New toy and Geocaching and the 4th of july party….

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Yesterday my new toy came that I bought as my birthday gift from my wife and daughter. I got a Garmin GPSMAP 60. It’s a nice little unit. So I went out to find my first cache last night and struck out on it so I moved to another one and couldn’t find that one either. I went back this morning when there were less people around so I could look like a fool by myself..still couldn’t find it.

After playing with the GPSr a little bit at work this afternoon I came home and got Karma and took him to the D&R canal path where there were 4 caches hidden. I found 2 of the 3 I was looking for. I was very proud of myself. I got to the 3rd one and hit a wall…couldn’t figure out where the cache was hidden and the bugs were eating me and Karma alive so we turned around and headed back to the car. We will go back later in the week or wait till after the 4th of July. Karma loved it, he was able to get off the trail and wander the woods with his human. 🙂

So we are getting ready for the party we are having on the 3rd of July. I want to have most of the back yard ready by the end of the weekend and really just have to get the ice and do the food prep on Tuesday. I still have to figure out the sound system since I really ripped it apart during the winter. We have a good number of people coming. The guy I buy my computer stuff from is coming from Arizona for the party as well as the regular crowd.

This is my off year but I feel I should discuss colonoscopys with you……

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I haven’t written in a long time. I have been busy with work and the stuff around the house and with the dog. I was looking for information today on the big Internet on something and came across this great review on a Colonoscopy. I am required to get one every 2 years because colon cancer runs in my family on my mother’s side. , but this is my year off. I only go on even years. I had my first one in 1986 right after graduating from high school…like the next day. Back then they didn’t knock you out and it was not a pleasant experience so I vowed never to get another one. Well, when I turned 37 I decided it was time to
go again so I geared up for the unpleasantness of it, but now it’s like taking a nap and waking up and not knowing anything happened. The prep the day before is still a pain in the ass (no pun intended) but once you get through that and finally get into the surgical center it is a piece of cake. So for the PSA part of this post get out there and get a colonoscopy to make sure all is good with your colon and go read this review of this guys colonoscopy…it’s very simple these days and pain-free.

What a week/month

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Well this week has been a traumatic one in so many ways. The shooting at Virgina Tech, I have friends down there as well as family in the area.

Then Don Imus was fired last week…I use to skip class when I was in college to hang out at the radio station I worked for to listen to him on the satellite feed between news casts. It was cool because during the comers breaks they would just leave the mic open and you would hear Imus conversations with the rest of the crew it was fun. I think the whole Don Imus fiasco was blown out of proportion, but that was just me.

Then today I found out a program director I worked for in Corning Dave Abby died from brain cancer last month. He was only 54. He was a good guy who cared about his announcers and the station.

The weather in this area was horrible this week. We had a nor’east come through here on Sunday and Monday that caused a ton of flooding. My basement took on about 4 inches of water. Thanks to Smed and Ed for coming over and helping me bail out the basement. But the weather has cleared up and it looks like spring may be here for good now. I need a few weeks of dry weather so the water table can go down some in the back yard and the standing water can go away…even though the dog likes to play in it.

A night at Irving Plaza with Waren Haynes and Friends

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It was titled “Warren Haynes all star jam at Irving plaza on March 28th 2007.” It was an OK show. It had it’s high points and it’s low points. The biggest low point being that the show started an hour late. It was scheduled to start ate 9 with doors opening at 8. Well we were in line by 7:30 and they opened the doors early which was no big deal since the night was warm and the crowed was friendly. But then we had to stand around for 2 hours till Warren finally came out and started the show with an acoustic version of “A Million Miles From Yesterday” which went right into “Sad And Deep As You” He was then joined but Edwin McCain
the first of may friends of the night. The first hour was all acoustic till Susan Tedeschi came out and did 2 great songs which she forgot the words on the last one and blamed her Irving Plaza bad luck. After she was done Warren came out and was joined by Greg Allman and they did 2 acoustic songs with Greg on lead vocals. Then the first break of about 30 min. (another low point)

The break was over and the Allman Brothers band came out to a loud cheer and went right into “Come and Go Blues” and then right into one of the best versions of “Jessica” I have heard in a few years (high point). We got another 15 – 30 min break while the next band set up.

The Derek Trucks band minus Derek came out with Susan Tedeschi on lead guitar and vocals on “Evidence”. For the rest of the set Derek was playing and Susan was singing. She has a great set of pipes and a great stage presence. Derek has defiantly come into his own and is playing the best he has in years. (On a side note if you missed the article about him in Rolling Stones Magazine try to get a hold of it and give it a read.)Another 30 min break while Matt Abts tuned his drums and the band I guess went out for pizza or something (Big Low Point). Warren’s wife Stefani Scamardo came out and thanked the fans for coming out and telling us that we are the real reason they do this and that this show was for us…well next time you are doing a show for us how about
starting on time.Mule finally came out and kicked it right off with “Hammer And Nails”. The band was tight and the “friends” were a perfect fit for the night. They did a 5 song set and the encore.

We had to bail before the encore to catch the last train out of New York for the night.

I think the show over all was a great show and we saw and heard some great music. Like I said waiting an extra hour for the show to start sucked and I know the delay was for the venu to sell more alcohol and that Warren and the band are known to start late but an hour is crazy, but I would do it again. If they had started at least a 1/2 hour late they cold have played more music for the fans…since the show was for us.

As my cousin said while we were waiting it’s these little shows that you get great live music and pairings of musicians you wouldn’t get other wise. I am a big fan of the “Jam Band” genre and it is shows like this that make this kind of music great.

Here is the set list:

Warren Haynes Solo Acoustic
01 Intro 00:27.52
02 A Million Miles From Yesterday 03:40.67
03 Sad And Deep As You * 04:49.31

Warren Haynes & Edwin McCain
04 Sign On The Door 07:11.25
05 Crazy 06:09.07

Warren Haynes, Kevn Kinney & Edwin McCain
06 Good Country Mile 07:13.74
07 Trail Of Seasons 05:24.24
08 I Shall Be Released # 06:28.30

Susan Tedeschi
09 Till The Earth Runs Dry 03:08.58
10 Shelter 05:02.40

Gregg Allman & Warren Haynes Acoustic
11 All My Friends 05:15.04
12 These Days 06:02.02

Allman Brothers Band
13 Come And Go Blues 06:32.17
14 Jessica 12:41.56

Derek Trucks Band with Susan Tedeschi
15 Evidence $% 08:02.39
16 I Wish I Knew 06:50.12
17 Only You Know And I Know 04:28.73
18 The Weight %+ 12:18.23

Gov’t Mule featuring Kofi Burbridge on Keys
19 Hammer And Nails 06:29.66
20 32/20 Blues ^ 07:51.67
21 Same Thing ^& 13:17.44
22 Straight To Hell @ 09:27.58
23 Turn On Your Lovelight ! 08:19.22
Encore:
24 That’s What Love Will Make You Do ~ 12:03.08

Total: 169:16.74

  • with Kofi Burbridge

with Susan Tedeschi

$ no Derek
% with Eric Krasno
+ with Edwin McCain
^ with Audley Freed
& with Charlie Drayton
@ with Kevn Kinney, Edwin McCain, Tony Mason and Lenny Kaye
! with Col. Bruce Hampton, Audley Freed, Tony Mason & Jay Collins
~ with Brian Mitchell, Jay Collins, Tony Mason and Audley Freed

Going to a PDA from a PAA

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While I was at the LISA conference in Washington, DC my cell phone died. I had already gone through 2 of the same model and both died a very sad death. So when I got back home from the conference I hit the Verizon store and picked up a Palm Treo 700w smart phone, the w stands for Windows based. I have been using it in combination with my PAA to keep track of my appointments and contacts and todo lists. Well I have gotten tired of taking the PAA around with me all the time so I had decided to just take the 700w around with me. The one down side to this idea was that I had to install Microsoft Outlook to sync and keep my
stuff backed up. I hate Outlook and just refused to install it. Then my buddy Brian wrote a great article about Time Management for Sysadmins using Google Calendar to sync his calendar and keep things organized. He also added a few neat things to make working electronically work out right.

OggSync
First I had to find a program that would work with Windows Mobile 5 and sync to Google calendar. I found Oggsync and it works quite well except that the free version only syncs one
calendar. So I am thinking of paying 29.95 a year so I can sync all the calendar that I have made in Google Calendar. If you know of another Palm to Google Calendar sync program that will work with Windows Mobile 5 and is free and will sync multiple calendars then please let me know.

Remembering the Milk….
The second thing Brian mentions is a great little site called Remember the Milk (RTM). It’s a todo list site that you can integrate into your Google
Calendar. The neat thing about it is you can E-mail tasks to the todo list and it will add them to it. I love things like this, it makes life so easy. I haven’t had time to really play with this service yet so when I have tried it for a bit I will do a post on it.

Google Calendar
Now I am not a big fan of big corporations that have my data stored on there servers..thus why I have my own server that does Web hosting and Mail Delivery and other stuff where my personal info will be, but I decided to use Google Calendar because they do it so well. Sure there are some issues that I hope they will fix and or implement. I will list those in a later post. It didn’t take me long to set up the Calendar the way I wanted it and at the same time I set up Google Apps for my family again more on that in a later post. Once I got things set up on the Google end I was able to sync all my info from the Treo to Google in no time. I found out that it didn’t sync things that are tags by categories other then my name. I am hoping this will be resolved if I goto the pro version of OggSync.

I am going to work with this system for 6 months or the end of the summer, if I like it I will keep on going if not then I will go back to my PAA.

Listening to: Mountain Jam – The Allman Brothers Band

How to Eat Dinner in Princeton NJ

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Step 1: Very slowly and carefully, leave Princeton.

I was looking up info on a restaurant that a friend of mine recommended and stumbled on to the “How to Eat Dinner in Princeton” page.  It was written by an Assistant Professor of Mathematics that use to work at Princeton U.

The listing of restaurants to try is perfect and he’s even got DeLorenzo’s Tomato Pie in Trenton on the list. So if you are going to go out to dinner in the Princeton area check out the How to Eat Dinner in Princeton NJ page.

New look

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As you can tell I have changed the look of the website. I had been thinking about it for a while so i had some free time yesterday and mad the change. I got the design idea from a template on the movable type template contest. I took it then made some tweaks. I am also going to be upgrading the gallery program in a few days/weeks. I have also been looking for the time to start back on the genealogy project and get the family tree up to date.

If you find any problems please let me know.

FM – No Static At All!

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I was kind of bored yesterday afternoon and decided to see what free movies were on “On Demand” and found one of the best “Radio” movies around “FM”.  It has a great soundtrack and 2 great concerts in the movie.  The first being Jimmy Buffet and the other a Linda Ronstadt
concert.

I have been trying to find this movie on DVD for a while now.  Netflix use to have it but was on my wishlist so long that they dropped it from there movie list, the local Blockbuster had it and I grabbed it off the shelf, but it was a bad copy and wouldn’t play.

The film perfectly captures the feel of the late 1970s. The casting is great, with a passionate performance by Michael Brandon and a very funny one by Martin Mull. The background music is just right and the concert appearances of Jimmy Buffett and Linda Ronstadt add to the late 1970s atmosphere. A young Tom Petty gets interviewed at the radio station. REO Speedwagon also appears at a record store signing. If you’re a fan of WKRP, then check out this movie.

This movie captures what needs to happen again in radio today..the jocks need to take over the station and make the listeners and the music the focus of the station.  As I have said before and I will say it again…Big business is killing radio and it’s time for the people to take back the airwaves…

So to see what radio should be like today check out “FM”.

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Well another Thanksgiving has come and gone. This year we had a few people in for a great meal. I think this was the most low-stress one I have had yet. The turkey came out perfect…I cooked it on the grill this year so it freed up the oven so I could cook the stuffing and a great sweet potato casserole that came out so well. So that was Thanksgiving… 😉

Let the Christmas craziness begin…

We all stayed away from the malls and stores yesterday…Carolyn and I headed to an early showing of the new James Bond movie – Casino Royal. It was great and there was no crowd. 🙂

I have jury duty next week, I don’t have to report Monday morning but have to call in around 11:30 am to see if I have to report in for the afternoon session. I hope I get called in on Monday and get rejected or not used so I can have the rest of the week to get ready for the LISA conference in Washington DC the first week in December.

I have fallen off the wagon

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Well, things have gotten crazy at work and I realized the other day that I was at the same weight when I stopped drinking soda. So to calm my nerves and to get a cold caffeine high I decided to have a cold coke.
Well, a Coke Zero…the jury is still out on whether I will keep drinking it or go back to the Classic Red can coke.