Monthly Archive for March, 2008

maintenance

Published on March 31, 2008 in Family & Friends, Web and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I tried out a different Mazda dealership when I needed to replace my headlight, a couple weeks ago, and I liked them, so I’m at their place, now, using their free wireless connection while my car gets a full inspection/fluid change and gets the seat belt retractors replaced. I mentioned the dimming lights when operating windows and the wind noise from the door/post right behind my head, but I doubt much can really be done about either. I’m still considering buffing the paint off from where the ground wire meets the body. One of the fitness instructors at the Y is trying out a Mazda5 for a couple days and I told her about how much I like my car. I guess she’s having troubles convincing her husband that the 5 is the car for them. I did my part, to help, I feel.

I’m back on a normal schedule, this week, at work. Last week was daytrip week. We did three in a row, and had good weather for the first, but rainy/snowy freezing temps on the second and a cold start on the last one. It tired me out pretty good.  We’re moving on to bigger and better problem solving initiatives. The boss is throwing some weird rules at us, that I really feel are hindering the natural progression of the groups… but apparently, we’re all about skills this season, not teams. Yet, we’re still experiential… so wouldn’t building a good team and forming naturally and working together in the best team possible be the best way to experience the skills needed in a community or team? Whatever. The daytrips were a great environment, but I’m glad that I’m back to the schedule that I’ve sort of grown accustomed to. I do have to start getting the stats from the initial surveys entered this week, but it shouldn’t take too much extra time.

I also made some eMail changes this week. I was playing around with Google Apps, and it really made me realize the superiority of GMail. I now have GMail retrieving (and then deleting from the server, thus solidifying my committment) all my POP accounts AND I’ve got the old HoTMaiL (I like to pretend that Microsoft didn’t take it over and ruin it, and therefore still spell it with the, admittedly obnoxious, capitalization that it originally debuted with) account forwarding there. Right now, I have them filtering into separate labels for each account, but I’m sure I’ll make up a set of labels and filters like the folders I have in Thunderbird now. I also enabled IMAP for the whole GMail account, so I can still use Thunderbird and see all my old mail and my new mail in one program, though in separate inboxes. I’m happy with it so far. Next web project: upgrade this blog to Wordpress 2.5.

Now that Michigan is behind us, we’re rapidly approaching our Seattle trip. Sarah and her mom are all about having a good plan, so they’ve started asking around and researching attractions “not to miss” in the Seattle, Victoria & Vancouver areas. My first thought, when Seattle is mentioned, is Kurt Cobain. While I appreciated him as a songwriter and musician, I’m not enough of a fanatic to go seeking out any of his old hangouts or the house he died in or anything creepy/weird like that. We’ve got a week there, so I guess one of my goals is to find some great places to eat. I’ll definitely be using Yelp to see what the locals think.

I’d come upon reviews on Yelp while searching, but never realized what a big and active site it was, until Friendfeed tempted me to sign up for my own account. If you’ve got an account on Digg, Google Reader, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp or a blog with an RSS feed, you should sign up for friendfeed. Then we can be friends and I can get updates about your stuff without having to make up an “imaginary friend” feed for you… and you can see updates from all your friends’ stuff on one page. I think it’s a brilliant use of RSS technology.

just want to play

Published on March 24, 2008 in Music and Web. Closed Tags: , .

I’ve been trying to find a band to play in. I’ve cruised the craigslist ads, I’ve posted my own ads, I’ve even looked at alternative places to post, though none seem to have the traffic that craigslist does. The cynicism I developed in the Wormtown scene about bands that suck rules out about 80% of the groups I hear. It’s possible I’m being too picky. The others don’t get back to me… maybe I’m too old or maybe it’s that I live in the suburbs? I dunno, but it’s pretty darn frustrating, I’m almost ready to give up.

I went and played for one group. It was after my early day of work and I was pretty exhausted… so I might have not really been awake enough to be in an audition position, but I didn’t think it went too badly… especially being the first time I’d played with other people in over a year. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard back from them and noticed that they’ve reposted their ad a few times. I’ve reposted my ad as well, with a few tweaks. I made the terrible mistake of not mentioning that I wanted to play original music (and not covers) in my first post. Not-so-ordinary groups respond to my ads, as well… soul, jazz, “weird” (humor) … and sometimes I respond to those kind of ads, just to see if there’s a way I could fit into something different. Nothing has come of it, so far. A lot of talk about possibly getting together, but no actual results yet. All the groups that I would be really excited to be a part of, don’t get back to me. I also can’t decide what kind of genre I should be going for. I feel like a rock group would be a lot of fun, but sometimes I’d like to do a folk type thing again… then, y’know, when Mark’s group comes out here again, we could play the same show or something… that’d be cool.

I really just want to play again. Anybody know anyone in the Chicago area? I haven’t tried too hard with the musical people I already know in this area… but I’m feeling a little desperate, so I’ll probably revisit those ideas and actually go after those kind of connections with some sort of zeal and/or determination.

long line for hams today

Published on March 22, 2008 in moBlog. Closed Tags: .

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MI Photos

Published on March 19, 2008 in Photo. Closed Tags: , .

Only a few photos. They’re all at flickr. I also put a few photos from the Monster Truck show we went to on the weekend.

Left Only box:
left

Weird sad u-turn sign:
u-turn

Disappointing book store:
booksearch

I wasn’t kidding, the clouds didn’t break on the whole trip… except maybe a little on the highway on our way home, today.

Michigan’s weird

Published on March 18, 2008 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , .

We got up early, today, and had the breakfast part of our bed & breakfast. It was delicious… and very filling. We weren’t hungry for hours and hours, which was good, because we took a ride out to Kalamazoo and barely got out of the car for the next three or four [or maybe more] hours. The indoor flea market had about twenty vendors, if that, and there wasn’t much, beyond one charming little book, worth our drive out there. Then we got lost driving around downtown Kalamazoo. There doesn’t seem to be much to the town, nothing that made us want to get out of the car. Then we started heading out of town, and saw a nice “Rare” book store. Unfortunately, it had a sign in the window that said, “back by 2.30 or earlier.” I think that was sometime around noon.

So we continued back, trying to come up with a plan… going over the things we may or may not have seen on the michigan tourism websites… when we saw a billboard for a guitar factory. I had never heard of Wechter, but thought it might be cool, so we took the exit. It was fairly impossible to find, we went back and forth in every direction from that exit a couple times, while we struggled to find address information on my phone’s mini internet browser. We did finally end up finding it, and it turned out to be a room with about 15 guitars in it. On the way there, we started heading back on the Red Arrow Highway, instead of the interstate, since we had read somewhere that there were a lot of antique dealers on that road spanning several towns. We stopped at a few, but most of the ones we passed were closed… and the Red Arrow Highway somehow disappeared when we got too close to a small airport. When we tried to follow the signs to stay on it, we ended up going around in a circle. We had to break out the GPS to find our way back. It turned out that the Red Arrow Highway didn’t really exist for about 10-20 miles.

We finally felt hungry again, and decided on pizza at the Stray Dog. The logo seems like a take off on the black dog tavern, of Martha’s Vineyard and yuppie-status-symbol fame, and it is a vacation/beach town, and there is a co-founder/chef from the east coast… but the place had it’s own cool vibe and excellent food. We probably didn’t really have the stomach space for it, but we also went to a pig-themed ice cream shop, down the street.

There are some weird signs out here. Making an illegal U-Turn warrants a bright yellow sad face, and there are big boxes hanging along with the streetlights that say Left Only. Often, it seems like they’re there instead of just painting left only on the lane. Sometimes it seems likes not enough, and sometimes it seems redundant. A left turning lane isn’t that difficult a concept is it? There was one intersection with a box above each of three streetlights, one said left, one said right and the middle one said “thru” … I didn’t notice if it was also painted in the lanes on the road, but the green arrows certainly said exactly the same thing.

Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow. Haven’t quite figured out what time we have to leave to get home in time for Sarah to change for work and get there on time, but we have the time zone change working for us this time. I think we have one other store that we definitely want to hit before leaving the area. I took some pictures of some of the things I mentioned, but I don’t have the card reader in the room, so you’ll just have to be patient. I’ll probably take some more pictures tomorrow and then upload them all when we get home. Still doesn’t look like we’ll get any sun, though. I would’ve had a lot more pictures, if we did.

First day in Michigan

Published on March 17, 2008 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I’ve never been to Michigan, before. I drove very close to it on my treks between Woonsocket and Chicago, but never crossed the line. Today, I did. I believe our bed & breakfast is in about the second or third town over that line. Cute little towns with shops and restaurants and beaches. Not much in the way of urban civilization. We drove about 30 miles north-ish and found a movie theater in a town with a bunch of retail stuff. We saw Horton Hears a Who. It was cute and fairly well done. It gets the thumbs up. Our bed & breakfast also gets the thumbs up; nice sized room, friendly person at the desk when we got here… all the local restaurant menus in the “library” … wi-fi. Our first stop here was a brief one, we just brought our stuff up and took a look around and decided where we should have dinner. Red Arrow Roadhouse won, mostly due to having delicious sounding desserts and toasted ravioli as an appetizer. I had a full slab of ribs and it was yum. They had two different kinds of mudd pie, we each got one. The place was pretty full, especially for a Monday night, and it was getting even more busy as we were leaving. After food, we went to a casino in the New Buffalo (the first or second town over the Michigan border). I put in somewhere between twenty and twenty-five dollars, and cashed out at $85.75. Did a little video roulette, but won most of it on a video slot machine.

Hopefully, I’ll get some pictures of stuff tomorrow. The lake on the horizon seems unnaturally high to me. I told Sarah that it looked like a “lake mountain” and she laughed at me. We’ve got the Kalamazoo indoor flea market and other such antiquing/shopping on the schedule for tomorrow.

Michigan and Seattle

Published on March 14, 2008 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , .

Next week’s mini vacation destination has been decided; We’re going to Michigan. We’ve got a bed & breakfast booked on the other side of Lake Michigan and at least one Flea Market on our destination list. I’ve been browsing a Michigan tourism site and reading pleasant sounding descriptions of the areas we’ll definitely be hitting. Sarah’s mom suggested visiting the Kellogg’s plant, but it turns out that they stopped giving tours of the factory back in the 90s sometime and opened a “Cereal City USA” attraction, which included a fake cereal plant tour. Unfortunately, the “not a real cereal plant” wasn’t popular enough and now it’s just plain closed. Bummer.

In May, we’re planning a family-style vacation, and we’re leaning towards Seattle. Just in case we take a little trip up to Canada, I’ve put in an order for a new birth certificate from the city of Buffalo. Last time I tried, it seemed impossible to do unless you went in person… now they have some sketchy online system that failed at verifying my identity once, but worked the second time. Maybe, if it actually comes, I should attempt to get a passport. That’d make things easier and give me some incentive to think bigger for future vacations.

change of time, change of scenery?

Published on March 9, 2008 in Family & Friends, Music, Random Thoughts and Work. Closed Tags: , , , .

Next week, not this week, is Spring break for Chicago public schools. Sarah has just given notice at her job (seems like a sinking ship, doing what it can to cut costs by cutting hours). We think we should take another road-trip/vacation… last year was our trek across Missouri. Where should we go this time? Sarah wants to go somewhere “green,” so I guess maybe we need to head somewhat South-ish? At some point, we want to go see Mom, with Sarah’s mom, but that’ll wait until we all make some time at the same time and Mom has her guest room ready… and New England is probably no more green than it is here.

I walked around the Y and changed all the clocks, again, today. Last time the time changed, I was late for work when my clock changed on the wrong weekend. It was too smart for its own good. My new clock has a daylight savings time mode, so I got there with no problem… and I think we only had one guy show up late because he hadn’t changed his clocks.

And yes, the amp and equipment and stuff all still seems to be working great, I’ve got a couple opportunities to go play with some people in the city this week… to try some stuff out, see if there’s a good fit. I plugged my bass into my computer and played along with some tracks yesterday. It was fun. Looking forward to playing with people… hoping something comes together.

guess what all still works

Published on March 6, 2008 in Music and moBlog. Closed Tags: , .

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