The Purpose Driven Storage Unit

Is it half empty or half full??

Prepping the house...

I hate moving... The Queen goes into hyper-nesting mode and has to fix everything in the house, knowing full well that the new owners are probably going to repainting all that we just painted...

This week, we added new archway trim in all the main rooms, crown molding in the dining room, new rock in the back yard...

Today we met with a realtor. Good news is we might manage to break even. Only time will tell.

Changing of the Guard in MA

Ted Kennedy's passing marks the end of the Kennedy political dynasty, and possibly will bring a much more moderate voice the the Senate.

When John Kerry was running for President, Kennedy and other Dems were concerned that the Republican governor of MA would appoint a conservative to replace Kerry, so the state enacted legislation at Kerry and Ted's urging requiring a special election be held to replace a vacancy in the Senate. It's a fair way to avoid pay-to-play actions like what we just saw in Illinois, and it's only fair that elected officials actually be elected...

Fast forward eight years... Kennedy realizes he's finally facing justice for Chapaquiddick and leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die, and realizes that in a real election, it's possible now that Obummer's policies and the popularity of Dems means a real possibility that a moderate or even a conservative might replace him...

So does he honor the legislation change from 2004? Nope. He tried to roll back the clock and have his successor appointed by the current Dem Governor...

There are still efforts underway to reverse Massachussets law and allow the Gov to appoint his replacement, but hopefully law will prevail and that doesn't happen. The vacancy is now there, and the Kerry law is in effect at the time the vacancy occurred.

If it does revert back to appointment, I expect you'll see even bigger tea parties in Boston...

What Are The Chances...

...of getting a job located in a building just a block away from where my dad's last office building in the Loop was?... Granted, that was 35+ years ago, but in a city the size of Chicago, the odds of winning the lottery are probably better...

Toys

We're starting to get our house ready to put on the market, and have been doing a lot of the usual "this box never got unpacked when we moved the last time" type cleaning... I have a lot of music equipment that I haven't really used since my 20's (except for a couple times with a church in Texas). I can't part with all of them, but I did decide to check out CraigsList.Com to see if any of them still had some value. Surprisingly, my Roland D-5 might still be worth almost half what I paid for it in 1990. If I had a DX-7, it would still be worth quite a bit as well.

But the following ad really caught my eye:

2 fast PC's, loaded with ram and hard drives, Nuendo, Cubase and all the plugius, Kontakt 3, Layla soundcard and Delta 1010 soundcard. 2 15" LCD monitors, KVM switch to switch monitors between computers, 1 Mac 7200 running MastertracksPro sequencing software, 2 midi interfaces. 2 Rode NT1 Microphones w/ 2 Event Electronics Mic. preamps, 2 heavy duty studio mic stands w/ shock mounts. 4 tier custom Keyboard stand, Roland Phantom keyboard, XP50 keyboard, R 8M drum module, Alesis D4 (both drum modules accept trigger in), Proteus module, Korg M3R module, 2 oak racks, Sony 100 w stereo amp, Alesis Studio 32 mixing board, 2 JBL studio monitors, Nakamichi cassette deck, all cabling, power supplies w/ battery backup. Best offer for all. Must sell this weekend. Losing home. I'm tearing it all down this weekend, so somebody is going to get real lucky. call Ron 555-1212

Granted, some of it probably wasn't new, but some of it is, and combined, is worth thousands.

And he's losing his house. Sad. He had money for the toys, but no money for the mortgage.

Hmmm...

Back Online...

Sorry, the company who has been hosting my server and domain pulled the plug on their hosting services on short notice.

For the past two years, I've hosted my blog on a real server, and only used Blogger as a content management tool. The hosting was free, so I'm not complaining about the short notice, but I really had no desire to pay $100-150 a year for hosting somewhere else.

Instead, I made the business decision to just go with the flow and use BlogSpot's hosting, and redirect my custom domain. For some reason, I could redirect to Blog.Lanehog.Com, but had no ability to redirect WWW.Lanehog.com due to some internal config issues to an expired Google Apps account also referencing this domain... After a few attempts, it got resolved, and now all is well in the world.

And no, I'm not complaining about Google or Blogger. For the price, you can't beat their services. I'll have to give up some of the flexibility I had to throw a custom page with programming onto Lanehog, but I just can't justify the price of doing that right now...

Five Things I Miss About Texas

Vicki would have her own list, starting with our old house, but here are a few of mine, in no particular order...

1. Braum's
2. Colter's
3. Esparza's
4. QuikTrip
5. Freeways

Braums... definitely one of my favorite places for ice cream. Nothing spectacular, but it's consistently good. They purposely keep the number of stores to a manageable level, and within a day's drive of their dairy in Oklahoma. So we'll never see them in Arizona anytime soon...

Colter's... Love hate with this place -- we used to have staff meetings there and we'd have to watch my boss at the time lecture us while there was food and sauce stuck in his moustache and beard... It's taken me time to get over that, and this week, I got to spend an extended lunch there working, thanks to their complementary wifi. Again, not the best BBQ in Texas, but it's consistent, and reasonably priced.

Esparza's... One of my favorite Mexican places in Grapevine. It's in a former funeral parlor, but the food is nothing near death. Great salsa for the chips, and good cooking. Didn't get to have a margarita tonight because I was driving.

QuikTrip... OK, it's just a gas station. But we don't have them in our part of AZ, and I love their selection of sodas and hot food (4 different types of taquitos, 6 different types of hot dogs...), and always plenty of room to park or gas up... When we first moved to AZ, we'd try to stop at a QT in PHX whenever we drove up there for the day. The Queen somehow managed to buy at least one of just about everything imaginable sold at Ikea about a year ago, so we don't get up there anymore...

Freeways... I hate traffic, but there's something to be said about being able to go 20 miles away in 20 minutes. You just can't do that in Tucson. No freeways, unless you count I-10, so everything is on arterials with stoplights... I don't know how you grow a city to be 1M in population without some form of freeway system, but somehow TUS managed to do just that.

Back in Texas

Got to spend a couple days in Texas this week... Unlike the last two trips this year, I had some holes in my schedule and was able to get back up towards our old house, and see some friends. A good time, no doubt, but damn, I really don't miss this place as much as I thought I did.

The first welcome back was at DFW. My rental car was tagged with 35% in taxes... Yes, that's 35, and not 3.5 with a missing decimal... Unbelievable. I hadn't rented a car at the airport in over 18 years, so this was a shocker to me, and I actually pondered the idea of saying "no thanks" and just taking a cab to the hotel...

The second welcome back was the humidity... Jeez... It was only 95F outside, but after ten minutes outside waiting for the rental car bus, I was drenched in sweat...

Third welcome back was the traffic. I had to jump online and do some work before leaving the airport (thanks to the Admirals Club wifi... lifesaver!). By the time I left the airport it was after 7pm, but I still sat in bumper to bumper traffic going down TX-360 to Arlington.

The upside to the evening... I stopped at Six Flags for an hour, and got to ride the Titan, Texas Giant, Batman the Ride, and Mr. Freeze. All that in an hour. Not wanting to press my luck, and with my brain somewhat scrambled, I headed out to dinner and finally to the hotel...

Adventures in Driving

Our oldest son just got his drivers license a few weeks back... Talk about feeling old.

With school back in session, it's sort of a relief, in that I no longer have to make that drop-off on the way to work, and it's nice having someone else who can run to the store while we're trying to cook dinner, but I think it's an understatement to say it's more than a little frightening...

Green Two (our 9 year old Jeep Cherokee) is now his "to drive"... He think's it's his forever, but I'm just not ready to part with it yet... Green Two had been garaged for the past year, knowing this day would come. After a couple hundred bucks in repairs (new battery, headlights; the engine and tranny mounts had long rotted away, and a couple of the mounting bolts had actually broken off in the block...), she passed inspection and was back in the street legal category.

Something else about Green Two -- the 6" lift kit and 35" tires... Being a 4x4, it's just a matter of time before #1 would want to take her off-roading, so he and I headed off last Sunday to a place lovingly known as "The Pit" which is really a river bottom, and did a little exploring. #1 did the driving, and #3 came along for the ride..

I have to say, he did pretty well for his first time off pavement. We found our fair share of scrub to run into my side of the Jeep (depth perception is acquired, eh?), and a few two-tracks which had been pretty well rutted out. Climbs up and down were no problem, and there was only one point where I really got concerned and had to take over... We were driving on an angle up an incline, and he managed to plant the right front tire high enough that the left front was airborne, and the right rear was at first digging in, and then also airborne because he'd spun it a little too much...

After we switched, I managed to let gravity work, took another stab at heading up the ridge, and got up, but deemed it a little too much for him to try again on his first day out. So we headed off in another direction for a while.

I love getting off road and exploring, and I could tell he was having an absolute blast as well. I know he's going to head out on his own with his friends some day, and I'll find out the Jeep is either stuck or rolled, but hopefully that won't happen for some time...

Ah, the religion of peace and tolerance...

CNN is reporting the following...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Six people were killed in Pakistan on Saturday when Muslim demonstrators set fire to houses in a Christian enclave and fighting broke out, local police said.

Police said Muslims were enraged over an alleged desecration of pages in the Quran at a Christian wedding last Saturday, and held a rally to protest. The Quran is the Muslim sacred text.

The Muslims went to the Christian community in Gojra City, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southwest of Lahore, and burned 40 to 50 houses. Muslims and Christians exchanged gunfire.

Police said efforts to settle the concerns with dialogue so far have failed.

On Thursday, 15 Christian houses in the region were also torched.

Pakistan is predominantly Muslim but has a small Christian community.

Meanwhile, police in Islamabad reported Friday that an al Qaeda member thought to be involved in several attacks was arrested.

Bin Yamin, a senior police official in Islamabad, identified the suspect as Rao Shakir Ali.

Police believe he was involved in strikes on targets such as the Danish Embassy, a rally of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chauhdary, police, and a hotel.

The suspect is a resident of Sargodha, which is 165 kilometers (about 100 miles) northwest of Lahore and has a house in Rawalpindi that has been used to facilitate insurgent acts, police said.