Check this:

Look past the "different" costumes (yeah, that's Geddy in a cloak, or a gown, or something), and check out all the stuff that's going on in this song!  Neil Peart (drummer) has to switch sticks every five seconds because he goes from drums to bells to chimes to bell-tree to gong, etc.  Geddy Lee (the singer) is playing a double-neck rickenbacher 4-string bass/6-string electric guitar.  He's also singing incredibly high, playing all the synthesizer parts, and using his feet to play background things on "Taurus Pedals."  Not to say Alex Lifeson (guitar) is slacking off or anything, but all he's doing is playing guitar . 
If ever there were something I would have liked to have seen live, it would be this performance.  This is incredible!  There's so much going on at once, and Rush is only a three-piece band!  Generally, most people consider drums or keyboards to be the only instruments where the player has to mentally subdivide different body parts which are doing different things simultaneously (i.e. the four limbs of a drummer, or the right-hand and left-hand parts of a piano piece).  Just watch Geddy for about two minutes around 3:00 into this video again... wow.  Singing, playing a killer bassline, and layering a synth pedal part underneath it all.  That's skill.

So it strikes again. On an exceptionally rainy night, driving down the highway with my brights on and drinking a horrible-tasting Vault, I got bored with my usual radio station so I turned to the scan button (God forbid we ever get the tape player fixed!).  Maybe it was the cloud cover doing a reflection job, but I was able to pick up a plethora of stations, more than usual.  There were some distinct patterns.  All Country stations came in pairs.  The 90.x band was nothing but Christian music and Classical music.  In the end, as usual, my late-night road trips seem to broaden my musical horizons.  I had about 25 minutes worth of driving, and in that short time, I listened to Ludacris, Taylor Swift, Clapton, The Police, Sean Paul, Chicago, and just a snippet of song about a schizophrenic psycho.  Oh the wonders of the scan button -- I can't express them all!  Next time you're in the car, give it a whirl.  Eject that tape (or that CD if you're one of those rich city-slickers ) and hit up the ol' FM band.  Listen to some things you normally wouldn't, you might hear something you like.

I found a more preliminary report of this last year, but I just heard some more about it, so I figured I'd share.

Personal computing giant Microsoft is doing more than Vista and Xbox - now they're making furniture.  To be specific, their new line of coffee tables (titled "Surface") will, in the near future, shape the direction personal computing takes for the next decade or so.  Don't get too excited, Microsoft is limiting sales to a few choice businesses during this initial phase, but sooner rather than later Surface will be available to mainstream consumers.  So what is it?  Well, Surface is a Vista PC in a coffee table... oh and a 30" multi-sensory touchscreen.  You really have to see the video to grasp how cool this is, but basically it's a touch screen that you can manipulate with more than one finger simultaneously, or that more than one person can use at the same time.  With this, you can "physically" drag images, videos, files, folders, kangaroos, or what have you around your screen, resizing at will, stacking them, spreading them, or whatever to your heart's content.  Oh yeah, then there's this little thing about the cameras that are inside the table facing up through the screen.  Thanks to some clever bluetooth and UPC labels and all, you can, for example, place your digital camera on a Surface unit and, oh hey what do you know, it's immediately interfaced with the computer!  Drag your photos right off of the camera.  Trying to split up a complicated bill at a restaurant?  Have everyone place their plastic on the table and just drag images of what everyone ate to each person's credit card!  Needless to say, this is an awesome technology, something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.  Check out the full article and a video about it here.

Now, kids, I'm going to go watch some sci-fi channel, so maybe I'll be prepared next time something big happens.

Summer's here.  It's time to hit the weights hard again.  I love lifting - it's so empowering.  You can push yourself to do so much; a feeling you don't get sitting behind a desk.  It clears your mind and allows you to focus on a goal, even if its only to get the next rep up.  For me to do that, I need some good music with me.  Good, hard metal or hard rock does it best.  It pisses me off so bad when I walk into a gym and they're playing gd Whitney Houston or Kanye West.  What kind of motivational music is that?  I usually make playlists on my Zen to ramp up the intensity as my workout goes along.  Here's an example of my typical adrenaline-boosting lineup.

Warm-Up
 1. Fallout Boy - Thnks fr th Mmrs
 2. Breaking Benjamin - Polyamorous
Lift
 3. A Perfect Circle - Judith
 4. Children of Bodom - Kissing the Shadows
 5. Stone Sour - Come What(ever) May
 6. Soil - Halo
 7. Stone Sour - Made of Scars
 8. Children of Bodom - Silent Night, Bodom Night
 9. Atreyu - Becoming the Bull
10. Dry Kill Logic - Paper Tiger
11. Hoobastank - Out of Control
Bike/Run(Cardio)
12. All That Remains - Not Alone
13. Megadeth - Mechanix (a.k.a. Metallica - The Four Horsemen)
14. Rage Against the Machine - Guerrilla Radio
15. Hatebreed - Perseverance
Cooldown
16. Smile Empty Soul - Bottom of a Bottle
17. Thrice - All That's Left

I've got seven or eight lists I shuffle through, but they're all similar.  Even if you don't like real heavy music, try something like this when you're lifting.  Most of the time the music just ends up fading into part of my subconscious while I'm throwing the iron around, but it still gets me going.

...the Earth was formless in the void of the night.  Sometime later, I began this blog to try to capture all the random interesting things I come across during my cyberspace exploration and/or life experiences.  So it begins.  Now if only my "a" key wasn't so broke, I would be able to type at a decent rate.  It's discouraging when you are staring off past the LCD at random things throughout the room while typing, as I often do, and look down to see words like nnihiltion (annihilation) or phrmcy (pharmacy) or even fcebook (facebook, which looks somewhat like fecesbook :P ).  One would think after a good twenty years of popularized mainstream personal computing, the industry would come up with a better type of keyboard than just a bunch of thin, fragile plastic tiles mounted on little springy buttons.  I think there's something in the works involving light and motion detection, but it's not hit the market yet.  It kind of irks me; I'm missing the plastic cover of my Caps Lock key, so now I have a little green rubber nipple on the left side of my keyboard.  It's erect.  It's distracting.  Man, if only we could develop neural net technology.  You'd just wear a sweet-looking hairnet like apparatus and just Think what you wanted to Type.  Kind of an extended motor function thing, like learning to move a new muscle.  Oh well.  One of these days.