Hey, Tell us more about your new job.

Thanks for asking! The new job is right down the street from our new pad. No more of this driving 30 miles each way to the corporate park. No more coming home soaked in sweat from sitting in traffic in 95 degree weather with no A/C, breathing in fumes and watching people take insane chances on the freeways with their competitive driving habits. No more feeling like I have to rush to get out of the house by 6:30am just to beat the morning traffic.

This new job will entail a lot more programming, which is mostly why I took it. I was doing some programming at my present job, but more recently had been corralled into doing a lot more monkey work. The new place is real small, too, like 12 people as opposed to 700. They have contracts with the city of Denver (doing groundwater modeling) and also with the Denver bus system, both of which are immensely more interesting to me than airports, which I have been dealing with for the past 1.2 years. There's another contract involving the Big Straw project, which involves pumping some of the Colorado River water back to the Front Range (east of the Divide) instead of Nevada, Arizona and California. I'm not too sure what all the contract involves, but it should be fairly extensive.

I interviewed for this job on the Monday before the wedding, and accepted it that Thursday, then went out of town for almost two weeks. So now I'm at my old job for the rest of this week, and you can imagine how difficult it is to get motivated to do anything at all work-related. Which is exactly why I found myself at Guitar Center yesterday.

So I'm pretty stoked to get out of the commuting BS, and out of the shithole office park, but still, getting a new job is kinda stressful. I hate being the new dude, the guy who accidentally deletes a bunch of critical data or crashes the server or spills coffee all over a bunch of blueprints or plugs up the company terlet.

Which reminds me, I'll be anxious to see if their servers are named after Fourteeners, like every other business in Colorado does.

Hey Yale, what are you programming in?

My all-time favorite guitarstore dickwad story:

My friend Adam was contemplating buying a different speaker cabinet for his half-stack guitar amplifier. So, he decided to stop into Portland Music Company to test out various new half stacks and figure out an idea of what he wanted. At PMC (a pretty much all-around gayass music store) they have the little room with the big amps in it so you can be noisy. But like you said, some peniswrinkle always has to be there staring at you, showing you what the amp can do. In this case, Adam was doing essentially the same thing as you, Yale, and playing some half stack Huges & Kettner (I think) amp and cab that cost like $5,000 or $6,000 or something crazy. Adam says: "Well, I guess this sounds pretty cool, but who REALLY spends six grand on an amplifier anyway?"

Cool "extreme" PMC employee replies: "Oh I don't know. . .(pause- cocks head). . . Ever hear of a little band called-- Bon Jovi?"

Adam said he pretty much just walked out after that.

Hey, by the way, congratulations, Yizale.

Ever hear of a little band called-- Bon Jovi?"

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, that is fucking hilarious! It never ceases to amaze me how clueless those guitar store bozos are. It really is evidence that there is an entire subculture of people who are just hopelessly stuck in that fucking Rikki Rachtman mode of thinking. And the only possible place where they can fraternize with one another is guitar stores. It's worth noting that this is the same group of people that gave us the Grunge effects pedal.

Does anyone else have Mars Music in their town? We used to have two in Denver, and it was similar to Shitar Center in terms of cheesedick-ism and retail largesse, but at Mars, the salesmen hardly EVER talked to you. It was so cool, I'd go in there and play drums for hours, and aside from the occasional fat kid in a Misfits t-shirt wanting to get into some sort of drumming showdown, nobody ever bugged you. And then sometimes these old black dudes would be in there playing really freaked out jazz/funk shit; I always loved watching those guys. Admittedly, having six people in a room playing drums at once was enough to cause Tourette's Syndrome, but it's great for a while.

But alas, this laissez-faire business model caused both Mars Music stores to close last year. Boo.

Hey Yale, what are you programming in?

Thanks for asking! It's called ArcObjects; maybe you have people at Edulog using it? It's essesntially a huge library of COM+ objects that you can use to customize or extend GIS software. It's pretty boggling; I've been using it for a year and feel like I've only scratched the surface.

How 'bout you? I seem to recall you being a C guy, but I could be wrong...

Where are the wedding photos?

Music stores are very strange. I have a love/hate type thing
with 'em. I tend to like the old strange stuff, and get super
stoked if I see something unique and get my heart set on it.
Once that happens there is no turning back. It is like hotrods or something

Have not been buying much of late, but there is no better feeling of getting a good price on old gear that sounds great. The new stuff is cool too but usually too expensive & pro.

Music Villa here in bozeman is probally one of the most laid back places in the world - very cool. The manager is super cool too - soft spoken and willing to work with ya on trade.
most of my gear has come from there.

There is no better place to be in a band than the Bozo.
Hands down. check out www.jetstreamcowboy.com

It is pretty down home here.

On another note I'm thinking of starting a cowboy/voodoo/surf band with a big heavy.

any ideas for a name?