THOMnottom – Page 26 – Back and bloggier than ever

I may be a wanted man…

If you want to leave a car parked in front of our house overnight, you have to call the cops. We have a two car driveway, so it’s typically not a problem. But sometimes one of us will leave a car in the street until the other gets home based upon exit strategies for the following morning. And occasionally, we are just a tad too forgetful and a car sits out in no man’s land all night.

A recent bout of forgetfulness landed me a ticket. Nevermind the fact that there is something truly disgusting about a township charging you $35 for leaving your car in front of your house when they will also turn around and charge you even more in taxes if you expand your driveway to fit said car. Nevermind that, I was willing to pay the ticket. Except I didn’t know about it for awhile because it blew off of my car. So I get notice that I need to pay $45 now for my lack of clairvoyance, and do so by the 25th – they’ll even provide me with a nice website where I can pay. And if only it worked, I might have actually paid my ticket on time.

Now, according to the notice I have, they may have issued a warrant for my arrest. There’s part of me that wants to not pay the ticket to see if they’ll come for me. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? I could change the tagline for this site to “That guy who got arrested for parking in front of his house”…

Things to be thankful for

Let me just say, that I am totally thankful for the Internet. For it provides us with such fantastic viewing as badly re-dubbed Santana:

There’s a whole selection available, but the Santana one is the best. (thanks to Questionable Content)

Not to mention, where else can you find such hysterical spoofs of Hitler:

(thanks to kottke)

But parody is the backbone of the ‘Net.

Alright, there’s also funny cats, brilliant book covers, and crazy-ass tuba-playing.

In the end, though, all we really want is cats and hamsters snuggling:

(courtesy, of course, to Cute Overload)

Oh yeah, and I’m thankful for family and friends – whom I will be spending plenty of time with this holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving all!

What have we learned?

So far, we have learned that I cannot keep to a schedule. I’ve proven this over most of my life but, come on, I couldn’t even link to some kittens or something? Missing the first night was silly. When I skipped this past Saturday, well, I was well on my way to a wine and cheese induced coma. That managed to wipe out Sunday, too. I’m still not even sure what happened on Monday – I think I went to work.

Alright, in reality this whole NaBloPoMo was really about encouraging me to write on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I lost site of the inspirational part and focused on the schedule part. In order for me to get back to writing more – and writing better – I’ve got to get in the habit of writing when I’m inspired. You should be able to figure out when that is pretty easily – compare the stilted, single paragraph posts to ones that meander for way more words than any subject needs. Hey, that’s my style and I’m sticking with it, thank you very much.

I’m most upset that I missed my Sunday Photo. I really need to think about that more before hand – maybe even go out specifically to shoot something. I need a muse…

I cannot emphasize how much I loath this state

If you were keeping score this week, I believe it’s something along the lines of New Jersey 5 Me 0. Let’s see, there was the ridiculously out of the way drive home Wednesday night. I managed to not be able to make it into the City to see Mike Doughty with a friend on Thursday night. And today I drove to Paramus twice – yes, that’s right, twice – and still couldn’t get to the Verizon office in time to switch out my TV box. Hmm, that’s 4 – I’m sure there was a fifth time New Jersey kicked my ass this week… we’ll just give it a bonus point. The state certainly earned it…

High culture for sure

Just an FYI, this blog is rated:

Apparently that’s because I’ve recently used crap twice and pissed once. I guess it’s appropriate then that I write at this level:

I’m guessing for the same reason… So it looks like I should start pandering to my target audience more – 13 and 14 year olds who have to sneak behind their parents’ back to see Weekend at Bernie’s. Hmm, how could I do that?

(thanks to Decrepit Old Fool and Chris)

New Jersey sucks

For the second time this year, I found myself accompanying The Woman for a “musical experience” at NJPAC – that’s the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for you non-locals. The first one was an orchestrated version of Led Zeppelin – which was a lot of fun. This time it was Rain: The Beatles Experience. The group did a very good job impersonating The Beatles, and it was a lot of fun watching the progression from the teeny-bopper pop group to a mature band of psychedelic musicians.

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend any of you to actually go there. Why? Because Newark is a shithole. Yeah, I normally avoid words like that on this site but, seriously, how else can you describe 75% of Jersey. NJPAC is about 2 miles from I280, but it’s a royal pain in the ass to get back on going west. Even if I hop right back on the route we came down, there is no entrance for I280 West. This is a common occurrence throughout this lovely state – you can go in one direction but not in the other. You know what another common occurrence is? Not posting signs to major highways. Or, only posting enough to get your confidence up, and then not directing you the rest of the way.

Once again I ended up heading a few miles East for no reason other than there was no decent way for me to turn around and head back home. I swear, it would have been easier to just drive 25 minutes to Hoboken, spend 10 minutes looking for parking, and then take a 20 minute train over to the center – even though it’s technically less than 15 minutes from our house.

SyncToy

Ever since my little hard drive incident last month, I’ve become more concerned with… you know… backing up my stuff. While the photos are my main concern, I also am sick of re-downloading or re-ripping my entire music collection whenever I screw up. So I purchased an external drive that could be configured as RAID 1 array to act as my real backup solution. Once a week I would copy everything new up to it and then shut it down to prevent any shenanigans. The only problem was how to limit the backups to just the new and updated files – no matter where in the directory structure they are located.

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a Microsoft power tool called SyncToy that does exactly what I want. Not being content to hand my backup scheme over to a stable piece of software, I skipped directly to their beta for version 2. I can’t really compare it to the old version, but I will say that this new one kicks ass.

I’ve already set up 3 pairs of folders to accomplish certain tasks. One syncs the music folders on my external drive that I take with me to work with my home computer. Now I can make changes at home and at work and know that everything will transfer properly. But with the other two folders, I just want a one way sync. I used the “echo” function, which will replicate any changes to the photo and video directories on my external drive to the backup device. And today, when I knocked the external drive over, I only had a mild heart attack as I knew all of the important data was already synced.

Crap

12 days in and I blew it. I even had something I wanted to post when I got home (already forgotten) but got so wrapped up in little chores that I never actually wrote it. Argh. I have to admit, I didn’t expect it to be a difficult task. But when you’re not completely inspired, it becomes almost a chore to log on and post – even if you have a topic in mind.

But, I’m not giving up. There’s still almost 20 more days, and I don’t want to miss another one…

Sunday Photo: The Hills Go On Forever

I took this photo at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Repeating patterns are very appealing in photographs and the repetition of tens of thousands of tombstones is both sad and intriguing. The sun was a tad too bright out there, which means you’re not going to get very somber photos of such subjects. So, instead, I oversaturated it some and really brought out the colors in contrast with the whiteness of the headstones.

And what did you do Friday night?

Hmm, I’m trying to figure out how I can post from my cell phone. You see, I’ve got some cool videos that I want to upload. Videos taken while we sat in the fourth row for this. It’s a tad odd, but I’ve now seen Duran Duran live 3 times – including these awesome seats and a special club appearance when they first reunited.

I have to admit that I really dig a lot of the new album – there was some great dance music. And the band still knows how to put on a great show. After they played the new album (Red Carpet Massacre) in it’s entirety, there was a brief intermission before they kicked into the second and third acts. The second act was called the Electro Set and it felt as though they were channeling Kraftwerk. The third act was when they really kicked in with the classics, including an awesome rendition of “The Reflex”.

Although the tickets were way more than I wanted to spend on a concert (apparently The Woman agreed to go before finding out just how ridiculous the prices were), we still had a blast. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to post the videos from my phone to avoid this being just a really lame review…