Well, greetings once again from the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, Missouri, where I am finishing up the last day of my Christmas visit. Yesterday I started getting everyone caught up with how the holiday went for me and my family this year, but I had so many updates and ran out of room; so they've spilled over into today's entry as well. And as yesterday, since I have access to my dad's Mac G4 laptop and WiFi connection and all, I thought I'd supplement the usual entry with lots of photos and audio links as well. So enjoy it, because starting tomorrow it's back to the usual text entries. (Oh, and today's my last chance to access chat as well; if you feel like gabbing a little, you can reach me via Google, Jabber and MSN as 'ilikejason,' and on Yahoo as 'jasonpettuschicago.')

So, it ain't a holiday without a couple of big family get-togethers, one for my mom's side of the family and one for my dad's. My parents, in fact, grew up in adjoining small towns in the same area of Missouri, down in the southeast area of the state where all the lead mines are; and in fact the vast majority of my relatives while growing up were still in those cities, because almost all my relatives for the last 200 years have been lead miners. (My dad was the first one in my family, in fact, to not be one, and I'm only the second.) So when I was growing up, holidays used to just be this overwhelming thing because there were so many relatives around; always four or five parties you had to hit in four or five days, with something like 50 or 75 people at each of them.

Of course, most of those former lead miners from my grandfather's generation have all died now, so there's not much of a reason for us to visit St. Francois county anymore; and so the family get-togethers have tended to shift to St. Louis now, and are attended by a lot less people. So the one for my mom's side of the family, for example, was on the 26th down at a second cousin's or whatever the fuck, down in the LaFayette Park area of St. Louis, where a whole bunch of old grand brownstones from the 1904 World's Fair are still standing, and home restorers have bought them all and fixed them all up again, and painted a bunch of them like Victorian Painted Ladies in San Francisco. And why yes, those are the parents of my second cousin Nathan Keay, a photographer and writer in Chicago with a rapidly growing fan base; and his girlfriend (or maybe wife now, I can't remember), a popular folk singer in Chicago named Stephanie Morris.

So that was fun, but in a "family get-together, how much fun are you gonna have anyway" kind of way. And then we all played Bingo, of course, which has been going on every Christmas since long before I was born, where people donate joke gifts for the winners, and like this little plastic cup being one of the gifts for something like 40 years now, with little bragging rights to the one who wins it that year, etc. And it was nice to see everyone again, of course, but you know how that stuff goes - not much to report, just a lot of conversations where I desperately try to get far-flung relatives caught up with me and my life, and always failing. I will say this, though, that for the first year in my life, I no longer have to confusedly explain my online journal to these relatives, to their continual befuddlement; I just start explaining it now and they all go, "Oh, it's a blog, right? I write a blog too! Our real estate company started one and all the employees take turn putting up little articles! It's so much fun!" Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Web 2.0 - where middle-aged suburban women in the middle of Missouri not only know what blogs are, but are writing one themselves. And having a great time, and picking up actual audiences, and are finally understanding why I've bothered maintaining mine for seven years now myself.

And then the next night we met up with my dad's side of the family, over at a microbrewery and restaurant on the historic St. Charles riverfront called Trailhead. And that was fun as well, of course, although I have even less to report about that one, since it was pretty much a repeat of what you just read above. Oh, although, I was disappointed to see that my second cousin couldn't make it, whose name happens to be Jason Pettus, and who, poor guy, is always getting emails from readers confusedly mistaking him for me, and a lot of misunderstandings from his friends about what freaky stuff he's actually into, once they Google his name. We actually correspond via email on a semi-regular basis - in fact, I'm trying to get him and his young buddies to all make a road-trip to Chicago soon - so it was too bad he couldn't make the dinner and gab in person about all the weird mix-ups both of us have had to deal with in the last couple of years.

And so then after the dinner I got in my brother's rented purple Ford PT Cruiser (which makes him and his wife cringe every time they see it) and we headed down into central St. Louis to meet up with old friends of theirs, from when they lived in St. Louis themselves not that long ago. And of course I used to do this all the time when they actually lived in St. Louis, so I already know their friends pretty well too; so that's always fun, to see those people that I only see once a year or so, and drink and talk and laugh and act all goofy and say a bunch of smartass things, because they're all smartasses. And then for the first time since setting up the account, I finally jumped on Audioblogger.com and recorded a five-minute audio report on my cellphone with my brother, just about nothing in particular - how their holiday has been going, how the recent NYC transit strike affected them (they live in the Bronx), how things have been going recently at the bleeding-edge tech company in Manhattan where he works, etc.

And that was really great, because actually my brother and I have this whole long history of making goofy audio reports together, stretching way, way back originally to the mid-'70s, when we'd sit in the back seat of our parents' Mercury Marquis, using an old Bell-Howell tape recorder the size of a shoebox to create our own fake radio-station patter, perform little audio plays about secret agents and the like, etc. And then of course in college, since we actually went to the same school at roughly the same time, and had all these mutual friends back then, he would often come down to the campus radio station (KCOU 88.1 fm, Columbia MO) when it was time for my show, and sit in on the air with me and act all stupid and smartass. In fact, one of my best stories about my time at KCOU involves my brother being a co-host...

One of the specialty shows on the air at KCOU back then was an early-'80s one, and it was hosted by this little queer club kid who played nothing but new-wave hits on it. But once I was down at the station right when the kid was calling in sick, and he basically begged me to sub his shift for him that week. And see, since KCOU used to be an album-oriented FM pioneer when it started (Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, etc), long before it turned into the place for super-duper-hipster indie-rock it currently is, the station happened to have this hugely impressive collection of heavy-metal albums - 300 albums or some ridiculous number like that, which all the DJs knew about and would occasionally dig into for ironic effect. So I decided to do a special all-metal edition of the early-'80s show that week, and the first thing I did was call my brother and get his ass down to the station, because he was a much bigger metalhead than I was in high school and knows a lot more about those bands. (In fact, he's all excited about me getting that ADSTech analog-to-digital converter for Christmas, the thing that will let you rip your own vinyl albums into MP3 tracks, because he's finally going to get to rip his old underground Japanese import metal albums from back then, all those Loudness bootlegs and the like. Dork!)

So anyway, we had this grand ol' time on the air that week, playing Y&T and Aldo Nova and Yngwie J. Malmsteen and every other obscure '80s metal one-hit-wonder we could possibly think of. And the poor sick host, of course, kept calling us every twenty minutes all afternoon, screaming, "This isn't what the show is supposed to be! This isn't what the show is supposed to be!" But screw him, right? Because we were getting such tremendous feedback from the audience - 200 requests over two hours, when the average back then was 10 to 20 - and it was of course all anyone was talking about around the city for the two weeks following.

I've always thought that my brother and I do well together on the air as a team, since we share the same personality and can often anticipate what the other is about to say. In fact, I'd love to rig up a way to do a regular two-person podcast between him and me, like maybe once or twice a week via cellphone as he walks from his office to his train station in the early evening. All it'd take, really, is a way to record my cellphone conversations to my computer, and I have to imagine there's some little device out there I could get for such a thing. That'd be fun, I think, because it'd be real funny and smartass each episode and I think people would enjoy listening.

Oh, and let's see, what else did I want to discuss while I was here? Well, it's been interesting having such unfettered access to a full computer and WiFi this week; my parents actually have a desktop at home as well, and end up using that most of the time whenever I visit, so that I tend to have the laptop to myself almost 24 hours a day. And I came across something really cool this week, in fact, that I had never even heard about before, and which of course I can't access on my mobile device, so wanted to mention it to all of you too, in case you haven't seen it either. Basically, the tech news site CNET is offering this really intriguing bleeding-edge way to interact with their site right now, that just runs along the side of all the normal web pages; they've categorized each and every page there by title, topic and companies mentioned, and are now offering an extremely cool animated graphical interface on top of the usual hyperlinked text interface.

Just check out the screen capture above to get a general idea of what I'm talking about, although that image has been shrunk to the point where it's a little difficult to read; what we're looking at here, for example, is a recent article on the RFID protocol, and how it might be getting embedded into this possible "National ID card" that the right-wingers are howling so loudly about these days. And so when I checked out the graphical interface for that article, you can see what happened - all the related articles appear in black in a web around that first article, instead of as a hierarchal text list at the bottom of the page, and then all the concepts being talked about in that article appear in green in the same manner. But since it's all Flash-based, the coolest little things happen when you switch to another article; the matrix updates itself, puts that new article in the middle of the screen, eliminates some of the old related titles and topics and adds new ones. And so that way you can crawl along from one article to the next, and see like in a game of Telephone how they're all tenuously connected; and of course it's much easier to follow one particular topic that you might be the most interested in, and to quickly get to the place in the site where you can find a lot more articles on that topic, than it would be through a hierarchal text-based list of hyperlinks. Anyway, it's a really intriguing experiment, and one that I think is a great, great success, so just wanted to point it out to you as well.

Oh, and I think I'll poop out some short notes as well, as long as I'm here...

--College students, you're probably familiar with RateMyProfessor.com, right? For old fogies like me who aren't, it's basically a student-empowerment site; it's where people can go and say exactly what they thought of certain professors on their campus, and why exactly you should or should not take a class from them. And sure, these have been around forever, but I guess this one for some reason has gotten really popular, and has just millions upon millions of students who use it. So I thought it'd be a kick, for example, to look up my dad, who's a professor at one of the community colleges here in the St. Louis area; and sure enough, there were something like 25 student reviews for him there, and I was happy to see that his overall rating is a 4.9 out of 5, and that four of the commenters had even listed him as "hot."

So I thought that I was going to spring all this surprise information on my dad when telling him about it; but it turns out, in fact, that everyone at his school knows about RateMyProfessor.com already, and that many of the professors in fact check their own ratings there on an almost obsessive basis, laugh about what the students are saying about the co-workers they hate, etc. Funny! And in fact, my dad was telling me, one of the professors was getting such low scores there, and having such bad things said about him, that he actually wrote to the administrators of the site and tried to bully them into removing his listing. Which of course plays right into the hands of the administrators, because it proves their entire selling point, that their website makes professors feel legitimately threatened; in fact, if I was an administrator of RateMyProfessor.com, I would publicly reprint such bullying letters each time they arrived, just to prove to the members that their comments actually are getting noticed by the people in question. So there you go, just in case any of you students have ever wondered if that site makes a difference; proof positive that it does.

--So, I finally clicked on a Google contextual ad! I've been wondering, in fact, how long it was going to take me to finally notice one of them in one of my emails or searches, have it actually capture my consciousness, and be intriguing enough for me to want to click over and check out; I mean, I keep hearing all the time how Google is making billions and billions of dollars from such unobtrusive ads, but I have to admit that in all these years I had not clicked on even one of them myself. But then I was discussing travel writing with a friend the other day via email, and one of the Gmail ads on the side of the page was for a site called TravelWriters.com, which promised a place for travel writers to swap tips, help network, get in contact with professional editors and the like. And sure enough, I finally was intrigued enough to click over; and I haven't looked at the site in detail yet, of course, but on quick examination it definitely looked interesting enough to visit again. So there you go! Another nickel or whatever owed to Google by the administrators of TravelWriters.com!

Okay, so I think I'll go ahead and wrap things up for today. Don't forget, I'm in transit tomorrow from St. Louis to Chicago; and then if I have the energy when I get back, new entry about this analog-to-digital conversion stuff I've been doing here in St. Louis - nostalgic thoughts about digging through all my old '80s punk vinyl albums, full technical details on the conversion process itself. And then back to the usual, I guess - posts from coffeehouses, my continual search for a day job, and girls who want nothing to do with me. Oh, and I shaved off the beard, by the way - what do you think? Do I look ten years younger, like my mom said?

Oh, and a final thought from here at the coffeehouse where I'm writing today's entry; I can't seem to ever listen to the Smiths in public without starting to sing out loud, damnit. "Shyness is nice, and shyness will stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to. So if there's something you'd like to try, something you'd like to try, ask me - I won't say no. How could I?" Seriously, how can you not sing along to lyrics like these? I've been told, by the way, that the Smiths have become retro-popular again among all the cool kids, which of course leads me to this obvious question - how could they not? Talk about a band destined to eternally appeal to sullen artistic 17-year-olds from now until the end of time, man.