Hot Fresh Content
After a hiatus of about a month, there’s fresh new content up at minterforhouse.org. Enjoy.
Cordially Invited
I’ve got a couple of GMail invites left, if anyone wants to try out the system. Reply to this post with your email address, or mail me directly, and I’ll provide your hookup.
First-come, first-served.
What, Me Travel?
In a perfect storm of vacation time, business trip, and a understanding wife, I’ll be flying out in late July to Green Bay, Wisconsin! I’ll be taking the opportunity to visit with the fine folks at Netsonic, who provide colocation services for SkilTech, as well as participate in a weekend of improv with Comedy City, the outstanding improv troupe in Green Bay.
I don’t travel much – mostly by design, though even less now that I’m married with a baby. So getting to geek out, do improv, and see a new city’s going to be a treat. It looks like it’ll be JMatt, Philip, and myself representing Raleigh on the improv front. Both of them are very good players – I’ll need to knock some of the performance rust off before I get on stage.
Who knows – maybe they’ll let me into their voice booth if I ask nicely?
Pod Port Problems
My iPod had been on the fritz recently – ever since I got back from vacation. It started off that it wasn’t showing up properly on my desktop – the icon was one for a removable hard drive, and not the normal icon that looks like an iPod. Plus, it was having problems syncing up with iTunes.
After the problem didn’t resolve itself, I booted the iPod software updater and refreshed the software back to factory settings. Still problems. iTunes would start when the iPod was attached, but hang trying to transfer the first song. I’d have to restart the system to free up iTunes, and do a hardware reset on the iPod.
I put the problem away for a week or so, relying on CDs for my commute. Tonight, I went back to support.apple.com to look around, and found this thread. People were suggesting to plug your iPod into the other firewire port in order to solve it. What a moronic idea – like that would fix anything.
But I did it anyway. Plugged the firewire cable into the other port, plugged the iPod into the cable, and iTunes started and immediately sync’d the songs from my library onto the iPod. So it looks like the solution was to use the other port. I have no explanation for why one port would be better than the other one – I don’t think the other port is bad or anything. And it’s not just me having the problem.
Hopefully Apple will fix this issue soon, but in the meantime, I’ve got my iPod back.
Draft Beer
Holly, Hayley, and I took advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime chance and went to the NHL draft at the RBC center this weekend. We joined over 15,000 other people there – one of if not the largest crowd in NHL draft history.
Raleigh and the Canes put on a great show for the draft. The special edition Caniac Carnival had lots of stuff, from pickup games to video games to slapshot contests to live music, and more. The Canes video production staff, as always, did a great job of using the jumbotron and ribbon board for multimedia effects. TV announcer John Forslund announced the picks during the first round, and did a great job. And the famed Caniac fans braved the rainy weather to pack the house.
The fans seemed to enjoy the proceedings, in spite of the fact that we didn’t know much about the players being drafted. Introductions of our rival teams (Detroit, New Jersey, Washington, Philadelphia) were met with lusty boos, but the crowd was very supportive of the kids that those teams picked. And when the fourth pick rolled around and commissioner Gary Bettman said “We have a trade to announce . . . and you’re going to like this one,” the crowd exploded like it was Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals again.
We three got the free general admission seats, so we were up in 328 without any of the 328 crew. They were down in the front rows, and the picture that graced the top half of the N&O sports section on Sunday featured many of them. That group just can’t avoid the spotlight. Of the visiting teams, Washington brought the largest group (of course, with the city being so close), but I saw sweaters from just about every other team in the league.
As for Carolina’s draft, we picked up a good player in Andrew Ladd, our 1st round pick. A goalie in the second and a defenseman in the 3rd rounded out Day 1.
The region represented itself well with both the presentation of and turnout for the draft (even if visiting clubs were geographically confused – many of them thanked “the city of Raleigh-Durham,” which is a lot like thanking the “city of Minneapolis-St. Paul”), which I think bodes well for our chances at an All-Star game and the future of hockey in the area. Now, if the league gets its act together and has a season this winter, we’ll be ready.
Decisions, Decisions
Things are a lot easier when you don’t have to decide stuff.
Return Of The Cos
After hearing about their return for a while, I actually ran across Jello Pudding Pops in the store! Of course, I got two boxes.
Like many children of the 80s, I loved those Bill Cosby-shilled treats. This new incarnation isn’t too much different – somewhat smaller, and in plastic instead of paper wrapping. But the taste is just about where I remember it, which is to say, very good.
Now, if someone would just bring back the old Mickey Mouse ice cream, with the vanilla ice cream in a full-on profile of Mickey’s face, with chocolate ice cream eyes, mouth, and ears, and the ears covered in a chocolate shell. Then I could die a happy man.
Nuthin’ But A GMail Thang
Thanks to the generosity of John Beimler, I’ve got an account with Google’s GMail system. The real question now is – what am I going to do with it?
I’ve been using the lunenburg.org address since 1997, so I’m not planning on changing my primary email account away from that. And I’ve got a yahoo.com account that I use as my standard spammer-bait crap account on webforms. I’m not sure if there’s another role that the GMail account can fill.
But, much like with Orkut, it’s fun to be in the “in crowd.”
The Family That Gets Sick Together, Stays Together
In a first for our three-person family, all of us have been very sick today. Holly has some undetermined ailment that kept her up all night with the chills, Hayley has been so sick that she threw up for the first time, and my temperature has been hovering around 101. We made two trips to the doctor today (one for Holly, one for Hayley), and probably should have made a third for me.
I don’t know what bug we picked up, but it’s kicking our collective ass. Blah.
Garage Band Song #2
I found time while on vacation to create my second song in Apple’s GarageBand software. It’s a little more rock-like than my first song, and I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out.
Credit Holly for convincing me to remove the “Hollywood Strings” intro. 
If you want to check it out, you can download the MP3 for “Outer Banks” from my GarageBand page. If you listen to it, let me know what you think!