Hello Visitor From Oman!

I had a visitor from Oman this week! Thanks for visiting visitor from Oman using Netscape 3. Ouch Netscape 3. That brings back memories. I hear your nation is oil rich. Pray that Bush doesn’t find out about it. We may end up bombing you too. Honorable mention goes to this weeks visitors from Austrailia,Taiwan, and Spain. There are usually a couple of you a week but Oman? That’s a first. Very cool. Come back soon.

Man I really need to go to sleep. If I don’t hit the hay soon I’m libel to sleep right through the Linkin Park concert. 15 Hours and counting. Hopefully the next 8 to 10 of those I’ll spend asleep. So much for golf this morning. Oh well. I’m not all that into golf yet anyway. I think AIM is under attack. Denial of Service or something. My AIM connection keeps dropping out. For a while it booted me off and wouldn’t let me back in. Kept saying that my password was incorrect. Oh it is? I’ve only been using it for 7 years or so. Or maybe this happens on AIM all the time at 5:00 am and I’m just usually not up to see it. Alright, well I’m heading to bed. Come on Nora. Lull me to sleep with your sweet, syrupy voice. (Nora Jones’ album makes for great sleeping music. Very peaceful.)

+ War + Iraq Poster Exhibition +

Check out this site, + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition +. (Thanks to Wilson of Racingmix.com for pointing me there.) I had to link to it here. All I can say is it’s very thought provoking. My favorite poster so far is this one. I guess I hits home for me because I have some ties to Texas with it being my birthplace and all in addition to being the home of several close friends and family.

Linkin Park + Evanescence + Soccer = Incredible Weekend

April 12 has finally arrived. Well almost. Tomorrow, Linkin Park comes back to Memphis and I can’t wait! The last couple of weeks have been rather stressful but this weekend should be awesome. I’ve dubbed it Stress Relief Weekend 2003. Linkin Park tomorrow evening. Soccer on Sunday. I might even squeeze in a round of golf tomorrow morning (gotta test out the set of clubs my parents got me for Christmas).

Speaking of awesome music (Linkin Park) I bought the Evanescence CD, Fallen, last night. A couple of days ago I downloaded demo versions of all the songs on the album (unintentionally but that’s another story). I had been pondering buying this CD ever since it came out on March 4th. The first single Bring Me To Life blew me away when I first heard it on the Daredevil movie trailer. When I heard it on the radio for the first time I was stunned. Now that I have the CD I don’t know why I waited so long. It’s great. It’s a nice contrast to the Linkin Park kick that I have been and still am on. The band’s sound is a mix of the epic and the ethereal. It’s kind of hard to describe but I like it. Most of the songs have a vastness and sonic depth to them that a lot of bands don’t even try to attempt. The kicker for me though is the lead singer, Amy Lee. Her voice is both beautiful and haunted all at once. She really feels the lyrics. A lot of the songs have a spiritual undertone to them. I wouldn’t say that the group is overtly Christian though. Throughout the album you get the sense Amy comes from a Christian background but is at a point in her life where she’s struggling with her faith. It seems like she’s at the crossroads between the faith of her childhood and the faith of her adulthood. Kind of like she’s working things out in her head through the lyrics. That’s a place many young Christians and young adults in general can relate to. I know I can. This make for a very intriguing listening experience throughout the album.

Well I’m off for another 8 hours of work. The best thing about going to work tonight is that when I get through, I’ll have such an awesome weekend ahead of me. Later

Testing 1-2-3

Just testing out this new Blogging tool I discovered, w.bloggar. The simplest way to describe it would be a desktop publishing program for your blog. Instead of logging into Blogger.com to create blog entries, all I’ll have to do now is launch w.bloggar and start typing. It handles everything else. It’s got built in spell checker, built in HTML tag generator, template editor, plus it posts and publishes you entries straight to your blog for you. One feature I really like is that it makes it easy to save a backup copy of each of your posts on your hard drive. I’ve been doing that manually for almost a year now. That feature alone makes it worth it’s weight in gold. The best part is, it’s free. You gotta love Freeware. Of course they ask you to make a small PayPal donation if you like the software. I’m sure I’ll be doing that in the near future. Gotta give this wonderful piece of software a test spin first though. So far so good.

Thanks to TechTV and more specifically Leo and Patrick from The Screen Savers for introducing me to this wonderful tool. If you have a blog head over to wbloggar.com right now and download this software. It makes an already simple process even easier. Plus it’s compatible with all the major blogging systems out there right now. Blogger, Moveable Type, etc. Try it. You’ll like it. I’m sure of it.

Sorry To Disappoint

I hope I’m not disappointing the many visitors who discover my site during their search for Telekinetic enlightenment or awakening or whatever it is. No I’m not some telekinetic guru out to share my genius with the world. My blog comes up on search engines all over the wide world web because the title of the blog used to be Telekinetic Psychology For Your Mind. Apparently there are a lot of folks out there looking to tap into their telekinetic side. Sorry to disappoint. Thanks to a little thing we like to call caching in the tech world my blog will continue to get search engine hits when the term Telekinetic is looked up for many months into the future even though I changed the title recently. This post will only help perpetuate that since the word telekinetic appears rather liberally throughout.

The original title came from a play on words based on one of my favorite Linkin Park songs. The current title: Somewhere I Belong puts all pretense and creativity aside. It’s a blatant rip off of the title/lyric from the latest Linkin Park single and yet it’s rather fitting at the same time because I feel that my blog is Somewhere I Belong. Maybe not all the time but it is sometimes. It’s a place where I can vent and explore my random thoughts. It’s a place where I can get things off my chest and put my musings on paper… I mean blogger…. I mean whatever. My blog is my home on the web. Or more accurately, my room on the web. It’s cozy and quiet and set up just the way I like it. It’s small and tucked away and visited by very few people other than myself much like my real-life room. But unlike my real life room, I promise to never install one of those java apps that streams crappy midi music to your computer whenever you visit the page. Streaming audio fits perfectly in my real room. Streaming audio = bad idea for blog.

Am I the only person that gets a kick out of doing reverse-IP lookups on the IP addresses of the people that visit my blog? I see you nodding your head yes. If you don’t know, your IP address is like your street address on the Information Super Highway. Doing reverse lookups doesn’t give me any personal information whatsoever on my visitors so please don’t worry. I’m not storing all the data somewhere waiting to track you down and stalk you. I’m just curious about where the few visitors I do actually get are coming from. The site that does my webstatics has a list of countries and the number of visitors from each country that have come to my site but a lot of visitors fall into the ‘other’ category. Apparently the webstatics site doesn’t have a very sophisticated web lookup architecture. That’s why I look up the IPs myself. There’s nothing hacker (there’s a term for the search engines and government carnavore computers to pick up on. welcome all you people looking for information on becoming a hacker. I’ll let you in on a little secret though. If you have to do a web search on how to become a hacker give up now because you’re not one and probably won’t ever be a real one. The best you can hope to be is a script kiddie which is what most of the people who claim to be hackers today are.) like about reverse IP lookups. Anybody can do them. Just do a Google search for reverse IP lookup and you’ll get tons of sites that will help you do them.

Interestingly enough I get a lot of International hits. The program I use, Neotrace, visually maps where in the world the user is and traces the route (meaning each server they passed through) to get to my blog. It’s pretty neat. So hello to my visitors from Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Brazil, The Philippines, Hawaii, Britain and points in between. I guess you guys are really into that Telekinetic stuff huh. Sorry, I had to slip that in there. Gotta keep those hits coming.

So It’s Come To This

I can’t believe it’s come to this. I’m sitting here in the middle of the day watching the old New Kids On The Block Hangin’ Tough video on MTV 2. I really need to find something to do with my days. This is really ridiculous. Yes you read correctly. New Kids On The Block. I know. I know. Please stop shaking your head and don’t laugh because you know that back in the day everybody thought the New Kids were the bomb. They were so sixth/seventh grade. Anyway mercifully the pain has passed. One of my favorite Yao Ming commercials is on. It’s the Yo! …. No Yao Visa commercial. Love that one. Other videos that have graced the screen this hour include I Think We’re Alone Now by Tiffany, Tearing Up My Heart by a very young N*Sync, some song from the Stone Roses (a one hit wonder I vaguely remember) with a really tight beat but lyrics that my 6 year old cousin could have written better. Ah yes, and this trip down memory lane wouldn’t be complete without Can’t Touch This by MC Hammer which just came on. Now all we need is Vanilla Ice and all will be right with the world. Out of all of these I think that the MC Hammer joint still sounds fresh after all these years. The others should be kept where they’re at…. in the past. Thankfully I’ve got an hour less to piddle around with nothing to do today. I’ve got a training class at work which will require me to come in an hour early. 3 instead of 4. Which also means I’ll get off an hour earlier. This is truly sad. I’m so bored, I’m actually looking forward to work where more boredom will also ensue but at least I’m getting paid for it.