HAHA

My blog hath moved to it's final resting place, http://tablet.druid628.com

woo hoo!

End of line.

About Music

As I started this entry I started to write about a few different topics however, I decided to condense it yet still (hopefully) hit all topics... so here goes.

Music
First and foremost. Last night/very early this morning was one of the greatest times of my life. Last night One-Eyed Doll made their Chattanooga debut or as Kimberly likes to say, "day-butt." They appeared at JJ's Bohemia headlining a show where I was able to experience another band out of Austin, Tx named Mobley which was a very exciting band!
The most important thing was Jambo and I were finally able to meet One-Eyed Doll, Kimberly, #3 (P.J.), and Jr. (Jason). They were great! Nicest people you could ever meet. As we arrived we met #3 and Jr. in the parking lot and stood there and talked for a bit before venturing inside where we got to meet the beautiful and talented Kimberly. It was so exciting to get to meet them I was truly star-struck just talking to the three of them. It was only after the show that I finally was able to hold a conversation with them without being struck dumb by their stardom. I was so excited Jambo and I were able to get pictures made with the band.

Another thing I wanted to talk about regarding music is this. This should be a GREAT year for music, below are some of the artists releasing new albums this year:

Egypt Central
One-Eyed Doll - out already && got it!
Killola
School Seven Bells (sviib)
Vanilla Ice

Well my train of thought has seriously derailed from how this entry was originally supposed to follow.. so I guess since I can't really remember what's left I'll just end it here.

Freaking Excitement!

I just found out that one of my fav. bands One-Eyed Doll http://www.oneeyeddoll.com is coming to Chattanooga on 30 March, 2010!!!
JJ's Bohemia. Be there!

The First of the Last

This will be the first of last blog posts here on druid628.blogspot.com...
it will be moving soon a permanent location. This was originally supposed to be temporary in my mind when I started my blog here. That was May of 2005.
That post:

Testing!
Friday, May 6th, 2005
Well I’ve decided that I’m going to try this out and use blogspot for a while as my blog.
We’ll see how it goes.

Well here we go almost five years later and my blog is growing up. I just decided this as I pasted that post into this one that my roll-over date will be the 5 year anniversary of my first blogspot post. So there we go folks, 6 May, 2010 the druid tablet will be moving from blogspot to it's final location. "Make your time."

Juggalonely

Over the past week or so I have been stepping back through the Six-or-so Joker's Cards of the Dark Carnival. For those who are already confused, I am referring to the series of albums by the Insane Clown Posse.

For those who know me, I am a self proclaimed Juggalo. Though I have not been listening to ICP since the beginning, I actually got into ICP and the Dark Carnival in mid-to-late '96 starting with The Riddlebox. I knew rather quickly this music was for me. I have been a Juggalo since. Anxiously awaiting each new card and accompanying albums.

Though The Riddlebox will always hold a special place for me because it was my first of the Joker's Cards, the Amazing Jeckel Brothers captured me and would not let go. The first of the Dark Lotus albums came out and suddenly I started to get the big picture.

Finally, the long awaited final Joker's Card, The Wraith: Shangri-La arrives on the scene. Everything came into focus. Now I have always been a religious person and to hear how the joker's cards put it all out there, I was very pleased and the connection to the music I had loved so much was even more clear.

Now, over the past few years I have become increasingly disillusioned. For years when I would see someone with ICP memorabilia I would always make a point to speak to them. When I first started doing this, I would normally get a favorable reaction and occasionally a negative. During the good time I did however meet one of my best friends. Eventually I got to the point where I would avoid this interaction as the number of these negative encounters began to increase.

Recently the latest ICP album, Bang Pow Boom has come out I've listened to it a few times and enjoyed the heck out of it. In fact, it's right up there with the Joker's Cards. Last week after a desire to listen to "The Real Underground" probably one of my favorite songs, I decided to step back through the past and follow the Dark Carnival from the beginning and end with the current carny Bang Pow Boom. It occurred to me that the juggalo nation could use a serious wake up call.

Part of being a juggalo is, as the guys [ICP] have said over and over, it's about family and your homies. The juggalo friends I have are some of the closest friends I have we stick together. I miss the days of seeing someone out in an ICP hat or a Great Milenko shirt, speaking to them and feeling welcome, like a long lost cousin they never knew they had.

I only hope that the true Juggalos and the back-slid Juggalos will hear Bang Pow Boom and decide to "retrace their roots" as I did and come to the same conclusion.

.::. DruiD .::.

..We see the uh.. Earth now...

...This transmission is coming to you...

... from Samus.

At the moment, thank God, I have gotten back into my PC in attempt to recover data from a PC I was reloading. I hope that once I finish with these three PC's that I will be able to spend some time investigating my own computer woes. Maybe then I can get my box reloaded with FreeBSD.

So for the moment....

good news.

When it Snows It Pours

Well, let me begin by saying how unhappy I am.

Admission No. 1)
I've had three PC's at my house for varying lengths of time. I have been trying to reload/repair/do something with each of these PC's ever since they came into my possession. I have felt less than zealous to complete these PC's since they are all for family and I wasn't charging for these.

Admission No. 2)
My home office has been a disaster for some time. In recent history there has been a clear path from the door to my wife's desk and one from the door to my desk which then continues on to my closet door.


Yesterday, after church and visiting with family, I sat down in order to make a dent in my tasks of finishing these pc's and maybe cleaning up my office or at least my desk. I sat down and reloaded one of the pc's I already had the data backed up previously. Meanwhile, I am attempting to figure out why I am having trouble installing a new os (FreeBSD preferably but I'd settle with Ubuntu) on my 1.5 TB harddrive in my computer. DING! Reload finished. w00t! Ok now I go to stop what I was doing and hook my harddrive back up and move the old data back to the newly reloaded PC. All is fine. I then exclaim, “Oh Crap!” I realized that I had neglected to hook up the “broke drive” which is a 100gb sata drive I bought off a guy at a flea market. The reason I call it the broke drive is that the rail for the sata data connector to fit snuggly (not snuggie) into is broke so I just have to jimmy-rig it to stay in place. I do that and boot the PC back up. Comes back up. I start to click on “My Computer” (yes I know it's a windows pc – hush!) BLUE Screen-then-REBOOT “CRAP!”

Well when I boot it back up the computer is doing the good-ol' “Splash-screen - REBOOT” game which I hate oh-so-much! I disable reboot and it tells me, “Unmountable Boot Volume” well after 10 – 15 minutes of swearing. I grab the newly found 40GB drive that I had plans for, load it up crap now it cant find my network card. Oh wait, I have a slipstream that has my driver on it.

I'm going to pull a Kanye West on myself and interrupt myself. All this is after spending hours yesterday attempting to load BSD or Ubuntu onto my 1.5 TB drive, running MemTest 4 against the RAM and a myriad of other tests. None of which had the best video of all time.

Ok, so while I'm letting the slipstream disc run I went to put my daughter down for the night since my wife had been keeping an eye on her during all this. I get her to sleep and put her down. Then I go back into my office and it's rebooting, “cool it's ready!” XP splash screen... REBOOT!

Requiring all the energy in my body I restrain myself from shouting and picking my computer up to throw it through my window. After a bit of cool down I sit back down and start back to work on it.
Unfortunately, with no resolve.

I could have shortened this by saying, “ARGH!!!” but then you wouldn't really know what was going on would you?

Hopefully I'll get SOMETHING resolved soon.

Crazy Mac OS fun tonight...

So this evening I sat down to play on my MacBook Pro -- one which is among the many apple laptops which has issues with sleep/wake. I have tried multiple different solutions and the only one which seems to be the best fit is to let the machine hibernate when closing the lid and wake on power press.

I recently have been attempting to rectify this problem with out much luck. So back to where I started, I sat down this evening and lifted the lid on the laptop... black screen. I press a button, black screen. I press the power button, black screen. Frustrated but not bewildered, I press and hold the power button to power off the laptop. Then power it back on, everything appears normal,
Login Screen, i type my username, then my password, my password again, and my password again. I then am prompted with my password "hint" I try one more time and see that my Mac Book Pro is telling me, that I'm an idiot but it will let me login with a new password but I will not have access to my keychain, however should I relearn my old password I can have my keychain all I want...

WTF?

So I punch in a temporary password, nothing just the login box shaking at me.

WTF?

So I click cancel and login as root. I attempt to change the password and am cursed at in a foreign language (the language of error codes). So after a few minutes of poking around, I learn my home directory... is empty. NOOOOO!!!!!! I then spend several hours attempting to troubleshoot, debug and hack my Mac. Finally I am glad to report, I was able to get into my account with all my stuff in place. I plan to do a write up and add it to my Apple/Mac section of my site (which is seriously starved for content).

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed now.

Happy New Year!

Sirius

So, let me tell you about my morning.

I get up slightly later than my normal time, get ready, leave with in time for me to get to work. On my way to work I go from listening to a CD to listening to my iPod then to Sirius and when I couldn't settle on any music I switch over to some of the political talk.

Dear reader,

This is not a political rant so fret not.

-DruiD

Continuing to listen to the political channel the rest of the way to work I'm content, the discussion I'm listening to mostly aligns with my political views, no complaint. Arrival at work, going into my office, I want to hear the rest of the story. I sit down, I log into my ubuntu box and pull up my email and a few other apps I use all day long, then spin over to my mac which I generally use as my media source while at work. I pull up the sirius website click on "Media Player" I login. This is where the story begins,

I am promptly receive a message that in a much nicer tone reads,

"I'm sorry your account sucks, you need to upgrade it and pay us more money to listen online. Have a WONDERFUL day!"

...wait, what?

I pull up my account, still have the "Sirius Everything" package -- wtf?
I find an FAQ that tells me:

4. Why have you changed the online listening product?

The Online listening platform has been upgraded to a higher quality digital audio and is no longer included as a part of a base subscription at no charge. The upgrading of this service allows for customers to listen at near CD-quality sound (128k) for a better listening experience. In the future this will also allow customers to access the online listening platform from a variety of electronic devices.

Well hoo-rah! Now after having Sirius for 3 years and listening online for 3+ years -- no more. I read on further find out that the reason I just now had trouble listening online is because my Sirius subscription comes up for renewal mid-December.

BOO! HISS!
Shame on you Sirius/XM Satellite Radio.

Honestly, I don't know that I want Sirius anymore, that's an easy $165/yr I could save I could put that towards upgrade my computers instead of dumping it into Pay-Radio. The internet usage has been a large part of my listening pleasure. Yes it's great to have the in car radio I use the heck out of it but I love(d) being able to go into the house or into work after being in the car and continue listening where I left off by just firing up the computer. Sirius does have a history of issues with online media. Before I got my account a couple that I worked with had Sirius and they would both listen online then one day in the middle of the day they were both kicked out then they logged back in kicking each other out each time one would login. Limiting each account to one media player login -- I totally can see that, understand it and agree that it's best to manage it that way, but they were never notified.

Now I can't do that. I wonder if I can get my service fee prorated and get my money back on the rest of the year. There is such great programming on Sirius but if I can't listen in the car AND online at home/work what the devil am I paying for? Just car usage?

I think not.

Thanks Sirius/Xm (or as I liked to Call it 6M or SiXm [from Sirius XM]) for saving me $165/yr.

Sirius FAIL!

.::. DruiD .::.