Archive for February, 2006

Hole In Juan

I finally got to another show on Friday night, Robert Randolph & The Family Band. Mike, Maria, Joel and Amanda all met us at our apartment before the show, and after a couple of drinks we headed up to the show. They played one of the longest sets I have seen in awhile, it must have been over two and a half hours. I started my recording a little early, before they started playing, but they were still playing when I reached the three hour recording maximum. Oh well, there were a few other tapers there. I think everyone had a good time, although I did hear Mike comment on the length of some of their songs. He swears that one song was 45 minutes long!

Saturday we had to get up early to prepare for the Barstool Open, a pub crawl involving a miniature golf hole in each of the nine bars. Team “Hole In Juan” starred Mike as Jose, Christie as Rosa, Kim as Zita, and myself as Juan. We started the morning off at the Levee and then moved on to Mike’s, Charlie Hooper’s, the Brooksider, Lew’s, Tanner’s, Dark Horse, and finally Kelly’s. You might have noticed that the list is only eight bars long. The crawl was so popular, and the bars were so crowded, that we didn’t have time to make it to all of them. In fact, we only putted at six of these eight bars. Luckily, they only count your top six holes, so we made it to enough bars to qualify for the prizes. I think we only really have a chance at winning the “best dress” though, since our putting wasn’t that good. Wait until you see these pictures…

Speaking of pictures, I added Kim’s San Antonio pictures to the site over the weekend. Sunday was a relaxing day. I caught up on some Olympics action and messed around with the computers while Kim ran some errands and hung out with Bianca. Later in the night, I finally got to play hockey again. I think the last time I played was about a month ago, so it felt really good to be out there again. I’m happy to report that our team is still undefeated this session!

What’s The Revolution?

This question was posted on OARfans.com yesterday, when the author had someone ask her, “What’s the revolution? Are they supporting a cause or something?” If you didn’t know (and I assume that most of you do) O.A.R. stands for ….of a revolution. When I read the thread again this morning I stumbled on this response:

the revolution is…
– their music
– their views on taping/trading
– their fans (loyalty)
– their endless touring
– their rankings in the music “industry” (how they don’t get any recognition on TV or the radio, yet they still managed to sell out MSG
– the fact that they stay loyal to their music roots (to some extent)
– the differences that set them apart from any other bands
– this website and oarsa
– ed paff

Viva La Revolution! :)

Idol Catch-up

The results are in and we are back in first place in our volleyball league! The former champs, Kinky Sets, must have lost all three games two nights ago. So as long as we win one game against them next week, we should at least have a share in the championship. Well that also assumes that we sweep the team we play in the final week. This is very likely though, given that they’ve only won one game all session. I guess I shouldn’t count them out though, anything can happen.

Kim is back from Texas. She was pretty tired last night, so we just ate some dinner and then caught up on some TV. American Idol is back, and we had a couple weeks of try-outs to watch. I still think those are the most entertaining episodes that we’ll see all season. We also watched the first night of the Hollywood round, but nothing exciting happened there at all. I consider this the down point in the show, but luckily there is only one more night of Hollywood. Then the real show begins!

Up Next…Kinky Sets

Johnson County Park and Recreation District has done it again! They’ve taken forever to enter the results for last night’s volleyball matches, and they still are not up. You have to start questioning what exactly we are paying for.

Despite missing two of our regular players, Kim and Christie, and playing with only five players, including the one substitute we could find, we managed to win all three games last night! I believe that I’ve mentioned the game time limit before, and I’m sure I was complaining before, but it actually went in our favor twice last night. Two of our games were ended by the time limit when we were only up by one point. Overall, I still think that this was quite a victory, and we have a great chance to take back the top spot when we play the league leaders this coming week.

After the game, the good luck continued. I was finally able to format the C: drive on the old machine, so that I could get a fresh copy of Windows XP installed. I am now in the process of making sure all of the critical updates have been installed, and from there I hope to get the server up and running very quickly. Once that’s done, assuming all of my tests pass, I’ll have to get busy redesigning edpaffjr.com.

PC Load Letter?!?

I really don’t have too much to write about today. Last night I sat at my computers and tried to get various things done. I still haven’t got windows XP setup on the old machine like I’ve been wanting to. Currently the machine is sitting on the floor, with the case open, and various parts missing. I’m not having much luck with it. Perhaps I’ll have more time tonight after volleyball.

Kim is still down in San Antonio with work. I’m still not sure why I didn’t tag on to the beginning or end of this trip like I’ve done a couple times before. Just look at the hotel they are staying at, and you’ll probably be asking the same thing. Adding further insult is the fact that I’ve never really been to Texas before. I have had a layover or two there, but I don’t count those. I think we decided that it was just going to cost too much, especially since I wanted to spend time in Austin as well as San Antonio. I guess we’ll just have to arrange for a different trip down south.

Guys’ Night Out

After work on Friday Kim and I headed to dinner at Brio. The food was wonderful and mostly free since we had some gift cards to use. From there we headed back to the apartment and put together the new office desk that I bought from a guy on craigslist for $30. It is big enough for both sets of monitors, keyboards and mice. I’ll have to take some pictures of the new setup, it looks really nice.

Kim left early on Saturday morning for San Antonio, the location of Great American’s annual conference. After sleeping in for a few more hours, I put together a new filter for the turtle tank. I hope that the tank will require much less maintenance than before. From there I sat at the computers and made some progress in getting them all working as I want them to. I’m to the point where I am ready to install Windows XP on Ringo, the old dell machine. From there it should be easy to get the webserver setup and hopefully run some tests on it. Soon enough it was time for the guys’ weekend to start. Todd, Mike, and I first went up to Harling’s to watch the one and only Mama Ray. From there we headed to Kelly’s for a few rounds and some pizza. Finally we ended up at the Levee to listen to Groove Agency once again. It was a nice night out.

Sunday I had lunch at The Mixx, a rather new restaurant next to Chipotle. The food was good, but it’s a little pricey. From there I picked up a few things at the grocery and headed home to make some Skyline dip. Mike and I walked over to Todd’s a couple of hours before the big game, to start tasting some of the leftover bourbon from the New Year’s tasting. The party was a nice way to round out the weekend, even though the Steelers won. :)

It’s Tax Time!

Last night was tax night, well at least for me. I started off by filling both of our federal returns. I know that I said last year that I didn’t like the way H&R Block’s questionnaire worked, but filling online is so much easier than any other way I’ve done it. It’s free for us, you don’t have to send anything in, and your refund is direct deposited very quickly. Obviously, I choose this same method again. The nice thing was that the answers I entered for many of the questions last year were automatically filled in this year. I completed my return first and I will be receiving an $850 refund! The IRS has already accepted my return and I should have the money direct deposited within a week or two. Next I did Kim’s federal return hoping for something similar, but as it turns out she owes $10. The nice thing was that we could set this up to be automatically withdrawn from a checking account.

I then tried to do our state returns the old fashioned way, since H&R Block will charge you to file your state returns. Missouri has an online PDF that automatically calculates most of the blanks. I attempted to use this on my old PC but it kept freezing. So then I tried the same form on my new PC. I got the whole thing filled in and then I went to print it out. One problem though, the stupid thing wouldn’t recognize the network printer that’s hooked up to the old PC. I tell ya, this is a never ending project! I called it a night and I just got done with the state returns here at work. I’ll be getting $61 and Kim will be getting $115. Our overall return will be $1016. Time to plan another trip!

Dominique Moving?

We went over to the kids’ house last night for what might be the last time we see Dominique. Supposedly he is flying to Atlanta today to live with his grandma. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this from them, but it sure seemed pretty truthful last night. Overall he seems pretty excited about the move, and I think it will be good for him. He has so many responsibilities here with caring for his three younger sisters along with taking care of himself at the age of 13. This will allow him to actually be a kid and do the things that most kids take for granted. I gave my phone number to him again, and told him that he can find the Atlanta office of Big Brothers Big Sisters to get paired up again. We’ll see if the move goes through this time…

From 1st To 2nd

Someone finally beat ‘Off Each Other’, our volleyball team for this session. We had a match last night against one of the better teams in the league. Kim missed the game because she was on her way back to KC from Salt Lake City. Perhaps that was what threw off our rhythm because something definitely changed. If you remember from before, our team was dominating the competition before last night. After losing the first two games we were finally able to win the last. At least we weren’t swept. Our team has dropped from 1st place to 2nd place, and we are looking at a tough couple of weeks ahead of us.

Both Kim and Christie will be gone for next week’s game, and to make it worse we are playing another pretty good team. Then the week after that we will be playing the now top team of the league, so hopefully we are back to full strength. I’m hoping for a strong finish so we can take back the top spot in the league and receive a t-shirt or whatever crap they give the winners.