I did get back into WoW this week, with most of my time playing wasted by downloading patches. I have gotten my character to level 9, so it’s not as much of a frustrating mess as it is when you begin. But I promise that I won’t endlessly ramble on about the game, since most conversation on it makes for dull material.

Staying up late to wait for said patches to download, I watched a really great documentary on Roy Orbison on KERA. Afterward, when the download finally finished, I downloaded his greatest hits. I never realized how awesome this guy was. Some of his stuff can be really haunting, but so enjoyable. If only I wasn’t creeped out every time I hear In Dreams. Thanks, David Lynch.

This week I also discovered an amazingly stupid feature of my Mac mini. The microphone jack isn’t powered. I was wanting to use my run-of-the-mill Logitech headset to see if I could use Skype or talk on WoW, but no sound would be recorded. It detected the microphone, but picked up nothing but silence. A little searching around on teh interwebz revealed that unlike most computers made in the past two decades, the microphone jack is unable to power passive mics. I pretty much have to have a mixer or a USB microphone. Oh well, guess that gives me an excuse to get a badass mic and try to get a little voiceover business going.

This next week is going to be busy as hell, with work plus finals. It won’t be fun, but it’ll pass by quick, to be sure.

I own a turntable that regularly plays the great albums of classic rock. The only other tuntables I’ve seen anyone my age own play shitty hipster/screamo albums made on shitty vinyl by six-year-old children in Korea. I regularly go to my local used bookstore and almost always buy a used vinyl. My purchase could range from Little Feat, to Robert Palmer, to Billy Idol, to Sade. Yes, fucking Sade. My MP3 player can shuffle from Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden to Smooth Operator just as easily as it can shuffle from Eric Clapton to Hall & Oates. That brings me to another thing.

I have almost every Hall & Oates album in either digital or analog form. I even have their piece of disco excrement X-Static. I don’t know why I like them so much. Steely Dan is the same. Almost every album. Fleetwood Mac, too. In my defense, I prefer the pre-Stevie Nicks era Mac. Bare Trees was a much better album without Nicks’ sheep-like vocals. But I digress.

I always wonder how I got this way, and I think it was because of my Mom. From birth, I only listened to classic rock. On the way to elementary school, the radio was tuned to Q102, later, KZPS,  and for an incredibly short time, Country station KSCS. That’s how I became somewhat acquainted with the Country genre, but it also helped me learn to hate Country music. My mom still quizzes me to this day on who did certain songs. And I always answer.

I shocked some of my high school’s football coaches when I brought up Huey Lewis. He loved Huey Lewis. We proceeded to listen to Huey Lewis in the equipment van on the way to a game. He asked me a question he thought I couldn’t answer.

“What was the band Chicago called before they were called Chicago?” he asked.

I replied, almost without thinking “Chicago Transit Authority.”

His mouth was agape.

But all this still doesn’t explain why I enjoy 80′s pop. I guess I’ll never know. I do know that I’ll leave you with this:

I also nabbed a copy of the new remaster of The Beatles catalog. One word…awesome. The technicians definitely knew what they were doing with this master. I also played the new Beatles Rock Band game earlier this week, and I was equally impressed. Not only was it a great way to experience the history of The Beatles, but it was also a great improvement of the Rock Band user experience. I especially liked the new way to switch from right to left hand settings. No longer do you have to press start as soon as the song starts or scrolling through all of the settings and wasting time. You simply just press back before a song, and you’re there. As a lefty, I have to say that not only I’m happy, but so are all of my right-handed friends.

Continuing my bank switching saga, I can now announce that everything has been started, activated, transferred and configured with my new Bank of America account. I have to say that it’s been pretty good so far. I especially like the fact that the ATMs aren’t stuck in the ’90s. Never before have I had a bank that allows me to never step into a branch. THE ATM CAN DEPOSIT CHECKS! I know many of you may take this feature for granted, but my mouth was agape at that first ATM visit.

Now I will continue my day most likely by watching episodes of Little Britain on Netflix and playing some Tiger Woods.

I came across a great write-up on Boing Boing Gadgets yesterday talking about one of the special effects in the video of my favorite MJ song, Smooth Criminal. Near the end of the music video, Jackson, along with the dancers surrounding him, seem to lean so far as to defy gravity. While filming the video, they used a mix of strings and magnets to achieve this effect. Of course, strings would look stupid onstage, so Michael came up with an ingenius idea to achieve the same effect with no wires.

Special shoes were constructed with a groove placed in the heel. These grooves were designed to anchor to pegs that would pop-out of the stage floor at appropriate times. Once the dancers and Jackson locked their heels onto the pegs, they could lean forward or backward just like in the video. Here’s a live version of Smooth Criminal, so you can take a look. Notice what after they complete the move (about 3:50 in,) you can see a dancer on the right of Michael have trouble disconnecting his shoe from the peg.

So cool! Here’s to the guy that thought of it all. Turns out he patented the shoe design, too! Head over to Boing Boing Gadgets at the link below to check it out.

Michael Jackson’s patented “Smooth Criminal” leaning shoes | Boing Boing Gadgets.