Read this and you'll go insane

A Very Strange Dream

2010-10-25T17:15:00.001-04:00

I was at a man's house with a couple of friends. I'm not sure who any of the other people here were. There were three cats inside, one of them died but was still animated (walking around, zombie-like, though not hungering for brains or anything, just like it was in a trance). There was a dog outside and it wanted to come in, the dead cat wouldn't get out from in front of the door for us to let the dog in.

[next scene]

I was on the campus of my Alma Mater (William Carey, not USC) with Jason Brunet and another guy, we were going to the cafeteria for lunch after a class. The other two went ahead and sat down and I went to get some food. It took forever to get anything, and the guy working there was a wanna-be gourmet chef, but the lady serving next to him kept making fun of him for it. When I finally got some food and sat down Jason was up on a stage performing.

Apparently I'd been on some TV show by accident the night before, as some sort of superhero, and everyone was talking about it, and the girl who was sitting with us was flirting with me a lot. I dropped food on myself, since I'm so smooth.

After we were done eating and Jason was done with his set we left. I got stopped by a man on the way out and he was asking me a lot of questions about my TV appearance and suggested that if I was curious about his offer I should follow him. He took off walking at a quick pace. I decided I'd check it out, bid Jason goodbye and took off after the strange man. He went into a very large brick building with an imposing set of curving stone steps and iron railings. At the very bottom of the steps there was a miniature set of steps with six inch railings that I had to step over to get to the regular steps.

Inside was a grand lobby with marble floors and a cold, greenish light, it was empty. At the far end were some wide doors and I saw the man go through them so I followed. On the other side of the doors was some sort of factory. I was standing on a catwalk about 50 feet above the floor, with a long, tall window separating me from the factory. Inside there was some sort of assembly line with large machines. One of these was an old bi-plane but the rest looked very futuristic. The man was a few hundred feet down the catwalk to my left so I followed, he turned left into a doorway.

When I got to the doorway it opened into an office with a reception desk and a couple of work desks. There were people there but they ignored me. I stood there for a moment waiting to be noticed but no one did. I started looking around in the office and the couple of rooms off of it but couldn't find the man. No one said anything to me. Finally I stood at the reception desk and a man asked if he could help me. I told him I was looking for a mysterious man who had told me to follow him. He knew right away who I was looking for and said he would be on the roof. An older man with an air of authority about him took me through a door and up some stairs. We used a zipline to get from where we were to a pointed roof. We then had to slide down that roof to another pointed roof.

I saw the mysterious man below us on a flat roof looking down at the cars in the parking lot which was 40 feet below him. The older man told me to jump down to the flat roof with him. I asked if there was an easier way and he said no and jumped, pulling me with him. The mysterious man looked over at me and said, "So, are you ready to join us?" I told him I guessed I was and they said it was time to go inside. We walked around the structures with the pointed roofs and there was a large door laid into the roof with some sort of computer terminal beside it. They entered some commands and tried to open the door but it wouldn't budge. They tried the door one more time but it still wouldn't open and they informed me that we were stuck here on the roof.

I asked if we could contact someone on the inside to open the door and the told me it would never be opened again. I asked if we could contact someone on the inside to come out the same way we did, and ask them to bring a rope so we could climb down the outside of the building and they told me that wouldn't be possible. I asked if we could somehow climb up to the zipline and use it to get back inside. They said no, that the door for the zipline only goes one way and we were stuck on the roof for good.

This post brought to you by Google Scribe and The Alphabet.

2010-09-12T23:41:00.003-04:00

All rights reserved • Design by Free CSS Templates • Icons by Category or Business Name or Category Search Results for All Products → ∞ and the other is a more detailed description. By continuing past this page to a friend or family member who is a member of the Board of Directors of the Company and the Company shall be entitled to a refund of the purchase price of the product or as part of the products name of the person who is not board certified.

Contact Us & User Feedback & Suggestions for New Members of the public may purchase hardcopy documents from the Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office of the Revisor of Statutes Office.

Do not have a Kindle in Singapore and the United States and Canada and the United States and Canada and the United States and Canada. Email this article to a friend or family member who is a member of the Board of Directors of the Company and the Company shall be entitled to a refund of the purchase price of the product or as part of the products name of the person who is not board certified may still be a champ for me to get a good deal of the day and night to make sure that the following conditions are met, the warranties will default to the standard of care for the elderly and the disabled. For example the following is a list of the most important thing is to be used in the present study was to determine the effect of the drug in the treatment of the subject areas below and select the most appropriate way to deal with the problem.

Get the latest Flash player to view video content with the page that you are not a member of the Board of Directors of the Company and the Company shall be entitled to a refund of the purchase price. Home & Garden Newsletters and Alerts The latest news and analysis delivered to your in box free shipping on orders ov the Gods of the Copybook. I have a lot of people are going to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Company and the Company shall be entitled to a refund of the purchase price of the product or as part of the products name of the person who is not board certified may still be a champ for me to get a good deal of the day and night to make sure that the following conditions are met and the application of the law of the land and the people who are not in the same way as the first. Join Date Jan 1 from the sale of the property of the respective owners of the domain name you entered is not in the same way as the first step to doing all this and more.

Key Phrases (CAPs) in mice and rats and elephants but sure as hell do not want to be related to the search result. Loading High Resolution Images for Free.

More Info on cities nearby to also consider the possibility of a new window in your browser to use this feature.

New York City Area Directory of All Stores International Sites & Affiliates Forum & Resources for Teachers and Students. Other item info to a Trip Plan for the City of New York City Area Directory of All Stores International Sites & Affiliates Forum & Resources for Teachers and Students at the University of California. Page 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful to you by the hand of the Father and the Son of God and the world of the living room and dining room with a view.

Quick Links to Canadian Cities Get Top Marks for Attracting Newcomers Discussion Forums are the opinions of the individuals who post them here for you to keep. Related Searches for Nike Air Max 1 Premium SP Safari Books Online for Free on Largest FSBO site using your Internet account information to ensure that the information provided by the merchants and MyShopping.com.au assumes no responsibility.* The Doctor Is In The Air.

Search for people you know and we will e mail you the current version of the Macromedia Flash Player to view this video in a new window in your browser. The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive or inappropriate messages to two male students at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Berkeley. United States Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of All Media Guide to the Galaxy.

View Public Profile for my watch and chain.

We have a lot of people. Xbox LIVE Support Disaster Relief in Haiti After Quake Finding Himself Buried Under Rubble Shares How He Survived for the first time in the future and the future of the world and the world of the living room and dining room. You can turn Autoshare off at any time and without notice to you and you will be able to see this on the map or by adding a new direction for the future of the world and the world of the living.

Zip Code Finder Retriever Product Key Finder Pro Download Results For The Week Of October 6 to October 7 to November 8 and 9 of the Act and the regulations of the United States and Canada and the United States and Canada and the United States and Canada.

Strange dream

2010-08-06T15:07:00.002-04:00

I had a strange dream. My sister, Becca, was staying here, and when I woke up and started my morning routine in the bathroom I noticed that she had started ripping the wallpaper down and painting the walls in there. I was very confused and upset since a) she was just visiting and b) I don't own this place, so I started yelling at her about that, then all the rest of my family, the twins, mom and dad, and Mike were here (I'll assume that since Becca and Mike were here that Jennifer was around somewhere) and my apartment was about three times bigger than it is. Then I noticed that someone had replaced my appliances while I was asleep. The new fridge and dishwasher were nice but they had taken out my stove and replaced it with the crappiest cooktop I had ever seen. It was a step up from a camp stove and had to be 80 years old. I was pissed off about that, too.

I found out it had something to do with some sort of safety code and they had come and my parents had let them in early in the morning. Not sure why that stove was safer than the other one...

So I got to repositioning things in my kitchen how I wanted them and running a wire for some sort of TV antenna even though I have cable. By this point my kitchen was now bigger than the rest of my apartment really is, and I had a few cafe tables in there and Lyta Alexander from Babylon 5 was sitting at one of my tables having a coffee, and Mary Lee (who I worked with at the coffeeshop back in the day) was making something in my kitchen.

Then we all had a big dinner in my huge dining room that doesn't actually exist.

After a long blogging absence: Baby platipodes!

2010-08-02T22:07:00.004-04:00

Windows 7 (and networking issues therein)

2009-10-03T16:53:00.002-04:00

Just putting this out there in the unlikely chance that someone who reads it may be able to help me. I've been scouring Google for a while now trying to figure this out and have had no luck.

I've downloaded and have been trying out Windows 7 RTM (build 7600) 64-bit this week. So far I have not had any issues with it, and the things that annoyed me with the basic setup I was able to quickly find and change (unlike Vista where it took me two weeks to get to a state I could tolerate, by which point I had ordered a copy of XP and replaced Vista).

However, one issue I have been having is with DHCP and my wireless network. In XP my computer picks up the router's DHCP just fine, however in Win7 it is a pain in the butt. It will try to connect to my network for a while before giving up and assigning me a local IP address instead (the 169.x.x.x crap). If I reboot the router at this point the computer then finds the correct DHCP address and all is well. The only other way to fix the issue is to forgo DHCP and enter the address, gateway, and DNS information manually (which works, but I prefer to use DHCP).

Anyone have any idea what is going on here?

Fried egg wih basil chiffonade

2009-06-05T22:44:00.002-04:00

I decided to try something a little different today and spruce up my fried eggs. Since I have a huge bush of basil growing on my porch I figured I would use that.

So, I caramelized some diced onion and fried two eggs (sunny side up). I brushed olive oil onto two slices of bread and toasted it (I realized recently that this works great in a toaster), placed a slice of picante provolone (Boar's Head) on each piece of toast and then some of the onions. Topped that with the eggs and then a chiffonade of basil.

It is very tasty, the freshness of the basil and the sweetness of the onion and richness of the cheese compliment the egg very well.

Some odd things...

2009-05-02T04:36:00.003-04:00

I found some old stuff, from 2000 and 2001, tonight in a file drawer. Mostly it was old receipts but there were a few other things in there too. For instance, a sheet of lyrics I was memorizing sometime that year for voice lessons which included Schubert's Der greise Kopf, a song which I recently dusted off and sang on a concert two weeks ago! How weird to find this lyric page now!

The other was my Louisiana organ donor card with my Louisiana drivers license number on it, starting in 007. My SC DL starts with 007 as well. Both of these were issued after I had adopted the name Platypi007 online... How stranger is THAT?

Also I found two PC Worlds and a Computer Shopper from 2001 which I am going to enjoy browsing through and seeing how far things have come in 8 years.

Oh, and my first WCC ID card, with my chin rug and bucket hat on in the picture!

My morning thus far...

2009-03-08T11:13:00.002-04:00

I remembered to set my clocks ahead an hour last night and I got up this morning at the right time. But still, I missed church (my job!) today! Why? I filled up at the gas station up the road from me on the way to church this morning and three blocks from leaving the station my car dies. Just dies. Won't start up anymore. I coast off the road onto a side road and try a few times. It cranks strongly but will not start. I wait a little bit and try again. Same story. I begin to try to get in touch with the few people at the church whose numbers I have in my phone right now but since everyone is in Sunday School or running late because they forgot to change their clocks last night they do not answer. I do get ahold of my father, amazingly since he is a pastor, and he isn't able to give me much more of a diagnosis over the phone than I was able to figure out myself. We both agreed that it was probably a fuel line issue.

By this point I can get the engine to run for a second or second and half every few tries with starting it, but no more. I get a call from my pianist, I figured returning my calls but she was telling me she was running late. I asked her to cover for me at the church since by this point it was unlikely I would be getting there before the service starts. I get a call from someone at the church, concerned about me since I hadn't shown up and am able to get the number of a towing company from someone in the office there. (I got a small phonebook just last week or so from AT&T but hadn't put it in my car, so I had no good way of finding anyone. 411 is relatively useless at finding anything you don't already know the name of.)

So I call the tow company and they say it'll be about 30 minutes before they can get out there (Oh yeah, my church is on the other side of town from me and so is everyone who goes there, so they know numbers of stuff on that side of town. Still, at least I had a tow truck on the way). I keep trying to start the car, it doesn't act any different than before other than the fact that it is cranking less strongly since I am using up the battery each time I try.

The tow driver calls me and lets me know he is five minutes away, this is 45 minutes after I called them, 15 minutes into the service at my church. I try a few more times. Nothing. I try one last time and the car starts, sputters a bit, and then runs smoothly. I give it gas. It sputters a bit more and runs smoothly once more. I give it gas again and it runs smoothly. I shut it off and start it again. No trouble. The tow truck pulls up.

My car started one minute before the tow truck got there. Lovely.

He tells me he'll have to charge me $35 for coming out and asks if I want him to follow me home to make sure the car gets there. I gladly accept his offer and when I get home I try a couple more times to start it. It works fine. I gladly pay him the $35, happy that I will not have to figure out how to get around sans car and that I will not have to pay to have it fixed tomorrow.

Now it is 11:30, the service at my church is almost over and I am sitting at home posting on Blogger.

At least, as I was telling my neighbor when I got back here a while ago, this happened on this beautiful spring-like day rather than on last week's cold, damp, rainy Sunday morning. I can sit in my car for over an hour in 60 degree, sunny weather and still be happy. Had this happened last week I would be in a terrible mood.

In case you didn't know I was strange...

2009-03-07T17:14:00.007-05:00

I'm getting a new phone (touchscreen PDA, be jealous) on Monday and was reading the user guide and realized how amusing the safety precautions would be if one were to replace "phone" and "battery" with "baby" and "diaper". Also I discovered the second page of precautions and have replaced "memory card" with "brain". Here is the result:

Safety Information

Read these simple guidelines. Breaking the rules may be dangerous or illegal. Further detailed information is given in this user guide.

Never use an unapproved diaper since this could damage the baby and/or diaper and could cause the diaper to explode.
Never place your baby in a microwave oven as it will cause the diaper to explode.
Do not dispose of the diaper by fire or with hazardous or flammable materials.
Make sure that no sharp-edged items come into contact with the diaper. There is a risk of this causing a fire.
Store the diaper in a place out of reach of children.
Be careful that children do not swallow any parts such as rubber plugs (ears, connection parts of the baby, etc.). This could cause asphyxiation or suffocation.
Unplug the power cord and charger during lightning storms to avoid electric shock or fire.
When riding in a car, do not leave your baby or set up the hands-free kit near to the air bag. If wireless equipment is improperly installed and the air bag is activated, you may be seriously injured.
Do not use a hand-held baby while driving.
Do not use the baby in areas where its use is prohibited. (For example: aircraft).
Do not expose the diaper charger or adapter to direct sunlight or use it in places with high humidity, such as a bathroom.
Never store your baby in temperatures less than- 4°F or greater than 122°F.
Do not use harsh chemicals(such as alcohol, benzene, thinners, etc.) or detergents to clean your baby. There is a risk of this causing a fire.
Do not drop, strike, or shake your baby severely. Such actions may harm the internal circuit boards of the baby.
Do not use your baby in high explosive areas as the baby may generate sparks.
Do not damage the power cord by bending, twisting, pulling, or heating. Do not use the plug if it is loose as it may cause a fire or electric shock.
Do not place any heavy items on the power cord. Do not allow the power cord to be crimped as it may cause fire or electric shock.
Do not handle the baby with wet hands while it is being charged. It may cause an electric shock or seriously damage your baby.
Do not disassemble the baby.
Do not place or answer calls while charging the baby as it may short-circuit the baby and/or cause electric shock or fire.
Only use the diapers, antennas, and chargers provided by LG. The warranty will not be applied to products provided by other suppliers.
Only authorized personnel should service the baby and its accessories. Faulty installation or service may result in accidents and consequently invalidate the warranty.
Do not hold or let the antenna come in contact with your body during a call.
An emergency call can be made only within a service area. For an emergency call, make sure that you are within a service area and that the baby is turned on.
Use accessories, such as earbabys and headsets, with caution. Ensure that cables are tucked away safely and do not touch the antenna unnecessarily.

Brain information and care

If the damage cannot be fixed, format the brain.
The brain cannot be used for recording copyright- protected data.
Do not write forcefully on the memo area.
Carry and store the brain in its case.
Do not allow the brain to get wet.
Do not leave the brain in extremely hot location.
Do not disassemble or modify the brain.

I should update this, eh?

2009-03-07T15:42:00.002-05:00

Ok, so here is the quick run down of my life (not involving pizza, king cake, or computers) over the past few months...

Finished the job at Kilbourne Park Baptist as the music intern there in December and spent about a month and half trying to find another job.

Took my oral comprehensive exam in the middle of February and failed it.

The week before I had gotten the call from the chairperson of a local church's personnel committee wanting to set up a meeting with me and the committee, so Thursday of the week I failed my orals I met with them and on Friday they called offering me the position! So, I am once again employed.

The Saturday before Mardi Gras I had a Mardi Gras party at my place which lasted until much later than I thought it would (the next morning being my first Sunday at the church this was, quite possibly, not the smartest move staying up until 3:30 and all) and had another failed king cake. (Ok, I lied about there being no king cakes in this post. King cake one this year was barely acceptable, king cake two was a miserable failure. I made an experimental batch of mini king cake dough balls which the last two worked out well so I used the last modification of the recipe for the two I made for my party, which both failed. I am at a loss to explain the behaviour of my king cakes since I moved to Columbia--I never had trouble with them in Augusta.)

Two Sundays have passed now at the church and things are going pretty well. I've even almost gotten Easter planned! The rest of Lent, however, is still not planned.

I am taking two online classes for library science and that is all I am enrolled in for credit. Singing with two ensembles at the school (concert choir and grad vocal). I am also still sing with Colla Voce.

I have yet to get my orals rescheduled--it was tough getting the first one scheduled--so I will not be graduating in May but in August. I hope. Then I will begin working on my MLIS (professional student here).

So, that is about all for now.

A Tale of Two Pizzerias

2009-03-01T22:48:00.002-05:00

Tonight my friend Tim and I had an interesting experience that allows me to give contrasting examples of good and bad customer service in the restaurant industry. We both love a terribly bad breath inducing pizza: sausage with garlic. There are two places in town we get this pizza, both have excellent pizzas.

Back in the fall, after one of our friend's had completed his grad vocal recital, we went to one of these places and the two of us ordered said pizza (as two single guys we can partake in the consumption of what is probably the equivalent of half a head of minced garlic on a pizza with no worries).

When everyone's food came out the waitress brought us a pizza which had sausage and pepperoni on it. We pointed out the fact that there was pepperoni and no visible garlic. The waitress told us it was probably under the cheese and for us to try some and let her know when she came back if there really was no garlic on the pizza. We did, and there was none. We sent back the pizza, minus two slices (because we each tried one as per her orders) and then preceded to wait another 20 minutes, while all our friends enjoyed their meals, for our pizza to come out.

Twenty minutes pass and our new pizza comes out. She sets it down, proudly, and we look and see that there is, indeed garlic on the pizza. However, there is also no sausage, only peperoni. Rem member, we never asked for peperoni. In fact, Tim doesn't really like peperoni. We point this out to her and inform her that we will gladly keep this pizza in order that we may at least have some dinner this evening but feel that we should be compensated for never having gotten the wrong order.

We finish our meal and the bills come. We get a check with both pizzas charged and one is marked at half price. We complain, since we only ever ordered one pizza and never actually got the pizza we ordered, and sent back the first incorrect one. She gets her manager to come talk to us rather than try to clear up the issue. The manger accuses us of eating both pizzas and informs us that it obviously wasn't her mistake since she had been working there for five years. Aside from the fact that longevity at a job doesn't make one immune to mistakes--even if you have a doctorate in your field you are still likely to make a mistake from time to time--we argue that it was obviously someone's mistake and not ours. We manage to get them to remove the first pizza from our bill and get half off our second (though still incorrect) pizza. We leave feeling cheated and upset for being chastised by the manager, and embarrassed for causing a scene in front of all our friends.

Tonight we went with some friends to establishment B that we get this wonderful, smelly pizza and order one to split. When the orders come out the waitress points out that somehow the order got messed up and the kitchen put onions rather than garlic on our pizza. She offers to leave the incorrect pizza for us and informs us that she has put a corrected order in and will bring it out as soon as it is ready. We laugh, and inform her of the above story and ponder why it has suddenly become impossible for us to get this pizza prepared correctly. We eat the mistake pizza happily, staving off hunger and are saved the annoyance of having to watch friends eat happily while we starve because of a mistake that was not our own. Shortly the corrected, and even upgraded in size pizza arrives and we enjoy this one very much. We leave, each with take-out boxes, happy.

Now, neither of us has been back to establishment A since the incident back in the late fall, and we have no plans to go back any time soon. We will readily go back to establishment B any time in the near future.

The cost for each place was probably the same, they each made two pizzas for us (actually, the cost for establishment B was a little higher since they upgraded our second pizza). However, the cost in the long run is that establishment B has kept two customers and has managed to make them even more loyal. Establishment A drove off two semi-regular customers and generated a good bit of negative word-of-mouth publicity in the fall from a whole table full of people. In addition to this, the waitress helped herself out in that we both tipped over what we normally would have tipped (I tend to not under-tip based on bad service but I will over-tip based on exceptional service).

I'll leave you to figure out the moral of this story, I have pizza in the fridge to attack.

King cake!

2009-01-10T23:27:00.002-05:00

Here are pictures of my first king cake of the 2009 season. This was working off of my newly formalized and slightly modified recipe. I ended up adding more flour because though the recipe should only have been around 50% hydration it looked more like 80%... I'm not sure if I mis-measured something or if the flour was just particularly non-absorbent, I'll try one more before I make the change in the recipe.

I've also posted a picture of the original recipe, scribbled on notebook paper and stained with oil, complete with the sticker from one of the lemons I used one year (one lemon produces more than enough zest and just enough lemon juice for the cake, cream cheese filling, and icing and you should always use fresh lemons for such things rather than those lemon-shaped bottles of stuff).

King cake season!

2009-01-08T17:44:00.002-05:00

King cake season is here! Another Mardi Grad season has begun and today I have finally formalized my king cake recipe, which for the past three years has been pencil scratch ingredients with no directions on an oil soaked sheet of paper with a note from my grandmother on the back and the sticker off a Sunkist lemon on the front and various calculations from an earlier attempt at converting it to weight measurements scribbled all around it.

Today I sat down and looked at it and made it work. I have typed up a nice neat three page recipe with all the measurements in US standard cooking measurements and in weight by grams! (Weight by gram is a much more accurate way to measure flour and make bread.) I figured out the baker's percentages and figured out the hydration of the bread! I consolidated fillings and the icing onto one page, including cream cheese, chocolate ganache, and brown sugar with pecans. I also wrote out step-by-step directions!

I made one change, using water and powdered milk rather than milk, because I changed the recipe to use a poolish (preferment) and I don't want half a cup of milk sitting around for a few days. The new and improved recipe will be attempted this weekend for Sunday dinner at my parents house and if all goes as planned I'll make it available here. (Or I may just ask you to contact me by e-mail so I can send the nicely formatted file rather than making it work in HTML and the confines of my blog layout.

More on computers

2008-09-25T01:26:00.002-04:00

Looking around I see a few others saying the same things, while some seem to be saying that the touch-screen laptop will be the way to go. I don't see that happening, I think that tactile response is a key element to typing quickly and accurately. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am the 21st century equivalent of the typists of the past century who resisted electric typewriters with their far easier to press keys. Perhaps the future is in keyboard-less systems utilizing touch-screen keyboards and handwriting input. Perhaps I am the old guard and will resist such changes as generations past have done with other advances that eventually took over. Perhaps the Iphone and its like are, indeed, the future.

The only way I'll ever be fully onboard for touchscreen tech as a daily interface for regular computing is if they can find a way to do away with the biggest issue: Oily finger smudges all over the screen. It would drive me insane.

On the future of computing

2008-09-24T23:10:00.005-04:00

Ok, probably nothing profound or new will be covered here. Just that I've been thinking about where computers will be in the next few years and what I'd like to see happen.

Seeing the new tiny laptops (Acer Aspire One, Asus Eee PC, HP Mini-note, Sylvania Meso) on the market has been encouraging to me. While it is fun to have a laptop with the power of a desktop and a 19" widescreen high res monitor for playing games and watching movies on it just isn't the best deal in the world.

To get the computing power of a desktop system in a laptop you sacrifice portability and battery life, two of the key ingredients to making a laptop worth having, and often to keep it running cool enough you sacrifice performance on the top end.

These small laptops, most with a 9" widescreen display and weighing just over 2lb are truly portable. With my laptop and it's 15.4" widescreen display, weighing in at over 6lb I really have to want to have it with me to pack it up and lug it around. More often than not I'll leave it at home because I don't want to carry it around all day and I can't leave it in the car where the sun will possibly destroy the fragile hard drive.

These tiny machines have battery life claims of from 3 to 8 hours, versus the 2.5 hours claimed by my Aspire. (Of course battery life claims never match up with real-world usage. I get about an hour and half out of mine when running in reduced power mode.)

One of the things that makes these extended battery life claims possible is the fact that so many of these small machines are using solid state drives rather than magnetic hard drives. This is a great advancement for a few reasons: weight, battery life, heat reduction, noise reduction, and durability.

Magnetic drives are heavy, loud, power hogs that generate a considerable amount of noise and heat. Solid state drives cut down on all of these areas since they have no moving parts to draw power or generate heat and noise. Also, since they don't generate the heat of a conventional drive the system requires less cooling power. Since there are no moving parts there is much less potential for a jolt to cause a hard drive failure. Of course the drawback is that they don't come near the 1 terabyte capacity of today's magnetic drives.

This brings me to one of the failings of the systems I see on the market now. Of the systems I mentioned earlier none of them have ESATA. Sure, you can use USB to connect an external drive but it is limited to 480Mbit/s to SATA's 3Gbit/s speed. Yes, USB 3 will be 4.8Gbit/s but it isn't out yet, and SATA 3 with 6Gbit/s is supposed to be out soon. So for speed, ESATA is the ideal method of connecting an external drive.

If these small systems would rely on a small SSD (solid state drive) and include an ESATA connection you would be able to have your cake and eat it too: The benefits of solid state on the system and the ability to connect your gargantuan multi-terabyte drives full of video and music externally while still getting internal speeds.

Now, running a Windows system on something with 20 gigs of space might be hard to do (and some of the SSDs on these small systems are even smaller, 4 or 5 gigs) which is why many of them are turning to Linux. With Ubuntu the world of Linux has become much easier for the novice to navigate and these operating systems tend to be a lot leaner than Windows.

So, to me, the perfect laptop would look something like this:

7-9" display, low-power processor to cut down on battery usage and heat, a good-sized SSD, USB, ESATA, a multicard flash reader (always a handy thing to have for digital photography and you can stick a flash card in for more storage if you need it), wifi, lan, VGA (or DVI and possibly s-vid), power, a touchpad, keyboard, 1-2GB ram. Minimal graphics, again cutting in heat generation and power usage. Optical drive? Nope. If you need that you can connect it via the ESATA or USB ports. With a Linux operating system all the software you could ever need on a system like this is downloadable anyway.

This machine would be used for internet, word processing, and simple things like that. It would have enough memory to view videos if you really wanted to, but not enough power to run high-end video games. If you need a bigger screen you have the VGA or DVI outputs.

I'd love to see this get under 2lb, into the 1lb range, but even 2 is great. With the durability of SSD and the extended life of the battery this would be ideal for taking on the road or to class. A student could bring just the laptop and no power adapter with them in the same bag as all their books and a business traveler could fit this into their brief case as well.

The systems that are on the market with similar capabilities to these are currently in the $350-$550 range (HPs machine is over $700 but they are clinging to the magnetic drive and Windows OS) and I can imagine something like this reaching the $200 mark. This would allow users to buy a portable computer for portability and durability and leave them enough budget to spend on a higher-end PC with all the top of the line components for gaming and video. And of course, I am of the opinion that you should build that yourself, ensuring upgradability in the future.

That is, assuming you still need a "desktop" system. The casual user probably doesn't use a desktop rig as gaming or for media and as such they would be perfectly happy with the low-power laptop. But for those of us who still like their high powered media systems we can afford one after buying the $200 portable system.

I also long for the day when the home theater PC is fully in the mainstream. If I could have a small, ultra portable laptop and a high-powered multimedia pc I would be happy. (and a 19" monitor for the laptop and a huge flatscreen for the HTPC!)

I hope this is where we are going. I don't think the Iphone is the answer. They are nice, but I don't think they are the ideal interface for the things we use computers for. They are just too small. They have a use but I don't see it replacing laptops. Maybe I'm too short-sited in that, I don't know.

Addendum:
Oh, and I fail to see why you wouldn't be able to achieve passive cooling in a system like this. With the SSD storage and reduced processing and graphics capabilities and the advances in passive cooling lately thanks to the advent of HTPCs and the desire to keep them quite, it should be possible to at least have a fan that only comes on some of time if not to be able to eliminate the need for a fan at all.

Addendum 2.0:
I forgot to mention the possibility in the future of using OLED technology to prolong battery life and further decrease thickness by eliminating the need for a backlight in the display.

On the inauguration of a new pan and the creation of a new dish (in the culinary sense)...

2008-07-11T23:21:00.002-04:00

So I found out a couple of days ago that some of my friends from the music department were getting together tonight for a pot-luck dinner on behalf of a couple who are moving to New Mexico for a teaching position. I wasn't sure what I would be able to fix since yesterday would be shot with class and rehearsal and today I had class also.

Some time last night I settled on making a pasta dish using penne and pesto. Today on the way to and at the grocery store I became a bit more creative. What took shape in my kitchen was different, still, than what I had envisioned while procuring the ingredients and was very tasty. The dish is something of my take on the traditional Prosciutto e Mozzarella dish, thinly sliced prosciutto served with fresh basil and mozzarella cheese.

Unnamed pasta dish

Ingredients:

1/4 lb pancetta, diced (I got a slice about finger-thick)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup onion, coarsely chopped
1 each red and green bell peppers, julienned (I cut the julienned slices in half lengthwise)
2 large tomatoes (or four romas), peeled, seeded, and diced
1 cup white wine
3 Tbsp salted butter
1/4 cup milk (the milk and butter were actually a substitute for cream which I did not have when I decided at the last minute to make this a cream sauce)
2 tsp cornstarch in a small amount of cold water
1 lb pasta (I used penne, I like the thickness of it and it holds a light sauce like this well)
8oz mozzarella, cubed
1 cup (approx) fresh basil leaves, washed and sliced
Extra virgin olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions:

Place pancetta in a cold pan and turn to medium heat. Once fat has rendered add garlic and onion to pan, sauté for a few minutes and add peppers. Sauté until tender. Remove ingredients from pan and set aside.

Return pan to heat, deglaze pan with white wine, add tomatoes and simmer for a few minutes. Lower heat and add butter and milk (or cream) stirring well to avoid clotting. Add cornstarch and remove from heat.

Begin preparing pasta about 10 minutes before the sauce will be done (about the time you add the peppers). At this time you should also put the cubed mozzarella into the freezer (this prevents the cheese from turning into a stringy mess). Have a large pot of boiling water ready and salt it generously with kosher salt (the water should taste like sea water says Alton). Boil the pasta (provided you are using penne) for 10 minutes, remove from heat and drain.

Toss pasta in a large bowl with extra virgin olive oil and mozzarella. Add all other ingredients to pasta and toss to coat. Serve warm or cold.

In all honesty, you probably won't need any salt, the saltiness of the pancetta is perfect for this dish. You also might not need any more oil in the pan for the sauté. but if you feel that you do just add some light olive oil (extra virgin will burn).

This was the first major dish I cooked in my brand new 12" frying pan (stainless with an aluminum core) that I bought a couple of weeks ago. The first really nice piece of cookware I have owned (not quite as nice as the stuff Gordon Ramsay recently came out with, but nicer than any of the stuff I have had, very heavy) and it did a wonderful job with this meal. I cooked a piece of chicken in it last week just to have used the pan.

I hope I didn't forget any ingredients or steps in this writeup...

Savory Herb Cheesecake 1.1

2008-07-04T01:09:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow we are grilling salmon for the 4th and I thought that my cheesecake would pair wonderfully with that (I also wanted to show my newest creation off to my family). Rather than doing minis I decided to do the full size deal. I also realized that the 11oz package of goat cheese I bought was $11 something instead of $1 something and the price sticker had been torn. So I went with the 5oz package instead. Why is the small package not half the size of the large is my question?

So I used the same 24oz of cream cheese and 8oz of sour cream, just changed to 5oz of goat cheese. I used 4 eggs, and about the same amount of herbs (probably closer to a full cup, though not packed, of chopped herbs). I did increase the balsamic to about a quarter cup, perhaps a little more. The batter had a rich cream color rather than white.

Baked it for an hour in a water bath (no spring form pan here, I use a 3" deep 9" cake pan lined with parchment on the bottoms and sides, i'll flip it upside down onto a flat plate and then flip it again onto the serving plate, spring forms leak if you cook in a water bath but water baths are the only way to ensure that the cake doesn't crack, though the flour helps) up to the edge of the batter level in the pan. Let it cool in the oven for 15 minutes with the door cracked. Now it is cooling overnight in the fridge before I remove it from the pan.

The surface of the cake looks beautiful, much better than the minis do, they always get wrinkly. Looks aren't everything but they are something.

Tomorrow we shall see how it worked out with the modifications!

2008-06-30T03:34:00.001-04:00

My latest cooking adventures

2008-06-29T00:20:00.004-04:00

...for the dinner tomorrow night at the church.

I decided to make mini cheesecakes, but rather than just doing sweet ones I decided to try some savory ones as well. I searched around and found a few recipes but in the end I modified a basic cheesecake recipe.

I used cream cheese, but left a quarter of it out--replacing it with sour cream and goat cheese to give it some bite. I gathered some basil, oregano and mint from my pots outside and chopped them up fine, mixing them into the cheese along with some black pepper and some balsamic vinegar.

The crust, which is a little too crumbly to be eaten neatly so it is good that this is a dinner and not just a snack event, I made with Triscuit crumbs, butter, a touch of sugar (about a third of what would go into a sweet cheesecake crust) and chopped up rosemary (again, from my pots). I blind baked the crust, but with less sugar coupled with the fact that triscuit crumbs aren't as absorbent the crusts didn't get hard. I'll have to experiment, either with bread crumbs or just abandoning the crumb crust and going with a pastry crust next time.

**update: After cooling for a couple of hours in the fridge the crust is a lot more solid and less messy.**

Other than the crust they turned out great, and the crust is tasty, just too messy.

I ended up adding some cocoa powder and chocolate chips to half of the sweet mix.

Mini Savory Herb Cheesecakes

Yield: 2 dozen 2.75" muffin sized cheesecakes

Crust:

1 1/3 cups Triscuit crumbs
4 tablespoons butter, melted
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped

Cake:

24oz cream cheese, softened (3 packages)
8oz sour cream
11oz goat cheese, softened
4 large eggs
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup fresh herbs, chopped (I used basil, oregano, and mint)
Fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar (I might try 2 next time)
3 tablespoons AP flour

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325f. Combine crust ingredients and mix well. Place muffin papers in tin, spoon mixture into liners (1 heaping teaspoon per cup) and press down. Blind bake 10 minutes. (Blind baking is the act of baking a crust sans filling.)

Mix cream cheese, sour cream, goat cheese, flour and eggs until smooth and fluffy. Fold in remaining ingredients. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin papers with baked crusts, a heaping tablespoon should fill the cups, fill to the top. Bake at 425f for 20 minutes, remove from oven and cool overnight.

Mini Cheesecakes

Yield: 6 2.75" muffin sized cheesecakes
(This the other recipe could obviously be scaled back, but as it is it uses standard sized packages of sour cream and goat cheese)

Crust:

1/3 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 tablespoons sugar

Cake:

8oz cream cheese, softened (1 packages)
1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
2 teaspoons cornstarch

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325f. Combine crust ingredients and mix well. Place muffin papers in tin, spoon mixture into liners (1 heaping teaspoon per cup) and press down. Blind bake 5 minutes. (Note the time difference between the first recipe, these crusts will burn if you leave them in much longer than 5 minutes!)

Mix remaining ingredients together until smooth. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin papers with baked crusts, a heaping tablespoon should fill the cups, fill to the top. Bake at 425f for 20 minutes, remove from oven and cool overnight.

I forgot until just now that I usually add fresh grated nutmeg to this recipe, sad. A teaspoon should be fine in the above recipe. I added about a quarter cup of cocoa powder and some chocolate chips to a double recipe of the above. Could probably have added a little more cocoa powder. If I were planning ahead I would have used chocolate graham crackers for the crusts to do chocolate cheesecakes with.

He is risen!

2008-03-23T23:14:00.003-04:00

Moving!

2008-03-18T18:08:00.002-04:00

I signed a lease today on an apartment in Columbia! I'll be able to move in on Friday, though I probably won't have time to move all my stuff until next week, but I'll get enough stuff there to make it liveable this weekend (air mattress, cooking stuff, a chair of some sort) so that I can go ahead and enjoy the luxury of living not an hour away from school and work. Yay for apartment.

Tonight I get to scream Beethoven's 9th symphony again. Not looking forward to it or to sitting on the bleacher/ricers we are using for the first three movements. We had nice, comfy plush choir loft chairs in Augusta.

Thursday night is Maundy Thursday and I am at the first Baptist church I've known of to have a service for Maundy Thursday, I was very excited when I found out they do this. I managed to pull a service together in two weeks and hope it will come off well. I think it will.

Anyway, that is the news from here.

Snow!

2008-03-08T08:59:00.002-05:00

I have been in Louisville, KY since Wednesday for the American Choral Director's Assn convention (ACDA). Well, we were staying near Elizabethtown at my friend's parents house and driving in for the convention. Of course last night we got snowed in in Louisville. Woo, fun. It is cold.

Vote!

2008-03-02T15:46:00.002-05:00

No, this is not about the Primaries or November. There is plenty of coverage of that elsewhere. This is about the vote this morning at Kilbourne Park Baptist Church in Columbia, SC. Today the church voted to call me as part-time music director!

If you aspire to become a music director I suggest that you try not to start a new job in March of a year with an early Easter. I have less than a month to plan Palm Sunday, a Maundy Thursday Tenebrae service, a sunrise service for Easter morning, and Easter morning! Simplicity is our friend in this.

Anyway, that is the news. Soon I will be moving (provided I find a place to rent for cheap). I have said sad farewells to everyone at First Pres thorough e-mail and facebook. I will miss that church greatly.

But, I am glad to be here.

Well, one more week.

2008-02-18T20:42:00.003-05:00

So it seems that since the deacons weren't able to meet until today to make their vote the announcement for the church to vote will be made this coming Sunday (which will function in the way that things USUALLY work in the Baptist church, as my "introduction" to the church I will have now been doing music at for nearly a month) and then they will vote the FOLLOWING Sunday.

This is going to make for fun times getting ready for Easter which will be only a couple of weeks away from my becoming the actual music director...

What has Nick been doing lately?

2008-02-18T14:55:00.002-05:00

Just in case any of you haven't heard from me by now about happenings in my life of late: I have been talking with a church in Columbia, SC since before Christmas. I met with the personnel committee in early January and then the first two Sundays of February I lead the music in the services (and rehearsed the choir the two corresponding Wednesdays) on a trial basis.

This past Wednesday the personnel committee voted to recommend me to the deacons and the deacons will be meeting tonight. All things going positively (and I fail to see why they would not) I will be leading the services again this coming Sunday and then the congregation will vote.

I plan to move up here when this happens, since I am tired of the two hours of driving five days a week and would hate to add another day on (and the whole point of getting a church job in Cola is to be able to eliminate said drive), so this timing hopefully will work out wonderfully: if I can secure a place of residence by the start of March I will be able to move in during our spring break (the second week of March, I will have just returned from the ACDA convention in Kentucky).

So, that is what is up. In other news, I'll be conducting my recital in mid April. Everyone should come, regardless of where you live and what other obligations you may have. I demand it.

In singing news, I've added to my schedule this semester singing with the jazz vocal group Carolina Alive (a couple of you got random calls from my psycho cellphone Friday and got to listen in on one of our rehearsals) and a men's ensemble for my friend Adam's recital. (In addition to Concert choir and Grad Vocal) The first Saturday of this month I sang with the Augusta Chorale one more time as they joined the Augusta Symphony for Beethoven's 9th. We sing it here at the school on the 18th of March so I got a bit of a head start on people here.

And since I mentioned it, in case any of you have gotten mysterious calls from me lately where I do not talk it is because my phone has become possessed or developed AI and decides I need to call people at random times when I am not using the phone. I suspect it has to do with my Bluetooth earpiece (maybe it has something to do with the Archangel Network? That reminds me, I need to stick those three eps of Doctor Who onto a DVD for my friend Clay...)... Anyway, I am sorry if it disturbed anyone. Hope those of you who heard the rehearsal Friday enjoyed it.

Coffee, bread, and soup! And a (unrelated) job!

2008-01-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday after lunch I set up for roasting with the bread machine. Got out the scale, thermometer, bread machine, heat gun, a fan, colendar, my OveGlove, gloves, a notepad, pencil, power strip, and the coffee beans.

I set up on our patio, using one of the picnic table benches as my base of operations. Plugged everything into the power strip and measured out some beans (114g), got the thermometer positioned in the roasting chamber, and preheated the chamber with the heat gun. Then in went the beans and 14 minutes later I had a temp reading of 400, first crack had just finished, and the beans were a nice light brown. Off went the gun and bread machine and on went the fan. Into the colendar and over the fan went the beans and about a minute later (it was rather cool out which helped with the cooling) they were done. Post-roasting weight was 98g. Into a mason jar to outgas for the next 24 or so hours.

Yesterday evening I started a biga (preferment for bread, grows between 3 hours and a full day before use and gives the bread a better flavour--similar to sourdough but without all that time) and started some soup. For Christmas my mom gave us all (my sister, grandmothers, and me) each a jar of "instant" bean soup. My mom and sister had already discovered that since there are chic peas in the mix the soup has to cook longer than the directions say (2.5 hours on the directions, I cooked mine for nearly 5 hours and the chic peas are still not fully done. Usually chic peas have to soak overnight before cooking and always take a while to cook). I discovered today that the mix is VERY salty, some of that could be because of the extended cooking time and resultant reduction so tonight I added more water (about half what was put in originally) and it is much more palatable.

With the soup I am eating the dinner rolls I baked today with the biga I started last night. They are a lovely soft roll with poppy seeds on top. I made 13 rolls (a baker's dozen totally by accident, the recipe said it made two dozen rolls by weight) and doubled the size of the other rolls making 6 sandwich rolls. They are yummy and soft and yeasty and have a nice crust on the outside. Very yummy with soup and tomorrow I will experience a sandwich on one.

I also drank a cup of my coffee tonight (french press style) and it was very yummy. I have ordered a pound each of Kenya AA Giakanja Co-op Coffee Mill, Sumatra Lintong Special Prep, India Monsooned Malabar AA, and Panama Organic La Berlina Est. I also got the sampler pack of 4 half pound coffees selected by Sweet Maria's (the place I ordered from). Those should be here by the end of the week or so! (Actually, I just got the e-mail from UPS with the tracking info and it should be here Monday.)

Also today I was looking around and realized that while there is a Facebook group for Coffee Kids there is no Causes entry for them. So I made one. Join it. (Search for "Coffee Kids" in the Causes application. Two causes will come up. The second one is someone who is selling coffee to support Coffee Kids. This is a wonderful thing for someone to do and brings recognition to Coffee Kids, supports them financially, and gives what I assume to be good coffee, but I felt there should be a group specifically for Coffee Kids.)

Tomorrow I actually have to go to class again so all of this fun will have to slow down a bit I guess!

Wednesday I'll be interviewing with the personnel committee at a church in Columbia (the one I talked to the pastor of in November or so and have been wondering why I never heard back from them. Yay, this is good news! Perhaps I will have a job!

Coffee!!!

2008-01-19T21:14:00.000-05:00

Well, not just yet. I finally took that bread machine apart tonight and did a little modification. I removed the circuit board and disconnected the thermocouple and heating elements and hardwired the motor so that now when the machine is plugged in the motor is on. I may add a switch later, I may not. I will probably do a little modification to allow me to use a simple digital kitchen thermometer to monitor the heat down by the beans but i will save that for later.

I'd love to go use it right now but it is a bit wet outside and I don't feel like cleaning up chaff from using it in the basement. Also the whole house would smell like coffee smoke (which would be an improvement over the cigarette smoke that permeates the house when my uncle is working down there...) if I did that.

And I think the green beans I have are probably over two years old, unless I can find the green sulawesi I think I have around here somewhere... (About a year is the average shelf life of green beans. 2-3 weeks for roasted beans, fyi.)

Addendum

2008-01-11T13:24:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot the best part: About three months ago Becca ordered us some new shirts. They came this week. I get to wear mine for one day. I made sure to wear it for my one day. It is way nicer than the 3 year old tie-dyed one with holes and bleached spots on it. The tie-dyed one was cool until it got holes and bleach spots, though.

Another last day

2008-01-11T10:55:00.000-05:00

Today will be my second last day working at R. Gabriels Coffee. I spent two years working at the original location, 2004-2006, first as a barista and later a manager. I left the first time in search of more money and better hours. I was also just tired of the job at that point.

Last year I began graduate school, at last, and had to quit the better paying full time job and returned to the coffee business, working at the VA location (and now the only location) with my sister as manager and only other employee. Now that two must end as I'll be in Columbia five days a week this semester, and hopefully will find a church job soon.

So, I bid R. Gabriel's farewell once more, and I continue my trend of the last four years of quitting jobs in January/February. I started in the coffee business in February of 2004. I quit two years later, again in February and started at Allegra. Last January brought about my parting from the print business and welcomed me back to coffee. And here is another January and another job passing.

Perhaps February will be the month I find another one?

Greetings from Edisto

2007-12-30T02:37:00.000-05:00

So I am at the beach right now, sitting on the deck listening to the waves crash on the shore and enjoying a cool night breeze (probably a little too cool for most, but the night is relaxing and besides, the unsecured wireless network I am barely holding on to only works on the deck. If I sit facing the house, or stand up).

I was online inside using dialup, but the annoyingness of having but one phone jack, and the slowness of it got to me so I began wandering the house in search of a wireless network. I found that the one secure network I've been picking up all night has the password of "admin", however I am unable to get a proper IP address on it, but in my wandering to find more reception for that one I found an unsecured network I am able to get on. And it is faster than the DSL at home (probably cable).

The beach is nice. It rained on the way up here, and it stopped raining when we got here. We were able to walk on the beach for a while and then ran to the local store for food to fix dinner with (we had Zataran's Red Beans but needed meat, got some good sausage to toss in and some brocoli to steam) and all that. The only downsides of this place are: The tap water on the island is salty and the odd assortment of mismatched pots and lids/lack of good knives.

My parents and little sisters were here in October and said the water was nasty and Brita filters did not help. They did not say the water was salty, so I just assumed it was sulfur or somesuch. When I started to steam the brocoli the water smelled like the ocean. This is when my mom told me the bad taste was salt. There are ice cubes in the freezer made with tap water and they taste like salt. The city gives away free water at city hall (probably some sort of dispenser since it is available all week) because of this, and they acknowledge the issue in the literature about the city, saying that it is good for cooking with since you don't have to add salt. Ha, what a positive spin they put on the problem!

Anyway, so here I am, relaxing and having a good time! It rained earlier tongiht but has stopped. The weather reports call for rain tomorrow then clear skies the rest of the week. We are here until Wednesday.

Happy New Year to you if I am not around until then. I probably will be around, but I may not post again until then. Have a good one!

Just a FYI here...

2007-12-29T01:21:00.000-05:00

I might not be around for the next few days. Headed down to Edisto for New Years with the fam, will be there until Wednesday. The house doesn't have internet that we know of, but there is the possibility of getting on dialup. As much as dialup sucks. So I may update from there, I may not. But if you do not see me you now know where I will be. Bye now!

Indeed, there is a lot more than "just turtles" there...

2007-12-14T10:51:00.000-05:00

A giant tortoise on San Cristóbal Island.

So I've been working here at the coffee shop two days in a row since my wonderful sister agreed on short notice last wee to work for me on Friday so that I could devote my waking hours to writing a paper and studying for exams.

Yesterday I was looking at the coffees we had since I needed to refill the light/medium roast grind hopper and found a couple of sample bags of organic Galapagos Islands coffee (all the agriculture on the islands is done organically since it is a national park of Ecuador and the focus of major conservation efforts), my favorite coffee in the whole wide world. So organic Galapagos Island is what has been brewing for the past couple of days and people have shown a lot of interest, more than they usually do when I brew it up. People are intrigued by the fact that is from the Galapagos Islands or are drawn to it because of the word "organic", and when they ask me about it I can tell them that it is my favorite coffee and my choice when I buy beans for myself (not my only choice, but my most frequent).

However, I am tired of people saying, "I thought all they had was turtles." Seriously, the islands are not populated entirely by giant turtles and nothing more. That would be silly. Stop being silly people. These are doctors and nurses, educated people, who are making the assumption that the only inhabitants of the Galapagos Islands are turtles. Ok, ok, I understand that it may seem odd that a national park and wildlife conservation area may have a fairly good sized population and a coffee export industry, but it is not populated entirely by turtle. No.

So, I've been reading up on the islands and the coffee industry there, since I didn't know much about my favorite coffee. I learned that it is a district of Ecuador, which I did not know, and that coffee is the only export allowed. I learned that, not only is it required to be farmed sans pesticides and the like, under the shade of larger trees, but the export is limited to 5000 60kg bags a year. (Though I found it interesting that one article extolled the fact that it is shade grown under orange, avocado and guava trees while another claimed that these non-native plants were one of the major conservation problems on the islands.)

There is a population of about 30,000 on the islands according to the most recent census. I also found it interesting that San Cristóbal, the island where the coffee is grown, is the only island in the archipelago with fresh water. The coffee growers are very aware that conservation, or the lack thereof, would directly impact their business in such a self-contained eco-system and seem to strive for conservation as much as anyone. In the process they make yummy coffee.

San Cristóbal Island.

San Cristóbal is the easternmost island and the second most populated. It was the island Darwin first set foot on. Two volcanos make up the island, one has been inactive for quite some time and the other last erupted in the last 200 years. These are one of the keys to the success of coffee on the island. Volcanic soil is the best for growing Coffea arabica.

A view from San Cristóbal Island.

Kicker Rock, San Cristóbal Island.

In other coffee related news, I am in the search for either a suitable popcorn popper or the right kind of bread machine to rig up my own coffee roasting rig. The former would be an air popper rated at 1500 watts with side vents rather than a screen on the bottom of the chamber and with a little modification is one of the main home-roasting methods in use. The latter would be a Teflon-free bread machine wit a metal dough stirrer. I'd disconnect all the electronics and hook the motor up to a switch. The beans would go into the bread chamber and the stirrer would keep the bean mass stirred. I'd drill a hole in the machine in order to place a thermometer and then blow a heat gun into it to roast the beans. Anyway, I'm sure you all care so much, but I won't be working in coffee in a month (5 days a week of classes, no more R. Gabriels for Nick) and will need something to satisfy my coffeegeekery. So, my Christmas break will include some time visiting thrift stores in search of these things.

In other coffee related business, I need to find out if my sister knows anything about the fairly light-roast beans in the espresso grinder; they have been creating the most amazing shots these past two days. Seriously, thick, rich, golden crema and a wonderful flavour. Mmm, lovely. I'm afraid the shots aren't going to be as good when it gets down to the new batch I added on top, beans that look far more like our regular espresso blend (a blend created by yours truly a few years back; not my favorite espresso blend but a good base for the American style drinks that drive the espresso side of our business).

And now, in addition to reading about the Galapagos Islands and writing this fairly long blog entry I have spent time reading Language Log and playing with Lite-Brite. It is twelve-thirty. Three and a half hours remain before I can leave. Sweet. Nick is very bored.

A quick word of advice:

2007-11-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

It is always a good idea to put the filter basket on the coffeemaker before starting a brew cycle. Yes. Especially when there is a spray head on the coffeemaker so that the water completely misses the coffee put under it when you try to operate it sans filter basket. Indeed.

Cold morning confusion

2007-11-16T08:38:00.000-05:00

Why is it that on the coldest days of the year I seem to sell the most frozen drinks? Most mornings I don't have to break out the blender until 10 or later, today I had 6 frozen drinks and once iced drink before 8am and it is just now 29 degrees out.

What will they come up with next?

2007-11-14T01:02:00.000-05:00

There has been a SD memory card for digicams out for about a year now that gives your camera Wi-fi capabilities. You plug it into your computer with a usb adapter and set it up then put it in your camera and you can transfer files to photo sharing services and your computer over wifi networks. Crazy.

It wasn't that great a day...

2007-11-13T17:19:00.000-05:00

I've not been feeling well the past couple of days, and road construction had my running late for class this morning. Concert choir was at First Pres in Columbia today and something or another was going on at the Koger center and I wasn't able to get a parking spot when I got back to the school of music. 15 minutes late for class, I was stressed out. Got to class and there was a note on the door that we were meeting in the recital hall, so I headed that way to sneak in late and when I opened the door I saw an old woman at the piano just finishing playing something, and tv cameras.

I immediately recognized the woman as Marion McPartland and realized she is in town rehearsing with the USC orchestra for her performance on Thursday and she must be giving a special performance for the school!

We were treated to more music by her, a question and answer session that lead to her sharing some of her life's story and inviting a student to play a duet with her (the student had asked how she coordinates the duets when she plays on the show) and then a bit more discussion, the invitation of more students to play with her which ended up being an upright bass player and trombone, and a baritone sax that came up mid-performance. After that another pianist and trumpet were added to the mix which was followed by another duet by her and one of the professors.

So while my day started off as a drag it was made so much better! Fun stuff!

2007-11-12T18:20:00.001-05:00

Hotmail vs. Thunderbird

2007-11-10T14:07:00.000-05:00

The developer of the Webmail extension for Thunderbird is wonderful and as soon as the changes Hotmail was rolling out were in place was able to get an updated Hotmail plugin out. I am once again able to get my Hotmail delivered to Thunderbird. Gratsi.

I never knew this but...

2007-11-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Jimmy Carter was attacked by a giant, swimming rabbit the year I was born.

Stopit! Hotmail!!

2007-11-08T17:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, stop trying to "improve" your stupid interface and screwing with my ability to use the Thunderbird webmail extension to check my e-mails. I have stuck with you this long just out of the desire to keep the same e-mail address but if this happens much more I will be switching to a G-mail address. So STOPIT! NOW!!!

"Male enhancement"

2007-11-04T01:52:00.000-04:00

If I never hear those two words together again it will be too soon. This in combination with the terrible whistling commercials about Bob are almost enough to make me not want to watch TV ever again.

The $9 cup of coffee

2007-11-01T02:53:00.000-04:00

So I went to get a cup of coffee and put a dime in the meter. It took me about a minute longer than the dime buys and in that minute the meter cop gave me a ticket. Blargh.

In other news: Electronic delivery of journal articles from ILL is so cool.

"Free copy of Open Office"

2007-10-22T11:17:00.000-04:00

So I got a notification last week that there was a new version of Java to install, and as a special offer for installing Java I would get a free copy of Open Office. Um, the whole point of Open Office is that it is free...

Study break for Heroes

2007-10-15T22:17:00.000-04:00

I love this show!

----mild spoilers from season 2 eps 3 and 4----

So we have our second original Star Trek crew member on board now, just as another leaves. We have gotten rid of Sulu and gained Uhura. Nifty, though sad that Sulu died.

Very nice episode tonight, except for poor Molly being locked up inside her head for the time being, and Sylar being out in the open again.

I've been enjoying very much reading "Beaming Beeman", director Greg Beeman's blog after the episodes and getting a little bit of the background on each episode. I think I found that from Real Life Comic's news feed, can't remember.

Well now I must depart the world of Heroes and return to inter-war European music history.

Things that are as old as Nick

2007-10-13T18:39:00.000-04:00

So I found the "[year] introductions" category on Wikipedia today while reading about Nerds candy and decided to check out 1979. Among the things that were introduced in the same year that I was born: the McDonald's Happy Meal, Maglite, Mello Yello, the Sony Walkman, Trivial Pursuit, and Tostitos.

In TV land we also got The Dukes of Hazzard, The Facts of Life, This Old House and the TV show/station Pinwheel which would later bear a variation on my name: Nickelodeon. A show that would later find a home on that very network also came out this year: You Can't Do That on Television. Apparently Pinwheel and You Can't Do That on TV are two of Nickelodeon's longest running shows ever.

Spidey!

2007-10-08T22:05:00.001-04:00

So I was walking through my room when a little spider ran across my path in the general direction of where I usually keep my bags... That corner of the room as now been thoroughly sprayed with spider spray now. Lets hope that the only spiders I see in this room for a good long time are dead spiders. At the very least I want them to be spiders I am sure won't bite me and cause my skin to start rotting. Yes. Dieing skin is bad. Bad I say!

EEK!!!!

2007-10-08T11:18:00.000-04:00

So this thing just jumped out of my laptop bag (not this particular one, but one of it's kind...) and ran across my hand, onto the table, off the table and onto the floor under the table where it became partially squashed by a chair and then fully and very authoritatively squashed by my foot.

Now I have to ask myself... How many of it's babies are in my bag? Where did it COME from? I don't want more, and I don't want my flesh rotting off.

Now that I look at the picture closely and think back to the horrifying few moments before I dispatched the vile creature, it may not be a brown recluse. But I'm not sure what it is. I don't know my spiders very well. The legs weren't quite like a brown recluse, and the abdomen wasn't quite so large. I dunno, but I didn't like it jumping out of my bag and onto me.

Odd, odd indeed...

2007-10-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

So last night I was thinking that we should start taking orders for whole bean coffee at the VA shop and when I came in this morning there was a note on the computer saying we are now selling whole bean coffee and have six pounds here right now. Crazy.

Stargate Atlantis season 4

2007-09-28T22:59:00.000-04:00

Wow... what a start for the new season, and what a cliffhanger for next week...

I miss having Sara to talk to about it--I don't know many other fans. Blargh.

And last week's Doctor Who saw the re-awakening of another Time Lord, The Master, and he is evil. Got another two hours before Doctor Who is on, though.

2007-09-25T21:21:00.000-04:00

Daniel freaking Jackson (Michael Shanks) is on Eureka!

How cool is that?

Of course the one person who would care has been MIA from the internet for nearly two months...

Someone tried to steal my money!

2007-09-19T16:54:00.000-04:00

I was contacted by my bank saying they needed to verify some recent activity on my account. It was a $3.53 charge to a Martin Capetz, a DUI lawyer in Portland, OR. What does someone pay a lawyer $3.53 for with a credit card number? Odd...

At least my bank finds it odd that I would pay a lawyer in Oregon $3.53 with my credit card too. The card is now canceled and a new one is on the way. Yay.

But so very, very odd.

Fun quote

2007-09-16T22:01:00.001-04:00

From a reading in my Research and Bib class on what should be included in concert programs:

"Musicians tend to be grateful to have their names listed as they themselves prefer, though in one case we denied a fellow named Boom-Boom his sobriquet."

Unhorse Shunless

2007-09-10T14:59:00.000-04:00

hard-skinned spheres the size of a mans fist.
Maybe these were the
and here is Madonette, welcome, welcome.
are just one more sentenced crook.
Who is going to carry his own pack-
males soon became manic brick makers.
After we showed them how to

extruded sharp toenails, leaped high then climbed up my clothes,
Where is the key? the man in the cage asked,
but the boy was gone.
Wonderful, Floyd muttered. It may have seemed pretty obvious to him
I took another sip of water,
wished that it was a stronger liquid.
Thanks for the job offer-but no thanks. So the men beyond the wall
top of him.
manner.
can see quite clearly . . .

That is all for today's issue of Spam Poetry.

A few random things from Nick's life of late:

2007-09-10T14:33:00.001-04:00

Wednesday/Thursday I was very nervous. Thursday morning was my first "Micro-teaching" experience in my choral methods class. We each were assigned a small segement of a lesson to work on (this weeks fragment was teaching rhythms and we each had a different aspect of basic rhythm/notation to teach) and had to make a lesson plan and teach the other students in our group this lesson. It was being critiqued by the teacher, another student, and was video taped. VERY NERVOUS WAS I. Well, I was the last of four in our group to teach, and after the first three I had pretty much thrown out my entire lesson plan and was trying desperately to formulate a new one. Thankfully we didn't have time for mine. Now I'll have to do my newly formulated one for her sometime. Also after seeing the other students screw up, get nervous, and not have things right (sorry guys if you read this!) encouraged me a lot. I felt a bit out of place, being a grad student in with a bunch of undergrads and not knowing as much as they know about this stuff.

Friday was nice, I didn't work at the VA because I had to be in Columbia at 3 to leave for the choir retreat in Charles Town this past weekend and had some things to do beforehand. So, rather than waking up before 6am I woke up after 9am and enjoyed getting some much needed sleep after the stress of the past couple of days.

We had a short time in Charles Town to eat dinner then headed for the church to rehearse for 3 hours.

8:30am I awoke and had a rushed shower and ate a dry nasty biscuit from the hotel lobby for breakfast. Yumm.

Made it through the morning rehearsal and we went for lunch, came back for a short bit more rehearsing and then headed back to Columbia. I was very grateful to be out of the back seat of the coup (roomy though it was for a coup) and in the front seat of my sedan driving back to Augusta.

Today I overslept for some reason, missing my cellphone alarm and not ever getting the alarm clock alarm which malfunctioned for some reason today. In my haste to get to class not nearly as late as I was going to be if I followed the legal speed limit I passed a Highway Patrol car on the side of the road as I was going 82 in a 70 zone. Before I even got near her, just after realizing that it was a HP car on the side of the road and not some other sort of car, I saw her brake lights light up and knew what my fate was. As soon as I was next to her and passing her (now 75, 70, 65mph) the blue lights came on. It wasn't even a quarter mile from where she had lain in wait (in plain view) to where I stopped.

She let me off with a warning, but the writing of which ate up the time I had saved in my haste. I got to class 20 minutes late. Oh well.

At least lunch was enjoyable--McAlister's orange cranberry club with their famous sweet tea, enjoyed whilst re-reading source readings regarding/from early twentieth-century composers. Schöenberg, club sandwich, and yummy sweet tea make nick happy.

Now I am utilizing the super-fast internet in the music library to download updates for my brand new XP install. An install which I am very happy with. Oh yes, that is what I did with my Saturday night. I had ordered XP Home SE last week, being so fed up with Vista that I decided to shell out the $80 for an OEM copy. I'd backed up my files on Thursday night and everything was ready Saturday. External USB drives make this process so very simple and quick. Lovely, just lovely they are! The install went very smoothly (though I had hoped to be able to back up the restore partition to DVD so I could recover, if things should fail horribly, Windows Vista (it would have had to have been absolute, unrecoverable disaster for this to happen) but the tools didn't work for that. I was able to backup the software disk at any rate (thereby giving me the ability to install the software into XP if i felt so inclined. Of course, I found out that all the drivers and Acer tools included with this laptop are designed for Vista. Acer has the XP counterparts on their website).

The above has lost all sense of flow and sentence structure. It is like a badly coded website and I am sure there are open tags all over the place. Please be like IE and ignore them. I don't want any Firefox grammar Nazis on my tail about it.

So, that huge rambling paragraphblobthing simply means this: I now am running Windows XP, it runs much faster, doesn't eat up nearly the memory (Vista was frequently ending up with as little as 50MB free ram out of the 756megs available, XP is running constantly with 300-400MB free while running the same software or more. And now I feel fully in control of my system again.

Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows in general but XP has served me well for years now, with minimal troubles. I rarely have to reboot due to a system crash or slow down. 98 crashed constantly and Vista is slow as Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

In other news: it is hot.

Goodbye.

Three cheers for Windows XP

2007-09-08T22:52:00.000-04:00

So I got a copy of XP and have done away with the Vista install on this laptop and now have XP running. Woo! I'm in the process of setting up all my programs now.

Anyone out there?

2007-09-03T17:10:00.000-04:00

Does anyone read this anymore? Moo, eh.

Alcohol rocks

2007-08-29T00:01:00.000-04:00

The isopropyl variety. I found out today that you can use it to remove stickers from books! Put some on a cloth and rub it on the sticker, let it sit a while and then do it again, peel what you can of the sticker off the book then rub the gooey bit with the rag soaked in alcohol and it comes off easy! Yay for books with no stickers.

Milk & Yellowjacket nest

2007-08-28T23:43:00.001-04:00

"Milk and yellowjacket nest it fills me up
with a yellowjacket nest on my plate and some milk in my cup."

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound]"Beep"=

2007-08-28T16:54:00.000-04:00

YES???

For some reason the install of Vista to Acer laptops (or at least mine) has this incredibly annoying system beep type beep turned ON. This beep sounds very LOUDLY at random events (such as any time I click on a filename in InfraRecorder. Not double click, simply click on. This is annoying when the headphones aren't plugged in, or when they are plugged in but not on my head. It is painful if they are plugged in and on my head...

There are plenty of other random occurrences that cause it to give off this deafening beep and I had not been able to figure out why in the world it was doing this. Now I have found out that there is a registry key to turn this infuriating "feature" on or off and at least on my laptop it defaulted to on.

Add this to the list of things I absolutely abhor about Windows Vista. Another is the fact that I still can't get it to see my XP computer on the network.

Shoot me now...

-- The End --

2007-08-24T23:09:00.000-04:00

Tonight we celebrated the end of an era.

For four years now R. Gabriels has served the Augusta area some of the best coffee around from their location on Davis and Washington Road. My sister has worked for them from before they opened their doors, moving quickly to manager position and now is in charge of one of the other two locations. I started working there in early part of 2004 and by August was a manager as well, a position I held until I moved on to Allegra Printing last February, two years later. I am now working for R. Gabriels at the VA location that my sister manages (as the only other employee at this location).

Now the original location is closing. The roadwork in the immediate area will leave the shop cut off from vital traffic flow, and the parking situation has been terrible from the start so they feel it is time to close up shop. The two other locations will still be around and there is always the possibility of a new and better location opening up somewhere.

But tonight we gathered at the shop, enjoyed free drinks and snacks, and music from some of the performers that played the shop over the years including my own sister and brother in law.

Many old faces were there, employees and customers, as well as new faces (the children of employees and customers born in the recent past). Fun was had. And a chapter is ended. Goodbye, R. Gabriels on the corner of Washington and Davis roads.

Fishes!

2007-08-20T21:13:00.000-04:00

Went to the Georgia Aquarium today with my family. Was fun. Saw lots of fish. Saw whale sharks. Saw beluga whales. Saw beluga whales mating... Interesting.

The end of "summer" draws near...

2007-08-18T16:42:00.001-04:00

Thursday will be the first day of classes for the fall term. I'm taking 20th century music history, theory, bibliography, and a choral methods class/private conducting lesson to make undergrad credit count as grad credit and help me with my left hand.

I have an assistantship, yay, which is paying for half my tuition and gives me a stipend. Also means I get a little help with the school's student insurance which is really a pretty good plan.

Yesterday went up for the first grad conducting assistant meeting and helped put music in folders down in the music library and then went out with the other graduates and Dr. Wyatt.

Today I got up bright and early (7am) to help my sister and brother-in-law move his stuff from his old apartment to the townhouse and acquired living room furniture, a food processor, and a charcoal grill. Score! Also I scored a meal at Pizza Joint thanks to the wonderful couple! Thanks guys! We had blessedly cool weather for the morning, it only got hot around noon by which time we were done moving stuff. They have about a car load of boxes left to move (and then a lot of organizing at the townhouse!).

Now I am back to working on computers -- I took a look at the systems in my parents/my possession and realized that the Compaq desktop I got from my friend Mike a couple of years ago is far better than the two computers I pieced together for them (also Compaq sadly) a while back from other systems. 233Mhz vs. 1330Mhz. Yeah, time to upgrade them there. And their other system which I built some years ago and have upgraded a couple of times for them is a 1400Mhz system lacking only in ram.

I realized when I started setting them up that the copy of 98 wasn't going to cut it anymore since MS has discontinued even long-term support for that POS. So we have upgraded them to XP home SE. XP is really the only MS operating since DOS that I have had anything good to say about, and it is a really good OS imho. Much better than 9x, ME, or Vista. I almost bought a copy for myself to replace the Vista POS I have on this laptop. Instead I bought a 19" widescreen LCD monitor to replace my 10 year old CRT which is fading and flickering more every day. And a mouse to replace the one I broke in frustration with a computer a couple of weeks ago.

So anyway, I have gotten the system set up for the "new" Compaq including 512megs ram, a DVD player, CD-rw, 46gigs of HD and Win XP. Now that I have backed up the things we want to keep off the four hard drives I've been working off of I'm going to format the remaining two and install XP again, clean as a whistle. Rock on.

After I am done with this I will put the extra CD-rw I ended up with in their other system and put XP on it. The ram I ordered for that system wont be here until Monday so for now it will still only have 128megs. Sad.

Bye now, time to make it happen!

I'm losing my memory

2007-08-03T18:08:00.000-04:00

Bit by bit I am losing my memory. Every few days something else falls off.

So far half of it is gone, about 64 MB right now are gone and 64 remain.

I am speaking of the SIMM stick I have had on my keychain for a number of years now. I am surprised it has lasted this long, some five years or so. One of the holes wore through and I had to use the other one but until last week none of the chips had fallen off. Now four are gone.

I still have the graphics processor on there, too.

Almost a week ago...

2007-08-02T17:02:00.001-04:00

my sister was married. The whole weekend was great fun thanks to all of the good friends who came down for the event. Thursday night I skipped summer chorus to help decorate the church (though the work was done by the time I got there) and hang out. I went out for sushi with my old roomie, Christopher Lovely, and my sister Fer, Jen (becca's old roomie and the wedding coordinator), Becca, Mike (the groom) and his brother Mark. The sushi was wonderful as it always it is at Matsu Sige and much fun was had.

Friday night I got to the church for the rehearsal and Mike Roderick and is wife Jen were there (Yes, two Jens and a Fer, making 3 Jennifers involved in the wedding). The rehearsal went smoothly, two run-throughs. Afterward yummy red beans and rice were had at my parents house with Mike's Family, our family (though more of his family), and the friends who were involved in the wedding. Also yummy djembe cake was had.

Our friend Haley was down for the wedding and came over friday night with her boy too and the evening was filled with music as Mike (Roderick) and Chris played and we all sang (the big hit being "I'm going back to Yarrawonga", a song my grandmother had been sent by friends in Australia. We performed it over the phone for her during the course of the evening).

The wedding day came (Saturday) and things progressed smoothly. I was there for photos before the show and at one all of the ensemble I directed was there and we had a chance to warm-up and practice--it went very well. The only hitch was that Becca and Fer forgot to get Mike's ring and Jen (Eckert) was sent to get it while the service proceeded.

After the service and reception the bride and groom went to the bride's house for the evening (to depart the next day for the mountains of north Georgia), the Rodericks departed (for the mountains of north Georgia), and then I went out with Haley and her guy, Fer, Mark, and Christopher Lovely for dinner at The Bee's Knees (great tapas bar in Augusta) and then we played games at my parents house until late.

Sunday saw me getting up for the 8:30 service which I usually don't go to when there is no choir (and I often do not go to even when there is a choir... bad habit haha) so that Christopher could get on the road (and it would have been somewhat rushed to go to the 11 o'clock service and get Fer fed and on her plane on time anyway). After church Christpher took us to have brunch at the IHOP. By 2 everyone was gone and my parents and I were left with copious amounts of cake, punch, crackers, fruit, and red beans to consume. Some of these things are still being consumed. The cake, wonderful yummy cake, is all gone.

Good weekend.

However, I didn't have time to do my stuff for school. Thankfully the class hasn't focused on discussion at all this week and only on conducting. And we didn't conduct the pieces we needed to prepare for until Tuesday, focusing on Bach chorales on Monday.

Class is over next week! Choir is over next week! Then I get a couple of weeks to prepare for the fall semester (and my first semester with a full load). I need to do the things that I planned to do during the month long break between the end of spring semester and the start of June but never did. I think that if I can get my room organized, including ripping the rest of my CDs to the computer so the CD shelf can be organized in something other than "this stack has been ripped and this stack has not" and get my bookshelves at LEAST organized better and preferably cataloged in SOME way I will be good. Also yardwork will call my name.

Two more hours relaxing in Atlanta Bread Company, two hours of choir and then home to sleep a short while before working tomorrow. I hope tomorrow goes better than last week. I have my doubts since Becca has been gone all week and the coffeeshop seems to fall apart a bit when Becca is gone.

Oi, what a morning...

2007-07-27T10:18:00.000-04:00

Perhaps since I have gotten all the bad luck today my sister's wedding rehearsal will go fine tonight?

So I start the day off being late to work because of a train (downtown trains are the bane of my existence at times...

I got to work and had troubles with the computer and ended up having to reboot. So now it is about 6:50 and I've gotta get three pots of coffee brewed and put everything out in the next ten minutes.

Then when I opened the main part of the counter and looked for the second set of keys (we have two sets of keys, one gets into the counter and cabinets--that one we keep with us, and the other opens the cash box, fridge, and closet where all our stuff is stored--that one lives in a locked drawer that the first set gives us access to) but they were not there... I called Becca who called Mary who had closed yesterday but Mary slept on peacefully, not knowing she was needed. As far as I know she is still asleep or at least doesn't know yet that we need her.

So I can't get to our cash, extra supplies, or anything in the fridge. I got Jim who is in charge of the canteen here at the VA (which we fall under as a contractor for them) to open the closet and get the extra set of keys out of the safe for me (This set only opens cabinets and the fridge). So while he was getting keys I was breaking the cash box so I could have money to operate.

Of course the copy of the fridge key he has is like the copy I had that doesn't open one of the locks even though it opens the one on the left... I don't understand how a key works differently in two identical locks but whatever...

So it is 7:30 and I haven't opened and am just getting coffees brewed and people keep asking if I am opened yet because usually we open right on time... I end up having to run with no back-up pots of coffee brewed and run out of various coffees multiple times before 9 and run out of EVERYTHING twice before then. Thankfully the ratio of rude customers to understanding patient ones at the VA is much better than it ever was at the main shop. (This is not to say that everyone at the main shop is rude, there are just more rude ones and I would have gotten bitched by at least one or two people if this happened there ever. Not so, the VA.) Everyone who was buying coffee at the times I ran out either patiently waited for a pot to brew or went off to do something else for a few minutes before returning.

The problem is that (aside from this being the morning from hell) our one Bunn brewer will only brew two pots of coffee before requiring a warm-up cycle. So it can take a long time to get what you need brewed and often by the time you have gotten one pot brewed the second pot is empty and you need to start a new one, only while you were brewing the new pot the OTHER roast also ran out so now you have two pots that need to be brewed and coffee is still vanishing. Eventually it all catches up and you run out. That is, unless you have time before open to have backup pots of everything brewed (or at least in the first half-hour of operation).

I realize this post is far more boring than the usual boring posts I make I just needed to vent.

Things have slowed down now and everything is fine. Except for the cash box which isn't feeling too good any more, and I don't have the keys that stay here and Mary's keys are here which I assume she will need the next time she works.

Nevermind

2007-07-16T22:53:00.001-04:00

It works. Somehow the switch that sets what the timer operates got switched from the outlet to the oven. I also found out how to turn whatever that switch is set to to be on.

Oven...

2007-07-16T00:54:00.000-04:00

So our 55 year old oven apparently died sometime in the past 24 hours. Blah. Down to 0 ovens, 3 burners, 0 electrical outlets (It has one, it doesn't work anymore), and 0 clocks that keep time on the stove now.

Doctor Who

2007-07-13T23:56:00.000-04:00

Tonights episode was wonderful. Shakespeare, two Harry Potter references, Queen Elizabeth I threatening to off the Doctor's head for something he said he hasn't done yet. Woo, fun!

In other news: I consumed raw fish today. Yummm. Otoro is sooooo yummy.

The "no-fuzz latte"

2007-07-13T12:37:00.000-04:00

So I just had a customer order a latte, sans the "fuzz". I am glad that she draws the line at fuzzy lattes. Fuzzy dogs, fuzzy sweaters, fuzzy blankets, and fuzzy carpeting are all well and fine but the day we have fuzzy lattes is the day I will retire from coffee (or the day I get a job in music or some job with better pay, but at least I will still consider myself to be a "coffee geek". When we have fuzzy lattes I think I will abandon coffee).

It is nearly 1pm, usually the hours between 11 and 2 drag by with excruciating slowness but today the last two hours have gone rather quickly (most of the morning, it seems, has flown by) due to the fact that I have been reading (and trying to finish lest I go into debt paying overdue fines) New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu and reading about the history of computers on a site that they talked about on Your Day (SC public radio show) yesterday (but that I had been to before). Of course, I started reading about the PCjr and finding related sites for that computer.

The PCjr was the first computer I really got to know, using it from about 1986 when my grandfather, an IBM employee, got a great deal on a couple since they had been discontinued in 1985, one for my family and one for himself. This was the computer I would use until the early 90s, to be replaced by a cobbled together 386 in an IBM AT case that I bought sometime around 1984 or so.

I have quite a romantic view of this system even though it was a failure in the market. It is, perhaps, the reason that I am such a hands-on person when it comes to computers and am not afraid to try things like Linux, building my own computers, or repairing them. I think I also loved it for the do-it-yourself following it developed in the late 80s and early 90s, allowing people to upgrade it to do things like run with 1 meg of ram (originally it was around 128k), use a hard drive, upgrade the CPU eventually to a 486 chip even, and program in BASIC very easily thanks to it's cartridge hardware based BASIC.

Another fun thing with the PCjr is that, unlike computers today that come with less and less documentation and what is included isn't all that useful from a technical point of view, it came with full manuals for everything. All nice and neatly provided in ring binders for easy reference.

The only thing I never did with the PCjr was connect to the internet—something I did do before I replaced that computer using a 1200baud modem attached to my dad's 286, using it to connect to local BBSs in New Orleans and the GNOFN (Greater-New Orleans Free Net) either directly and just living with the one hour cut off or connecting to the local library and starting a Telnet session to GNOFN and then disconnecting, allowing me to Telnet into other sites (DALnet IRC in particular) with no time limit.

When I got my 386 I ended up running DOS 6.2 and a bootleg version of Windows 3.11, a program I made very rare use of (mostly to play the Solitaire game that was included with it) because I didn't see much point in the whole thing. I had been using command line and running a single program at a time for years why would I need these windows?

That has all changed, of course. I soon upgraded to a Pentium 75 that came loaded with a bag of hell. I mean, Windows 95. I also moved to a real ISP and Netscape instead of Lynx for a web browser. I have since then built a computer in 1998 which I still use to this day, upgrading as need be. I have run Windows 98 and now XP on it as well as various flavours of Linux. I've been on the internet since around 1993 now.

I have seen the growth of the net from the beginning of the major boom in the early 90s, including the development of Yahoo, Google, Ebay, blogging, pop-up ads, spyware, Mozilla, Wikipedia, and all of that. It has been quite interesting.

What is the most interesting to me is that I have a hard time imagining my life before it all. I have a hard time imagining how I found information on the strange stuff I followed (such as the PCjr) before the advent of the internet in it's modern inception. I started out using a computer with a clock speed 4.77Mhz (in performance this was not the speed the PCjr actually got, since it had to refresh the RAM every 4th clock cycle due to its lack of a memory controller), 128kb of ram, and a 5.25" 360k floppy drive with a CGA monitor and now have two computers one running at 1200Mhz and the other at 1700Mhz, both with 1gig of RAM and over 160megs of hard drive space. One has a DVD-RW drive and the other has a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive that is almost never used. They both have great video cards (with the exception of Linux support on my laptop...) and sound cards (the PCjr had a sound chip that could produce 3 voices at a time—something that hadn't really been included on IBMs computers at the time but still wasn't very impressive in relation to other systems that were out). They both have Ethernet cards and can connect to the internet at speeds far greater than the 1200baud I first connected at, and the laptop even has WIFI (via a card which is totally unsupported in Linux at the present time...). Amazing.

Beyond thinking how useless the windows design was with it's multitasking I now regularly have multiple applications open and love any application that allows me to use tabs (Firefox, Editpad) and have been using a dual monitor setup for about 5 years now to increase my workspace and thus, multitasking ability. I have even been looking into 3d desktops such as Beryl on Linux giving such innovations as the rotating cube for multiple desktops (unsupported thanks to the lack of support for my freaking video card), and using a program called Yod'm 3D which is pretty amazing in that it just works and doesn't even have to be installed—just unzip it into a directory and run. It seems to use very little resources and is reported to work on Windows 98-Vista (it works in Vista, a feat I am still in shock at). It's got some issues that I don't like very much but I am not sure how Beryl would handle these things since I can't get it to work so it may have similar annoyances).

Anyway, this is long and boring to most of you and I probably lost everyone a long time ago. It is nearly 2pm now and I need to eat my sandwich and then I'll read for the next hour-and-a-half before I start closing.

On another note: Sulawesi Celebes Kolossi is yummy.

In going back and reading this I realize that this post only serves to reinforce the polls from July 3. *grin*

2007-07-06T09:24:00.000-04:00

"Old cities soothe and ease the pain of living because wherever you are, someone else was there before, had troubles worse than yours, and passed on. I don't see how people can inhabit spanking new suburbs without succumbing to terminal anxiety. We need the dead to make us feel alive. In New Orleans they're at it full time." (Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour)

Thanks to Rae...

2007-07-03T17:16:00.000-04:00

And in other news: I am done with History of Oratorio! Well, I need to finish up my paper and e-mail it to the prof, but other than that I am done!

Heee he

2007-07-02T17:04:00.000-04:00

My pet toilet frog

2007-06-30T15:21:00.000-04:00

So I wake up today and go to use the toilet but upon opening it I discover that a small creature has taken up residence in there... A rather large tree frog.

He was up under the rim and very hard to get at, I left him there hoping that he would swim away later. When I came back later he had moved up on top of the rim, under the seat. So I was able to get him then. I am pretty sure he was too big to fit under the seat and get out into the house. We have rather large tree frogs this year...

I hadn't seen tree frogs around here until this year. We had them all the time in the yard of the house I grew up in--little green things about the size of the poison dart frog--these we have now are like tree bullfrogs. It's crazy.

And now they have found a way into my toilet. If you visit, check before you sit!

I think that he must have come in through the vent--some other people have had similar issues and that seems to be the consensus.

Words...

2007-06-28T16:43:00.000-04:00

John Piper's site is having a book sale through today. Every book is $5. They offer library rate shipping. I bought 8 books today. :D

In other news, I gave my presentation on Pärt's Passio today! I thought it went really well, though I hated chopping the work up into listening examples. It's best heard in it's full uncut hour long length with no breaks. But, the other people seemed to enjoy it and asked questions afterwards which is a good sign. And the teacher did NOT ask any questions at the end, usually he asks questions to clarify a point or to get more information but he did not ask me anything so I assume I covered all that he wanted to cover. Rock on.

Now I have to turn it into a 6 page paper and write a presentation on Tan Dun's Water Passion after St. Matthew.

Class is over Tuesday, woo! Concerts tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon for the summer chorus.

Then a week after next I start a whole new term.

The end.

2007-06-22T23:26:00.000-04:00

SG-1. 1997-2007. 10 seasons. The final episode aired tonight.

My trip to new york in comics

2007-06-22T10:54:00.000-04:00

So Greg over at Real Life Comics was in New York earlier this week and now is doing comics based on the trip. It reminds me a lot of my trip in the spring. For instance this:

The hotel room

...and The short trip.

Amusing exchange

2007-06-22T10:03:00.000-04:00

Customer: *pointing at muffin* Is that orange?
Me: No, that is blueberry.
Customer: *pointing again at the muffin* No, that muffin right there.
Me: Yes sir, thats blueberry.
Customer: *pointing, yet again, at the same muffin* No, no this one here.
Me: Yes, that is blueberry.
Customer: Oh, it's not orange?
Me: No, sir.
Customer: Oh, you don't have any orange then?
Me: No sir, we are out of orange muffins but we do have this box of one dozen starving , crazed weasels.

Ok... So I added the weasels part just now, but the rest of it really did happen.

Milk!

2007-06-22T09:16:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know. Many of you will find it somewhat surprising that I would care about milk at all, but I do. The only thing I do not like to do with milk is to drink it plain. But I do enjoy it with additives. Chocolate, coffee, cereals...

So I'm at work today and notice that a) we have one carton of half and half and generally go through a carton and a half a day. Ok, I figure I'll just make the rest with the heavy cream and skim milk (half and half...) but then see there is one gallon of skim milk left so that could be an iffy thing too.

Anyway, I then go on with my work and eventually things slow down and I can eat my breakfast -- Muslix cereal with milk. I notice the milk doesn't seem quite as tasty as usual. Later on I notice that the milk is not, in face, Coburg milk like we generally use here. As milk goes, Coburg is pretty amazing. We had someone once order a drink with skim milk and bring it back complaining that it was made with whole. When we assured her that it was, indeed, skim she said there was no way that it could be skim and be so good. (This was shortly after we had switched to Coburg milk at the old shop.) We showed her that it did come from a carton marked skim.

Coburg milk is just that good. Now, I hate skim milk even more than I hate white milk and would drink a glass of whole white milk before I'd use skim milk on my cereal or to make a coffee drink or chocolate milk so I use the amazingly thick and sweet whole variety.

Anyway, I was just wanting to let people know that I do care about milk and I am quite picky about the milk I like (as I am with most any other product that I consume).

In other news:

Still struggling to get Ubuntu Linux to work on my laptop. Having issues with the wireless card that is in the computer as have others. If I can't get it working I'll just replace it. (The wireless card, not the computer or Linux.) Other than that most everything is working, except for the multicard reader and I could only test one type of card in it anyway since my parents have a digital cam with SD cards. I don't know anyone with other cards nor do I care since I don't use cards for anything except in that I just feel like if a computer has a piece of hardware stuck in it it should work.

Tuesday Dr. Wyatt had me come by his office to talk and told me that he would at least be able to get me a partial tuition waiver ($1500 a semester, about the cost of one class) this next year and may be able to get me a full waiver ($3000 a semester). This would involve 9 hours of work a week. When figuring out how that works out hourly it is more money than I have made before. :) ($15-$30/hr)

Then he asked if I could sing in the Summer II Chorus. Of course he asked me this after he told me he was getting me money so how could I turn him down? :) Hopefully I won't have to be up there every Tuesday and Thursday night in July, though. He said he is splitting the chorus up into two groups (it is a double chorus work), the community group and the trained singers group and that the trained singers group won't meet at the same time and it won't be a problem if I have to miss rehearsals the last week of July due to the wedding of the sister. And I asked Tim if I could continue doing the Tuesday night thing with him if need be and he said sure.

And speaking of summer chorus, last night's rehearsal was much reassuring. Tuesday was an off, OFF day for us and had Dr Krueger, Tim, and myself a little discouraged. But last night was far better than it was on Tuesday. I hope it stays better for the coming Tuesday but at least if it is better again by Thursday we won't have all weekend to forget it since the performances are Friday and Sunday (and a few of us will be singing for the mass at the church on Saturday night).

One summer term will be over in just over a week, woo! I might not even have to do my presentations the rate things are going! We didn't have class yesterday and there are still a number of presentations left to go before mine (I'm at the very end). If we do get to them, though, I got the materials I requested through ILL: Hillier's book on Pärt, the score to Pärt's Passio, and a little pamphlet on Tan Dun. (One of the few printed materials I was able to locate on him.) The Passio score is very interesting indeed, instead of using a traditional full score only the parts that are involved at a particular moment are printed, making for a very clean page.

Anyway, I'll stop boring you with all of this. I have also ordered a book for pure enjoyment with ILL. I hadn't ever really thought of ordering regular old books through ILL -- most of what people ordered when I processed ILLs at the seminary were dissertations written in German.

Windows Vista, the saga continues...

2007-06-14T16:57:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I found out that many of my problems stem not from Windows Vista sucking to an extent that I have not seen many things suck before but from Microsoft doing even more sucking than I have felt that Windows Vista was doing.

Why do I say this? My issues stem from the fact that I have Vista Home Premium installed on my machine and not Business, Enterprise or Ultimate. The ability to access the security policy control panel has been deactivated in VHP and can not be activated or installed. Instead the security changes that would be accessible through it are only able to be altered through editing of registry keys.

I have also found out that another "feature" that has been crippled is the ability to rollback a file's version in Vista. Vista stores backup copies of individual files in the same way that XP stored backups of the system configuration. This allows you to get a past version of any file you have edited back. It also takes up disk space. This has been deactivated in the lower three versions of Vista (Basic, Home Basic and Home Premium. They should be called Sucks the most, Sucks more, and Sucks badly). Deactivated? Well, not so much. Hidden. Apparently if you use the temporary "trial upgrade" thing you can access past copies of files you had edited before you did the trial upgrade. This means that while I can not access these past versions of files at the moment they are being stored on my hard drive and taking up space.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of suckage, I am sure.

I understand offering versions of the software with limitations and fewer features than more expensive versions of the software would have. However, security features shouldn't be one of the things that is turned off, and there shouldn't be disk space used up for a function that you can not access.

This little marketing scheme by MS doesn't make me want to spend more money and upgrade my OS to the Ultimate version. Instead, it makes me want to run as far away from Microsoft as I possibly can.

Microsoft, you have created another Linux user. Good job.

2007-06-14T16:14:00.001-04:00

Ok, Sibelius does, indeed, work with Vista as far as I can tell. Now here is to hoping that Ubuntu or Debian like my laptop and that I can get Sibelius to work inside an emulator.

Windows Vista Security

2007-06-14T15:40:00.000-04:00

While I appreciate all the trouble MS has gone into making Vista more secure than their past operating systems... I really, really would love to be able to change things that I want to change. I don't want to have to go AROUND things to fix them. I want to have full control of my OS and computer thank you very much Acer and MS.

So I will soon be among the users of Linux, I think. As long as I can get my wireless card to work in Linux. I'll keep Vista to dual boot in case Sibelius doesn't like Linux. Actually, I'm not even sure if Sibelius likes Vista... I should find out soon.

For now my download of Debian continues and I will soon be backing up the entire C drive to DVD, just in case. I'm also going to try to back up that evil hidden restore partition that Acer makes insanely hard to get at.

Stupid Windows Vista

2007-06-13T11:11:00.000-04:00

Well, I had hoped that the ISOs for Debian would have downloaded wile I slept last night but apparently after I told Vista not to reboot to install the updates it wanted to install it went ahead and rebooted without my permission. Bad Windows Vista! BAD! Go to your room!

We hates it we does.

I have 2 of the three DVD ISOs for it.

Stupid people on the internet

2007-06-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

It was so nice when it was very, very hard for stupid people to get online. But I had a revelation today about how important Myspace is in this new world of a massive population of stupid online. It is the flypaper of the internet, attracting the stupid people and holding them there. One day they will all be trapped there and unable to bother me

Also stupid people built Windows Vista.

Why, why are there links (shortcuts) to folders in my user directory that I can not open from my user directory (apparently I do not have privileges to do so when logged in to the account for which the user directory belongs) but I can open them from their original locations? Why would c:\users\Nick\My Documents\ (My Documents) actually be located in c:\users\Public\Public Documents\ (Public Documents) and only be able to be opened from the real location of it? Why? Why??? Why even put the link there if it isn't able to be accessed?

Summer is here

2007-06-09T17:34:00.000-04:00

Ok, so it is only 95 right now and the humidity is only 35% but it is hotter than it has been lately. And my dog smells because of it.

Ack, I forgot to get the Roundup for the yard... Oh well. I was out getting shorts because I have not worn shorts in years but since I'm outside doing yardwork in this heat I need them. My legs could blind a man, though. :D I hadn't even thought about there being Father's Day sales going on this week, it was a good time to buy men's clothes.

Got my copy of Tan Dun's Water Passion after St. Matthew today (CD), one of the works I am doing a report on at the end of the month. I really, really am enjoying it so far. Really. Really.

It is scored for mixed chorus, Soprano and Bass soloists who both do overtone singing and play the Xun, solo violin and cello, electronic sampler and 3 percussionists. The percussionists each have a large, lit bowl of water (there are 17 of these on stage in a cross formation and the percussionists are at either side of the cross and at the top of the cross each playing one), a soda bottle, "water drums" which he describes as wooden salad bowls floating upside down in the basin, sieve, water tube drums, water gong, water tube with foam paddle, water shaker (described as a long tube with water and many plastic balls), water gong, large tibetan double cymbals, smooth contoured stones from the sea or river, water phone, bass drum, tubular chimes, and timpani. I'm not sure what all of the water instruments are, if they are actual instruments or things that were created by Tan Dun for playing in the bowls of water. Also marked in the score are towels for hand drying.

Anyway, it all leads to some nifty sounding stuff. Oh, and the chorus also gets to play with Tibetan finger bells, thunder sheets, river stones, and water.

I seem to remember river stones being used in The First Emperor but I don't remember for sure.

This piece was composed in 2001 and premiered in 2002 so it is very new.

cleaning spree of boredom

2007-06-08T14:43:00.000-04:00

So I was bored and falling asleep around 12:30 and started cleaning. it helped wake me up and pass the time. 3 is almost upon me and I will start closing. Yay!

Whoa, blogger from the VA??

2007-06-08T11:58:00.001-04:00

Yeah, so I was able to log into Google today at the VA, oddness. So I'm making a post.

The last week has been so much fun for me, let me tell you! My computer broke a week ago on Thursday and I then had to deal with the long broken usb ports on my tower (the MB in that is from 5 or 6 years ago now, maybe 7...). I hadn't had any trouble with them until now because I just didn't use them.

On Monday I was an hour and half late to my first day of class--there was some sort of vehicle burned out on I-20 and traffic was backed up about 6 miles--getting to class moments before it let out. At least I was there in time to get the syllabus and my assignment.

Tuesday we didn't have class and thankfully I knew this fact so I enjoyed another day of nothing much. Tuesday night I headed to Columbia for summer chorus. Tim offered to let me stay at his place on Tuesday nights if I'd sing with them, which saves me a tank of gas each week this month so I happily agreed to it.

Wednesday after we got lunch we found out that there was no class that day (a fact I would have known in advance if my laptop was functional.

When I got home my package of computer parts have arrived (adapter to let me plug the laptop's drive into the tower so I could at least get at my data, usb card to remedy the issue that has been long-known and ignored by me until now, and a stick of ram to test in the laptop). The RAM did not fix the laptop so I was looking at possibly replacing the CPU to test it, a part that runs $100. Other than that it is possibly the whole motherboard or at the very least the video adapter which is onboard, either option requiring the repair (replacement was not to be found) of the MB. A task that one place was going to charge $500 for the diagnosis and repair job.

So rather than spend $100 that might end up being for naught or spending $500+ on a repair of an old laptop when I know they can be found in the $500 range NEW I looked for a new laptop. I found a new laptop. At Circuit City. On sale with a mail-in rebate for under $500. It was in stock here in town and the specs are twice what the specs on the old one are. It is another Acer, which I was happy with my Acer until it gave up the ghost.

AMD 64bit 2GHz chip with a gig of RAM and 120 gig HD, DVD-RW, wifi and all that jazz. And they have fixed a couple of design flaws from three years ago. And this has a wide-screen display that is bright(!!!) and crystal clear.

The downside? Well, the same downside ANY new system has these days -- it comes preloaded with a nice big wad of SATAN. (That is, Windows Vista.)

I knew I wouldn't like Vista. I didn't realize I would hate it with every ounce of my being. But I do. I hate it with every ounce of my being.

Now to figure out some way to use the restore partition on my old laptop's harddrive to be able to install XP on this system, and also to install some flavour of Linux to dual-boot into. (Something 64 bit? I don't really have much use for it but I've got a 64 bit processor so why not?) (I'd swap over to Linux all the way if I wasn't scared that Sibelius won't work well with it. Most everything else that I use is either ALREADY opensource with a Linux counterpart or there are Linux apps that do the same thing.)

Windows Vista... Ughh.... Things are hidden, things are dumbed down... They spent so much time and money making it PRETTY (options which I turned off soon as I got into it) and not enough time making it WORK well. It is silly have have an OS that only runs well with a gig of RAM minimum.

Also it is silly that though this laptop is capable of 4 gigs of ram it has two 512 meg chips to get it to 1 gig so to upgrade I'd have to replace BOTH. But that is par-for-the-course as far as prefab systems go. So is not having freaking RESTORE disks instead of the wonderful restore PARTITION everyone is using these days.

Ugh... If only it worked well to build your own laptop. My 9 year old desktop system has been upgraded multiple times now and works GREAT (except for the dead USB on the MB but that is FIXED with a card (of course the PCI slots are now FULL).

I wouldn't have spent the money to get a new one if I wasn't commuting 4 days a week to school but it's just so good to have a laptop while I am doing that and to be able to go into the library (or a coffeeshop or atlanta bread company, etc) and do all my research that way.

Oh, and Wednesday when I was putting the new USB card in my desktop I removed the secondary, unused (since I only have one monitor right now) video card but for SOME REASON this caused the primary video card not to work... I don't understand THAT at all. So I removed another unused card and put the silly secondary card back in... Whatever. Oddness.

Today I work 10 hours and then I grill. Yay for the weekend.

Laptop = dead

2007-06-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

Yeah so... I got the order from TC today, ram had no effect. I have decided that it isn't worth it to buy a $100 processor that might or might not fix it (and I am beginning to think it may be the video adapter that is out, which is part of the motherboard, which would cost $500 to fix). Instead I have started looking at new ones. I can get a better one for under $500 right now. 64bit AMD processor with 1gig ram. It's got Vista though... most anything will but... ugh.

Good news: The 44-40 pin IDE adapter worked and I have now transfered all the data off my old laptop hard drive to my desktop. The USB card worked and now I have 5 USB ports on my desktop that work at USB 2.0 instead of 2 that only work one at a time not at USB 2.0.

Class was canceled again today. I missed the first day and the last two days haven't met. Tomorrow maybe?

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

2007-06-05T01:12:00.000-04:00

Oddly, this morning as I was showering I had Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in my head for some reason and then as I was driving to school they mentioned that today was the 40th anniversary of the release of that album. Odd.

Summertime

2007-06-04T21:55:00.000-04:00

And I have school again! It's my first time doing a summer course, I've got oratorio lit this month and next month I've got conducting. I was an hour and half late for my first class today because of a horrendous wreck on I-20 eastbound just outside of Aiken... It was, I think, an RV that burned. All that was left was the charred remains of the chassis and engine. I assume it had been there since the morning since it was not smoking, and it was still there 2 hours later when I made the trip back, traffic still blocked up behind it for 6 miles.

I got to class in time to get the syllabus and my two assignments for the month, and to find out we don't have class tomorrow. I'll be doing reports on Arvo Pärt's St. John Passion and Tan Dun's Water Passion on St. Mathew. Tan Dun is the composer of the score for Crouching Tiger and for Hero, he composed an opera that made it's debut at the Met this past winter (that I saw on simulcast if you remember) and Pärt is one of my favorite contemporary composers as well. Nifty!

Got home and did the yardwork and went swimming with my sisters and Mike.

Not a bad day if you delete the sitting on I-20 for an hour.

#^%#$^(@#$&^#(@$%^&#$(%^&@#%(^&@!%(&@#$_1

2007-06-01T02:35:00.001-04:00

...

First I break my car then I break my comptuer. Do it yourself sucks.

I managed to overtorque three of the nuts while replacing my valve cover gasket on my car and snap off one of the studs... Not sure how I'll fix that without replacing the whole head... It should be possible from what I've read but I cant get the damaged studs out...

And I was installing Ubuntu Linux on a removable drive on my laptop and the windows bootloader got screwed up (always a problem). Only, for some reason I can't log into the Windows Recovery panel with my admin password...

And now the laptop won't even POST... so something is seriously wrong and I can't even get at my data. I'm used to being able to plug screwed up hard drives into another computer and go with it...

So now I've gotta get a 44-40 pin IDE connector so I can plug a laptop drive into my desktop... I'm so at a loss when it comes to how to repair a laptop, they are so hard to even GET INTO to figure out what is wrong.

So now I'm using my desktop, which I have had to update all the software on to use since it's just been serving files for the past couple of years... And I just realized it's after 2:30 and I work at 6:30.

And this computer needs a new fan because one went kaput a week or so ago.

Smilax

2007-05-08T15:45:00.000-04:00

Is EVIL! It is a thorny vine that in the wild will grow into thickets like what burr rabbit lived in, and like what birds will build their nests in to protect them from predators. This is all well and good, but when it invades your yard it is a pest.

It spreads either by birds eating the berries of the plant or through rhizomes near the surface. Apparently when it spreads in a local area by rhizome there are often both sexes of the plant present and they do not grow fruit.

These things sprout up a shoot with fleshy thorns and a few leaves at the top, they quickly grow straight up looking for sunlight. If allowed to grow to the top of the canopy they will the wrap themselves around whatever they have grown up through and become hard and woody, the thorns hardening into a sharp dangerous thing.

If you cut them off at the ground a new sprout simply comes up in place if it a few days later. they grow very fast.

The only way to get rid of them is to dig up the rhizome. And if you leave just a part of it in the ground it will grow more. These rhizomes are much like large ginger root, so you can see how it would break off if you aren't careful...

I just spent two hours in the yard digging them up. I'm sure they will come back soon. Some I was unable to get because they are growing near the root systems of trees...

I guess this is part of the punishment we must endure from the Fall...

Although, it has been said that if you cut the shoots when they are tender and cook them they taste similar to asparagus. And the rhizome is used to make sarsaparilla and other herbal medicines.

Smilax on Wikipedia

Done!

2007-05-07T23:03:00.000-04:00

My last final of the first semester of grad school was today! I think I did fairly well, I know I missed some things but overall... Having sung three seasons with the Augusta Choral Society helped me because I knew some of the literature from that!

I found out I made a B+ in Counterpoint, good stuff! And of course an A in concert choir.

Now, if I could just find out about that class for the first summer term... Second summer term I'll be taking conducting. Fall I'll be in two history classes, a theory class, bibliography, and concert choir. And I'll be in the grad vocal ensemble again for no credits.

Now I will relax and do all sorts of things like get a new key made for my car, get my tux cleaned, perhaps buy a new suit since mine is nearly 10 years old, get a haircut, do loads of yardwork, get a ceiling fan for my room, clean my room, clean my bathroom, and organize the kitchen. :D

Dinner!

2007-05-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

I spent a couple of hours getting ready for the dinner at Becca's tomorrow night. Since Fer is in town I decided that I should cook for us, so tomorrow night the Fer, Becca, Mike, and I are getting together for dinner.

I decided I wanted to grill, since Becca has a grill and it is grilling season now, and then I decided to go in an Indian direction with the meal.

The menu includes grilled asparagus marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil with sesame seeds, tandoori chicken, eggplant curry over rice, naan (an indian flat bread), and rice pudding.

I made the rice pudding and curry tonight, along with starting the chicken marinating for the tandoori. I had to make a garam masala since I couldn't find any. And I ended up just throwing some spices together that seemed similar to what the sites online had (since there isn't really any one recipe for it) so I am not sure how it turned out (it is a part of the marinade for the chicken and since I am unwilling to eat raw chicken I will not know until tomorrow night).

Tomorrow I will just have to mix up the bread dough and let it rise, marinate the asparagus, fire up the grill, and grill the foods. I'll reheat the curry and cook some rice and we will be having dinner! Mmmm...

One down, one to go!

2007-05-02T13:54:00.000-04:00

So I drove to Columbia this morning, leaving before 8am to get here for my 9am exam in 16th Century Counterpoint. It was a little easier than I had expected -- we didn't have to write any examples, only analyze excerpts from 5 masses and one motet using fairly specific questions he had written out.

I made one really dumb mistake (calling mixolydian mode lydian) and there was one question that I have heard a few others say they did not recognize the term put forth in it. There was one section that I just didn't remember the answer to. I feel better about it than I did the second test in that class. And it is over, no more counterpoint for me.

It was a good class for me, I think. Not that I really know how to write counterpoint very well but I understand a bit more about the choral technique used in that period. The counterpoint class in undergrad focused more on instrumental stuff from the 18th century and the Fux species counterpoint that Bach and everyone studied. This was more a study of what actually happened in 16th century contrapuntal composition. I think it will help me understand any choral works I may do from that period or shortly thereafter.

Now I am spending time in the library surrounded by 10 scores out of 20 that I have to know (four I already did stuff on for presentatons and one I have my own copy of, I was unable to find scores for some).

Right now I have been looking at Berlioz's Te Deum which he composed in 1849. It is a very massive work for 2 100 voice 3-part choirs (STB) and one 600 voice SA children's choir, large orchestra containing things like the ophicleide (brass instrument later to be replaced by the tuba), Trumpets AND cornets, "A lot of cymbals" (I am guessing that to be what "Grosse caisse et cymbales" means especially when followed by the parenthetical, "4 or 5 pairs", 12(!!!) harps), organ and strings (specifying 25 violins, 18 violas and cellos and 16 basses)!!!

We do not have a recording in the library so all I have been able to do is listen to short clips from each movement on Amazon. I think it is about 40 minutes long.

Good luck finding the forces to EVER do this. 12 harps! 800 singers!

A clean keyboard

2007-04-28T15:12:00.000-04:00

Is a happy keyboard?

Well, last night I popped the keys off my keyboard to clean it and then decided to go a step beyond the compressed air thing because there was all this gunk under the keys. I suppose this is 2 years worth of bread crumbs, skin particles, skin oils, and matter from micro-wormholes or somesuch that collects in dark places. To do this I took the screws out of the bottom of the keyboard and took out the insides. This consists of a small circuit board where the (X)lock LEDs are, three mylar sheets, and a rubber pad. Two of the three sheets are printed circuits, the blank sheet in the middle has holes punched out where the keys are, and the rubber mat is pressed down by the keys to make connections. Anyway, that is beside the point, I took them all out and washed the case and keys in the sink.

It took me a good while to get all the keys back on, and I still am not sure about some of the non-standard keys that i never use. But i never use them, so I don't care.

The fun thing is I can do the letters and numbers from memory. :D

It took me four tries to get the circuitry working again, I was having trouble getting the printed circuits on the mylar lining up with the contacts on the circuit board. But, it works now, and it is clean! And I just finished eating a sandwich over it so I am well on my way to getting it dirty again! At least all the hair is out. Dog hair and my hair in a big flattened out mass, eeew.

Yardwork!

2007-04-25T16:02:00.000-04:00

So I've been spending "spare" time chopping up shrubbery over the past week or so! The yard has been in a state of neglect for the past six or seven years now and the azaleas were the worst off for it. The ones in the back were in dire need of a massive cut back, one had taken root on the patio bricks in multiple places and was about 8 feet in diameter... One was all but killed off by a vine...

Anyway, I took care of all that on Saturday. The azaleas in back, all but one which hadn't grown out of control, are now just wooden branches a few feet long. Hopefully they will grow bushy. And hopefully the one that was almost killed off will revive.

Last night when I got home from school I trimmed up the azaleas in front, they were overly bushy and were making the driveway too narrow and were going to block the windows of the house. It got dark before I could finish up the front.

Today after work I did that. I trimmed the azaleas by the driveway and I cleared out the "oasis" on the side of the yard inside the driveway (it's a circular drive). I cut the seven foot camellia down to about three feet and cut out the vines that were growing in it. It is a lot more open now. I also trimmed the azaleas down and cut a few overly large limbs out of some other flowering bush/tree thing. I think I still need to cut a couple of limbs shorter on that but I managed to break the lopper I was using.

Anyway, it is starting to look better!

Beard, azaleas, pollen

2007-04-12T00:04:00.000-04:00

So lately I've been letting my beard grow out again, for the past few years I have kept it neatly trimmed but I want it to be a bit thicker right now just... because. This week it has gotten to that length where I tend to play with it a lot more, running my fingers through it and such. I love my beard.

I've taken over the yard work from Larry, the guy who didn't actually DO anything with the yard yet charged my grandmother, sometimes double for weeks he didn't even come... He basically came with his crew, blew the leaves onto the lawn, and ran the lawn mower. He even mowed in November, when the grass isn't even growing. No trimming bushes, no lawn care, just blow and mow.

So now I'm doing it all. The azaleas, which once were very beautiful, have grown into giant, monstrous, shapeless blobs of unkemptness... I'm not entirely sure how to go about fixing them. One place suggested pruning only a few branches each year, but I am assuming that they were talking about bushes that have been taken care of in the past. These have been neglected for a few years. Posts on Gardenweb seem to suggest cutting it back drastically to get it back into good shape and size. I'll keep looking.

Pollen sucks. I was really, really stupid yesterday and blew the driveway off without wearing a pollen mask. I then spent the rest of the evening sneezing and hacking up globs of snot. Yay pollen.

It has been raining today, so that should help.

However... It got dark last night before I was able to get all the stuff I blew into pile by the house mulched so now there is a soggy pile of oak squiggles, leaves, and cut lariape next to where I park...

I almost never have nightmares...

2007-04-07T18:00:00.000-04:00

But last night I had one.

I was in some opera or another and it was opening night. The first act went wonderfully, amazingly wonderfully really. Then we got out for the second act and it fell to pieces. First only one half of the curtain went out and we kept on going for some reason, and then no one could remember their lines or the music or staging, it was like we hadn't even rehearsed the second act at all.

And we had to do it all again the next day and didn't even rehearse the second act to fix it.

Crazy. I almost never have bad dreams.

Blogger comments

2007-04-05T00:14:00.000-04:00

I switched over to Blogger comments, the Halobook ones no long show up so that I do not have two comment links per post.

Dear IPod, XM Radio, and other MP3 listeners:

2007-04-02T19:45:00.001-04:00

To those of you who use the radio transmitters to send the signal from your digital music device to your car radio: Stop it.

It is so amazingly annoying to be listening to NPR on the way to, and while driving around in, Columbia when every few minutes my signal is interrupted and then taken over by your crappy pop, country, rap, stand up comedy, etc. I do not wish to listen to whatever you are listening to, please stop.

Dear manufacturers of such devices: QUIT.

Sincerely,
Nick Gosey