Re: Moving
Mon. May 11
He plays at 6 pm tomorrow night at Menominee Park by the lake. Give me a call if you wanna go so I make sure I'm there. (sometimes I stay home depending on the weather and how the day went.)
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Soundtrack of a Divorce
Jun 16
Well, it's over (although not really since I've pre-written this blog post). Throughout my entire divorce I've been tracking the music I've been listening to just out of curiosity, via Facebook's iLike application. The app allows me to choose the songs I'm listening to which I've done for the past 7 months now. And now on to this glorious 7 month in the making blog post -
November - The Beginning
It all started November 1st, 2008, the day we went our separate ways. The soundtrack, literally, to this brief moment in time was hands down the CD "Class of 98 by 98 Mute"
The song I listened to on repeat was "Short Fuse" because that's more or less how I felt for that hour or so. I also listened to "Election Year" a lot because, it was after all election time, and that song captured much of the same energy and anger that "Short Fuse" also had. 98 Mute is a 90's hardcore punk band and I usually only listen to them when in a terrible mood.
November - Second Half
After a more hardcore styled start to my 7 month journey I moved on to some of Blink-182's more emo-ish songs and also started listening to Creed for the first time in my life. Most of the Creed songs were quite depressing and I've always felt, that to get over depression, you need to "fully go through it" i.e get it all out of your system usually by crying it out. The Creed songs pretty much sucked it right out of me especially "One Last Breath". I also listened to "One" & "My Own Prison" quite a bit.
December
After much of that very depressing music for some reason I moved on to something a bit more upbeat with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (MMB) & Bob Marley. My MMB CD I was listening to was a CD I owned for a long time but never bothered to listen to. I found that many of the songs on it were really good and this cheered me up briefly.
Then there was my "One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley & the Wailers" CD which I had got from my brother in-law Nick. This would be a reoccurring CD throughout the entire divorce. Whenever life got hard I turned to my Bob Marley CD. "Three Little Birds", was my theme song and the song Will Smith listens to throughout the movie "I Am Legend". The song also had great, reassuring lyrics such as:
Don't worry, about a thing. Cause every little thing, gonna be alright
Bob Marley calmed me down and kept me straight lined throughout the whole process. This was a CD I listened to pretty much the entire 7 months.
December - January
I next moved on to another CD I owned but didn't listen to frequently which was "The Swiss Army Romance by Dashboard Confessional". This is an all acoustic CD which is something I usually don't listen to but the lyrics on this CD are just awesome and the acoustic guitars play in an unusual way. One song that really stuck out was "Turpentine Chaser". At this time I let my guard down and started noticing girls again, which was a huge mistake for me at this juncture. I think the lyrics below explain how I was feeling, essentially just wanting to being with someone just for the sake of it but at the same time, really just wanting to be left alone.
All I want, is not to need you now / All I want are vows of silence now
Another great song was "Again I Go Unnoticed" which ties into what I was talking about above. After my stint with Dashboard Confessional I realized that being single is really the best and only choice for me.
January - February
Now it was January, which was below zero almost the entire month! (Most people seem to forget that now in June and feel like complaining about 60 degree weather). The car I was driving at the time sucked really really bad at playing CDs when it was cold out. For some reason the only CD I was able to get to play was "Full Collapse by Thursday". Thursday is an emo band or more like the emo band. Their music is very depressing, but at the same time I think that accurately describe me during those cold months.
The song I listened to over and over again on this CD was hands down "Standing On The Edge Of Summer". Just the title alone, described me, i.e. waiting for my divorce to be final in summer. This first set of lyrics reminded me how fast the years leading up to my marriage went, and then how quickly it seemed to end:
Driving in your car, Miss the stop sign, fall in love...Just to get knocked down
The next set of lyrics alludes to how fragile my relationship was and the fact that we had recently bought a house:
In this house of cards we're all holding hearts and spades. (One breath, one step could knock it all down)
And more alliterations to "a deck of cards" and the demise of our relationship:
When the people you love get lost in the shuffle, (When you leave, you leave nothing but broken hearts)
I also listened to "Stay What You Are by Saves the Day" a lot during this period. Their lyrics are a bit more angry and less elegant than Thursday's but still a good listen.
March & April
For the months of March and April I started listening to some more positive upbeat music in the form of pop-punk. I discovered a great Blink-182-esque CD from Britain called "Welcome to Loserville by Son of Dork". I also started listening to my "Mmhmm CD by Relient K" and later my "A Hangover You Don't Deserve by Bowling for Soup". All of these are really poppy upbeat CDs. I think I was doing this to try to counteract my less than optimistic outlook on my job because it seemed certain that our company was going to go through another set of layoffs. By April the layoffs didn't come but I stuck with the pop-punk music.
May
For the month of May I continued to listen to pop-punk but for this month it was some of my faster, more technical guitar laden music. This was due to the fact that I started playing guitar again, for the first time since early November. Two of my all-time favorite speed pop-punk CDs are "Cheshire Cat by Blink-182" & "Perhaps, I Suppose by Rufio". I admire Tom Delonge's work on Cheshire Cat and still feel that it's the best Blink-182 CD despite some of the more mainstream CDs they have released.
The Month of May was a relatively exciting month because I was getting a lot of movement on my house and the divorce appeared to be moving along smoothly without any problems.
June - The Final Month
The countdown to June 15th began but almost as quickly as I started the timer, a giant roadblock appeared. Despite the problems I was facing, unlike earlier in the year when I would have turned to some angrier music I kept my cool and turned to Ska, which is like really fast reggae with horns and is generally very upbeat and happy. I turned to my CDs "Throwing The Game by Lucky Boys Confusion" & "Why Do They Rock So Hard by Reel Big Fish". "Why do they Rock so Hard?" was the first ska CD I ever bought and I still consider it the best. It is also the most upbeat CD I own and it's almost impossible to feel sad or depressed when listening to it. The "Throwing The Game" CD is also very upbeat.
Today
And so that brings me to today, 7 months later. Looking back I can see a trend with the style of music I listened to through the 7 months. In the beginning it was angry, hardcore punk. Then depressing emo during the winter months moving on to happier pop-punk during spring and finally upbeat, happy ska once summer hit. The style of music I listened to had less to do with the season and more with me healing from the breakup.
The Soundtrack to My Divorce
- 98 Mute - Short Fuse
- 98 Mute - Election Year
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps
- Creed - One Last Breath
- The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Toxic Toast
- Bob Marley - Three Little Birds
- Bob Marley - Could You Be Loved?
- Dashboard Confessional - Turpentine Chaser
- Thursday - Standing On The Edge Of Summer
- Thursday - I Am The Killer
- Saves The Day - At Your Funeral
- Son Of Dork - Slacker
- Blink-182 - Touchdown Boy
- Rufio - Dipshit
- Lucky Boys Confusion - Child's Play
- Reel Big Fish - Down In Flames
Well I hope you enjoyed my little research experiment and I applaud you for caring enough to read this far! Perhaps you've even bothered to click-through on a few CDs to get inside my musical psyche. Thanks for reading!
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Message Board
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Re: Moving
Thu. May 7
Sure, I'll take you up on that offer. I don't have much going on during the week. Maybe give me a call next week before you go to remind me.
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Re: Moving
Thu. May 7
Nick is playing softball again in Oshkosh on Tuesday nights. If you're ever interested in hanging out give me a call. I think this coming Tues he plays at 6:00. Most of the time the games are a bit la...
Poll: How Long Will The Economy Suck?
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6 Months
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1 Year
41% -
Forever
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It Sucks?
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Tech: How To Create CSS Text/Font Gradients With CSS
Jul 1
Something that CSS is currently lacking is the ability to add gradients to our text blocks. Currently we can add drop shadows to text or change the color of it but not add gradients. I suspect that in the coming years this will be a new property but until then here is a method to do it.
HTML Setup
The HTML Setup is pretty simple. Just place an empty SPAN element inside your heading element:
<h3><span></span>Text Here</h3>Using JQuery to Automatically Insert SPAN Elements
I think a few people might find the above code unsightly, so here's a method to leave the empty SPAN element out of your HTML and inject it via JQuery:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $("h3").prepend("<span><\/span>") }); </script>CSS Setup
The most important part of this code is setting the H3 element's position to relative. I'd also recommend setting the line-height to the same height as the font-size used and also reseting the margins back to zero.
h3 { font-size: 25px; line-height: 25px; margin: 0px; position: relative; }Next, we position the empty SPAN element absolute and give it a height and width. Using this SPAN we can overlay various background-images over the H3 element.
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Photo Gallery
Photo 4 of 4: Here I am holding my new little nephew Liam. He was born June 6th (D-Day) 3:30am at AMC in Appleton. He weighed 7lbs 11oz. I am excited to be his only uncle on the Grosskopf side. Neal Grosskopf (0)
Review: Star Trek: The Movie
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May 16
I just finished watching the re-boot of Star Trek: The Movie, so I figured I'd write a review on it. Like all remakes I was very skeptical of how good the movie would be. Too often in remakes, they lose the meaning of the original work. I think the Star Trek movie kept much of the original meaning, but also presented it in a much different way than any of the previous Star Trek TV shows or movies have before.
I'll first start our by reviewing the casting choices for the movie since characters are very important to the success of a remake. I think probably the character that was most like the original series was Dr. McCoy. It was almost a dead-on impersonation of DeForest Kelley from TOS except for his appearance. The next most similar character was Scotty. I would say that Spock also bore an extremely close resemblance to Lenard Nemoy that it was scary. The only difference with Spock was his voice was a bit different and that was hard to get over. Finally Captain Kirk, probably bore the least resemblance to the original. The characters appearance seemed a bit off, and his actions did as well. Overall, I think they did an excellent job with the casting, which had to of been a difficult task.
Next I'll review the special effects. This movies had by far the most complicated and advanced special effects I've ever seen in a movie. This is something not typical of any of the other Star Trek movies or shows and will probably annoy a few Star Wars fans who have always had the monopoly in this arena. J.J Abrams did a wonderful job creating some of the stunning scenery in the movie.
The plot of the movie was a bit confusing at first, and in a sneaky way, the movie does away with the timeline of events of the series by the use of time travel (in a Back to the Future sort of way). Because of this, Abrams won't have to worry about canon from the franchise by using an alternate timeline. This is both good and bad. It's good because we'll get fresh stories and won't have to strictly adhere to the past rules, but it could be bad because Abrams could start creating a really bad alternate storyline.
Here's a few other random thoughts about the movie. Spock quasi-dating Uhura was stupid and very unlikely for his character. The Romulans also did not look 'enough' like the Romulans we've seen in prior work. The interaction between Spock+Kirk+McCoy did a very, very good job in bearing resemblance to the original series, and in essence WAS the original series. It was extremely funny to see a 'Red Shirt' die in the movie (like the old shows).
Overall it was a really great movie, and I hope they decide to make sequels. I give it a 10/10. View Comments (0)
Video: Obama Swats Fly during CNBC Interview
A funny video of Obama swatting a fly during an interview. It seems like out of any president that I've known, he has some of the more funny clips I see ending up on YouTube. Probably even more funny was PETA issued a statement after this stating that they wished he hadn't killed the fly. Neal Grosskopf (0)