dbgrandi

Top 5 Most Influential Live Music Performances

I got stressed at work today, so I took a little time out to put together my very own top 5 list. I have a whiteboard next to my desk, and I wrote this down. It was actually a good deal of fun and relaxed my mind enough to get back to work.

Top 5 Most Influential Live Music Performances (in no particular order)

• 1 - Jimmy Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
• 2 - Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms @ Nelson Mandella Birthday Concert in South Africa
• 3 - Bruce Springsteen's 6 hour performance at No Nukes concert
• 4 - Grateful Dead, 1974-1977 (can't pick just one)
• 5 - Tied
  • Joe Driscoll, Old Main Inn
  • Eli from Marshall Street and Downtown SYR, every single day

Talk amongst yourselves.

Earthquake in Virginia

I was just on IRC and somebody said they just felt an earthquake. Not sure if this really happened yet, but somebody posted this link two minutes after it was first mentioned. If you'll notice the time of this post, it should be about 10 minutes after the earthquake happened. The Internet rocks.

24/7 McGriddle

Headed out to Darwin's tonight to see Joe Driscoll play. Upon the advice of a friend, Doug and I went out to some truckstop out by Liverpool and found a McDonalds that is open 24 hours a day.

Now, I've never had a McGriddle before, but my buddy John was right on when he recommended them. I have to admit that (especially when nothing else is open) I am a big fan of the McGriddle now.

birthday excitement

Today is my 23rd birthday. I think I would have forgotten about it without Doug and Reid sending me some kind email reminders. I've never been big on birthday hoopla (not since my 21st, at least) and I think I did everything I wanted to today. Went out to breakfast at Cosmo's and then came home to play on the laptop trying to turn our home network into a computational grid while watching some college football; you know, typical Saturday stuff.

Ahh, another year, another 28,386 spam messages.

Update: Doug told me it was illegal to not go out on my birthday so we ended up hitting Awful Al's for a few drinks. After that, it was down to Ambrosia where our good friend Joe Driscoll was playing. All in all it was a good time, and I'm glad he draged me out of the house. A couple of glasses of good tequilla really hit the spot.

anize is five by five

Woo-hoo! The anize.0rg server switch is pretty much complete. I spent the day setting up all of the blogs and trying to get everthing (pseudo) close to what it was a week ago. Most of this involved setting up all of the accounts, blogs, templates, and importing stories from the 7 or 8 blogs we have hosted here. I’m sure that there are going to be a few snafu’s here and there.

Any questions regarding screwed up blogs or email should be sent to dfc in size 28 font bold typed HTML email.

In addition to the blogs, we now have a much better mail server with SSL support and some spam filtering (via spamassasin.)

Fortunately, my church excused me from tithe this week due to my service for the community.

Amen to that

darwin awards, here I come

A few nights ago, we had some rather nasty weather that knocked a tree down onto the garage behind our apartment. This in itself wasn't a problem, but I couldn't get my car out of the garage bacause there were several large branches blocking the way. Figuring that our landlord probably had better things to do, and that it could be fun getting this big ass limb down from where it was, we took it upon ourselves to get the job done. My upstairs neighbor, Trish, and Reid were both around to help so we got into it rather quickly.

After Trish and I took a quick scouting trip up onto the roof of the garage, and found out that it was most likely hazardous for us to be up there, we settled on the idea of getting some rope tied around part of the limb and pulling everything down. It took a few minutes, and a few tries, but we finally got a piece of rope slipped around the limb and began to try to pull the sucker down. Let me tell you , wood is damn heavy. With the three of us pulling on the limb we couldn't get it to come down. We did, however, manage to move it over a little long enough to get my Jeep out of the garage.

From there, we did the only logical thing we could think of. So, after we got the rope tied to the rear bumper of my Jeep, I pulled the sucker down and we cut it up.

I probably shouldn't even be allowed to play with sharp objects, let alone climb on the garage with them and try to move large objects with my Jeep. At least we didn't collapse the garage, or lose any fingers, or crush a car, or....

On backing up data

I lost a hard drive the other day. 15 Gigs of data containing everything digital that I had created in the last 5 years. From email to term papers, programs to stupid little unix hacks, everything I had done on my computer was gone.

The worst part about it is that this wasn't a hardware problem, the drive didn't crash. It was more of a misunderstanding in which I thought I had it backed up and proceded to reformat (5 times) the drive for use in a new machine. All of this could have been avoided if I wasn't a moron. I've never been big on backing up data, and I've heard the old adage about backing up data from the old time computer guru's; "There are two kind of people. Those who have lost data, and those who will." Guru's are guru's for a reason, I guess.

Now, the reason I wanted to post on this subject was not to tell everyone to back up their home directories. It's just that this was the first time I realized how much my computer reflected my life. Thinking about what I just lost, I saw that my computer was itself, the closest thing I had to an actual journal (aside from my few and far between anize posts.) It contained a pretty detailed record of everything I had done for the past half a decade. It contained enough information to decode what classes I was taking in a given semester, what personal interests I had, who I corresponded with, probably some passwords, and a whole mess of other goodies. If one were so inclined, they could probably put together a good picture of my life with all of this. Good thing I didn't sell that drive on EBay.

I haven't given up hope yet. There are a few things that I would really like to recover from that drive; namely my PGP key and anything from my address book. Wish me luck.

Vigilante college kids...

So the other night I'm sitting on the couch and the upstairs neighbor knocks on the door and yells into me and Doug. Doug and I, most likely from an overdose of NYPD Blue or CSI, got off our lazy asses, saddled up the dogs and went out after the two punks who spraypainted my car.

We walked down the block and turned the corner only to see the two "shitheads" (as the cops later called them) walking along about a block in front of us. As we later caught up with the two guys, the first thing I noticed, aside from the fact that these two wiseguys were pretty much wasted, was the can of spraypaint in one of the guys hands. We shall call this People's Exhibit A.

You know what? Why should I type this thing up if dfc already has it posted on his blog.

Cheers

Time to relax

Rough day. I had two tests today, the first in Analysis of Algorithms and the second in Discrete Math. The discrete wasn't all that bad, and I think I did alright on the Algorithms test also. Two tests in one day is still pretty stressfull, though, and I think sitting down to a nice round of golf (Hot Shots Golf 3, to be exact) on the old Playstation sounds like a good way to unwind for a little while. After that, I really need to do some coding for work. I need to write a few different tests for our software tonight. Either that or veg out in front of the computer. We'll see...

Dracula, and relatives, in Ithaca

My mother and I travelled down to Ithaca last night to see my uncle perform in a play.
It was an interesting rendition of Dracula, with all of the music taken from old Gilbert & Sullivan shows. Greg, my uncle, played Dracula. It was a fun role that he played and he did a great job, but I was sorely dissapointed that he didn't have any fangs. Apparently he tried to wear them for one of the rehersals, but it was a little two hard to talk without a lisp. Anyway, the show was great and I went to a cast party afterwords with my uncle. Had a great time, ate a lot of food, and met a lot of really nice people.

Of course, now that I'm back home, it's time to study for two midterms (algorithms and discrete math) and clean the kitchen... fun :)

how my room got cleaned

So, trying to get into the spirit of the blog, I'll share my latest adventure with the world.

Last night I was trying to go to sleep when I heard a strange noise in my room. When I looked over at my window fan I saw a shadow about the same size as a maple leaf. Then I noticed the weird squeeking noises that this shadowy object was emiiting. Turning on a light in my room, I noticed that this squeeky little maple leaf was, in all actuality, a brown furry bat!

Now, I'm not that fond of bats, but I figured that there's some times where you have to take a stand, and this was one of those times. So, after getting the hell out of my room (with the door securely shut behind me,) I ran around the house collecting enough clothing to adiquately cover every square inch of my body. Then I found myself (in the tradition that John Candy taught me) a medium sized pot and a racketball racket. Feeling ready to face my opponent I slowly open my bedroom door just in time to see... nothing. The flying rat was nowhere to be seen. After an hour or so of prodding around with a lacrosse stick, I gave up for the night and proclaimed that the bat had won this round.

The next day I woke up and tried to think of a better plan than the previous night. It came down to basically cleaning up my room enough so I could go through everything in my closet... one damn piece at a time.

-- This was an old entry that I never posted --