alex chiang: web 6.0

Number of times I was drunk this weekend: 5
Number of hangovers I had this weekend: 5
Number of times I was naked on Sunday: 5

Huzzah for beer.

I guess old habits can be broken. I purchased music today for the first time in a long long time. I’d been browsing the iTunes music store for a few weeks, previewing a few songs and getting some free tracks, but never actually purchasing anything.

Today, I saw a compilation of bluegrass instrumentals that looked interesting, and before I knew what was happening, I clicked “Buy this album”. Twenty minutes later, download complete, I was grooving to Earl Scruggs. Sweet.

The Asian mullet. Yes, it’s back. These are the sorts of things that happen when you lose drunken roshams.

some things were not meant to be
i wondered and i hoped
i took a chance
i know now

I’m quite a ways off from writing my own book. Not even close, in fact. But I took my first tottering baby step today.

Two of my Las Vegas climbing trip reports were published in Red Rock Odyssey, a wonderful book about the history of Red Rock climbing written by my friend Larry DeAngelo. I find it hard to believe that I am sharing the same binding as Largo himself, in addition to Larry Hamilton and Joe Herbst. A mere mortal like me is not worthy as a climber or a writer, to be mentioned in the same breath as those masters. Really.

Buy the book! Buy 6 copies!

Update: John Vawter has written a much better review.

I finally got sick of the comment spam and with 10 seconds of googling, found MT-Blacklist, which is a plugin designed to thwart constant barrage of spam about propecia and whatnot that I get innundated with. Thank the gods.

In other news, this is my 100th post. A nice round number to kick off a new era of spam-free blogging. w00t!

I bought a 20 GB iPod a few weeks ago. The short story is that I love it. Enough cannot be said about having all your music with you at all times.

That said, there are a few nits I’d like to pick. I wish there was an easy way to toggle the shuffle mode. Currently, you can’t add the shuffle mode to the main menu, so you must traverse all the way to the main menu, and then drill back down into the “settings” menu. That annoys me greatly because usually I want to listen to complete albums, but sometimes I just want random play in a playlist I’ve created.

The other minor improvement that could be made would be an “album skip” mode where you press the button and instead of skipping to the next track, you skip to the first song of the next album.

In other news, I’ve been listening to a lot of Dashboard and Wilco lately. These bands are fantastic. Wilco has an amazingily twangy country but still indie rock and roll sound that I can’t get enough of. Check them out if you haven’t already.