Jay Lark

My girlfriend, my neighbors, and I all went out last weekend and had one of the most unexpected but wonderful experiences in a long time.  Too much awesome happened to write down, but here is a little summary.

I’ve always been a pretty big fan of The Decemberists, but I’ve become especially enamored with their latest effort entitled The Hazards of Love.  Shara of My Brightest Diamond fame is one the guest singers on the album, and while I’ve been aware of her for a little while, I really never listened to her music that much before.

Shara’s voice on The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid is one of my favorite parts of the album so I decided to do a little research on Shara which obviously led me to My Brightest Diamond’s website.  Once on the site I was pleasently suprised to see that Shara was coming to Detroit very soon to play a free show at The Yes Farm!

Shara with the gang

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Boo hoo! Massive RIAA Layoffs: I’m feeling lazy, and the write of the article sums it up pretty nicely so I’ll just quote.

“The real issue is that the RIAA has basically managed to run one of the dumbest, most self-defeating strategies over the last decade. Rather than helping major record labels adjust to the changing market, it continually, repeatedly and publicly destroyed its own reputation and the reputation of the labels — each time shrinking their potential market by blaming the very people they should have been working to turn into customers”

“They may claim that they “had” to take this strategy because it’s what the labels wanted (and, indeed, that was Hilary Rosen’s excuse), but that’s ridiculous. It was evident to pretty much anyone who took the time to understand the issues back in the mid- to late-90s, that the internet represented an opportunity to those who embraced it. The RIAA’s decision to fight progress and its own customers at every turn has been nothing short of a complete disaster.”

So Mr. Shuttleworth announced the name for an upcoming Ubuntu Release. Karmic Koala is what it will be called and so of course the KDE version will be named Kubuntu Karmic Koala.  In the long press release it is also mentioned that the famous brown theme Ubuntu is known for will be dropped.  KKK, no more brown, shame on you Ubuntu.

I’d like to deracify (not a word) my computer but unfortunately Blackbird: The browser for the African American community only runs on Windows.™

This country is going to hell in a handbasket.  Let’s all sit back and enjoy the ride!

I used to blame horrible parents and kids for the problems in our schools, but man, really stupid teachers are popping up everywhere. I had some stupid teachers, but it is getting really bad.  Can we please pay these people more money so we can get someone with half a brain teaching our kids?

Two of my favorites from the past month:

Teacher bans Linux from school.  “No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful” Really? I make a program and give it to you for free.  I hope you aren’t hurt too badly.

“I along with many others tried Linux during college” Oooooohhh!  Linux is like a drug or a same sex partner!

and what about a little invasion of privacy!

“ ‘My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it.”

What?!?!? These are my notes. I wrote them.  They are mine.  And going into a student’s backpack without cause?

Very busy month!  Come January 26th I will have worked 26 days in a row! Yikes!

I was sick  earlier this month, and work this past week or so has included a lot of standing and walking. (Trip to New York = walking)  Weight check this morning confirmed this as I now weigh an even 219 pounds.  For those not keeping track, that is a total loss of 0.5 pounds this month.  Weight is just falling off!

Come see me at the auto show, I’ll be at the Chrysler display every morning!

CES hasn’t quite started started yet, but MSNBC is already having a little fun with a modified version of our Vectorform Surface DJ.

Check it out:

Vectorform has released it’s first application for the iPhone/iTouch.  All you guys with your fancy stuff head over to the iTunes store (will open iTiunes) and buy it now! Make us rich!

So yesterday I started out with a good workout.  The basement at work was flooded so I carried 6 shop-vac buckets of water up a flight of stairs and dumped them in the parking lot.

I’ve heard that it is dangerous to loose too much weight too quickly though so I woofed down 10 White Castle cheeseburgers and a 64oz. Coke for lunch.

Weigh in this morning was 220.5 lbs. so disaster avoided!

Today I started the One hundred pushup challenge.  I am at rank 4.  I have no idea what this means.

Total weight lost so far: +1 lb

As you may or may not know my brother-in-law went on some fancy power diet and got to go on TV and talk about all the weight he lost.  He and Tony Horton are like best friends now.  They go fishing every weekend and played fantasy football together.

This inspired my New Year’s resolution from last year to lose weight so that I may someday get on TLC’s Little People, Big World.  Well, it’s December 29th so I thought I should get started.

Today’s Stats:

• Height: 6′4″
• Weight 219.5 lbs (The .5 is probably because my hair was wet.)

Goal:

• Height: 4′2″
• Weight: 98 lbs

Okay, enough typing for today.  I probably lost 5 pounds in my fingers just typing this.  Tomorrow is the first day of the hundred pushup challenge!

As I’ve mentioned before we’ve been working on some cool things with the Micrsoft Surface.  Unfortunately we haven’t really been able to discuss exactly what we have so friends and family have had to rely on my vague descriptions.

One item that is now in the public view is our BMW configurator.  Check out the video at the end of this Vectorform Surface Blog post.

We even got a mention in the NY Times.