So, I was doing some recording last night on bass. I came up with a cool little line I really liked and figured I better lay it down before I forget it. I tried finding a drum pattern to lay down on top of it, and couldn't find anything I like. As a matter of fact, I've never found a good program for laying out drum patterns. Maybe it's my lack of patience with any tools, but I've just never found anything I like. If anyone has any recommendation for PC-based drum machines, let me know.
Well, I'm still at work—but I'm getting ready to leave the office. Jenn's been sick today—another bad migrane. She's probably going to kill me that I'm blogging from work instead of home, but I can post much faster from work. :)
Anyway, not much going on. Took Maddie to training class last night. She's still very easily distracted and for any type of "stay" action, I have to have a treat in hand to entice her to stay put. However, she did start picking up "High 5" and "Wave Goodbye." She does the "High 5" really well, but we still have some work to do before she'll get "Goodbye" done pat. I want to see if I can get her to wave goodbye when someone waves at her. I'm also working on getting her to sit up on her hind legs (with the front legs in the air.) If I can do that, then we can work on some more tricks.
I'm hoping we'll have band practice on Friday, but Todd was sick on Monday. Jenn was talking to one of her co-workers the other day and it turns out he plays drums. She gave him my number and she got his. I've been waiting to see if he calls me, if not I'll probably give him a ring to see if he's interested in playing out.
Well, I updated my Photo Album today. I got the picture developed that I took at Salt Fork and converted them to jpegs. I also posted the pictures from my trip to Denver, CO and I posted another set of miscellaneous pictures—which contain pictures of Maddie with her "Buster Collar" on as well as some of my house.
I also moved my Photo Album off of www.pengoworks.com and moved it to blog.pengoworks.com. It made more sense to me to move my "personal items" from the consulting site to my personal site. I'm creating redirects from www.pengoworks.com/photoalbum/ to blog.pengoworks.com/photoalbum so that your bookmarks will work temporarily. If you have my Photo Album page bookmarked, please update your bookmarks.
Well, I bought a Gameboy Advance SP this weekend. I was playing around with one at the store the other day and was really impressed. The GBA now had some really good classic arcade games game packs that where pretty cheap, so I bought the Konami Collector's Series, Namco Museum and I also picked up Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3.
I haven't played around with it enough to give a full review, but I had no problems viewing the backlit TFT screen outside in the sun yesterday while at the campgrounds. There's nothing like playing Rush'n'Attack while sitting in a lawn chair lounging around at the lake on a Sunday. :) I'd like to pick up one of those "eReaders"—there's a ton more classic arcade games for the eReader which are all under $5.
Well, I'm tired as crap this morning. Jenn & I went to Salt Fork State Park yesterday to spend the day at the lake with her parents—and of course we took Maddie with us. We left around 9am and got back just before 10pm.
I was pretty excited about getting Maddie to some water again. The first time she was in water (about 10 weeks ago,) she didn't really care much for it. I think it freaked her out when she couldn't touch the ground anymore. While she did splash around a bit that day, she was very tentative. About two weeks after that, we took her back to Antrim park and she played around in the water with a lot more enthusiasm, but she was still didn't swim—as a matter of fact she'd get out of the water anytime she started getting too deep. Anyway, this had me concerned that I'd have to spend a lot of time with her to coax her into the swimming.
Anyway, we got to the camp ground area around a 11:30—we had a minor detour in Cambridge trying to find a Walmart (or some store we could get some dog treats and a disposable camera.) We sat around for a bit and had some BLTs—my version of a BLT consists of bacon, lettuce and turkey. :) We chatted for a bit and then loaded the canoe up and headed down to the lake around 1pm.
I recently blogged an entry about Microsoft phasing out the standalone version of Internet Explorer. Well, it now appears now that Microsoft is rapidly trying to recant that statement. That doesn't surprise me at all and I even alluded to the fact that they'd probably backpedal away from this announcement in my blog.
"We don't know what's happening," said the [Microsoft] representative. "There are a lot of different options, and it's too early to talk about any of them...Nothing has been decided yet."
Anyway, I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear about the issue.
Mark Hyman, of "The Point" recently posted an article about Peter Jennings personally changing scripts before going on air to provide his own political slant to the stories—even making stories completely unrecognizable.
This is my major concern about the FCC allowing one company to control all the media outlets in an area. I think this could be a really big problem in small markets—where you're much more likely to run into the situation of one company controlling all the news. I don't like the fact that it's possible for an area to receive news that's all slanted one way.
We need diversity in reporting to get the full picture. I believe you need to read multiple views on an event in order to properly evaluate your own stance on it. I don't really mind one company owning all of one type of media outlet (i.e. radio, newspapers, or tv,) but I just see a real potential to misled the public if one company decides to abuse their power by presenting only a single point-of-view of events to the public.
Microsoft just made an interesting announcement in regards to Internet Explorer. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to drop the standalone version of Internet Explorer.
I found this quote quite ludicrous:
While IE does conform to most of the W3C's specs, there are still a number of areas where it needs improvement and updating—which don't have anything to do w/the underlying OS."Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I've got to admit, IE has been my preferred browser over the past 5-6 years or so—basically since IE3 was released. Over the past few years I've felt IE has the best browser on the market, but Gecko's made very good ground over the past year or so. I think the latest Gecko-based browser is a great product and with this announcement, I'm sure I'll find myself using it more and more. I'll probably stick with using Mozilla over NS, just because I find it's a little less bloated. Anyway, if MS sticks to this decision, I think it's probably the death of IE.
My good friend Robi blogged a little story about qForms (my open source JavaScript API) and an experience he had while working on a project a while back. He actually first told me this story a while back—and at the time it really surprised me. I really need to figure out a marketing idea for making some money off the code. I see a little bit of money from donations, but if I could get just a $1 a form (that qForms is implemented on,) that would turn out to be a lot of money—not to mention well worth the $1. Anyway, just thought Robi's story was interesting.
Looking for a good spam filter for Outlook? I've been using Cloudmark's SpamNet service for blocking spam in Outlook for about 8 months or so—since beta 4 or so—and I've found it to work tremendously. Now that the product is out of beta, they've gone to a commercial product and now charge a service fee for each month.
Anyway, the normal fee is $4.99 a month, but for a limited time they're offering it at a locked price of $3.99. I can do you better though. If you subscribe using my referral code of "hzx4hl" you can not only get the service for $1.99 for the first year (from the time of purchase) you'll also give me a free month of service. Ok, so the second thing benefits me, but you can sign up for the service for half the normal cost. I get enough e-mail that the service is easily worth $2 a month. It captures 99.9% of my spam—which adds up to several thousand e-mails a week. That's much better than weeding through them all on my own. Anyway, I find it's a top notched product and well worth paying for.
The Steelers, for the first time ever, are offering a football fantasy camp for men. I wish I would have found out about this sooner. I wonder why the Tribune-Review only publisized this a week before the camp was supposed to start? Anyway, I'll have to keep an eye out for this camp next year!
The Steelers will give their male fans an opportunity to taste the life of a professional football player when they hold their first fantasy camp for men June 6-8 at St. Vincent College, near Latrobe.
Participants will receive on-field and classroom instruction from Steelers assistant coaches Mike Mularkey, Tim Lewis, Tom Clements and Kenny Jackson. and former players Jon Kolb, Louis Lipps, Edmund Nelson, Andy Russell and Mike Wagner.
The package includes two nights' lodging and five meals, including a Saturday night banquet emceed by former Steelers offensive linemen Tunch Ilkin and Craig Wolfley, who are current members of the team's radio broadcast crew. The evening also will feature Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris and WDVE's Jim Krenn.
Registration must be made in advance and costs $349 per person. Further information can be found on Steelers.com or by telephoning 412-697-7713.
Ok, so I haven't updated the site w/my goings on as of late. Well, that cold I had really kicked my ass. I ended up spending the 3 day weekend in pretty much resting—I even ended up having to miss Justin's birthday/house warming party on Memorial Day. I just didn't want to risk getting everyone else sick—especially since everyone would be eating and drinking. Jenn's been sick since last Wednesday or so as well (I feel bad about giving her my cold.) She's feeling worse today and even stayed home sick.
Anyway, Maddie and I had training class on Tuesday night. She was pretty distracted during the class—she just can't get used to that "Gentle Leader" collar. Overall she was ok, but she just seemed restless the whole class. I'm going to spend more time working on training this week—it's obvious that I haven't spent enough time on the exercises up to this point. I went home for lunch yesterday and we spent the whole lunch working on training exercises—we also practice a bit more in the evening. She listens wonderfully as long as she know you have a "treat" in your hand. :)
Works going fairly well, I'm making good progress on my current project (which is due the end of June.) The biggest problem I'm having w/the project is the code has to run in CF v4.01—and I'm having problems finding compatibility charts to find when certain functions were introduced. There's been a lot of changes to the language in the past 4 years, and I've forgotten a lot of the rules for programming in CF4 (since the rules change from version to version.) I'm also really missing the "Request" scope.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with Verizon Wireless' current selection of mobile phones. I've been looking to upgrade for a while, but they're really behind the other companies—like Sprint PCS—in the area. The messed up part is that Verizon by far has the best coverage—at least in the Columbus, OH area.
I was on Sprint up until about 8 months ago or so and finally got fed up w/Sprint after 4 years of pour digital coverage in the area. Overall I'm happy w/Verizon's network coverage—I'm just not happy w/their phone offerings. They really need to step up to plate and get some phones that compete with the feature base of some of their competitors.
This is my new BlogChalk:
United States, Ohio, Columbus, Hilliard, English, Dan, Male, 31-35, computers, music. :)
I updated my blog so you can now page through the entries—which means you can easily access older blog entries. If you're only interested in seeing a specific category, just highlight the category and start paging through my entries. It was getting pretty difficult to find specific entries since the blog software only showed the first 15 entries for the selected category.