señor taco’s travels

Pardon me while I act clever and blockquote myself:

I was sitting at lunch one day and I felt that there had to be a way to see my
friends that I don’t live near. Not every day, not even every week, but over
time. One of the blogs that I started following is the photblog href="http://www.tenyearsofmylife.com/" title="Photoblog: Ten Years Of My Life">
Ten Years Of My Life. On it Matthew Haughey has taken on the quite awesome
project of taking one picture every day for 10 years. The href="http://www.tenyearsofmylife.com/about" title="Ten Years Of My Life:
About">about page for the project has a head shot of Mr. Haughey for every
month. Then it struck me, that’s the perfect way for me to see the progression
of life for my distant friends (in fact, that would be cool for all my friends
to keep so that we can look back and see the past without the clouds of memory).

So here we are, here, this is Me, My Face, And
I. Every month I will be putting a new head shot up so friends, family,
and strangers can see me over time. Sometimes I’ll be smiling, others I’ll be
indifferent, and once or twice maybe I’ll be scowling. This isn’t about me on
my best days or when I’m happy, it’s about me not wanting to lose touch with
those I can’t see all the time. Once it’s setup it will take very little time
every month. I’ll be trying to get my friends to start doing this too and as
they come around I’ll link to them here. Contact me if you want more
information. For those interested the layout is whatever you want, suggested
image size is 100×100 to 200×200. I’m going with 175×175. Make sure to label
your images with the at least the month and year they were taken. More exact
dates are fine as are more than one picture per month (who knows, maybe you
want to show off that awesome new red hair of yours :)

So, Ladies and Germs, I give you title="Me, My Face, And I">Me, My Face, And I. I’ll be contacting friends
and acquaintances soon to see if they’re on board. Hopefully there will be
more than a few people that join in.

I’m releasing my images under the title="Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0">Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You, however, are
free to choose any license or restrictions you want. Have fun.

I recently obtained a copy of BSD Sockets Programming from a Multi-Language Perspective by M. Tim Jones and decided to href="http://www.sfobug.org/reviews/BSDSocketsProgramming.html"
title="BSD Sockets Programming Review">review it. It’s a good book for
learning network programming. The review is hosted by the href="http://www.sfobug.org/">SFOBUG. Please direct any comments on the
content of the review to me.

Last night I ventured to Slim’s once again. On the bill for last night were
(in performance order) The Vacancy, title="part of the remains of Kid Dynamite">None More Black, href="http://www.againstme.net/" title="wacky rockers from Gainesville">Against
Me!, Rise Against, and title="more Pitt, PA rockers with a message">Anti-Flag. I knew this was
going to be a good show when I first stepped into Slim’s. All the bar stools
had been removed and the house music was the Beatles all night.

Having been to a few shows in the last few months I was starting to hate (a)
large numbers of opening bands and (b) the quality of said opening bands.
Mostly I was just wanting them to not play. Last night, however, that was not
the case. I will now give mad apologies to my friend CB for taunting him
about my attendance to this show that he could not be at. While I was there I
wanted for CB and my other friend Matt to be there so bad it hurt. This was
the best show I’ve seen in a long time and to not be able to share it with them
was a real downer (ignoring the fact that I was at the show by myself). So now
I will recap the bands in greater detail.

The Vacancy was surprisingly good. They rocked really hard and I wish they had
a CD for sale with them. The only criticism I have is that the singers could
have been a bit more direct into the mics to come across a bit better, but it
was still good. None More Black was up next. I was already familiar with
their material and I think live they were nothing short of excellent. Tight
and very much in sync with one another. The only drawback was that the entire
time I kept thinking that I should be seeing Kid Dynamite up on stage. How
I wish they had never broken up. Such is life I guess.

Against Me! then took the stage. I had only heard one or so song from them
before. I was blown away. These guys know how to rock and do it well. They
have a good silly style and good lyrics. They were so good I bought the CD
right there. After Against Me! played the band I really came to see was up,
Rise Against. I just have one word to describe them: whoa! They were
everything I hoped to see and more. The amount of energy coming out of the
band was just incredible. Every song they played was a great one (which isn’t
that hard when all their songs are great), and even the new song they played
rocked. They had so much energy going and imparted it to the crowd that
during a couple of songs the pit looked like a giant pack of rabbit weasels
on some sort of accelerant. It was nutty to see.

After that Anti-Flag was up, but during the set change they played a
documentary about the San Francisco war protests and some Iraqi war stuff. I
couldn’t see it too well and the audio was a bit drowned out by the people so
I could only make out some of it. Anti-Flag was another energetic group, but
not quite to the level of Rise Against. It was also kind of funny that the
drummer looked like he was in pain the whole time.

Well, I don’t have any more shows planned for a while, and that’s fine by me
after this last stint ( href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/11/03#hepcat-slims"
title="the past">Hepcat and href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/11/07#rancid-warfield"
title="more past stuff">Rancid included).

Last night was a rainy crappy night. I went to the Warfield theater in San
Francisco to see Rancid. Unfortunately my friends with the tickets were
running late so I missed the opening acts of the Necromantix and Tiger Army.
Such is life. We got in and saw an amazing set from Rancid. They were so
on. I love how well those guys play together. Tim is goofy, Matt is super
solid (probably one of the best bass players around), Brett is solid on the
drums, and Lars anchors the band so well. I’m just glad I got to see them
again. They played a lot of stuff off of all albums (except maybe
Rancid(2000)) and even one song off their first album! All in all it was a
good time. The Warfield was good for seating because you could see the stage
from every seat.

So, on Saturday I went over to Mitch & Deb’s and help them cook some food
for a barbecue that they were hosting. There was mucho food and drink. Many
people eventually showed up. Keith and Colin came over and had the most
amazing queso dip I’ve had in a long time. That plus the guacamole was
heaven, heaven I tell you.

Later in the evening Ryan (M&D’s cute as heck little boy) was watching an
Elmo DVD before bed. He ended up chilling on the couch with Colin and Mark
(who were also fascinated by the Elmo DVD):

alt="three cool guys" />

So then, Ryan got enthralled with Colin and was crawling all over him. He was
so darn cute:

alt="Ryan! The Cutest!" />

So, a fun time, good food, and dessert (a great cake from Nina)
was had by all.

src="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/images/hepcathead.gif" alt="hepcat!" />
Well, as much as I love title="Hepcat">Hepcat I had never seen them play. So, last night Dode,
Ann Dial, and I went to Slim’s in San Francisco and saw them on their very
small reunion tour (I think it’s only a few dates). They were really good, but
seemed like they hadn’t played together in a while, still good though.

The crowd was definitely much older than the normal shows I see at Slim’s,
which was neither good nor bad, but just was. They played a good selection of
tunes from all their albums and even a new song. It was good to see Alex up
on stage, he had taken a brake from the band for a while in pursuing his acting
career (he was the blind vendor on the CBS show Becker, I’m not sure if
that’s even still on). At any rate, having both singers makes for a great
show.