Author Archives: brad

This is not surprising.

I wondered how long it would last.

Well, the show was washed out by the side effects of Hurricane Ivan, so the band-with-no-name didn’t get to play yesterday.

So now we’re looking for more excuses to practice music.

And a name.

We thought about Vote Quimby for a name, but it turns out it’s taken.

Bill had suggested The Jebus Band, and we’re still considering it.

Your pirate name is:

Calico Sam Kidd

Often indecisive, you can’t even choose a favorite color. You’re apt to follow wherever the wind blows you, just like Calico Jack Rackham, your namesake. Even though you’re not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

What’s your pirate name?

Wow. In seven days, we have an honest-to-goodness gig.

Kind of.

On September 18, Mountville will hold this year’s Mountville Days. Yes, it’s Mountville Days, despite the fact that it’s self-contained within a single day. At least I think it is. Maybe I’m wrong about that. If so, I shouldn’t have been quite so dogmatic just now.

Anyway, Mountville Days is when Mountville, Pennsylvania becomes the world’s largest garage sale. Everybody and his grandma has a table, stand, rack, or some sort of display outside, where they sell junk they no longer want. Various companies and organizations set up shop along Main Street (yes, the name of the street is literally Main Street; just one of the many endearing features of the town) to hawk their wares or provide cheap snacks to harried garage sale patrons.

Along Main Street sits Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, an incredibly old building that dominates the street’s landscape. Jen’s mother works there as the secretary. Her employment is the root of our long and checkered history with the town of Mountville. The church’s computer consultant, Charlie, lives right down the street from the church, and at one time operated his business from his home. It was during that time that he mentioned a need for some cheap labor, and my mother-in-law gave him my name. This is also, incidentally, how I got involved with computers as a vocation. Up until then, it had been strictly a hobby. Anyway, I ended working for Charlie for several years. Our business relationship ended in 1996 when I set off on my failed quest to become a teacher. Later that year, we moved to Mountville and lived in the renovated firehouse. It was such a cool place.

Toward the end of 2002, Charlie called me out of the blue. Knowing that I was a worship leader at the time, and knowing that I had a history of helping out with both worship services and church youth groups, he asked if I’d be interested in going on a retreat with Saint Paul’s Church’s praise band, which almost entirely made up of youth group members. Basically, I’d be helping them learn to become worship leaders. Jen and I packed our bags and headed off to Camp Innabah with them, and it was super cool. We had a blast.

A few weeks ago, Charlie called out of the blue again. This year, during Mountville Days, the church is setting up a stage outside, and the praise band is going to be playing. I think this is a cool idea. What would be nice, he said, is if the praise band could take some breaks but somehow still keep the music going. He asked if Jen and I would be interested in playing two one hour sets. Our answer, of course, was yes.

What Charlie didn’t know, and something I haven’t been advertising, is that Jen and I have been working on putting a new band together. In fact, we’d already found a willing guitarist/harmony singer by the name of Josh. This gave us a much-needed excuse to get together to practice. We worked on some material that Josh, Jen, and I are all familiar with from our Westwood days, and we even dusted off some Anonymous Joe songs, too. And they sound pretty good. Josh’s guitar playing and his singing blend with mine very well, I think. We still lack a drummer, but I suppose that will come when the time is right.

So, we have our first gig on September 18. I’m really excited to be playing out again. I’ve missed it terribly.

If you want to see the new band, or at least what we have so far, we’ll be playing from 10 to 11 and from noon to one outside Saint Paul’s Church. Don’t bother coming to both sets unless you really want to; they’ll be identical.

Now all we need is a name. We haven’t discussed it as a group yet, but I don’t think I want to use the name Anonymous Joe again. That part of my life is behind me. I’ll still use some songs I wrote for Anonymous Joe, since they’re my songs and everything. I just don’t want to use that name again. So I guess I need suggestions. I came up with The Blessed Rhinos. I was half-joking when I suggested, and I half-like it, but I’m not sure. Let me know what you think, and if you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

So the Olympics are over. All the athletes have gone or are going home and Athens is being swept up. We’ll have to wait another four years for another Summer Games.

Truth be told, I really hate watching sports on TV. About the only thing I dislike more is actually participating in sports. All that running and jumping and… whoa… I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

But, I have to say, one sport I enjoy playing is volleyball. I don’t know why, but I always found volleyball to be fun to play and rather satisfying as well. Maybe it’s because you don’t have to be in super shape or because you don’t have to run much, but I like it. I really enjoy two on two, although it’s a lot more work. And I actually enjoy watching it. Watching Misty May and Kerry Walsh mop up the court with every single was somewhat inspiring. I won’t mention the other reason I liked watching them play, but it’s probably obvious.

Anyway, volleyball is an OK sport. In fact, in college, I took Class Volleyball as one of my PE electives. I was thinking back to that class while watching the olympics the past couple weeks. I was in the class with three other English majors. I did my student teaching at the same time as one of them. I think his name was Tim. Tall guy, blond hair. He was a closet Mac guy, and I tried to coax him out, but Doom got the better of him. Anyway, the other two guys were kind of peripheral for me during my college career. In the cast list of my life, they would have been Other Volleyball Guy 1 and Other Volleyball Guy 2. We had a good time in the class, though.

Believe it or not, we four English majors were not stellar athletes, me especially (remember, this was college, so picture me with 50 pounds more than I have now). But we didn’t care. We had a good time, but we annoyed the living crap out of the professor. Professor seems like a strong word. Professor of Volleyball? Anyway…

When the prof would give us advice, we’d twist it into Zen Volleyball advice and use it as a mantra. For example, one piece of advice the prof gave us was the deeply insightful: “Jump, find the ball, hit the ball.” We turned this into: “Jump, find the ball, be the ball.” Personally, I disregarded the prof’s advice, and still do to this day. I prefer to know where the ball is before jumping, otherwise I’m just wasting jumps and looking more stupid than usual.

We always played six to a team, and the four of us would always team up together, much to the great disappointment of the other two players that got stuck with us, because we lost every single game we played together. We didn’t just lose. We get creamed. Whooped. Cleaning of clocks. You name it. But we did it laughing, yelling to each other, “Be the ball!”

One day, apparently, the prof had had enough. After his demonstration, he told us to team up. So the four of us searched for two victims. But the prof stopped us. “No,” he said. “No more.”

We looked at each other in surprise.

“You guys are all on different teams from now on.”

We sulked off and joined other teams, but Class Volleyball was never the same after that.

After class that day, I walked up to Tim and said, “You know what?”

“What?” Tim replied (since it was the obvious response to my prompt).

“We were mainstreamed today.”

As education majors, we found this hilariously funny and laughed for a long time.

I ended up with a B in Class Volleyball, mostly because I had a positive attitude and I did well on the written final exam.

Seriously, there was a written final exam.

Sure has been quiet around here.

I’m currently gearing up for the start of the school year. Lots to do this year. Normally, at this point, I’m up to my ears in computers that need to be configured, cloned, or otherwise dealt with. This year, however, I am virtually uninvolved in hardware. This summer, we restructured the department and I became the data manager, a new position created this year. As data manager, I’m responsible for getting and keeping all data systems up and running, including child accounting, inventory, tech support, etc. Child accounting is proving to be the biggest challenge, as we try to come to grips with which child accounting/SIS package we’re going to settle on (this year, we’ll be running PowerSchool and IMSeries concurrently, which should keep me plenty busy).

Beyond that, I’ve been frantically at work on Tangelo. I hope to release 1.0b6 (which I hope will be 1.0fc1) this week. I’ve added some great stuff, including custom file names for posts and sections, better image management, and much improved FTP publishing (now with error reporting!). My goal is to have b6 done by Thursday, for reasons which I cannot disclose at this time.

Jen, Gracie, and I have been trying to settle into life at a new church. It’s weird, and it’s different, and sometimes I really don’t like it and I wish that Westwood were still around and that I could see God’s plan from His perspective, but we’re doing the best we can. I’ve been playing on the worship team, along with Josh. To be honest, it’s sometimes a struggle for me to part of the worship team and not the one picking the songs, running rehearsal, and choosing arrangements, but we only grow in situations we’re not used to. And it’s mostly my own ego that sometimes makes me feel that way. Don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not leading an insurrection or anything, and I’m happy to be a team player. It’s just another adjustment.

Time for bed. Hopefully I’ll have more time to update this site.

I’m sitting in room 621 of the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, waiting for PowerSchool University to kick-off.

Fortunately, Jen and Gracie were able to come with me on this trip, which is good, because otherwise, I may have gone insane.

We arrived yesterday afternoon. Gracie was very nervous about the flight, and the 90 minute delay, while we were already sitting in the plane, didn’t help. So I missed early registration for PSU and had to come early to register this morning. We checked into the hotel last evening and I discovered, much to my dismay, that they want $10 per day for high speed internet access. Bull crap, say I. I’ve stayed in two other (much cheaper) hotels this year, and they both provided high speed access for free. Fine, so I’ll use the remaining hours on my AOL trial. Oh, wait – the hotel wants to charge you for dial-up, too! Thank goodness PSU itself has high speed wireless. Aaaaahhhh…

We went down to the Navy Pier last night. Very cool place. I’m sure we’ll be going back. Gracie loved it.

I decided to wear my black Apple Developer Program t-shirt today, because that always throws people off and then they think I work for Apple. But the PSU people gave us each a t-shirt, color-coded by region and asked us to wear them today. So now I’m wearing my royal blue PowerSchool t-shirt, and I look like the rest of the dinks around here.

PSU provides breakfast and lunch every day as part of the tuition. That’s pretty cool. So this morning, I leave my hotel and walk over to the Gleacher center, only to find out that the meals are over at the hotel. Dang. Well, there’s always lunch.

Hey, there’s Wayne! He did my Object Reports training at the IU back in April.

So, let’s see… what else is in my goodie bag? Well, for starters, there’s the bag itself. Really nice laptop backback. PowerSchool keychain, one of those mountain climber clip kind of things (hopefully Mike will provide the correct name in the comments). Ticket for a cruise on the Spirit of Chicago. Probably won’t be going, though. 10% off my next Apple Store purchase. Nice. 4D propaganda. Ehhh, not interested. I’m really finding 4D to be a major turn-off. There would be an iBook in there for me to borrow for the week, but I declined. I’d rather use my own machine, and they were totally cool about that.

More later.

I’m back from Ocean City, MD. Actually, we got in last night. I got through all of the things I wanted to accomplish during the trip:

– Frontier Town: check. What a great place. There’s a water park with lots of kid-friendly stuff, and unlimited miniature golf. They also have campsites. We’re looking into staying there some time.

– Eat pizza at Dough Roller: check.

– Eat breakfast at Dough Roller: check. We stayed on 41st street; Dough Roller was right across the street.

– Hit the beach: check, check, check, check, check…

– Ride the Sea Rocket: check. I love the Sea Rocket. It’s cool to see the beach and boardwalk from the ocean, and the ride’s a blast. You get soaked if you sit toward the back of the boat. And the crew is always a hoot. Two kickers this time. First, we saw dozens of dolphins. Usually when you see dolphins in Ocean City, you might see one or two and get a glimpse of the top of their dorsal fins. But there were many dolphins out that day, and they were jumping completely out of the water. But the best part was that they let Gracie drive the boat for a while. That was seriously cool, and she loved it.

– Discovery Nature Cruise to Assateague Island: check. My parents and my sister’s family did this last year and convinced us to try it. It was pretty cool. The guide was obviously a science teacher somewhere; we figured this was his summer job. He was extremely intelligent and told us all sorts of stuff about Ocean City and the bay. The tour lasts about 90 minutes, and in the middle, they drop you off on Assateague Island with a net and tell you to catch whatever you can. Then the tour guide came through with a huge dragnet and told us about all the critters that he caught in it. He got my two nephews to help with one end of the net, and he had Gracie assist him on his end. The kids really got a kick out of that.

– Dumser’s: check. Mmmmmm. Dumser’s.

– Check out Randy Hofman’s sculptures again: check. This guy is so amazingly talented. I can’t believe the things he can do with sand. A couple years ago I was lucky enough to walk up to his display while he was working. He talked to the gathered crowd briefly, then left. I got the impression he doesn’t like crowds.

– Quality time with family: check. ‘Nuff said. Most of my family is still down there and won’t come home until next week (my parents, my grandparents, and my sister and her family). Me? I was ready to come home. I’ve got a ton of work to do this week, and I kind of missed Jackie Boy.

– Boogie Boarding: check. We actually had decent waves this time, and Jen and I were able to spend a lot of time on boogie boards. I had to correct Grace repeatedly that they’re boogie boards, not buggy boards. I don’t think she gets it yet. The waves were so good that we had to replace one of the boogie boards we borrowed because it snapped in half. Then, as I finished riding it in, I nose dived and front tip snapped.

Just wanted to note that after using a cable modem for the past two years, I’d totally forgotten how slow dial-up access is.

And now I’ll find out how Tangelo fares over dial-up.

I’m off to the beach for a week. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves while I’m gone.

As for Internet access at the beach, I think I’ve been reduced to installing AOL on my PowerBook. I feel so… dirty.

So hopefully I’ll have enough connectivity to check mail once a day, and maybe even update this site once or twice during the week. I’m curious to see how Tangelo performs over dial-up. It’s been over two years since I’ve even used dial-up.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me, that means I couldn’t get connected.

See you on the flip side.