Category: mostly unimportant

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The Happen(ings)

These last two weeks have been crazy busy… Two weeks ago, I had Josh and Sharon’s wedding, and everything that goes with it (bachelor party, rehearsal dinner, wedding day), and then this past weekend, I had Jerry and Missy’s wedding (bachelor party, rehearsal dinner, wedding day). I was a groomsman in the first, an usher in the second…the first was in St. Louis, the second was in Rock Island, IL… So yeah, I just don’t feel like I’ve had much time to sit around and do absolutely nothing for the last two weeks. Thankfully, we don’t have any more weddings until mid-August…which Brooke gets to be involved with, this time!

Anyway, I took pictures of all of this, and they’re linked above for those that are interested…

On another note, Brooke’s camera died a few weeks ago, so we replaced it with a Nikon Coolpix S210. Thus far, we’ve been pretty happy with it, and had a great deal of fun playing with the “fireworks setting” that keeps the shutter open for, like, 3-4 sec. for fireworks pictures. They turned out pretty nicely, so check those out, too!

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Two Unrelated Subjects

So, church has been going pretty well, recently. There was a time during the fall/spring where we were losing members of the band to go do other things, making it exceedingly difficult for Brooke and I to leave for the weekend and not be there (not that it’s required that we go, of course, but I feel guilty being gone when it will leave 2 people on stage to do the playing!). Anyway, this past weekend was pretty awesome on that front in that we christened a new drummer for the band! Chris will be back for the summer (he’s been off at college), which was going to relieve me to do some guitar playing, sound running, or **gasp** simply sit out in the congregation and do nothing else. But besides Chris, Steven also is joining up to play bi-weekly (or all the time?), which will help out come fall in that he’s in 8th grade and will be hanging out for conceivably 4+ more years at the church. That means that pressure will be off me having to play in the fall, too! Anyway, Steven did an excellent job on Sunday, especially considering that he’s in 8th grade now and plays as well as I was doing in 10th grade (I started playing drum set in 8th grade…). We also may be getting a youth guitar player sometime over summer, too, which will further aid the ability of musicians to rotate in and out of the band on any given week.

Regardless, I’m pretty happy about these prospects because I really don’t want to leave in 2 years with everything falling apart there. Yanela is running the show, of course, but Brooke and I both do quite a bit of stuff and it’s nice to think that someone will be there to pick up the slack after we head off to the next step in our lives…

Anyway, speaking of “next steps,” I’m heading to Columbia this week to help Mom and Dad move across town. We have lived in the Georgetown subdivision off Scott Blvd. in Columbia for just about 20 years now, and Mom and Dad felt it was about time to move some place a bit different. They’ll be moving out near Columbia Regional Hospital to a much bigger house (…how they’ll fill it up, I have no clue…my vote is to have a “ball pit” room in one of the bedrooms…that’d be pretty awesome…), so it’ll take a little adjustment getting used to a new address, a different exit off I-70, etc.

The best part, of course, is that the new place includes a wet bar…w00t!

So yeah, if you’re in the C-town area this week, lemme know…I may be able to make a little time…assuming Mom doesn’t have all my time monopolized… 😛

Edit: I looked at the date and realized I should say “happy anniversary” to Mom and Dad (#29 this year…) and “happy birthday” to my Grandma (who won’t be seeing this, I’m sure…as she’s now 93 and doesn’t know the first thing about computers). Either way, I hope both parties have a good day! Mom, that means you need to chill out and have a beer amongst the boxes in your living room… 😛

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You know it's bad when a blind guy is better than you…

I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning…they like mentioning these 30 sec. funny stories before the regular news starts…and one of them before 8:30 am mentioned a guy in Alta, IA that bowled a perfect game on Saturday night. This wouldn’t normally be that big a deal, but he’s 78 and legally blind – apparently, he could only see the ball when he picked it up.

Yeah…my high score is still only, like, 160…grrrrrrrr…

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You know it’s bad when a blind guy is better than you…

I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning…they like mentioning these 30 sec. funny stories before the regular news starts…and one of them before 8:30 am mentioned a guy in Alta, IA that bowled a perfect game on Saturday night. This wouldn’t normally be that big a deal, but he’s 78 and legally blind – apparently, he could only see the ball when he picked it up.

Yeah…my high score is still only, like, 160…grrrrrrrr…

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Too bad…

…they canceled Joan of Arcadia after only 2 seasons…

Joan: “It was a total disaster.”

God: “Nothing of value comes without a little struggle. Some of the most beautiful flowers in the world only grow after a forest fire. Literally out of the ashes they blanket the ground with color.”

Joan: “Yeah, but if you made that happen without the fire, people would like you more.”

God: “They’d just find something else to blame me for.”

God: “You can’t control everything, Joan. Turmoil, conflict, chaos; they’re just part of life. Look at any playground. The screaming, the laughter, the tears. Out of that mayhem comes relationships, love, and the simple joy of being surprised by life.”

Joan: “So, more surprises?”

God: “Oh yeah, there’s always more surprises.”

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Mmmm…new toys…

So, we went ahead and switched from DISH Network to AT&T’s U-Verse service, which means that we still have AT&T DSL and phone service, but now our TV comes through the phone line, also… U-Verse is amongst the first (along with Verizon’s FiOS service) that uses fiber optic cabling to increase bandwidth along phone lines, thus allowing robust television signals to travel on there as well as digital data and analog phone signals. The benefits are as follows, from our perspective:

  • Two receivers (i.e. two TVs) rather than just one that can access cable programing
  • HD programming cheaper than DISH (w00t!)
  • More channels (including ones we’ll actually watch)
  • Four tuners for television viewing (i.e. we can watch programs on two separate TVs and record two other channels simultaneously, whereas we could only do two channels total under DISH)
  • We can set up recordings remotely…which is awesome… So yeah, through the internet, we can tell our DVR to record something even if we aren’t at home to do it through the DVR directly…w00t, indeed!

    • These three primary things for ~$10-$15 more a month than we were originally spending… So yeah, we’re spending a bit more…but we’re also getting more, and personally, getting more value per monetary increase in cost.

    Anyway, I do have a concern or two with this new service, primarily in that everything now goes through a cute little box sitting next to my computer. Meaning, our DSL modem and router are now combined…but not only that…the TV signal now goes through that same box. If that box decides it doesn’t want to work anymore, we will not have TV or internet until AT&T can come out and fix and/or replace it. I guess it’s my same argument against the iPhone, in that if my phone dies, then my iPod and organizer go with it… There are certain things I like to be separate, and this may be one of them. Then again, perhaps it’s the wave of the future, so I should just get used to it.

    So yeah, this will be an interesting experiment. Everything seems to work well so far, though!

    …now, they just need SciFi in HD and I’ll be happy… 🙂

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    Why do CDs cost so much?

    There’s an interesting blurb in this month’s Rolling Stone talking about why CDs cost $15.99, and moreover why Wal-Mart wants that cost dropped to $10… Apparently, the price of a CD is figured as follows:

      $0.17 Musicians’ unions
      $0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
      $0.82 Publishing royalties
      $0.80 Retail profit
      $0.90 Distribution
      $1.60 Artists’ royalties
      $1.70 Label profit
      $2.40 Marketing/promotion
      $2.91 Label overhead
      $3.89 Retail overhead

    Now, in all honest, it’s rather interesting just seeing how many pieces of pie are getting divided up here, and how the retailer only sees $0.80 in profit per CD sold, and the artist themselves see $1.60 per CD sold.

    Apparently, according to the article, Wal-Mart has emerged as the nation’s biggest CD retailer and your record’s sales at Wal-Mart essentially determine whether you’ll make money or not (~138 million people shop at Wal-Mart each week). However, Wal-Mart (and Target and Best Buy…) take a loss on CDs to sell them closer to $10 in hopes of getting people into the electronics section, where they’ll buy something on the way back, or pick up a DVD, etc. while they’re back there.

    Well, Wal-Mart is tired of taking that loss on each disc and is trying to convince the music industry to streamline their process a bit, otherwise Wal-Mart will cut back on space for CDs and instead offer shelves to DVDs and video games. This would, of course, be terrible for the music industry as a whole in that nearly all their CDs are sold (excluding the internet) in Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy now, as an estimated 1200 record stores have closed in the last two years alone.

    Anyway, I find this relatively interesting… I did a presentation for Speech class in undergrad on how stupid the music industry is, as a whole, and how they really need to adjust their model if they want to compete in the 21st century. That was nearly 6 years ago, and apparently little has changed. As the article states, the music industry is all about milking every last dime in profit from a given song (frequently crappy ones…), while companies like Wal-Mart want to make every purchase as cheap as possible to make their profits on volume. I kinda think iTunes, and other online retailers, are following closer to the Wal-Mart model, removing most of the overhead costs listed above in favor of making money on the volume sold of a given song (or album) to millions of people.

    Personally, I’m shocked the CD has made it this long as a popular medium. Brooke and I only buy CDs anymore when it’s a certain group (like Dave Matthews, for example) – otherwise, we’ll buy it through iTunes and burn it ourselves, as we tend to care very little about how pretty the cover art to a given album is.

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    Updat(ing)…

    Nothing too special going on recently, but I’ve been keeping pretty busy…

    1). Work has been going pretty well, recently. I’ve been getting lots of useful data, but I’m still waiting on an important piece before submitting my first paper for publication. I don’t really know which journal I want to submit it to yet, either, but that will partially depend on this last piece of the puzzle. Regardless, the data I’ve been obtaining in the last few week has actually been somewhat exciting, so it makes things interesting for me!

    2). I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl last weekend and have been playing it mostly incessantly since I unwrapped it. The game is crazy addictive, lemme tell ya… I’m only about a quarter of the way through the single-player portion of the game, as I’ve been dabbling in the Event modes, Classic mode and on-line games trying to unlock characters and levels. If you’ve got a code for me, shoot me an e-mail or something so you can beat me up with Peach! 😛

    3). Grounded was last night, and I think this was our 7th one or so. We’ve been having a great deal of fun with it, but it’d still be nice to see more people coming out (third Saturday of every month!). I recently got all the advertising materials from my sister so now I can start editing some things myself. As such, I added a new section to the Grounded site that has photos, wallpapers (I’m still working on those) and, more importantly, music. So yes, you can stream music recorded from monthly Grounded events from your own computer. w00t!

    4). We’ll be heading to Columbia for Easter this year… We are supposed to play for the Good Friday service here in St. Louis first so we won’t hit town until Saturday morning. Otherwise, we’ll be at church Saturday night at St. Andrew’s, as per usual, and then hang out with the immediate and extended family on Easter Sunday. Hopefully giant radioactive rabbits don’t crash the party…

    I guess that’s about it. Tomorrow is St. Patty’s Day, so Dr. Westfall, the chairman of our department at school, always has a huge party (complete with dancers…he has to install a wood floor in the basement for them every year…) and it’ll take up the entirety of my day. Heck of a way to spend a Monday, I say… 😛