Well, I figured it would happen sooner or later with the exploding gas prices, so I shouldn't really be surprised that public bus fees will soon be going up here in Minneapolis. I really can't complain too much since $2.00 each way to and from work isn't all that bad. $4.00 a day beats having to drive into downtown, somehow secure parking and pray that it doesn't cost your left nut, and then plow through traffic on your way home.

I don't know how much public transit costs in other cities, but when I visited Seattle last year, I remember the buses not costing very much so maybe Minneapolis is expensive when it comes to mass transit, but I would think even if they raised prices to $2.50 each way I'd still consider it ok.

Lord knows I can't make it through my day without copious amounts of coffee or other caffeinated beverages. As such, I've grown to like and enjoy the various drinks at the coffee shops in the Minneapolis downtown. I predominantly visit Caribou Coffee, but will occasionally make a run to Dunn Brothers as well. I refuse, however, to set foot in a Starbucks. I don't know what it is exactly, but all of their coffee tastes like it was first burnt in the roasting process and then brewed through a dirty jock strap or old pair of gym socks. It seems like no matter what you get at Starbucks it tastes like liquid ass and I don't know why people continue to go there.

Anyhow, getting back on topic. Most often I get skim mochas at Caribou since they have the sweetest mochas of the shops around. If I'm going to get coffee instead of an espresso drink, it's always Dunn Brothers. Every now and again, however, I like to get something different at Caribou, usually one of their cold or iced drinks.

So this morning as I was in Caribou getting my weekly mocha, I noticed an advertisement for their new cold drinks--various combinations of tea and fruit. I don't know about you, but mushing together green tea and mango just simply sounds atrocious. True, I'm not much of a tea guy, mostly because it tastes like warm, slightly flavored water, but adding it into a grossly colored smoothie isn't appealing.

It's crazy stuff like this that makes me remember why they're a struggling company. I've wanted to invest in them in the past since I like most of their products and they're local, but it's crazy crap like this that I can't get behind... well, that and their negative EPS.

On the other hand, I did run across a Caribou product in Target the other day that I simply have fallen in love with. They are selling, via General Mills, mocha flavored granola bars. How can you go wrong with a granola bar that has a slight mocha flavor, a refreshing espresso smell, and a dash of caffeine to get you going? You can't.

It's really too bad that Caribou can't continue to make more interesting products like their granola bars that seem to have more legs than their crappy-ass new drinks. Given time, hopefully they'll learn...

I love a good thunderstorm or rain shower as much as the next weather lover, but every now and again I feel bad for our little friends, the earthworms. We've had a couple of decent overnight rain showers in the last month or so and I've simply loved hearing the trickle of rain on my skylight as I sleep through the night. Walking to my bus in the morning, however, is usually a depressing block and a half jaunt.

Now I'm not going to claim anything ridiculous like earthworms deserving as many rights as humans or starting a "save the worms" campaign, but I do get a little sad for the worms I see out in the street the day after a rain.

As it rains the ground gets saturated with water and the worms need to come up above ground until the water drains through. Living in the country I'd often see them coming up across the gravel of our driveway or making their way across the cement slab outside of the garage. Usually they'd make their way back to the grass and go about their business once the standing water had cleared away. Occasionally, however, you'd see a few that didn't make it and got dried up by the sun. It's sad, but there weren't all that many most of the time.

Here in town it is quite different. As the worms make their way out of the ground and search for a temporarily unflooded place to hang out for a bit many will crawl over the curb and into the road. Once they fall down that curb wall, they're pretty much goners. Having no way to climb back up the curb they're stuck facing down a long day of drying out in the sun. Sure, they'll try their hardest to hold on, finding some build up of dirt here and there or trying to make their way across the road to a better place, the fact remains they will never see their earthy homes again.

Yeah, call me crazy getting worked up over a bunch of earthworms, but I have an odd tendency to superimpose myself and fellow human beings on animal life. It keeps me entertained when I'm bored, ok? Anyhow, I imagine what a horrible thing it would be to suddenly be stuck in an area that you can't get out of and can't survive in for very long. Think about it. It's raining out so you run to try and get out of it only to fall over a ledge that you didn't see (because you don't have eyes... y'know because you're an earthworm) and now you're out of the rain but you're also sentenced to an inadvertent death sentence, and a long, drawn out one at that.

Now I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I guess the takeaway could be that it sucks balls to be a worm in the city on the days that it rains. So next time it's raining out and you're cursing yourself for forgetting your umbrella, don't get so worked up, it could be worse - you could be an earthworm inching towards its cement killer.

Believe it or not, I'm a very organized person. I have very precise, unique organizational schemes that I use for just about everything. My DVDs are alphabetized in three distinct groups--the DVD movies I have not yet watched, TV on DVD I haven't watched, and all of the DVDs I've watched (TV and movies combined). My CDs are in alphabetical order. My books are organized a little more crazily. I just like being organized, but at times it sure doesn't look like I'm organized at all.

Anyone who sees my desk at work must surely wonder what tornado made its way through my cubicle. I have documents all over, CDs strewn about, cords everywhere, and crap all over the place. The thing is, though, I know where everything I need is. For example, the latest DB spec that I'm working with is underneath my exchanges list document right next to my Canada stuffed football. Or if I want the release notes for the last version of the app I'm working with I know I have to look in the folder pile that's next to my mini-tiki mask.

It would probably drive anyone crazy to have to work in my cubicle and, from what I see walking throughout the office, everyone else seems to be really, really neat as well as being organized. I'm sure everyone thinks I spend most of my time finding what I'm working with, but just because I'm not tidy doesn't mean I'm not organized. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go hunt down that requirements document in that pile of papers next to my Dwight Schrute bobblehead.

It would be next to impossible to review music, movies, or… well, anything for that matter, if genres didn’t exist. They are wonderful helpers that can be used to set the confines of whatever is being discussed right at the outset. Simply by saying that a CD is hardcore or that a movie is a comedy, the target audience, genre conventions, and personal influences on that particular subset of media come into place. Just a few words of description can put a piece of media into a proper context, but it can also paint it into a corner, which is always the associated risk with using genre tags. When I say “instrumental rock” there is automatically a stigma attached to whatever I will be talking about. In most cases, that’s ok, but not always. In this case it’s quite appropriate for Burbis to be governed by the confines of the “instrumental rock” genre, but there should be an asterisk next to that tag when talking about them. They may be restricted to this genre, but they do their best to add a little flourish here and there to set them apart.

With your first run through Curse of the Golden Dracula you will definitely hear the influences of post-rock heavyweights Explosions in the Sky and Caspian. There are more than a few passages where the trademarked EITS twinkling guitars are used to push a song forward, but unlike the aforementioned band Burbis inject some much needed weight to the usually sparse and mellow twinkles EITS are known for. Along with this added oomph, there are still moments that seem to blatantly rip off EITS and all of the EITS clones, such as the majority of “The White Snake”. This song is over nine minutes long consisting of about seven minutes of growing, slow burn build-up to a bursting crescendo of instrumental glory. I bet you’ve never heard that a hundred times before...

Even thought there are some been there, done that songs on this album, there are a couple of gems as well. “Winter Bloom” offers up a novel addition of Nintendo-ish keyboards to complement the melodic and sparse guitar work of the song. As odd as it sounds, this funky keyboarding actually works. The keys found here, and on a couple of other tracks, never overwhelm the song or feel completely tacked on. Instead they actually feel like they’re an integral part of the song. If only Burbis could have found a way to integrate this unique instrumentation into the majority of their songs, since then Curse of the Golden Dracula would have felt a little more unique instead of suffering from a lack of uniqueness on about half of the tracks. The combination of the keys and some of the heavier post-rock moments, such as what’s found on the title track, would be a heck of a combination that could really get this band noticed, but they’re not quite pulling it all together at this point in time.

There’s a significant amount of potential to be found in the members of Burbis, but they’re playing in a genre that is becoming quite crowded and has some extremely talented bands reigning over all of the up and comers. As mentioned before, they just need to do something that will get them a little separation from their peers. Once they achieve that, it’ll be a simple thing for their talent to take over as they create something really great. Until then, however, Burbis are definitely creating competent music, but it just doesn’t quite reach its full potential.

Well, according to Rotten Tomatoes, it looks like Iron Man is the best reviewed movie of the year so far. That's a pretty good endorsement for the flick if you ask me. I must say, I'm still going to keep my hopes tempered until after I see it tonight. I've been hopeful that it would be good, but I didn't think it could be great.

Back when I first saw the previews I figured it would bomb. The CGI wasn't complete, the story (from what I could tell) seemed somewhat contrived, and I didn't think they could pull off making a second-tier comic book character into an A-list movie. After seeing the latest trailers, however, and reading the reviews it sounds like it's going to be a ton of fun.

I'm also a little hopeful that it does well being a Marvel stockholder. This is the first of their in-house movies to be released so it will be setting a precedent, hopefully a good one, since I don't see The Incredible Hulk doing that well later this summer. Sure, it has Ed Norton, but I think people will have a bad taste in their mouths from the last Hulk movie. I thought Ang Lee's Hulk was great, but most people didn't.

Anyhow, if you don't have anything to do this weekend, I'd suggest giving Iron Man a go. It's not like there's anything else decent to see coming out this weekend.

In the quest to always have the latest and greatest, I volunteered to be a guinea pig at work and test out a new migration tool and build in order to have a newer laptop, as well as to have the latest software packages available. My prior computer was also having some issues, so this seemed like the logical thing to do. What comes with being a guinea pig, however, are all of the associate little issues that haven't been worked out yet.

For the most part, the transition to my new laptop went pretty well. It took about 4 hours for everything to get transfered from my old machine to my new one, but just about everything made it over. However, I did have to dedicate a few hours to re-installing a bunch of programs that I had on my old machine that I needed on my new machine to feel at home again. I just can't use a default Windows XP environment. After having so many utilities and tools that have made my everyday activities so much easier, you can't go back.

I got everything moved over, all my settings copied over, and it looked like everything was up to speed and rocking. Unfortunately, that was too good to be true. My mouse wasn't working and I figured maybe I just needed some updated drivers, but since it's a bluetooth mouse, there was a whole other world of pain associated with trying to get the thing working (and it still isn't as of right now).

In my most humble opinion bluetooth is a horrible technology that was poorly thought out, has been poorly implemented, and proves to cause more problems and headaches than it is worth. In my experience, I've never had an encounter with bluetooth that went well and this was another case. There was firmware mismatches, software mismatches, driver errors, and everything else you could imagine associated with my mouse and computer. What's crazy is it is a Microsoft mouse and we can't get the damn thing to work on a Microsoft Windows XP machine using Microsoft's drivers and even trying out a Microsoft bluetooth attachment. It's all Microsoft technology, but none of it works. Thank goodness I sold all of my MSFT stock so that I don't feel bad when I talk crap about them.

Anyhow, let's just say that having a new laptop is awesome, but bluetooth is not since it wasted a couple hours of my day and will cost me more in the future since my dumbass mouse still isn't working.

My cell phone bill is nearly $100 a month just to get my basic phone service with something like 500 anytime minutes (my unlimited nighttime minutes don't start until 9:00 pm) and my blackberry enterprise service. Thankfully work covers my blackberry fees (or else I wouldn't be using it), but it still leaves me with what I feel is an overpriced plan for a phone I don't use a whole lot. The thing is, I have the 2nd cheapest plan through the perennially evil AT&T. The cheapest is just ridiculous and I can't see anyone using it since there's hardly any minutes available.

Anyhow, one of the features my blackberry has is GPS. I can't use it, though, unless I add on a $10-$20 GPS service onto my monthly bill. It'd be cool to have GPS but, frankly, I wouldn't use it much since I don't leave the metro area very often.

Leave it to Google, though, to come up with a free pseudo-GPS function added into their Google Maps application on my blackberry. It was rolled out probably 6-9 months ago and it wasn't that accurate. It could locate me in a 1,000 meter radius or so, depending upon where I was in the metro. Cool as it was, it wasn't useful since it would show me 5 blocks away from where I actually was which didn't help when driving.

Now, however, there must have been some updates because as I was tinkering with it yesterday I noticed that it was locating my position accurate to within 3 meters at time (usually between 5 and 10 meters, though). That's almost GPS like tracking using cell tower signals (I'm assuming). Who needs GPS with this kind of accuracy using my cell's signal that I don't have to pay extra to use?

I'm sure that once I get out of the metro area it won't be as accurate, but I don't see myself needing it to be ultra-accurate when I'm driving out in the country and there are turnoffs every mile on average. It's awesome to have a free GPS alternative and hopefully it'll stick it to AT&T and get them to allow GPS usage for lesser fees or, God forbid, free. If you have a blackberry, download the Google Maps app and give it a whirl. It's pretty damn useful.

Your enjoyment of this release, and ultimately of the band itself, hinges on one very important aspect of the band--the vocals. Erik Fǽo has a screeching wail that takes a little getting used to, to say the least. Coming off as a mix of Dennis Lyxzén from Refused, Johnny Whitney from The Blood Brothers, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala it’s easy to see how Erik’s approach may grate on many listeners’ nerves. I’d like to say that you’ll eventually get used to it and may even grow to like his approach, but that isn’t necessarily the case. I know that for some, his vocals just won’t ever be approachable and that should be expected with such an outright abrasive style.

While the vocals are sure to be the focus of your ears the first time you listen to Jeroan Drive, the rest of the band doesn’t sit back with the knowledge that they aren’t the focus. Honestly, it might be interesting to hear some instrumental tracks and a few more instrumental passages since these guys pull together some of the better pieces of Refused, Thursday, and even some Helmet-esque moments. “The Greatest Betrayal” contains some of the best Helmet riffs in the last 4 years that haven't been written by Page Hamilton. Really, though, this song is a little bit of a departure from the band’s predominant sound, focusing on the really heavy riffs between the subdued choruses filled with melodic female vocals that are, unfortunately, mixed a little too low and almost get lost in the shuffle.

The band does get to show off their chops on the latter half of “11:57 at the Laundry Service” as they lay down a very precise, surgical post-hardcore groove that no doubt slays when played live. At times, as stellar as Jeroan Drive are, they tend to stray a little too much into the realm of merely mimicking Refused. “Mirror Escapades”, for example, sounds like it could have been a long lost b-side from The Shape of Punk to Come. The only thing that keeps it from sounding exactly like a Refused song is the spoken word style vocals near the end of the song that, frankly, should have just been left out.

Special note should be given to the title track as it shows the band really stretching their musical legs. The song has many disparate and interesting elements. It’s barraging at first, but it still possesses a mellow undercurrent courtesy of the backing chimes. The melodic female vocals make a return on this track to much more success than in “The Greatest Betrayal”. The song flows nicely back and forth between thundering heavy verses and the more restrained choruses before spreading out into a sprawling instrumental bridge that eventually fades to silence only to be resurrected in a cacophonic, cathartic, and unrestrained release, easily becoming the album’s strongest song.

It’s easy to peg this band as nothing more than a Refused clone with some slightly more abrasive vocals but, believe it or not, this band is much more than that. There is a genuine sense of emotion flowing through this band, showcased in the violently delivered vocals and intricate instrumental delivery both.

It's a really great feeling when you get to complete something, especially if you're somewhat of a collector by nature. I've always had that collecting urge ever since I was a kid. I was an avid baseball card collector, comic book collector, and toy completist. It was my goal to get all of the action figures in a specific series or the entire run of a comic series or the entire team of a certain sport. It was in my blood.

I've managed to wean myself away from that "need" to have all of a particular thing since, sometimes, it was a money sink and I didn't always need the entire set. For example, I might start reading a comic series and find I really didn't enjoy it, but I'd keep buying it because of my completist nature. I've since broken that habit. Now I just need to break it when buying TV on DVD since I've bought more television DVDs than I can possibly watch in the next few years.

Anyhow, what this is leading up to is me saying that I've finally met one of my remaining completist goals--I just received in the mail the final volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. This 28 volume graphic novel series has been so critically acclaimed since its release that I told myself I needed to get the entire set someday and then sit down and read all the way through it, experiencing the epic as a whole. At about 250 pages a book, that's around 7,000 pages of reading. It's a daunting task, but the set is staring at me from my book shelf every time I walk by it. I'll start it soon... soon.