meddlingBanter

I’ll be spending this weekend at the Rothbury Music Festival in Rothbury, MI.  The festival is being held at this place called the Double JJ Ranch.  I’ve never been there but its supposed to be beautiful and is generally a popular resort ranch here in Michigan.  Abby said she had been there before when she was little since her father works near there.

This is the first music festival in Michigan of this stature, something reminiscent of Bonnaroo.  Lots of good people are gonna be there, most notably Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Snoop Dogg, and Modest Mouse. I’m most looking forward most to see Snoop, then after that Trey Anastasio, Mike Gorden, Panjea, STS9, Keller WIlliams , MICHAEL FRANTI AND SPEARHEAD  and Perpetual Groove. Hopefully I’ll be able to send updates to my facebook and twitter while there, otherwise I’ll post up some pics and commentary of the events the are sure to ensue after I return home.  Have a great 4th.

“Can you scan a spreadsheet into my computer so I can work on it?”

Tonight I finished setting up my new firewall/gateway based on the lastest Ubuntu server edition.  I actually finished this last Thursday but that machine crapped out on me the day after I had everything configured correctly.  It was an old P3 system with around 512 MB of PC-133 in it.  Not the greatest system but plenty for a home Gateway/Firewall.  The HDs I used in the machine were a couple I had laying around, 8 GB and 10 GB setup in an LVM.  I figured they might have had a little more life in them and 18 GB would be plenty of space for this system.  Well I guess they were a little too old as they both stopped working the next day, in fact the computer doesn’t even recognize them at boot time.  I’ve had trouble on that system before, sometimes detecting a drive, sometimes not, so it may just be the board as well.  I decided not to waste anymore time with that old machine and now I’m using Abby’s old emachine.

Things went rather smooth after my second install this afternoon.  I had installed it over the weekend at Abby’s (on her machine, not the machine that died), but her internet was flaky and wouldn’t work during the install of Ubuntu so I wasn’t able to configure some things during the initial install and that seemed to give me all kinds of errors this morning when I went to finish things up.  Also I spent a good amount of time troubleshooting a problem with one of my network cards, in that it would initialize but I couldn’t connect to the computer through the LAN to it which had me googling and scratching my head for some time.  I then decided to open up the case and try to reseat the NIC.  The card was actually not seated all the way so I pushed it in then rebooted and it worked perfectly.  Next time I won’t be in such a hurry and actually screw in the NICs.

After fixing that problem I had one more issue with that NIC after finishing up the second install. For some reason it would only register as a 10 Mbit half-duplex NIC, when it was capable of 100 Mbit full-duplex mode.  Turns out this is an issue with the card and certain switches.  The card just doesn’t detect the type of network its on properly.  I forced the card into the proper mode and now things are good to go.

Right now the f/g is pretty basic.  I have three NICs in it, one connected to my switches/OPEN-WRT AP, one to the cable modem, and the third will be used for another AP I plan to have an open wireless network on.  I installed smoothwall to configure my firewall as well as bind and a DHCP server.  I don’t really like all those services running on that box so I may leave bind on there and move the DHCP server back to the OPEN-WRT router or maybe to my other Ubuntu Server.  I really just wanted to install the dhcpd3 server on there to learn how to configure it.  With those minor hicups things are running smooth now.

For my quarterly update I thought I would talk about a couple things I’ll be doing in the upcoming week and months.  This weekend I’m supposed to join my family on Sat or Sun and help put a new roof on my Grandpa’s house.  I literally have no experience doing anything like this so I don’t know how much help I will be but I’m sure I can help clean up, bitch work I suppose.

On Sunday Abby’s aunt is having her wedding reception in Lansing. I don’t know if I can go yet, depending on when we go to fix the roof, but I’ll probably end up making an appearance.  If I’m not mistaken my Adult Kickball league should also be starting up this weekend or next weekend so that’s exciting.  Last year we did pretty good and should continue on that track this year.

In two weeks Umphrey’s McGee is doing a three night stint in Michigan, June 5th - 7th.  The 5th they are playing in Grand Rapids which I’ll be drinving out there for.  Then on Friday I’ll be driving back to Detroit to see them again at St. Andrews Hall.  And if I find a soul to attend Saturday I’ll be going to that one as well.  I have tickets to all three nights, but Abby has a wedding on Saturday to shoot so she can’t come with me that night.  This will be the the 6th, 7th, and possibly 8th time I’ve seen them this past year, the last of which was over New Years.  They never disappoint.  Abby has been in contact with some of Umphrey’s people about getting a photo pass and someone finally got back to her today and put her on a list so she can actually bring in her camera this time (they don’t let you bring in professional cameras) and has permission to get up close for the first three songs, but no flash.  They also said they are looking for some shots of their drummer Chris for their website so I’m sure she will be taking tons of photos of him in hopes they will use some of her pics.

Not really about the future but Abby and I both have purchased new computers recently.  I got a good deal on a Dell Vostro 1400 (probably should have got the 1500) for around $800.  It’s a 2.1 Dual Core Penryn CPU and I think an 8600 Nividea GPU of some sort.  Not that great of a GPU but I opted for a 1400×900 screen and two 9 cell battery’s.  Now it only came with an 80 GB 5400 rpm HD and 1 GB of ram so I decided to bump those up to a 250 GB 7200 rpm HD and 4 GB of OCZ ram.  It’s running pretty sweet right now and after not having a new computer in probably 4 or 5 years it was about time.

Abby recently bought one of the recently revamped iMacs.  She went top of the line witlh the 24inch screen and 3.0 GHz processor with only 2 GB of ram.  Once we find a deal on more ram shes probably gonna bump that up to 4.  These are supposedly running a new intel dual core thats not released, or at least similar specs to that processor. Either way it’s a real nice machine.  I’m kinda jealous of all that screen realistic and the form factor is pretty sexy.  I have noticed though that it gets really hot and she may have a bad superdrive on it.  We tried to burn 5 dvds on Saturday and burned 5 coasters.  She bought the 3 year warranty so that’s no worry and the nice part is that Apple will come out and fix it for her.

One last thing: Over the 4th of July Abby, my friends Ben, Gabe, Chris, Abby’s friend Lindsay, and I will all be going to the Rothbury Music Festival in Rothbury, MI.  From looking at the lineup it should be one hell of a time.  I haven’t been to a music festival since I first starting dating Abby and it really is my favorite thing to do in the summer.  It’s something you should do at least once in your life.  I’m looking forward most to seeing Snoop Dogg.  Now with all the great music there that’s probably an odd choice, but I’ve seen nearly everyone else before and come on, its Snoop at a music festival with a bunch of hippies.  Priceless.

While I have a free min before bed I thought I would update the blog a little bit.  I guess I should begin with December when I began and ended the month with Umphrey’s McGee.  Sometime around the 1st Abby, Chris, Ben, Gabe, BG and I all went to see Umphrey’s at the Boarders in Ann Arbor and again that night.  Seeing them up close at Boarders was pretty cool, except for the fact I lost my chair to Chris due to me trying to go sit closer to Abby..I ended up standing in the back for whole set but that was all right since I got to jam out back there.  I do remember this kid in front of me who was texting feriously to someone every song they played. He also said suck memorable things as "this is single handedly the coolest thing I’ve ever been apart of."  Now I think Umphrey’s is great, but that statement seems a little out there for me.  After Boarders we all tried to just go to a bar and drink before the show, but decided just to go to Kliens and drink and then return later. 

None of us really had seats together except Abby and I because we all bought them at different times.  For a while Abby and I left our seats and just jammed out in the iles just to get up close.  At one point I think I felt I could dance better if I had my shoes off so I spent the better half of the show with no shoes, seems a little dumb now, but what’s the worst that could happen?  Umphrey’s performed awesome as always.

Later in the month was Christmas.  For that Abby came to my house to celebrate with my Dad’s side of the family the weekend before Xmas.  I went to her house Christmas eve to spend it with her family in Haslett.  I met most of her family for the first time then.  I think it was a good first visit with her relatives (aunts, uncles etc).  Christmas day I went home sans Abby and we celebrated Christmas day apart.  I didn’t get a whole lot for Christmas, but I got everything I wanted.  I bought a bunch of clothes from the Timberland store and had my mom give me that.  I also had her get me to Umphrey’s at New Years in Chicago.  Well, my parents actually got one for me and one for Abby.  Then my parents surprised me with a paper shredder.  I had borrowed theirs for a long time and apparently this was there way of telling me they wanted it back.  I never would have thought I wanted one, but I love that thing.  It’s pretty nice if I can say so.  It cross cuts, shreds CDs and credit cards, and has a removable bin.  As a bonus its on wheels.  I usually hate surprises like that but they did good this year. 

I mentioned earlier I got a ticket to Umphrey’s New Years show.  Abby and I decided instead of getting each other presents for Christmas we would just go to Chicago for New Years to see Umphrey’s.  They were playing a three night show at the Aragon Ballroom so we had to be there.  We wanted to go all three nights, but financially we decided to just to two shows.  In retrospect that turned out to be the best idea because doing those shows two nights in a row drained me pretty bad.

We drove down on Sunday morning since I had made plans to meet up with my buddy Jeff who lives there. We met Jeff around 2 at a bar to watch the Lions game and catch up since I hadn’t seen him since GVSUs homecoming, and that was only for a night.  I think the lions ended up losing that game but still we had a good time.  After that Abby and I still had some time to kill before we could get in the hotel so we went with Jeff back to his apt to check it out.  I forget the city off the top of my head, but its southwest of the city….I think.   It was a pretty nice one bed room apt with a nice view of a golf course.  I’ll have to check it out this summer if at all possible. 

Fast forward to the hotel.  We stayed at this place called the Club Quarters at the corner of Michigan and Whacker downtown Chicago.  We got a decent deal on the room, I think something like $125 a night.  For New Years in downtown Chi that seemed pretty damn good to me, especially since the room Abby booked was $200.  The hotel was pretty nice, though the rooms are a little narrow compared to a normal room.  For us it was perfect since all we were doing was sleeping there before the shows each night and during the day we planned to go out.  We had a sweet view of the river and the new Trump tower being built across it.

I won’t go much into the shows but I will just say Umphrey’s took a lot out of me both nights.  So much the second night we didn’t end up meeting up with my other friend Jeff who was also in Chicago for New Years.  Dancing for 4 hours can do that to you and if I recall we were in a Blizzard on the way home. 

On New Years Abby and I opted to get a late check out and order room service and bum around till it was time to leave.  We probably should have left sooner since it took us 5 hours to drive home in the snow, but I didn’t have to drive so I didn’t mind:)

In other news my 4 or 5 year old laptop died a few weeks ago.  It’s had a problem with the power supply for a long time, I would have to hold the power cord in a special way just for it to charge up.  Years of doing this probably led to the tiny fire that erupted sometime in December.  After that little ordeal it worked fine for about another month until it finally stopped holding a charge.  I noticed more sparks again when it finally died. That really pissed me off since I had just finished putting full disk encryption on an Ubuntu install that week.  When I ended up taking it apart to take out the hard drive and any other parts I could, the mobo had a hole in it near the power supply.  I guess this is what did it in.  Now I’m in the market for a new one.  Once I get my tax returns I’ll probably purchase a Dell or maybe a Thinkpad.  I think I’ll then get rid of my CRTs and turn my desktop here into a server since it is ancient and really just a burden.  These things get so hot and suck a lot of power so it’s time they go.  Then whenever I have some extra cash I’ll purchase a new desktop, or just collect parts as I find deals and put one together. 

In future news I’m going to NY city in a month to visit my friend Andrew.  I’m thinking I may try to set up a job interview or two while I’m out there since I haven’t had much luck here at home with a more permanent position.  I looked on craigslist today and found some pretty interesting jobs. I should now be up to speed and hopefully I’ll update soon.  If only I were motivated.  Ha, ok good night.