($0335) // 52957 - TK values for loaded (132 for tlk). Putting filename in there and calling routine $9ff8 loads and runs file (for instance, ask)

ASK - 0a Bytes (1) - 0110 Load (tape input error log) - 1704/1702/1806/1703/1701/END/FINISH
CONVERT - LOADS NORMAL SYS BASIC - Looks like Something for GEOS?
CHANGE ACCESS - SELF BOOT for Access Change
DMO - Demo - 1704/1702/1806/1703/1701
REG - Registration (change access numbers n shit)
MMM - Main menu
SPRINT - Loads Normal SYS basic - CBM Sequential File Printer
9901 - Looks like assembly - $1000 Start
0002 - Looks like assembly - $1000 Start
TLK - File Loading Instructions for the People Connection
ACC - Service Center
C64 - Commdore Zone?
FUN - Fun and Games
INF - Information
LIB - Library
LRN - Learning Center
STP - >> From menu
BTL - Sea Strike (AKA Battleship)
HMN - Hangman

ML FOR QUANTUM:

.C:02cd   A9 EA      LDA #$EA
.C:02cf   8D 28 03   STA $0328
; Kernal stop routine High Byte?
.C:02d2   A9 02      LDA #$02
.C:02d4   8D 20 D0   STA $D020
.C:02d7   8D 21 D0   STA $D021
; Turn Screen Red
.C:02da   A9 0B      LDA #$0B
.C:02dc   8D 11 D0   STA $D011
; Blank Screen (Faster Loading)
.C:02df   A9 07      LDA #$07
.C:02e1   A2 08      LDX #$08
.C:02e3   A0 01      LDY #$01
.C:02e5   20 BA FF   JSR $FFBA
; setlfs (set logical, first, and second addresses
.C:02e8   A9 03      LDA #$03
.C:02ea   A0 02      LDY #$02
.C:02ec   A2 F9      LDX #$F9
.C:02ee   20 BD FF   JSR $FFBD
; setfilename (location of filename and length)
.C:02f1   A9 00      LDA #$00
.C:02f3   20 D5 FF   JSR $FFD5
; load file
.C:02f6   4C F8 9F   JMP $9FF8
; execute code

Summary:
Turns Screen Red
Blanks Screen
Loads "DSC",8,1
sys 40952 ($9ff8)

Essentially, if you poke the filename stump you want to load (poke 821, asc("T"):poke 822, asc("L"):poke 823, asc("K")) then load "DSC" and execute it (sys 40952) it will load any section you want, skipping the dial up procedure. The bad news is the core items are written in assembly and would be a serious pain to re-write to connect to alternative serve. That's why I've opted for option C and re-write the fucker in flash and XML.

As far as that's concerned, I found the perfect way to do it. I plan on using an open source protocol and server network called Jabber (Linux dorks should be familiar with this). I found a guy that actually has pre-written a Jabber API in action script, so I'm gold there. I just have to pass commands to Jabber via the API. I already have a good deal of the screen routines done from an elementary commodore 64 emulator I wrote in action script a few months ago. Maybe in a day or two I'll post up a beta that people can play with. Trust me guys – this will be cool as hell.

In other news, I had a job interview/meeting that went well today. I'm doing a "test" job for something that might pan out to about 20 hours a month from Portland company that does system on a chip IC's for displays. That coupled with my current work load should take care of the bills an keep me from having to worry about selling work. Some temporary relief is in sight y'all.

-Sir Cloister "Space Cowboy" Maximus III, Esq.

Re-creating Q-Link Thoughts

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-27T10:00:00-05:00

..but it's so damn easy making love to you....

This is going be SO boring to everyone that isn't a complete nerd.

Having taken care of most of the stuff I needed to do today (construct a printed portfolio, hotsync my palm, cut my hair, laundry) I had some downtime. It always gets the best of me. I start thinking about stupid stuff, and my mind wanders back to 1990.

In 1990, I was the biggest nerd in the world. Well, OK, perhaps not the world, but certainly in my neighborhood. I was highly addicted to Vess Soda (Ozzy Smith says JUST WISTLE!), Alan Parsons Project's greatest hits CD, and Q-link. Q-link, for those who don't know (everybody), was one of the first commercial online services available to the public. Targeted towards Commodore 64 users (I was one) it used the now obsolete Telenet System (Not to be confused with telnet witch is a different thing all together) back in the budding days of the commercial Internet. The way it worked was you had a software disk for you Commodore that will use a modem (300 Baud) to dial up a local Telenet Hub. Once connected, a series of handshakes would commence, and the local Telenet hub would connect you to the node specified via the internet. The hub was Q-link's telenet hub, and the software provided a front end interface to things like multi-user chat, download section, encyclopedia, email, and games. It was a lot like AOL – Witch should be no surprise since Q-link, once taken over by Steve Case, became AOL around 1992.

The neatest thing about Q-link at the time was a "game" called Club Carrabie (Formerly known as Habitat). Basically, you chose an avatar (like The Sims) and could walk around a virtual world and interact with other avatars who were Q-link users in real time. For a 13 year old with gobs of social problems, you cannot imagine who incredibly cool this was. There are a few things around these days that are similar (Habo Hotel comes to mind), but every once and a while I get the urge to just hop into Club Carabie for a bit and see what everybody is up to.

That's where today's project comes in. I started working on this a while back, but got frustrated and took a break from it. My idea is that I can either:

a) Reverse-Engineer the Q-link/Telenet protocol and write a server that can act as a Q-link hub, so my commodore could connect to it via a modem the same way I would have with Q-link

b) Hack the original Q-link code to connect to a mini-getty proxy process that would connect the Q-link program to IRC and IRC could act as a relay between clients

c) Create an emulation of the system via Flash MX and some sort of Java XML Socket server.

So I kludged through some of the Q-link code to day (client side – NOBODY has a copy of the server software – more on this later). This was pretty easy since believe it or not, the client is mainly written in basic. A quick hop into my monitor in VICE like this:

>m $0328
>fill $0328 $0328 ED

Viola! run/stop now works and I could break the program. From there, I saved out the code to a blank disk, took the blank disc and extracted the program via Star Commander, then converted the tokenized basic to ASCII with petasci. Now I have the code I can look at and start to comment. I didn't get too far, but here is some interesting bits:

 9808 i=i+1:ifb=135then5
 9810 ifr$<>"terminal="then9806
 9812 gosub41400:r$=""
 9814 print#2,"d1"
 9816 gosub41400
 9818 ifb=135then5
 9820 ifr$<>"`"then9816
 9822 gosub41400:r$=""
 9824 print#2,"set? 10:0,15:0,0:33,57:1,63:0"

Essentialy, I can now see how the q-link front end is establishing a connection with the telenet node. The set command is setting parity, stop bits, terminal emulation, etc. How do I know this? Phrack! That's right, I found some back issue of phrack that have some juicy info on Telenet systems. It was unfortunately written by a 12 year old so it's more interesting in cracking the system, but it's still good info to have.

Doing research on the actual Q-link protocol, I found some shit in the usenet archives that makes me think this might be near to impossible. Here is an excerpt:

The system (PlayNet and QLink) was actually quite sophisticated. It was run by programs written in a multi-tasking state-machine language. (Yes, your C64 was multi-tasking when doing this - N state-machine tasks plus the "main" (basic/etc) task, which ran the game or whatever if needed. Things like Online messages caused a new task to be started.) The communications protocol was designed (by me) to error-correct the X.25 pad<->modem link, obey a limit on packet size (128?), and minimize the number of packets (since we were charged both by the hour and the packet back then). It used CRC error-checking (yes, in a C64), asymmetric sliding-windows, piggybacked-acks, selective retransmit, etc. It may be that this protocol continued (continues?) to be used in modified form in AOL, from what an AOL engineer told me shortly after QuantumLink launched AOL. I also wrote the fast-loader (which hid itself under the screen ram when not in use, and used huffman compression of all files to help speed loads) and other bits like the server side of the BBS (news-sort-of) section (my original rejected design was much more like News; amusing since I hadn't seen News at that point).

The server side ran (and runs) under Stratus VOS on Stratus fault- tolerant hardware (originally at PlayNet a Stratus 200, with 8 12Mhz 68010's). The server-side software was (and may still be) written in PL/1 subset G, as was most of Stratus software of the era, including the OS (C was introduced around the time PlayNet went under). The design of the Playnet server software was specifically set up to make maximal use of multiple servers connected by medium-speed links. For example, each chat room was a separate process (if I remember correctly, or maybe each process handled N rooms), and all the IPC was set up to use Virtual Circuits (sort-of equivalent to sockets), so they didn't care whether the other end was on the same system or not.

AOL still runs on Stratus hardware, and pushes it (and VC's etc) to the limit I'm told. For a while they kept an old Stratus in the corner of the machine room for C64 owners, as I'm sure you know.

Undocumented CRC error-checking, asymetric sliding-windows, piggybacked-acks, selective retransmit? Holy shit, even in my prime as a 6502 assembly wiz kid, I doubt I could reverse engineer this protocol via an undocumented de-compile of the machine code. I think option B or C sounds a WHOLE lot easier right now. It's just that A seemed simple, when without documentation, it's quite hard. If AOL holds onto that documentation because it's still the crown jewels, I'm screwed. I'm sort of dumb too.

Well, I have an interview to go to tomorrow for a freelance job. Wish me luck everybody.

-Sir Cloister "STA $d020;" Maximus III, Esq.

Best 100 Records of All Time

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-26T10:00:00-05:00

I'm working on new music list – Cloister Maximus's 100 best records of all time. It's going to take a while to finish it up, but I should be posting it in tomorrow's journal entry. I'm big into top 100 lists now.

Today the Clarks had a bar-b-que. We went over, chit-chatted, ate junk-food and hot dogs, watched pulp fiction, and played two games of cranium. The funniest moment was most likely when TJ had to do an impersonation that went like this:

TJ: "Motherfucker!"

ME: "Eddie Murphy!"

Ding ding ding! In only 1 second flat. What a weird wavelength I was on since TJ doesn't sound anything like Eddie Murphy really (even when he's impersonating him).

Very tired. Can't really see what I'm typing. It's time for bed.

-Sir Cloister "I've got Lighter Fluid in my Mouth" Maximus III, Esq.

Summer Records of Years Gone Past

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-25T10:00:00-05:00

Did I mention I used to be a huge Flaming Lips fan before they got into their post-electronic experimental pop phase they are into right now? During the spring of '92, I was dating this girl that had this wonderful habit of cheating on me and I needed to clear my head of it (high-school drama) so I went to stay with my friend Tymm who was going to school at Mizzou in Columbia, MO at the time. During my stay in his dorm I got turned onto clove cigarettes, beat poetry coffee shops, Red Dwarf, and the Flaming Lips. There was a free show in one of the parks by the dorm he was living it that featured ALL (AKA The Decedents) and the Flaming Lips. I was completely blown away by their performance and went out and purchased a copy of Oh My Gawd! It's the Flaming Lips by mail order. That record soon became the soundtrack to the summer for me. I still hum a couple of bars from Love Yr Brain when I'm making coffee sometimes.

I brought this up since somebody posted that record and reminded me of summer soundtracks. Everyone has them. Here is a list of summer soundtracks I've had (that I can remember). This should be funny:

2002 - Papa M - Whatever Mortal
2001 - Squarepusher - Big Loada
2000 - Smog - Knock Knock
1999 - Joan of Arc - A Portable Model of How Memory Works
1998 - Shellac - Terraform
1997 - Palace Brothers - Viva Lost Blues
1996 - Sentridoh - Weed Forestin
1995 - Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
1994 - Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand
1993 - Skinny Puppy - Last Rights
1992 - Flaming Lips - Oh My Gawd! It's the Flaming Lips
1991 - Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
1990 - Public Enemy - It Takes a nation of Millions to Hold us Back
1989 - Inxs - Kick
1988 - Guns and Roses - Appetite for Destruction
1987 - ?

Feel free to email me YOUR summer soundtracks. I'll post them in my journal. HONEST! I should make a whole site devoted to this.

Oh, and I showed up late to Seans birthday party because I'm a cretin. But I did bring him a Coors tall can wrapped in a bow. How kick ass is that?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

A Night at the Blackbird

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-24T10:00:00-05:00

.....Gozer the Traveler will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveler came as a large and moving Torb! Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.....

And so it was said. Thank you, Vinz Clortho.

Went to see the rock show at the Blackbird tonight. Minmae opened up with a somewhat speeded up set (rushing each song at a faster pace than usual) but still good; I've seen them play better, but they are breaking in a new drummer so you have to cut them some slack.

The Baptist Generals played next. I gulped down my $2 PBR and enjoyed what may be classified as southern indie rock if there is such a thing. After they played a short set, the insanity began.

This band Mono (who are apparently big major label dudes that everybody but me has heard) started playing. Soft, very quiet instrumental stuff. Then they went bonkers, and proved to be one of the loudest bands I've heard in a while. They sounded a lot like godspeedyoublackemporer (or maybe godspeedyoublackemporer sounds like them? Or maybe both Mono and godspeedyoublackemporer sound like Frip and Eno? Who can say). That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they were playing too loud for me. I had to back up to the end of the club because I could literally feel the inside of my skull rattling. I don't want to come of as some kind of pussy, but damn man. I kind of need my hearing. I certainly wouldn't want to blow it on some mediocre rock band that plays too loud for their own good. Good music and all, just too damn loud.

I decided to stick it out and watch the Swords Project play. It was worth it because they were decent and played a short set. That was good because I was getting a serious case of club-back (You know, when your back starts hurting after standing up in a smokey club for 3 hours?).

Today is Seans birthday. I should make him a present or something. Like a copy of the complete JFLC catalog. Boy would that be obnoxious.

YOU WILL ALL PERISH IN FLAMES!!!!!!!

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Monster Chicken

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-23T10:00:00-05:00

I wish I was a Wolfboy
Cuz then I'd know people like Leonard Nimoy
He'd know where Bigfoot hides in the woods
He'd know everything that I should do to everything that pisses him off
He Chops off their heads, and gives it to his friends,
the aliens.

These immortal words are from the mysterious "Black Sabbath" tape that I found in my 4-track tape crate back in 1996. Today I decided to get around to digitally transferring a bunch of tapes I have in my closet, including that one.

To whomever recorded the Wolfboy song, and the Monster Chicken song – please email me. Come on and take credit. I want to know who is responsible for this.

I also encoded the original Darling Little Jackhammer 4-track tapes. If you know how super leet this is, let me know and I'll burn you off a copy.

Not a very eventful day. I have just been watching my eBay bids and encoding/cleaning up these tapes. One of them labeled "TJ & JFLC June 1998" was eaten by the 4-track however. I'm sure it was the coolest thing ever, but now it's gone for ever.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Selling Stuff on Ebay to pay the rent

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-22T10:00:00-05:00

It isn't getting much better around here. Spent a good portion of the day putting a bunch of stuff I don't need for sale up on ebay. Parting with my Nanoverb, Bass Guitar (The Official Wussyboy Bass), and a bunch of video games (Nintendo 64 and Gamebody). Who needs games when there is rent to be paid? Besides, I can play all of those games on various emulators. The Bass Guitar is the only thing that sucks to let go of. But it isn't like I play it very much. I was hoping to trade it for an electric guitar from somebody however. Oh well.

I can say one thing. I have a wicked mp3 collection now with the addition of the hardrive I salvaged from the cap box that melted last week. 1100+ songs, 50+ gigs. It's smaller than some peoples collections (I know TJ and Keith have like 100+ gigs) but it's more concise. More bang for the buck. I could let the whole thing play through and enjoy every minute. Here is the synopsis:

11111 tracks in play list, average track length: 3:42

Estimated play list length: 687 hours 8 minutes 32 seconds (That's about 28 Days)

(11023 tracks of unknown length)

Got to love technology.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Under the Weather

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-21T10:00:00-05:00

I'll keep this brief.

No journal yesterday due to the fact that I was a little under the weather and just sat around all day watching movies. Although I could write volumes about Clash of the Titans, I'll leave it be.

Pretty much spent the whole day just organizing my music collection, as Jen and I are getting ready to make a run to O-Zone records to sell about 200 CD's. I have them all in mp3 format, and could care less about the discs themselves now. Plus, I need the cash.

Blah. Not a single job posted today. Must have been a super slow Monday.

- Sit Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Bar-B-Que the Bronto Burgers

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-19T10:00:00-05:00

.....But, Tina's got a big old butt, so I'm leaving you. See ya!

Had a somewhat impromptu bar-b-que today. Jen went to the store to buy some stuff to cook, and I pulled the grill out of the utility closet and gave it a good scrubbing. I was incredibly paranoid I wouldn't clean it well enough and some bacteria would survive and make everyone sick since I heard that your first bar-b-que of the year can do that (make you sick) if you don't do a good job of cleaning the grill. So I pored on the anti-bacterial dish soap, the comet with bleach, and scrubbed away.

In attendance was the usual people. Calvert, TJ, Nichole, Keith, Nick & Angie. I left a message on Johns machine but I figured he was hanging with Caseys folks and had to work anyway. Same goes for Sean. Gave him a ring, but nobody was home. I'm sure he was working at marketing decisions or whatever it is he does during the day, so I doubt he could have made it anyhow. Shit, maybe he had a show tonight? I forget. Anyway.

So we feasted on my trademark bronto burgers, hot dogs, garden burgers, and Jen made a salad of some sort. TJ and Nick had d-ball mits and we're tossing the ball around until one of them threw the ball up into the upstairs neighbors porch. When they tried to fish it out, the neighbor walked out and gave them a funny look. I didn't see this myself, as I was inside blaring the theme song to Top Gun. Aww Yah.

Angie went a got this board game called Cranium that we played. It was pretty fun. It was like a hybrid of 12 different games in one – Charades, Trivial Pursuit/Mind trap, Pictonary, Name that Tune, and some other stuff. My team won 2 times, then the last game we lost. Win some, loose some. But it was a bunch more fun than I figured it would be since I don't usually dig party games.. but this was alright. Too bad Chris had to bail before we started playing, because if he was there we could have had even teams. Oh well.

So it's 3:37 AM now. I'm pretty tired but I wanted to finish watching this Steven Hawkings Universe DVD I started watching earlier. I'm getting hooked on them. But that should come as no surprise to anybody that knows me. I'm a sucker for documentaries, especially those dealing with science, the universe, and superstring theory. I remember when the Cosmos DVD box set came out. Shit, I was catatonic for a week watching those. I sometimes wish Carl Segan was my dad, and that his super slick voice could have lulled me to sleep as a child. Come on? How cool would that be, if Carl Segan was your dad.

But Steven Hawkings got a much cooler chair than Segan ever did. And the robot voice let's you know he isn't fooling around.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Two New Mouse That Roared Members at Disjecta

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-18T10:00:00-05:00

...Attitude... you've got the fucking attitude...

So tonight was the first TMTR incarnation with John and Casey over at Disjecta for some union benefit or something. I, obviously, wouldn't know a union from tomato soup since I don't have a job. But it went well I think. It's a little hard to say when your up there on stage doing your thing if you sucked or not. Such judgments are reserved for those foolish enough to video tape themeselves playing and watch it sober (I have been guilty of this before). I know we played well and it was fun, but Disjecta's lack of on stage monitors created the typical situation where I couldn't hear my own voice at all, so god knows what I sounded like. However, post show someone made a comment that I sounded a bit like Bill Calahan so it couldn't have been all bad, since Calahan croons like Bing Crosby.

I sold a couple of CD's, witch I unwisely spent on booze, chips and salsa over at the Kennedy school. In a whirlwind of weirdness, just when John and I were getting ready to leave Disjecta so I could get back to my car, Sean and Jill showed up. Then the opening act (I can't remember her name) chimed in and somehow well all came to the conclusion to go get some drinks over in the Cypress Room.

As my psychic abilities excel like the Dead zone guy after he gets conked on the head and wakes from his coma, I can see everything with utter clarity and wisdom. Once we finished playing the Disjecta show, Calvert loaded up his drums to boogie and play ANOTHER show with his other band the same night. I hate to toot my own horn, but damn. I am in the know. What did I say yesterday? Was I right, or was I right? However, what to do about this annoying situation isn't clear just yet. I think whatever shows I set up in June here in p-town will be acoustic only. I don't need to compete against another bands time. That's for children. And I'm a man. A man with shitty gammer.

So yah, at least one part of the band is functioning like a Italian porno star on buckets of cocaine. John and Casey are on. I couldn't ask for better new band mates. And furthermore, they like the songs. At least they say they like the songs. But they don't strike me as the types to bend the truth. So I trust them. Tonights show, being the first from them might have been one of the tightest TMTR performances ever. I'm not just saying that. NO MISTAKES dudes.. I didn't here a single flubbed chord or misplaced note. Back when I had a hodgepodge of people playing with me that didn't even like the band I couldn't say the same thing. It was crap, really. So my point is that if you have seen us play before and thought we sucked, I urge you to come to the next show. It's a whole new band kids. And we practice now. No more "Hey, I'll just write the notes down to this song you've never heard before.. Cool?". I'm reformed. I've found Jesus.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Sharing Band Members is Bad Mojo

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-17T10:00:00-05:00

The influx of 60's brit/psych pop keeps flowing in. Today I snagged a copy of Chocolate Soup, witch has a bunch of nasty rare ergot induced tunes from yesterday.

So today I had an epiphany. A revelation. A vision. This is it:

Having a band with people that are in other bands is a one way ticket to misery.

Case in point. Calvert's other band is going to be fucking huge. I can just see it now. Already I'm seeing that sharing a band mate is problematic, especially when the other band is very active. I don't want to be the asshole that causes scheduling problems with them since they are so fabulously successful, and my shitty music is not. Maybe I can attribute my feelings on this subject due to the doom and gloom I feel about things in general right now. Jobless, Agitated, and tired. It's like a dark wave of impending doom was just washed over me in the past few days. I think that's why I'm really trying to get my hands on as much psych pop as I can. It just hits the spot. All that drone and overused mellotron/organ just makes it all glue together. Introspection tempered with apathy.

I mean how different is shit today, in 2003, than it was in say, 1967? We're still living under the threat of annihilation from modern warfare. We also have just come out of a decade of high prosperity to high anxiety. It's all making sense now. We're caught in a temporal time loop, like a bad sci-fi plot.

So what does this all mean, this big moment of clarity? Well, it either means I should start thinking about a backup contingency plan (AKA, a drummer who only has one band), or follow through with my original plan of giving up the rock at the end of age 27. The later seems more appealing at times. This whole thing is not to say that Calvert is going to bail per se, or certainly that I don't want him in the band. It's more of an admission of guilt that I may be making life hard for someone else to serve my own selfish needs. And the conclusion is that I should try my hardest to not put him under any obligations. If you can play – cool. If you can't, that's cool as well. I think that's a quote from some movie.. wait.. no, I'm thinking of Dazed and Confused and the quote was "It would be a lot cooler if you did, man."

Sorry about the gloomy gus routine. I'm just venting. Right. Anyway, check the music page. This week's treat is "Belloq - S/T (2003)". If you ever wanted to know what the mouse that roared and minmae ripping off pink floyd would sound like, this is the record for you.

Maybe shit will be cooler tomorrow? Like I'll open my mail and find a check for $100,000 for no goddamn reason? Wouldn't that be nice?

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Working on Minmae's True Love and the First Tuftees Album

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-16T10:00:00-05:00

For some reason I am super tired today. From the moment that I woke up I've had this irresistible urge to take a nap. I think it has much to do with the fact that I keep going to bed real late (5am) but force myself to get up at noon. That's only about 6 hours of solid sleep and I need more. I like sleep. So I think I'm going to try to snap myself back into a quasi normal schedule starting today and hit the sack at a more reasonable hour (3am). Then, if I continue to set the alarm earlier and earlier I can be up at 9am again. Ready to take all those job opportunities that are knocking down my door.

Sean came over today. We rearranged the order of True Love, and did a touch of editing. We'll most likely still need to do a raw mix of all the songs to send off to the mastering dude since the current mixes have some compression and EQ on them that might get in the way of letting the mastering engineer do his job. We also encoded his current 4-track offerings, and some of it's pretty damn amazing. Although that's pretty much a given. An incredibly flattering cover of Still Life with Woodpecker is on there two. Man, it's got some fat beats. I'm not just saying that. You MUST dance.

Fixed the Tuftees cover, re-mastered the disc without the legal-issue song included. It's okay. Honestly the song was a little weak and I played the same drum beat on it as another song on the record, so it's inclusion isn't necessary anyway. Gives the rest more space to breathe.

Still haven't cleaned up this mess in my room. Tomorrow for sure.. I swear. And I'll put these goddamn cd-r's away too. For real.

Jen spent some time today proofreading and correcting my horrible writing up on the main site so prospective clients/employers think I can spell and have decent grammar. The fools! Ha ha ha ha! I'll fix that stuff up tomorrow as well.

Two more days till this show at disjecta. I'm sending out my first TMTR mailing list email tonight. I hope I don't piss anybody off with it. Honestly it's no big deal if none of my friends show up to that show since it should be pretty packed naturally, and we only get like a 20 minute set. No big deal, but it will be the first show with John and Casey, so that should be fun and educational. It's good not to have high expectations about things. That way you are never let down by the horrible painful truth of reality.

A whole lotta rosie. 300 pounds of loving.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

The Rubble Series Box Set is Psychedelic to the Max

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-15T10:00:00-05:00

Everything is almost back to normal. Boring.

First, I was to thank the anonymous coward who was kind enough to post the Rubble Box Set Vol. 6 to alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1960s. I actually wanted this for quite a while (It's the one that has Tinkerbells Fairydust 20-10 on it). The only way you can purchase this record is to get some cash converted to Euro's and mail order it from England. As I am a total sucker from psych pop this hit's the spot. Plus, I have this new drive in my main machine that needs to be filled up with about 80 gigs of music. I'm off to a good start.

So my machine is totally up to speed, and to field test my setup I did a remix of Minmae's "No Issue" for giggles. It's kind of good for something I just pitched together. Those that are familiar with the Cloister Maximus style and primarily Belloq will know where this is coming from. Yes, there is a mellotron on it.

I finally got a copy of Animals today. I'm a little disappointed. It was a whole lot better in my memory than in reality. Go figure.

I totally ate all the food in my freezer today.. Had some bizarre mix of chicken nuggets, toquitos, and a roll. Taco sauce and Bar-b-Que sauce doesn't go to well together.

I Have a bunch of stuff I've been putting off that I really should get around to doing. Nothing work related, but stuff I've been putting off. I figure I'll designate tomorrow as my clean up and fix up day when I'll knock everything out of the park now that I'm not preoccupied with a big project like I have been for the past week or so. So tomorrow, I WILL fix the Tuftees cover, WILL re-master the record, WILL put this stack of 50+ cd-r's into a binder, WILL clean up this mess that is my room. Etc, etc.

I also spotted an old friend on slashdot today. I need to find a way to get a hold of him, but he only has an AIM and Yahoo IM address listed (witch I have neither of). I'd like to see what's going on with him and how NYC is treating everybody job wise since things are hopeless here in Portland. Not that I would ever move back to New York. Been there, done that. But I DO miss the hell out of Ben's Pizza in Soho. If anybody wants to ship me a slice by yet, I'll spring for it man. I've got $2.50 here somewhere. Oh, and I don't need a coke. Just a slice, thank you so much.

Freaking out to The Accent - Red Sky at Night. Man the 60's were fucked.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Windows XP Reinstall Secrets

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-14T10:00:00-05:00

I slept in too late today. Then again, I didn't go to bed until 6:30 AM. So I suppose it's all cumulative and should be expected.

Just to point this out – my box hasn't even been up and running or connected to the net since Sunday morning, so I haven't had a chance to upload the journal entries for the past few days. All fixed up now, nice.

I am almost done re-installing on Medusa. All the software is there and XP is pretty patched up except for SP1, because I don't have a legitimate "key" apparently. Whatever microsoft. Some notes I feel I should enter into here since this IS a journal.. This is for myself, the next time I reinstall. Everybody else can ignore this part (Unless your picky about your setup like I am):

–––––––––––-

For some users when they remove windows messenger or just disable it from starting up automatically they experience a great slow down when launching Outlook express. Users who experience such a slow down will find a error in the system error log saying The server {FB7199AB-79BF-11D2-8D94-0000F875C541} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout. The solution this problem is quite simple. Just Open up regedit and search for the string {FB7199AB-79BF-11D2-8D94-0000F875C541} and modify the keys InProc32 and LocalServer32 default key to a empty string. After a reboot, Outlook will start up as fast as possible.

REMEMBER to get the proper ASPI drivers so your cd-drive works right under XP. Who knows why this doesn't work right by default. Nero seems to have a free download of a dll you can stick in system32 to fix this. Before it was fixed Audio Catalyst didn't work right (Tried to rip cds analog style.)

You can't un install movie maker or net meeting, and a ton of other junk that comes with XP that is of no use to anybody but total gimps.

Remember to check the "run once" registry keys for bogus entries from winamp trying to start it's "winamp agent". Yesh.

You cant copy cookies into your documents and setting directory, so be sure and memorize your web passwords before you reinstall, otherwise your boned.

–––––––––––––

That's enough of that. Had spaghetti for dinner with those kick ass pilsberry croissant rolls. Now just enjoying a fresh install.

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

A Melted CPU and Hella

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-13T10:00:00-05:00

Well, that was "hella" uncool.

Today I was struggling with my secondary computer (witch I use as my portable recording machine, as well as my television cap box – like a tivo). It kept crashing and freezing. Then it wouldn't boot. When I opened it up there was thermal grease everywhere and a puddle in the CPU socket.

You guessed right. The CPU melted in the socket. It seems that the fan wigged out and the heat just cooked those little transistors. So that's the end of that.

Well, besides being bummed out I decided to take out what hardware I could and put it in Jen's box as well as my main machine. So today Medusa gets a new 100 gig drive, witch in turn forces me to finally re-install XP (thankfully I have my laptop to write a journal entry). It will take me a day or to to get back up to speed.

So tonight I splurged and went to my show for this month: Hella. And it was good. Chris and I went down and as soon as we walked into the blackbird we spotted John and Casey, who were there to see the opener (The Quails – who actually didn't play) but decided to stick around for the head liner The Aislers Set. Hella was everything I hoped they would be – monsters of spaz core, playing so fast it was like looking at a photograph taken with a long exposure. Substantially rocked and sipping my rum and coke that Calvert was kind enough to buy for my broke ass, The Aislers Set took the stage and I was pleasantly surprised. I had never heard them before, and they were pretty damn good. I like that. When you get to hear a band that you have no idea what they will be like and have no preconceptions and they are actually good! Ha. It was like a bit of Komeda, 5th of the Breeders, touch of Stereolab pop sensibility and stirred well. What a tasty drink.

After the show I went and shook hands with one of the Hella dudes and chit chatted about Sacramento (where they are from) since we'll be down there on tour in 2 months. Apparently the one good club in Sacramento (The Capitol Garage) is all messed up post Great White.. yah, you heard me right buddy.

It's late and my computer is still in total chaos. I expect I'll be fixing this mess all day tomorrow.

-Sir Cloister Maxiums III, Esq.

Slow news Day

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-12T10:00:00-05:00

What a slow day. The menu was taco's ala Taco Time and tortia chips. No salsa though.. We're out I think

Now that everything is pretty much taken care of with COT I can focus on the tiny details. It apears now that google has finaly updated it's index and has the new index.html in it's cache.. That's a good thing.

Nothing much else to record here. Just rocking out to some Gaster Del Soul.. If one can 'rock out' to David Grubbs.

I did, however, finaly break 5000 today! It's been a long hard 5 years, but I'm proud to day I may have the largest collection of television shows to date.

-Sir Cloister Maxiums III, esq.

The History of Illegal Drugs

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-11T10:00:00-05:00

Did you know that Hitler was a meth addict? I sure didn't. I spent the first part of the day totally fascinated by this History Channel series called "Hooked" that chronicles the history of illegal drugs. So far I've watched the one on marijuana, opium (morphine/heroin), and amphetamines. I don't know what it is about documentaries (or drug ones for that matter) but I'm a complete sucker for them. Two years ago I got seriously addicted to VH1's "Behind the Music" series and would watch 8 hours of VH1 at a time. The result? I'm a walking encyclopedia of useless rock n' roll history, and my IQ has dropped 20 points. I can't spell either (Yah that's it.. it's VH1's fault).

I'm so ashamed to admit this, but I really like Wilco's "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel". It really does live up to the hype everybody was spewing out about it. It's so easy to pick up on the obvious Beatles theft going on, but it's still good. Jen doesn't agree, but I can't convince her to listen to it once either. I know a month ago I wouldn't have agreed either. I figured Wilco sucked, right? But the mouse that roared would get compared to them so much I figured I should give it a listen to find out how much people were insulting me. Turns out, we both want to be Sir Paul Mcartney real bad. But radiohead still blows. Sorry dudes. I don't get it.

I finally got around to watching my Logan's Run DVD I got for 5 bucks last month at Best Buy. What a goddamn classic. Before all of the dark future matrix/gattica/minority report/impostor films, Logans Run was lighting the first torch to be carried along for many years. The later two films, being based on Philip K. Dick novels should be exempt, even if Tom "Maverick" Cruise was in one since Dick was dreaming up this dark future shit long before Logan's Run I suppose. Can you imagine a movie based on Do Android Dream Electric Sheep? I'm sure it would suck, but boy that would be a hoot.

That brings me to another point.. I've been watching too much TV/Movies lately. I really should go back to reading the Odyssey since I put it down in mid journey home a few weeks ago. I can't recall who was doing the translation in the copy I have (ebook) but it's great. Much better than I remember it being. Although the last time I read the Odyssey might have been 9th grade. Who knows. Brain rotting.. gotta quit posting to slashdot. My karma bonus is through the roof, and that's sad.

So, I didn't do to damn much today. I mailed off a bunch of packages. Jen, your TMTR CD is in the mail – sorry about the delay. I also mailed some of my new spiffy business cards to Susan in hopes that she knows somebody swanky pants that needs some work done. Let's hope so. Right now I'm living on the d/l – Haven't hung out with the crew in a week or two trying to conserve my cash. But I think soon we will all need to go out drinking so I can get out of the house and lift the spirits a bit, even if I do clunk down 20-30 bucks. The important thing is that if I space it out across 2 weeks or so, going out to have a good time won't effect me that bad financially and will keep my friends from thinking I've turned into a total Hermit Douche bag.

Man, I hope somebody posts The History Channel - Hooked: LSD tomorrow. I bet that one will be even better than Hooked - Over the counter cheap gas station speed.

Ciao,

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, esq.

Getting a Design Agent and Cleaning up Shop

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-10T10:00:00-05:00

This is going to be a pretty short journal entry.. I'm totally tired and it's 5:00am. I am seriously off my day schedule now. I've completely reverted to the nosferatu schedule. Since I have little to wake up for in the morning I just sleep later and late.. sigh....

I only accomplished half my goals I set for myself today. I went to kinkos and printed out some business cards – they look pretty damn nice I think. It's time to pass them around and hope I can score some work.

I've been thinking about maybe getting an agent. I know it sounds lame (and sorta sketchy) but that might be just what the doctor ordered to make sure my bills are paid. I have no problem dealing with people and doing a whole lot of work; I'm just a pretty piss poor salesman. If I had an agent, they would pimp me out to some good clients, and take their cut on what I would assume would be some pretty high paying gigs. Meanwhile I don't have to worry about sending postcards, going to parties, making chit-chat, and the dreaded cold call. I think I'll try to talk to somebody that has an agent to get a feel for if it's right for me or not.

Cleaned the old hard drive out today (burned about 25 CD-R's), fixed Jen's computer (it stopped booting – I took out the NIC, put it back in, and it worked fine...weird), packaged some promo packs, cut my business cards, and watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Yah, you heard that last part right. The only thing I didn't accomplish today was calling some clubs in Seattle and LA about some shows. I'll just put that off till next week when some of those promo packs might be at the clubs by then. The music should wow them, right?

All in all, a boring day. The menu was chicken nuggets and pizza. I love eating like a 5 year old. It makes me feel like a man.

- Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Booking the Tour and Getting Paid

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-09T10:00:00-05:00

......Klaus Grunberg is a naive German student who falls for blond American junkie Mimsy Farmer and discovers drugs in Paris. He follows the flighty babe to Ibiza, a sunny Mediterranean island paradise, where he falls into the world of former Nazi-turned-heroin-pusher Heinz Engelmann and succumbs to addiction. Part counterculture portrait, part antidrug drama, and deadpan bursts of intermittent narration.......

That's right. Ibiza Bar from MORE is today's pink floyd reference. Quicksilvers wooshing high pitched sounds echo outward.

Shit.

It's not all 'floyd today though. I somehow wound up going through the entire Ween catalog and listening to The Pod (Ya know, the one with gene ween with scotch guard bong taped to his face? Maybe it was dean ween... my memory isn't so good.) Oh My Dear (Falling in Love) might be the only perfect song EVER. Well, it's either that or The Stallion Pt.2.

Yah, I didn't leave the goddamn house today. I pretty much did the same thing I did yesterday (worked on COT) – but today I actually finished the core work that I wanted to finish before I go and print up some new business cards and postcards. I plan on taking the day tomorrow to hit the sale road and make some phone calls, mail some stuff out. I haven't done a freelance job in about 2 weeks so it is totally time to get off my ass and get paid. Somehow.

Gloom and Doom isn't falling on everybody though – Sean emailed me today and told me that Devil in the Woods will be putting out Minmae's True Love Album (witch I recorded a good deal of). Not only that, but they want to put out a total of 2 records PLUS an EP from Minmae. Cheers to that, because the dude deserves it. Minmae rocks and you know it.

A few more dates hit the tour list today. It's starting to shape up well. I think we have about 9 shows scheduled so far. Only about 5-6 more shows to book and we're golden. Just have to hope their are no last minute changes with any of those. And we need to get out and do some promotion for the tour, but that's the easy part (right?)

It wasn't a good day in the food department. I ate ramen. And popcorn.

What are the symptoms of scurvy again?

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

Practicing with John and Casey and working on the Site

Stephen Kozik — 2003-04-08T10:00:00-05:00

....Viviane enjoys a comfortable life as the wife of a French consul until she visits New Guinea in search of curiosities for her Paris boutique... there she meets Olivier and is tempted to join his expedition to the interior, lured by the prospect of rare feathers found only in such remote areas... led by Gaeten, they travel in search of a secret valley, marked simply 'obscured by clouds' on the map, that is held in reverential esteem by the local people as home of their gods.. the journey is long and arduous - only Gaeten's mystical obsession with the valley keeps them pushing on through increasingly hostile conditions... along the way, they encounter the mudmen and are invited to join a papuan ceremony ... eventually viviane's 'civilized' personae is shed little by little with each new experience until there can be no going back...

Today's Pink Floyd reference is the mudmen from Absolutely Curtains (Obscured by Clouds). They are chanting right now as I type.

Anyway.

More work done on cirleofthunder today. I moved the Mouse that Roared site over to a subdirectory, resurrected The Circle of Thunder Photo Gallery, put the Tour Application up and moved the perl database. Oh yah, and I started working on an elementary skeleton site at the root of COT for the purposes of getting some freelance gigs. In a better world I would make the main page some neat interface with links to all the cool stuff on circle of thunder, but I digress. This is not a perfect word, and I need to pay my rent by pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Had Mouse that Roared practice today. This was only the third practice with John and Casey and it went smashingly well. A marked improvement was evident from the last two (I think mainly due to the fact that I turned my amp down and played a bit softer so everybody could hear themselves over my led Zeppelin fantasies) and I think the show at Disjecta next week will go real well. It's shame that I think nobody at this show will care that we are playing, but it doesn't matter. We have about 3 more shows coming up here in good old p-town before we book for tour and rock cali-for-ni-a.

We also did a little photo shoot in the back yard! Ha. The photos are here if you want a giggle. I look like I'm completely cracked out in one of them. The truth is I think I was in mid blink when calvert snapped the photo without telling me.

So, it was yet another day of slack. Bob dobbs would be proud. Todays menu consisted of beef taco's and pizza. Healthy eating for a healthy dude.

Word

-Sir Cloister Maximus III, Esq.

aka g00z

aka Cloister the Stupid