I told the building people that a row of tiles in my shower is all cracked and there's probably water leaking in and causing damage. Six weeks and a few reminders later they still haven't fixed it, but I did just find out that my Halloween decoration won first prize of a contest I didn't know about. Two movie passes are apparently on their way. We also found out that there's a Christmas decoration contest with a non-chump prize: a $300 rent rebate.

Last night's scary inner-city pub crawl was a huge success. A couple of girls I know through friends of friends organized a bus and about 30 of us went from seedy wattering hole to seedy wattering hole to enjoy the atmosphere and try our best to avoid the knife fights. Everyone we met was really friendly, more so than our usual night spots. There was a crazy old lady in the first bar who went around hitting on a few of the guys in our group. I almost peed my pants when she started rubbing Bob's shoulders and told him she could "boom boom" for 5 hours. When she asked us what were doing that night, Darren yelled "trying to lose our virginity". Hilarious. The second bar had a couple of musicians playing and towards the end of our stay, they passed on a toast from the regulars who thought we were a fun bunch of young people.

Speaking of young people, I got talking with a guy in the second bar and he made some comment about how people like he and I probably don't party as much as we used to. For some reason, he thought I was in my thirties somewhere, unlike my young colleagues. What is it with people thinking I'm old lately?

There was a report on CBC about Windows messenger spam today that really annoyed me. The whole report was about the ethics of spam and whether the government should introduce legislation about it. They made it sound like messenger spam was some new technology that can't be stopped and ignored the obvious ways to eliminate this problem:
1. Stop using Windows.
2. If #1 is impossible for some reason, turn off the messenger service and/or use a firewall.
The crap that passes for reliable computer-related news reports these days. I can't help worrying that their background research for other current events is as shabby as their technology work and I just don't realize it.

So Dave and I got pretty drunk at the concert on Saturday and decided that we should start our own band. Being idle drunk talk, it was a pretty serious planning session. Number one, it would be purely to pick up girls. We're not teenage dropouts who start a garage band, linger in obscurity for a few years, then grow old and become carpet salesmen. We're already financially secure, so this is a side gig for kicks. We quickly decided on the standard 4-piece drummer, bassist, guitarist, and lead singer layout. I later suggested that we should have a growly female vocalist to front the band. Like Brody from the Distillers, suggested Dave. Yes, perfect. Do yourself a favour and go watch the Young Crazed Peeling video on their page at Epitaph records. No, really, do it now. And turn your speakers up nice and loud.

The next big question was of course the name. We both wanted a mildly obscure pop culture reference that didn't make us sound like posers. It's important to make sure we don't look like posers because we're aiming for an old school sound, not one of these sell-out pop-punk bands like Blink 182 or Green Day. Anyway, I think Dave has the best idea so far, but I think part of being a good punk band is changing your name two or three times before you catch on, so I'm not sure I want to use that one just yet.

Somewhere in there, we briefly addressed the issue of who plays what instrument. Dave wants the bass because the bass player always looks cool. I suspect it's just because there aren't as many notes to play. But really, Joey Ramone only ever learned three or four chords to play guitar and he carried a hell of a melody. It's the energy that's important.

We eventually sobered up and went for donairs. I'm sure Evan will tell you Edmonton's donairs aren't as good as Halifax's or whatever, but it's all just near-rancid meat and mystery sauce. Then I went home and washed off the cigarette stink and the blue gunk that unfortunately shows up a lot better on my bath tub than in my hair. The point of this story? I don't know, I need a hobby?

Three weeks, three concerts. Tonight was Punk-O-Rama Tour 2002 featuring Face To Face, Guttermouth, and a bunch of guests, a mainstream punk extravaganza at Red's in The Mall. It was a fun show. Plus I caught a drumstick at the end of Guttermouth's set. It appears to be a Vic Firth American Classic 2B and reminds me of kids who used to chew on their pencils in elementary school.

OpenBSD 3.2 was recently made available for pre-order. Done.

Tool on Sunday was a good time. The guy running the parking lot said the people next to us drove to Edmonton from Saskatchewan for the show on Sunday and were planning on driving to Calgary the next day to see it again. Two of Warren's friends were only slightly less intrepid fans, driving 5 hours to Edmonton to see the show, then driving back immediately afterwards. There were plenty of eery video clips and computer animation loops, including a grainy black and white clip involving two naked women and a mechanical tentacle that I'm told lasted longer during other stops on the tour. I'm sure the creepy imagery had deep metaphorical meaning for some, but it was all marketing as far as I was concerned. No complaints, of course.

My boss wanted to get a new cell phone, so I inherited his Treo to replace my plain old Nokia. I already want my old phone back. This Treo thing is much bulkier and the tiny buttons make dialing really annoying. I was interested in using iCal and iSync, but once again I've realized that PDAs have very limited usefulness for someone who's always in near a real computer anyway.

I bought Beck's new album, Sea Change. It's really... mellow. I'm no music critic, but I know what I hate. I don't hate this. It's certainly not grating like Mellow Gold, but it's not as rocking as Odelay or even Mutations. I suspect I'll get to like it more, but I doubt I'll ever know the names of the individual tracks.

Memento sure is a good movie.

Update on Saturday's party: we have received an official warning from the property managers because of the noise. Our neighbour on one side leaves her TV volume on max all the time and the neighbour on the other side has loud girls on his balcony almost every weekend. Plus the construction outside wakes me up almost every morning. I thought our party fit in pretty well.