Work: The Next Generation

I hurt in ways that are not unusual by themeselves, but the combination of aches, near muscle pulls, bruises and other abrasions have me seeking an odd combination of comfort food bedfellows: beer and tapioca pudding. I'm sure it'll be just like bubble tea. Honest.

Hooray Beer! Hooray Weekend!

Employment

Today was my third day of training at a national shipping company so that I may become a package handler. My legs look like I owe someone money. Not enough debt to break bones, just enough to slap a rubber hose across them repeatedly. My right forearm looks roughly the same. In short, ow.

The job kind of sucks. The pay definately sucks. The hours don't suck, but only because I don't have any sort of social life, and as I'm not getting paid enough to have one, this works out rather well. The bright side of this: I get to work in a field (manual labor) that I've not yet worked, and I get to drop my gym membership and not baloon up like a Sally Struthers.

eMusic!

I have an intense dislike for DRM. It's a pointlessly restrictive method of copy protection that's as functional as a 20 year old Yugo. It's also why I'll never purchase any music from iTunes. To me, limiting myself to a single type of portable music player (or doing so on this side of the DMCA, anyway), and to a small amount of transfers is more cumbersome than buying a CD and then ripping the tracks.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to only buying physical copies of music, so I was pleasantly surprised by a post on BoingBoing about eMusic, a site that has legal downloads (and not quasi-legal Russian based servers) with no DRM, no restricions on transfers between storage devices, and a high bitrate.

Their selection, for me, is really quite good. Last night I downloaded the Old 97's album Wreck Your Life and a couple of songs from The Weakerthans. Today I used up the rest of my free trial (25 songs) on a few songs from Spain, Vox Vermillion, Petra Haden (from that dog. and The Rentals), Eletric Frankenstein, Future Bible Heroes (an alternate outlet for Stephin Merritt), and The Decemberists.

In the light of day, I'll probably activate the billed portion of my subscription. $10/month for 40 downloads means about $3 a cd, and still room in the budget to, you know, eat. I'm in favor of eating, especially to good, new music.

A man who should wear tweed

From the Village Voice, via Boing Boing

He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts.

This is not the context you're looking for

Pulled from Open Thread 68 at Making Light we have quite the painful imagery:

fanwanking the lemons of bad writing and worse acting into an only slightly palatable lemonade

Edited to add another bit of geeky behaviour:

"I've got to go polish Boba Fett."
This is not what it sounds like either.