I had a mouse in my house last week, and it sortof freaked me out.
Here’s a write-up/description of how it went down.
Click to read all about it!
There’s also a song I made about it, which you can listen to here.
SPOILER ALERT: There is no longer a mouse in my house. That’s the power of music!
This year’s xmas album is finally available for free download! I took a day off from work and cranked out a 5 original songs and 1 old standard.
While you’re listening or downloading, here’s a wordy rundown.
If you’re still hungry for more Xmas Album fun, try these from past years:
XMAS 2005: Have a Great Xmas (Don’t Kill Yourself)
XMAS 2006 (It Sucks A Lot)
One year after the fact, I have finally gotten around to compiling all of the data collected for the pumpkin beer tasting I held back in 2006. 15 people, 12 beers, it was truly a spectacle. It’s a shame that the write-up is more spreadsheets and 1995-style-html (check my tables!) than flashy pictures and cool graphs, but here’s a drawing I made in ms-paint to soothe you.
When I was 12 years old, I wrote and illustrated a book for school; “Shuttle: Slime” starring Sinbad the Gerbil Space Pirate. The story is a standard sci-fi saturday morning cartoon formula:
Space heroes encounter strange alien substance that starts attacking their ship, things look bleak, but with a little teamwork and science they overcome it.
There’s even an “In English, professor?!” line.
It’s not my lack of originality that I find most interesting about it, though, it’s how strangely homo-erotic it seems. A team of gerbil space pirates with names like “Lt. Flame” and “Sgt. Krammer” running around in pink shirts, shorts, and wrap-around sunglasses fighting goo-covered tentacles. I’m sure the teacher enjoyed showing it to her friends over drinks, or prayed for my soul more likely (it was Jacksonville, FL, after all).
Anyhow, I’ve scanned it in so that you can read and judge for yourself. The kid that wrote it used the word “gay” like it was going out of style, with no real clue what he was saying, so let’s laugh at him together.
After far too many delays (stemming from computer failure and human distraction) the Robot Week Album is now available for download!
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
I have included a “bonus track” called “Robot Companion” about a heartbroken robot dying in his creator’s arms. It’s a “bonus track” because it’s got some messy tuning issues where I couldn’t/didn’t adjust the tuning sliders on the voice-transformer enough to get it just right.
Also, volume levels can be tricky, as usual. I adjust them, but different stereos handle them differently. I guess that’s why some people get paid to “Master” albums and I don’t.
Nonetheless, This album has some songs relating to robots that I really like on it, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
I’m currently writing up a less-than-brief account of my time in the band “The Napoleans”.
Click Here to download a .zip of their historic “1995 LBHS Showcase of the Bands” performance.
Click here to read some live-blog-style notes about the performance while you listen.
Click here to see some of the flyers we made to advertise the performance.
I’ll finish making the history page look nice, sometime soon. Well, nicer anyhow.
Summer has arrived, and so have the Jamz to which you will enjoy the warm weather. These songs wil bring all of the teachers to the club on weeknights for the next 2 months!
Click to Download the zip file containing the Jamz!
I am fairly certain that hearing these 11 songs by 11 bands (only 5 of which are me!) will bring you 11 times more joy than not hearing them!
Have the BEST SUMMER EVER, now that you are properly equipped to do so!
The “Tooth Week” album is now available for downloading and enjoying!
Click to download!
Songs about teeth! These songs are perfect anyone with teeth, and suitable for the toothless as well!
Most were recorded in March 2007, but there’s a brand new cover-song at the end! Please download, unzip, import, and listen!
Feel free to share with your friends with/without teeth!
As always, more songs and some other details can be found at the 202-427-0633 myspace page!
Sooooo, my webpage at homeworkparty.com doesn’t get a lot of hits, and that’s deserved. I don’t put a lot up there and when I do I usually repost on LJ, Myspace, Flickr, and wherever. I aim to change that and make it more better soon, but haven’t firmed up those plans yet.
Anyhow, I sometimes check my referral logs, and recently found that one of my entries was linked to by some place called “videotoys.net”. It looks like a blog that is made up of a collection of other folks’ posts. Sure, they link you to the source, but they’re pulling my bandwidth (using my pictures) and not adding anything to my post. Not even a “Check this out!” or “this is lamez0rz!”. Basically, they post other people’s content, get seen by a search engine, then hope people click the google-ads on the side of their page so they can profit.
Historically, I believe the proper response to this sortof thing is to find a copy of goatse.cx and rename it ‘miijoelhaircut.jpg’ and put it on my server, but since I’m at work I spent 5 minutes replacing the picture they linked to with a note about their tactics being crappy and had to edit my original post to use a newly-named ‘miijoelhairtcut1.jpg’.
It was a bit of a hassle creating and renaming the image and I think the picture could do a much better job of chastising the thief AND encouraging people to come to my site instead without supporting the other site. Plus, I’m not sure I like the tone. I’m not particularly harsh, not exactly nice, not vicously snarky, and not gut-bustingly hilarious.
I’m going to work on a standard image to replace it, and future stolen images with. Hopefully it will achieve each of these goals:
1. Draw people to my rarely-updated website.
2. Discourage future thievery.
3. Make the thief look dumb, greedy, stupid, and dumb.
4. Make me look awesome.
If you have ideas on how to do this, or an example, please share it!
In the meantime, I’ve gone back and edited my first try to make it more ugly and obvious that the article is incomplete and the whole thing can be seen at my website. Also, I needed to try to correct some of the grammar.
In other blog news, I’m going to try to sign-up with Technorati so I can keep better tabs on who links to me (it’s usually me linking to myself from different locations!). Also, I hope it will cure me of checking the same 20 un-updated friend’s blogs 80 times a day. Technorati Profile
During the first two weeks of March, 2007, The Panda recorded an album of songs answering questions asked by the public. These questions were left in a voicemail-box at 202-427-0633, where the songs were posted each day.
Click to Download the Zipped Version of ‘Ask A Panda’ album!
Today, the “Ask A Panda” album is released, including 11 question answers (maybe 12 since one song includes 2 questions) and a re-recorded version of the “Ask A Panda” theme song. It is hoped that the release of this album will help encourage understanding between humans and pandas, and help ease strained panda-human relations.
So professional that it has both a front and back cover!
The theme song from the album is currently up at the obligatory myspace page as well as other songs and more information about the 202-427-0633 song-phone.
Friends, Celebrities, Characters, and Abominations
The Nintendo Wii allows you to create avatars to be used to represent yourself in different games. Using a set of default features that you can select, rotate, scale, and move to try to get as close a representation of yourself as possible.
Here’s me before and after my latest haircut. I love giving myself that dumb-looking mouth.
The result of a Valentines Day challenge to record a bunch of songs about ‘love’ onto my voicemail. 14 songs, 10 recorded reactions. A 24-track 29 minute masterpiece for those who love listening to semi-improvised music after it has gone through a bunch of compression.
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD
Unzip it and put it in your favorite mp3 player and learn nothing about Love!
I’m doing two special things for Valentines day at the phone number 202-427-0633.
1. At least 5 songs put up during the day. All will mention love or be about relationships or something. It’s a tough subject to sing about off the top of your head… PSYCHE! NOT! /sarcasm!
2. People are encouraged to leave messages after the song ends and talk about love or anything. Maybe I’ll do something with the messages, maybe not!
Give it a call! More details at the 202-427-0633 myspace page!
Since the DS came out I have been struggling to find a nice way to display my games that makes good use of space while allowing me to see all the games I have quickly without digging through my little satchel of cartridges.
The cases they are sold in are too big and bulky for the small card-cartridges. Game-wallets and small plastic cases tend to be too bulky, hide the game titles, or only hold a few games at a time. They make sense for travel, but despite the portable nature of the DS I do most of my gaming at home.
I even drew up rough blueprints (in the margins of my notebook at work, next to terrible song lyrics and doodles of my boss with blood shooting out his eyes and the requisite Metallica logo) for a display/storage system that would be made of a soft molded rubber, but it seemed like a lot of work to get something fabricated. Then I saw a CD-rack at Ikea which was pretty much EXACTLY what I drew, just with slightly wider/deeper grooves. It works great for DS games, allowing you to store lots of games in a small space while still being able to see which is which without moving them around.
Here are some instructions showing how to make one for your special someone, or yourself.
You can even store other types of games in it!
In a mall in Mexico City, I saw this PSP demo-kiosk that was made to look like an airplane. Three rows of three seats with PSPs in front of each.
I tried to be covert when taking pictures, because I didn’t want to have the “Sorry sir, you can’t take pictures in the mall” or “Did you just take my picture, jerk?” conversation in Spanish.
Import Video Games at Best Buy
The Best Buy near work has apparently started carrying import video games, like “Jump Superstars” and some Naruto game I don’t know anything about. I think they’re both street-fighter -style side-fighters.
Prices are about what you’d pay from an internet importer, so it’s an interesting move. It’d be nice if they started getting more variety, because the ones I’d like to see are the more bizarre ones like the one where you play the DS like a guitar.
Beside it are a few games that made their way here somewhat based on the strength of their importing numbers (”Cooking Mama” and “Elite Beat Agents”).
Thank heaven that the DS isn’t region encoded!
Coming soon, the naked-torso miis I made on my new wii!
There have been a few times in my life where people have wanted to recognize me for various accomplishments. Since they went through the effort to make a tactile, public, acknowledgement of my greatness, I have put together a virtual trophy-case to show off their work in appreciating my work.
Please Click to continue on to the trophy case and read a bit more about the awards.
After spending nearly as much time trying to encode it as it took to make it, time that I should’ve spent double-checking my packing for Mexico, here’s the Xmas2006 album.
Click to download!
Here´s the tracklisting. Unfortunately the songfiles are not named because my harddrive wouldn´t let me and I had to skip town.
XMAS 2006 (It sucks alot!)
1. O Holy 1
2. Hula-Hoop
3. O Holy 2
4. O Come, O Come, God With Us
5. Wenn Cess Lass
6. Santa Comes
7. Whose Kid is This?
8. Dec. 26th
9. drummerboiz
Details: It’s a mixed bag that might have some promise if I had more time. My roommate and I played a few songs together after some egg-nog, her being a beginning drummer and me being typically terrible on accordion and keyboards, which results in some live stuff that I mixed down with a delay-pedal to add ‘flavor’.
I’ve listened to it a lot today, and I don’t hate it. There are lots of cringeworthy moments, particularly in the one original “Dec 26th” which I sang this morning before work and didn’t have time to mix out offending notes. It’s sloppy and uneven, not showing much progress since xmas 2005…
Anyhow, think of it as an xmas card from me, like a cassette of your grandmother singing carols. Possibly unlistenable, but cute in a pathetic way. Have a superfun time!
So, I imagine that most people are travelling for 15 minutes or more this holiday, and may need to listen to something as they do so.
I realize that you have a lot of choices when it comes to sounds, and I respect that you may not want to listen to an “album” that is really just Chad and I messing around when we were supposed to be practicing for the tour last summer.
The good news is that it is 6 songs and under 15 minutes long and is totally about Thanksgiving.
The bad news is that it is essentially a Jam-Session and is in iTunes-centric .m4a format because it’s late and my mp3 converter isn’t working.
You can download it, here.
After a year-long wait, I have finally completed my report on the Pumpkin Beer tasting we performed in October 2005. Five Pumpkin-Beers were reviewed using a blind taste-test, and the ratings and comments are recorded in an overly lengthy report which can be found right here.
Enjoy!
Before tour, I got a fancy DSLR camera and needed to practice using it.
During our 5000+ mile trip through the Midwest and Southeast, we purchased
gas for the Honda Civic we were touring in 16+ times and at those times I typically whipped out the camera to work on my technique. Chad handled the gas-pumping duties.
Here is the proof.
Are you afraid of ghosts? Are you Friends with ghosts? Are you trusted by ghosts? Do you HATE ghosts? Did a ghost make you a promise and not keep it? Did Ghosts Challenge you to a Toboggan race?
There’s something for every manner of ghost relationship in the 15-song album “Ghost Week 2K6″ which you can download below!
The 15 songs composed and recorded over the telephone for Ghost Week have been compiled into a Ghost Week ALBUM.
Ghost Week Album in Zip Format!
Not all songs are “Winners” but the project would be incomplete if I did not include them all. The levels aren’t always even, so get to know your volume control, and enjoy!
Also, for those listening with small children, some material uses curse words to express emotions unable to be conveyed through conventional vocabulary words. Sorry about the cussin’.
Click for pictures and video of a series of FIREWORK TANK BATTLES!
Or, if you just want to skip to video with the crazed screams of “Aw sweet!” then, uh, here you go!
Video 1.
Video 2.
Combining boredom while commuting to/from work, a desire to always be creating something, a need for deadlines, and a relatively cheap cellphone, I present the homeworkparty.com song service.
I’ve got a new phone number, and its only purpose is to receive calls from you and deliver to your ears a terrible song that I make up on the fly!
Not sure how long I’ll do it, but I’m setting a goal to have at least one new message on it every day. Feel free to call and get a free listen to a 1-2 minute song.
202-427-0633
It’s basically the They Might Be Giants dial-a-song minus talent and planning.
You should call it EVERY DAY (if you like it after hearing it… Don’t torture yourself!)
It’s a terrible number, with that zero right in the middle…
202-GAS-(zero)-ODE ?
202-HAS-(zero)-MED ?
20-CHAP-(zero)-NED ?
Terrible.
Any ideas or challenges on how to use it are welcome.
202-427-0633
You can listen to samples from previous days at the official myspace page. You can add it as a friend if you need myspace-friend-padding!
So, it’s 06-06-06, a day that comes but once every 100 years (like all days!) and you’ll want some way of remembering it and freaking out numerically-paranoid-sales-clerks…
So, here’s a handy spreadsheet to help you calculate your pre-tax total needed to get sweet receipt-souvenirs for this special day!
click to download .xls spreadsheet
Just enter your local-sales-tax in the purple box (the dark-lord’s favorite color!) and get out there and start standing at the register doing math in your head!
(I tried this morning, but the only thing I saw that would get me the right total was two coleslaws and 2 slices of cheese…)
Also, you can buy about 2 gallons of gas or really annoy the cashier/butcher when buying anything by the pound! The trailmix of the beast!
I like to think I’m open and accepting of different cultures and religiosities, so in honor of the high-unholy-day of June 6th, 2006, I decided to try out a satanic ritual.
It certainly didn’t need to happen, and I’m certainly years behind on this one, but here’s a loving tribute to Ghyslain Raza.
I’m sure you’ve seen his moves, but as you can click here to see, together we would be unstoppable!
Back in high-school I had long hair. It was sortof a desire to stand out and sortof a desire to not pay money for haircuts and sortof indecision about what type of haircut to get.
In my senior year, I had my shoulder-length hair braided, then had my dad cut it of and I gave the braids to friends. TRUE friends still have them and are entitled to my kingdom when I get it. I left one un-cut braid hanging down in front, like a Jedi. This was 1994, so that’s where Lucas got that Jedi style from. From me. He got it from me.
After it was cut and I didn’t have my long hair to differentiate me from the rest of the slobs at school, I did a bunch of different styles, including having the top of my head shaved to look like Jean-Luc Picard and getting a checkerboard pattern shaved in my head for a show my band played. We were not a ska-band.
After graduation, the saludatorian and I tried to dye our hair grey. We had no hair-dye experience and the bleaching process was not effective enough to get us to white so we ended up with orange hair to which the grey dye did nothing. Hozefa’s parents were not cool with his new look and he went back to black quickly. I went half blue, then later pink, and a few other variations here and there since.
Up until last week my hair was the longest it had been since high-school and now it’s pretty tame. Here’s a collage remembering my hairstyles of the past. Please enjoy.
I have made an effort to find the ideal facial hair combination for my face, by emulating an iconic poster photo for the Lord of the Rings.
I’ve long held the suspicion that it is better and more natural to sleep on your right side than your left side. This hypothesis is based soley on the shape and orientation of the stomach. I have no idea if this has any scientifically studied back-up, but this diagram says it all for me.
I’m working on a page of record reviews, check it out.
Here are some examples:
Band: Hours pay for cars
Album: 4X4 children
Rating: *
One word: *meaningful*.. The tired old scene is great. The percussion is piercing. . The anti-rock movement is really taking off. Their lead-guitarist and guitarist are amateurs!
Band: The glowing of a stumbling blade
Album: Destination: elderly theory
Rating: **
This album reiterates dance music is stagnant. Dance music is really taking off. You can tell that their bassist knows what they are doing. . They need practice. The violinist, Ethan, is also in ‘Tales of calm sirens’!
I update it all the time, so feel free to refresh to see the latest.
(Also, if you get a blank page, refresh it a few times. I’m still working out the kinks in my terrible javascripting, but the problem is that the more words I add to the randomness the more often the page doesn’t work! If you understand why that would happen, fix the code! Sorry to break character!)
I get all grossed out when I’m in the bathroom and someone walks straight from the urinal to the exit door. Maybe I never should’ve learned the transitive property, but here’s my take on it.
Suitable for framing above every urinal in the world.
This weekend I went to New York for work and on my way out of town met up with Molly and had some fruit. We were talking about improv groups and I asked if she knew about “ImprovEverywhere” which is a group that does organized events (usually around NYC) like no pants days where a large group of people ride a subway car without pants, and other people come by and sell them pants, and they play it off in total seriousness. I heard about them from Cockeyed.com, who put them on his front page on a slow-news-day.
Most of the stuff they do is pretty funny, and usually not mean or making fun of anyone, which is real great.
A couple weeks ago I was in New York, visiting Chad and I was telling him about “ImprovEverywhere” and a particular prank they did called “The Moebius” that was inspired by the Star Trek: TNG episode “Time Squared”. The gist is, they kept re-enacting the same scene over and over again in a coffee-shop until people started to notice. One person would spill their coffee, another would play the same song on their stereo, and a couple would have a fight and one would run out. Chad’s a big TNG fan, which is how it came up.
Later that day, we ended up at “The Strand”, a large and popular bookstore. There was a really long line we had to wait in to check your bags. We looked around the store for a long time, and there were a surprising number of people who would make eye-contact just a little longer than you’d expect. I figured it was just a weird/magic New York night, and I was getting the eye or had something on my face from dinner.
On the way out of the store, we noticed that a lot of cell-phones were ringing near the entracne of the stor, where the bags are checked. Cell-phone rings are sortof the background noise to life, but this was unmistakably not normal cell-phone ringing. The sheer number of overlapping rings was disorienting. It was the most appropriate time in my life to use the word ‘cacophony’.
We stood by the check-out counter for a bit as Chad claimed his stuff and I tried to figure out what was going on. It was hilarious to me and the more I listened the more intentional it seemed. I was amused. In the future, I’m going to try to be amused without looking so dopey.
The Cell-Phone symphony was an event organized by ImprovEverywhere, and I am pictured in the write-up of the operation and also seen at the end of the video they made about it, looking mildly amused and guffawing to myself. In the caption, they call me a ‘man’ and say I whispered “It’s like a symphony…” quietly to myself. Could be, but I probably said it to Chad.
After leaving, I unfortunately forgot all about it until I checked out their webpage today.
My only resolution this year was to get good at making Billy from Family Circus on my sandwiches.
I need a finer tip on my mustard bottles.
PS. Steven thought my ketchup version at his birthday looked more like Elroy from the Jetsons.
Of course I fought him.
This may be easy to install, but figuring it out is not.
CLICK TO VIEW
CLICK TO VIEW