Do you hear that, Doug? I’m coming to London.
Avi (Dennis Farina), “Snatch” (2000)

Nora and I have hit London. One of my clients is playing the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 this week, so I have headed to London to cover the events.

This is a brief rundown of the events…

* Wake up super early on Monday morning. Rush to L.A.X. Get to L.A.X. with 3.5 hours to go before my flight. Check-in doesn’t even open for an hour. Bad sign.

* To ensure that I am passed out cold for the entire flight, I take a double dose of Nyquil. I take the Nyquil 90 minutes before the boarding time. All is fine.

* See Tommy Chong ordering a pastry. Cool.

* Flight is slightly delayed (30 minutes). I force myself to stay awake, and as such, ruin the effects of the Nyquil. I am groggy for 10.5+ hours of flying. I never sleep.

* Baby crying in my lovely (read: smaller than half of me) coach seating area cries for 3/4 of the flight. F***!

* Due to stomach issues (well documented in previous posts), I could not eat on the flight. Also did not eat before the flight, or on the trip from Heathrow to the hotel.

* To save money, I take the Underground, in the rain, to the hotel. 45 minutes of train + rain + lugging luggage up long flights of steps = exhaustion. Remember - still haven’t slept or had food yet.

* Get to hotel (which I will not name). Go through four rooms before I finally get one that is usable. Seriously - check these issues out (the following spans approximately three hours or waiting and ruarounds):

** 110V outlets are not hooked up. Literally! There’s a faceplate for the plug, but no inner working to actually plug into! Fourth room it finally works!

** Front Desk clerk failed to mention that the room key enabled the lights.

** Heater fuse was blown in room #1.

** Internet Ethernet cable (hello? wi-fi!) was missing in room #1. Sent up a replacement cord. Did not work. Sent up another, finally worked.

** Toilets take over 10 flushes before they “flush”. Redefines “floater”!

** Sink in room #3 did not drain.

** Bedsheets in first three rooms have mystery stains (multiple colors).

** Towel in room #3 had what appeared to be smeared blood on the white towel. The clean towel!

I am now sitting here, checking my email, drinking a complimentary Coke (front desk sent up a pitcher with eight mini-bottles) and finally having my second meal of the day (literally just inhaled a 20pc Chicken McNuggets with Fries, and am still starving). Hell, the last meal I had (and last time I slept) was Sunday night. I went about 35 hours without eating or sleeping.

It’s rainy. It’s been difficult to get settled. I’ve gone through a lot. But - who cares. I am in London, I get to see (and shoot) two bound-to-be-great shows, and I have two full days of “not working”.

Bet I end up getting jet lag, and sleeping through my days off.

After being home for a little while after my $32 payout to see the Cameron hype, I have these conclusions:

$16 per f****** ticket!?!? “Sir, please be advised that the “Avatar” 3-D screening is a special event, and as such will be an additional $4.” What!?!? It’s already bad enough that I have to smuggle in food and drink to the Burbank AMC 16, but now I have to sit in a puddle of my own blood (read: my ass is bleeding from being raped). Are you kidding? Wow - James Cameron has the biggest movie of all time. OF COURSE HE DOES! Charge $16 for a ticket, and of course your movie is going to make more!

We have 3-D and cutting edge effects. Yeah, you sure do, Sparky. Maybe you should have taken a few dollars from the F/X budget for better acting! This made Starship Troopers look like Shakespeare! And, seriously, enough with the damn 3-D! Yeah, it’s fun for a few minutes, but I had to sit through 2+ hours of crap movie. Having random 3-D effects did not improve the experience. It simply pissed me off that I had to wear glasses through the entire movie!

The Story. Yeah, I get it. Thinly veiled protest against war, and pro-nature. Sucked that I could tell what was going to happen at least 30 minutes before it happened.

The “Na’vi”. Am I the only one who felt this was a bit off. Seriously, when I started seeing the characters all gathering together, swaying back and forth, joining together to pray to their “God”, the movie lost me. Enough with the tribal ripoff crap. I was watching a movie about the future, and it turned into Lion King. Remember The Matrix? Everyone loved the Matrix. I loved the Matrix, until the part in Matrix Reloaded where the people of Zion started raving. What? What happened to the bullet time F/X? Why am I now watching sweaty people auditioning for the lead in Stomp? UGH!

The special effects are great, but a movie is more than CGI and over-used 3-D effects. Give me a proper story. Give me a movie that has substance. Give me a F****** reason to believe that my $16 is being well spent!

I have loads of DVDs (and Blu-Rays) in my collection. I love movies. This movie will never be entering the collection. The next time James Cameron makes a movie, I will not waste my money. I’ll grab a copy for free online.

Movie Studios: Why do people pirate your movies? You make crap like this!

I want my $16 back (technically $32, as I paid for my girlfriend as well)!

I was working on mind-numbing code last night. I took a quick break, and stumbled across the multi-tracks for Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher (not saying where - don’t ask).

As I was already loopy from lack of sleep, I decided to go “full crazy”, and mash Van Halen up with…Jay Z!?!?

This is merely a “proof of concept” hack/joke. Diamond Dave is time expanded WAY too much to be truly usable/listenable…but it is funny.

Van Halen vs Jay-Z - Hot For 99 Problems (excerpt)

Instead of trying to explain this to every person who is contacting me (Twitter / Facebook / email / IM / et cetera), I will explain what is going on right here…

Last year, I had a kidney stone. Yep, my little baby is over a year old now (see above).

This year, I had a larger kidney stone. The pain was so bad, I had to go to the hospital…twice! Each time, essentially, the doctors said “Yep, you have a kidney stone.”, and sent me on my way with a prescription and huge bills (five figures, people!).

When I went to the hospital the first time, the doctor made the following comment: “Yes, you have a very large stone. You also have two more on deck.” Yikes.

The first stone made its way through my kidneys, but never fully left. The second stone: same thing.

Now, I have the last of three stones on the move, and fuck it hurts. As I can not afford another $8000+ hospital bill for some overpriced quack to go “Yep, that’s a kidney stone”, I have been just taking the remains of the Vicodin from the first trip this year. Sadly, it’s not really easing the pain. The Vicodin worked earlier this year, but not so much now. I mean, seriously, for the Vegas Depeche Mode show, I was barely there. I had to pop a Vicodin before the show started, I was in so much pain. Ugh. At least the footage looks great.

So, to sum up. I had a BIG kidney stone last year (that I passed naturally). This year, I went to the hospital TWICE for just one stone, but found out there were two additional stones “on deck”. What I am in agony with right now is the third of those three stones.

I stopped drinking about 90% of the soda I used to, dammit! Stones, leave me the fuck alone!

Oh - and the picture above contains some of the many “funny sayings” that my friends have come up with lately. Thanks for cracking jokes while I have fucking Alien trying to emerge from my kidney. Bastards.

I had always been a fan of U2, but U2 lost me with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”.

It wasn’t the huge live shows. It wasn’t the activities that the band did outside of creating music. U2 lost me when the music simply starting sucking.

Nowadays when you hear a new U2 song on the radio, you know it is a U2 song by the vocals of Bono, the guitar of The Edge, and the limp, phoned-in quality of the song. Every song sounds like every other song. They sound like songs that were being worked on, but with album release dates and impending tour plans approaching, they just rushed them out, incomplete. There is no amazing U2 hook. There is no powerful vocal. There is no stunning guitar work. It’s just…there.

Honestly admit the last time you thought to yourself “I want to hear a great U2 song” and you put on tracks like “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”, “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” or “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own”. Excluding the Trent Reznor remix of “Vertigo”, nothing that U2 has put out since 1997 has fucking mattered, and that makes me sad.

U2 played a huge show at the Rose Bowl tonight (a big deal, if you ignore that Depeche Mode did that 21 years ago, or The Cure did it in 1992). The fact that their show has a “360 degree” stage was the huge selling point in the article in the October 25th edition of the L.A. Times. The article didn’t mention the music. The article just highlighted how many additional people the band can play to due to a 360 degree stage.

The music doesn’t matter anymore, as long as they can play to a huge crowd.

I can hear the U2 fans reading this blog entry, and getting all bent out of shape. My question to you is this: Why the fuck aren’t you getting pissed off that the band hasn’t put out anything good in over a decade!?! You are willing to pay $251.50 (PER TICKET) to see them pay a set list heavy with shit songs? Why? Just because it is U2?

I watched the webcast tonight. I endured all the shitty post-1997 songs. I enjoyed the good pre-1997 songs (when the webcast feed wasn’t glitching). Am I sad that I didn’t go to the show? Not at all. I don’t get off on standing with 90,000+ people, and hearing only half the songs I like (and especially not for over $250!). I don’t care how big the damn stage is.

Blackberry loves U2. I stopped loving them when they stopped putting out music that I wanted to hear.

Bono, Edge, Adam, Larry. I have a plea. Stop rushing out new records. Go back to the drawing board, and put out an album that is worthy of your name. I don’t care how long I have to wait. I don’t care if the stage doesn’t have a huge “spaceship” that looks like a bad clone of the spider creature from “Wild Wild West”. I just want to hear a fucking good U2 song again. It’s been too fucking long!

U2, R.I.P. - 1979 - 1997

UPDATE FROM END OF WEBCAST:
LiveNation, Universal, Blackberry. Seriously? Did he just name check the fucking sponsors!?!?!? Is Bono seriously thanking people at the end of the show? Even worse - is Bono reading prepared corporate “thanks” from a fucking teleprompter!?! UGH! I give up!

For close to a week now, I keep going to my Facebook profile, only to be greeted by text saying “The page you requested was not found. You may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive.”

Seriously?

For a week now, people have been complaining on the Facebook site. Half of the time, when you try to even report the error, the page times out. Good luck finding a direct email address to contact Facebook on their site. There isn’t one.

There’s no feedback from Facebook at all on this matter on their site, other than a post days ago saying there was a small database bug. Squash the damn bug already. One would think that you have to be employing enough people in your company that it should not take a WEEK to fix a “small database” bug.

I even tried the email addresses I have for Facebook through some clients. Five days. No reply.

#facebookfail

UPDATE: October 10th - The profile is now online again, but trying to log into the site in general seems to take three or four attempts. The page either times out, or says my password is not right. And forget about actually having the “remember me” box actually work. Someone at Facebook needs to learn how to program a cookie.

“Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life”…eventually.

I’ve had this mashup kicking around various hard drives for a few years now. I never finished it…until now.

While you can read the backstory on this mashup in the Mashup area, I am choosing to use the blog space to rant.

In between the 9-to-5 work, I found the time to craft a video for the mashup. After seeing the success the last mashup video had, I made a video for the new mashup, and uploaded the file to YouTube. Damn thing didn’t even get through processing before I saw the “blocked worldwide” warning. Wow.

Now, I do see the irony here, as I handle the copyright account for one of my clients. But - this is different. When I delete videos for my client, I only delete straight uploads of released content. I do not delete fan-made content, which my mashup video is.

As I am proud of my little video mashup, I’m eating the server cost, and hosting it myself. Screw YouTube!

I hope you all enjoy the mashup. Be sure to download the video as well!

Nine Inch Nails vs Peter Gabriel - Closer To Your Eyes
(both mp3 audio and mp4 video files are available in the link above!)

Final NIN show. Four-plus hours of standing in lines. On the floor. On the rail.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I witnessed history.

Enjoy a bit of audio from the night (courtesy of the LS-10):

Nine Inch Nails - Down In It
(Live, The Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA., September 10th, 2009)
(unprocessed audio recording direct from my Olympus LS-10 - mp3 file)

Cars - Nine Inch Nails with Gary Numan
(Live, The Palladium, Los Angeles, CA., September 2nd, 2009)
(unprocessed audio recording direct from my Olympus LS-10 - mp3 file)

Today seemed like a normal day. Woke up (still in pain from the kidney stone, dammit), checked my email. Nothing significant until I hit my YouTube folder. What the hell!?!? Why is my NIN/Rick Astley mashup getting so much traffic!?!?!

One word: Digg.

And to think, this was a throwaway mashup! I should go make videos for the better ones (Billy Joel vs Jay-Z, Cure vs Commodores).

Gotta say, that was a cool way to wake up. Thanks to everyone for the hits and comments.

Thanks, Kevin Rose!