Some Guy's Blog

Mail

I have a good GMail system that I love. I used it to sort through approximately 5,000 e-mails from over two years into a pile of less than 30. Two wrenches are in those gears right now. All my workstation time is on Mac OS X now (yes!) and the new FireFox 3 betas are already the best browser there, in my opinion. But curses! my Better GMail extension is not yet available! Second wrench—I have to learn to get back to my starred messages (a.k.a. action items). Take it to the next level.

Church

I joined a church, the UUCC. I think we’ll have more on that as it develops, but it’s one of the elements in our Charlotte life that Megan and I have already come to value very deeply.

Music

Megan made fun of me for calling a recent playlist “a mix tape,” because clearly it’s not getting anywhere near a cassette player. We don’t even own a cassette player (although I still have a few of my KTRU shows on tape—the dream lives on!).

I simultaneously acknowledge that she is right, and rue the woeful downgrade in the coolness of sharing personal music. A “playlist”? Really? A “mix” doesn’t even sound any better! Do I have to send people the MP3’s or do I make a real CD? Are they going to download these tracks? Yuck. Much less cool.

Also, was having a Walkman ever cool? I mean, people working out had them, and that was obviously cool. But what about everyone else?

Music

On an related note, it blows my mind that having an iTunes library comprised largely of a network file share is such a problem. I don’t want to keep 160GB of music on my hard drive. HELLO!

Music, one more time (hit me!)

We didn’t go to a concert in Charleston, SC on Saturday night because my leg hurt so badly. We ended up having a low-key weekend with plenty of relaxation thrown in, as well as a haircut.

Money

Megan and I are also having budget talks. It takes a long time to go from “we have no real way of tracking or planning for expenditures” to “we know what expenses we incur each month, and are planning to spend in ways that more closely match our values in the future.” We are getting very close, but it’s been a journey filled of discoveries and new understandings. I highly recommend it to everyone.

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I saw Built To Spill at the Neighborhood Theater here in Charlotte earlier this month. I almost didn’t go because I felt a little low energy, but I couldn’t be happier that I did. It was an excellent introduction to live music here in Charlotte. They closed their set with Carry The Zero, a song that I named one of my favorite mix CD’s after—ten years ago! Unreal.

Also interesting was the discovery that rock and roll is still alive—and it looks like my dad! I can’t find any pictures of what Doug Martsch is looking like these days, but he’s not going to be on TRL anytime soon. I bought a cigarette off a beggar for 75 cents. I’m not sure whether to feel depressed or whether I was actually showing him the way up and out of poverty.

Last night, Megan and I went to see Greg Brown at the McGlohon Theater. An old friend got me into Greg Brown more than ten years ago. I saw him in Knoxville’s Laurel Theater ages ago. This show was a lot more bluesy, but he was still personable and so relaxed. He broke a string, and retuned the guitar and finished the song with more aplomb than some other musicians do a whole solo.

I was amazed at how intimate the venue was. Incredible. Megan got very distracted at some of our fellow concertgoers—you must learn to tune them out, grasshopper! We took the light rail into uptown to try that out. It will be worth it for ballgames, but overall I thought the most impressive part of the light rail was getting a fuller view of Charlotte itself. There is definitely a lot to like about this city. I’m feeling very at home.

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I haven’t started reading his books because of his death, but I read Cat’s Cradle during my sister’s graduation. I fell in love all over again with his content and his style. I hadn’t read any of his work since I was in middle school (Harrison Bergeron, with the predictable effects).

I’ve read the first few pages of Slaughterhouse Five, and I am quite certain that he will become one of my favorite authors. At the same time, it becomes clear to me that I should begin some library transfer from my father.

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• Megan and I redid the kitchen! It’s mostly her doing, although I did a lot of the furniture assembly. We repainted and redecorated. In somewhat related news, is there some place like Flickr and SmugMug that’s actually free?

• I thought the holidays went really well, although I personally was sick for most of Thanksgiving day and parts of the surrounding days. I am mostly over it now, but not completely. Yuck.

• I was effectively eliminated from playoff contention in my one fantasy football league. That’s tough to take, because I feel like the top three teams are all in my division, and I just didn’t get the breaks this year. If I find myself in a football league half as enjoyable as the Fans of the ACC fantasy baseball league that I am in—that’ll be a happy day.

• That fact has in no way damaged my enjoyment of this college football season, which is the most enjoyable in my memory—besides Tennessee’s 1997 championship, of course.

• I think Jeremy and I are really getting into some fruitful discussion areas. Changing minds, both your own and others, is tough!

• Thanks to this software, my iPod and I are finally getting along somewhat. I want to like it, I do, it’s a great piece of hardware but I much preferred loading up my iRiver—it just did what I wanted.

• I’ve been getting more exposure to Zimbra at work since we’re transitioning to a hosted service for our e-mail. That is one slick program! I’m excited that I might actually be able to use a calendar. Neither Google’s nor Yahoo!’s ever stuck for me.

• I’m going to see if my sister can turn out a design for my redesign. Then, even if that works, I’ll have to do the CSS part. Here’s hoping! After that, I’ll still have to do some work to get the categories into Mephisto ready shape. But I’m excited and ready to make the switch.

• As far as CISV goes, a new web design is in store there, and I think it’s really good. That’ll be a fun week to move the CISV USA site to something from the 21st century.

• I heard she started with one red paperclip.

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Get a free 80-hour TiVo unit when you sign up for a service plan. I am pretty sure that the first plan is $14.95 a month, and, if you watch TV at all, it’s an excellent deal. You can actually watch the shows you want to watch, and the wish-list taping is an incredible way to bulk up the movie collection. Megan and I have actually canceled Netflix, the experiment has been so successful.

Please leave a comment if you sign up.

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