Hot Jazz Tonight

Music

The word on the street is that tonight at 7:30 PM at the Pasta Co. on Woodway (map) there will be some burning big band jazz with yours truly and my good friend Rene in the alto section, and the lovely Sarah Williams screaming with the trumpets. Last week was a blast and this week should be even better. I need to get a list of all the amazing people in the band together, because everyone is so talented they deserve individual mention. Come check it out and say hi to me if you do.

Update: Thanks to Josh, Elissa, Jesse, Eddie, Emily’s parents Denise and Bob, my parents, my cousins Norma and Megan, Kelly Dean, and everyone else for coming out.

Hey Hey Hey, Z1A

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I don’t know how to describe my mood except elation. Remember the laptop that broke last week? Well I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to take it in to Best Buy until today. If you remember, my hard drive was hosed. I was bringing it out of hibernation and it hung. When I restarted it I was informed that there was no operating system found. Many hours, recovery disks, and general messing, it seemed that the hard drive was fubar.

Obviously it had gotten jolted out of whack or something, and I went in to the store expecting them to send it away and maybe it would be an easy fix so I would have my laptop back in two weeks instead of a month and a half. However they just checked if they had another Z1A in stock and exchanged it out for me. Sweet! The timing couldn’t have been better because I had just started to notice the wear and tear that inevitably happens.

Anyway now we’re trying to fix Josh’s computer, which he’s trying to upgrade to work with Star Wars Galaxies, however Murphy has intervened and nothing seems to be working right. Hopefully we can work things out though.

Update: Josh’s problem was a bad CD-ROM drive. He’s now up and running with Windows XP (which is running really fast on his machine) and everything seems to be working. He hasn’t installed the game yet that prompted this slew of upgrades (XP and 120GB HD) so it’ll be hilarious if it doesn’t work.

Mozilla 1.4

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THANK YOU Mozilla 1.4 for deleting all of my bookmarks. This could take months to recover from. I must have a copy somewhere…

Otherwise things are good on my front, the rhyming email project has been going well.

Update: I found the bookmarks.html file and was able to import it successfully. Whew!

Rain Rain Go Away

Personal

I usually don’t post lyrics, but today I just couldn’t resist.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring
Bumped his head and he went to bed
and he couldn’t get up in the mornin’
Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

In The Last Episode…

Music,

A lot has happened since the last time I posted, it’s been a series of very long days.

Tuesday I went into work early to finish up some of the cabling (which is still going on) when mid-afternoon I got a call from John Greiner asking if I could play lead alto with a big band that night. He said they needed another alto too so of course I called Rene and we were all set for that night. I left work a little early to try and get a head start on traffic because I had to pick up my horn and stand from my house (Southwest), pick up Rene (Northeast), and go to the gig (Northwest). It was going to be a squeeze but Sarah offered to give Rene a ride and that made things so much easier.

The gig was a blast! It was the first ever performance of this group, which is basically a rehearsal band of musicians from around town. It had some funny parts (most of us were sight-reading) but it’s a great group and the good news is we’re going to be performing every Tuesday from 7:30–9:30 at the Pasta Co. on Woodway. Come check it out next week!

Yesterday was pretty crazy because the gateway/firewall/mail server here at work crashed pretty badly, to the point where I had spent so much time trying to fix bizarre problems that it became apparent that it would be faster just to set a new machine up. I was also surprised to find out that the machine was only a 166mhz Pentium with a mere 40mb of RAM! Before I saw the box itself I just assumed it was some sort of nice machine because it ran so well. Linux rocks! Anyway we set up a new one with some more modern hardware and I dropped Red Hat on it (something was wrong with our Slackware CDs) and then I spent the rest of the evening becoming intimately familiar with iptables. After that I drove all the way down to Sugarland to help some people out with some computer stuff and setting up a wireless network, and that went very well and it was a pleasant change of pace to have everything work the first time! Since it wasn’t enough having been working or driving for 16 hours that day, Josh called and we went to House of Pies, of course.

Today we’re getting three new T-1s installed!

Looong Day

Personal

I was at work for 10 hours today doing cabling and other things that need to be done by tomorrow. We didn’t finish, so I’m going in tomorrow morning as well. That actually wasn’t that bad, the work was hard but it needs to be done and it’s not like I’m not getting paid. What really blew though was when I booted up my laptop and it told me “No Operating System Found.” What? Where did it go? What could have happened? Who knows.

On my old laptop I would have just popped the drive out and plugged it into my desktop (I have an adaptor) and seen what was wrong, however a tradeoff of the nice look of this new one is that there seems to be no good way to open it without messing a whole mess of things up. So I’m downloading Knoppix to boot from the CD-ROM and see if I can see what’s up. Honestly I wouldn’t care and just go straight to a recovery CD if it wasn’t for the Vegas pictures that I haven’t uploaded yet that are still on there. I really hope this doesn’t become a recurring issue like the ones I had with the GRX.

On a brighter note, I got my review copy of Andy King’s Web Site Optimization yesterday. I had some time to get started on it and it looks very interesting. I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web * SIGs here in town and I’ll also post something here. I have to be back at work at 9 tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 7-ish (hour to get ready, hour to get there) so I better get to bed soon.

Open Key Works

Open Key

The OpenKey system works! I would link to all the old posts, but it’s very late and I’m very tired. Browse the categroy.

Long story shorter, my keys were locked in my car since yesterday, and it seems I had given a key to everone but the people I live with (sometimes called my family) so I couldn’t get in, but key holder Sarah W. (who will have a photolog soonish) drove over and opened the car for me, and all was good.

I’m thinking of starting a gallery of people with their photomatt.net key to collect all the pictures in one place (when I have many people their key it was with the stipulation that they take a picture with the key and send it to me) and also to test out some new WordPress photolog stuff. Soon.

Also, keys are sexy.

And No Play

Personal

Well I just finished up my first day of real work. “Real” in that I went to an office for a set time and worked with other people and I’m going to be getting a paycheck. For years now I’ve worked by myself and for myself, and to be honest I never planned to get a job with a capital J because I didn’t want to be part of that enviroment. This is just a temporary engagement, so I’ll be back to my free-wheelin’ self in a few months, but to be honest I didn’t see this coming.

It was just last week that this offer came my way, and I thought about it quite a bit before accepting it. There are a number of downsides, including that it’s very far away from me (at Veteran’s Memorial and 1960 for you Houston people) and it’s full-time, meaning I don’t have a lot of room for summer things. The time thing was probably the biggest issue, because the oppurtunity cost of relaxation, social time, and other projects is high, but I think it’s going to work out well. The driving doesn’t really bother me because they’re letting me start an hour later so I miss most of the traffic and even though it’s still far away once I get some good music on my stereo I don’t really care anyway.

I don’t really have a formal job description, but from the looks of it I’m going to work on lots of computer troubleshooting issues, their website, some PHP and MySQL backend stuff, and Linux/BSD administration. I was worried about coming in today and I even had the first day jitters when going up to the office, but everyone is really nice and it seems like a great environment. Plus I’ll be working on things I love.

I need to watch what I talk about though, as I found out last night at Diedrich’s with Josh, Julie, Elissa, Ramie, and Chris when I almost put the entire table to sleep by talking about what WordPress is going to do with multimedia in the future. Actually I think Josh was secretly interested but won’t admit it. It’s really interesting, I just need to think of a way to describe it (without showing it) in non-programmer terms.

Back in Town

Meta

Vegas was great, but I don’t even know where to begin. I didn’t have internet access save that one five minute session the entire time so I’m a little more behind on things than usual. There are hundreds of great pictures to go up but for now I’m going to relax a bit and see if I can catch up with my email.

First Step Toward World Domination

Meta

Before I finish getting ready to leave (and yes it’s 4 AM) I would just like to point to this search. Google is a harsh mistress; weeks ago I was on the fourth page (after skirting the first page a while back) and now somehow I’ve been bumped up to 8, 7 if you take out the duplicate.

I can’t think of a better birthday present for this blog from Google. (This domain turned one year old a couple of days ago. I’m working on a year recap but it’s taking a while. Loving the new WordPress draft feature though.)

Leaving (for) Las Vegas

Music

At an ungodly hour Saturday morning I will be leaving hot Houston for very hot Las Vegas.

Why? Why does anyone go to Vegas? To play of course. I will be performing twice with a local union band for the American Federation of Musicians’ conference. I think the music is going to be pretty good so I’ll try to get a recording of it up on the site sometime (if I get one).

I’m looking forward to this a lot and I’m going to try not to get into too much trouble while I’m there. Wish me luck and if you’d like anything while I’m there get me an email quick.

I’m not sure if I’ll have any sort of internet access while I’m gone, so email responses may be even further delayed than normal. Updates probably won’t happen but I do plan to take a lot of pictures, so look for that when I get back. (Or when I find good WiFi.)

Speaking of pictures, Photo Matt.net has had its very first guest photographer, Elissa, whose photos are interspersed with photos from Tuesday (with Julie!). My plan is to eventually have them all in chronological order, but that’s proving to be quite a pain, so for now things are a little bouncy.