My dear cousin-in-law (arch nemesis) Mike made a comment today that he was having a KMFDM marathon.  This reminded me of a period of my life around the age 20-22 when I subsequently lost all my KMFDM t-shirts.  By “lost”, I mean “was robbed”.

A little back story here:

KMFDM is a German industrial band.  They were formed in the mid 80′s and have since done something like 16 studio albums, with “Juke Joint Jezebel” being their most widely heard song, showing up on the big screen in both Bad Boys (featuring Martin Lawrence and The Fresh Prince) and Mortal Kombat (featuring Sub-Zero and Scorpion).  I listened to them quite a bit during the 90s.

The thing about KMFDM is that they had EXCELLENT album covers.

my favorite design, now probably in the bottom drawer of some harlot's dresser

I thought these designs were superb and had a pretty good collection of black t-shirts featuring said artwork.  Of course, the girls I dated also thought they were pretty cool.  I noticed that slowly but surely my shirts would eventually end up in the clutches of these thieving women.  By the time I hit 22, my collection had gone from maybe 6-8 different KMFDM shirts to 0! Of course my friends all thought this was tremendously funny.  In fact, whenever they would see a girl wearing a KMFDM shirt they would ask them if they knew me.

A word of warning: UNLESS YOU ARE MARRIED TO THEM, DO NOT LET WOMEN BORROW YOUR FAVORITE SHIRTS!

That is all.

Great new video from Imelda May’s upcoming album “Mayhem”.  Now, the name of her album isn’t the only reason I’m posting this video.  This woman absolutely rocks.  Her debut album is superb and gets a lot of playtime in my car and at my desk.  Unfortunately I missed her by a week when I was in Ireland (she played at the INEC right next to my hotel).  I would love to see her play live.  Unfortunately, she’s Irish and is typically playing the EU circuit.

Do yourself a favor and pick up her first album, Love Tattoo.

This reaction from Zoë pretty much justifies every annoying or troublesome thing my life. To be able to make someone so happy is priceless.

So with Apple and AT&T having issues with the iPhone pre-orders this morning, I decided to take a hop over to AT&T’s Facebook page and see if they had a statement.  I was rewarded with seeing this little gem of a post:

Unless you understand networking, don’t talk about it. Having worked with my old school for 2 years and taking classes on it for all 4, I think I know what I’m talking about. You all don’t. Less qq.

This totally cracked me up.  I really hope I never said anything when I was younger that sounded like this.  I know I said a lot of stupid stuff, but I think I’ve always had a pretty good handle on my relative level of experience.

For those of you not in the know, “qq” is an emoticon for “crying”.

In case you weren’t aware, AT&T recently discontinued their “unlimited” data plan and introduced a tiered model.  Under the new model, they’re offering 200MB for $15 a month and 2GB for $25.  People with the existing unlimited plan will be able to keep their unlimited data plan.  The stated reason for this was to require heavy users to pay more for their impact to the network.  According to AT&T the “heavy users” take up around 2% of their customers.

While this sounds like a solid idea in theory, AT&T is facing a pretty substantial backlash.  People see the unlimited option being taken away and instantly cry foul.  Since you can remain grandfathered in on the unlimited plan, the users AT&T are looking to control with this pricing will not be impacted.  They can just continue to use as much data as they like for $30 a month.  So the net-net is AT&T gets negative press AND they don’t fix the problem they were supposedly trying to do.  From a marketing perspective, this was a really bad move.

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I admit, the switch to the iPad 3G data plan a month after release does stink a bit of “bait and switch”.  Part of the draw of the 3G data plan was that you could stop and start it at any time and get unlimited data for $30.  They’ve now changed their pricing.  This seems unethical and leaves a bad taste in my mouth towards AT&T.

Realistically though, I will most likely switch to the $25 a month plan, since according to the usage statistics on my phone, I have used a total of 1.5GB of data in the past year and my on my iPad, 300MB this past month.

I have no problem with the changes they made, it just really should have been handled better.  I expect a little bit more from the marketing department of AT&T.  They’re supposed to be professionals.