Caught In The Whirlwind
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The Blargh Part
Sep 20th 2010
And now for the second half of the post I wanted to make this morning. Less updating, more personal stuff.
Like I said, I’ve been feeling a bit blargh recently, for a variety of reasons. Some of which would be uninteresting to people who aren’t me, so I won’t get into it. But I want to go into some of the stuff.
A lot of it probably has to do with the situation at work. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that one of my bosses and myself just don’t see eye to eye on stuff and that conflict is gradually increasing over time. Not going to turn this into a big complaint session post or anything, but just in a nutshell, I’m in a situation where he’s given me some fairly complex projects to work on without understanding that they’re as complex as they are and expecting me to finish them faster than I can. So he either gets pissed at me for getting it done on time and not working like it should because the timeframe was unreasonable, or he gets pissed at me when I do it the right way and it takes longer than he thought it would. Or the fun part, when he gets pissed at me when it doesn’t work how he thinks it should work, even though he never told me he wanted it to work like that to begin with.
I’m just detecting over the past several weeks that conversations have started to become more adversarial. Even when I attempted to bring up my concerns with him it got turned around on me somehow. The situation is heading towards some sort of breaking point. I just don’t know when.
So yeah, that’s weighing on my mind. And it’s not like I particularly enjoy working here or anything. What I just mentioned is part of the reason why, plus other things. I’ve been trying to find another job that would either present me a new opportunity in my existing career or let me go back to school on a more full time basis and work towards a graphic design degree. But so far there’s nothing in this area that looks like it might work out. And I’ve been looking.
Which brings me to my second reason for blargh-ness. I’ve got several design related projects I’ve been working on, chiefly a book layout for a friend of mine that’s pretty extensive, and a redesign for my friend Wassy’s website. Lately I’ve been slacking a bit on this stuff due to mostly, City of Heroes Going Rogue expansion. I’ve been trying to get back on top of things though. Trying to would be the operative word. It’s kinda like there’s some sort of disconnect and I just can’t come up with anything that works. It’s getting to be incredibly frustrating at this point.
So those are the big things weighing on me right now. It’ll pass at some point, I know, but right now things are just kinda blargh.
On the bright side though, the photos I posted up earlier this week seem to have gone over well with the professor of the course. Well, the first one anyway. She’s working on commenting on the rest. So it’s not all bad!
House Hunting and Other Activities
Sep 20th 2010
Blargh.
That about sums up my feelings right now. I had kinda a mixed bag weekend, but I’ve decided to split it up into two posts so I’ll get to the second, more personal one later. First the fun recapy stuff.
Saturday and Sunday I went out with my roommates on their quest to find a good house. The first one we saw was simply awesome and if they had the finances ready for the down payment and we didn’t have our lease to consider right now, I think they would have put in an offer right there. Totally updated, more than enough space, great location. Probably the only reason it hasn’t sold is that the bedrooms were a tad small but not insurmountable. The basement more than made up for it with a great almost finished area (all it needs is some kind of flooring) which could work out perfectly for a living area/tv room or something like that.
The second house…had character. The lot was right next to a busy road which didn’t leave the best first impression. Then we got inside. The entry had the lowest ceilings ever. I almost had to duck. The low ceilings continued through about half the house. The other half was really outdated and needed a TON of work, especially with the wiring only a handful of 3 prong outlets in the entire place. My favorite part though, was the two staircases to get upstairs. The first one we came across was off the kitchen when investigating what we thought was the first full bathroom. A door in the back of the bathroom though had stairs which lead up to what I presume was being used for the master bedroom. So any time anybody was using that bathroom you’re either stuck in the bedroom or unable to get to the bedroom from the kitchen. Well…unless you’re real friendly with the occupant of the bathroom. The awfulness continues upstairs with seemingly random placement of power outlets and random room layout. I know it’s an older house, but…geeze.
So that got crossed off the list and we headed home until Sunday when we went out to Ilion to check out a couple of houses there. The first one was pretty good. Good layout, pretty good bedroom sizes for an older house. Nothing that really stuck out as totally awesome but also nothing that was a major negative either. Well, until we tried leaving. It has a shared driveway with the house next door that’s very windy and cramped. When backing out we had several close calls with hitting various objects. If the next door neighbors ever have a party or something that lines their side of the driveway, that would make it even worse. It’s not a good situation for people who have multiple cars.
The second house we went to on Sunday didn’t leave a great first impression. It was a huge older house that needed a TON of work on the exterior. Some of the windows were cracked, the porch was going to need some significant repairs. but the inside was totally awesome. They must have spent all of their money fixing up the interior because it was neat. It was worth the trip just to be able to walk through it. It even had a servants quarters type situation in the loft/attic area, with an intercom system and a servant’s stairway. Big bedrooms, really cool dining area…just perfect. Well, except for the required exterior repairs. The windows were all original too which would be…costly to update if one was trying to make the place as energy efficient as possible. The exterior repairs also made it not eligible for a FHA loan which puts it out of my friends consideration as they can’t really take on a conventional mortgage.
So then onward to the rest of my activities this weekend. I played a lot of Baldur’s Gate. I bought this game back in 1998 when it first came out and never got even halfway through it. I think it was the difficulty level that did me in, but I’ve recently borrowed it from my sister (she got a copy of BG and BG2 on DVD and I think I’m missing a CD at this point from mine…) and installed it. I’m using 2 mods, EasyTutu which basically takes the original game and transplants it into the Baldur’s Gate 2 engine. Same game, better interface and a bunch of other small bug fixes that Bioware never got around to fixing. I’m also using a widescreen mod so I can play the game at 1440×900 instead of the default 640×480 (or 800×600 in BG2). So far so good. I am using a walkthrough because the game is freaking hard and I want to find all the hidden stuff. But it’s brought back a ton of memories of playing though the first part of the game over and over and over again.
I just got into chapter 3 and I’m working through side quests before I head up into the bandit camp to advance the story. It’s further than I thought I was going to get. My other productive plans for this weekend ended up falling through. But I’ll get to that in another post.
Shadow Photography
Sep 13th 2010
I mentioned briefly that I was taking a photography course this semester. Well, the first assignment has been completed, and my work turned in so I figured I’d post up some of the shots that I turned in over here in an effort to stop this from becoming the weekend recap blog. I’ll probably have some more over the next little bit as some of my shots weren’t exactly based on the topic but I got some good stuff anyway.
The subject was Light and Shadow, capturing how shadows and reflections can create interesting images. So here we go (Click on each image to get to flickr where you can see a larger version)
First up my favorite one I took:
I happened upon this early in the morning at one of the local parks. The shadows from the railing on the gazebo were just awesome. One of the shots I took here that I was praying a morning jogger wasn’t going to run by though. You look a little weird at 8 in the morning, laying flat on your stomach over the steps of a gazebo taking pictures.
Here’s another one from the same park. The assignment also dealt with reflections of light, and I came across this setup with the sun refelcting in the water of the little pond thingy they have, with the hard light shadows on the rocks.
Different park this time (and a different day). This particular town park has a big network of nature trails. This was taken morning as well. The sun at this time shines directly into the entrance of this path making the foliage on the trees kinda glow which looked pretty neat.
This one I didn’t end up submitting, but I kinda liked how it turned out anyway. We’re back at the second park, along the sandy “beach” area. This was another one of those “Please nobody come by” type photos due to how I had to situate myself to get it right.
Jordan Rudess “Speaks”
Sep 9th 2010
I don’t like just linking to videos, but Jordan Rudess, keyboardist for dream theater posted up this amazing improvisational piano piece as his statement about Mike leaving the band. It’s deeply emotional and heartfelt and I think it deserves to be shared.
Stunned
Sep 9th 2010
I sit here shocked, not really knowing what to say. Oh, don’t worry, nobody died or anything like that. In the grand scheme of things this isn’t a gigantic tragedy. And yet here I am, still shocked.
Mike Portnoy has left Dream Theater.
I’m sitting here staring at those words, not really believing that I actually typed them. I found out last night and hoped that I would wake up this morning and it would be a dream or a joke, but it isn’t.
For those reading who might lack the context as to why this is such a huge deal to me, please accompany me on a journey back to…oh…2001, 2002. Maybe a little earlier While listening to a new internet radio station I discovered a song called Fatal Tragedy from a band named Dream Theater. Before this I was listening mostly to top 40/classic rock stuff on the radio, not really connecting with any of it. And when I heard Fatal Tragedy I thought it sounded cool but it didn’t really hit me then. I remember downloading it from Napster and it went into my rotation. I thought the band was some kind of classic rock band that wasn’t around anymore.
Flash forward a bit and I decided to check this Dream Theater band out. I picked up the album Scenes From a Memory and became hooked instantly. I still remember listening to it for the first time, lying on my bed with my headphones on, drinking it all in. This was the first time in my life that I really cared about music. Where I could just sit there…listening.
I started looking around and realizing there was a whole world of bands out there, just like this. People who cared about the music, weren’t afraid of being technical and to hell what the mainstream thought about their 7 minute long songs. I noticed that a lot of the members of Dream Theater had a bunch of side projects. So I checked out Liquid Tension Experiment and Transatlantic. Through Transatlantic I found out about Marillion, Spock’s Beard and The Flower Kings. I got on the Mike Portnoy.com forums and learned about Porcupine Tree and Opeth. Ayreon, Symphony X, Frost*, Bigelf…so many more. Heck even Rush. I knew of rush before but never got into them heavily until now.
My first concert was Dream Theater at The Palladium in Worcester, MA on August 21st, 2004. It was so freaking awesome. They opened with Metropolis Part 1 and I just went nuts. I didn’t even notice that the keyboards weren’t working until 2 minutes into the song because I was just so excited to be there and couldn’t believe they were right there, 40 feet in front of me doing this stuff live.
Since then I’ve seen them 9 times. I’ve met the band once, got my picture taken with them (which was lost when the meet and greet person’s laptop got stolen, oh well). The last time I saw them was earlier this year. At The Palladium in Worcester, MA. The last time ever for Dream Theater as it’s existed, at the same place where I saw them for the very first time.
Dream Theater is responsible for making me CARE about music. Without them I never would have wound my way into this progressive metal/rock world which has truly been a huge impact on my life. This music has been with me through some of the best things and worst things I’ve ever experienced. And one of my favorite periods of time was when I was able to pass on my love for Progressive Metal/Rock to my friend Wassy and experience the journey through her all over again.
Dream Theater will continue on without Mike. But he was such a force in the band that it’s never going to be the same. He handled all of the live production, setlist construction, business deals, album art, promotion, live releases and was a gigantic part of the core writing team of him, John Petrucci and John Myung who have been together for 25 years. Heck, his dad was the one who came up with the name!
The band may be continuing on in name, but it was Mike’s baby, and it’ll never be the same. I’m having a hard time imagining going to a live show and not seeing his gigantic drum kit back there with him spitting everywhere.
Whatever happens and whatever the reasons for the split. I just want to thank (yeah, as if they’re going to read this) Mike and the rest of Dream Theater for 25 years of amazing music. I hope the new Dream Theater can rise to the challenge and give us another 25 (Well, you know what I mean. 25 is probably going to be pushing it at this point)
RUSH!
Sep 3rd 2010
Yesterday, as I’ve been mentioning for a while now was the day that Rush played the New York State Fair as part of their Time Machine tour. This was my first time seeing Rush (my previous first time was thwarted by my sister scheduling her wedding for the same day as the concert and refusing to move it) so I was pretty excited.
I had originally planned on going alone to the fair and the show but I ended up asking my Mom if she wanted to go with me during the day to the Fair and then we’d part ways when it was time for me to head to the grandstand, so that’s what we did. Despite the extremely hot weather, I had a good time wandering around the fairgrounds doing various fair type activities. Checking out the butter and sand sculptures, eating various foodstuffs, checking out some animals. Eventually the time came and I wandered over to the grandstand to find my seat and wait for the show.
Thus comes my one and only complaint about the show, and that’s the moron who sets up the track seating at the state fair. There’s about 2 inches of leg room per row which can be reduced to 0 inches if the person in front of you has pushed their chairs back. Thankfully the sitting didn’t last long as we ended up standing and folding the chairs up so we could have more room. I chatted a bit with the people next to me while we were waiting and eventually the lights went off and the opening video began.
I was sitting about 13 rows back, dead center (a lot closer than the picture above makes it out to look. The opening video was awesome, involving a music producer with a contraption designed to make a band called “Rash” sound good. The guys in Rush played various roles in these hilarious video bits. As the producer fiddled with the machine turning The Spirit of Radio into various versions from a disco song to polka, he eventually hit a big red button labeled “Time Machine” and the real rush stepped onto the stage and started playing the real The Spirit of Radio.
About this time I’m pretty sure I got a gigantic grin on my face. The stage show was awesome, the band was energetic and the playing was spot on. I am sad to admit that my Rush album collection isn’t complete, so the first set contained some songs I wasn’t too familiar with. I’m setting out to correct this oversight now though.
My real highlight of the show was the playing of the classic album Moving Pictures front to back. Tom Sawyer was awesome, with a video of the band as chimps playing along with the song as the real band was playing on stage. The other highlights included YYZ, seeing all of the solos being performed right in front of me. The big one though was hearing The Camera Eye. It’s one of my favorite Rush songs and I’m glad I caught this show to hear them play it. Witch Hunt and Vital Signs aren’t my favorite Rush songs ever, but I like them well enough and they capped the album off nicely.
The two new songs they played (Caravan and BU2B) worked out really well live (and were accompanied by a lot of special steampunk-y effects which was really cool). I also like to mention Neal Peart’s drum solo. I’m not a fan of drum solos generally but this one was REALLY cool. Lots of tricky drum bits but very well structured not to be complicated just to be complicated. And the animations in the background during the third section were amazing.
I was also a fan of the section of 2112 that they played. I hope someday they play the entire song again, but the first bit is good enough for me.
After the show was over I stumbled out to a parking lot (after realizing that it was the WRONG parking lot and I had to stumble back through the crowd and out the correct gate to find my car). And it took a while to get out and back on the road, but I ended up getting home just after 1am, eating the McDonalds I picked up on my way (I was hungry!) and then falling straight to sleep.
Very glad I decided to go see this show. It’s been a year of really good concert experiences. Transatlantic, Dream Theater, and Rush, plus TSO and 3. And I still have Roger Waters to see!
Busy Weekend Recap
Aug 30th 2010
So I’ve survived my busy, busy weekend. Here’s a little recap. As the title says:
Saturday was the 3 concert in Bearsville. We left at around 3pm for the show and arrived around 5:30-6pm. It was at this time I found out that I was an idiot who misremembered the time the doors opened, meaning we were by far the first people there and we had to wait an additional hour before we could get in. Ah well…it was annoying but we brought books and eventually ended up sitting outside by one of the fountains for a while. By the way, driving through Woodstock is a strange experience. You’re on this small, windy road through a forest when suddenly it opens up and there’s this town with people everywhere. This time we saw a streetside harp player, for example. Lots of people hanging out along the road and playing music and drawing/painting.
If you’re not familiar with the Bearsville Theater, it’s a very tiny venue with a open floor area on the bottom (with some seats in one corner of the room) and a small balcony on the back wall with chairs. We headed straight for the balcony area as we didn’t want to stand on the floor the entire time for this show (which is why we got there so early so we could sit up there)
The opening band was all right (Ricochet I believe). Then the wait for 3 to come on. They are the absolute slowest band ever for setting up. The opener started at 9, played about…15-20 minutes. 3′s set started at 10:30. In between Joey Eppard’s uncle John the Baker played some acoustic songs. He’s…an odd character. I’m not quite sure what to make of what he did on stage. He had a song about crack babies for example.
Anyway, 3 came on finally and the show rocked. The first couple songs were rocky as Billy Riker’s guitar amp was malfunctioning and he was having a heck of a time trying to fix it. Eventually Joey ended up doing an acoustic version of his solo song The Game during which the guitar got fixed and the concert went off as planned. They played a bunch of new songs which sounded really good along with some older stuff. This the first time for me seeing them without their former percusionist Joe Stote (Wow, can’t believe I spelled his last name wrong. I blame lack of sleep) who was simply awesome in his quirkyness, but they managed to do the old stuff really well without him being there. I miss his stage presence, but the band plays on.
After the show we wanted to find someplace to eat that was open 24 hours just so we could grab something to help on the 2.5-3 hour drive back. I found a Denny’s in Albany near our route of travelon my GPS so we headed that direction, only to find that what the GPS said was a Denny’s was really a Lutheran church and seemed like it always had been. There was a McDonalds nearby as well but it happened to be one without a 24 hour drive thru. Foiled! We ended up getting back on the thruway and stopping at the next rest stop for something to eat and drink and arrived home a about 3:30am.
My weekend fun didn’t stop there though. I woke up and wandered off to Whetstone Gulf State Park to hang out with my family at our annual reunion there. It was a good time. Although I said I never would again, I broke my promise to myself and ended up doing the 5 mile trail around the edge of the Gorge with my sister. We walked it in 3.5 hours with me stopping along the way to take photos for my photography course. I haven’t gotten a chance to see what I took, but I’m not sure if it was what I needed for the assignment. Ah well.
Surprisngly, after doing the hike I’m feeling pretty good right now. The problem is my back and arm due to the long game of horseshoes I played after the hike. Owww. But it was a fun time. Hung out by the fire for a while, enjoyed talking with family. Very fun day.
Next up on the fun events schedule: Rush at the state fair on thursday! Wooo!
Class
Aug 26th 2010
Well, another semester of college has started, and yet again I’m taking another course. This time it’s a Basic Photography course that’s web based, so I’m not going to actually have to visit campus much this semester. I’m still trying to figure out a way to go to school more but…it is what it is at this point.
I’ve been excited to take this course for a while now because, if you remember, I went off and got myself a Nikon D3000 earlier this year and, while I’ve played around with it some, I haven’t really gotten used to all of the manual mode settings and such how I wanted to. So now I’ll get to learn about proper technique and how to meter properly and all that good stuff.
Expect to see some more photographic output from me in the near future as I go through the class. The first assignment is light and shadow.
Busy Weekend (But Not As Busy As Next)
Aug 23rd 2010
So this weekend was an unexpectedly busy weekend for me.
Saturday evening we went to my roommate’s sister’s engagement celebration get together. I was figuring we’d stay for a couple hours, have a good time and then go home but we ended up staying past midnight and having a very fun time hanging out, eating, drinking and chatting with various people.
Sunday saw me going along with my roommates as they went to some open houses. They’re looking at buying a house as soon as humanly possible (for a lot of various reasons that I don’t feel like getting into. Basically the situation in the apartment is kinda awful between our neighbors and the building management not doing anything. I don’t really want to go into it because I’m tired of talking about it.) so they went to some open houses to see what’s what. The two we went to yesterday weren’t really great prospects. One had an awesome lot but the house itself was really old and needed a TON of work, in addition to the rooms being tiny and the floorplan being pretty…bad. The second’s downstairs was good but the upstairs suffered from the same “tiny room” syndrome and it needed waaaay more work to get going. But it had potential for future improvements. Neither seemed to be a potential leading contender in the search though.
However, that was nothing compared to my activities next weekend:
- Saturday 3 concert at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, NY. Going with Wassy and driving back after (probably won’t get home until around 2am-ish)
- Sunday Family Reunion gathering at Wetstone Gulf State Park, probably going a little more in the afternoon so I can sleep in after the late night driving.
And then, not the weekend but, September 2nd I’m going to see Rush at the State Fair. Woo!
Time To Jinx It
Aug 17th 2010
Nearly every time I’ve mentioned that I’m trying to lose weight again on my blog, it ends in miserable failure. So this time I’ve waited about a month’s worth of progress to actually say anthing.
So yeah, I’m trying to lose weight again. Last time I did this (successfully) I was down to under 250 before I fell off the bandwagon, but since then I’ve gained back the 25-30 pounds I lost and put on another 25 to boot. I’m tired of this and at the urging of a friend of mine (Kris) I’ve joined him in his attempt to lose weight as well (strength in numbers!) and so far I’ve dropped about 5 pounds, just with modifying my diet. So yay! Once I start evening off I plan on reintroducing exercise to help break through the plateau situation.
So…so far so good. Hopefully I can keep this up. I’ve seen the first visible progress of things so far because I was able to tighten my belt another notch. Seeing the numbers go down on the scale is one thing, but noticing that you need to tighten your belt or your pants are going to fall off is a much cooler sign.
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