From RollingStone.com, DOUGLAS BRINKLEY writes about "Slaughter Haus 5" (among other) author Kurt Vonnegut, entitled "Vonnegut's Apocalypse".

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies." - "Cat's Cradle"

"He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it took George W. Bush to break him."

"He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. "Oh, yes," he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?" "Lung cancer?" I offer.

"No. No. Because I'm eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'"

Sometimes it's hard to be some of the things that are happening right before my very eyes. The pending housing market bust, insane satanic style murders and the erosion of the American Ideal. An editorial in today's New York Times post details in layman's terms the recent vote by Congress, regarding the Military Commissions Act, HR 6166 or the "Torture Bill".

Here's the final paragraph, which I hope sinks in:

"We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."

Andrew Sullivan shares a video showing Hillary Clinton at least attempts top stand up to this...

This is a test, only a test of the new version of Windows Live Writer, which was released to day. I wasn't sure it was going to work with the version of DasBlog that I'm using, but alas poor york, it sure as heck does. I'm still a little baffled as to why Microsoft is releasing an "offline blog editor", though I guess some people aren't "wired" 24/7.

MSNBC.com has an story today of very concerning interest to rock 'n roll guitarists the world over. It seems as though the company ExpoPUL, who makes aproximately 60+% of the world vacuum tubes, is being hassled with a very hostile takeover from another Russian company. This especially new worthy for me, as I'm a devout electric guitar player, and cherish the sound of a good tube guitar amplifier. The story hints at corruption in the Russian government, and it appears that the right people are escalating this issue as best as they can. Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of solid state amps and the new digital modelling type amps, but neither of those technologies "make the ground move" like tube amps. To play into the cliche', I love the "warm sound" of tube amps, as do most die hard electric guitarists. Obviously, this is a niche market, so I expect to see tube and tube amp prices sharply increase in the near future. Hopefully, ExpoPUL will come out on top legally, and we can all continue to "teear peoples heads off" with the fantastic tones of tube amplifiers.

You can read more about this ongoing story here.

If you are or know nay fans of Frank Zappa's music, and everybody knows at least one person who is, I'd suggest tuning in, turning on, and checking out "Zappa plays Zappa". Dweezil Zappa has taken it upon himself to organize a group of some of the world's best musicians (including guitar god Steve Vai) to re-visit the complex and challenging music of his father, Frank.

A freind of mine, Jon Gallant, is getting ready to release his debut album, check out his tunes on his website.

Well, it been a while, but there is a new version of Microsoft's classic "XML Notepad". I could go on and on about how much I love this tool, but I think you already get the picture. You can get this download by going here. You can also read about the design, to get a good insight on the history of "XML NotePad". Once you have installed this app, you can take a look around the installation location (/Program Files/Xml Nodepad 2006/) for "XmlNotePad.zip", which contains the source for this also. This one runs on the .NET Framework V2.0, and adds several new features listed below:

• Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
• Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
• Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
• Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
• Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
• In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
• Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
• Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
• Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
• Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
• Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
• Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
• Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
• Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
• Built-in XML Diff tool.

Much thanks to Chris Lovett for his dedicated days, weeks, and hours build this project.

You can still find the older version around on the net if you search for it.

Oh man, OK. The site is finally starting to take shape. There are a few little issues, mainly CSS and DasBlog configuration issues. It took all weekend, but I have finally able to integrate the main sites CSS with the blog template. Looking good in IE6/7 and FireFox 1.5.xx. Anybody know when FireFox is going to start supporting HTML+Time? Now I can get some sleep...

Well, I migrated quite a bit of the old blog posts from my Windows Live Spaces site, namely choicing the ones where either the links weren't broken, and also just removing a lot of the redundant ones. The next challenge is to redesign my master page and file system layout to work better with this instance of DasBlog. Since this is a "living" site ( meaning it changes at my whim), I'm trying to come up with a unique user interface design and layout. Style is everything! Or should I say, CSS styles are everything!

At this point, I'll take feature requests for this site and/or maybe install whatever the equivalent of news groups, boards, forums, "buzz word of the week" type web apps.

Things I know I need to add:

1. Consistent RSS features
2. Some cool AJAX Demos and other code samples
3. Some of my music, art, and programs.
4. Anything else I like...

Here it is my new web log location!! Waahoo, my new blog!

You may remember my "Windows Live site", or maybe my "MySpace" site, or maybe it was my "PhotoBlog" pages (which I rarely used..). Well, these will eventually being going away, to be replace by this "blog". You will "digg" it, once you have "reddit". ;)

I'll be customizing this particular "DasBlog" CSS and template, as I can't stop playing "ASP.NET 2.0".