Porcelain

OK, here is some more music to get my blog going again. This is from around April of 2006, I believe. It is a cover of a Better Than Ezra song called “Porcelain”. It doesn’t sound very much like the original version. The original version doesn’t have a meandering guitar solo at the end, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, this was recorded in Garageband, before I switch to my PC based setup (and have since switched back to Mac, they are so much better for music stuff.)

Porcelain (Download)

I actually won something

OK, I didn’t win, but I came in 3rd place in the Glen Phillips Remix contest. I win some consolation prizes, which isn’t bad. The actual winner, who won a signed guitar, decided to donate it to charity, which is very classy, don’t you think?

American Girl

If you are a pre-teen girl, this place is some sort of paradise – apparently. And expensive for the parents of said pre-teens. But hey, it was their birthday presents for this year. I don’t want to think about how much we spent there.

And yes, Pam is taking them to see Kit Kittredge tomorrow.

Haircuts

Mallory and Emma haven’t had a real haircut in over 2 years. So it was a pretty big event the other day when they both got radically shorter haircuts.

Here they are right before.

And here they are right after.

The excess hair was donated to Locks of Love. I think the new hairdos look great, plus its so much easier to brush now.

To iPhone or not to iPhone

OK, though I’ve bought tons of iPods since they came out. (Hey my first iPod was so old, it actually had scrollwheel that moved! You kids today with your touchscreens!! Now, get off my lawn!!!)

Uh, what was I saying?.. oh Yeah, I don’t have an iPhone. There were several things holding me back, but the main thing was I was waiting for was the “version 2.0″ which was announced this week. And now that its here, I think I might be holding off a little while longer. Right now I am on Sprint, and have their SERO plan (the absolute best kept secret in the cell phone market.) I have a Motorola Q, which is a functional but sucky Windows Mobile phone. The only thing it does that’s worthwhile is push email/contacts/calendar with our Exchange server at work. I can get that now on the new iPhone (and the old ones too, but you can’t get those anymore.) My current iPod is a 32gig Touch, which is awesomely cool and all, but I still have to carry along two things most of the time. Could I squeeze into a 16 gig iPhone? Probably. The Touch could always go up on ebay.

The biggest that keeps me from making the leap is the plan cost. My current plan gets like 500 minutes, unlimited data and 500 text messages for $35 a month (I told you SERO was great.). The minimum iPhone plan is going to be $70 and that may or may not include any text messages. That’s a big jump in price every month for the same service. What I wouldn’t give for an iPhone that would run on the Sprint network.

So for now, I think I’ll hold on to my sucky Q and look for the eventually to be coming 32gig iPhone, and then think it over again. Unless some awesome applications show up that push me over the top. I hear there’s rumors of a wordpress client…

We’ve Got To Get In To Get Out

The other night I had the pleasure of attending the screening of the new Genesis concert DVD, When In Rome, in HD at the local movieplex. It was quite good. I would go again just to hear it on that sound system.

Genesis was the first band I ever got into at all, way back in 9th grade. That’s (lets see…) 22 years ago. I wonder how many times I’ve heard these songs in those many years. At least in the hundreds, and most likely in the thousands. Up until I discovered them, I wasn’t really that much into music. I had a few albums (I seem to remember I liked movie soundtracks), but I never listened to any of them regularly. Then one day, I clearly remember, I was walking home from the bus stop and humming something from Mama. “That’s a cool song” I thought. When I got home, I dug through my sisters tape collection (she was away at college then.) and found the “Mama” album – actually just called “Genesis”. Mama was on there, and That’s All (hey I remember this song.) but by the time it got to Home By The Sea I was hooked. I hadn’t really heard anything like this before. A few weeks later they released Invisible Touch, and I snatched that on up as well. I slowly worked my way back in their catalog as my limited finances would allow. Pretty soon I had just about everything, and loved it all.

But I never got to see them live.

After We Can’t Dance came out, I was really planning to go see them. I knew they wouldn’t come to Nashville, but I figured I could make the trek to Atlanta. But they didn’t come to Atlanta on that tour after all. A few years later Phil Collins quit, and after an ill-fated try at replacing him, they seemed to have pretty much hung it up. There were some box sets and greatest hits albums, and the Internet has become a great place to find concert recordings of various qualities. But I never expected much out of them again.

There were some decent message boards on the “Official” Genesis site, and I would check them out every so often to see if anything was going on. There was always someone speculating on some type of reunion, and lots of other people shouting them down with a “No, we’ve been over this!” It became known as the “R” word. But then there were some more specific rumors of something, and all the sudden there was to be a press conference. And what do you know, a Genesis tour of Europe and America!

Well, I wasn’t going to miss this. I told Pam that I had to see them this time, no matter where they played, and she agreed. She even offered to come along to wherever we would have to go to see them. In the end, the closest and most convenient concert was in Columbus, OH. We flew up for a Saturday night concert. We had pretty good seats that I got in a fan club presale (for $200 each. Ouch!)

It was awesome.

It was nice to relive a bit of the concert the other night. There were only 20-30 people at the theater, but still, with the surround sound, there were also 500,000 Italian fans there, or at least it sounded like it. Changes are that’s it for Genesis, but I sure am glad I got to experience at least one concert before they hung it up for good.

Here’s “Mama” from When In Rome:

TechEd is Here

Well, I’m here at TechEd. Just got out of the keynote, given by Bill Gates. It was OK, nothing earth shattering. Sometimes at the keynote they will make annoucements of new, upcoming things. Not this time. Just some demos of some stuff we pretty much knew about. I expect more meat out of the breakout sessions.

The last two days we have been at the parks. The first full day, we went to Magic Kingdom – which was awesome. I’ll go into details why in a post later on. Yesterday was Animal Kingdom, which was OK, but its probably my least favorite park at WDW. It was very hot as well, and Animal Kingdom doesn’t have that much in the way of air conditioned venues. We only stayed about half a day.

I’ll try to catch up on whats been going on later, but I’ve got to head to a breakout session. More TechEd to come.

Countdown to Disney World… er, I mean "Important Work Trip"

Every few years, I get to go to a Microsoft conference called TechEd for my work. While its a great place for learning about new technologies that I really do need to know to do my job, its also a week of not actually having to work. This will by my fifth TechEd. A brief history:

TechEd 98 – New Orleans. Lots of fun, good food, too much drinking. The new upcoming technology was “Windows 2000″, or maybe they still called it NT5. The attendee party was in the Superdome, with Cheap Trick and Steve Winwood for the entertainment.

TechEd 2000 – Orlando. Pam was 8 months pregnant with Mallory for this trip, so she stayed home. This was a fairly disappointing TechEd. A few months after, Microsoft announced its .NET initiative – and we understood why they didn’t seem to have anything to talk about at TechEd. It was still under wraps. Attendee party was at Islands of Adventure. We got to ride the Dueling Dragons roller coaster about 10 times in a row with no waiting.

A lot of people are fed at one time at these things.

TechEd 2004 – San Diego. This was probably my favorite TechEd. Only Aaron and myself went to this one. Our hotel was right next door to the convention center, which was the ultimate in convenience. There was a lot of good upcoming .NET technology to talk about. The food in San Diego is absolutely amazing. The weather was great as well. The attendee party was at Seaworld, and was quite fun.

TechEd 2006 – Boston. Nothing against Boston as a city, but it wasn’t the best place for a TechEd. First off there were no hotels near the convention center. The bus rides would take over 30 minutes for a one way trip between the hotel and the convention center. There was good food around town, but in the middle of the week I came down with a nasty stomach bug or food poisoning or something. I was basically in bed all day Wednesday and Thursday and ate nothing for 48 hours. I did recover enough to make the attendee party at Fenway Park – but I skipped the bratwurst! The entertainment was Buffalo Tom and Train. Both were very good.

TechEd Party at Fenway

TechEd 2008 – back in Orlando. This is the first time I’ve ever taken my family with me. We were going to stay at the Hilton in Downtown Disney. As an official hotel, there would be bus service between there and the convention center – about 10 miles away. But here at the last minute we decided to switch to an official Disney Resort – The Polynesian. That means I’ll have to be driving myself to the convention center in the rental car. I have a feeling I might have ended up doing that anyway rather than standing around waiting forever for a bus. The resort looks quite nice in the pictures I’ve seen, and most importantly, its on the monorail. That means it will be a supper easy trip for Pam and the girls to get to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot on those days I’m away learning stuff. And I hope to come back at night at head back to the parks with them. I’ll probably skip the attendee party this year. I think its at Universal Studios. It would be $110 each for Pam and the girls to come along too. They do provide free food and alcohol, but you can buy a lot of chicken strips and beer for $330!

I’ll try to keep up my blog while I’m there (as an aside – I doubt anyone really reads this blog, its just my little journal and I’ll be interested to read my experiences in later years). I think I figured out how to post pictures taken with my cell phone through here via Flickr. Its a crappy cellphone camera, but its better than nothing. And well definitely be taking lots of pictures and videos at the parks. I’ll post my videos once I get back and get them edited.

Radio Paradise Monitor

One of these days I’m going to have to write a post about the awesomeness that is Radio Paradise. In the meantime I’ll just say its a cool Internet radio station that I listen to nearly everyday at work. I used listen to it using my Roku Labs Soundbridge, but that recently kicked the bucket. So now I’m listening just using iTunes. One thing I miss, however, was being able to glance over at the soundbridge to see what song was playing. So I wrote up a quick and dirty application pops up a little window for a few seconds every time the next song comes on. So if you listen to RP like I do, you might enjoy it too.

It looks something like this:

Download the program here.

To run it you will need the .NET 2.0 framework installed, if you don’t already.

I make no promises that it won’t crash, delete your bank account or kill your firstborn…

Busy weekend

There was just too much going on this weekend. A weekend should be a nice time to relax, but we were running everywhere this weekend – and while much of it was fun, I am simply exhausted. And sunburned, which doesn’t help either.

Friday night was the girls piano recital. I have a video, which I’ll post here as soon as I get a chance to upload it. On Saturday there was a soccer game and a seminar Pam and I went to, then in the afternoon a school picnic at a local park (which was actually quite nice.) On Sunday we had to go to the 8 AM church service for some reason relating to Girl Scouts. Then in the afternoon we went out to the Tennessee Arts and Crafts festival at Centennial Park. My brother makes Windsor chairs and has a booth showing off his wares. Its a fun show, and there are lots of goodies to eat (I partook in some nummy roasted corn on the cob, fresh lemonade and kettle corn, plus we purchased an unhealthy amount of fudge.)  That’s where I got my sunburn, as well.

Now I just need a nap.