Holidaze

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 102004
 

I botched it last week and forgot to plug the KUT Holiday Sing-a-long. We went last year and it was a lot of fun. This year was good too, although the warm temperatures made it a little harder to get into the spirit. It was either that or the cranky screaming toddler we brought with us.

It probably doesn’t need any plugging, but Trail of Lights begins Sunday and runs until December 23rd. Last year was the first year that we missed since having kids. I’ll let you in on a little family secret. We generally avoid the long traffic lines by parking on one of the side streets by Green Mesquite, having dinner there around 6, and then walking to Zilker. It makes for a bit of trek on the way back, but I’d rather be walking than sitting in the car, especially in this weather. (For those that read this more than a week from now, it’s supposed to be 76 and sunny on Sunday. Not that I’m rubbing it in or anything.)

 Posted by on December 10, 2004 at 1:05 pm

Hicks

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 082004
 

No, not that kind of hick, Bill Hicks. I’m currently in the midst of a Bill Hicks marathon. I just finished reading American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story. I followed that up with a viewing of Bill Hicks Live – Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-Up Comedian, the new DVD from Ryko.

I think I was vaguely aware of him during my college years at UT in the late 80’s/early 90’s, but I never really got into him. I must’ve barely missed the infamous censorship episode on The Late Show with David Letterman. I went to one of the taping that fall. I can’t even remember who the guests were the night I attended the show. I was also living in New York when he gave his final performance in January, 1994.

It seems like I kept just barely missing him over that 5 year period and only really became aware of him at Ethan’s recommendation upon returning to Austin a little more than a year after his death. It feels even more eerie now that I’ve read his biography. We share the same birthday. He was exactly 10 years older than me. Weird.

 Posted by on December 8, 2004 at 10:40 pm

Illin’

 Miscellaneous  No Responses »
Dec 082004
 

Various people have been mentioning getting sick or not feeling well over the past week or so. It appears that, as of yesterday, I’ve managed to catch something as well.

It started yesterday afternoon with that whole-body-achy-feeling and the congestion has been mounting over the past 24 hours. We had the annual Chez Nous December birthday/holiday party to attend last night, so I fought through the beginnings of the illness. We only stayed for an hour and a half or so because the kids needed to be in bed for school this morning, but I decided at some point that it’d be ok to have one beer. Boy, was that a mistake.

I took TheraFlu last night once we got home in an attempt to ward off the impending doom. It worked for a little while this morning, however, now I feel as bad or worse as I did yesterday at this time. I guess this is a rather public way to announce to your job that, barring a miraculous recovery overnight, you won’t be coming in tomorrow.

 Posted by on December 8, 2004 at 1:05 am

Busy – Geek addendum

 Geek  No Responses »
Dec 062004
 

It’s been so long and I had so much stuff to mention that I forgot to recount my tale of hard drive woe.

The Monday night before Thanksgiving, I went upstairs to our office to do my usual home e-mail check and found a black screen with a prompt about a non-system boot disk. Upon restarting, I got another ominous prompt and noticed some evil noises coming from my boot hard drive. Sometime between Sunday night and Monday night, the hard drive gave up the ghost, taking at least 5 years of e-mail and all of my contacts with it. Luckily, I store most of my important stuff on another drive, but I left the Outlook .pst in it’s default location on the c: drive. I know I’ve lost at least 10 points of geek cred for not backing up that file, so I’ll give those who are chuckling to themselves and calling me a dumbass a moment to finish…

Done? Good. Moving on. I managed to score a new 120 GB drive from Beast Buy for $40 after rebates and installed almost all of my usual crap this weekend. The next step is to hook the busted drive as a slave into another machine and see if I can recover anything on my own. I hear those disk recovery places are expensive. Anybody have any experience with them?

 Posted by on December 6, 2004 at 4:09 pm

Busy

 Family  No Responses »
Dec 052004
 

I haven’t posted much lately because things have been nuts. We’ve been in the process of getting a new roof on the house for three or four weeks and we finally finished this week. I still have to figure out how we’re going to pay for it, but it looks pretty good. In addition to replacing the shingles and the flat roof portion, adding/removing various venting systems and flashing and replacing rotted siding and eaves, we’re also still going to replace a rotted back door and will need to paint all of the new woodwork. It’s just primed right now to match the two year old unfinished paint job courtesy of me in the front entry area. We’re either going to paint the whole damn house or just the primed stuff depending on the estimates.

We had Thanksgiving in Dallas with my Great Uncle from Worthen, England. He’s the last of my grandfathers brothers still with us. I went to see Helmet the first night in town. It was good to see them again after all these years. I went with an old high school friend whom I haven’t talked to much lately. It was a nostalgic evening all around.

My band, The Bad Rackets (I had nothing to do with the site design. In fact, I’ll be re-doing it as soon as I finish a few other prior obligations), had another gig Thursday night with Ugly Beats, Blue Flames and Faster Disasters. Our next show is an early one at Beerland on Saturday, December 18th. The Wife and I ate at Stubb’s before our show at Room 710. We saw Lance Armstrong who was attending some sort of cycling dude dinner. We decided not to hassle him.

We put our tree up last night and attended the KUT Holiday Sing-a-long. It was a little harder to get into the holiday spirit with temperatures near 70, but it was fun.

I signed myself up for Holidailies this year, so there’ll be a lot more activity this month. I’m hoping that I’ll have the time to live up to the commitment. I already screwed up and didn’t mention the Holiday Sing-a-long on Metroblogging

 Posted by on December 5, 2004 at 9:49 pm
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