I finally got around to finishing my MeFi Swap cd mix that I need to send out to five people ASAP. I haven’t recieved any cds yet, or heard from anyone that’s supposed to send one to me, so I hope people haven’t just lost interest, but they’re probably like me and just took a while to get around to making and burning the mix. I hope to pick up some padded envelopes and get mine in the mail tomorrow. I’m not exactly sure what I think of my mix, and I’m not really the most accomplished mix taper in the world. It doesn’t really have a clever theme or feel to it, but I think its not a bad mix in terms of song quality and flow. Naturally, I had to close it with Back and Forth by the Dismemberment Plan, one of my favorite D-Plan songs which I’ve always thought made an incredible album closing song as well as a great song to listen to in the spring time. Also, it took some restraint but I managed to make an entire mix without putting a single song on by the Smiths or Morrissey. I think that’s a first. The entire mix is:

Starflyer 59 – I Drive a Lot
Jawbox – Excandescent
Bedhead – Extramundane
Whiskeytown – Reasons to Lie
Frodus – Out-Circuit the Ending
Max Tundra – Cakes
The Sea and Cake – Sporting Life
The New Pornographers – Letter from an Occupant
Burning Airlines – Wheaton Calling
The Birthday Party – Mr. Clarinet
Havalina Rail Co. – 2/4
Pixies – Hey
Yo la Tengo – Cherry Chapstick
Morella’s Forest – Lush of Spring
Archer Prewitt – Raise on High
Beulah – Silverado Days
The Dismemberment Plan – Back and Forth

Today is the most beautiful day of the year so far. Its amazing outside, really. Wow. As I drove home from work at noon today, CD101 was kind enough to play Beulah’s A Good Man is Easy to Kill followed by Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. I think I almost broke my steering wheel from pounding along so gleefully. I’m exuberant.

My fate is sealed. I have crossed the point of no return and stepped up to the ultimate level of geekiness. I have added a second monitor to my computer. Hey, at least I’m not trying to go for 3. Some people do that you know. Losers. Not like me at all. Maybe buying a second monitor sounds a little wasteful to you, but its all part of my brilliant plan. See, by buying a monitor I’m helping the slumping tech ecomony, the very ecomony that I hope will someday employ me. Yes, by buying a second monitor I have virtually assured employment for myself. Genius! And besides, once you’ve tried working with two monitors, you can never go back. Its just that good. Unfortunately, this addition was not without casualties. Windows2000 just wouldn’t cooperate with my two monitor plan, possibly in an attempt to save me from my own geekiness. I loved Windows2000 dearly, but I had to kill it. I finally went to WindowsXP and everything went great and my two monitors are happy and HOLY CRAP WHY DOES MY DESKTOP LOOK LIKE A FISHER PRICE PLAYSET??!! After much tweaking and prodding and turning off of useless annoying crap I think I’ve started to warm up to XP, basically by turning it back into Windows2000. I loved Windows2000, did I mention that?

My beautiful new DPlan/DCFC poster just arrived in the mail. Talk about a good looking poster, I love this thing. The sad thing is, I’m guessing that they had this for sale at the show but I just missed it entirely there. Instead, I had to order mine from Barsuk records.

Argh! I was all ready to go out after work today and pick up a 20GB Nomad mp3 jukebox, when I happened to find out that the Nomad 3 is scheduled for release “soon” (possibly later this month) I wasn’t even aware that this was in development, much less that it was near release. Looks like I’m going to have to wait for that to come out, especially since it has a much nicer battery and (joy!) Firewire. Since 11 gigs of mp3s would take 10+ hours to copy over USB, having a Firewire connection able to go up to 400 mb/sec is a very very good thing. Now if I can only endure the waiting, the horrible horrible waiting.

Last night I went to see Big Trouble, not entirely sure what to expect. I knew it had to be at least somewhat funny, I mean its based on a novel by Dave Barry so its got a lot going for it right there. On the other hand though, it has Tim Allen in it. But on the other other hand, it has Jason Lee, Janeane Garofalo, and Andy Richter (who, I should point out, has virtually the entire sum of his screen time featured in the commercials for the movie. Why do they do that?) Oh yeah and Johnny Knoxville is in it, playing against type as a complete idiot. With about a million different characters and a run time of only an hour and a half, it was frequently a bit loose and unfocused but fortunately it was even more frequently very funny. I would even go so far as to call it zany. And not just to have an excuse to use the word “zany” in two posts in a row either.

I didn’t think it would be that hard to track down a Smiths guitar chord book, but now I’m not even sure if such a thing exists. Amazon, eBay and Google have all turned up nothing. Lately I’ve been working on improving what minimal guitar skills I have for the purpose of learning to play Smiths songs. Most of the tab that I’ve found on the internet has been either incomplete, inaccurate, or overly cryptic so I thought I’d see if I could find a real chord book. See, the eventual goal is to reach a level of Johnny Marr-like perfection so amazing that it summons Morrissey, who insists that we form a band. Naturally, we do and we begin to spread melodrama and melancholy the likes of which the world has never seen. Also we drive around in a van solving zany mysteries. Ok, so I haven’t got all the details worked out but it doesn’t matter because it won’t ever happen unless I can find a Smiths chord book!

As I was tearing into my Easter stash of lovely Cadbury Cream Eggs today, I suddenly became aware that I have an odd compulsive habit regarding them. I always, and I mean always, have to carefully remove the foil wrapper in one whole unripped piece which is often a time consuming and fairly tedious process. Why don’t I just shred it off quickly and devour the faux egg creaminess within?? I have no idea. I don’t do the same thing with other foil wrapped foods, so what is it about the eggs that compels me to do that? This has been Will Gorman’s Personality Quirk #9834-b. Collect them all!

AIM+ is a brilliant little piece of software that gives AOL instant messenger some much needed improvements. For one thing, it removes the ads and allows you to get rid of some of the useless icons in the program. As if that weren’t nice enough it keeps chat histories, allows you to run multiple copies of AIM at once and even throws in transparency settings for good measure.

Go quickly, Indietabs.net has an amazing April Fool’s page up. (good lord, I hope its an april fool’s page…) Only 2.5 hours left in April Fool’s day. Hurry up, you’ll kick yourself if you miss it. (Warning, emo boys in underwear ahead)

Let’s face it. You probably spend hours every day fretfully thinking to yourself: “Boy, I’d sure like to know what Will’s listening to on Winamp right now at this exact moment.” I’m sure that some days it was almost too much to take. Well fret no longer, I finally figured out how to stick my currently playing Winamp song title into the page. Look, there it is right over there. I think that’s awesome, and by awesome I mean incredibly geeky. All it took was a Winamp plugin and this handy simple webserver. The only downside is that it won’t work in Netscape, but who uses Netscape anymore anyway?