So, it’s fun to play with music.  especially when someone has take some time to make the creation of music idiot-proof.  That’s impressive design when someone like me can produce something like this in 5 minutes.

You can find more stuff like this on Andre Michelle’s site: http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix .  Thanks David Hall Jr. for the link.

It’s kind of tough to pick up lumber at Home Depot and have the cashier say, “just bring your truck around and we’ll load you up.”  Inside I wince just a little bit.  I shouldn’t be ashamed; I don’t even like trucks.  But there’s something about being a guy and doing home-improvement projects and having a truck.  It all seems part of the equation.

I walk to my Subaru Outback with the seats down and hope that the process goes by quickly.

I make eye-contact with the loading guy and sure enough there’s a slight shake in his head as he looks at the pair of massive 12 foot long 6 inch thick beams and then looks at my little station wagon.  I know they’ll fit, but he thinks I’m crazy; he’s probably right.

At least the rental place was a bit more kind when I picked up the post-hole digger.  Everything fit in the back and I could even close the hatch.

So, after recruiting a few neighbors, digging two holes 42 inches deep, and pouring 300 lbs. of concrete into the ground, we have the beginnings of a swing set.  I’ll let the dust settle and concrete cure then start work on phase two some time this week.

So far, we’ve invested $65.00 in lumber, $37.00 in rental equipment, and $12.00 in concrete.  Not too bad, the rest should be easier.  I just have to get past the lumber guys laughing at the station wagon; maybe I could tell them how great my gas-mileage is…?  Nah, probably wouldn’t help.

So, I don’t mind complaining to businesses about bad service or inadequate product development.  I believe anyone running a business should listen carefully to customers or that business will lose their customers; that’s the darwinistic nature of capitalism.  I hope any company that gets an entire blog post and a video about their sub-par service stands up and listens; because I represent thousands of people that don’t give the time to complain.  Usually the customer just walks away and never refers their friends to the service.

This morning I got an email from TicketMaster and on the front page was a link to my favorite band Counting Crows.  So, I clicked the link and checked out the options.  The ticket price seemed about right, but what shocked me was the fees TicketMaster placed on purchasing the tickets through them.  Out-rageous!

Here’s the video I took right after; I wanted to catch my shock and disappointment.  (I aslo caught my son playing in the background, so excuse the little guy and the other weird sounds I make moving the laptop around.)

That’s my complaint of the day.  I would really like to get your comments; would you pay $10.00 extra per ticket, plus $2.50 to print the tickets with your own printer? 

What shocks me about the lack of charge on the standard mailing is that it takes someone’s physical effort to put the tickets in an envelope; even if everything else is automated, it’s going to take paying a human to get the tickets to me—yet it’s free.  And, mailing tickets is not the most ‘green friendly’ way to get tickets.  It’s going to produce a lot more waste than me printing off a couple sheets of paper with my own printer.

Okay TicketMaster, I think it’s your turn, how are you going to fix this?  Or, do we just need to wait until you go the way of GM and Chrysler?  (I guarantee you won’t receive a bail out from the government.)

Some time in April I kept hearing this thumping on our window.  It would happen in the morning and later in the afternoon.  I only heard it once or twice before until one morning it woke me up at 7:15 (yes, I was still in bed, I live 5 minutes from work, I’m spoiled).  I throw open the curtains wondering what the g-willlakers is going on and watch a robin retreat to the maple tree outside our bedroom.  This happened every morning for several weeks. 

I tried everything to keep those silly robins from banging on my windows.  They’re lucky I don’t own a gun.  It was only our tight budget keeping me from getting a pelt gun and spending an evening reliving my childhood.  Instead, I put signs up in the window, covered them with blue tape and the tapping and beating (which got earlier as the days got longer) eventually went away (not without a good deal of bird poop on my windowsill—stupid birds!).

“Stupid birds” I told Emily, “why in the world are they trying to get in our room?”  We had no clue, so I did some internet research and found this is common in the spring.  Birds are territorial and when they see another bird, they try to chase it off.  This bird saw its reflection; stupid bird.

Then I found nests.  Three to be exact. Amazingly constructed little nests on top of our rain gutters.  If it hadn’t been for the bad impression these robins made with tapping, I probably would have left them; but I wanted revenge.  I took the nests down and showed the boys and Emily.  They really were amazing.  The outside was lined with course bits of grass and twigs while the center was hollowed out with a soft grassy fluff.  I would have felt snug in this little nest.

After I took the nests down I felt bad.  I could only imagine the amount of work it took to bring each blade of grass and twig.  The bird had even take some dirt and what I can only guess as spit to create a mortar for the rim of the nest.  This made the nest strong and more resilient to perching on the ledge.

Well, when another nest appeared next to our garage door, I let it stay.  There wasn’t any poop on the ground, and except for the occasionally startle I got when I came out the door and the robin flew off, no one was being bothered.

I practically forgot about the nest until today when we had some neighbor kids over and one of the little girls saw the nest and wanted to look at.  I should say I’m a complete push over for little girls.  My two boys are great, but if we have a third and it’s a girl, she’s going to be really spoiled; probably to a point where the boys will have to get jobs or beg on the street because I’ll be getting and doing anything for the little princess (for I have no doubt a princess she will become.

So, when I lifted this cute little girl up to see the nest, I was surprised to hear her say, “Hey, there are blue eggs!”  Sure enough, five little blue robin eggs.  The internet says that American Robins take about two weeks from laying to hatching (if only my wife’s pregnancies were so easy) and then another two weeks of training from Mom and Dad bird while they learn how to fly.

So, I think we’re going to have an exciting month ahead of us.  If all goes well, we’ll have some more pictures of baby chirping birds.  Luckily the nest is far away from the bedrooms.  I know what it’s like to have new babies; hopefully these fledglings aren’t too colicky.

Hopefully this little family will do well.  It seems that the parents are attentive and have kept the nest warm.  And, with any luck, they’ll teach the fledglings well and the whole family will have a great summer.

My only concern, which is the same as any parents, is that the babies will stick around.  I pray they don’t, because if I have five birds pecking and running into my window next year, I’m getting a pelt gun.

Haven’t listened to the whole thing, but I do love what these guys do.  It’s also very cool that they post the whole album online for anyone to stream.

I guess there’s one other thing that happened in the last two months.  We got a server.

You might remember this post, where I was concerned with our current backup situation.  After some thought, prayer, and research I decided to make a substantial investment and get an HP Home Server.  So far, I really enjoy it.

There are some things I learned during set up.  Having a router that supports UPnP makes life a lot easier.  Since my router doesn’t support this basic protocol, I had to go in and manual setup port forwarding (which I should probably share on this blog the ‘how to’ since it took me a little bit of work to research) and then wait for all the DNS servers in the world to update.

Here are a list of things I like about the HP Home Server:

Automatic backup for my PC and my wife’s Mac.  This was crucial.  I wish the Mac had an automatic ‘media sucker’ (which grabs all the images, video, and ‘important files’) like the PC does; but I think I can setup some Automator scripts or watch folders for that.

Large Add-in community.  If there’s something you want to setup on the server, chances are someone has made an add-in for the server that makes it dead simple to do.  There are a couple I need to install, like FTP and better Power Management; but I’ll get around to it.

Access files from anywhere.  Since I setup my router with the proper port forwarding, I can get all the files on the server through a simple web-portal.  Very nice.

Easily expand hard drive space.  I don’t know how to properly RAID a set of hard drives in a level 5 configuration with striping (I don’t even know if that’s possible) and at this point in my life I don’t really mind not know.  Since the Home Server can do that for me, I’ll probably never learn.  In theory, all I have to do is put a drive in the server, tell the server it’s there and Wham-O, I have more space that just works.  We’ll see how this actually works when it comes time to put in a new drive.  Stay tuned.

Back-up to Amazon’s S3 and other services.  This is the next step.  Once we get everything we want on the server, I need to get an off-site back-up.  The server is no good if our house burns down, and I think Emily would prefer I grab the kids instead of the laptops, server, and external hard drive.

So, that’s the run down.  If you got any questions about my experience (which is still limited) let me know in the comments.

Totally broke my site this last month.  Tried to blame it on my hosting provider, but I’m pretty convinced I did it this time.  Oops.

So, what happened in these lost two months?  Learned a lot about Adobe Flex.  So far I’m able to pull video from Screencast.com and display it in a list.  It looks like crap, but I can actually pull and read in XML data, so for me it’s a win.

What else… painted the house, put together a bunch of service projects for my Church’s youth group, and (as of today) fixed my blog.  :-)

And, can I say that I really love Paint.Net.  If you’re on a PC and looking for a great image editor, this is where you should look first.  I’ve used it over the last few years and when I know Snagit can’t do something (like transparency) and I know it’s too simple of a job to load up Photoshop; I open Paint.Net.  Great for bloggers!

I really enjoy a lot of music.  And, music influences me heavily.  So, if I’m trying to concentrate, I generally don’t listen to music.  If I’m riding in the car, I want a certain kind of music, (although I listen to NPR more than anything in the car now).  When I’m with the family, I want fun musicals that I can dance to with the boys and when I’m with Em I want calm funky music that I can talk over.

One of the more difficult areas to listen to music is a at work.  When I’m doing the more mundane task music really helps.  But it’s important to find a nice balanced music that doesn’t distract, but keeps me energized.  Since this is a tough and finicky level to maintain, I’m going to start posting albums that I think fit the bill.

Now, just to clarify, these might not be the best bands ever;  this is “work music”.  Music that let’s you (well, at least me) get something done.  Hopefully it will be interesting to you.

So, my first pick is Owl City.  Recently found them on Lala.com.

This is important to you, your family, and friends.

Facebook can use your face and information in their Ads. They don't have to pay you and they can use your pictures to entice your friends to click on their ads. But, you can change your privacy settings so they don't.

This video shows you how to change the settings. It will take you 30 seconds to fix.

As a note, Facebook changed their Terms of Service recently to let them keep all your information (your pictures, your "25 Random Things About Me" posts, your address) even if you delete your account. Luckily the community complained and it hit the news prompting Facebook to change their Terms of Service back... but it goes to show that Facebook is willing to sellout its users to the highest bidder.

Remember Beacon? Google that for an interesting story.

Now, I’m sure some people like, “who cares? What does it matter what Facebook does?  They’re letting me use their site for free.”   And, you can certainly take that point of view.  But just remember, they’re using you to sell stuff.  You don’t have any control where you appear and it might be something that you don’t like.  I like Facebook as a service and a community, but I don’t like my face and pictures being used without my knowledge; I just don’t think that’s right.

There’s an ever running list of videos and music I want to see and hear.

So much to do, so little time.