Yet another quick weekend. It seems that the Tour de Oakdale is becoming common during weekends. Memorial Day weekend was not any different.
Michelle and I spent the first day of the weekend sodding those areas where the grass seed never took. We got up, got sod, and laid the sod Saturday morning. The weather forecasts told of storms for the rest of the weekend so we wanted to get it done before the rain moved in. It ended up being pretty nice for part of Sunday and all day Monday. At least we got it out of the way so we were free to do other things.
Sunday was one of those days were there wasn't much to do so we got bored. We ended up cleaning the house. Michelle did upstairs and I did downstairs. I was excited because I got to use the Dyson again. I'm amazed every time I use it.
On Monday was the Tour de Oakdale. We started off over to my parent's house. As usual we brought Anabelle over to run with my parents dogs. My brother also brought his two dogs, so we kept the human to dog ratio pretty close. Anabelle spent the afternoon running around like a maniac; terrorizing and trying to get the attention of any dog that would chase her. After a couple hours she was worn out and laid down. Michelle and I figured it's always a good thing to wear Anabelle out to exhaustion.
The next stop was the in-laws. We went to Petco before hand since we didn't have any toys for Anabelle. She didn't play with of the toys we bought and spent most the time sniffing the yard and trying to find somewhere comfy to lay down. I went out to the car and got the pet bed we keep in the back of the Santa Fe. Once I put that down, Anabelle quickly plopped down for the rest of the afternoon.
After getting home, I looked in the mirror and saw my forehead and neck a nice shade of red. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as it looked and I only got one "Were you out in the sun?" at work on Tuesday. So all in all it was a good weekend. On a side DORK note, Michelle and I have fallen in love with Sirius. We took the plunge and changed our semi-annual subscription to a lifetime plan. The initial cost was high but the break even point is 3 years. The only worry I have is if they go belly up. I don't see this happening anytime soon with Howard Stern joining Sirius next year.
May 2005 Archives
A couple things have happened in the last couple days to put me in more into the dork category. Music itself would not push me in this direction but my action do put me in the dork area.
The first thing that happened is related to a band I saw when I was in 7th grade. That band is Edsel. I won tickets for a concert from the local radio station. It was a school night so I was only able to see one or two of the opening bands. One of these opening bands was Edsel. They completely blew me away. After the concert, I spent the next couple days tracking down their two CD's. I ended up buying them from CDNow (which was taken over by Amazon sometime ago.) At that time CDNow didn't take charge so you had to place your order and then send in a check. They released another full CD in 1995 or 1996 and an EP in 1998 or so. I got the full CD but I could never justifying paying the high cost of the EP ($10 after shipping). The EP only had 4 songs on it, so I always kept an eye out for it on Half.com and Ebay.
Last weekend I couldn't sleep so I started searching for any info on Edsel. I've done this previously and never came up with any results. Most of the results came back regarding the car. I did remember that they were from Washington, D.C. so I included this information in the search. I came across a new page that listed the names of the guys in the band and a little update of what they were doing. There was a site that was linked in the article. I checked out the linked site and on the page was a contact link. Not too promising. I went back to the article and found the lead singer's name and typed that into Google to see what I would hit. One of the top results was the page with the contact link. I thought what they hey, I'll send off an email to see if this person is connected to the band to see if I could buy a copy of the EP directly.
To my surprise the very next day I got a very courteous response. It was indeed the website of the lead singer. He gave me a quick update on all the guys of the band. Unfortunately he did not have any copies of the EP I was looking for. He did offer to post the MP3's of the album and some other rarities. I quickly responded with a enthusiastic yes for the MP3's. A couple days later I got a link from him for around 100 megs of music. I just downloaded the zipped file and am listening it as I post this.
On another dork, I finally broke down and bought into the satellite radio. Target had a great deal on the receiver after a rebate and my employee discount. I haven't listened to much radio besides 89.3 the Current. I looked through what both XM Radio and Sirius had to offer and decided that Sirius had more offerings that Michelle and I would listen to.
I told Michelle that I had made the decision that we were going to get it and her response was "Who is going to install it?" She didn't like the idea of me trying to tear apart her car trying to get this thing installed. The receiver has an antenna that mounts on the top of the car and a power cord that plugs into the cigarette lighter. I got the receiver mounted very quickly since it's just a suction cupped to the windshield. I decided just to place the antenna on the dash and it seems to be working. I think we are in an area that had repeaters on the ground because the receiver says the terrestrial signal is 100%. I don't see any reason to go through the hassle of mounting the antenna if I don't need to. The power adapter needed to be hidden under the dash and I thought this would be easy enough to do. I searched the internet hoping to be able to find directions on how to remove the dash in my wife's Santa Fe. When I told her that I would need to remove her dash console I could tell she was a little worried.
It took me awhile but I finally stumbled into a Santa Fe owner's message board. I found step by step instructions on how to remove the console, so I was ready to go. After a twenty minutes of "firmly" pulling on the dash, I got the pieced removed. I have never removed a dash on a car so I was having problems with the firmly part. It took more force than I thought it would. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't busting anything since Michelle would have killed me. I got the power adapter run and the dash back together without any other problems. My wife told me that everything worked fine during her drive to work. She did run into some interference because the receiver is using a FM transmitter to get the signal to the car's stereo.
The added bonus is that I can stream Sirius to my computer at work. I can listen to Alt Nation all day long. Alt Nation plays all the best 90's alternative/grunge that I grew up with. I love it.
What do you get when you mix New Castle, listening to music, writing a web page, and a dog chewing on a bone?? You get my Friday night.
I have been using J. River's Media Center for a couple years now. The program has skinning and plug-in support. Back in college I spent many hours working on a skin that I called Simpleton. I want one thing that the program doesn't offer. In that case I wanted a slim skin. All the skins available at the time were huge. I just wanted a line that told be what song was playing and playback controls. So I spent countless hours in Photoshop Elements creating the skin. This did expose me to XML and how it worked I still haven't used it much but I have a good understanding of it.
The project I'm working on now for Media Center is s visualization. This will display the album art, title, album, artist, and a couple other random facts. The visualization is basically a HTML template so I'm trying to work my way through that. I figure this will be a little warm up for when I redo the layout of the site. I want a new layout but I don't seem to have the creativity to come up with what I want. I've tested out some new colors but I can find anything that I like. I want something in the green family, but it's either too pastel or too dark. Most likely it will be a long while before I finally decide on a new layout and I doubt anyone really reads this anyway.
More on the dork front I got a new cell phone. I have been waiting for the phone to come out for a couple months. I saw an ad in one of my smut magazines (Maxim, FHM, or Stuff). The phone I got is the Sanyo VI-2300. My previous phone was a Sanyo and I loved it. I had Sony and Samsung phones before, but my old Sanyo had the best reception out of those. As a result I am now a loyal Sanyo customer. My old phone had a cracked screen for about a year. Dust has started slowly working it's way under the screen. I saw the ad in the magazine for the phone and I immediately knew this is the phone I need.
If you haven't shopped for cellphones lately let me recap the landscape of the cellphone market. Your choices are either dirt cheap phones with low quality or phones with all the bells and whistles for $500. The only thing I wanted from a phone was a sturdy flip phone without a camera. The 2300 fits the bill perfectly. It is a quality phone but it excludes the camera I don't need. The phone came out about a month ago but I just got it this week. Sanyo is a manufacturer that is finally realizing that people like to stand out. They have started making their phones in different colors. This phone will be available in 6 different colors. They first released silver and a blue. I wanted a black one so that's why I had to wait a month. I called the local Sprint stores once a week to see if they had the black phone in stock. After a couple weeks they finally had it in stock and I was able to go look at it. I was happy until they told me that they couldn't get my saved numbers off my old phone. With the help of Michelle I was able to enter in all my saved numbers manually.
Something else that I have been fascinated with lately is Audioscrobbler. This is a site that you sign up with and then install a plug-in for your media player. It tracks what music you listen to and builds a profile based on it. You can look to see what people who have similar tastes are listening to. You can also look up to see what is the most played song. You do have to take into account that this isn't something that the people who listen to pop do. This may explain why Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, and others show up while Britney isn't there. A cool thing with the profile is that it's linked up with Last.fm. You can launch your personal radio station based on bands you have previously listened to. The Audioscrobbler site has had some major issues in the past two weeks, but I think they are up and running at 100% now. Check it out.
That was my Friday night. Not much fun for most people, but I had a good time.
I can tell I'm growing up when the highlight of my weekend is cleaning the house from top to bottom. That's the task my wife and I completed this past Saturday. When I was younger the weekend would focus on what things I was going to do: go out to movies, out to dinner, driving around, hanging out with friends. We got up around 9 and started cleaning. After a couple hours of cleaning and a whining dog we had completed the house cleaning. I took the bathrooms and the kitchen while my wife took the bedrooms and vacuuming. She likes vacuuming now that we bought a Dyson. It amazes me how much stuff that thing can suck up. Looking at the amount of hair the thing picks up I'm amazed everyone in the house still has hair.
More evidence of growing up is my worrying about all the dead spots out on my lawn. After getting the soil and seed from Wal-Mart we did some digging and planting. Unfortunately, we have yet to see any seedlings come up. The bag said 7-10 days and it's been over 2 weeks without anything. I'm beginning to think that we might just buy a couple rolls of sod and fix it quick. We only dug up the front of the yard so our side yard with more dead spots from the dog still needed to be addressed. I looked around on the net and talked with co-workers to see what they did about this. I read and hear from a couple sources that raking the dead spots "may" bring it back to life or at least tell me how dead it is. I spent about an hour this evening raking my yard to pull up all the dead grass. The result of my raking is that the yard doesn't look as bad. I have until June 1 to fix the yard so I'm going to spend the next two weeks hoping and praying that some of the grass comes back.
When I was younger the only attention I paid to the lawn was the 45 minutes I spent mowing it.
