I’ve started a half dozen blogs since my last post but I never seem to finish them with my crazy schedule.  I’ll consolidate and post some of that another time.

Today I attended a funeral of a close family member.  Never a fun thing to do, not to mention, the stark reminder of your own mortality.  I could write a rather lengthy blog on why I hate the pomp and circumstance of funerals, and all the attention that is paid to the body and casket.  But…another time.

It was really a nice day for November in the town where it was held.   Sun was out, 68 degrees, slight breeze.  My father actually conducted the grave side service.  I thought he did a great job in presenting it as a celebration of her life, and kept it short, sweet and upbeat.  I had a strange sense of peace and felt strangely …..happy.   Not happy in the sense about my last living grandparent passing away,  but a strange sense of “…everything is okay” like a warm hug.   Hard to describe but I think Anna Deen was with us in spirit today.

She lived 97 years.  That’s quite a life.  We should all be so lucky to live that long.  She lived through hard times that make our current economic slump look like a “boom”.  Her family always came first.  She helped people.  She was a volunteer for hospice for ten years.  She would give a complete stranger the shirt off her back.  She lived for Christmas and loved children.  She could also drive you completely buggers in 5 seconds or less!  She’ll be missed but I sense that she’ll be with us in spirit.  I like to think she’s doing alot of catching up with her husband of 50 years right now.

Life is short……enjoy it.

Cheers!

I love this scene.

I recently hit another milestone…one of those that marks another year of life on you.  The older I get the more I see patterns in my life.

I felt the need to toss some recent thoughts into this blog.  Yeah it’s been a while.

I have some friends and even a former friend experiencing some bad times. I also have a 6 going on 7 year old who has a hard time with disappointment and failures.  I’ve certainly experienced my share of failure and disappointment, depressions and will probably experience more.  I have a hard time knowing what to say to my friends and family during these “times” …a pat on the head and “everything will work out” seems kind of patronizing and an “easy out.”  I’m an introvert and I have to come up with my own solution regardless of all the advice I get.  Extroverts tend to drive me nuts in that respect.

If it’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that human beings are fallible.  No one’s exempt.  Our heroes, our parents, our friends, spouses, significant others…. no-one is exempt from ‘fucking up’.  And the other part of that is it’s hard as hell to face our failings.  No-one hates to be wrong more than your’s truly.

In life’s travels I’ve come across people that are not capable of identifying or even admitting to their mistakes.  It’s always somebody else’s fault.  It’s always easier to point out all of the flaws of other people rather than think about ourselves.  That’s a whole other blog topic.

As a parental unit we don’t like to see our kids experience disappointment and failure.  But we’re not doing them any favors if we keep them in a protective bubble for 18 years and kick them into the cold cruel world.   There’s another potential blog topic, all on it’s own.

So back to my friends (and for myself) fucking up is inevitable….it’s not fun…but it’s going to happen.  At that point we can blame the external people/forces….we can kick ourselves….we can throw in the towel….be a chicken-shit and take the easy way out.  (Even in the darkest of times, suicide has never been an option for me.  I have this incessant need for survival that always takes over. )

After 30-some-odd years I’ve found some success in an other option.

The idea that it’s never too late to start all over again.

Like we used to say as kids…”OOPS, DO-OVER”.

Maybe it means trying again with a different approach.

Maybe it means completely re-inventing who we are.

Maybe it means finding a new road altogether.

I think…(notice I say think)…the key…is to find that 1 thing in life that is worth fighting for –  (Maybe if you’re lucky there might even be a couple.)  I also like the idea…that forgiveness (though hard)  is always possible.

I raise a pint to my friends & family.  I’ll weather the storm with ya the best I can.

Cheers.

I did it.  I exceeded the test score I needed to get into Calculus by 15%.  With that, I was able to talk to the Chair of the Math dept today and get into the classes I need.  I worked my ass off the past 2.5 months.  I regularly questioned myself if I would be able to do it, had moments of doubt, stress, and fear of the unknown.  The Pay-off happened Saturday when I nailed the Assessment and with today’s meeting.  Now I’m preparing to embark on some of the toughest classes I’ve had to take yet, but I’ve got my mental faculties back, my confidence back, and the motivation to kick some ass.   This was not a very enjoyable summer break.  We were not able to do much with the kids between work, classes and my studying.  Next summer that will change.  However, today’s carrot made all that work a nice little payoff.  School starts in a couple of weeks.  Bring it!

It’s been in the works for sometime, now it’s on the launchpad.

I love the music and the performance aspects of my current band.  That’s not changing, although, the three of us have been quite busy and haven’t accomplished much lately.

I have this other musical alter ego that creates music that doesn’t suit the mend palette.  I have a back catalog of songs (some more in the vein of ideas than structured songs) gathering virtual cobwebs.

It occurred to me last year that I should actually finish them and release them under my own moniker.  Especially in the digital age where I don’t have to worry about the expense of pressing CD’s.

I also discovered beatport.com…..it’s like itunes but deals primarily with electronic artists.  There is some amazing electronic music brewing out there, aside from the darker harsher industrial/EBM stuff I love.  So I’m tapping into that side of me.  Yep, it’s the proverbial solo project.   There’s something kind of freeing about working outside of a band format.  100% control….the only schedule I have to worry about is mine…which is hard enough right now.  It will also be a great way for me to dive into my love for trance, house, glitch, trip hop and ambient music.  I may also dive into “covering” some classical music….and when I say covering I mean turning some Mozart into a full blown beat driven club song.

I’m calling the project “finding wonderland”…yes there is an obvious Lewis Carroll reference there, I like it, it feels epic and psychedelic.  While cruising around the net one day, I saw a humorous pencil sketch of a cartoon rabbit wearing a gas mask carrying a basket with the caption “The Ether Bunny”.  I saw the potential for a “white rabbit” reference.

I found some clip art did some surgery and electronic drawing in photoshop & gimp and developed my icon for the project.

Meet DJ Wonderland, aka The Ether Bunny, aka The White Rabbit.

The project site is at www.findingwonderland.com and will progress as time and schedules allow.

My patience with Microsoft Vista came to an abrupt end last week.  I have a fairly new Toshiba widescreen laptop.  AMD x2 proccessor, plenty of ram and hard drive space.  It was zippy and fast and I never had a problem with it the first year.  Then gradually I noticed with new updates, new processes began running in the background.  It reached a point where it was using 35-40% of the system resources while completely idle.  The symantec framework for Norton began to fail regularly.  I purchased a fresh copy of Norton to renew the license and hopefully correct the issues…no such luck.  BSU’s network utility for logging on began to fail.  Booting up took 20 minutes and often required a restart. CD’s and DVD’s stopped autoloading.  Video began failing. The list goes on and on.

So Monday, I had it….I said farewell to MS Vista.  Buh Bye. Bon Voyage. I’m done.  I backed up my files and nuked the hard drive.

I setup an install disc for Unbuntu 9 and joined the Linux crowd.  (An inevitable step considering I’m in school to be a Software Developer)

I’m in love with my laptop again.  IT’s fast.  Everything works better than before.  The only negative is that Kodak does not provide linux drivers for their printers.  This is a minor hindrance compared to what I was dealing with before. (I’ll just “print to pdf” and then plug a thumb dive into the printer to print).

Wine is a great new development that acts as a shell/virtual machine for Windows software.  I set it up – Office 2007 and Dreamweaver run just fine on it.  I got everything I need for development- Libraries, my fave IDE’s (netbeans, & bluesfish) gVim, Dia & some other app which name I forget for building UML diagrams.  It’s ready to roll for another school year.

Audio & video works better than it ever did on Vista.  I miss it NOT!

Cheers!

….Since I’ve blogged anything.  Lot’s going on! Be back to my usual rants soon.  I’ve been busy self studying college algebra, trigonometry and I just started an online learning module that will help with the 2 exams I need to get into Calculus I this fall.

So the nice big Sansui flatscreen HDTV we’ve had for 1.5 years has now decided to intermittently shut itself off.  Uneducated best guess is a fuse? Considering that we are a household of students (Wife is working on her Master’s in Accounting while working full time, I’m neck deep in my undergrad Compsci working part time, and a Kindergartener who starts 1st grade in a full time GATE program this fall) television is pretty low on the priority list.  We don’t pay for cable/satellite because frankly it’s a waste of money for a luxury we don’t have time or money for.  We’ll eventually get it looked at and diagnosed but we’re making do in the meantime.  So now that spring semester is done, I toodled around on the net…there’s actually quite a few TV shows you can stream live on the net for free with no or minimal commercials.
I keep hearing all the hype about the show “Lost” from various friends, etc.  I often dismiss ‘hype’ because things rarely live up to it.  I missed the first season, and it’s one of those shows you can’t just start watching from the middle, or end or wherever it’s at, so I never bothered to check it out.  I discovered that ABC provides free streaming of all of the episodes for lost here: http://abc.go.com/. So last night I decided to check it out and started with Season 1 from the beginning.  Whoa!! Yeah…I’m hooked now!  It reminds me alot of the recent Battlestar Galactica series.  The way in which it’s filmed is similar, it’s as intense, great chemistry, great cast, yeah….its my new vice.

Recently and suddenly, a former Warden and someone I worked with for years, died last weekend way before his time.  He wasn’t someone close to me by any means, in fact I had some issues with some of his practices.  I don’t know much about his family but I know he left behind a wife and a teenage daughter.

I’m not sure why I’ve been a bit bothered by it this week, perhaps I wish I could have parted ways with him a little differently.  Perhaps it’s from looking back and seeing myself in his shoes had I continued in that career path.

Finals are here, I wear my stress on my face.  My seborrhea Dermatitis flared up badly.  I get wound up over things that in the end, are not as big of deal as I (we) make them to be in the moment.

Today I was rushing to get the 6 year old out the door, I found my patience about to snap when he said something kind of silly and innocent as 6 year olds do…I really don’t even remember what it was that he said but we found ourselves laughing to the point of tears while getting our socks and shoes on.  I no longer cared, so what if we’re two minutes late to class on this gorgeous day in May.   Rather than rushing off after dropping him off to school I got out of the car and watched him walk into school with his batman messenger bag bouncing behind him like he owned the place.

It’s a good day to be alive….sometimes you have to realize that.

gotta get ready for work.  Cheers all.

Spending the day working on math review from the ground up.  I have alot to catch up on.  Trying to learn college level math when you can barely remember your name is not very conducive to remembering much.  I have two big placement tests to conquer which will get me into Calculus and more advanced Compsci courses this fall.  This is a “have to do ” not an “attempt to do” kind of thing, so I’m delving much deeper into the areas I have had issues with and just touching on the stuff I remember for practice sake.

Since Monday I’ve racked up nearly 60 miles on the bike…and most of those miles were climbing up a considerable grade.  I’m actually amazed my aerobic level is in as good as shape it is!

Today is “rest day 1 of 2″ where I’m giving the legs a break.  But as I go through a set of review questions, I have a little game- However many problems I get wrong…is the number of sets of 10 pushups (or situps alternately) I do at the end.  Then I go back and identify what I did wrong and will go back to those tomorrow to see how well I retained the info.  So far I’ve only had a couple of sets to do.  Taking a break now, time to eat lunch and hit it for another hour before picking up the oldest from school.  Plan to do the same routine tomorrow other than at some point I need to go out and assist my dad with his new a/v setup.

Time for tuna on wheat.