"Dumb Things I Have Done" #4,739,201

Dumb Thing: I just washed a load of white clothes with a bag of Bigelow’s Mango Green Tea.

Explanation: Every day, I take a couple of tea bags with me to the capitol. For ease of transportation (and to protect my tea bags from being crushed in my pant pockets), I always carry the bags of tea in my white shirt’s breast pocket. I had one left over Thursday, and in my hurry after work to change clothes before class started, I guess I left one of the tea bags in the pocket. Silly me.

This should make me the most popular kid in school…

I recently procured a Windows Media file of Napoleon Dynamite doing the Letterman Top 10 for a night about one and half months ago. If you are interested in the file, send me an e-mail to firstNamelastName@gmail.com (my first name is Jacob and my last name is Gerber–there’s no period or anything between the two names). It is about 2.4 megabytes, and it is a .wmv file, so make sure your computer and your e-mail account will be cool with that before going through the downloading process.

While My Fingers Press Onto The Strings (Yet Another Clumsy Chord)

As some of you perhaps noticed, I haven’t posted much in the last couple weeks. Instead of posting in my free time, I’ve been rekindling my love affair with guitar. (If this sounds strange to you, feel free to quit reading at this point. This post will probably extremely boring for anyone uninterested in electric guitars.)

A couple weeks ago, I attended a Worship and Arts Ministry conference at Berean. It was very good, and (among other things) convicted me that I’m not spending nearly as much time working at my “craft” as I should be. Primarily, this means I need to practice more, but I’ve also begun exploring the technical, gear side of electric guitar, in an attempt to push toward excellence.

This has given an excuse (perhaps a weak one) to make some gear changes I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. I replaced the stock pickups on my 50s Classic Stratocaster with Lace Sensor Hot Golds. While I loved the neck and body on my strat, the pickups definately left something to be desired. So, with the help of Bruce at Aamp’s Guitar Store and Corey (our sound tech at Berean), I now have all new electronics. The sound difference is quite noticeable. Whereas the stock pickups muddied up as soon as I added any amount of gain, the Hot Golds sing with smooth, harmonic tone. They also respond to the tone controls (unlike my stock pups) and have opened a much wider range of usable tones.

I’ve also been learning to do my own setups on my guitar. This mainly involves adjusting the truss rod and saddles. The truss rod adjustments were scary at first (I had nightmares of waking up to a snapped neck (the guitar’s neck, not mine)), but I’ve gotten to the point where I feel comfortable doing it.

Today, I entered the world of electronic mods. After watching Corey install the new pickups, I decided I’d give it a go and mod my Boss SD-1 overdrive pedal to approximate a Tube Screamer 808. (You can see the cool schematic/illustration here.) After buying the needed soldering iron, solder, and components, I sat staring the pedal, fearing that I was about to screw up a perfectly good pedal by frying the circuit board with the soldering iron or something. It actually went quite smoothly (excepting a minor problem with the board grounding on the metal backplate, a situation fixed with duct tape (what else?)) and the pedal now sounds much smoother than it used to.

In case anyone else is interested, a little more bit about my rig:



Guitar

1996 Fender Japanese 50’s Classic Stratocaster

Pedalboard (From right to left)



CryBaby Wah

Boss SD-1 Overdrive (modded to TS-808 specs)

MXR Phase 90 Phaser

Danelectro TunaMelt Tremolo

Boss DD-5 Digital Delay with tap tempo (the pedal just to the right of it)

(The pedal in the top right is a footswitch for the amp, and the big thing in the top left is the power supply.)

Amp

Tech 21 Trademark 60

More fame

Today, Governor Heinemann gave his state of the state address. I sat up by the new Lieutenant Governor (Rick Sheehy, my now-former mayor) as he presided over the legislature. Splashing tomorrow’s Omaha World-Herald is this picture. In the picture, I am the page (we wear white shirts and ties with black vests) directly behind Governor Heinemann. I’ll have to talk to my press agent to make sure they get my face next time.

I would also note, for those of you who attend Zion Presbyterian, that you would probably recognize the page closest to Gov. Heinemann in this picture (in case you can’t recognize him, his name is John).

---

Also, on a completely unrelated note, I pose to you a conundrum; a riddle, if you will:
Question: What UNL student activity has Nathaniel the RUF Intern done that virtually no actual UNL students have done?
Answer: I will post the answer soon; I’m interested if anyone knows the answer. Ben–once again, you are not allowed to play.

Potpourri

Although I haven’t written much on this blog, my mind has been churning out lots of possible posts. I have toyed around a little with a few, but none of them seemed to amount to much on their own (except a book review, but I don’t have time for that right now). So, here’s a smattering of my thoughts over the past week.

---

In my Top 5 Page Post, I somehow left out the main reason I decided to write the post. This had me laughing all morning. Since “Top 6″ doesn’t sound very cool, we’ll just sort of insert a new number, with the reasons still totaling five:

Threeve: Being on a first name basis with senators. In fact, just the other day, a senator came around the corner in a hallway and said, “Well, hello again Josh!” In fact, he quickly learned that my name was Josh when I worked two years ago as a page, and he is still able to call me Josh, whether or not my name tag is in full, complete view!

---

I had a moral dilemma the other day: I was sitting in a Tuesday-Thursday class (meaning that classes last 1 hour, 15 minutes, and either end on 15 minutes after the hour, or 45 minutes after the hour–this one was supposed to end at 12:45), and the professor said (at 12:15), “Well, it looks like our time for today is up.” I knew what time it was, and I knew what time we were supposed to get out. Should I have gently informed the kindly professor that he had mixed up his time schedule, or should I have bolted quickly out the door of that uber-boring class as quickly as possible, before he realized his mistake? Let me know if I need to repent of something: I chose the latter.

---

Grrrrr. If any of you have a spam filter for your e-mail that you don’t ever check to see if legitimate messages got trapped, you might want to start. I received a rather terse (yet somewhat diplomatically controlled) voice mail the other night from a lady whom I had promised to help with a project, but who thought I had systematically ignored her e-mails when she gave me things to do to help. I rummaged through about a month’s worth of spam (around 1500 messages), and I found about ten legitimate e-mails that my spam filter had caught. I had been dumping my bulk mail folder without ever checking it for as long as Yahoo! has had a spam filter, but now I will no longer be able to do that.

I suppose that’s a good thing, though. Otherwise I might miss all the advertisements on how I can refinance my home or a bunch of other things I really, truly need.

---

Finally: goodbye, Johnny Carson! He did so much for this state (especially his hometown of Norfolk) and for the University I attend. I never really watched his late night television show, but from what I hear, no one ever equalled what he did.

Top 5 Reasons I Love Being a Legislative Page

5) Working in the most beautiful building in Nebraska every single day. Today, I visited the State Law Library–so cool. (By the way, if anyone is interested in a tour of the capitol, I could show you a bunch of great places. Just let me know.)

4) Learning valuable life skills. So far, I’ve learned to run the mail room (including the fax machine and copy machine!), and people said my coffee tasted really good today. Furthermore, a senator asked me today to edit an official letter he was sending. After I edited it, the senator told me, “It’s nice to know you can make something out of yourself whether you are something or not.” He was just joking…I think.

3) Getting to see actual bomb dogs sniffing around senators’ desks. ‘Nuff said.

2) Having an ID Card that doubles as a magnetic key card that can get me almost anywhere in the capitol.

1) A paycheck.

The Sexiest Man Alive!

No, ladies, it’s not me (contrary to popular opinion, I’m sure). In fact, this sexy man reached the peak of his hotness in 1983, when he took these pictures for Teen Beat Magazine:

Now you see that reading Slashdot has its benefits. I think my favorite part about all of this is where he seems to be flipping floppies at us–how incredibly geeky! Also, be sure to notice that the computer behind Mr. Gates in the first picture is one of those really old-school Macs. He’s probably stealing the code for the graphic user interface as these pictures are taken.

Happiness is…

Happiness is…

• Burning all of last semester’s notes–beginning with art history–this past weekend to help start/maintain the fire in our cabin at the prayer retreat (thus, happiness is a warm…fire).
• Having a clean room to start the semester along with a new welcome mat for my shoes (I get tense about tracking into my room the salt/gravel crap UNL puts over all its sidewalks whenever it snows).
• Gobs and gobs of Mint Medley and Earl Gray Tea (my only New Year’s Resolution this year: more tea, less coffee).
• Watching The Godfather for the first time (Happiness is not, however, having to stop last night with about a half hour left to go–by the way, Diane Keaton looks nothing in this movie like she does now).
• Seeing my first (of many this semester, I hope) sunsets from my window last night. Unbelievably beautiful.
• Spending no more than a mere five minutes in line waiting for my books this semester.
• Helping Andrew with his French homework–I finally have a language partner! I’m putting him through an intense training regimen so that we can be code talkers together. (Tiens, Andrew–S’il te plaît, grâte le fromage de ma rate!).

Favorite Songs of the Last Few Months

Here’s some of what my hard drives have been spinning recently:

The Flaming Lips – Are You a Hypnotist? [Yoshimi Battles Pink Robots]

Waterdeep – Both of Us’ll Feel the Blast [Sink or Swim]

Waterdeep – On Our Way to Crazy [Whole 'Nother Deal]

Wilco – I Am Trying to Break Your Heart [Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]

Derek Webb – Reputation [I See Things Upside Down]

Sigur Ros – Flugufrelsarinn [Agaetis Byrjun]

Sigur Ros – Njósnavélin (Track 4) [()]

Sigur Ros – Popplagið (Track [()]

Catchphrase Humor

This weekend, Andrew and I went to a prayer retreat with our church. After all the planned activities had died down last night, we, along with several other people, played a game of Catchphrase. Most of it was quite tedious because many people weren’t really paying attention, but there were some clues and answers worth blogging about.

---

The clue: If you are a Buddhist, you believe in this…
The guess: Confucius?
The solution: dogma

---

The clue: This is a tree, but not just any tree; a really long tree.
The guess: Weeping willow?
The clarification: Just the first word.
The response: Weeping?
The solution: “No, ‘willow.’”

---

The clue: Guys wear these around their necks… (spoken by a girl)
The guess: Chains? (spoken by a guy)
The solution: I don’t have any idea; I was laughing too hard at the guy who had such a good perception of the nature of male-female relationships.