Everyday Stupidities

Hello, one and all. The most interesting thing I've done lately is going to a show at a cafe/bar in Seattle a couple days ago to see a guy I hung out with in junior high perform with a couple bands, having been invited to this by my junior year locker partner, I got to talk to his sister who I had a class with when I was in the sixth grade, and I was joined by my best friend from elementary school [at right], another classmate, and the drummer for the band I was in during college. If you find that Mighty Shiny and/or Mountain Kids Fantasy are playing near you (it could happen) go see 'em. Yeah, yeah, everything was orchestrated through Facebook except getting me in, which used good old-fashioned email. I spent all of Sunday recuperating. :-D Paige meanwhile was on the other side of the state visiting relatives for their annual St. Patrick's Day festivities, with several people flying or driving hours to get there, and got back this afternoon because the mountain passes were being snowed under. So we both had an exciting time over the weekend.

The silly thing, some would even call it stupid (six people definitely would) is that 3/4 of the people in that place were there to hear the first two bands. And left when the bands did. The headliner, a six-piece band which included a steel drum and a violin, didn't have much of a crowd left by the time they started playing a Dave Matthews cover... My group felt kinda sorry for them as we left. Only kinda.

Trivial life computer notes: At long last the memory for my computer arrived so hopefully there will no longer be 20 seconds between when I click on the browser when I've been reading email and when it's ready to browse, and I spent a bit of time refurbishing an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) that I have had laying around for a year. It's a completely different model than the one I have been using for a few years so I had to make a communications cable (that's how the computer knows how much juice is in the battery and can shut it down if the AC goes out for more than fifteen minutes) and buy a replacement. After installing the software everything is good, things work as expected, except for one detail... The old one, for home use, would put a dialog onscreen when there was a problem with the backup power. This new one, meant for servers, will send an email or a network message to someone but not display a dialog (because admins don't sit at a server terminal all day; they have smoking out back and first-person shooter games in their office to do). But the solution was easy and what I rely upon with the previous UPS: a buzzer comes on if the power's been out for several seconds, and beeps a few times every minute while it's out. The UPS is less than 3 feet from the computer and about one foot from my legs so it's not like I'm going to miss the alarm.

The weather here has improved a bit, now we're up to rain (sometimes plain, sometimes blotchy sleetish) instead of snow. But it's still wonky because you look out the window to see if it's still raining, the sun is out and shining, then by the time you've gotten your shoes on it's dark and raining hard again. Plus there have been windstorms lately, not too bad where I am but the news has been filled with trees-on-powerlines stories from places 50 miles north.

Hope it's good where you are for the next week, Jamie, and decent where the rest of you readers are.