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6月26日 Michael Jackson Was My First Hero
When I was eight years old and the Thriller album came out, this was the first album I was completely in love with. Nothing topped it. I remember getting a pair of red parachute pants as a present and thought they were the greatest thing in the world. About a month later I had put holes in the knees of them from constantly sliding across the floor. I lusted for a few years after that to get the red jacket, but it never emerged. I would have still bought one up to a couple years ago - it was never meant to be though. I was in Greenville at my Godmother’s house and her son staying up and waiting when the Thriller video had it’s world premiere and we thought it was the greatest thing ever made. I think they aired it a few times that night and we watched it everytime - to think this was on MTV back when they actually showed music videos. Lastly I participated in Hands Across America - Michael was into it and through this chain of millions of people I would be connected with him and everyone else in the world. Even though we lived in Elyria at the time, our place in the “Hands” line was literally about 2-3 miles away from the town we would eventually move it. We were at the Ford Plant on route 6 in Lorain, which is a literal stones throw from Vermilion. I remember thinking that Michael organized the whole thing - I know better now. He was one of the prime reasons I was into it though. As I remember people were just mulling around, no one wanted to hold hands until it was time. When the correct time happened there was this line of people holding hands as far as I could see to the east and the west. It was a moment in time that struck me even at the age of ten that this was a monumental thing. Time passed and I can say any fascination with Michael passed out of my life. We’ll skip the controversy years, but slip in that I loved that he owned a monkey. Recently I heard about his gearing up for the London concerts and was hoping that if toured the states that I would get a chance to see him. He is a concert I would have paid 100-200 to see. To capture a bit of that childhood - the memories of the parachute pants and never getting moonwalking down. Some people have gone so far to say he is our generations Elvis or Lennon. I may give him Elvis, but he was no Lennon. Either way he was a larger then life superstar that did have an impact on me, and it will be with me for the rest of my own life. 6月24日 The First Solidish FoodOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/24/the-first-solidish-food/
Last night Lex got his first taste of real food from a spoon instead of from a bottle or the breast. He seemed to enjoy it, though there was a partial bowl up turn in the beginning.
The pictures of the incident are below.
Click for a larger version.
                                  6月22日 Becoming a Parent - Part 3Original URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/22/becoming-a-parent-part-3/
I was in a meeting at work and around 3:45 a call came into my cell phone. Since the meeting was ending soon I didn’t even look at the call and sent it straight to voice mail. As I left the meeting a few minutes later I walked out and saw it was Xie calling me. I called her as I was walking back to the car. Her mother had her and she was on the way to the hospital. I rushed back to my office and rushed through everything I had to get done, get the paperwork filed for the maternity leave I was taking and try to rush out there. Now my hiring company (I’m a contractor) was in town preparing for the following week to do performance reviews - while I was waiting for my boss to show back up they rushed me through my review. My boss finally appeared and I rushed him through what needed to be known and done, and had the paperwork signed. Thirty minutes after talking to Xie I was on the road to home. My commute was an hour, then another half hour to the hospital. When I got home I rushed taking out and feeding the pets since I wouldn’t be coming back that night. I also grabbed everything Xie and I needed, but she didn’t take with her. While the dogs were eating I managed to get out the announcement on the blog that we were heading to the hospital and things were happening. I had actually written that a couple weeks before but had it ready in preparation so that took only a few seconds to get it marked as published. Everything said and done, I was at the hospital about two hours after Xie. When I arrived she was in a staging area, where they get you ready to have a baby. A room where you are not far enough along to move into the next room. They had her on medications, but she was still feeling quite a bit of pain. Her mother was there comforting her and feeding her ice chips, essentially wrangling it so I couldn’t get in at all. Now I have stated that I may not always be the most comforting person in the world, but I didn’t have a chance. At one point Xie interjected and pleaded with me to talk to her. Now I’m normally a guy with too many words and would just keep talking about anything and everything, but I blanked - and felt like total crap over it. Continued in part 4 coming soon 6月21日 Father's Day For My DadOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/21/fathers-day-for-my-dad/
My father, what do I say. I love the man to death, but for me he wasn’t the perfect father, but neither was I the perfect son. I can say now that he is one of the closest family members I have. Part of that is my nature, part of it is the relationship we strengthened when I was traveling on the road and my dad and I had many hours of long conversation. Either way we have a great relationship now. Though he will say otherwise, I’m not exactly the child he wanted. I wouldn’t worry too much about that though, my son could easily turn into a mustang driving jock, very far the opposite side of me. I’m sure I’ll have to deal with the same problems my father did; not understanding the time period, not understanding what I was going through in school, and not understanding me. Part of this is par for the course of being the oldest child, and part of it was the differences that sprung up in interest. My father collected alot of books growing up and said he enjoyed reading, I would say this is one thing we have in common over the long course of years. The problem is I don’t ever remember my father reading a book. If we set aside some of the truly negative memories we can focus on some of the more interesting memories:
For being a decent father to a rotten son ;P I can say he did an ok job. He taught me to take acceptance of the consequences of my actions, that I need to be my person. That I can do things my way, and as long as I was making forward progress he wouldn’t stand in my way or get mad. While I didn’t see it growing up, I can look back and say my father made me a better man.
Happy Father’s Day Dad. 6月19日 Becoming a Parent - Part 2Original URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/19/becoming-a-parent-part-2/
Xie and I had been anti-kids our whole relationship. Well, anti-kids is pretty strong. We will leave it at the fact that we had no plans to ever have any children. Even after the ectopic pregnancy we didn’t have any plans. It was something that if it happened we would handle it, if it didn’t we wouldn’t feel that we were lacking anything in our lives. So when we found out Xie was pregnant again, six months after the ectopic pregnancy we were a bit surprised. Keep in mind that up until 2007 Xie had never been pregnant - so we assumed that it wouldn’t happen. So within eight months she had been pregnant twice. After what we went through six months prior we still waited a couple months before telling any family. We didn’t know what to expect or if we were going to have a repeat. Well eventually we passed the information across the family. It also shows that even though I don’t speak to my mother, some news passes across borders. I told my father and then the next day drove up north to tell my grandmother, well they feigned surprise - but I found out from my sister who I visited after leaving their house that they already knew. I confronted them on the subterfuge, but they said they didn’t want ot ruin it for us. Welcome to the back channels and gossip that runs in the back current of my family that no one wants to admit occurs. During the pregnancy mostly things went normal. There was a couple concerns the first and one that still exists is that he had a multi-cystic non functioning kidney. So essentially today he only has one kidney. This is something that they have only been tracking in the last few years, and one in every 750 births there is instance of a child being born with only one functional kidney. My sister through different circumstances has had a single her whole life, and things have been normal for her. I don’t anticipate it effecting my son’s quality of life too much with the exception of what sports he can be involved with. The other issue was that a couple of tubes in the cranial cavity were enlarged that could lead to learning disabilities in life. This test was reversed on the next and subsequent visits. So this is really a null issue, but something we dealt with. One thing they kept trying to pressure to get done was the test for Down’s Syndrome. It’s not covered by insurance and unless abortion is an option for you if it comes back positive (which wasn’t for us) it’s completely useless. Every doctor visit where I went along they kept trying to push it. The thing with this test is that there is nothing they can do one way or the other, it’s just to be informed. I guess there are just somethings we were willing to leave to surprise. Xie had to hold appointments at two different doctors and at the end of pregnancy was going to one or both every week. Depending on who you asked the baby was due either February 16th or 18th. We had bags packed and procedures in place. Xie even bought a new (used) car on February 23rd in preparation. We were getting ready to start planning to have the baby induced when I got a call on Thursday February 26th…. Continued in part 3 coming next week. 6月18日 VCMA Is Performing At The Vermilion Fish Festival SaturdayOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/18/vcma-is-performing-at-the-vermilion-fish-festival-saturday/  This Saturday (6/12/09) the VCMA Community Band is performing at the Vermilion Fish Festival at 3:00PM at the main (only?) stage. Come on down, listen to some music, and say hi. Becoming a Parent - Part 1Original URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/18/becoming-a-parent-part-1/
The birth of my son, it’s something I haven’t explicitly written about, until now. It’s been almost four months and it’s now of those thing that you experience and you wonder how can I write about this. It’s also one of those things when your someone who shares so much about yourself online you say how can you not. Not writing about yet has put a writing anchor around my neck where I haven’t known where to go or what to write. It is a roadblock to getting other writing done. It’s an emotional roller coaster that of course goes back to the beginning, which is further back then some of you know already. I guess it’s best to start at the beginning and see where it goes. This journey started back in 2007. Sometime around the August/September time frame we found out that Xie was pregnant. Then a week or two later we were told she went through a miscarriage. This was a back and forth thing of the doctor’s stating one thing and then back tracking later. On October 31st 2007 I got a call at work from Xie that she was being taken to the hospital. What had happened is that she was going through an ectopic pregnancy. What this means is that fetus had started to form inside the tubes instead of the uterus. They had to perform surgery to make sure that she would survive. Unfortunately there was no possible to save the fetus. My family only found out about the pregnancy at all because I called my grandparents and my father to tell them what was going on since the doctor’s had told Xie that she had to have the operation that day or things could get dire. I wanted my support channels in place without a surprise about why she was in the hospital. Originally you think when someone is pregnant you don’t tell the whole family immediately, we didn’t. When we thought she had a miscarriage that there wasn’t a need for them to know. However it got down to crunch time with the hospital visit. That night the surgery essentially saved Xie’s life, but yet took the life of our possible first child. I took it hard, and Xie took it hard. I had been down this road once before. In college within two days of each other, two different girls told me they were pregnant. A month or two down the road, with different circumstances they both had miscarriages. While politically I am pro-choice, I wouldn’t choose abortion for my own child. So whether this was teenage girls saying one thing to get their way, or if they were actually pregnant - it doesn’t matter. In the end from someone who has to side with the truth, even though facts and situations may skewer the truth differently - emotionally I lost two children that year. With the ectopic pregnancy I lost a third. They assured us that even with one tube that many people can still have a baby and it things could go completely normal. Xie stayed up and cried that night. Partly from sadness, partly from hormones, and partly from what-ifs. I cried with her. I comforted her the best that I could. I’m not always the most emotionally there person at all times, and that frustrates Xie. We made it through it though. In the end we left the hospital with a one inch high teddy bear that they gave her. We still have this and it sits on our shelf. Continued in part 2 coming tomorrow. 6月15日 I Need a Way To Consolidate File Shares - A DFS ReplacementOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/06/15/i-need-a-way-to-consolidate-file-shares-a-dfs-replacement/
File shares are a pain. In and of themselves they are not, but once you get past two or three - it get’s painful. Now I have multiple computers with multiple drives with multiple file shares per drive spread across my network. What does this mean? Well I’m the only one with knowledge of what is on the network and where it exists. This means that the network is not only cumbersome for anyone else to use (and sometimes me) it make it nearly impossible if I want to tell someone to grab something off of the network if they come over and hook up to my wifi. I’ve put quite a bit of thought into this. I want something that essentially can act as a transparent gateway to my other file shares. Something like Microsoft’s DFS but cross platform. It would also be great if it could transform file shares but that isn’t in the cards. Before I go much further let’s go over my specifications I want.
Let’s gove over each of these so I can give you my reasoning for each issue that I’m looking for before I get a dozen answers that I already know about that could fit the bill in some ways if I’m willing to sacrifice a requirement. CIFS and SMB file sharing may be the domain of Windows, but it’s a standard that every operating system can speak. While I could use something like NFS and get it working for almost all of the clients on my network, if my grandmother comes over and wants to put family pictures onto her laptop, I am not going to tell her to download an NFS client to install on her laptop to grab the pictures. Unless I can direct her to a single file share it just won’t work for me. I want to point for an example here is sample layout I’m looking for: \\10.10.10.10\share Included folders include:
Combining and splitting file shares I think this is one of the tricky ones. Let’s give the example of the fact that I have multiple shares contain movies I’ve ripped (larger harddrives would definitely help with this). So I end up with shares that exists like movies1 and movies2. What I would like is for all my movies to present themselves from the movies share. I don’t want to have movies1 and movies2 sub directories displayed to the end user, I want them all in one directory. Alternatively for personal movies, like the ones I’ve shot for community band - I would like an option for that to link underneath my user directory as well as the movies directory. Cross platform is a must. I choose CIFS/SMB as a standard because almost no extra software will need to be loaded on any computer to access them. Microsoft’s DFS installed on windows servers does not work with non-MS operating systems - so this is a dead-end for me. The server control software needs to be windows or a dead simple web interface. Why? Well I want anyone else using my network to be able to fix problems and reconfigure shares as needed without having to do it myself. If I must turn to another setup, I will - but I would really like this requirement to be met. Must be able to handle offline files gracefully. If a machine is turned off I want the file to just not be there, if it’s a folder with combined shares - the offline files should be absent. All of this should happen without the server software flipping out at all. I’ve seen some solutions that do this and they flip out without having everything accessible all the time. It should be able to span multiple computers, while something may work on a single computers (for windows I could do hard links) - it doesn’t fix the issue of spanning multiple computers and this is something that is needed badly in my network environment. So now I’ve given my personal requirements, what do you have as a recommendation to do this? Going Digital and On Demand - Part 5 Control
Control One of the pr0blems with dealing with an all digital home media library is not only playback like I talked in the last article, but centralized control. Playback is the easy part if you set parameters on what devices you are going to support and how open you are going to be with your media files. For example none of the movies I’m ripping are being converted into a format playable on the iPod, why? Well we don’t really watch movies on the iPod so it’s a waste of time, loss of quality, and space issues to deal with multiple formats. Control is another issue though, control for these things should be regulated to a single remote or device. This makes it more unwieldy for everyone else around to take control and browse the media. The more barriers to entry that exist the more pain in the butt it is for everyone else except yourself to use. So how have we handled that? Chiefly we are dealing with web interfaces for all the hub devices. If you want to play it on your computer, your on
For audio playback I went with Winamp. I know that everyone has an answer for a better solution, and while I did run a Linux player for a few weeks, it didn’t work out in the long term. I used a plugin called Ajaxamp to provide the web interface for the home. The only problem I have with this interface is there doesn’t seem to be a method to save custom playlists via the web interface. I’ll make due with this until another product comes along. For videos, it’s all piped through the X-Box hooked up to the TV, lucky for me that XBMC has a built in web interface for controlling playback. Did I accomplish my goal of ease of use? Well Xie has been using it, and she complains whenever I make anything too complex or in her opinion hard to use. That goes to say alot. I do however need to take into consideration a pre-reader using the system in the next couple years. At that point it will back to the drawing board…… 6月11日 Going Digital and On Demand - Part 4 Playback
The biggest problem of course with moving to digital is how are you going to get the videos or music to where you want them to be. I’ve really fought with this problem literally for over a decade now (yes in 1995 I had a computer hooked up to a stereo and a TV). The last incarnation I was using was a first generation Mac Mini. The problem was that the streaming wasn’t fast enough for the Mac Mini (ironically every other computer in the house streamed just fine). So I would have to copy video files over to the computer manually to get completely stutter free playback. I dealt though until just a couple months ago.
In November I purchased my first original X-Box (yes I’m behind the times). I had always wanted to run XBOX Media Center on it, but didn’t want to go through the soldering effort to put a mod chip in, or track down esoteric software with the action replay kit to soft mod it. I did manage to find instructions on how to mod the x-box and install XBMC with things I already had, such as a computer and screw drivers. The most frightening thing about it was hot swapping a live IDE hard drive. Years of tech work has told me this is a no-no, but I did it anyway and it worked. I even went out and purchased a remote control for the X-Box and can now browse from the couch. I went back and forth on whether to get a wireless controller or the remote, I settled on the remote because it was cheaper and more intuitive for anyone other then myself. For MP3 playback we sometimes use the X-Box installation, but more then likely we are either using ipods, our N810’s, or the whole main floor audio we have going. In the basement we have a computer working as an MP3 jukebox. Off of this machine there is 3 different sets of speakers (one is the main stereo system) - that can cover the whole first floor of the house in zoned audio. Each room has it’s own volume control and it works fairly well. In the next year I will more then likely start running the cables upstairs to work on whole house audio. 6月10日 Going Digital and On Demand - Part 3 Movies
Movies Currently I’m looking at ripping all of my DVDs over to a network share so I don’t have to go and dig them out anymore (since the collection is large enough that they are kept on a shelf in the basement these days to control space management). I have a few movies I’ve ripped already so I can play these on demand already on my TV (next section). One of the main slow down factors that causes this problem is that it takes about one and half hours to rip a DVD. It takes about six-eight minutes to convert a CD to a collection of MP3s. I have probably a month or more of ripping DVD’s before I’m completely done with them. I do need to buy a couple terabyte drives. I think I can hold all of my DVDs (compressed) onto one terabyte. The second one is going to be a backup since reripping all the DVDs would be much much worse then reripping all the CDs. 6月9日 Going Digital and On Demand - Part 2 Music A few months ago I lost all of my MP3’s that I had been accumulating for over 10 years. It was a bad hard drive crash and over 200GB of music was lost in this tragedy. One blessing of this is that we got to start from scratch. Until a couple weeks I managed to keep putting off the long haul of going through hundreds of CDs to rerip them to MP3 so we can put them on our iPods and listen to our hearts content. The problem with our previous collection is that there was no uniformity, the sources from the files were varied, the tags were a mess - so now we have a clean slate to work from. Over the last two weeks I’ve been ripping CDs (and I’m amazed at how many “important” CDs we have lost). I found one last night, so the ripping is not completely over - but on Friday night I managed to get through the bulk and any ones left are going to be onesy-twosy rips, which I can handle. The new rule of the house is going to be, when a CD comes into the house it doesn’t get listened, it gets ripped and packed away. An example of this is the new Green Day Album, I never listened to the physical CD at all, I did listen to it after I ripped it. The problem on the outset was what size to rip them to. Of course the discussion online focus on 192kbs for size up to 320 kbs for quality. There is rampant discussions on whether someone can hear the difference of qualities so I did a test myself. Between 192 kbs and 220 kbs I could tell a difference, so 192 kbs was out. I then had Xie test between 220 kbs, 240 kbs, and 320 kbs. She could tell the difference between 220 kbs and 240 kbs, but not 320. So 240 kbs VBR was our baseline. All of our MP3s now have proper tagging and album art embedded into the MP3, uniformity at last. Now we have the other problem to go through. What about non-CD media. I’m still at a cross roads at that, I have cassette tapes (non-music and personal) that I want to save, plus we have a semi large (by today’s standards anyways) LP collection. The LP’s I’ll probably borrow or buy CD versions of those to rip. When I figure out how I want to do the cassettes I’ll let you know. I have learned my lesson though, currently my MP3s are backed up on two different computers. One is a “master” share and the other backup. So I’m attempting to fight off a had drive dying again. 6月8日 Going Digital and On Demand - Part 1 Pictures
This post has multiple parts to it, so fair warning I’m guessing this one is going to be long. Lately I’ve been more and more annoyed at traditional hard copy media. It’s a pain in the butt to deal with and takes up way too much physical space (for those that know me you find that sentence greatly amusing). Pictures This started happening over the last year with photo albums. Photo albums are terrible. It means normally that one person has a copy of the image and you can’t share them. It is essentially technology of the last generation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in having prints, but the pictures themselves.
I’ve made it my mission to start getting the family photos and scanning them in. I’ve managed to get most of my father’s photos from the era he was with my mother. The ones I’m missing are any he has of the kids hanging on the walls in his house. My next run is going to be the pictures from his current family (so a good 15-16 years worth of pictures to go).
My grandmother on the other hand has been very tightfisted with her photos. I can understand her being protective, but so far I’ve managed to get 59 photos out of her to scan (out of literally over a 1000-2000). I have managed to scan my photo album, and more recently used the digital SLR and took pictures of my scrap book from high school. So both of these can be tucked away in boxes that I don’t need to look at and take up physical space in my house. All the photos I have are now uploaded to Flickr. You can also read about my photo sharing issue with my mother over here. Continued tomorrow in part 2 |
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