The Dirty Northwest

The story of Arnel Pineda becoming a rock star for household-name band Journey is an incredible one.

For those of you not up to speed on the most recent incarnation of Journey (!), they parted ways with their latest lead singer understudy some months back. They eventually found Arnel from his videos on YouTube and hired him based partly on his talents but, cynically, I’ll posit partly for the Web 2.0 tie-in of it all.

To his credit, he’s nearly as good as the original… such as it is.

Prior to the Sopranos final scene, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing was tied to two memories for me: 1) office wide conference calls on speaker-phones for rock sessions via phone-computer connection to keep spirits high on the last day of the fiscal quarter on the sales floor of my software company (Get it? Don’t stop believing that we can hit our goals?) and 2) the most incredible karaoke performance I’ve witness in my life which happened to take place 6 years ago at a Chinese bar in Gresham, OR as an unassuming local brought down the house with his total domination of a selection so ambitious we were wincing when he began and crying when he finished.

My memory of both is strong but the latter makes me wish I could track that guy down for a Pepsi Challenge with Arnel. I’m sure time and telling have embellished my memory. Nonetheless, I hope he is out there somewhere and ready to audition for them should they need him to step up … and do it without a trace of irony.

Be careful cleaning out your closets this spring:

Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

This is the kind of irreverent Bible humor I always liked back in the day and still find hilarious.

Amazing article about my current favorite site, Pandora. I’m listening as I read the article and it makes me want to do all my online shopping via their ads.

Ah. How… American to be forced to stay in a bad situation because of your mounting debt. Welcome to the middle class, Clintons.

You’re lucky this default instance of WordPress is even skinned. Don’t go asking for it to look all Web 2.0, now.

The format war may be over, but that’s no reason to commit to BluRay just yet.

I’m a big fat lame-o who hasn’t yet switched to Mac, despite working for the hottest Web 2.0 company in Portland (akin to being the highest mountain in Nebraska, but hang with me…).

Today my sales engineer (you’ll see his mug in The Tied Fridayers) complained about how his fairly new Mac completely melted down and this evening my XP machine started it’s horrible Update Now cycle. Google had the answer, which I’d like to share here.

It remains a mystery to me that after 20+ years of personal computing that OS’s are such absolute garbage.

It’s completely unacceptable that you essentially have to be a power user to effectively run a PC or Mac for any period of time and utter bullshit that you have to be a power user who at least knows some Sys Admins if you want to do anything remotely interesting with your machine.

It should work like a TV. You turn it on, you flip through some channels, adjust the volume, and you’re happy.

Yet we put up with it as consumers, letting the suppliers convince us that it’s our own shortcomings to blame for our frustrations with their products.

I’d like to say “I’ve had enough!” but there simply is no other option. Is there?

Those that know me well, know that Steens Mountain is one of my favorite places on earth. Enjoy.

I love these things: internal memos with snarky interpretations by cynical employees. Great humor for us all mid-workday.