Fun Stuff

Q-SKY Radio – No Static at All 1

I am looking for a few “friends” or if you were part of WVIN back in the late 80’s or at WCEB during the 1986 -1987 semesters and would like to help out and get on the air and have some fun.

Do you have a topic you want to talk about or a genre of music you want to get others hearing, or maybe go live with a podcast you are involved with then reach out to me at wbilancio@qskyradio.com.

I would prefer people in the Corning area to start with, but am open to others in other locations if you have a good idea for a show.

The format of Q-SKY is going to be a mix of talk and freeform music radio, but we will have to follow the DCMA rules for streaming radio stations to stay legal. All rules and broadcast information will be explained if you are interested in doing a show. This is all voluntary and not a paying gig so don’t quit your day job to do this.

I just ask that anyone interested be willing to give me at least six months of shows and not flake out on me and just disappear. I want to get a very robust and fun schedule and get some listeners other than our parents and relatives. 🙂

I want to start broadcasting Q-SKY Radio in the first part of the new year to get things set up and get some ideas fleshed out.

New project started for the eyes

Picture of the day, a 365 day project…what ever you call it I am going to make a go at it. Starting today October 1st 2016 this is the first picture of the next 365 days.  Check out 365.bilancio.org for my new photo project.

I am going to do a theme for the first month – signs and stickers of Market Street.   Each day a new image will be uploaded with a small something. Every image will be different; it may have been shot on the day or may have been picked out from my archives, but there will be a new picture a day for the next 365 days.

I hope you enjoy the pictures. If you have an idea for a “theme” send me a private message and let me know I am always looking for new photo ideas….please keep it clean.

I have been taking photographs since grade school, but not full time in the past few years. I have picked up the DSLR camera on and off and since the cell phone cameras have gotten better and better over the years the photos we are producing have gotten better.

Enjoy the photos and let me know what you think…..

Looking for a relaxing RPG game

dice1I use to play D&D a few years ago with a bunch of friends, but the group got to intense and I stopped playing do to time constraints and just got a bit tired of the group.  Lately I have been talking to a co-worker who has been playing with some friends and was telling me about Pathfinder Role-playing Game.

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (abbreviated as PFRPG) is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) first published in 2009 by Paizo Publishing. It extends and modifies the Revised 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons‘ game rules published by Wizards of the Coast under the Open Game License, and was designed over the course of a year with the help of gamers who could download the playtest versions of the game, try the system and post their feedback on Paizo’s website. Announced in March 2008, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was released in August 2009. The PFRPG is intended to be backward-compatible with D&D 3.5, while addressing some of its issues.

This seems like a good alternative to D&D these days.  I am looking to put a group together that would be interested in playing either Pathfinder or straight D&D.  I don’t want to be the game master but just a player.  So if you are local to Lawrenceville, NJ drop me a line and if we get enough people we can get a campaign going.

I like to cook BBQ and I need a team name!

I like to take it low and slow. I love to cook BBQ.  I am looking to fire up the smoker and start the BBQ cooking again and I need to come up with a name for my BBQ “team”, because I would like to compete in the future at BBQ competitions after I get the cobwebs off my smoking skills and every team has a cool name.

The name should be something cool, have the phrase “BBQ” in it and must be something that will stick in peoples minds. So if you can think of something cool leave it in the comments bellow.

In other William BBQ news:

I am also going to be taking a BBQ judging class in July, so I can start judging local competitions.  I have always felt that all BBQ competitors should take the judging classes so you know what the judges are looking for and how the judging process works.

The Avengers

I have been a big comic book reader and fan most of my life.  I have taken a few years off from collecting and reading comics because of time constraints and that the cost of comics have gone up to $4.00 a comic.  The Avengers was always a comic I loved to read and I have been looking forward to the release of this movie and I was ready to take opening day off just to see it on opening day.  But I got lucky yesterday by winning a pair of tickets to see an exclusive screening of The Avengers movie from the Preston & Steve morning show on WMMR.  All I have to say is this movie ROCKED!!  I am not going to give anything away and spoil it for you.  If you are an Avengers fan go see this movie..it was done right and is just a great movie.  One of the best thing they did right in the whole movie is the HULK.  It was the best movie HULK yet.  Mark Ruffalo did a great job as Bruce Banner and the CGI for the HULK was perfect.

Also want to say that WMMR has this type of promotion down and did a great job of organizing it and making it work.  Thanks guys for putting on a great event and I had a great time.

So go see The Avengers when it comes out next week.  If you haven’t seen the trailer yet here it is.

A night of Tomato Pies with good friends

Last night I got together with some friends at De Lorenzo’s Tomato Pies.  in Robbinsville NJ for tomato pie and a nice choice of beer.  I was the first to arrive, the restaurant was a little crowded but not so bad we were going to have to wait a long time for a table. Since I was the first one there I opted to hang out and wait for one of the others to arrive before getting the table.  Greg Wilson showed up a little while later and he and I got talking about work and how things were going.  We got seated at a one of the big booths along the wall and hung out waiting for the rest to show up.  The next to show up was John LeMasney (who was the only one of us not to have ever been to De Lorenzo’s so he was the De Lorenzo’s virgin of the night) followed by John Martinetti and Brian Jones arriving a few minutes later.  Greg and John

This was the first time that the five of us have all been out to eat and just sit back and talk in a long time.   The topics ranged of course from work-related topics to the kids and everything in between.  The beauty of the five of us getting together is that we are all lovers of good beer so when we do get together the place must be BYOB or have a good choice of beer at the bar.  Last night both Johns brought a six-pack of Sierra Nevada.  John LeMasney brought the Sierra Nevada Celebration Fresh Hop Ale and John Martinetti brought the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Brian Jones brought a random selection from his fridge that all I remember was in there was Guinness.

The Tomato Pies were mouth-watering and so tasty.  We ended up getting two pies, a garlic, and a sweet pepper pie.  When they came to the table, it was commented that the pies are never cut in the normal way of even shaped triangular slices, there were long ones, short ones, small ones…but they were all good ones.  We took our time enjoying and savoring each bite of pie and sip of beer, but still made time to discuss the use of Drupal over WordPress and vice versa. After the first two pies were done and we had sat digesting them and talking about what I don’t remember…we ordered our third pie..a sausage, garlic and sweet peppers pie….another winner.

While we were all conversing and eating I sat back and thought how much I was enjoying this evening.  I was just out with the guys, I wasn’t worrying about work, PICC or LOPSA.  I wasn’t worried about getting ready for LISA or all the stuff I have to do while I am there.  I was just out with the guys and we were all having fun.  As the last of the beer was finished and the last crumb of tomato pie was eaten I felt that all was good with my world and I was glad I have friends like these.

Thanks guys for coming out on a rainy Tuesday Night……

Birthday gift idea from Google and Gmail

If you were wondering what to get me for my birthday (July 19th) this year.  This idea just came across my desk this morning from Google.

When Gmail came out of beta, we embroidered the Gmail logo onto sweatshirts for the team. Any given day in the office, a couple of people are wearing them. When other people asked us where they too could get their very own Gmail sweatshirt, we didn’t like replying with "Oh…they’re not really available, it was just something we did for the team," so we made them available in the Google Store.

gmail_sweatshirt

Getting a NJ System Administrator conference up and running

I have been busy working on a project that has taken up a lot of my time in the past few weeks, the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2010.

Back at LISA ‘09 in Baltimore, I had a sit down with one of the other NJ System Administrators and we discussed what was the problem with the system administrators group that we belonged to an how to help fix it.  The problem we saw that the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) had was getting there name out and getting new members.  So out of this conversation over a few beers as well as pulling in another fellow NJ SA we came up with the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2010 (PICC ‘10) to be held in New Brunswick, NJ on May 7th and 8th. 

We came back from Baltimore and jumped right in by finding a location and picking a date and forming the committee to work on getting the conference off the ground.  We have gotten 2 sponsors so far, 10 trainers and training classes, 3 keynote speakers and are now working on getting the Invited Talks and submitted papers together.

The training classes range from how to write better documentation, how to better manage your time, disk virtualization, automation with Perl as well as a class on automation with Powershell, as well as IT Policy writing and the tools to move from being a junior system administer to a senior administrator and more. 

The 3 keynotes we have scheduled are David N. Blank-Edelman on Friday night giving his "Through the Lens Geekly: How SysAdmins are Portrayed in Pop Culture?", Tom Limoncelli on Saturday morning and Eden Haber closing out the conference on Saturday afternoon with his “System Administrators in the Wild, What We’ve Learned from Watching You!” talk. 

The conference schedule is made up of 8 Training class on Friday and 2 on Saturday.  On Friday night will be the Conference Dinner and then the opening keynote followed by a movie. We haven’t gotten the movie figured out yet.  Saturday will also have the invited talks and submitted papers as well as a room set up for unconference topics.

Saturday will start with another keynote and then followed by the papers, invited talks and unconference tracks.  It’s shaping up to be a great conference.  We are hoping to get at least 150 local system administrators to attend.  If you are a NJ/PA/NY System Administrator and are interested then check out the website http://www.picconf.org and save the dates May 7th – 8th 2010.  Oh yea registration for PICC ‘10 opened up yesterday so to register go here.

Wow What A Thanksgiving Weekend we had this year

It all started on Wednesday night at my Aunt Bea’s house with my Aunt Bea and Clora, my parents and Avery while we waited for Fran and Family to arrive from Michigan.  The food of the night was going to be Blue Fish that I got from my co worker Tim Szwedo caught on one of his fishing trips.  My dad had marinated the fish for a bit and then grilled them on the grill.  Fran and family arrived right at 6:30 in time to sit down and eat.  We sat around for a bit and talked and laughed.  Avery and I headed out around 8:30 to hit Acme and then to crash out a bit for a bit.

Thanksgiving started for me at around 8:30 in the morning while I got the smoker ready for the big bird cook.  I actually used The Minion Method for the Charcoal burn.  Using this method kept the temp at a constant of 250 degrees for the whole 5 hour cook.  The turkey had been marinating in a red wine marinade sine Monday.  It came out of the marinade a nice dark purple color.  After the smoker had leveled out to a steady temp the Turkey was put on the grate at 9:00am.  I then moved back inside to start work on the Rye Bread Stuffing.  This turned out to be a great stuffing.  After getting that in the oven, it was time to start on another new recipe for Smoked Sausage Jambalaya another recipe that was a hit for dinner.  While working on all of these new recipes I had a pot of Cranberry BBQ Sauce cooking up, which was talked about a lot last year and was requested to be made again.  Other then making gravy and un canning the canned jelled cranberry sauce onto a plate I was really done cooking by 1:30.  My cousin Tim and family showed up around 1:45 and then it was a constant flow of family arriving till about 2:15.  I took the turkey off the smoker at about 2:15 and let it rest till about 2:45 and handed it over to my dad to carve while I got the rest of the food on to the table.   We finally sat down by 3:00 and the food was passed till about 4:30 as well as the great conversation.  The turkey was perfect and moist and had a great smoke ring around it.  The last person left around 8:00 and I was finally able to sit down and relax and to start thinking about Christmas dinner.

Friday was a day of working at some side jobs and going into work for a bit……but dinner was a treat, we did another pizza off at my Aunt Bea’s house, but with a twist…we did white pies only.  We got pies from Top Road Tavern & Pizza, Fedelos Family Pizzeria, Abruzzi Pizza & Cafe, Kings Pizzarama, Palermo’s III(Ewing), Limoncello’s Pizza.  The winner for the second year in a row for the Bilancio Pizza Off was Palermo’s, it now holds the title in both the Tomato Pie division and now the White Pie Division.  It was a fun night just hanging out talking to everyone. Dean brought some beer he had just bottled that day.  It had a great taste but it will be better after it sits for a few weeks in the bottles.  It was an early night because I ate so much pizza that it just made me tired.

Saturday morning started with me heading to my Aunt Bea’s to hang out with my Uncle Fran for a bit, so since I go there early enough I got a home cooked breakfast which was nice.  We all headed our separate ways for a bit to meet back at the house for dinner.  Which consisted of leftovers brought over from my house from Thanksgiving as well ham from Bath Packing.  Dinner was great and of course the conversation was good to.

It was great seeing my uncle Fran and family since it’s rare that we see them much since they are up in Michigan..tried to talk them into coming back for Christmas but since the snow will be flying by then I doubt we will see them till the La Vigna Picnic in July.

Well time to go and see about Christmas dinner now….

To see all the photos from the weekend head over to here.