Now this looks good. Lyle Lovett @ the Majestic. Probably one of the Top 5 greatest songwriters since I’ve been alive, and the music side is superb, too. It would be weird seeing him in such a formal setting, though. Man got tromped on by a Brahma, after all…fancy-pants downtown arts-district auditoriums seem out of phase, somehow.

Via Kramer…

I don’t know why this grabs me, except it sounds like he’s describing a standard Saturday nite at any random honky-tonk. Teenage cuties / politickin’ / Hare Krishnas / feed me chicken

Gorgeous stuff…I love that loping beat…makes you push the skinny pedal down real hard, no? Carll’s voice is so damn close to RWH that it makes me giggle.

Says he’s gonna be at Floore’s soon. Might go out that night.

Two-headed turtle:

It’s no Sasquatch, but it’s pretty cool. I bet it’s mama loves both heads equally.

• 6 days - Saturday to today.
• 22 one-hour meetings with customers and partners (2 no-shows).
• 3 two-hour post-mortems.
• 5000 sandwiches - I’ve had roast beef & cheddar, turkey & swiss, ham & American, grilled Ruebens, French dips, open-face meatloaf, and some breakfast deal with eggs, ham and cheese. A burger or two might have snuck in there.
• Approximately 12 hours of ‘tight like TJ’ poker played, only to lose it all on the last hand. Very, very bad call of an all-in, thanks to a bad read. That one hurt.
• About 10 monorail rides - you could do worse than building a poker trip around the monorail. Might try that.
• 10 boxes of equipment shipped from & to Texas.
• 0 pictures - we all forgot.
• 2 whores chatted up - my pard and I were trying to determine how long it would take before they set their sights on some other drunken degenerate gambler. Results: about 15 minutes of banal convo.
• $120 won by betting the Cowboys money line against Da Bears. Untold millions lost by NOT betting the Titans money line. The Saints look to be back to the ‘Ain’s, and I knew it, and I could not get back to the sportsbook to place the bet after rolling it around in my mind.
• One hour of delay at the airport, thanks to Big Dick Cheney.
• Five beers I’ve enjoyed on my couch since getting home - LV is great fun, but it’s just too much, even when you’re doing bidness. I lay in bed at 11 or midnight thinking, “21 floors beneath me, there are thousands of dollars being moved around.” So, that ain’t happening tonight, and I’m glad for that.

A 300hp V8-powered chainsaw, that is…

I pretty much detest this IOZ character, but this is some funny stuff right here . It has the added zest of being true, but the wordsmithing is genius.

And the bonus contemporaneousness, for me, of hearing today that it’s time to renew our health insurance at The Tiny Bidness, so I’ve got to quit smoking by October 1, 2006. I hope they didn’t tell them I gamble and own firearms, too, but they probably already know that.

Secondarily because I like the cache of linking to Nick Carr’s blog, which is an excellent 21st Century Bidness blog, by the way:

Salesforce.com, which is the flag-bearer for Software as a Service, can afford to take a very different view of the economics of business software because it is not tied to the client-server model (and, indeed, wants only to destroy that model). Its intent is to shake things up, and its vision is, not surprisingly, the most radical of the three companies. It believes that basic business software should be rebuilt from the ground up, in Web 2.0 style, through the contributions of a broad set of developers and innovators - from its own staff, from its clients, and from independent software firms. Cohesion comes at the platform level, with a shared computing infrastructure, a shared database, and a shared programming language - all under Salesforce’s control.

I’m speaking here as an extremely small business user of SalesForce. I am the absolute smallest unit on their price list, in fact. And I’m here to tell you that for all that high-falutin’ 21st Century Bidness bullshit bandied about above, I’ve never been more disappointed about my tee-tiny’s company’s dollars winging their way out of our pocket-book. Let me just tell you that the ‘broad set of developers and innovators’ have a long damn way to go to reach the most dumbed-down level of open-source software available today. That is, open-source, as in “free.” As in, you could run it on that AMD K6 PC you’ve got on the shelf over the workbench, free.

You can talk Web 2.0 all you want until the cows come home, but when you start subtracting features from the software you sold me, and telling me I have to change a 10 year-old workflow* and break every other connection I’ve built, and make your “radical” business model the center of my universe — well, buster, you can be sure I shan’t be re-upping in a month or two. I’m the center of the universe in my eensy-weenie bidness world. Just as my customers are my Sol.

Details? I’ll give you details…
Read the rest of this entry »

Leave Coach Fran alone!

“…all you people want is pass, pass, pass!”

Especially appropriate after last night’s butt-whipping…

Not that it matters, but it’s been a completely rotten week with the Peruvian Meteor Sickness. I got nothing done, and no hopes of being completely prepared for a supremely important* six-day biz trip to Viva Las on Saturday. I did get a handful of horse antibiotics from the doc yesterday & that finally broke the fever in the middle of the night. I should be able to get a little caught up, but I mainly want to be able to be lucid and cogent and on by Monday morning.

* So important, that I’m not even thinking about the poker prospects.

It’s been so long since I wrote about poker, I kind of forgot that I regularly play the game, albeit mostly in topless bars for no money.* But this line made me laugh out loud last night:

“Don’t go to pushing if you already got donkies doing the pulling.”

If I were a real poker blogger, I’d go into some big philosophically detailed post about understanding your opponents and managing your table image and a bunch of other hooha, but you know, that pretty much says it all. I reckon you can figure it out on your own.

If you need help with it, though, drop me a line…and comments are always free here at The Fat Guy.

I’m utterly out of it — too much with the work. Frankly, I’d much rather be working than wasting time here clogging up the tubes that run the internet. There are some things that deserve my attention, though:

Pretty standard corporate dumbassery at Southwest Airlines - get rich being the contrarian, become a boehemoth everyone adores, tighten the screws on your customers. Note that all this dumbassery happened after Herb and his Scotch with cigarettes stepped down and they put a woman in charge. Here’s a dress code I’d like to see enforced — no more fooking flip-flops, male or female. I want sensible shoes on all passengers. When the mofo goes down, I don’t want to have to climb over inert footless schmoes to get to the exits. And if we go down in harsh territory, I don’t want to have to command a crew of shoeless dicks. At a minimum, I want printed on the back of the ticket with the rest of the Geneva Conventions that you have to stay with burnt-out airframe, and I don’t have to save your idiot ass, because you chose to wear slaps.

Kevin also found some lame-ass Kenny Chesney interview that he makes hilarious. The only reason I link this is that I was drinking after work and found a Waylon Jennings* CD on the jukebox and none of it sucked. The tortured Nashville line from Waylon to Kenny makes me want to vomit. I left a few songs on the $5 I put in it, though, and some gal played the Dixie Chicks, chittering on about how great they were. To be modern, I played Leeann Rimes to shut her up.

I feel like a perv watching this video, so go to another tab and just listen to her voice. That’s strong stuff, kids.

*Waylon doing a Shaver song…audio sucks, but hell, it’s Waymore.

More genius Waylon, with a young Robert Duvall:

If she’ll leave her mama, son, she’ll shore leave you

Oh, hell, here’s a damn fine song:

Man, I love that Telecaster sound a whole lot. Kristofferson still strikes me as a posing California peacock, though.

Hell, this turned into a Waylon love-fest. Sorry…good stuff, Maynard. Makes me happy.

what would Jesus do?

I’m just thinking out loud here, but Jesus doesn’t care about your ads. Or how you handle them in your own personal browser space.

Why does everyone think that’s a funny joke? Could you possibly be that dumb that you don’t that know every one has heard it already at least 1,000,000,000 times? Is it your perceived readership? Your perceived wittiness? What?

I’ve seen this ad 20 gajillion times this weekend, since they’re hard-launching the postage stamp video version on the first weekend of real football.

Generic brunette with bangs in a spangly suit who can’t dance, generic song that had the good sense to mix in some banjo to catch the ears of Brother Jobs’ marketeers, lots of colorfully-costumed extras that stand out on big-screen version of the itsy screen on the actual product.

Sure, why not? Sign me up.

I think Apple’s missing a march by not co-marketing with LASIK surgeons.

Thompson Buzz Seems To Fade Before His Campaign Even Starts

Wlady Pleszczynski, editorial director for the conservative American Spectator magazine, says the long, slow rollout of Thompson’s campaign has backfired.

“So far this year he’s been a big tease, and . . . (it has) undermined his implied claims to being a real man. A real man doesn’t have things both ways,” Pleszczynski said.

Sorry, Wlady, but you’re a political journalist selling magazines to the choir - you don’t count, much. Most Americans mostly wish that all you poli-sci jerks would go hide in a salt dome. I’m a conservative, and I conservatively wish that I didn’t have to read fifty gajillion recaps of 10 gajillion debates by five gajillion candidates trying to appeal to 2.5 gajillion voters.

Personally, I’m going to vote for Fred because he waited until 14 months before the election. If someone shows up next August, I’ll vote for them.

I thought I was going to the dentist to get my all-new micro-measured snap-in teefies, and I end up with two-hour session in the dentist chair and a fresh filling and sore jaw and a freaking screaming GDMFSOB headache to beat the band.

To top it off, I only get 1/2 of the GDMFSOBing teeth that I paid for a month ago, because the GDMFSOBing dental floss doesn’t “snap” the way he wants it to.

I now understand why dentistry was so long to come to the frontier. Had I been blessed with a sidearm, I would have shot the GDMFSOB. And I like the guy…he’s a good dentist. But enough’s enough, dammitt. Gimme me my fucking teeth.

The pisser is they tell me it’ll only be a week before the four-figure teeth come back from a lab, and I know it’ll be another GDMFSOB month.

I’m telling you now…smoke like a chimney, drink like a fish, eat like a horse…doesn’t matter. There’s nothing worse than screwing up your teeth, so brush ‘em, floss ‘em, and go get ‘em cleaned about six times a year. I was seriously contemplating how much better the sweet embrace of the grave would be today at 1:45 in the pee-emm. Anything to avoid another 120 minutes of strangers poking around in your GDMFSOBing mouth.