I’m back at work today, boooo! The good news is that I feel a ton better today, yaaaay!

Once I finally got up yesterday I concentrated on getting all of my remaining concert ticket stubs scanned and into my database. I’m so glad that I can finally say that I am finished with this project. The scans will appear on the details page for each show (if I have a ticket stub for that show).

Once that was done I began my cleaning project of the office, followed by all other rooms of the apartment. We pretty much have everything cleaned and ready for the Cincinnati invasion this weekend. I also took some time off to get my new Sirius Satellite Radio hooked up in the apartment. I also have the car kit to get installed, but that will have to wait for another day.

Finally, no update would be complete without a little talk of fantasy football. One of my leagues is completely over now, and I finished in 4th place out of 14 teams! In another league, I am battling for 3rd place with Kim this week. As I mentioned earlier, the final league is being scored manually so I still don’t have the results from this past weeks semi-final games. The good news is that the worst I can do is another 4th place finish…

A couple of days ago we opened up the iPod mini that I mentioned winning earlier. Kim was going to start using it while running, since she lost her little radio on a business trip. I spent a little time the past couple days looking for cases that would protect it during runs. Through my research I realized that using the mini for running might not be the best idea.

Like the full size iPod, the mini actually has a hard drive inside of it. Although you aren’t likely to notice problems right away, continuous running actually could damage the moving parts of the hard drive. The hard drives are what allowed manufacturers to get large amounts of storage space in a small package.

Now they are capable of the large storage space using flash memory, which has no moving parts. Therefore, running should not have any affect on the device. The new iPod nano is one example of large flash memory storage.

I am now thinking that a flash based player would be best for us and am seriously considering selling the mini on eBay. I should have followed your advice before Andy! I hope the fact that it isn’t in a sealed box doesn’t hurt it, but I should be able to get over $175 for it. I’m still considering the nano as a replacement, but I’d love to hear any other suggestions that you might have.

A very rare weekend post, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I have finally moved my webserver to the machine that Phil gave to me. All of the kinks should be worked out by now, but if you notice something strange, please let me know. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I finally picked up my new iPod on Tuesday night from the GM of the gym. I ended up getting a silver iPod mini from the raffle they had after completing a survery. It appears that apple has just discontinued the minis with their release of the iPod nano. Even apple.com/ipodmini is no longer functional and is redirection to the apple store homepage.

Now the decision becomes one I’ve faced before. Should I keep this or should I sell? It appears that brand new minis are selling for $170-$180 on eBay. I really wish they would have given me a nano instead of the mini. The nano is about half the size of the mini and has even more functionality. It would be even easier to run with, although I’ve heard that you can easily run with the mini strapped to your arm. The downer is that the 2 GB costs $200 and the 4 GB (the size of the mini) sells for $250.

Feel free to toss in your .02

The show on Friday night was a fun one. I taped the show, but had to do so without using my stand. Jack Johnson does not allow microphone stands at the shows, so I just clipped the mics to my shirt collar and hoped for the best. We’ll see how it turns out.

Saturday Mike and I took his brother to the Boulevard Brewery tour, a great way to start a Saturday! From there we went back to my place and started up some cornhole games with Christie. Kim finally got back from Cincy sometime that afternoon and Doni showed up later on with Gabe. Another fun night!

Sunday I worked on my computer while Kim continued her studying for a upcoming test. I removed linux and installed Windows XP on the server machine. I’m hoping that I can get everything running on there before the end of the week, although I’d also like to re-launch the site with a new design. I guess I could do that later though.

Later on in the day we took Dominique and Bianca out to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a couple of hours. I always remember that place being so much bigger than it actually is, or maybe it’s just the one that we went to that is small. We had a blast though, and the kids did as well!

Awhile ago we filled out a survey about the gym, which said that a raffle would be held with those who participated and the winners would receive a free iPod. Well late yesterday I got an email congratulating me on being a winner of a free iPod. I can’t remember what version they were giving away, but regardless I now have another iPod and am faced with the same decision, should I keep it or sell it on eBay? We’ll have to see what shows up first…

I didn’t do much last night. I thought about going to another Citizen Cope show, but didn’t feel like making a late night drive back to KC. Instead I sat at my computer and tried to figure out Linux. This task has been going on forever and I still don’t know if I’m even close to getting it all figured out. If I get time the rest of the week, I might just wipe it out and install Windows once again. I know that I can get that up and running pretty quickly with everything I need.

Later today NASA plans to launch the space shuttle Discovery, the first shuttle launch in almost two and a half years. It seems that significant changes have been made not only to the shuttle itself but also the way the entire process is conducted so that an event like the Columbia disaster will not happen again. If you’ve never read the bio section, I did see the first space shuttle launch ever in person, although I was just over a year old. My dad worked for NASA years ago, and is an aerospace engineer although he has since moved on to software engineering. There have been 112 launches since the one I saw, and today will likely look just like most of the others. However it will be different, I’ve read quotes that this is the safest launch that NASA has ever done. In the past, I followed NASA and space exploration in general much more than I do currently, but I guess there hasn’t been much to follow for awhile now. Today, however, I am just as interested in this launch as I was years ago and hopefully I will be able to watch it all unfold via NASA TV. Be sure to either point your eyes toward a TV screen or the link provided around 3:51 Eastern Time (that’s 2:51 for me).

Damn, it looks like I posted 20 minutes too soon. NASA has scrubbed today’s launch because of a faulty engine cut-off sensor, which is responsible for making sure the engines shut down at the proper point during the ascent. If the engines were to continue running at high speed without fuel, it could lead to a catastrophe. No new date has been given for the next attempt.

The Pig-Fest evite was sent out last week sometime. I’m sure most of you already knew, but just incase you didn’t, there it is. I now have confirmation that American Cherry will be back once again to provide some evening entertainment! I may also be working out a deal with a band called Greenstreet from up around Detroit. It appears as if they really want to come down and play the fest, and I think they would match up fairly well with American Cherry. We’ll see how that all works out, but perhaps we’ll have the first inaugural edpaffjr.com Music Showcase at Pig-Fest!

I’ve been messing with Red Hat Linux on the computer Phil donated to me. I’m up to the point where apache is running and I have an active internet connection to it. Lately I’ve been messing with Samba, which should allow me to network Windows and Linux together. I’ve just about got that working now. From here I just need to get a ftp server running and then setup the programs I need to drive my site. Hopefully before too long the site will be off of my PC and on this “dedicated server.” I’ve also been working on a redesign of the site for this new and improved version.

Do you have your own blog? If you answered yes then go fill out a quick survey from MIT. Just follow the link below…

After work last night I stopped at the local VW dealer and picked up the part that was going bad in our car, a brake light switch. I guess these things are constantly going bad in VW’s and there is even a recall out on some of them but not for our car. Anyway, the switch cost around $17 but to have them install it would have cost at least $60 and perhaps more than $100, depending on the amount of labor. I then went to the hardware store and picked up a package of bits for my little drill costing an additional six bucks. With all the necessary equipment and a great set of directions, I successfully replaced this switch in 15 or 20 minutes with no problems at all and it only cost a little more than $20!

Mike came over and we cooked up some chicken parmesan along with pasta and sweet potato fries. It was quite the meal and I think I might still be stuffed from it. After that we checked out some of our camping supplies for this weekend and then headed to bed. I think we are gonna go out and buy some more supplies tonight…

I guess I forgot to make an entry last Friday, as you know it was a pretty busy week. Last Thursday night we saw Tanner play again, this time at Old Shawnee Days. Tanner and band had a much longer set to play and filled it with old songs, new ones and a bunch of covers. It was a fun show and I finally got to record something again.

Friday at work must have flown by and then from there we headed to Doni & Phil’s. We brought over a frozen pizza and a couple six packs of beer. We were Gabe’s babysitters for the night. If you didn’t already know, Gabe is their newly adopted pit bull. While enjoying our wonderful dinner and drinks we watched White Chicks which was actually entertaining at times. I wouldn’t go out of your way to see it, but if it’s on TBS one day you might enjoy it. We also fell asleep on their couch watching Caddyshack. Who would have thought that they would be out past midnight?

Saturday we walked down to Panera on the plaza and then came home to take care of some stuff. Kim watched recorded Oprahs while I worked on the new PC (aka Skinnyboy). Phil had it named FatboyII to go along with his Fat Boy Phil enterprise. As of today I have Windows XP SP2 installed as well as apache. I still have to install php and mysql and then I’ll have to move everything over. The two machines are communicating well except for this one small issue. While on Skinnyboy I can see my old machine (aka Ringo) but when I try to view the shared files I’m told that I don’t have permission to access Ringo or something like that. I may edit this later with the real error message. Anyone have any ideas? I have not spent too much time on this though, but I’m curious if I upgraded Ringo to XP from 2000 if it would then work. Anyway, back to our exciting day. From there we made dinner and Mike came over after a little bit. We had wanted to play cornhole all weekend but could never get together enough people to play, and the weather never really cooperated. So instead we did a “Power Hour” which involves a shot of beer every minute for an hour. I think Mike and I each finished off just over six beers in this short amount of time. I never actually did one of these while in college so I guess it was about time that I did, but I don’t plan to do it again. :)

Sunday we went to the driving range and hit some balls. I think we are actually getting better at this goofy game, but we’ll have to see about that the next time we go out to play nine holes. From there we did our standard trip to the grocery and followed it up with another trip to Doni & Phil’s. Mike was there watching Gabe, so him and I switched out the legs on their set of cornhole boards. We also put our set of boards in our car and took them back to our place. As we were carrying them back to our apartment a girl said something to the effect of, “That’s a really fun game.” We got to talking with her and she recently moved into our old apartment #3. Sounds like we may have found someone to join in our cornhole games!

Today I took the Jetta into VW to get a recall service performed. Kim had setup for me to get a rental car, but the guy said it would only take 10 minutes to install a new switch, so I just waited. Sure enough the car was back to me within 10 minutes. It now makes a much quieter clicking noise for the blinkers. All was going well until I got in here at work. I quickly realized that something was wrong, the damn air conditioning is not on. It must be 90 degrees in my office right now and we are still here. Someone mentioned leaving at 10AM if it isn’t fixed, so we’ll see what happens.