Matt Van Stone

I want to do this while it is still fresh in my mind…

I arrived at Guitar Works at 11:30. I was a bit early but I was about the 20th person there. They started handing out entry wrist straps at 12pm. If you brought your Shot to Hell CD with you they gave you a wrist strap. Then they started another line for people who did not bring a CD. I did not bring a CD because I assumed they would be readily available. So I waited with a group of about 25 people who needed to buy a CD. 1pm rolled around and still no Zakk, 2pm – no Zakk and still no CDs. At about 2:30 we see Zakk walk by the window. A guy comes out and starts handing out small posters for Zakk’s new deal with Dunlop for guitar strings. Apparently the CDs got lost somewhere or weren’t brought to the store or something. No big deal, I didn’t really care that much about the signature.

The shitty thing was I was maybe 5th in line to buy a CD, but when they started giving out the posters they just sort of started from the middle. By the time it was all done I ended up near the very end of the line. I was probably the 10th last person. I was a little choked. I had been standing there for 3 hours already and now I’m behind people who showed up an hour after I did.

By 3:30 I was 3rd or 4th and Zakk just gets up and walks out. I started to sweat a little bit… Where is he going? Then I overhear someone say he had to take a leak – ok, thats fine. Finally I get up to the front, he’s standing in the corner behind a round table. I walk over, put my poster down and he shook my hand and gave me a one armed hug. He asked me what my name was and I told him. He said right on brother or something like that. He asked me if I was coming out to the show tonight and I said yes. I told him it was my second BLS show and that I saw him in Vancouver two years before. He smiled and said right on again. He took a swig of what looked like his 4th Becks and signed and dated my poster. He gave me another huge one-armed hug and said thanks for coming and I’ll see you at the show tonight. For some reason the only thing I could think of to say was “you’re fuckin’ awesome man”, and that was it. The whole thing lasted maybe just over a minute. It was pretty much the single greatest moment ever.

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Holy freaking God man. Let me give you a recap of the events that took place on Friday. Drove past Guitar Works on 16th Ave (Calgary) at about 11:30pm. Sign says “Meet Zakk Wylde April 12th, see guitarworksonline.com for details!”. I crap my pants. Get home, find out you have to buy a Marshall amp to be guaranteed a spot or enter a draw to possibly win. I drive in next morning at 9:30 and buy the cheapest amp I could. Now I’m going to meet Zakk Wylde at 1pm on Thursday before the concert that night at Mac Hall.

I can not even believe how crazy this is. This is like psycho screaming girls crying because Nick Carter touched them crazy. I’m trying not to think too much about it because I don’t want to be too disappointed when all that happens is he grunts hello and signs an 8×10 glossy for me as quickly as possible to keep the line running. I don’t know what to expect. I have this dream of standing in line as he shreds on some Bullseye Zakk Wylde Signature Gibson 10 or 15 feet away from me while he waits for the 1pm mark so he can start his signing session. Oops… did I say I was trying not to think about it? I know, its a far fetched dream, but I cant help myself.

Anyway, like 70 hours to go.

Here is the PDF advertising it: Meet Zakk Wylde at Guitar Works

I am the worst binge blogger evar. Lets see… 9 post over a 3 or 4 day span in JANUARY. And nothing until now… nice.

Moved from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.1.2 Blogging Platform

Well I finally moved this site from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.1.2. As you can see it has a similar format, but completely different theme. I have been wanting to do something with that background pattern for a long time and I’m pretty happy with what I have mocked up. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Most of the work went into stylizing this very popular theme I downloaded. I was able to import my posts and comments from the old site very easily, and I updated my .htaccess file so that all of the addresses for the old site are properly redirected to the new page.

If there are some things that don’t look quite right let me know so I can fix them up. I had to edit a few of the posts because their format was all messed up, but for the most part I think it’s ok.

If you are on Internet Explorer it might not look so great. I spent some time fixing up some of the IE bugs, but really in the end I didn’t care. If Microsoft cant put the effort into making a w3c compatible browser I’m not going to put the effort into fixing the code so it looks right on their browser. If you are viewing in Firefox or Safari it should look as it is intended to. Otherwise it might look crappy.

You’ll see I added a lot more static stuff to the sidebar. There are photos, del.icio.us links, digg links, and blogroll sites. I also have last.fm stats and top movies in there.

Comment Span Zapped

One of the best things about switching to Wordpress is I now have a sweet comment spam filter to block out all that crap I was having to manually delete on my old platform. Spam Karma is sweet. Hopefully I can keep all of that smut spam I was getting on the old site off this one.

Lots of Posts

I currently have a load of drafts that I am going to publish over the next few days. Look for some posts on Linux, The Sopranos, horror movies, and Wii modding coming soon.

This weekend we made the switch from Telus to Shaw for internet and phone. There were two things keeping me with Telus. One was they never complained about how much I downloaded. Well actually, they did once, but they totally had a right too (360GB in one month). To be honest I was just trying to see how much I could get away with. The other reason was to switch to Shaw phone would cost me $55/month instead of $30. But now things have changed. I’m not downloading nearly as much as I used to and Shaw has introduced their Shaw Phone Lite for $29.99 (+$0.04/minute long distance). So now for the same price I was paying for high-speed and phone at Telus, I’m getting high-speed (that’s twice as fast [5Mbps vs 2.5 @ Telus]) and Phone with call-display (call display is extra at Telus).

So basically it was a no brainer at this point.

A few things I want to mention… The guy who installed the internet had to look at my computer after the internet was installed and note all the specs. So I booted it up into Windows for him because he didn’t know crap about Linux. When it booted up he wanted to know why I didn’t have an anti-virus installed in Windows. Well, it’s probably because I don’t use Windows. Not only that, but be didn’t even want to look at the Mac. Anyway. I should have just left him in Linux and told him I didn’t even have Windows. Then he wanted to look at the setup on my fileserver. I just told him it was Linux too and it was internal only, both of which are lies. I can understand wanting to take a look a the computer just to confirm that you aren’t going to call Shaw in 20 minutes to complain about your speed when you are running Windows 95 and IE 5. But I thought it was pretty obvious that I had everything under control.

I think I might need a new router though. When I had the Shaw hooked directly to my workstation it was blazingly fast. Pages loaded instantly. I reset the router to factory settings and reconfigured it. That seemed to make it a bit faster, but I still found a delay when it is doing the DNS lookup.

Seriously, its good nobody reads this tripe because I am the worst blogger ever. Not like I ever really wanted a “blog” per say, but it is an easy content management system. Either way, I suck at it. Basically if you could see the back end of this I have like 25 posts that I started writing and never finished. Really what happened was I wanted to redesign the site and move it to wordpress from movable type, because I think wordpress is better. So then my first re-design sucked and I scrapped it. I made too many changes to the template and it got too complicated. Now my second one is much better, its clean and simple (90% jacked from other sites), and I really like it. The only problem is I did all the design on Linux and it looks mint in good browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari, but all of the CSS is messed up when you view it in IE. So basically I have to go through all the code and add IE hacks, but I just havnt had the time or patience to do that. On top of everything, I have been running Linux exclusively for a few months now and have never gotten around to installing IE 6 through wine so that I can do the testing. Thats a whole other can of worms right there.

On top of all of tha,t moving to a different platform is a pain anyway. You have to check each post to make sure it was imported properly, plus you have to make sure you have all the right redirect rules setup in your .htaccess so if people access your old stuff they get sent to the new stuff. It’s a bit of work. I will get around to it sooner or later, but in the meantime I’ll see if I cant get some of these incomplete posts done.

Yeah, It’s August 1st already. The summer is on its way down now. We probably have one more nice month and then thats it, 8-9 months of winter. YAY!!! /not yay. I have a slight distaste for winter.

Anyway, I havnt posted because work has been super busy. It’s been face to the grindstone from the start of my shift to the finish. I’m also trying to switch this site over to wordpress. I have been working on a theme in my spare time. I think I have been working on it too long because what I thought was wicked when I started it I think is kinda over done now. Oh well. It should be done pretty soon… heh maybe by the end of August. I’ve got some cool ajax effects in it and the layout is much different. Who knows, I may scrap the whole thing before I actually get it done.

Seriously…. I thought I lived in the ghetto when my car was broken into a few months ago. This happened not a block from my house:

The suspicious death of a city woman has police combing through a Bridgeland home looking for evidence that may point to a homicide.

A woman, believed to be in her 40s, was discovered alive by paramedics inside the home in the 200 block of 3rd Street N.E. just before 3 a.m. on Sunday.

They rushed her to the Foothills Hospital, where she died of undisclosed injuries.

“Due to the nature and the circumstance of her injuries, the Calgary Police Service homicide unit was called to investigate,” said Acting Staff Sgt. Cliff O’Brien.

“We believe we have identified her. However, we have not yet notified next-of-kin.”

Police said a party was held at the home on Saturday night. The victim was one of about a dozen guests.

By the time officers arrived, only one man remained in the home — a tenant who had called 911. …Continue Reading

If you continue reading the article, I’m 99% sure that the people they interviewed are the resident managers of my appartment. Anyway, the cops have been hanging around my neighbourhood for a few days now and last night they had the chopper out and everything looking for some woman.

The best part of it all is my rent is going up… I get to pay $800 to live in the ghetto.