Whoa. The season finale of Star Trek Enterprise was awesome!
There was some talk the series was over after this season, but UPN recently announced they were giving it a fourth season. I love the show- more than I ever liked Voyager.
What?
Oh come on!
You knew I was a geek.
Oh, here’s the original of that Gorey photo.
Dave suggested we try to come up with a few possible captions for this thing. Please feel free to include some of your own in the comments.
Okay, here are some that we thought of.
“Esteemed colleagues, please hold your applause until I'm finished passing this kidney stone.”
“Who said you could leave?!”
“And now I will proceed to demonstrate that I can, in fact, deepthroat this microphone.”
“I’m sick and tired of Bill getting to have all the fun! Things have got to change!”
I’m anxious to see what other people come up with.
This weekend while Thom and I were in Wyoming, I made a comment to him about listening to him talk incessantly about a particular girl when we were teens and he shot right back at me about how it was worse for him because he had to listen to me talk about “Wendy”.
Wendy was a girl I was completely twitterpated about during eighth and ninth grade. She was in my same grade and was also in the “Gifted and Talented” program at our school with me and Thom (he was just “Tom” then, but that’s not important right now).
Last night, before I went to sleep, I was watching AMC’s presentation of Sixteen Candles—the 80s John Hughes film starring Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and others.
So, I’m watching this show and Anthony Michael Hall’s character (The Geek) tries to “bag” Samantha (Ringwald) and fails spectacularly. He does all the wrong things, but it’s obvious he’s trying to do things he’s been told will “work” and is a bit confused why he’s not getting laid. And then there’s Samantha obsessively rehearsing what she’s going to say to Jake—the senior she has a crush on—and then she can’t say anything to him when they run into each other.
Let’s just say the film touched some nerves.
Anyway, Thom mentioning Wendy probably caused some information vestibule in my brain to explode and begin leaking Wendy everywhere. This, paired with a fresh viewing of a film featuring uncomfortably familiar scenes of adolescent relationships, and then followed by deep sleep... Well, it caused some very strange and vivid dreams all night long.
Of course, I occasionally wonder what Wendy is up to today. I never go much further than wondering because of how embarrassed I still am about my behavior in the mid 1980s.
I was also discussing with Thom over the weekend how uncomfortable I am with even the thought of running into people I grew up with. I guess I am ashamed of who I was then— my behavior—my utter lack of rational, coherent relationship skills, my low self-esteem, etc.
I recently discovered there is a woman living in my neighborhood with whom I went to high school. We weren’t “close“ (but then again, I wasn’t close to any girls then), but I remembered who she was and she spoke with my wife about what she remembered about me. She said she remembered I was friends with Thom and that I was on stage crew and did the lighting for the plays and musicals.
Fast forward fourteen years. Somewhere along the way, I learned to talk to females and now I’m married to a woman and we have three children. I work out of my home doing computer programming and consulting. Okay? So, I’m not the stupid-ass dork I was then!
Ahh, but Thom and I are still pursuing our age-old dreams of the rock band. More and more I’m doing lights, video, and visualizations for the concerts. It’s almost like... nothing’s changed.
I know that’s not true. I’m not remotely the same as I was 16 years ago (and neither is Thom, for that matter!), but it would be easy for someone to look at that facet of my life and say, “Oh gawl, this guy is the same now as he was then.”
Maybe I should just chill and get some more work done.
People have been bugging me off and on for the last few months about adding an RSS feed to the Fozzolog. Well, I did it. I’m not really sure what value this adds to people’s lives, but it’s there.
As always, your input and feedback is always appreciated.
I slept 10+ hours last night. That was after I slept 30-45 minutes on the couch while the kids were watching The Nightmare Before Christmas. I was wiped out from this weekend.
Our favorite rock originals and Pink Floyd tribute band--Sons Of Nothing--played M.C.'s Club in Green River, Wyoming.
While it wasn't the longest drive to a SON gig, it was the bands first official "out of state" gig so it was somewhat monumental.
Thom and I drove up in my Subaru. The original plan was to put all the gear and all the humans in two truck/SUV vehicles, but being that Green River is just over two hours away, I elected to drive my own car and pay for my own gas. I probably won't do that again if the destination is further away, but it was nice to crank up my own tunes and yak Thom's head off.
We arrived in Green River around 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon. We found the club and proceeded to unload gear. Cory (the "C" of M.C.'s) was there to direct us and help us get set up.
We were able to do a sound check around 6 p.m. and then went across the street to the local Pizza Hut and had dinner.
We were planning on starting the show around 9 or 9:30. Cory had us push the show back closer to 10 because a lot of people who had purchased tickets hadn't shown up. Plus, the club was open until 2 a.m. (an hour later than Utah clubs), so it was okay if we started later.
The original set went pretty well, but the sound mix was a bit muddy. Cory fixed that during the break between the original set and the Floyd set.
Thom had promised he wouldn't tinker with the setlist at all for this gig, but he ended up with a short FloydShow set for the time we had to fill, so he broke his promise and added a few songs here and there. I was really happy when he threw in the medley of "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" and "Astronomy Domine".
This show marked my first running video and sound effects on my new HP laptop. Prior to this, I was using two desktop systems and a KVM switch to move between them. At the last gig, however, I was having a lot of problems playing video.
There were very few problems at this show. Everything on my end went pretty well.
I was also running lights. The club had two trees with four PAR30 cans on each tree connected to a four-channel dimmer pack. They connected these to a simple foot-switch controller that I ran. The Sons Of Nothing show isn't lighting intensive, so lighting was a low-maintenance task.
After the gig, we packed the gear and then Thom and I drove to Rock Springs (about 10-15 miles to the east) and got something to eat at Village Inn. We finally got to sleep at the motel around 4 a.m.
Everyone was back on the road bound for home around 11:30 Sunday morning. After dropping off Tim and Thom, I made it home around 3 p.m.
We saw fuel prices in Wyoming like $1.87, $1.85, and even $1.73 per gallon! The lowest I've seen in and around Salt Lake is $1.89 per gallon.
Okay, here are some pictures from the show.
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Looking down Flaming Gorge Blvd in Green River. |
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Our Marquee Maybe next time we'll be listed by name. :-) |
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Atmosphere The band playing during "Atmosphere." |
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Wish You Were Here Tim and Thom playing the Floyd favorite. |
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During rehearsal |
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Tim |
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Tim & Matt Tim and Matt working on the guitar parts for "Another Brick In The Wall Part 1" in the men's room. It was a little quieter there. |
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Shriner Thumb |
It’s been a couple months since I did any work on building out my office-to-be in our basement. Tonight, however, I made a lot of progress.
My brother Tom came out and helped me (I helped him) finish off most of the boxing of the ductwork. We also lowered the ceiling on the north side of the room by using some 2x4 lumber laid flat because there are some copper pipes running underneath the floor joists on that side. On the other side, I have some ABS sewer lines running under the floor joists so we’ll be lowering the ceiling there using 2x6 lumber.
I also got the insulation in place on the exterior walls (there are two in my office. I’m in the corner).
Once we get that south ceiling lowered and the electrical boxes in for the lights, I’ll be ready to start putting up gypboard (sheetrock) on the ceiling and walls.
What a week!
I don’t have a lot of time to enter much, but I wanted to mention that this week has been... harrowing.
On Thursday, I went to upgrade a client’s Windows XP box with some faster hardware. After installing the hardware, the box would just reboot over and over and over. I’ve tried to avoid XP so this was news to me. I did a little research and quickly found out you have to run the recovery utilities on the XP CD to fix this. All I could find in my client’s cabinet was an XP Home CD, so I tried it. That didn’t help me. One person I called suggested just reinstalling over the top. I tried that, but had to leave for another appointment. While I was at that appointment, the client called me and said he found his XP Professional CDs. After my appointment, I went back and installed XP Professional over the top of XP Home. The resulting system was unstable, slow, and not usable.
So, I backed up the data and reformatted - which is what I should have done in the first place. After five hours or so, my client had a system he could use again and I had more conviction that Microsoft is a front for Satan.
Friday afternoon, a client with a Linux server we support called and explained that he had accidentally disconnected the power from the server while trying to figure out why the display monitor would not power up. After reconnecting the power, the server would not boot.
I sent Adam over to check it out and none of his preliminary attempts to fix it worked. The hard drives were connected to a serial ATA controller and it seemed like that controller wasn’t letting the BIOS know it contained devices that could boot.
Adam took the machine home and confirmed that the data was still safe on the drives. He did this using the Fedora CD rescue mode. He brought the machine to me on Saturday and I researched the problem, purchased a new SATA controller, and then determined if the BIOS could see the SATA controller before the SCSI controller (for the tape drive), it would boot from the SATA controller. Sure enough, that fixed the problem.
We’re not sure why it was booting before, but it should boot from now on since the BIOS will see the SATA controller first in the PCI scan.
Saturday was XMission’s big install fest. It was fun. Not as many people came as we had hoped, but we had a good crowd and we met some great people.
Saturday night was a Sons Of Nothing show in Nephi. I was pretty late getting there, which stressed Thom out. And then my computer responsible for playing video files was wigging out. I couldn’t get the videos to play to the S-Video port. Eventually, I figured out I couldn’t play any Matrox MJPEG AVI files, but I could play some MPEGs. I was able to display some video for the show, but some songs traditionally presented with great video were videoless.
I think I made for up for it by taking over the light board and putting on a kick-ass light show. :-)
So, here it is Sunday. I’m feeling wiped out and like I’m coming down with a sinus infection of some kind. I’m sure glad this last week is over with, though.
Had a good Mother’s Day. I hope my wife and mom did too.
My brother, dad, and I handled dinner at my parents’ house Sunday afternoon. We did a cookout and had burgers and hot dogs my dad cooked on the grill. We also had some salad, baked beans, chips and salsa, and a yummy cake my sister brought.
My brother didn’t have his kids — they were with their mom. My sister only brought her youngest — Annabelle. Her two other (unmarried) kids didn’t come. Very disrespectful in my book- but what do you expect? They’re living with the king of disrespect... their dad.
After visiting for a while, we headed up to Christine’s parents’ in Roy where we visited with them for close to an hour before heading back home.
We got home around 11.
Christine was wiped out from the long day and because she had been up three hours the night before with Eli but that didn’t stop her from watching the Survivor finale she’d recorded until 2 a.m.
Last year, I said I wanted a new stereo for the Subaru for my birthday. I was all set to get it and then I got laid off from my job at About.com. Well, this year I got it!
I had the Panasonic CQ-C5410U installed by Ultimate Electronics on Saturday.
The biggest reason I wanted a new stereo was because the factory unit in the Subaru had the world’s crappiest radio, especially on AM (where the talk radio excitement happens.)
Some of the features that sold me on this particular unit:
Here’s a picture:
Hmmm. Mother’s Day is coming up. I’ve got to keep reminding myself of that fact as frequently as possible.
“This week has been nuts,” has started to become a mantra in my life. It’s like the norm rather than the exception.
One of our long-time clients had to move into new office space on fairly short notice earlier this week. I found out about the move on Saturday and scheduled Tuesday to go to the new location to set up the network. Mike and I showed up on Tuesday and concluded after surveying the place that it was going to be very difficult to run network cable to every office in the space. This was because instead of suspended ceiling tiles you can move up and out of the way, this office has a concrete aggregate set on wire mesh on which 12-inch accoustical tiles are glued.
There were a few access panels that allowed us access up into the space between the suspended ceiling and the next floor up, but it was small and there’s a lot of pipes and ductwork to get in the way.
In the end, we set up an 802.11g wireless access point to serve the three offices furthest away from the servers and ran cables to three jacks in the rooms adjacent to the room where the servers were going.
Those three jacks were still a major pain. Mike got the unlucky job of climbing up in the ceiling to do those while I set up the wireless network and got the servers and workstations up and running so our client could get back to semi-normal operations by Wednesday.
Another client’s wireless connection went down this last weekend. We’ve had poor luck dealing with the particular wireless ISP we used for this client and we’re ready to just say forget it.
Another client is getting DSL this week and will not be needing a wireless connection any longer so we want to move that equipment to the site being served by the very unreliable provider and switch to the more-reliable provider.
I don’t know why it is, though. It’s difficult to find good wireless ISPs in Utah. They all suck, to some extent. If only a company like XMission would enter the wireless space!
We had a NetGateway installation scheduled for this week, but we weren’t exactly sure when the client’s existing DSL connection would be switched over to use our preferred ISP. Well, this morning, our client called us frantic and hysterical because he desperately needed Internet connectivity and didn’t have it — presumably because the DSL switch took place.
I scrambled over there and got everything switched over and did my best to smooth things over.
So... tomorrow I’m setting up the DSL connection for the client that is switching from wireless to DSL.
I’ve been slowly working on putting a sprinking system in our front yard. If I had continuous access to a trencher, I would use it, but since I don’t, I’m using a pick mattock and a trenching shovel to dig the trenches I need to lay the pipes down.
I’ve been spending about 30-45 minutes a night working on this. I’ve got the main water line in place from the valve box near the sidewalk up to where I’ll put the valve boxes near the house. I’ve also got most of the trench for one of the three main sprinkler lines.
I think this process will work out pretty well because I’m not spending a ton of money all at once doing it this way. Plus, I’m giving myself a little exercise working in the yard every night.
Blogblock.
I can't really think of anything to put in the blog except that it's been too long since I wrote anything.
Let's see... Uhm... I got a new laptop. Uhm... Chadd came down tonight and we went to see the latest Coen Brothers film, The Ladykillers. Good show, but not the Coens at the top of their game.
Christine and the kids went to Wheeler Farm today.
That's all.
