Willo O'Brien

Yup, I’m back. I’m no longer sittin in my bikini in the shade, next to a pristine and majestic lake in 85 degree weather with a cold beer in my hand and my sweetie at my side. Sad really – but boy was that shower amazing when I got home!

We had an awesome time – and the new tent and sleeping bag rocked, too! I can’t wait to go camping again!

I am trying to get myself back into work – I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday!! – and once I have a few major things out of the way I’ll post stories and photos, etc.

My *beautiful* momma has the fortunate birthday of July 4th – and every year there’s fireworks and parties everywhere on her special day! What fun!!! :)

I wish I could be with her this weekend, but I get to see her soon for a family VK in a couple weeks. But hopefully she’ll do all the things she loves to do and has the best birthday possible!

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I’ve been cleaning my house the later part of today – holy cow did it need it!!! Now I’m off for Jane & Tantek’s 2 week notice happy hour at 111 Minna & then it’s packing and taking off for camping bright & early tomorrow morning!!

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend full of BBQ’s, Fireworks and FUN!

yyyyyeeeeehaaaawwwww!

Check this out – go send a fax!

Ok, so this weekend isn’t any hard core hike for hours with only a pack on your back, sweatin and heaveho’in till you’re red in the face until you fall graciously to the ground of your spot and put up your ultra-light tent and slip into your ultra-light backpacker mummy bag.

Instead, ladies & gentlemen… I present to you the Slumberjack Bonnie & Clyde Double Sleeping Bag.

Can I get an ‘aawww yaaaa’?

I’m STOKED. It’s the way campin should be when you’re snuggled with your honey. Plus it’s no rigged up comforter mess where it could slip off in the middle of the night revealing skin (i mean, flannel pajamas – hech hemm) to the deathly cold night air. We’ll be all zipped up and cozy warm!!

And this new bag is super sweet cuz it does unzip to be 2 bags – AND one of em is a 30degree and the other a 40 so you can flip flop it depending on the weather. yayhoo!!

We’re goin up to Lake Pillsbury this weekend with Jen & Guam and a bunch of people they know. One of which is apparently this master chef at the (mouth watering) Cheesecake Factory here in SF – And! (I hope you’re sitting down) apparently he’ll be making most all of our meals this weekend!!! I KNOW!! Luxurious right? Hell ya!

Don’t worry, we’ll get all hard core camping the rest of the summer. We got our tent & our double bag and we’re gonna cook our own meals while we drink lots of beer and our car is parked 25 feet away. But this weekend, someone else has got the food part. :)

I just LOVE all the little applications made for the mac. And to know that they’re not going to totally screw with your registry or install a bunch of spyware is just awesome!!!

I just installed Safari Sorter to alphabatize my bookmarks in Safari. But was also told about Firefox’s cool extentions, namely the Radial Context.

And then I started thinking – Why do I use Safari primarily when there’s a few key things (like blogging, uploading photos, etc) that I *have* to use Firefox for?

(p.s. if you’re on a PC, you can use Firefox too – in fact you SHOULD!! Download it here.)

So I got to thinking, well – what do I like about Safari that I think I don’t have in Firefox, cuz I’ll bet with all these fancy extentions, I can get anything I want! And one thing was I just didn’t realize I could make folders for the Bookmark’s Bar similar to Safari. That’s huge!! And I wanted a quick way to get all my Safari bookmarks over to Firefox – and huzzah! There’s *of course* an app created for that, too: Safari Bookmark Exporter

Other cool Firefox Extentions are: TinyUrl Creator, Copy Image and more… do you have a favorite?

What I would still like to do is have the great cmd+shift+arrow (like safari) to get through my tabs – how do I do that? AH HA! thanks to eric: firefox: command+1,2,3,etc. cycles through the tabs

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update: hmm, radial context doesn’t seem to be working for me, nor is copy image – are those pc only?

you gotta check some of these out.

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some unfunny news is that i’ve been letting my kitty out to roam a bit more here lately. he usually comes back about every 45 minutes to check in. but this morning he’s been gone for a long time, and i went downstairs & realized my neighbors had their door open & the door to the garage open, so he may have slipped out front! now those doors are closed and i’m so worried he won’t know how to get back. i have to think positively. he’s a smart kitty, i’m sure he’ll be back any time now!! :/

here kitty kitty kitty!!

2pm update: PHEW!!! The little bugger finally comes home. Jeeshk! Enough to worry me sick!

4:30pm update: By request, a little love to the fuzzy pants. Many of you may have already seen this, but most of you probably haven’t.

click to play quicktime movie

It’s from when Kazoobie was a little kitty… he was a little football player catching the pillows in mid air. Granted, he’s still a little acrobat – he plays with his mice and bats em around like a little soccer player, and when I come out of the bathroom sometimes he does this crazy flip off the wall like a skater. My cat’s awesome!

Sunday night Rick & I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. With a line spiraling up and around between 2 floors at the Metreon, we participated in the movement that made it a record breaking opening weekend.

The movie was intense… while I was watching it I had so many emotions, from laughter to sadness, anger to helplessness, and all out astonishment. By the end I honestly felt depressed. However, like many other clapping audience members, I applaud Michael Moore for speaking up and radically helping people get a small bit of insight into all that’s going on in our Federal government.

I know there are a TON of facts and loads of counterpoints that can be made on all sides, but even some of the clear black and white accounts of what happened in the days and weeks after 9/11 are indisputably shady on Bush’s part.

I mean – I’m not much of a political person, honestly, but I do know I want the Bush family OUT of the white house. I’m so angry at how he’s thrust us into war and how many troops and innocent people have been killed. And mostly, on a UN level, I’m just so sad that the conflict has risen to levels that may never be forgiven. Bush has only made us more enemies, including many of our own citizens.

THERE ARE IDIOTS ALL AROUND YOU

So get this – About 3/4 of the way through the movie the girl sitting next to me had her cell phone ring. So what does she do? Answers iT!! GAAAHH!!!

So she talks quietly for a little while, most obviously NOT about anything pressing, and everyone around us is thinking “you stupid idiot get off your phone”. I shot her a look, disapprovingly and in astonishment she would actually think that’s ok.

So then what does she do? Starts text messaging! Oh how considerate of you, except your bling bling phone is like a small flashlight and your clickety clacking on it isn’t exactly inaudible to the people sitting near you!!! arg.

So I said “Shh” and when she looked at me all bitchy I said as nicely as I could, “Can you please wait till after the movie?”

And her winner boyfriend on the other side of her says “Whad’that bitch say?” (!) And then proceeds to threaten me with, “I’ll come over there and SLAP you…”.

(!)

At this point I’m thinking, Are you SERIOUS? I’m sitting at a movie that is ALL about getting IDIOTS to wake up and this JERK threatens ME because I am nicely asking HIS *rude* girlfriend to get off her phone in the middle of the movie!!!??

My adrenalin was already pumpin from all the reality checks we’re getting in the movie, and I’ll bet his was too, but for Christ’s sake do you take it out on the person sitting next to you in the theatre!?!? I just gave him a bewildered look, like “is that really necessary” and went on watching the movie. Pretty unbelievable though, huh? Jeeshk!

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If you haven’t seen the movie, go see it. It’s a good wake up call! Sure, you can take it with a grain of salt as it’s certainly meant to be a pretty big Anti-Bush message, but it’s clear to see there are facts we don’t know about, and Michael Moore has done a lot of research to help us all get closer to realizing what is *really* going on.

I encourage you to get involved with MoveOn.org (if you aren’t already). They actually just sent a message out today regarding tomorrow night’s fundraising deadline for the Kerry campaign. Please use this link to donate now via MoveOn. By using this link, you’re also helping send the message that all the amazing work MoveOn.org is doing is really making a difference.

I hope to encourage at least a few of you to donate, if you haven’t already… even $25 or $50 will help!! We need to join together to make this change!!

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Encourage Nader/Green Party voters to join us.

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Also I just heard about this new documentary coming out about Clinton: The Hunting of the President

Looks pretty interesting. Man! Politics are so dog eat dog!

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Rick & I went for sushi afterwards, bypassing our regular favorite spot since it always has a long wait, and we went to Tokyo Go Go instead.

I was hoping it would be really amazing and we’d have a new favorite spot. I’ve been there before and liked it, but unfortunately Sunday night I thought everything tasted too salty. Except the “Best Roll” was DELICIOUS.

From James: A tip and trick for downloading music from iTunes

They come down as an MP4 (or AAC) file. Which is fine, BUT, built into the file is a little protection code that tells the Apple gods that specific song can only play on 3 computers. Pain in the butt if for some reason your system can’t connect to the Apple store… which is where the Apple MP4 gods live and give access to songs.

SOOOOO……

Once I’ve downloaded my music from iTunes I do 3 things. 1) make a CD from iTunes on a rewritable CD (that strips out the AAC coding. 2) Rip a new MP3 from the CD. 3) Backup the AAC to a folder and burn it with my next system backup.

Then you can play and share your MP3 with anyone you please! TAKE THAT APPLE GODS!

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Thanks James. I didn’t know about that only play on 3 computers thing! Have any of you run into this problem?

OK, FYI I’ve officially decided to go all yahoo calendar for my music events listings. It’s just much easier to update that *one* instead of doing that AND my homepage w/ links, too. I just don’t have that much time these days!

So, as you’ll see now in the left column there’s a link to the calendar. Again, note that these are only listings from my own bias. Either I am way stoked to see the show, or I’ve been wanting to see them or I’ve heard about them and want to make sure they’re on my radar should I find myself on a tuesday night wondering what’s going on & don’t want to scour the 15 different sites I look at. Or a few of them I dont really want to see, but I know other peeps that like similar music as me might want to know about it. So it’s a mixture!

I have another little live venue thing I’m creating that will help those of you interested to navigate directly too all the venue’s sites I scour. That shouldn’t take long to finish up and, as always, I’ll post about it when it goes live and it’ll be in that left column along with the calendar link.

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There’s a few of really incredible shows coming up that I’m SOOOO stoked on!

New Black (oops, this is NOT to be confused with THE New Black – they’re two different bands for sure!), The Evening, Camera Obscura, The Gossip, On The Speakers, Rilo Kiley, The Hives w/ Sahara Hotnights, The Clorox Girls, and The Donnas! And the Elephant/Ambulance LTD show… July & August are gonna ROCK!

Super sad news however is I just realized I’m flying out a day earlier than I thought for a family trip. So I’m sadly, sadly, sadly going to miss The Wrens & Jim Yoshii Pile Up @ GAMH. I’m SOOOOOO BUUMMMMED!!!!! *waaaaaah!!!* Do yourself a favor & don’t miss that show. Do it for ME! There’s a ton of good shows that weekend actually… hmph.

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I’m going camping this weekend! WOOOHOO!!!