May 2004 Archives

is fire alarms going off in your hotel

False alarm. Gone off a few more times since the time they actually evacuated people at about 5:45 this morning. May have to yell at hotel management as I leave for the show this morning.

The Red Sox beat the piss out of the A's tonight. Tomorrow, I may even be able to watch the game.

I'm still trying to figure out what it is with Phish and me being in San Francisco. It seems that every time I am out here something happens with the band.

A couple of years ago when I was here, Phish announced they were coming off hiatus. Then last year some time, they announced they were doing a tour. All good news. Well, this year it isn't.

According to this announcement, Phish is done. The tour this summer will be their last.

I'm still somewhat dealing with this. I learned about Phish late. A number of my friends had been trying to get me to go see some of the jam bands for a long time. Finally in 1999 or 2000, I went and saw Phil and Friends. I loved it! In 2000, I went with my buddy Don to 4 Phish shows, 2 in MA, 2 i n Vegas. After these 4, I was hooked. Bad timing on my part, as Phish went on hiatus after that tour.

Over the next 2 years, I spent lots of money and download time learning more and more about Phish. I went and saw TAB (Trey Anastasio Band) a few time. I continued to learn more about the band and listen more to the band. I really got in to them.

When they came back from hiatus, I went and saw them again, show 5. Then in December 2003, I got to see them again for their 20th anniversary show, thanks to Lukas. Show 6 and really the first show I knew a lot of the material.

This summer I was planning on going and enjoying a few more Phish shows. I have the possibility of going to 4. Two are definite, 2 are up in the air. I figure this would just continue my streak of seeing Phish on all of their tours and get me up to 10 or so shows. Well, now it seems like this is my last chance, so I better enjoy what I can.

As I said, I'm not so sure what I can say. I think I will enjoy these shows but they will also be very sad to see.

More on this later.....

On Sunday, right after I arrived in San Francisco, I learned that my co-worker who was supposed to come out and support the trade show with me was ill and was not coming out. No big deal as I have done shows on my own before and pretty much have become an expert at it.

Well, the no big deal changed yesterday evening when there seemed to be some confusion to who was going to be doing the talk at the Intel booth. I had been told one of the other people I work with was going to take care of it, she never heard anything about having to do it, etc. Mass confusion.

So, now it turns out, I have to give a presentation on a slide deck that I saw for the first time about an hour ago. Aiee! I can do nice small presentations in front of customers with my eyes closed, but having to get up in front of an audience to do a presentation I have never seen before it a bit more difficult.

Well, here's hoping it all goes well.

The worst part about losing your machine is having to piece is back together. I spent a bunch of time on Friday and this weekend trying to make my operating environment at least somewhat close to what I had before the crash. Now, I pretty much have all the application I use installed and running somewhat well. There are still a number of glitches and inconsistencies, but it's getting there.

My next step on this piece is to get Fedora Core 2 installed. At least that is Linux 2.6 and Gnome 2.6. Linux 2.6 is somewhat necessary on this machine, as I would like to be using ALSA and ACPI. Gnome 2.6 is just a nice piece, but I was getting used to it. Also, I need to get evolution 1.5 back up and running and get my snapshots back. Lastly, straw is still a version behind and lacking some features I used somewhat extensively.

The other HUGE problem now is the missing data. My aggregator has maybe a quarter of the feeds it used to have. Been slowing looking at my blogroll and adding pieces back. Figuring out what to eliminate and what to keep. Also, figuring out what I have added since I last updated my blogroll is rather difficult.

The other ugly half is that all my contact information is missing. I am WAY too used to typing 3 characters and having an e-mail address come up. Also, lost lots of birthdays, home addresses, etc. Slowly I will get this all back together, but it will take a while. I figure a mass e-mail will go out if I find some free time this week and get that all worked out.

There is also lots of little stuff. Getting my TODO list back up to speed is taking some time. Trying to remember the little things i had on there is not the easiest thing in the world. Slowly getting that back, as I remember things.

The loss of my MP3 collection is hurting somewhat these days too. I had lots of rare and live stuff on there more than just albums of artists I had.

Next time I get some money, I really am going to have to invest it in getting all the little pentiums I have sitting around the house back up and running with lots of disc space, so I can set up some automated backups and stuff. I have had lots of plans over time to do this, I guess now I have proven why it needed to be done.

I think the best way to do some of this is do de-centralize. I really want to set up a LDAP server, some sort of bookmarks server, a music server, a file server, etc. Make it so everything is out on servers which data can be pulled from and pushed back to rather than having everything in one place. I think the de-centralized idea is a much better one anyways. Plus, I can than access my data from anywhere, instead of just when I am sitting on my machine.

Slowly, this will all come back together, but its going to take a while. I know I am still slowly realizing some of the stuff I lost.

Good morning. Sitting around in my room at the Hotel Palomar chilling out. Listening to some Phish and just playing catch up.

I totally dig this hotel. It's very rock star with lots of fun ammenities. The in-room stereo is a nice thing to have, instead of having to blast tunes through my computer. The TV programming is rather amusing too. There is a Yoga channel that just does yoga lessons all day long. Also, there is a serenity channel which plays nice music with pretty scenes in the background. Very San Francisco.

The free Internet access in the room is great too. The hotel seems to have a very nice pipe to the Net too. I'm downloading Fedora Core 2 CDs at a very nice pace. Trying to get this machine up to a more updated state, since I am trying to fly without the net of my normal machine due to last week's unpleasantness.

I notice between yesterday and this morning that trying to watch TV without TiVo is rather difficult when you are so used to skipping commercials and watching a concentrate of stuff you like.

I've noticed I've gotten very good at rambling here lately, deal with it for now, eventually I'll have some better content :)

Woke up in CA and one of the first things I saw was Jay McCarthy's house burned down. Sacry experience. Considering I smoke in my apartment, this is a big fear of mine. Hearing about it from someone I somewhat know (well, at least I know about and read about) is very scary. The good part is everyone in his family is fine. The bad news is pretty much everything was destroyed.

Lisa Williams has set up a pay pal donation box for all to help out in any way they can.

Good luck in slowly getting your life back together, Jay.

Man, I have been exhausted all day and now that I finally try to go to sleep, I'm sitting with eyes wide open staring at the TV (and now the monitor).

Spent the afternoon hanging out with gnome-girl. Headed to an early dinner as we were both starving. Then she decided to be domestic.

Watched the season finale of Alias. Of course, more questions opened than answered. Brier told me that they are not going to come back on until January so they can do like 22 straight weeks of Alias with no repeats. That will be neat, but the wait is going to be way too long, especially with all the un-answered questions. I really need to get the early DVDs of Alias. I don't know the early stuff all that well, just saw a couple of episodes here and there.

Saw Welcome to Mooseport as the movie on the plane. It was ok. Had me laughing a bit. I'm not really sure how much I like Romano though. He seems to play the same kind of character as his character on his TV show.

Also watched Scary Movie 3 on the laptop. Was cute, but still wan't all that great. It was basically like the first two, but more Zucker humor. This series has been somewhat disappointing in my opinion.

OK, enough late night rambling.....

Made it to San Fran in one piece. Here til Saturday. Severe lack of sleep at this point, not good.

Argh, of course I end up hitting a set back as I try to get ready to go to California. I ran a too large load of laundry which caused the clothes to all be uber-wet. I ran them in the dryer for almost 2 hours, but they are still damp and I am out of quarters. I headed to the store to see if I could get some quarters there, but they were all out too. Doh! Hopefully the dampness will dry out before the morning, but I gotta leave in 6 hours. Aieee!

Hmm, not sure if this is BloGTK or MT, but the last couple of posts which I used BloGTK to post came out really funky.

Man, this is really getting annoying now.

Not only is my computer FUBAR, but then I go to get cash today and the ATM is down.

What the hell is going on with me and machines?

Have your hard drive completely crash to the point where it looks like it may not recover. On your main machine. Where you pretty much store your life. With no backup. MOTHERFUCKER.

Hopefully we can figure something out tomorrow, but it looks grim.

Oh yeah, let's not forget, I brought home another laptop to use for the evening and DIDN'T bring a fuckin power supply.

Watch out liver, here comes too much alcohol.

The Redhead has organized a get together tomorrow evening over at Clery's right next to Back Bay station to welcome the Accordion Guy back to Boston.

Finally, I am actually going to be able to make it to one of these. Haven't seen Joey since we terrorized Boston back in October following BloggerCon.

Hope to see you all there!

Phish has announced this year's festival. Two days, weekend of August 14/15 up in Vermont. Tickets actually went on sale this morning.

I think this could be cool, but I won't be going. First off, I already have tickets to two Phish shows this summer. Second, the $150 price tag is a bit steep for me, since I already have too much going on this summer. Third, I'm just not a big fan of camping :)

Hopefully, Phish will be smart enough to set up Internet feeds for thos of us who cannot attend.

Do not take a drink of water just before reading Dilbert. Almost caused a laptop disaster this morning by spitting water all over the keyboard.

she's obviously insane

Yeah, maybe I will be in CA in a few days.

I mentioned last week that I was slowly trying to get things done bit by bit. Well, this has turned in to a full scale spring cleaning. My goal here is to really make my place in to the place I dreamed it could be when I first moved in. This is going to take some effort by in the end I think it will really be worth it.

I've been thinking since I moved in, I wanted my place to be a place for my friends to stop by, hang out, watch some movies, play some video games, or just to sit and chat. I want it to be a viable alternative to going out, I guess. Would be nice to have somewhere that people felt they could drop by whenever and know they were going to enjoy themselves.

I put a bunch of money in to my apartment when I first moved in to do some of this. Things like the new couches, surround sound system, the PS2, etc. Now, I've added things like the WiFi connections, the TiVo and a whole bunch of kitchen appliances.

Now, if I can just finish up some of this cleaning and make the place a nice clean place to hang out, I may just have the next cool place to be in Boston.

From the Evolution blog, Novell announced today Connector for Exchange is now GPL'ed.

This is great. Between this and Groupwise support, Evolution can pretty much connect to anything with the 2.0 release.

Now, I need GW for Linux, so I can start testing it on my company's hardware and see if we might be able to use it in-house.

Gotta love security updates like these

Overview A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise a computer running Windows and gain complete control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Yet another reason to run Linux.

Man, my sister just picked the wrong weekend to get married, I really want to go to Bonnaroo. They have now put up a line-up, which looks like its just going to be nuts. The midnight to 3AM Robert Randolph and the Family Band looks like a lot of late night fun. The 3 1/2 hour Dave & Friends I would assume is going to include a lot more friends than normal. And the final set is Trey on Sunday night. I want to know what the line on Phish coming out and doing a bunch of that set with him. Obviously, lots more fun in the schedule as well. Check it out on the Bonnaroo Web Site.

Next, they announced that there will be wireless Internet access on the show grounds. That's totally cool. Now, I doubt there is going to be much power, but with a bunch of batteries, you could stay in touch with lots of people and even blog the whole show right from the grounds. That's totally cool.

As I mentioned, its my sister's wedding weekend, but I would love to hear about anyone who will be going and blogging over the course of the weekend, so I can continuously hear about what's going on and how the shows have been.

Anyone see Dave and Trey on VH1's (inside)Out?

It was a very cool special. Not only did it show lots of interesting music collaboration, but also showed some great stories and information about Africa.

The thing that struck me most was definitely the musical collaboration. Watching people who couldn't even speak the same language being able to sit down and play together and make some great music was just incredible.

It's also inspired me to re-double my guitar playing and musical efforts. I really want to get to the level where I can sit down with just about anyone and play and have fun and really enjoy music. I love music so much as a listener, now I really want to be able to jump in the fray and enjoy it from the otherside and hopefully give joy to others.

Pretty much once a week or so, someone in my aggregator complains that they got a ton of comment spam. For some reason these people are not yet running MT-Blacklist.

This is most definitely the easiest and best way to keep comment spam off your blog. I got killed a few times and finally spent the time to install it and LOVE having it every minute. I still get comment spam from time to time, but with just one click, it goes away and the URL is added to the blacklist.

So, people, stop complaining and just install this software.

You can tell it's a gorgeous Friday when there is a mailing list thread on how you spell the past tense of panic (paniced vs panicked)

Ugh.

Gorgeous day out.

Feel like crap due to what I hope is allergies.

Work stuff just not going as planned.

Can't seem to find any of the people I need to speak to to finish some other crap.

No fun, I just want to go sit on a roof deck of a bar with a margarita in my hand.

I realized about 15 minutes in to my car ride this morning that in my joy of being up good and early this morning, I never actually turned the alarm clock, that I beat by an hour, off. Oops!

I'm a rather bad procrastinator. I constantly have a ton on my TODO list, and even more constantly push things to the next day, every day. It's a very very bad habit. This becomes even more true when things get pushed off to the point that they cause stress in my life. I have enough stress in my life that I don't need to cause myself any more.

This past week, I have been trying to start knocking things off my TODO list. Whether they be little things or things that have been hanging over my head for a while, I'm just trying to get stuff done.

Thus far, its been nice. Even little stuff, like the single load of laundry I did last night, feels good, as I had been pushing it back all week. The biggest accomplishment of this week thus far has been throwing away the huge pile of boxes that I have accumulated over the 2+ years in my apartment. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it was a burden off my chest. Now I have more space in my bedroom to put the furniture I will eventually buy.

It's nice to feel a sense of accomplishment every day and even nicer to get weights off my shoulders, so I can continue to move forward. Now, hopefully, I can keep it all up.

From Phish.net News:

Phish will release Undermind, their latest studio album from Elektra
Records, on June 15. The album was recorded at the Barn with producer
Tchad Blake. The first pressing of the album will include a special bonus
DVD of the 26-minute short film "Specimens of Beauty," directed by
longtime Phish photographer Danny Clinch, that chronicles the recording of
the album in Vermont. The album's track list is:

Scents and Subtle Sounds (Intro)
Undermind
The Connection
A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing
Army of One
Crowd Control
Maggie's Revenge
Nothing
Two Versions of Me
Access Me
Scents and Subtle Sounds
Tomorrow's Song
Secret Smile
Grind