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.

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.

Upgraded my Wordpress install today.  There were a bunch of bug fixes, some compatibility fixes with older versions of php, and I think a security fix for good measure.  I had a little problem when I first upgraded while I was in the computer lab this morning waiting for CICS to start.  For some reason when I was doing the upgrade I thought removing the folder wp-includes was optional, turns out thats the case for wp-includes/languages, not the whole folder.  Since I’m not using a language file I just deleted the whole folder and uploaded the new files and all problems have been solved.  Really I was just having a problem accessing the admin side of things, not the main page.

In other news I’ll be done with community service this weekend and probation the following Monday.  Then the celebration will begin.  It will be weird not drug testing and doing PBT testing every week, though I think I can handle it:)  So long for now.

Hello again everyone. I put up the pictures from Saturday night with Goose and the International Students. Always a good time with them. Oh, I figured out that if I upload the original size of each picture you then get an option to download the orignal pic, not just the resized image that fits in my blog parameters. I’ll be uploading all my picture albums pretty soon so then you have the option to download the orignal image if you choose to. To view the original size you just click the link you find under the image. Time to get to work. You’ll find a link to the album at the bottom.

New Gallery

Yes it’s true folks. Today at approximitly 1900 hours hell froze over. Well actually, I payed for a video game. It’s a strange feeling. Half-Life 2 was on sale at CompUSA for $20 which is dirt cheap. When I got there of course it was sold out. The Collector’s Edition was also on sale though for $40. I wanted CS Source so I decided oh what the hell indulge yourself Ryan. Time to “back up” more DVDs.