short fat guy online

Here’s something for the holidays.  It was recorded last year at the Mannheim Steamroller concert at the Palace of Auburn Hills MI.  Their Christmas tour visited us the day before Thanksgiving, November 26 1997.
    I had trouble picking which track to offer.  There’s already a live album out from the Christmas tour, and the music doesn’t sound that different (actually, when you get right down to it, their last several albums all the sound the same too).  So here’s a wintry track, rather than a Christmas tune, originally available on Fresh Aire IV.

Ahhh… the weekend…
    I’ve gotten slightly re-energized with this web site over the last couple days.  I have no reason for it, so it’s best not to question it; but this sudden (and uncharacteristic) burst of energy has caused the creation of a few extra pages and the fleshing out of my Vacation (or “Travels”) section.
    Hope you like it.

The season premiere of my favorite show is just a couple days away, but strangely I am not looking forward to it.
    I used to be a huge X-Files fan, but now the thought of the show’s return fills me with unease. All the newspapers and magazines say I should be ecstatic that the show did not end following the resignation of lead actor David Duchovny. I should be turning cartwheels that the producers of the show have hired a new lead and that the show was snatched from the jaws of cancellation and can continue. But in fact I feel quite the opposite. I can honestly say I was hoping the previous season would be the last. I wanted to see my favorite show end with some class, rather than being bled dry by Fox’s desperate need for an hour-long drama. Even Chris Carter himself had stated he only stuck around for season eight since Fox threatened to continue the show without him.
    I know I’m not the only one almost dreading the start of the new season. I can’t stop thinking about such doomed projects as Archie Bunker’s Place or AfterMASH, which were pale imitations of their forebears. ...Yes, I’ll continue to watch, but I seriously doubt the show will be worthwhle or even survive. Sad to say, it’s already been chasing its tail for maybe three or four years, with all its monster-of-the-week episodes seeming like remakes of previous episodes. And I’m confident Chris Carter will screw up Scully’s pregnancy just like he did the conspiracy arc and the Samantha arc.
    But at least, thanks to TCFHE video, I’ll have season two to watch soon, and then season three, back when the show was good…back when the show was the best thing on TV…back when I couldn’t wait to watch the next week’s episode…and, sadly, unlike this season.
    Please let me be proved wrong.

My favorite video clip of recent days. Just in time for Election Day: a behind the scenes look at George W Bush’s appearance on watch it live or download it for later.
    (Please note: it might be necessary to upgrade to RealPlayer 8 to view this clip. Just make sure to look for the free download.)

What would a vacation be without some computer trouble? I’ve been noticing a lot of large files clogging up my hard drives, with generic names like “00093284.wav” or “00094726.avi”. And more recently I discovered these files were being orphaned by Windows. The OS was claiming it was deleting these files, but it wasn’t. It would say my drives had plenty of free space, but when programs I’d run off these drives would crash. What was most troubling was Windows Explorer would say I’d have hundreds of MB open, but my Norton Speed Disk would show the drive as being practially full, with many files bearing similar names to what I mentioned above.
    So I got around this by simply wiping my C: drive and starting fresh. Drastic, perhaps; but I guess it was around time for a fresh reinstall anyway. Which meant I spent most of Sunday reinstalling all my programs, and making constant visits to the Windows Update site to make sure I had the latest patches and fixes.
    An interesting sidelight is that the more updates I loaded in, the buggier Windows seemed to act.
    Hmmm.

“The show you would like to be watching, and which can be seen by the rest of the country, will not be shown so that we can bring you this old low-rent program we can pack full of local commercials…“
    Is it like this in your neighborhood? It seems all the affiliates here in Detroit will do everything in their power to pre-empt network shows for their own personal gain. They’ve run so many promos for “local news first” they’ve begun to take themselves too seriously, believing we’re only watching them for local programming. Sorry, guys. This short fat guy watches you despite your local programming, despite your desperate need to force feed me grief and suffering and fear (“Something in your house can kill you!“). So stop your censorship, stop your media blackout, and air the programs you’re supposed to!

Now that the new TV season is starting, there should be an update on the TV page soon; and I recently placed an order with Oupost.com so hopefully I’ll have an update for the Gadgets page too.  Until then, I might as well finally put a link up for the great SFG Message Board. I don’t expect a great flurry of activity, but all the other sites have a message board

, so why not mine? [since revamped]
    Later.
    P.S.  How about that snazzy new menu on the left (for all you Java-enabled-browser users)?! [since removed]

It’s time for a new offering.
  The latest MP3 is from Barenaked Ladies. It was recorded a year ago at Pine Knob, during their “Barenaked Summer’s Night” tour for their album Stunt. This MP3 also boasts at least six songs in one, as the band breaks off into a series of musical tangents. Partly for this reason, the MP3 has been slightly edited for both time and tightness, but I strove hard to make the cuts seamless.

“The Wendy’s Drive-Thru Query

“: Why is it you always get your drink before your meal, but you only get your straw with your meal? So you get to sit there holding your cola, unable to do anything with it until the rest of your order arrives.
    “

Still haven’t found time to create a full-fledged Music section, but I did manage to encode another MP3. Maybe this is an effort to beat the department stores at their own game, but despite its being only Labor Day, I’m uploading a Christmas song! However, it’s a great Christmas song—and one of my favorite Christmas songs off my favorite Christmas album, recorded live at the Palace of Auburn Hills, on Friday November 27 1998.