Useless trivia

The first recorded use of a blog dates back to 1774, when Samuel Adams detailed his account of the Boston Tea Party in a little known journal which he titled "The Boston Log." Amongst friends and colleagues he would refer to it as his "blog."

Also:
Due to popular demand for the film but governmental concern over its message, George Lucas's Star Wars was redubbed and recut by the Soviet Ministry of Information in 1981. In this altered version, Luke is reluctant to resist the Empire because he knows that their goals are virtuous, but is strongarmed into it by a conniving and cowardly Obi-Wan Kenobi, who commits suicide at the hands of Darth Vader rather than lead the rebellion against the Empire himself. Luke finally becomes indoctrinated, and leads an attack run against the Death Star, from which he does not return. The final shot of the film is of four additional Death Stars, and the implication of many more, underscoring the futility of Luke's fight against a government whose only goal is to protect its citizens. Interestingly, the name of this loving empire's weapon remains more or less unchanged, translating roughly to "Star of Murder".

Those factoids from gullible.info (no, they're really true).

So... the website for purchasing the DCI Classic Countdown tickets from is not working, but I purchased my tix directly from the theater over the phone. Downside: I have to pick them up in person and they will only hold them for 2 days tops. So - if anyone wants to order their tix over the phone and leave them in my name I will pick them up when I go down tomorrow after Conference (ca. 8pm). But you have to let me know ASAP if you want me to. Umkay? Umkay.

In other news, I have a new blog that will be coming online soon. It will be cool. Literally. I'll link it up here when it's ready.

Peace

Holy iPod, Batman!

Some of you may think that the iPod is the uber-player of digital media. Well, it was, but now it's not. It's just been trounced. Behold, the iZilla. Not 30GB, nor 60GB. Not even 100GB of iPod goodness can match this beast's 2000GB storage of digital euphoria. The best part is that it only costs a little more than 2 iPods. :) Ooh! And to top it all off, it even rips vinyl! I used to do that, but it took me a long time and a lot of equipment to do it.

Oh, and about the DCI show: yes, I think I will be trying to buy tickets for it. I'm in a serious low spot for band right now and need a bit of a pick-me-up.

Fortune:
diplomacy, n:
Lying in state.

you best go

to the DCI Classic Countdown. 12 drum corps shows on one night on the big screen!!! It's Thursday, April 27th at 7pm. Tickets are $12.50 and where supposed to go on sale yesterday but haven't yet. I'm going to the one in West Jordan at Jordan Landing. I believe thus far it's just Jon and I that are planning on going, but if enough people go (and want a ride), I'll take my parents van and we can watch some DCI vids. on the way down. Just let me know. I don't know how fast the tickets are going to go but I'm going to buy mine as soon as I can because they literally sold out every single theater they where showing it at last year. Well, have fun ya'll!! later.

Poetry

To the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean"

My Bonnie looked into a gas tank,
The height of its contents to see!
She lit a small match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

I know, it's kind of morbid, but I thought it was funny. It's my fortune of the day, y'know. :)

I concur

I concur with all jon said, including the nice date that he had. I was there, I saw the whole thing.....almost.

Woo Hoo!

Someone's alive out there! I was about to say something crass and see if anyone perked up at that, but then my conscience got the best of me. :) Just kidding. No crass-ness here.

Okay, I have to faunch for a while. I'm really frustrated with some things right at this moment and I just need to get it off my chest. First: Norton Anti-Virus SUCKS. It's a big, fat pig that uses every available system resource that it can find. It's update manager runs on steam, I think. It's freaking slow and bloated. Next, Windows Vista, the next version of Microsoft's flagship product, currently in Beta status, really sucks. It's huge, slow, and stuff just doesn't work. It's user interface is a bad ripoff of Mac OS X and it doesn't even look cool. It looks corporate and well, Microsoftian. Finally, why in the name of all that's holy and pure do brand-name computers (Dell, HP, Com[crap], Apple, etc.) not have hardware reset buttons? If the system ever becomes unresponsive and needs to be shut down, you have to hold the freakin' power switch for five seconds before the blasted thing gives up. Any DIY-ers out there have a hardware reset button that allows you to quickly reboot the machine.

*panting*

I guess the reason that I'm faunching about all this is because I just wasted the last hour fiddling with Windows Vista and its inability to determine whether a program is installed or not. I hope that when Vista (Long-in-the-tooth) finally ships that Micro$oft works out the Oh Duh! stuff.

Hey Jon, I have a proposition for you: What do you think of a community chess game on the Band Blog? Kristin and I were brainstorming some ideas the other day and thought it would seriously rock if there was a chess game or something on the band blog where people could randomly stop by and make moves. The system would keep track of the turn and the game play, but otherwise it would be totally open to anyone who wanted to play. For instance, someone could just make a move on the board and then check back later to see how others have done playing the game. There would probably need to be an option for an actual chess game where those more interested could actually sit down and play against the computer or an opponent, but the main concept would be just an open board. I recently installed a chess game on my server in which a player logs in and starts a game. He/she then waits for an opponent and is notified via email of requests to join the game. It's cool, but it's a little bit geeky seeing as it's really chess by email. :)

Anyhow, talk at y'all later!

Not boring

Gaming is really coming of age. What a colossal undertaking this must have been in the Planning and Thinking About Stuff areas.

Sorry, anypplz on dial^.

Jason, that's some no-nonsense talk about backup. I hope I can keep that in mind.

And yes, there's stuff going on in my life. Namely, I had a date for the first time in a long time and it went well, which is also good. Also, we're flying away to DC in a week and a half-ish. And there's more, but I'll blog it up when I get a bit more time.

Ok, laters all.

The Internet has become...

...a boring place. There's nothing new on the band blog as of late, so there's really no point in having an Internet connection. There are not even any decent news stories to follow.

So, to brighten up this dreary, lonely place, the next one who posts on this forum wins A NEW CAR!! Of course, I can never guarantee the state of this new car, but I can tell you that in some circles, it would be considered cool. :)

Anyhow, yeah, there's just been so little activity on here for the last few months and I'm just kind of wondering why. What's everyone up to? I know that school is dragging on, but there surely must be something of interest going on in someone's life.

Oh, I must share a fairly traumatic experience that happened to me recently, and if you learn something from it, more power to you. Okay, so last week, I was in my Database Administration class (CS3540.) We were discussing some of the finer points of backing up data in a corporate (or personal) environment. Well, I thought to myself that I hadn't backed up my schoolwork from this semester for a few weeks and it was high time I did something about that. So, I remoted in to my Windows computer at home and proceeded to back up all of this semester's work onto my Linux box, Persephone. After class got out, I headed back home to get ready for work only to find that the hard drive in my Windows computer was making a strange moaning noise. So, I tried to log in and it just froze up. I cycled power to the machine and it failed to boot. My hard disk had crashed. I took the hard drive out of the computer and replaced it with an old one I had lying around. That worked, but of course, it didn't have anything on it pertaining to my schoolwork. Fortunately for me, I had backed up all my work from this semester to Persephone and it was safe there. I took my hard drive down to PC Club in Riverdale where they told me that they would do what they could to recover my data (shy of cracking the case on the hard drive.) This was Thursday, I think. When Saturday came, they called me and told me that my data had been recovered and that I could come and pick up my new, larger hard disk with the recovered data. In all, I paid $154.xx to ge my stuff back. It was worth the cost, but I could have avoided the cost by properly backing up all of my data. So, the lesson I hope everyone learns from this is that if the stuff you have on your computer is important, BACK IT UP! And then, once you've backed it up, back up the backup. Be paranoid, but Don't Panic.

So, yeah, that was my not-so-fun week of learning the hard way about backups. Take it easy, y'all!

A website for the masses

Have you ever been really curious about what your neigbor's house is worth, but not nosy enough to ask? Yeah, me too.

So, now there is a website for ordinary people to use so that they can find the value of stationary property pretty much anywhere in the U.S. You can also learn things about the homes researched on this site. It will tell you the square footage as well as some other details about the dwelling.

The site is Zillow.com and it uses a Google Maps-type interface. It's interesting to note that your money will buy you a lot more house in Utah than it will in some place like Beverly Hills, where a modest 2,000 sq. ft. house costs more than $1M. I also found a house north of the State Capitol that had a price of over $3.5M and was over 16,000 sq. ft. It was cool!

Chao!

Spring Break...

...seems like a good time for me to have my eyes worked on. For those of you who were around, Spring Break 2000 was when I had surgery on my left eye that gave me the appearance of being in a fight with a fork. That was a fun experience. I especially like telling people about how I went back to the doctor the day after the surgery and had the operation fine-tuned. Yeah, it was cool. :)

Anyhow, I am going back to the eye doctor today to have a checkup. I don't think it'll be anything major; I just need to get a new prescription on my lenses so that I don't have such issues reading computer screens and printed text. I just think that my eyes have gotten a bit weaker in the last few years and so I need some better correction. :)

Anyhow, I just thought I'd bring everyone up to speed on my current ocular condition. I actually had a checkup a couple of years ago and the doctor told me that my left eye is still wandering a bit. He says that since I have had two surgeries on it already, I can't have any more surgeries. Drat! I'm stuck for the rest of my life being totally unable to look at repeating patterns. Going shopping is really hard for me.

Take it easy!

ps: I have created a new blog for all you Lost freaks out there. If you make it a habit of sitting down in front of the TV every Wednesday at 8:00 pm, then you probably know what I mean. Lost is the best television program ever!! If you wish to get hooked like I have, talk to me and I'll make sure that you're good and hooked. :) Jason's Lost.

My 15 Minutes of Fame

http://www.nba.com/rookies/mailbox_060309.html

Look for the King!

A thought for all

A thought from my Dad, March 6, 2006

“On the way home from Vegas I spent a lot of time thinking. I have been thinking about “treating the cause not the symptom.” It came to me that we are in a bit of a quandary. We are of great worth, if not we couldn’t become Gods. At the same time we are totally dependant on Christ for our Salvation and for Eternal life. So we are of great worth but we must be humble at the same time. Discouragement is one of Satan’s biggest tools against us. He tries in so many ways to get us to believe that we are not important, that we aren’t valuable, that we don’t deserve good things. After we got home I wrote this on the fridge…
“You are infinitely valuable. You are worth more than all the things in this world.”

The same is true for you too. My friends, you are infinitely valuable. You are worth more than all the things in this world. Pass it on.

And I'd like to thank...

...all those wonderful people at Saturn of Riverdale for making my experience there so enjoyable. Seriously, without those guys, I wouldn't be where I am today. That is to say that I wouldn't have a nice mast antenna to display my Mickey Mouse antenna balls. And it was free, to boot! All I had to do was be willing to accept an antenna from a '96 S-Series that had 219,000 miles on it. I figured that the antenna generally ages a bit better than the rest of the car, so I went for it and now I have a nice 1996 antenna on my 1999 car. :) Cheap as free!

Tootles!

ps: If anyone happens to want to donate to the $24,000 Buy-Kristin-a-New-VUE fund, we'll be accepting donations at The Stick.

Yes....but

your posts were both on the same day. If you look back, there were like 4-7 days in between some of my posts. Difference= mine>yours. The alligator of math is eating me, so I win. Hah!