the news

It looks like we’ll be hitting up Vegoose for our third year. We like this fest, as it’s in Vegas, so there’s always something to do, and it ’s just a hop-skip-jump away from us in San Francisco. The Halloween theme is fun and the weather is always good, of course. And such a varied lineup - Rage + Cypress Hill? Did you SEE Cypress Hill at Bonnaroo? Hillarious.

The initial lineup has been announced:
- Rage Against the Machine
- Daft Punk
- Iggy & the Stooges
- Muse
- The Shins
- Cypress Hill
- Michael Franti and Spearhead
- Queens of the Stone Age
- Public Enemy
- Blonde Redhead
- Ghostface Killah & The Rhythm Roots Allstars
- Umphrey’s McGee
- Ghostland Observatory
- Thievery Corporation
- the Battles
- and more…

So who’s in?

Pics from last year’s Vegoose trip are in my photos gallery!

It’s almost time for me to go to Australia!!! Woohoo!

The adventure begins in just three weeks. Today I finished our travel plans up, which included five flights, a car rental, a sailing cruise, a few hostels and travel insurance! We’ll be visiting Sydney, Melbourne, Mission Beach and the Whitsunday Islands (i.e. Great Barrier Rief). It should be a fun and exciting adventure for all!

One of the most exciting things, I think, is going to be a 3-day, 2-night sailing adventure. We’re going to be cruising around on a boat named the Kiana. Here’s someone’s picture of the boat:

Kiana Boat

Layout of the Boat

I’m excited! Woohoo!!! And cousin Jeremy is coming, too. He’s MOVING to Australia, though. For a year… A ballsy chap, eh?

More info on the exciting boat…

Check this out… This website claims that $20k reserves you a spot on a ship to space. Don’t believe me? Read for yourself.

Apparently this thing is legit… The company is Virgin Galactic, and it’s story is rather interesting. Play on the site to learn more. And no, you don’t get to go to the moon - it’s just a trip where you launch high enough to cross “an altitude of slightly over 100km, with a total weightlessness time of 6 minutes. ”

BTW, the guy doing this? Richard Branson. You know him for such things as Virgin Megastores, Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Blue and Virgin Mobile. I get the feeling he likes Virgins, eh?

So it looks like downtown San Francisco had a bit of a negative jolt this morning - losing juice to all the major important stuff downtown. Interesting to learn that half of the critical buildings downtown are all wired on the same circuit.

Well, shit happens.

But wait! It gets better. 365 Main, the indestructible, went down, too. Failover to generators was not flawless and Craigslist, Yelp and other sites crashed. Still down now, 3 hours later. Aren’t we in the age of failover redundancy in Silicon Valley?

I’d personally buy some stock in APC tomorrow, when every CEO in the Valley yells at (or praises) their IT folks, but that’s just me.

Anyone get to go home early?

SF Gate Article

Mind you all, I’m still happy we live in a country where 2 hours without power is considered a big deal. (It’s really not)

Well that was awesome. Two full days of music @ the Greek Theater, which has got to be the most fun venue in the area. It was hot hot hot, though.

Pics will be up on the website tonight.

Anyone feel the one this morning? I continue to sleep through these. Is that a bad thing?

Small quake on 7/20/07

OK you pesky New Yorkers… You no longer have an excuse not to come visit. For $238 (that’s not a lot for a flight out here) you can fly cross country from New York to San Francisco on the new, absolutely gorgeous Virgin America.

This airline looks freakin awesome. They spent entirely too much time showing off their computerized TVs, though - I’m way more amazed at First Class being $389 per seat! WOW! And you can do first class one-way and economy on return. Massage seats. Mmm..

But for the cattle car, there’s serious upgrades, too. Power at every seat is awesome for cross-country flights! Music on demand, order food at your seat. I’m a fan. It seems like they’re focused on using technology to make things more efficient so I have to assume some thought has gone into efficient booking systems, changes, etc. too. Let’s hope I’m right.

AND DID I MENTION THAT IT HAS WIFI INTERNET IN THE AIR? For geeks like me!!! Woohoo!

So I’ll throw this out there… Free place to sleep (my place - hehe), transportation and free food for anyone who choses to come out

Here are some cool pics and a video about the new airline…

Virgin America’s Main Cabin

Chat with Others

Built-in iPod Dock and Charger

YouTube Video

More here…

So if you haven’t checked out Alltunes.com / AllOfMp3.com, I think you should. Not because it’s a controversial site that involves possibly violating copyright laws, but because it’s a fascinating attempt at distributing music on the Internet for very low prices - that’s been HIGHLY successful. As usual, rather then embrace this model, music companies are fighting this firm (with millions of legal $s) in an effort to protect “their rights.” Fair enough. But aren’t these the same companies that are continuously failing to catch the public’s attention with their copyright-protection riddled downloading schemes? These guys are busy making millions with a wonderful system! BUY IT AND SET WHATEVER PRICES YOU WANT!

Now, because of all the controversy, you might have trouble getting started. So here’s what you can do.

1) Create an account on www.Alltunes.com and download the Alltunes player/store (it’s similar to iTunes).

2) Create an account on XRost - the payment system. This link will take you there. Create an account, and buy a credit for $20 or so.

3) Deposit the credit you bought in step 2 into AllTunes via this link.

4) Download $20 worth of music! At $0.14 a song or so, you can get about 140 songs or 11 albums ($1.80/album!)

If you want to read up on this stuff, check out these recent articles… A bit of background before you read:

1) The site uses a “loophole” of sorts to claim that all the music they distribute is covered under a russian distribution license that’s really intended for other uses.

2) The music industries have been trying to sue the company for years but Russia won’t have it. The RIAA has even used lobbiests to try and pressure congress to force Russia to comply!

3) Visa pressured a credit card processing company to ban payment processing by AllTunes. A Russian court overturned this ruling recently.

Try AllTunes here

So I am finally getting around to posting the literally thousands of pictures I have. Previously I tried to do it while commenting on every pic, but alas, it’s too time consuming. So I’m just doing a mass upload/dump for now into categories and later I will go through and add comments on some of the newer albums. So far I’ve put up all the Bonnaroo’s, some Fox Fields pics, some Wine Bus pics, Jess & Terry’s engagement and so on. I’ll be getting up an East Coast section sometime next week with older pics from college & beyond. Then comes the biggest section - concerts & shows!

The Wine Bus 2007 Movie is also posted for your viewing pleasure. I revived my old Phish NYE movie as well, which is at Phish New Years Eve 2003 w/ Team Debacle

I’ll get the Funny Stuff section fixed up tonight or tomorrow most likely. For now, I’m just posting three short movies.

More to come!

So I’ve officially switched. I bought the Mac Powerbook to try and familiarize myself with Macs so we could officially support them, since many of our customers at work are demanding Mac support. I wanted to “get it.” I really thought, as a power user, that I would hate the thing.

Alas, I’m done with PC. This thing is so freakin fast, reliable and flexible. I’m very, very impressed. Microsoft is in big trouble if you ask me - add a few more things to Mac OS and there’s not much reason to buy Windows anymore. Microsoft Outlook comes to mind, as does .NET 2.0 support and a few programming tools like Zend or Visual Basic. But with many things moving to the Web anyway, Outlook is the only remaining hurdle long-term, in my eyes.

Here’s what I was surprised to find works within Mac OS X itself:
- Active Directory domain support! Just go into Utilities and click the Directory Services program, then check the Active Directory button. Assuming you’re an admin or know the domain admin password, you can even join the computer to the network (use the “Bind” button) from within Mac OS X!
- Printers on the AD work fine after it’s joined. Awesome.
- 802.1X wireless authentication. Works great - just import the cert!
- Remote Desktop Connection to Windows PCs (though, really, could we add a few options like resizing windows here?)
- Samba/Windows file shares and mapped drives (some manual mapping was required)

I’m sure there’s more. So let’s be clear, though - Safari works fine for surfing the web, MS Office for Mac works fine for Word/Powerpoint/etc., TextMate works fine as a text editor, Adium is great for IM, etc.. So the only two things I’m using Windows for at this point are ConnectWise (work) and Outlook (for work primarily).

Very impressed, still. I’ll be posting my install instructions plus my top 10 favorite programs thus far in a post this weekend.