Doobie Brothers Pretty Much Rock!

It was short but sweet. They played about an hour and a quarter and most of the songs were the old hits, especially toward the end. But they did play a couple of newer songs. There were a total of 8 guys in the band. Two purcushionist, a pianist, a bassist, and a guy on the sax, plus there were 3 guitarists. The 3 of them must of had 20 some-odd guitars. From where we were sitting, the view was great. We had tickets in the middle section in row I, so 9th row and the seats we had put us centered with the lead singer.

Click the Read More link to see the pictures and video. Sorry about the video being in MPEG format and so large, I didn't have time to trim down the quality for a shorter download.








Video
Clip 1 54 Mb
Clip 2 60 Mb
Clip 3 37 Mb
Clip 4 19 Mb

Speculation Is Fun

It seems there is word on the street that Google, with recent hires from Mozilla and Bell Labs along with the acquisition of the domain gbrowser.com might plans for a browser and OS in the works. The speculation goes as far as suspecting that this new browser will be an offshoot of the open source Mozilla Firefox browser.

Check out this link to Google Tools and Services, Keyhole was a nice acquisition and it fun to try and find your own house from space, for a fee of course.

Read the linked article written by John Dvorak where he predicts a Google browser by years end and even a Google OS in the future.

Contemplating Becoming Chapter Advisor...

Of course I want to do it to help out the fraternity, but I'm always concerned with giving up any amount of my free time. So, I'm in the process of looking over the 100+ page Advisors Manual downloaded from the trusty www.phideltatheta.org website to see what this entails.

I guess either way I'll end up doing it since I'm one of the few alumni still in town and someone has to do it. Bill Gaul was the previous advisor but his job has moved him up to Washington, so it's tough to make meetings and the such from there. Beyond the work aspect of the position, it should be fun interacting with all the guys again.

Just Got My Tickets

Thanks to Andrew Reams of Davis for picking up some extra tickets and mailing them to us! I met Drew on

The Grotto

which is a Mother Hips message board website. He was nice enough to send us tickets after we sent him a check. Nice to know there are still people out there you haven't met whom you can count on and trust.


Mother Hips ticket for the G Steet Pub show on Feb 11, 2005.

Update to Mark Jen Blogging Episode

Well, it looks like he is going to be off the hook with his employeer, Google, but unfortunately for him, I think the public backlash is worse than that of his employeer.He does a nice job explaining his reasoning behind the post which created the controversy and it's basically what I thought it would be. He was just verbalizing the process of his decision to go to Google rather than stay at Microsoft and in the process pointed out some of the policies and benefits which he thought were lacking at Google compared to previous experience. Let this be a lesson to Mark and everyone out there in internetland, you're own thoughts and concerns will only get you in trouble if you voice them, so keep to yourself and keep the yap shut, lol.

Blogging Googler Gagged

Well, this ought to set precedence over at Google on blogging about work. One of Google's newest employees, Mark Jen, hired on Jan 17th of 2005 is already making his presence know at the search engine giant. He could also be making himself known as the first person to be fired at Google for blogging (as far as I know). Irony at it's best! The problem arose from a post Mark made on his blog, "ninetyninezeros" about what happened to his bank account which led to a rant about Google's compensation package. Basically, he sums up the benefits package as thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. I'd have to agree with Mark on this one, but his delivery is not very tactful. He tells us about the free lunch and dinners Google has daily which keep employees close to work at all times. He also makes mention about on-site doctor, on-site dentist, and on-site car washes. He slams Google's policy on relocation reimbursment and their stock incentive program. All in all, Marky Mark is on to something, but these are thoughts best kept to one's self or maybe even used at the watercooler, but not suggested for his blog.

I believe Mark didn't intend any malice toward his new employeer but was just verbally weighing the options, after his decision about employement at Google was made. Call it buyers remorse, or whatever, but I think we all do it, just not in print. It's obvious he realized, though the company's motto is "Do no evil" that they are in business to make money and perks like those mentioned above ARE there to keep employees at work, working!

Anyway, I wish Mark good luck at his new job! Read some of the other blogs and articles on this topic here:

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/WRJ read the entry entitled, "uh oh, what happened to my bank account?"

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-01-25-n43.html

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050126-083916

New Colors & Other Stuff

If you are reading this, you've probably noticed the new site colors and layout, if not, please see your eye doctor. I was getting a little tired of the old colors and layout, so I felt a change was in order. I found some templates at a couple of different sites which I alternated between before I decided on this one. Then, once implemented, I spent a couple of hours adding my links, getting the size of the columns set to my liking, and adding the code for Google Adsense.

So, there are two new things going here; the color and layout coupled with the ad service I've set up with Google. I'm not sure it's up and running correctly yet, but you will soon see ads at the very bottom of the right-hand side menu.

I'm hoping I've remembered to implement all the features I had in the previous template. So, if you notice something isn't working the way you expect or the way it was before, drop me a comment or email. I haven't gotten around to testing everything out, but this post is one step in the test process. Crossing my fingers!

Disc Golf and Bidwell Park

I read this article in the News & Review yesterday and probably only because I realized that on the front of the printed paper was my friend, Dale, hucking his disc up at the disc golf links.

Well, it seems that disc golf has been around in Chico for some and I remember about 7 years ago Dale mentioning how much he enjoyed playing up in Bidwell Park. Seems he's not the only one up there enjoying himself. With the sport really taking off in this area, the crowds up at the course are getting larger and the detriment to the land is growing as well. It seems the guys who started the course were given permission from the city to do so. But recently, a letter from a lawyer, hired by preservationists, and a meeting between the two opposing groups has created the current situation. The situation is that the city hasn't added the land acquired in 1994 to the park's master management plan which lead to the letter from the lawyer stating:

"the city has no management plan in place that would allow such mitigations"

This means even though the founders of the course are prepared to maintain the area, about 40 acres in the upper park, the city has no provisions for it to occur. The city has said that, while mitigation efforts are off limits, the disc golfers may continue to play a game that is now attracting hundreds of players to the oak-studded bluff overlooking Chico Creek Canyon, even though the trees, ground vegetation, bushes and other plants may be suffering.

The debate is getting so heated that both sides even have websites, check them out.

http://www.friendsofbidwellpark.org/
http://www.chicodiscgolf.org/

Also read the article linked above to better understand what I can't explain without re-writing the article.

My feeling are the park is a rather large area which should be able to accomadate many activities. I also understand that disc golf can destroy trees and the landscape in general. So, though I'm siding with keeping disc golf in upper Bidwell, modifications to the course and actions of disc golfers must be made. In the article, the disc golfers states their course modifications and they seem be a step in the right direction. The Friends of Bidwell Park believe total eradication of disc golf, along with mountain biking, are the only solution for preserving the park. Unfortunately, the city has put themselves in the middle of all this by trying to be the nice guy and not ammending the park's master plan, amongst other things. Pretty exciting stuff for Chico, eh?

Finally Working Through "Read More" Details

Maybe you've noticed or maybe you haven't, but if not now you'll know.

PS click the Read More! link below. I've had these Read More! links at the bottom of my posts for maybe a month or two, but haven't really spent anytime learning how I'm supposed to use it. So, I've taken 2 minutes to re-read the knowledge base article to bone up on how it works and to verify all my HTML code is in the correct spots. I guess the first time through, I missed the part about posting the text between specific tags. Now that I've got that down, I think this post will be the first where I utilized the Read More! link. If you are reading this, most likely you've clicked on the link and all is working.

First AudioBlogger Entry

Ok, so in the beginning there was just blogging. Then came along photoblogging and now, drum roll please, audioblogging. Of course, there is still videoblogging, but I don't have a video phone nor am I ready to jump in front of the video camera to begin hosting my own online show. But, back to audioblogging. It was a super easy setup, with three screens to get signed up and configured. Now from anywhere I can get a phone signal, I can phone in an audioblog that gets posted here to my blog, like the link below. Pretty neat, we'll see how useful it will be for me.

By the way, it's in MP3 format. Even more interesting is that the file doesn't get uploaded to the server hosting my website, but to the AudioBlogger.com website. Hey, thanks for the free space!

Attack of the furry blob!

I made some banana bread this past weekend with some banana that Raley's gave to Karin because they were going bad. Nothing like free stuff!

Ducks traversing the rapids.

Action shot of a duck jumping off our lower bridge back into the water.

Growth Update: Potential Chico Growth

Sure enough, I blog about new growth in Chico and a few days later there's talk in the newspaper about building a new baseball stadium, restaurants, and stores on the east side of town. I can't imagine the city will approve this type of development since the area which they plan to build at previously was protected wetlands. But though the grapevine, I heard mention of a Trader Joe's going in there, which might sway public opinion, cause people in Chico really want a Trader Joe's.

Either way, Chico will eventually grow larger than Chicoans want as it's already for some who live here. I don't think this project would have too much impact over where I live, but you can never tell since we are close to on and off ramps that may be utilized by those attempting to get to these new establishments.

Anyway, you can read the article linked above and see the little pic below of the front of the proposed ballpark.

New Office

We'll be moving soon so here are some pics of what the new office looks like and what my office space will look like. Here is a picture of the new office, as you can see, it's very very new. So new, in fact, that it's not even complete. Supposedly, the building is going to be ready for us to move into by the middle of March.


far away shot


close up of our portion of the building

Here are some pictures of the office I will share with Adam, the other tech.


This will most likely be the configuration of our office, but the attached room will be different.

The attached room will be configured like in this picture.

This attached room is the server room which will contain highly secret stuff. Just kidding, it will house our servers, the phone system, and all the networking equipment. I'm pretty excited about this since in our current office, the servers are on the floor of my office and the bathroom seconds as the wiring closet with the network equipment and phone system. Best yet, the new server room will be on it's own AC unit, so to keep the machines nice and cool.

The Future of Soccer

Ah, is this the only way the Japanese will ever win the World Cup? And if they can play soccer, can they clean my house and do the yard? I'll take two, cause they're small!

Online Video Rental

Ok, so online video rental is something that's been going on for over 5 years now but I'm just now thinking it might be worth a look. I'm not really big on watching movies so I'm not sure if I'll even get involved with any of the online rental companies. To boot, there is a blockbuster about 1 mile from my house. But, still yet, it's worth a closer look.

I've been aware of Netflix for sometime and recently heard Blockbuster joined the frey but only today realized that Walmart is stepping into the ring as well. So, I thought it would be worth a few minutes of my time to look into each of their offerings and give a review of what I thought was good, bad, and who I might sign up with given my findings.

First, lets look at company that broke ground in this segment of the video rental market in 1998, Netflix. Netflix offers unlimited video rental and a free trial as do the rest of the online rental sites. They offer a revolving library of up to 3 DVDs at a time and can exchange them for new available DVDs as often as you like for $17.99 a month. They also offer free shipping and handling on delivery and return of anyone of their more than 30,000 titles.

Then there is Blockbuster who has been in the news as of late because of the large ad campaign in which they have dropped all late fees at in-store rentals. As with Netflix, Blockbuster offers unlimited video rental, a free trial, 3 DVDs out at a time, but with their subscription, you also get two free rental coupons each month delivered to your email address. Each coupon is good for a free movie or game rental at any participating BLOCKBUSTER store. So, I see a little added value there, especially with the $14.99 price tag. They also offer free shipping and handling on delivery and return of movies.

Of course, since they sell just about everything else, Walmart also does online movie rentals. Figuring they slash prices on a daily basis, their service must be competitive. Once again, like the rest of the company's in this market, Walmart offers unlimited video rental, a free trial, but they have 3 tiers of rental agreements; 2, 3 and 4 DVDs out at a time with the price being $12.97, $17.37, and $21.94 respectively. They only have 16,000 movies available.

Based on this knowledge alone, I'd have to say Blockbuster offers the best deal if having 3 movies out at a time is of importance to you and the two free in-store rentals per month is a nice addition. But if you are looking for spend less, Walmart seems to be the best price with their 2 movies out offering. If obscure movies are what you are looking for, then Netflix is your best bet as they carry the largest offering of titles.

One other company I came upon that might interest broadband users is MovieLink. At MovieLink, you can download movies starting a $1.99, but the download takes about 1.5 hours on a broadband connection. I think this concept is still half-baked.

So, given this knowledge, go out and watch some movies!

Team Disco!

Today, Discovery Channel hosted the announcment of the new bike team. See the link above for the link to the Team Page at Discovery. Or click here to see pics of the event from The Paceline. The new jersey is lookin' pretty nice. Now it's time to get it dirty in the early season classics!

In case you haven't seen them yet, here is what the new jersey looks like.

Go team Disco!

Here are the pics

Here is the picture of the Butte College Chico Center.


This one is the HolidayInn.

Both were taken from Country drive.

Butte College in yellow and Holiday Inn in white.

Quick Report on Chico Growth...

Well, as with any town, growth is inevitable. Chico has been growing quite rapidly since I arrived in August 1991. I believe we've tacked on about 40,000 people to the population in Chico and the surrounding areas and currently have about 105,000 people living in and around Chico. On top of numerous new shopping areas, a few new things have popped up around our house. One being the Butte College Chico Center and the other being the Holiday Inn Extended Stay, both within a mile of home. The Butte College Chico Center is on the other side of Hwy 99 and is actually kind of a nice building, if you consider nice something that distracts the view of the beautiful canyons nearby as nice. Anyway, it's a two story, 54,000 square-foot, $16.3 million center with 18 lecture-type classrooms with space to accommodate 1,000 students at any one time. I'll see if I can snap a few pics to post later.

The Holiday Inn, at least that's what I think it's supposed to be, is much closer to home at about .5 miles. It's situated next to the roller rink and mini-golf place, basically across from the Chico Enterprise Record (Chico ER is the local newspaper) building. More hotels in Chico are always needed as there isn't enough conference space for businesses nor rooms for parents of graduating students from Chico State. So this should really meet some of the needs of the local community. I'll also try to get some photos of this as well.

Oh, and just as a matter of fact, we have 36 coffee shops in Chico, 7 of which are StarBucks, amazing! That means about 1 coffee shop for every 2000 people living within the city limits. I think I'll have another espresso now.

Dismantling Christmas...

Always the most unfun part of Christmas is having to put all the crap you set out away. For me, it's like pulling teeth putting this stuff away mostly because I only care about the tree. Karin likes to cover the rest of the house with Christmas trinkets which are a super pain to put away. It only took about an hour to take the glass bulbs and ribbon off the tree. I would have just dragged the tree out, but Karin was policing the situation and wouldn't let me, nor help me. So, whenever Karin doesn't want to help, I recruit a friend to help, which was Ben. Anyway, Ben had a little crash in his car and it's not totalled so I had to go and pick him up. Once we got back it took all of 2 minutes to drag the tree out, but it took me another 30 minutes to pick up all the needles that fell off. The tree was about twice as wide as the sliding door we brought it through, so it made quite a mess. Now I just need to figure out how to dispose of it. I just read that the Boy Scouts would have picked it up yesterday for a donation of between $5 and $10 but I think the Waste Management people pick it for free. Maybe I should try setting it out by the garbage cans tonight. Anyway, tossing the Christmas tree out is truely the end of the Christmas season. On to bigger and better things, like MLK Jr day. Yey for more days off work!

For anyone who cares, here is the remains of the tree
It still smells good though!

Once Again, Tony Wins Pick'em Football

Another football regular season has past and I have won yet another Pick'em Championship! View the files linked below and weep!

Grab a Tissue!

The Sierra Nevada league was a straight pick'em, so I that was required was to pick the winner. I managed to lead this league most the way through the season and ended up with a 7 game lead even though I only picked 6 correct games in the last week.

In the LetItRide league the object was still to pick a winner, but you had to apply confidence points based on the number of games played that week. So, say the Raiders were playing the Colts and there were 16 games to be played that week. I would select the Colts to win and apply 16 confidence points as I believe the Colts would most likely smoke the Raiders. But if the Raiders were slated to play the 49ers, I would pick the Raiders and apply only 1 confidence point think that that game would be close to a toss up.

The cool thing about the confidence points is the added difficulty in coming out on top. Picking the winner isn't too challenging, but when confidence points are involved, the game has some added spice!

New Year's with the Mother Hips

Ok, the ole' Sony DSC T-1 has some issues taking pictures in the dark without spending some quality time flipping through the menu. So, please excuse the fuzziness as I'm fairly sure I forgot to change the setting for night shots. Anyway, here are a few that turned out ok.

This first one is the set list. They didn't make it all the way through and omitted the last 4 or so songs on the list. But they did come out and do one encore and if I remember correctly it was Smoke. That was kind of a bummer for Karin as she really wanted to hear Emelie and it was the next song on the list.



The one below, is of Tim, Greg, a little bit of John's shoulder and the Sweetwater signage in the background.



I've seen these two people at a few shows, or maybe a few too many! Also, at the left edge, you can see just a smidge of Braden Barr. I used to work with Braden at Costco about 11 years ago and hadn't seen him for about 10 years. Sure enough, as I walked through the doors of the Sweetwater, viole, there he was. The very first person I saw! Weird.



So, little breakdown on the days events. I need to report that the cab situation in Marin, overall, is very similar to Chico. The cab we ordered to get to the show never arrived and when we called back they said we never made a reservation for pickup, nice. So, we drove over to Mill Valley, not a big deal. Parking wasn't too bad and we found a spot around the corner.

I'm not much on taking notes while at shows so this part will be brief. Show started a little before 11 and right off the bat you could tell it was going to be nothing but the most jammin Mother Hips tunes. It was rock and roll at it's finest and took me back to the early days of the band just played with much greater skill these days. The nice part about a bay area show, on top of the fans, is that they play are accompanied by a keyboard and slide guitar or at least that's what I call it. It's the sit down type popularized by country western types, lots of twang. It was a nice addition as it melded the country and blues aspect with the rock, pure Mother Hips! Anyway, that's about it. Super show, one of the best I've seen and better yet I was able to view it from about 3 feet from the stage.

Also, I've got to put a word in for the Sweetwater Saloon. They planned ahead and had plastic champagne glasses, party hats, and noise makers for everyone. Very nice place, great employees and owners, hell they even hired a limo service to take people home in Mill Valley. On that note, I'll finish up what occurred the rest of the night. After the show ended close to 2 AM we wandered outside and said bye to new and old friends. Braden walked home and Karin and I tried to sweet talk the limo drivers for a trip home, but unfortunately, they were under contract to stay in Mill Valley. So, after waiting around until about 3 AM in the freezing cold I finally found a cab down the street as I went for more money at the ATM. BTW, it was really freezing, but not raining, luckily and we weren't dressed for the weather. Even though the car was right down the street, we knew better than to even attempt to sit inside and run the heater after coming out of the bar. There were about 4 cops in a 4 block area and could see them following each car that was leaving and even though warmth would have been nice, the warmth of steel benched in a cement cell block wasn't what I had in mind. So, we froze, but we made it home.

Ok, now I did take some video as well. The cam leaves a little to be desired in that category, but it was pretty dark. I saw one guy with a digital camcorders and that seemed to be the way to go, but it doesn't fit in your front pocket quite as well and I also don't shoot footage like that often. I'm playing with the formats so be patient if you can't view AVI, I'm trying to minimize the size of the MPEG files so people can view them in a timely manor as they are 50 mb+ a piece. The AVIs are about half that size. See links below.

Short Clip of Esmerelda [44 seconds] AVI format
Short Clip of Singing Seems to Ease Me [27 seconds] AVI format
Short Clip of Third Floor Story [38 seconds] AVI format
Short Clip of Pet Foot [32 seconds] AVI format

Also, shouts out to people we met at the show...
Jana - had a little too much fun and had to leave early
Ana, her friend and friends husband - sorry I can't remember your names, but I remember your faces, so will look for you at future bay area shows
Braden Barr - yay for seeing him!