The World According To Chris Brewer

I rely on my iPhone to text, call and email. The thing does literally everything. I love it.

What I am not so in love with is the iPhone’s brand-new 1.1.3 firmware. It has borked two major features that were a big selling point for me in the first place.

First off, and I’m not the only one experiencing this, but in a text message conversation, each message is displayed out of order. Massively confusing especially during an important convo.

Secondly and most importantly, I can’t even get my email. It keeps prompting me to go to the Mail account settings and enter my password. I do that, and it forgets it as soon as I exit from the Settings menu.

I am downgrading to 1.1.2 right now. 1.1.3 is a load of crApple. I’ll take my jailbroken iPhone with the ability to post the songs I listen to over the internet in real time and read the Bible on my phone, over cell phone triangulation of my location on Google Maps, any day.

1.1.2, here I come.

I finally finished my website redesign this morning. Honestly I didn’t have to put too much work into it, as I simply modified some stuff from the Unwakeable Wordpress theme. For those of you wanting to know why I changed the look and feel of my website, I did so because I had a few readers who had emailed in saying the previous design was too big for their monitors, even at their maximum resolution (I take it they were running 800×600). Oh well, I like this look better. Lemme know how you like it.

The site has been getting some insane amounts of traffic this week. Today my site was even shut down for two hours by BlueHost, the folks who host it, because apparently I had a script running on the site that made it run adominably slow. Don’t know what it was but I fixed it.

Okay, enough with the techno-babble and onto real life.

- Tomorrow is the last day at my current job before I go to work for AT&T. Hopefully everything has come back okay because I would like to get all my orientations and training done this weekend, and have a seamless transition between the two jobs. Nearly doubling my pay (but taking a slight cut in hours) is always a good thing in my book. I look forward to my new line of work.

- On my way to Crimson House tonight, I was flipped off by a driver as I merged onto the James River Freeway in Republic. I don’t know why, because he was in the left lane and I was in the right lane. Dude then proceeded to speed up to about 80, pull in front of me and slow down to 65. There I received the bird again, so I just calmly followed the guy. I think I wasted about 5 minutes of my life following the crazy dude. Incidentally, this is the second middle finger I’ve received since I moved to Springfield in August.

- It is cold. The temp is 11 right now. They’re all saying it’ll warm up tomorrow. I hope to God it does — last night I suffered my first nosebleed in the U.S. and it wasn’t pretty — I say the U.S. because I got them all the time in Iraq. I hate them…I didn’t lose much blood from this one but still my nose feels weird.

- Dad still calls Best Buy, “Best Buys.” I still don’t know why.

- Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart’s track “Dancing in the Light” from their 1990 release Crank It Up (yeah, that’s some old-school Christian synth-rock for you) just began playing randomly on my iTunes playlist. I’m outta here to enjoy it.

Every time I’ve been there, they don’t have any.

Today will be my seventh time checking. Hopefully they have one.

I never knew Springfieldians were such huge Mac addicts.

File the death of Heath Ledger under “We didn’t expect anything like this.”

I normally don’t opine about the deaths of celebrities or people that have been made famous by the media or the silver screen. But Ledger’s life coming to a tragic end today made me think a bit.

The guy was only 28 and was obviously trying to make some sense of life. He had just finished filming his role as the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight and from what the news was saying, so intensely portrayed the Joker — a cold, sociopathic, almost demonic criminal — that he had trouble sleeping at night. He had just gone through a breakup as well. He had been addicted to drugs over a period of time, but friends said he was clean over the past year. Reports also say he was suffering from pneumonia recently.

He was found dead today by a housekeeper and a masseuse, apparently with pills strewn all over the bed in which he was sleeping.

Everything that the news reported today made me really wonder. Heath Ledger had fame and money that we all can only dream of, but in reality it seemed as if he just wanted to be human like the rest of us.

Any way you cut it, a young man’s life was cut short after 28 years and it is a sad, grim reminder that our lives are nothing without faith in Christ to fill the void that only He can fill.

Please excuse my work over the next day or so while I update the site with a new theme and add all the sidebar info.

The site’s formatting might be a little wonky over the next 24 to 48 hours but by Friday I should have everything done.

Thanks!

I’m not the biggest Led Zeppellin fan — in fact I’m convinced some of their music was just downright evil — but I do have to applaud and amen Robert Plant for having the guts to give his public opinion on one of the most overhyped bands of our day. Well, two actually.

This from the Australian Herald-Sun:

Rock legend Robert Plant demanded a London bar stop playing Radiohead on its sound system, branding it “rhyming crap”.

The Led Zeppelin rocker dislikes the melancholy five-piece so much he asked staff at Camden’s Fifty Five Bar to change the record because it was ruining his night.

A source told Britain’s The Sun newspaper: “Robert was drinking with a woman and didn’t like the choice of tunes playing.

“Radiohead was on and he started complaining. He said, ‘What’s this rhyming crap?’ ”

However, when staff put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers instead, the 59-year-old was still unimpressed.

The insider added: “The staff were obviously keen to please so they changed their music. They put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who they thought might be more up his street. But he didn’t like their stuff either and said it was like a ‘nursery rhyme’.

“He then said he wanted to listen to Captain Beefheart, an American musician who was famous at a similar time to Zeppelin from the 60s to the early 80s.”

Captain Beefheart, whose real name is Don Glen Vliet, was a musician and singer known for his surreal lyrics and harmonica skills.

He is best known for Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s 1969 LP Trout Mask Replica.

I’m not a Radiohead fan in the least, nor the Chili Peppers. Captain Beefheart? Can’t really say I am either.

At least he didn’t ask for Bob Dylan. Great lyricist but his voice makes me want to go cut out my vocal cords for fear my speaking voice would sound like that.

Anyway, here’s Robert Plant with Alison Krauss in a brilliant track from their album Raising Sand, “Gone Gone Gone.” This is brilliant.

What do you get when you combine a bit of good old freehand art in Photoshop with some music and dialogue, and throw it all together in Windows Movie Maker?

A senior school project, of course.

My old comrade Adam Gillette from Newport News, VA was instrumental (no pun intended) in the creation of this short film, entitled Plagiarism.

Grab some popcorn, watch, and enjoy. Then rinse and repeat.

Motivational posters in the background? BRILLIANT!!!

Last night I attended James River Assembly with my brother and mother. (Jason’s in town until Tuesday so that partly weighed in my decision to check the place out one more time last night.)

During the service, a woman gave a message in tongues, another man interpreted — and afterward pastor Curt Cook explained what the meaning of tongues and interpretations is to the church. What he said afterward is a good piece of wisdom that would benefit every single church in which the gift of tongues operates.

He basically stated that instead of immediately accepting the word given as gospel truth, everyone needs to pray about it, match it up with the Word of God and receive edification from the word as it was given. No immediate “we know for a fact God said this.” Instead everyone in the church acts as the check and balance system for such a spiritual phenomenon.

That was the first church I have ever been to that has publicly exercised that level of wisdom in discerning the Spirit, and it was refreshing especially for this skeptic of public tongues and interpretation.

Thanks for doing the right and Biblical thing, James River.

I won’t spoil the movie for all you prospective viewers.

But I will tell you that it was intense, INTENSE, I N T E N S E. The camera work in it, due to it being filmed first-person style with a Sony Handycam, made me a bit dizzy, but also added to the intensity of the film.

The character development sucked as with all movies of the “monster” genre do, but the plot line and ending of the movie made me cheer a bit.

Yeah it’s a bit of a pointless movie but I will say this: Godzilla, King Kong and the Blair Witch combined have nothing on this puppy.

Cloverfield gets a 8/10 in my review book.

You all know the drill…here’s a nice little set of tracks for this week’s 54321. A couple of these are fresh tracks I heard this week (or at least, new to me). Of particular interest is the nice remix of Scritti Politti’s “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin).” Great stuff this week.