Droid is now running a 2.2 build. It’s fast and I put Flash on there. Best part is being able to watch videos inline in Google Reader. All my music is showing up twice, but hopefully I’ll find a fix for that. I’m not really using the droid for music playing until they implement gapless playback or a soundcheck-like volume normalizing feature and/or the ability to shuffle by album.

WordPress is now at 3.0. Haven’t noticed any differences (unless crossposting doesn’t work when I publish this), except a couple memory errors in my dashboard… I didn’t really need to read the wordpress development news.

And now, to take advantage of the rest of my day off… I think we’ll be playing Lego Harry Potter.

In other news, we’ll be back on the east coast, doing the family thing and trying to catch up with all the people who I’ve neglected to see on my last couple trips that way from the day after Christmas until about the 30th. Let me know if you have time in there and want to reserve a day or evening, now.

I’m also back to trains and other public transportation for the summer and have been listening to a lot of music (and Half-Blood Prince, lately, in preparation for the movie). I like how the commute in the summertime gives me a chance to reconnect with my music collection. I’d still love to replace my phone (which still turns itself off quite a bit) and my iPod and the GPS with one device… but I don’t know if I should wait for the Garmin phones to come out or just cave in and get an iPhone. So I’m still nursing my phone along and carrying both.

The wedding and trip out to Maine  was fun. I haven’t really had a chance to go through those pictures and pick out the best ones yet, but again, I’ll post a link, when I do. I don’t think I have another day off until camp is over… though, I may take a Saturday, next week or the week after. I’m LOVING my Macbook pro. I haven’t completely set myself up on it and decided what programs I’m going to use for photo work and web work to replace my windows favorites (Paint Shop Pro and Homesite 5.5). It’s an awesome piece of hardware, and I’ve already used it to do some stats work for adventure ed. and it was almost a pleasant experience. I’ve definitely gotten used to the trackpad and the multi-touch-ness.

I’m also eating a little healthier. When I’m picking out meals, I constantly think of the Dead Milkmen song “nutrition,” which is fun to hum, but it’s kind of a silly song. I’ll get more into the reasons for this sudden health-consciousness when I’ve completely wrapped my head around it.

Macbooks down in price! Great timing! Cheap upgrade to Snow Leopard, too! Now, convince me not to switch to AT&T and get an iPhone … or convince me to switch, turn-by-turn GPS was one of the things holding me back from the iPhone and I guess that’s not an issue for much longer. I need a reliable phone ASAP. I’d love to wait for an Android phone on Verizon, but the chances that Verizon will cripple its coolness (app store and free access to all of googleness) is almost guaranteed… or convince me to wait and risk a few weeks of camp with a phone that turns itself off a few times a day. If I go all apple on hardware, will I be tempted by the apple counterparts to the Google stuff I use and love?

Looking forward to a trip out east next week… hope Sarah and I can shake our weird ailments before then.

I don’t have a timeframe for the phone upgrade. I was waiting for the nuvifone, but there isn’t a release date for that yet, and the main reason I was leaning towards it was the GPS-centric nature of it. The word on the street is that the new iPhone OS will enable using the Google maps in other applications and allow turn-by-turn directions. I don’t know if I can go Apple in such a big way… but the iPhone does have great customer satisfaction ratings and such. My phone turned itself off three times, completely at random, on Thursday… it is definitely time for that upgrade, but it also might not happen until the summer.

I don’t know if it’s actually going to be an upgrade, but we’re supposed to switch from Dish to U-Verse next month. Our DSL is currently with AT&T, and it can’t even handle streaming Netflix movies… I don’t think we ordered any more speed, so it probably won’t change, but the girl who set up the install sure did try to convince us that it was a newer, better, more exclusive dsl line. As far as I’ve heard, U-Verse is just TV over DSL. It’s pretty likely that we’re actually trying to squeeze TV and the internet over the same pipe and actually downgrading. We shall see.

This site’s wordpress code is due for an upgrade, but I don’t have any desire to do that. All of my little plugins are working fine. Maybe, if I get a little more into tumblr/twitter/etc. after the phone/macbook upgrade, I’ll feel the need to tweak the code here to keep up with more mobile updates.

My car doesn’t need any upgrades… I guess Doug’s van is dead, though. We peeked at some craigslist ads for similar vehicles in our price range, but haven’t started actively looking at anything yet. I’ve been using the Sirius in my car much more often, lately. I got an eMail from Sirius and I was tempted to buy the latest portable radio while I can still “lock in” the current rates. Who knows if Sirius will survive? I’ve done my part to support them. I resisted the urge by telling myself that the radio I had put in my car works fine and I don’t need another portable music player… I like the idea of combining a couple devices, not adding one to carry around.

My camera also doesn’t need to be upgraded, but I haven’t used it much, lately. When I had time to be taking pictures, I was mostly playing video games. I’ll bring it along on the field trips for work and maybe that’ll respark my desire to shoot. Maybe a new toy would help… Or maybe I should get a Diana+ for myself, since it seems to be getting all the cool attachments and add-ons lately.

Upgrade fever is similar to Spring fever. All of our vacation planning is definitely keeping the typical spring fever symptoms at bay… unless vacation planning is a symptom of spring fever. Mom’s coming up during my spring break, we’ve got a family vacation planned for early June and a wedding back east in late June… and we’ve yet to pick out a show, but we plan to hit APT/Theater in the woods again this summer. I guess there are a few weeks between the team-building season and the camp season that I haven’t thought about, yet. There’s always video games…

First, I should mention that I entered this shot of Penny into a photo contest with the extremely vague theme of “Black & White.” Sarah found the contest, she entered too – You should vote for us.

Sarah is working today. She went from no jobs to one retail job at Jo-Ann fabrics, one photojournalism gig at a local paper and one Promotions gig (web design, print newsletter design, photo slideshows, etc.) for a non-profit in Florida. It’s weird to be home while she’s not; that hasn’t happened in a while.

While she was in Florida, gathering photos for this job and meeting the people she’d be working for, I replaced the G4 with a G5. I grabbed a last-generation G5 (just before the intel switch) on eBay. It’s crazy fast, compared to the G4, and stable, so far. I got everyone’s accounts migrated onto it without too much trouble. The handles got a little bent in shipping, but that’s ok. The G4 has been a trusty computer for many years now, mostly as a backup, occasionally as Mark or Drew & Candace’s main machine in Woonsocket, but I think my constant hardware tweaking was finally too much for it. It was crashing at random. I mostly suspected the not-really-for-a-mac video card, but I didn’t want to go back to the one that was slowing the whole machine down. It’s downstairs and hooked up to that behemoth of a CRT monitor that Zombie is hooked up to. When I have time, I’ll mess with it and see if I can make it stable. Unfortunately, it never crashed on my watch, so I don’t know if I can duplicate the problem.

I’d like to be downstairs, now, playing with the other computers and catching up on my TV shows, but Frank’s friend Karol is sleeping on the couch down there. I’m trying to think of a way to make noise and wake him up but not give away the fact that I’m doing it just to wake him up.

In other news, Thursday, the Mazda is getting an oil change and the master window switch replaced, again. The first time it was because the Auto button wasn’t working. Then the replacement made the right rear window non-operational. It’s been a long process, and a learning experience, since I’m now on my extended warranty and have to pay money for repairs. I also have to pay a whole bunch of money to have my windshield replaced. I woke up, Sunday morning, to find a starburst and cracks branching off in multiple directions right at the top center of the glass. Illinois doesn’t have that nice separate glass policy that Massachusetts did… so I have to pay my full comprehensive deductible. I’d say that maybe I could get some cook pictures of the work in progress, but we’ve lined up sealcoating for the driveway for the same day, and that smell gives me an almost instant headache that lasts for a whole day.

Tomorrow, I think I get rained on during our first day trip of the season.

Even though I was half-relieved to be out of this musical situation, I still want to play, so I was a little upset. If nothing else, I have to go through the effort of finding musicians, again, and that’s a lot more effort than I originally imagined it to be. A little sadness and/or stress brought out all my usual urges. My first urge was the “nasty letter” … to go post on craigslist about not wanting to play with “impatient, pushy kids” and having unencumbered “freedom to use space, variety and melody” in my basslines… but I quickly squashed that idea. It was replaced with my go-to urge in times of stress and light depression: spending money. It started innocently enough, looking into the exhaust fan for the mac. But I was doing it on my zombie PC downstairs, which needed software updates… then I started looking into what kind of hardware was in there and whether I could max it out. It’s not like it was running slow at all and I barely ever even use that machine. I had an amazon cart full of hardware, when I came to my senses and realized I was stress-spending (like stress-eating, but more expensive).  I can spend money today on much more necessary things, like a haircut and an eye exam and new sunglasses…. and maybe new strings.

I guess this means I don’t need to pick up my 18″ cabinet when I go back east. I should probably retrieve it from whoever has it and get it to Mom’s, so I can have it shipped out here, when and if it does become necessary. We still haven’t firmed up any definite days for the week I’m out there, but the requests for hang-out time are coming in quickly, so if you haven’t commented or eMailed me, do it soon. T-Minus 6 or 7 Days … or something like that.

60 inches is big!

updates on recent trips and stuff, soon, I promise!

Getting utterly lost on the way there, due to our complete reliance on the unerring accuracy of printed out Google directions, made me realize that I really do benefit from the GPS. It’s time to get a unit in the car that’s mountable, unlike the cheesy little laptop. I added one with a good traffic system and a big screen to my Amazon wishlist. I’m unimpressed with MSN’s traffic system, on the laptop, but I’ve heard there are a couple new traffic monitoring systems coming out soon. We did chance upon a Cosi, though, so it wasn’t a total waste.

It’s nice to have my car back. I had to pay my deductible, but the Progressive dude seemed pretty sure that once he heard back from State Farm, that I’d get reimbursed pretty quickly. I got a nifty little keychain. It’s one of those classic, flat, rubbery ones. It’s a nice addition to my growing keychain collection. The place also did some serious cleaning of the interior. I was amazed.

I’m strongly considering using public transportation for camp this summer. I don’t need to carry a whole lot of equipment to camp everyday, and I’ve got my iPod and Nintendo DS for train/bus entertainment. I did some searching through transitchicago.com for routes from a couple of the Metra stations. The system is pretty darn cool, goes through Google maps and gives you alternate routes with approximate arrival times. Maybe I’ll try out a route or two next week, during camp training.

Got a couple new power adapters for my laptops, including a auto adapter for the little Dell that’s coming with us to Seattle. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it’ll kill the need for that DC to AC converter that always makes the airport security flip their wigs. I also got the latest version of my GPS software… it’s the new Microsoft version with the “Connected Services” that tell me traffic and gas price information through a little FM receiver. Unfortunately, I haven’t had those services connect for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time and only when I’m as close to downtown as the high schools I work at… as soon I get a few miles out, it loses its connection or something. I’m holding out until we try it in the Seattle area to give it the scathingly bad review that it, so far, deserves. The GPS part, however, works really well, as good or better than previous versions. It still doesn’t speak the street names, but it does automatically reroute when you go off route, instead of just saying “Off Route” over and over again until you tell it what to do.

In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.

Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.

It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.

HP finally put the Leopard drivers on their website for our printer/scanner/fax, so we can now scan directly from the mac, again. We’d been scanning to my laptop and then writing the files to the network shares on the mac. It was a little tedious, but we don’t have to do that anymore. Yay!

The adapter that came the other day turned out to be the opposite of what I needed, but I took a trip down to Micro Center while Sarah was at work. It took a really long time to get there, due to traffic/weather issues, so I didn’t get to wander around the store and bask in it’s full glory, but it was pretty impressive. Very big store, seemed to have a good selection and someone was there to help me within a minute or two of me walking in. They had the right one, so I’m closer to fixing the fish tank computer, though I still don’t know where or when I’ll tackle that.

In other news, I took some of the money in my ING account and invested it in some stocks, prompted by their eMail about acquiring Sharebuilder. I’ll never use the crazy stock strategies that I learned with Dad at those nutty seminars, but I did include some Food industry stocks in my little portfolio, in honor of his idea that “people will always need food.” I’m about 60/40 Technology & Food industry stocks, so I guess I could do another food stock or some other industry, but I invested about half of what was in the ING account, and I was kinda hoping to see the results of that savings account interest versus the stock gains over time. So I’ll probably just leave it how it is.

I prepped my Robert Rodriguez Puerco Pibil tonight and put it in the fridge to marinate. We used a couple slightly different ingredients, but it still smelled strong and spicy. It was really tasty last time. I hope it turn out just as good. Maybe I’ll try to make the recipe on the Sin City DVD… I should really watch that movie again, first, though. I got Planet Terror this Christmas, too, I really need to put aside some quality time in front of the TV downstairs.

I also got a 24-20 pin adapter so that I can use Frank’s old power supply in the fish tank. That’s gonna be a messy project, I’m sure, so I’ll have to save it for a fully free day. I finally got the laptop Sarah’s uncle left here back to working order, I’m not gonna open it up and resolder the power jack, though. I’ve never been good with soldering and taking apart my Dell was a tedious project that I probably would avoid doing again, given the choice.

Still enjoying my break… but would enjoy it more with a little sunshine.

-  I miss playing music. I knew that already, obviously, but I took a ride with Mark to a couple music stores, looking for gifts for Raianne, and I missed even that part of the scene. Hanging around talking to music store employees, seeing how knowledgeable they are, guessing what kinds of shoppers the other people in the store are: parents, multi-instrumentalists, strictly piano, garage band kids, etc. I also almost went to a show at Ralph’s. I was extremely tempted, just to see some local music, even if it was metal(!) … but I didn’t end up going, mostly because I didn’t have my earplugs with me, but the yearning was there.

- While the GPS is useful out here for finding out how long it’s going to take to get places or getting around large obstacles like airports or finding out where the bridges over the rivers are, it’s not necessary, since the grid road structure seems to extend forever. It is, however, completely necessary when driving to new places in New England. Grid doesn’t exist out there, except in small pockets of residential suburbia or inner-city areas that happen to be uninterrupted by a river or a coastline or a humongous hill. Most roads go diagonally at some time or another, very few are straight for more than a mile at a time. If GPS is unavailable, a printed out set of directions from a map service is ok, if you have a decent navigator to read them to you. Getting directions from locals works in a pinch, but be prepared for landmarks that don’t really exist anymore (“bear left where The Fair used to be, then go up past the old closed Texaco and turn left at the building that used to be the high school. When you pass the parking lot that used to be the Ford Dealership you’re almost there, you just have to take what was the third exit of the rotary at that big intersection where they installed a light. Then it’s on your right, after the where the mill used to be…”). Of course, if you live out there, you just know which roads go where. I used to have mental pictures of where each road ended and which important roads it might intersect with along the way. Maybe I can start clearing out all the brainspace for other things, now.

- My little laptop could might be able to get me through a weekend or maybe even a week of regular use. It’s pretty beat up and kinda sad, in that it has no CD-Rom and has to have either wireless network or USB ports, since it’s internal USB port fell out. But it gets me to my mail and the rest of the web. It does just fine with that GPS stuff, when it doesn’t do that 25-minute blank screen before booting thing.

I wish the rest of the computers here had such minor problems. Frank’s is due for another upgrade, to be able to play Call of Duty 4. He thinks it’s the graphics card, it probably is, but that’s gonna require a Power supply upgrade … and since we left it in the crazy Gateway case, it’s gonna be easier and cheaper to do a case transfer. Not a huge problem, but still a big project. The fish tank computer was due to have the Reserator added to it, but after successfully fishing out the molex power lead that tells the reserator when to turn on, the machine won’t boot. It seems like a power issue, and the power supply was just the crappy stock Gateway… possibly not the best candidate for oil submersion. Maybe, after the upgrade, I’ll submerge Frank’s equally crappy power supply, instead. removing that tray from the oil seems like a really messy project that I’m not especially looking forward to. And then Sarah’s uncle Paul left his laptop here on Christmas… it was ridiculously infested with spyware and malware and adware, but it also can’t see its audio card… or, more accurately, it can see it, and install drivers for it, but only the line-in gets installed. For output, it says “no audio device.” It’s annoying. It also has a power jack issue, which, I believe i saw something about needing a re-solder in a quick google search. I’ve never been good at soldering.

There was also a threat of canceling the Adventure Ed overnight for one of the schools because of some new electronic filing system that all trips have to go through and some CPS paperwork and legal department bull… but I guess they finally worked it all out today. We got the go ahead this afternoon. We were on the verge of coming up with some sort of concelation day for all the kids who had signed up. They were still signed out of their classes and stuff, so they were technically ours for the day, but we probably would’ve been restricted to school property. I’m glad that didn’t end up happening. The high ropes experience is really a key element in my mind.

Psyched that I got the mophoblogging going again. I was doing that stuff back in early 2005 (via Livejournal). I’m pretty sure moblogs and that term existed then, but I wonder if I could’ve coined mophoblogging, or snagged a related domain name or something.

Another fun week of camp… there some photos on Flickr and Zooomr (same shots). I enjoy the camp photographer role quite a bit. Next week’s trips include Lamb’s Farm and an Ice Cream Factory. Wee!

Spent July 3rd at the Taste of Chicago and stuck around in the record breaking crowds long enough to catch some fireworks. We all stayed at a hotel in the city that night and went swimming in their 19th story pool, the next morning.