Big Leather Couch

BET YOU THOUGHT WE WOULD FORGET...HUH...?

NOPE....TIME TO DONATE SOME RICE TODAY!
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Build your vocabulary, feed the hungry...
20,781,490,570 grains donated at this point!

YUP! Topped 20 BILLION!



So....we have had...ummmm...how many days off???...Wednesday...Thursday...Friday...ummm that would be three days off...what the hell did we do with that time?

Well, we spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday NOT feeling well at all... We left work early on Thursday and took Friday off and spent most of Saturday in bed...Bad cold, sore throat, body cramps...ugh - at least it was not the flu...as we are feeling a tad better...We had darlin' Nancy come over and play nurse on Friday and that was nice...

It did cramp our plans for Saturday evening. We had tickets to a Memphis Grizzlies game and reservations at a local restaurant - all set up by her boss who gave us his seats for the game.

As we have mentioned, we got the iMac last weekend and we did spend some off our time, moving all of our CDs into iTunes, giving us a nice start on reviving our music collection on-line.

OH...AND....WE GOT A CALL ON FRIDAY from Computer Labs - the folks who have our old iMac. They have it up and running!

At that point they thought they had recovered everything, but were doing a few more diagnostics to it to and would be calling back today. We have a decision to make...whether to drop in a new larger hard drive or leave the 60gb drive and just buy an external 500gb hard drive for backing everything up.

So, we have all of our music and photos and documents back. It also means we have our Photoshop and Illustrator back. Granted, they will need to stay on the old machine (they are not compatible with Leopard, the new Mac operating system).

But after pulling everything else onto the new Mac, the old one will have plenty of space...

We also tracked down the USB turntable we want ... BUT - another device by the same company came into the picture...ION makes it and it is a converter called u record that takes the outputs from either a turntable or a cassette deck and converts it to go into the computer and comes with all the same software for removing clicks and snaps when using vinyl.

Our turntables are just fine, both work great, though the one we would use for transferring - A Pioneer Direct Drive we used when we DJ'ed, needs a new stylus.

We also have two cassette decks in great shape, In the end it is about 3/4 the cost of the turntable alone, and then we would need to buy the USB Cassette. Not sure we will ever use cassettes again after we digitize them, so why spend the money.

OK, let us say one thing here....WAKE UP FOLKS....that was in case anyone had nodded off...

The iMac has given us one problem. Last week, we used SKYPE to 'call' into the Radio Happy Hour and using the same headphone/mic set we have used on the work laptop, the sound quality was unacceptable.

Not sure why it is giving us an echo - or making us sound "as though we are sitting in a bathroom" - as Doc put it...or did he say the phone WAS a bathroom???

We have checked all the settings - so we will need the laptop when doing the show...

What else....oh what else did we want to talk about? OH yeah... we have to change the title of "The Quest", the short story (found HERE) we are working into a novel...Seems there is a movie called "The Quest" already...we happened to notice it on the STARZ in-Demand selections this weekend.

It is a 1996 Jean-Claude Van Damme you to all hell you hack... OH, sorry...got carried away there. As the storyline follows what my lead character calls THE QUEST, we will just need to change the title when we are ready to submit to a publisher.

OH, yeah, so we have a century or two before we need THAT problem solved! No, really, we have been jotting some notes and want to get back into that.

OH...and that wild, fun, talented guy Roger, bestowed upon us this cool badge...THANKS ROGER!!


Well, think we have rambled on long enough...

There is all sorts of new music sitting on the computer...so we will just shuffle it all up and let you hear the first two...just because we can!

TIME TO DONATE SOME RICE TODAY!
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Build your vocabulary, feed the hungry...
15,088,124,750 grains donated at this point...15 BILLION TOPPED!



How was your weekend? Ours was pretty good...we went pre-shopping for our new iMac and have pretty much zeroed in on a 20" monitor and 350gb hard drive. We will probably up the memory to 2gb from the 1gb the computer ships with to allow for faster draw when using Photoshop and allow us to have more programs open at once. That was our problem with the old mac...we would have iTunes, Photoshop, Illustrator and Firefox all running at the same time and the poor little thing just could not handle it. Still not sure if we will get the wireless keyboard, but will certainly get the wireless mighty mouse, which offers trackball scrolling and two-button options...

Totally cool and graphics are incredible...Just do not think we will be able to get it until mid-February, so our music stored on the old one and any graphics programs are unusable until then...



Saturday evening we went and celebrated the 83rd birthday of Nancy's mom, Mama Dot...we brought along an antipasto which went over pretty well...had a real nice time with the entire family and then had CAKE....yummo cake...apple with a caramel frosting made from fresh apples received from Vermont...also had a small piece of homemade pecan pie which was just deLISH...

Sitting watching the San Diego / New England game...not sure the Chargers have a chance, but they put a 3 and out on Tom Brady on his first possession and now are moving the ball...