Yep.  We got a halfway-decent amount of snow in The ATL last night.  “Halfway decent” meaning, of course, about 2 inches.  From what I hear, there was the requisite run on the grocery stores and I’m certain that, today, there will be no bread, milk, beer or batteries on the shelves of those institutions. 
The roads weren’t at all bad during the storm, but the drivers were – as usual – complete morons.  I can understand not wanting to drive 45 MPH on a twisty secondary road when it’s snowing out; but come on, people.  FIVE MPH is taking things a bit to extremes, don’t you think?

I’m not sure how cold it got last night, so I have no idea about driving conditions today.  If things are okay, I’m toying with the  idea of going up to SC to see the folks and maybe take in the football banquet.  Failing that, I’ll probably grab the camera and go somewhere to shoot snow scenes.  Maybe that stupid cemetery that I spent two days trying to find a couple of weeks ago.

As I mentioned in my last entry, my quintet played at the Southeastern Horticultural Society flower show last weekend.  We’ve done this just about every year for the last 10 or so, and it’s always a traumatic experience for me.  The other four folks would rather sit around and talk than actually play, which is embarrassing.  This year, we had the added bonus of not having our regular first trumpet player, and the guy who subbed for him was…well…not good.  And I learned that our regular first trumpet player covers up a multitude of mistakes made by our second trumpet player.  In a nutshell, the only thing more embarrassing than sitting around not playing this year was – you guessed it – sitting around playing.  Glad that’s over.

Work this week was, for the most part, sort of fun.  I started playing around with a new tag in ColdFusion that allows me to include inline HTML in my code.  What that means is, for example, I can show a summary listing of servers at all the locations in the country – Atlanta has 30, Dallas has 22, Denver has 12, whatever.  The user can then click on any of those locations and I can display the details for that location on the same page with the summary, rather than opening a new page.  It makes things a lot cleaner for the user, which is always a good thing.  It also makes things a lot more interesting for me, which is always a better thing.  That (CFDIV) tag, plus my continued experimentation with javascript, actually held my interest for most of the week.

Also had my annual performance rating meeting with my boss (who I still have never seen), and was graded out as someone who “meets and may exceed” expectations.  I’ve never really understood that concept.  These reviews are…well..reviews.  We’re looking back at the previous year.  Either I *did* exceed expectations or I *didn’t* exceed expectations.  There’s no *may* about it.  Yet I’ve been described on my reviews for the last 12 years in just that manner.  People wonder why I don’t understand big corporations.
I was supposed to teach a class (via conference call) on ColdFusion and Dreamweaver yesterday afternoon, but it was rescheduled for next week.  The most interesting part about that is that I really don’t know much about ColdFusion or Dreamweaver.  I spend most of my time “coding” pages in ColdFusion by copying stuff that has been written by someone else and tweaking it to fit my purposes.  I couldn’t tell you, from memory, 75% of the tags that I use.  As far as Dreamweaver goes (it’s a program in which one writes code), I rarely use it as it’s too slow.  I prefer to code in notepad.  You know – that little text editor that has been a part of Windows since about 1990?  That’s my primary tool at work.  Dreamweaver, for me, is worthless.   The class I teach next Tuesday should be interesting.

When I was very young – I’d guess 5 or 6 – Mom brought home a Tupperware toy that was called, I think, a Pop-a-Lot.  It was a yellow funnel-shaped thing with a red screw-on bellows-type thing on the narrow end.  The way it worked was fairly straightforward.  You dropped a hard blue plastic ball into the funnel, pointed the fat end of the funnel away from yourself, and slammed your hand on the bellows thing.  That compressed the air behind the ball, which subsequently exploded out of the funnel, to be caught (one would hope) in another Pop-a-Lot that somebody else had.

As I was saying, Mom had at least one of these things at home and I was small and I naturally thought that the proper way to use the Pop-a-Lot was to put it between your legs and bounce around on the bellows thing while trying to avoid getting bashed in the face by the ball, which, as you can imagine, would furiously try to escape from the funnel every time my 5-year-old butt slammed the bellows thing into the ground.

So I was doing that in the dining room in Shoreham.

Mom saw me from the kitchen at about the same time I saw her.  Let me rephrase that.  Mom saw me stopping what I’d been doing at about the same time I saw her and figured I’d better stop what I was doing.  And you know how moms are about things like this.

“What were you just doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw you doing something.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

Somehow, she managed to convince me that I wasn’t in trouble, and so I showed her what I’d been doing, thinking all the while that I was in deep shit for doing it (not that my Congregationalist-Church-Raised-Fiver-Year-Old mind would ever have thought of it in those terms).

As it turned out, she thought the whole “Riding the Pop-a-Lot” idea was a wonderful thing to use at a Tupperware party that night.

I’m not sure how many of the ladies present managed to win door prizes doing it, but I like to think my creativity was worth at least one or two sales for Mom.

TWD

Good:
I got to work early this morning for a change.  That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve had a pretty good week at work so far.  I’ve been playing a lot with javascript and completed a page yesterday that used it heavily (and successfully) as well as a few more advanced concepts of ColdFusion.  Before I left last night, I sent a note to my boss saying, basically, “This stuff is actually interesting again.”  Let’s hope today goes as well as the last four have.

Got to spend some time with Chris on Tuesday and Wednesday, and might even go see her tonight if our schedules allow.  Don’t think I have to explain why that’s good.

I got an email from David Klausman last night and I’ve been booked to play a high-paying Easter gig with a kick-ass quintet.  Really looking forward to that.

My own (very mediocre) quintet will be playing at the Atlanta Lawn and Garden show in Cobb tomorrow night.  I guess that’s a good thing.  It’s a chance to play in front of people, at any rate.  We’re not that good, but we’ve been doing the flower show for the last 5 or 6 years now and it’s a nice low-stress gig that nets us dinner.

Bad:
I took my car into the shop on Tuesday to have them figure out what was causing a rattle underneath the passenger floor.  They worked on it for about 2.5 hours and apparently managed to find the culprit, as the rattle is gone.  They did this for free. Why is this bad?  Because they handed me a sheet when I was leaving describing in detail all the things that they found wrong with the car which need to be addressed quickly.  Little things like brakes and split seals.  So my bonus, which I’ll get on March 6th, is basically already spent.  Total cost is looking to be $2K-$3K.

It continues to rain every time I have an opportunity to do things that require that it not be raining.  I refer, of course, to the leak in my roof.  I have *got* to get that thing fixed, but – seriously – everytime I leave my office, it starts raining.  I’m not going to try to get on my roof in the rain.  I just won’t do it.  Still trying to figure out how to just go ahead and put on a new roof.  I’m thinking a 401K loan might be in order since my insurance company doesn’t want to get involved.  I’m also thinking that I might get involved with a new insurance company.

Really freaking ugly:
I can’t really go into much detail about this because it involves the GBB.  One of our tuba players did something stupid and was asked by his section to take a leave of absence for the rest of the concert season because of it.  Our reasons for asking this of him vary – some liken it to an intervention, others to outright punishment (I’m with the latter).

Because this was a personnel issue, I thought the the personnel manager of the band should be informed about the act of idiocy.  Because of potential embarrassment to the idiot, the rest of the tuba section over-ruled me.  As it turned out, the personnel manager found out anyway and was/is extremely pissed about the situation.   The entire board has now been informed of the details – several different versions of the details, actually – and a regular old shitstorm of emails has been flying for the last couple of days.

The sentiment of many on the board is that the half-wit was treated unfairly by the rest of the section and “forced out of the band.”  I disagree with this attitude, but as far as I can tell, my credibility with the board has been destroyed and I have offered to resign if anyone would like for me to.  I still am not sure if that’s what I *want* to do, but the actions of 1 total imbecile and 3 other idiots, who didn’t want to take the simple step of informing the personnel manager, may have taken the decision out of my hands.

Remember in my “Disturbed” post when I talked about how, in spite of a lot of work that was put into a code of conduct several years ago, the band still has no code of conduct?  Ironically, such a document would have saved a lot of bad feelings in this situation.  I guess I should have pushed harder to get it done.

And that’s enough about that.

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I won a lottery and was one of the very few people who lived on campus who was awarded a coveted single room.  The school didn’t have many singles, preferring instead to put two people in each room (or three or more in some cases), and I was pumped about getting one.  Juniors being awarded singles was extremely rare – the rooms usually were snapped up by seniors in the weighted lottery – so I was thrilled.

During the summer, I procured a couch, built a loft for the bed, and did various other things so that I’d be ready for my wonderful private dorm room.  And then I got a message from the school saying, “We made a mistake.  TWD shouldn’t have been given that room.  We gave it to someone else.  Tough luck on that.  Maybe next year.”

Mom basically blew a gasket.  I’m still not sure exactly who she talked to or what she said to them, but she was over-the-top livid mama hen in fully involved “I will eat you for breakfast” mode.  In about a week, I was informed that the school had magically found ANOTHER single room that I could have.

I got the room that I’d originally wanted for my senior year – making me one of the very few people who ever had a single for two years.

Thanks, Mom.

TWD

Yesterday after typing all that stuff, I had a relatively uninteresting but pleasant day.  I watched a Matthau/Lemmon movie (Bon Voyage or Sailing Away or Off Shore or something along those lines) while eating chex mix and hot dogs, then went in search of the elusive Vinings Cemetery.

I managed to find it after cruising through Vinings about 4 times, and – though I didn’t stop there yesterday – it looks to be completely boring.  The entire cemetery is about the size of a good-sized house and it’s surrounded by high-rise office buildings.  Not sure how you’re supposed to see downtown Atlanta from that spot, but I’ll check it out sometime when I’ve got an hour free.

After locating the dead people, I decided to go bowling.  Went to the lanes where I played on league (many years ago), and learned that I’d have to wait an hour to get a lane.  So I opted to take Rich and Betsy up on the offer to hang at Rich’s house as it was fairly close to the bowling alley.

As I was driving to the house, it started snowing (“Great,” I thought.  “I’m going to get stuck at his house for the next 48 hours”).  Picked up some coffee for the two of them and a bone for the dog and stayed there, watching Planet Earth and chowing down on some really amazing snacks (oatmeal cookies, homemade chex mix, and some sort of unbelievable cake named Tres Leches cake or something) until 11 pm.

The dog (a Great Dane) made things interesting for the last hour by somehow managing to get her butt and about half of her torso on my lap as I sat on the couch.  She kept her front feet on the floor and basically went to sleep.  Strangest thing I’ve ever seen, but quite adorable.

It was chilly when I left, but the roads were clear and I made it home by midnight, listening during the ride to a hilarious story about a young obituary writer.  It was being read on Selected Shorts if you’re interested in finding the podcast.

Today, as I said, I’ve got a church orchestra rehearsal followed by a brass quintet rehearsal.  As of now, I’ve done basically nothing except watch another Matthau movie (The Survivors) and wonder where I’ll get the energy to get out of bed and shower.

TWD

Time flies, huh?  I get caught up in other stuff and forget all about updating this thing.  Then, when I have some free time and remember that I’m supposed to be updating it, I can’t remember what I’ve done.  Maybe I need to start using the iPhone/email procedure more often, huh?

Just read my last entry in the hopes that it would give me a jumping-off place for this one.

It didn’t.

I spent a lot of time at work this week trying to get a project to run using a great deal of javascript (which I’ve mentioned that I need to learn).  On Wednesday and Thursday, I made some really nice strides and I was able to present a website, which is about half finished, to the client.  So I’ve got that going for me.  Still a great deal to learn, but at least I’m doing something different and the week was relatively interesting at work.

I took yesterday off with a semi-formed idea of going to Virginia for a few days.  Chris had been talking about visiting her school and there was a tuba thing going on in DC.  After a few hours of nail-biting on Thursday afternoon, she decided that she didn’t want to go and we went to dinner instead.  Nice, much-needed time with her for me.

That didn’t rule *my* potential road trip, but I didn’t really get motivated to do anything yesterday and decided that I just didn’t feel like driving for 16 hours and spending money that I really don’t have to stay in a hotel last night.  Besides, I’ve got a couple rehearsals tomorrow.

Instead, I went looking for a cemetery in Vinings, GA, yesterday, from which I’m told one can take great photographs of downtown Atlanta.  I was unable to find the cemetery.  Might try again today.

Or I might not.  I’ve been invited by one of the tubists in the GBB to go to a woodworking exhibition in Norcross today.  Have also been invited by Betsy to go hang out in Marietta with her and Rich, have dinner, and watch some blueray stuff (high def DVD’s for the non-geeks among you).  I also could do some cleaning (fat chance) or painting (even less of a chance) or fix the hole in the roof (yeah…right).

I could also practice my horn.  In fact, I probably should be right now, but Scott is still sleeping off whatever he did last night and I’m generally a considerate landlord.  I had to explain to him last night, however, that if he doesn’t wash most of the crap off of his dirty dishes before he puts them in the dishwasher, they’re not going to get clean.  I refer to my dishwasher as a dishsterilizer, actually.  I generally hand-clean the stuff, then let the washer have a go at them and dry them for me.  In the rare instances over the last 5 years or so when I haven’t had a renter, the dishwasher also served as a cabinet, since I don’t get a lot of dishes dirty at once anyway.

Actually, I would at least try to do something with the hole in the roof if it would ever stop raining on the weekend.  In scanning my entries from the last month, I see the phrase, “it is dreary outside” far too much.  Not just because it proves that I have a very limited vocabulary, but also because it’s just too freaking rainy all the time.  What gives?

TWD

It’s a brand-new unused Saturday morning!

And I’m sitting naked in my bed doing absolutely nothing.  I think that may be my goal for the rest of the day.  It is rather dreary outside and I am rather dreary inside, so it’s either stay in bed or figure out someplace to go take some pictures.

Or convince myself to crawl on the roof and finally fix that leak before my house implodes.

On Thursday, a friend at work managed to get a trojan horse on his computer which, while not destructive, was quite a little bugger to figure out.  It was one of these things that installs itself and then lets you know that it’s there by constantly popping up a “You’ve got spyware!  Click here to have it removed!” message.  Normally, those are pretty easy to remove, but this one also had a couple of nasty little tricks.  It kept disabling the task manager, which proved to be quite annoying, and it also spoofed McAfee (an anti-virus package that I’ve never trusted, but which ATT insists we run on work machines) into telling me that it was the NetSky virus.  So after writing  a little script to re-enable the task manager every 20 seconds in order to figure out what was running, I went on a wild goose chase looking for ways to remove NetSky – which wasn’t present on the system.

I finally noticed that one of the services running was smss32.exe – and remembered that the actual service that should be running is smss.exe (no 32).  When I was informed that I couldn’t stop that particular service, I googled it, found out that it was the trojan, and took steps to remove it along with a number of other files.  Took me about 2 hours to figure it out and 2 minutes to clean the machine.  My friend was quite happy.

Came home for lunch yesterday afternoon and got a bit of practice in on the horn.  Did the same after work last night, but was really tired and crashed early.  Chris called at around 9 or so I chatted while falling asleep.  Speaking of Chris and the phone, I paid bills yesterday and was somewhat stunned to find that my wireless bill had quadrupled.  Definitely not what I needed this month, as January is normally the month that I scrimp to make up for all of the December expenses that I get nailed with.

As it turned out, my bill quadrupled because I signed up for the ATT Employee discount.

You got that, right?  I signed up for a discount and my bill quadrupled.  God, I love my company.  See, here’s what happened:  When I signed up for the discount, ATT took it as a change to my plan and wiped out all of my rollover minutes.  Chris and I normally talk for about 700 minutes a month.  My plan included 450 minutes per month, but the additional 200-300 were always covered by my leftover rollover minutes, so it was no big deal.

When my ever-so-benevolent company gave me a discount and wiped out my rollovers, I got nailed for 267 minutes at .45/minute.  After cursing for about an hour, I began researching ATT’s equivalent of the “Friends and Family” plan to see how I could talk to Chris for free.  It turns out that they do have such a plan, called “The A-List,” but you can only get it if your plan costs more than $50/month.  My existing plan (before the discount) was $40/month.

So I changed it to the lowest plan that allowed me to get the A-List thing (something like 700 minutes/month) and Chris is now on my “A-List.”  This should be interesting, as she’s basically the only person I call – so my rollover fund is going to go through the roof.

I just wonder if, by changing my plan, I got kicked out of the employee discount pool.  I guess I’ll find out next month.  I think I’ll also add a bunch of other people to my little A-List, on the off chance that I actually talk to them.

Mom and Dad switched doctors last week and got a second opinion which said, basically, that the first opinion was correct.  They’ve opted to forego any additional treatment for Mom and have contacted Hospice to get some help for Dad when he needs it.  He tells me that he’s doing okay and folks from their church are willing to sit with Mom whenever Dad has errands to do or just needs a break.  Mom has her good days and bad ones, I’m told; and morphine apparently helps with pain.

It’s still a bit surreal for me.

Abruptly switching topics, I learned this week that I’ve been using haute couture incorrectly for my entire life when I was describing my first solo and ensemble performance to Chris.  I said, sarcastically, that Vermonters are known for their love of haute couture – which I though meant “high culture.”  She quickly informed me that it means “high fashion.”  Naturally, I had to look it up and try to find a loophole for myself (she and I disagree over the proper use of possessive apostrophes for words ending in “s,” and I’ve discovered that there are two acceptable rules, so we’re both right); and I found, to my great shame, that I’m an idiot.

Of course, Chris, I was trying to convey that I was quite nattily attired for my first solo and ensemble performance (furiously switching tabs here to make sure that I know what the hell nattily means…), and that Vermonters are always impressed with the haute couture of the nattiness of the natty clothes worn by elementary-school-aged trombonists.

So there.

TWD

Not much to talk about today. Fixed a virus at work, got started on a new project that scares me, practiced for about two hours after work.

Will try to provide more details tomorrow.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W. H. Auden

A storm is brewing. While it's still a dreary day, I'm loving the wind whipping through my living room.

Have got about 15 minutes to kill before I head to the church rehearsal, and I think I'll make the most of it by doing nothing.

This is an iPhone post, by the way.

Not a lot going on the last few days – but that’s no surprise.

I had a pretty productive day at work on Friday – managed to knock out one of my “feel good” projects, which turned out to be much more difficult than I’d imagined.  I didn’t leave work until about 6:30.  Brett and I had planned to do some camping on Friday and Saturday, but I had to cancel because of the work thing.  Came home, practiced my horn a bit, watched a bunch of Star Trek reruns, and went to bed.

Yesterday (Saturday) was pretty much a wasted day all around.  I slept as late as the cats would let me, then watched reruns of Hawaii Five-0 for several hours, then watched a football game (Indianapolis vs. Baltimore), did some midnight shopping (needed cat food and mouthwash – not that cat food makes my breath stink) and went to bed.

I slept REALLY late this morning (cats be damned – they jumped all over me until 9:30), then decided that I needed to print some new music out for a quintet rehearsal I’ve got tonight.  In order to do that, I had to have coffee – which I went to get at QuikTrip, along with a cheeseburger.  I’m currently printing the music while watching Family Guy on hulu.com.

Plans for today, apart from the aforementioned quintet rehearsal, which starts at 6:30, are to rehearse with the church orchestra, then meet the horn player from the quintet for an early dinner, then do the quintet thing.  Then I’ll give my tuba to the horn player, who repairs instruments for a living.  Then I’ll probably come home and go to bed.  Fun life, huh?

Going to play trombone with the church orchestra today, which should be fun.

The weather today is dreary, but not cold.  Actually, it’s pushing 60 and I’ve got the window open.

So I'm told that I can now update this blog from my phone. Let's see if that works.

I got a fair amount done at work today, had lime Jell-O for lunch, and plan to practice the horn a bit tonight.

I also didn't realize that I send an email response "to all" when I didn't mean to do so.

Oops, indeed.