Being a CompSci major and all, working with Unix machines, I've built up a decent amount of goodwill towards Macs. We have nice ones in the lab, and they're usually useful. Fairly well-designed OS, even.

But dear God, their latest advertising is doing a good job of destroying it. I don't need some smarmy jackass shoving straw man arguments down my throat and telling me that Macs are some unstoppable race of supercomputers. Macs crash and have issues too. They have their shortcomings, their software shortages, burnt-out logic processors, their spinning-color-wheel-of-death moments. But the main thing is, I find their spokesman unbelievably irritating. Really, I find their entire corporate philosophy irritating; they seem to go out of their way to be pretentious and smug at every turn. So I'll probably just have to start running Linux at some point. Linux folks are smug from time to time too, but all the software is open-source.

Pet peeves aside, all goes well. I had my face melted Tuesday, by the one and only Javier and the Bear. Somebody needs to get these gentlmen some decent gigs, seriously. They get better every time I see them, and they were pretty much an unstoppable force already musically. Now they have advanced to Stage Presence. Most of them actually look like Rock Stars, although the more stylistically-minded can elaborate further. If anyone here hasn't heard Javier and the Bear, shame on you, you poor deprived child. Here is a band with firepower, and one need only look at Joe "the Fro" O'Connor's shattered cymbal to understand just how hard these guys rock. fast and loud, sure, but fast, loud, and tight, with that epic thunder-and-lightning classic rock sound that melts faces, shatters eardrums, and will surely make women swoon if they can just get an audience (although this is the first time I've paid to see them in any fashion, so that's a step up). Also, some entertaining-to-awesome original songs. The show was reportedly recorded, so we'll see if some decent mp3's show up.

And, for the sake of maintining this procedure, new poetry up, you should be able to spot it by now. I do date everything as it's published, after all.