But not like any acoustic music you probably listen to. Allow me to introduce Rodrigo y Gabriella.

I listened to their album a bit and I couldn’t really wrap my mind around how in the hell Gabriella was strumming so fast. Even after watching this video, I have no idea how she’s doing it.

Anyway, apparently, both of them met while playing in a speed metal band (think Slipknot) in Mexico City, and decided to do an acoustic version of that with some Spanish guitar influences, and this is what they wound up with. They actually do covers of Metallica songs and other metal songs in their shows. This is crazy awesome music, folks.

Wouldn’t you know it, I scheduled some time off today and then got sick. A little backwards, I know. It’s some sinus and throat thing that I think I caught from the people in the cube next to me at work. Anyway, I don’t really feel like leaving the house right now, so I flipped through the on-demand movies on our DVR and discovered, much to my delight, that they were showing the movie Hackers. It’s actually a terrible movie, but it puts together two of my absolutely favorite things: computer geekery and Angelina Jolie. Yes, you read that right: Angelina Jolie as a hacker.

I saw this movie in theaters when I was 14. Even at 14, I knew that all of the actual hacking in the movie was complete bullshit, and I didn’t even think the movie was all that good. Here’s a sample clip that pretty much sets the tone for the entire movie:

The plot is basically that an evil corporate hacker has created a virus and infected his own company with it. The virus holds the power to capsize oil tankers and spill their oil all over the ocean. (I can’t make this stuff up.) The virus is actually a cover-up for a worm that he created that skims a few cents off of each transaction his company (a bank) makes and puts it into an off-shores account in the Bahamas. He needs the virus, apparently, so some other hacker can take the fall for it. This is a Captain Planet level of cheesy evilness. (Remember when that Captain Planet villain went back in time to sell a nuke to Hitler? That’s what I’m talking about.)

But there were two things I pulled away from this movie:

• The preferred mode of transportation for hackers is rollerblades. Hackers rollerblade all over the place, including subway stations and high school. Unfortunately, every time I put on skates of any kind, I end up with a bloody face. Status: fail!
• Hackers are destined to fall in love with Angelina Jolie. Status: check!

Just for the record, I should point out that I’ve never done any real hacking. I broke into the display computers at Wal-Mart a few times, but really, who hasn’t?

I’m a big fan of recycling—I recycle cans, cardboard, old computers, postal stamps, and mouthwash—but when it comes to recycling my childhood memories, that’s where I draw the line!

If you don’t know, Disney re-used a lot of their animated sequences in a lot of their earlier movies. I don’t just mean that they re-used the same ideas or storyboards. They re-used the same animations and painted over the old characters. If you haven’t seen these before, they will blow your mind. So, prepare yourself… for recycled Disney animation!

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If you don’t know, king cake is a Mardi Grad tradition. It’s a dough wrapped around a filling of fruit, sweetened cream cheese, and some cinnamon. Janelle and I tried making our own using a recipe that we found online. Apparently, it’s not as easy as it looks.

We loaded all the ingredients up and realized that we had forgotten to sweeten the cream cheese. That’s when we realized that this is probably something we should document, so we took some pictures then:

Key lime
Raspberry

We rolled them the best we could and baked them as directed to. Baking certainly didn’t help.

Key lime
Raspberry

I didn’t mention that this was for a party tonight. Luckily, HyVee saved the day. We might bring our abominations to the party anyway, but we needed to give guests the option of a decent king cake.

The moral of the story: making king cake is harder than it looks.

Thanks to Missy for this link.

Well, those folks in Japan have done it again! They’ve created a robotic replacement for cats! See this informative video:

Buy one today!

We have a stock photo site that we use at work to get photos for our advertisements. We occasionally run into one that’s a little ridiculous for one reason or another. We’ve run into blonde Amazon women with spears while searching for African American females, and we’ve run into topless nuns while searching for religious photos. There are some photos that are weird because of their descriptions. This one takes the cake.

I don’t mean to brag, but my cats are actually pretty proficient hunters. Sherlock was kind enough to present me and Janelle with his latest kill. Here it is!

Somehow, my site got hacked and redirected users to some Chinese video site. I think I got this fixed, but let me know if that (or anything funny) is still going on, and how it happened.

Thanks!

Go to this Wikipedia article on Megaman (the Nintendo character who starred in games of the same name). Scroll down to the references at the bottom. Look at #7.

That’s right. They cited me as a reference for an open-source dictionary article on an eight-bit video game character from the 80s.

I’m also finding a lot of people linking to my Faith page, and a lot of people ganking the images off of Pulpexplosion. And my quizzes are popping up occasionally on MySpace or in forums. Ah, glorious Internet fame.

A little late to be posting this, but I have another video of Zoey. After Christmas, Target has crazy clearance on their Christmas items. As you may already know, we got some cat costumes for our kitties. This included a full Santa suit.

We later read the packaging, and it said it was for animals up to 12 pounds. Zoey’s 12½. When you have to lose weight so that you look like jolly ol’ St. Nick, something is wrong.