Got my XBox to turn over on the +12V power supply tonight! It worked enough to blink the front light red, mostly because the hard drive and DVD drive aren’t plugged in…It isn’t quite right yet. It ignores the front power button until you hot-wire the power supply (shorting green, or the On signal, to black, or ground). At that point, the CPU fan spins like mad but the rest of the machine dosen’t start…when you hit the front power button, the CPU fan spins down to a normal pace and the machine starts cranking up. So I still have some debugging to do, but at least no smoke came out.

Oh yeah, so last Friday I met up with Pete, Alysia, DHarp, Jason and others to see Matter play at the VT. They were great as usual – sounded a little heavier than last time, which was great. After they finished, I was treated to one of the odder performances I’ve seen in a while. Valient Thorr, who claim to have arrived on this planet in a UFO crash in 1957, float somewhere in my mind between fascinating and terrifying. I first spotted the lead singer, looking all the world like a youthful Charles Manson, replete with long, wild hair and beard and wearing a brown leather jacket with fringe, standing on a table in the back of the room during soundcheck. He was keeping time with the band by banging a fork on a bottle of ketchup. The wierdness continued – the pattern established by Young Charlie was to rant about…something…for a few minutes, then blaze their way through a vicious hailstorm of a song resembling Motorhead fronted by, well, Charles Manson. Lather, rinse, repeat. Occasionally loudly berate the audience or the people at the bar for not paying attention. One rant involved Terri Schiavo and armed revolution; another had to do with how the Illuminati could track your activities through the pyramid and eye on the back of your dollar bills. It was…strangely compelling. I decided to nickname them “Uncle Charlie’s Happy Funtime Band”. Seemed to fit.