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We’re still waiting for the iPad we ordered.  The order system being down for maintenance (preventing us from checking the order) is only increasing the tension…

Tags: Apple, shopping
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Tree Frog in Umbrella Stand

This is a little tree frog that lives in our umbrella stand.  Our neighborhood seems to be a habitat for a lot of them.  At night when the weather is just right they call to each other.  They are all around or neighborhood, and the sound they make is not only distinctive but its at a pretty crazy volume as well.  On a good night its almost deafening as dozens of them call across the trees to each other.

They are mostly nocturnal, but every once in a while we’ll catch him out of the umbrella stand in the flowers or on the side of the house.  He’s about an inch and a half long and changes color, so he’s often hard to spot.

Tags: backyard, frog, nature
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This is the song stuck in my head today.  It pushed out the “Give Me Back That Filet-O-Fish” jingle.  Finally.

YouTube – KT Tunstall – Suddenly I See [LIVE 2005]

Tags: music, songs stuck in my head
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I’m completely speechless.  I am seeing something I never thought I would see.  It’s like a dream – an amazing, unbelievable dream.

Steam Comes to Mac, Offers Cross-Platform Gaming Free of Charge – Steam mac – Gizmodo.

Tags: games, Half-Life, Steam
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Saw him perform multiple times with Hall & Oates, as well as Saturday Night Live.  Most recently, he was with Hall & Oates when we saw them last year.  Talented, and a great presence on stage.

T-Bone Wolk Dies From Heart Attack | undercover.com.au, Music, News, Entertainment.

Tags: Hall & Oates, music, T-Bone Wolk
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There has been a lot of news about bed bugs; the bugs seem to be going through some kind of resurgence.  We have fallen into a routine of checking for them when in hotels, and because we never saw any nor knew someone who did, it was starting to seem like some kind of paranoia.  I have now had my first direct account with the nasty little bugs.

When checking into a hotel (which will remain nameless, as it could happen in any hotel), I went through the ritual of looking under the mattress with a small flashlight I use for travel.  The lack of cleanliness first caught my attention – looking under mattresses in hotels is not for the faint of heart.  Then I saw movement!  I was so surprised I couldn’t quite believe what I was looking at.  They were smaller than I expected, and also paler in color than I expected.  However, there was definitely a bug problem with the mattress and they were definitely trying to get out of the light as I shined the flashlight around.  They didn’t move very quickly.

Now, I’m not a bug expert and perhaps they weren’t really bed bugs.  No matter, I wasn’t staying in the room.

While upsetting, the fact is that the class of hotel doesn’t protect you from coming across bed bugs.  They are coming in from other guests.  And, the hotel staff did immediately move me to another room and mark the room as out of service.  I repeated the exercise in the new room and it was much better, so hopefully it is a room-by-room thing and doesn’t take over a whole building.  The advice is:

• Keep a flashlight for travel, as bright as possible.
• Before unpacking anything, lift up the matress and inspect with the flashlight while the room is still darkened.  Look along the seams of the matress.  They are small, move slowly, and will try and move out of the light.
• Report any concerns to hotel management immediately.  Don’t unpack anything.

It’s a scary world out there.

Tags: bed bugs, hotels
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Finally, it feels like we’ve dug out of the mountain of snow that fell here in the past week.  26 inches fell last Friday, than more than another 12 inches fell on Tuesday.  I know this doesn’t seem like much to someone that lives in Denver or Vermont, but in Washington DC this set the record for most annual snowfall.  This is an area where we see snow 4 or 5 times a year, usually just a few inches, and it usually disappears in a day or two as temperatures go back up to the 40s.

I’ve posted some pictures.

Other than muscle soreness from moving tons of snow, we weathered the storm fine.  Our power was out about 4 hours; they purposly took us off line so they could fix someone else’s problem.  While the house cooled off a bit, that’s not nearly as bad as others who were out for days.  And, we’ve been in that boat twice in the past – not good.  Our street was plowed, by our neighbors not the county, so we can get out.  I was able to work from home, so being out of the office was not much of a hardship.

The region went through its usual insanity as the storms came in.  All the milk and toilet paper disappeared from the stores, which lets you know what people really value in life.  But, now that its over we have this common bonding experience to trade stories about and the snow does provide a natural beauty when its deep like this to remind us how amazing the world is when you stop long enough to look at it.  To help with the stress of future storms, I’m documenting the following tips for survival:

• Weather happens, you can’t control it so just deal with it.
• Remember what is really valuable, and keep it nearby.  You might have to get out quickly.
• Be much more critical about what is a necessity, and don’t worry as the non-necessities are unavailable.
• You can survive without phone and TV as long as you have the Internet.

Tags: snow, weather
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That rotten Gilbert Gottfried!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Tags: funny, LOLcats
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Container garden in 2009

2009 wasn’t the greatest of years for gardening.  We didn’t do the vegetable garden this year due to time constraints.  The container gardening on the deck was attacked by a groundhog, then raccoons, then drought.  But, not much Japanese Beetles which was good.  We also had fun watching a Praying Mantis all summer and some tree frogs decided our umbrella stand was a nice home.

I’m trying an open source photo tool called “gallery” (catchy), and have moved some pictures there.  All the shots were taken with our little Canon PowerShot SD 400 camera, which does amazingly well for a little thing as some of the closeups show.

Tags: gardening
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Shelves of old stuff...

I’ve gotten into a bit of a project, which I’ll be providing the technical details of in a few days.  But, some personal thoughts…

While we resisted (far longer than most) the migration of our music collection to digital, we eventually felt we had no choice as the vinyl format started to disappear and the CD-ROM took over.  So, we started buying CDs like everyone else, and lamented the loss of the large album art and the liner notes in a font size larger than “4 pt”.  We also moaned as we purchased favorites already owned on vinyl so we could listen to things in the car.  Now, we’re going through this again as we start migrating to MP3/AAC downloads, purchasing things we have no physical evidence of owning.

Partially motivated by cheapness, and partially motivated by the inability to find out of print items, I started thinking about converting all the old things to MP3 myself.  After some research (translate as “Google”) and some experimentation (translate as “plug in old hardware”) I discovered that it’s not too hard to convert to MP3 from old sources like vinyl.  So, I’ve embarked on a project to convert everything we have so we don’t have to repurchase.

This is not a short term project.  Over the years we’ve collected hundreds of pieces of vinyl, dozens of vinyl 45s, hundreds of audio CDs, dozens of cassettes, and concert VHS tapes and DVDs.  If you total it all up its more than 1,000 hours of audio.  And, there’s no short cut to spending all that time spinning the audio into a computer to convert it.  So, this project will literally take months and months.  So, we start.

And, it’s turning into a wonderful walk through personal history.  There are all kinds of recordings that have been part of our lives as far back as we can remember.  There are recordings that we have no idea why we purchased them.  There are out of print items.  There are audio cassettes of performances of mine from various groups that are poor recording quality, poor performances, and priceless things to possess.  Listening to everything is a parade of friends, places, times, experiences, memories almost forgotten and easily retrieved with a drum beat or guitar chord.

It’s going to be a fun two years…

Tags: music
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