The shed has arrived!

After about a month of waiting, the shed has arrived!!! And it's rather impressive. Below is a slide show of the various stages of delivery and setup.



My brother Chuck came over to give me a hand with anything that needed to be done, and I'm glad he did. There wasn't anything major that needed to be corrected, but it was helpful to have him help with getting some extra stone for the ramp and just odds and ends. At the end of the day, we had a family dinner.

Counting Crows and others

The summer concerts continue!
On July 22, Teri and I went to the opening show of the Counting Crows summer tour in Wilmington, DE. This tour will take place in minor league baseball parks around the country. Over all it was a good time. I take issue with the Crows playing such a short show, they may have been on stage an hour. That's LAME for a band nowaday.
Anyway, below is a slide show of the various pictures I took. They didn't come out very good, I'll have to get closer at the other two shows that I will be at in August.
The slide show shows the pictures in the orer that they were taken. The first group is of Collective Soul (blonde haired singer), then Live, followed by the Crows. This is my first attempt to use the slide show feature. Leave feedback if you like it or not.

Geez-Fest (Jack Fest) 2007

The first of a string of shows. This was Geez-Fest (aka, Jack Fest) at the Baltimore Arena (or whatever the call it now). As mentioned in previous posts, the line up was Stray Cats, Pretenders, REO Speedwagon, and ZZ Top. Below are pictures of the bands and some of the more remarkable members of the audience. Chris and I went and we got in for basically half price. A couple of decent seats, 11th row on the floor for $40 each. The face must of been around $80 each after all the charges. With seats like these, I'll never use Ticketmaster again!


Stray Cats! Really just Brian Sitzer in the pictures




Brian and the standup Bass player, with the Bass player on top of his Bass.






The Pretenders. They put on a great act, and Chrissy Hiend still sounds GREAT!

REO Speedwagon put on an excellent performance! Chris wasn't looking forward to seeing them (he has some weird, teenage post traumatic stress, something or other) but he really liked them.


That Lil' Ole Band from Texas put on a great gig. They didn't try to do anything out of the box, stuck with the Greatest Hits disc. And that's what we all came to see. I was telling Chris that I had seen them at least half-dozen times. Chris found this rather unbelievable! I don't seem like the ZZ Top kind of guy.










This is some of the audience. The bald guy is a piece of work. He had about 100 piercings, you can't tell but his earrings were these huge loops that went through his ear lobe. The couple were big time into the Stray Cats! Who knew that such fans were out there, but they would say the same about my Springsteen obsession.


Next show is the first of the Counting Crows shows on Sunday!

Recent interesting websites

Recently, I have found some websites that are very interesting. Below is a short summary of what they are and links to them. As always, the link on the side of the page are also interesting.

Maddox

One of the funniest websites that I have found in a LONG time! Granted some people may be offended, but if you are, you shouldn't be reading this blog. It's just the ramblings of someone who is stuck in life like the rest of us. A must read.

Cranky Geeks

For those of us who have been around technology for a long time, you need a little attitude with your technology. This is just enough attitude, with useful information.

DL.tv

What more can I say, "For Tech Fans, by Tech Fans". This has a bunch of former TechTV folk with Patrick Norton as the host. They talk about various technology things and give opinion about such things. Pretty decent.

Party is a Go!

For the past 5 years we have an annual summer party. The date moves around a little, last year it was early August, this year, Labor Day weekend, September 2. Here is the invite I have e-mailed to folks. If you are reading this, consider this your invitation!

Recent Media

In my free time, between working, gardening, family stuff, and household chores, these are the latest media that I have been involved.

Transformers: The Movie

Finally a good summer movie! In my previous posts I haven’t been too happy about the movies that I have seen this summer. Transformers was different. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have had to watch the cartoons to know what was going on, and you don’t. Basically, these guys over here are the good guys; these over there are the bad guys. Lots of action and the story moves along at a good pace.

The most interesting part of the movie is the visual effects. When you saw Star Wars, you knew something changed, and then you saw Jurassic Park, something changed. Then came The Matrix, and that was a big change. Transformers is one of those movies that is a new high-water mark for visual effects. I highly recommend seeing this movie! (And I don’t do that very often)

Einstein: His Life and Universe

If I haven’t mentioned it, I listen to audio books while riding the train to work. I saw an interview with the author of this book a while back and finally got around to getting the audio book. And it turned out to be a really good book. I’m not going to go into all of the details, but there is a lot that I can personally relate. Not that I am a genius or anything of the sort, but I do try to be a progressive thinker. And that is what Albert Einstein did in his life also. The physics seemed to be a means to an end. His interest in physics was an intense hobby, but in another age it could have been any subject. His personal life was even more interesting. Einstein separated from his first wife and married his cousin. This may seem odd today; I don’t think it was unheard of 100 years ago. There was never any plans for children between them, and none were conceived (both had children from previous marriages).

Einstein also went became a very public figure and was often asked for his opinion of world events. In the late 1920’s he became more involved with being a Zionist. With the anti-Semitic fervor in Germany, this lead to Einstein being ostracized by his country-men and others in the political and academic circles. Finally in 1933 with Hitler in power, he left Germany forever and none too soon. His house was ransacked and eventually seized by the Nazis.

It would take pages for a full review, but it was an interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone.

GO put your strengths to work

This is a business, self improvement type of book. There is apparently a Strength Improvement philosophy within business improvements circles and this book build on this philosophy. Essentially what the philosophy emphasizes is that you should improve the areas of your life that you have your most strength. As oppose to improving the areas that you are weakest. If you look at it from a grading point of view, if you go from an F to a D, there really isn’t much of an improvement. If you go from a B- to and A, that looks a lot better and you will improve your work much more. Thus working to improve your strengths as oppose to where you are weak, makes a bigger change for the better.

“Go put our strengths to work” gives examples of how to improve your strengths and case studies of how others have made improvements. I listened to the audio book and it comes with a CD of PDF files that can be used for exercises described in the audio. These were helpful to determine how to modify your work habits to make improvements.

Overall this was a good book if you have the job flexibility to modify your workflow. Personally I will try to use some of the techniques to assess where my strengths lay and where this will help me move forward in my career.

That’s all for media reviews, see you next time.

Latest Baby Pictures...

These are the latest baby pictures. Teri was suppose to find out what she will be having today, but the baby didn't want to cooperate.







The bottom picture on the slide with 2 pictures is supposedly a leg.

Latest Garden stuff

Nothing major with these pictures, just more of the garden.
The first one is the latest harvest of cucumbers and some squash.




This will be some of the first, large tomatoes that will be ready. I am guessing that they will start coming on around the 20th.





Squash, peppers, and okra.






A cantalope getting ready! My estimate is around 7/20 for the lopes too.

Slow day...

Kind of a slow day today. Nothing really going on.
Friday was a little interesting. First off, Gram was pissed because Heather came over Thursday night. I hate to break it to her (and anyone else), but this is MY house! I will have anyone over for as long as I want. If you don't like it, leave! That all being said I made dinner for the two of us and that perked her up. Today she was fine.
Jobs...Chuck
I picked a bunch of cucumbers (again) from the garden Friday evening. I'll take a picture when I pick more on Sunday. I can't get rid of them quick enough, and I don't even eat them! Friday after work I took my brother to pick up his van that was in the shop. He lost his job a couple weeks ago, and I am sure he's been in the dumps about it. And next week his live-in is making him go to North Carolina to visit her mothers grave. She didn't like her mother much when she was living! For his sanity, I hope he gets a job soon.
Speaking of jobs, my old company (TranTech) lost the contract at Census. I'm sorry for the people on the contract, but there seems to be too much of a middle management layer, that wastes a lot of money. I don't know who won the contract, but I wouldn't be surprised if I get a call from a head-hunter looking to fill a slot.
Live Earth (Happy 7/7/07)
I watched some of the Live Earth concert today. Basically, it wasn't very good. And the hypocrites were all over the place. Use less fuel, but most of the people at Giants Stadium in NY came to the show in an SUV. And the celebrities were all in limos. Yeah, they care about the Earth.
I don't mean to get on my soapbox, but the things that they say you should do, I am! I take public transportation to work everyday, drive a smallish car, grow my own garden, recycle, and avoid wasting energy. The steps that these people recommend, I'm already there and it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Then the whole thing about Global Warming. If you do a quick Google search for solar system warming, you will see several articles going back 10 years discussing how all of the planets in the solar system are warming. Maybe the sun is in an active stage and that's the culprit, not a million SUVs. Personally I look to use less gas to save money. Or should I say, spend money in other places. I'm sick of being made to feel guilty about the whole thing.

Bunny Update

Tuesday Teri and I were in the garden. I lifted a leaf in the cucumbers, and the bunny was there! We discussed moving him out, but I don't think there is much he will eat, so I left him.

On Wednesday, Teri was on the deck and looked over at the garden. Sitting on the fence was a large, Red-tailed Hawk. She pointed out how quiet things had gotten. If you don't know, hawks are birds of prey, which means they eat other critters. It must be looking for the bunny, but heard Teri and flew off.

You live another day rabbit!

Loose ends

This week seemed to be the week of cleaning up loose ends.

I’ll start from early in the week and work forward. I use Capitol One credit card most frequently, for a couple of reasons. On the credit card it has a neat Chesapeake Bay theme; this is a good conversation piece. Secondly, and probably most importantly, the interest rate is relatively low at 7.99% if I didn’t happen to pay it off. I haven’t been using it much recently, but I was looking at the statement and noticed that my interest rate is now 12.99%. This concerned me and I called. Turns out, Capitol One claims to have raised it on all of their customers, simply to make more money. This REALLY pissed me off! So my plan, pay off the card, then each month use it only to buy a pack of gum or some small dollar item and pay this off each month. Basically this will cost them a lot more then the items actual value. Let’s see if that makes them more money.

I think the next day I received a statement from Shell (gas credit card). I have had a Shell card since the early 1990’s, but really haven’t used it in a while (I don’t even carry it with me). Thus I was surprised when I received a statement. On the statement there was one charge, a $20 annual membership fee. Shell sold their credit division to Citi and Citi started charging a membership fee. This again pissed me off. I called, went through the whole phone logon, and finally got to a person. They wanted my logon password. I never established this and told them so. I then told them my problem. They said ok, we can sign you up for this other program that has no membership fee and a lower interest rate. Sounds good to me. To sign me up they need my password. Again I explain that I never established one. The guy didn’t know what to do. I asked if I could reset my password. Yes, this can be done and we did. Then to sign up to the new program he asks, “… and my I have your password…”

A couple of weeks ago I switched to Comcast from MDM. I thought they were all the same. Comcast has about 50 HD channels and the broadband internet service is really high speed! I am loving life! I have been waiting for Teri to change her e-mail and this week she finally did. I took the digital boxes and cable modem back to MDM and closed the book on that mess. As it turns out, Verizon may be coming to my neighborhood soon, so I may switch again. But for now, life is good on the cable TV service side.

Finally, I turned my laptop back to BAE systems. This closed the book on that job. It was a minor thing, but that is done. I enjoyed the places I went generally, but it was too much on the homestead.