Kevin's musings

Went up to boulder last night and made some beer at the beer store. We
had a good turn out of folks: about 6 of us making 2 batches. A
nice brown ale that should be ready to bottle in two
weeks. Since I hadn’t taken him out with me much, I took merlin
along (The beer store is dog friendly), and we sat outside at
the southern sun for some fish and chips after brewing. A
pleasent evening.

Tonight I take twyla down to her last therapy dog visit. She should
graduate tonight if she doesn’t have any issues.

Went down to denver to see
Rail Road Earth
down in denver last night. The show was supposed to start at 10pm, so
of course the band didn’t start until around 11:15 or so. I
guess clubs are kinda trapped into doing that now, since
everyone expects it. If they started shows on time no one would
be there for the early part of the show. It’s not a big deal to
me on a saturday, but annoys me on weekday nights.

The show was at
Cervantes Masterpeice Ballroom
which is a place I had never been to before. Not a bad venue. Good
space and seating, nice stage layout and decor, but the sound
system seemed kind of weak to me. They could do with putting up
some more speakers high up to project better. They did have some
acoustic baffle thingies, but not sure how much they helped. The
place has the largest disco ball I have ever seen, it was very
very cool.

The band was very good. They played two sets and finished up around
1:30am. They played hard the entire time. The fiddler was
particularly excellent. The audience was really into
things. Lots of dancing and such. In fact after they started
playing I don’t think there were many people that were still
sitting down. Everyone headed out to the floor. All in all I
would recoomend them. See them if they come near you.

Recap of the week here:

Wed I took twyla to her second therapy dog class. She did quite well
again. It’s amazing how hot it is in that place. I know now not
to take a jacket, but even so I am usually sweating when we get
back out. There were a few people that really enjoyed petting
twyla. It was a good visit.

Thursday had a nice time as usuall at hacking society. Didn’t get any
of the things I was hoping to get done done, but still had fun
not doing them.

Lots of possible music coming up this weekend… Some folks are going
to a show by
Railroad Earth
down in denver on saturday, then on sunday I might go to the clumsy
lovers show.

Went and gave my Linux On Laptops talk to the
CLUE North
folks tonight. It turns out the new meeting place they are using is
about 2miles from my house. Super easy to get to, tons of
parking. Got in and setup my laptop in the room. It did
1600×1200 quite clearly! I didn’t have to bother changing
resolution. They also had 802.11b wireless all setup and working
there. Very handy. The talk went pretty well I thought. Had some
good interaction with folks in the audience. After the talk some
of us went and had a beer at the nearby
CB and Potts

I left merlin out loose in the house muzzled. I got back after about 3
hours gone and everything was fine. No accidents in the house,
everyone seemed fine (although happy to see me). I think merlin
is adjusting well.

The BBQ went nicely last night. I was thinking no one was going to
show up, but then late in the afternoon about 6 people showed up
at the same time, then another 2 showed up later on. Had some
nice visiting and then we played unexploded cow. A fine way to
while away the time.

Almost preped for the BBQ this afternoon. House is all cleaned up, new
propane tank on the grill, outside all cleaned up, cookies
baked. Just need to start getting snacks all preped before
people arrive. No telling what kind of turn out there will be. I
know a number of folks are on spring break this weekend and
others are off traveling. I guess time will tell.

In other news I have gotten dvd ripping pretty much set on my dvd/mp3
machine. I have been ripping some favorite movies and tv
series. Pretty nifty to have them just waiting on the hard drive
and not have to worry about finding the disk or changing disks
or anything. I might need to swap space around and put a larger
drive into that machine soon, but drives have gotten so super
cheap. (hurray!).

Took twyla down to the therapy dog inc meeting last night. Since kurt
has graduated I figure it would be good to get twyla certified
too so I could take whichever one of them. She did very well on
being personable and being petted. She did have one no no moment
when I pulled her near a patient in a bed and she thought it was
an invite to jump up on their bed. Luckily I had a short leash
on her and she didn’t manage to jump on the patient much. He had
no problem with it and was seeming kinda happy she was wanting
to jump up with him.

Had a nice (if short) visit with some friends from chicago this
weekend. They came in from snowboarding and skiiing and relaxing
in the mountains on saturday. We met up at
tucanos
(one of those brazillian all you can eat meat places). The food was
pretty tasty, but the service kinda blew. Our waitress was
impossible to find, we ended up flagging down the hostess to get
someone to take our dessert order. They didn’t come by all that
quickly with new meat either.

On sunday we all slept in and then went down for lunch at Tosh’s
Hacienda. They were quite good… lots of nice mexican
food. Then we hit the
REI denver flagship store
so we could look over the bike selection. It’s a pretty gigantic
store. That done, I dropped my friends at the airport and
relaxed the night away.

oops. I forgot to rotate my journal so this page was just for the
month of March. Fixed now, hopefully I will remember to do the
right thing when April rolls around.

Got a new dog bed off ebay from
victoria peak trading company
One of my old ones was getting pretty worthless. The dogs would all
try and get one of the other dog beds and the poor slow dog
would end up with the lousy old sams club one. This new dog bed
is frikking gigantic. It’s 56″ around and really poofy. From the
ebay description: “…heavy duty denim dog bed suitable for dogs
of unlimited weight, ponies, and/or your brother-in-law the next
time he makes himself unwelcome at home”. It took the dogs a bit
to realize they could get on it and press it down some with
their weight, but they are loving it now.

Currently using both
mythtv and
slimserver
at the same time. That gets me the best of both worlds. I have mythtv
for the spiffy looking interface for weather, dvd’s and video. I
have the web based and nifty slimserver for playing music. As
long as I stop the slimserver playing before playing a movie or
video file with mythtv everything works great.

Got dvd ripping working with mythtv. It turns out the default on the
rip dvd page is ‘perfect copy’. That means it just copies the
mpeg2 from the dvd. Nice, but quite large. I tweaked with the
quality settings and can now get a test file (a MASH episode)
down from about 1GB to about 190MB with xvid encoding. Looks not
half bad. Will have to rip some movies and see how they look.