andy’s place…

Those that know me know that while I don’t spend much time in the bars and taverns around here, I do like a very well made drink in the evening (or whenever appropriate).  While out traveling, I love to find the great locations and great drinks to be had.  San Francisco taught me the value of Hangar One vodka (sorry Grey, you lose).  Kansas City had a couple decent whiskey bottles I’ve never seen since, and heck, even Sioux Falls has something once in a while that I haven’t had before.

And those that have been to my home know that I like to keep my home “bar” stocked with some of the better spirits that I can access and afford such as the Hangar One, Grand Marnier, Single Barrel Jack (hey, it’s better than the regular, and everyone needs Jack for a party), etc…  As much as some like beer, I like my spirits.  Scotch, gin, vodka, etc…  it’s welcome here.

Well, my brother decided that, as a thank you for helping him out this weekend with his office migration to their new setup, I needed a couple of new bottles for the collection.  So I now have a brandy addition, and a bottle of Patron Silver.

And being that I previously wasn’t much into tequila, I really don’t have any drinks in mind for it.  Of course, straight is welcome (although I need shot glasses for that, sounds like a SF shopping run) and the Margarita, when made well, is a great drink.  But what else?

And for brandy, any thoughts as well?

Don’t let me down here…  see if anyone earns awesome points

It possibly could be a sad, sad day soon.  Why?  Here’s why…

When it finally seemed like I was going to be able to go into a bar in this town (or Sioux Falls or wherever), have a good time, and not go home smelling of a stale ass tray (ash, ass, same thing).  But no…  as I expected, the mass numbers of old farmers, often drunk office coworkers, and other tobacco tasters have come together en masse to delay what was going to be one of the happiest days of the year for me until some point in 2010 or so.  Sad sad boosh…

Had an argument with co-workers about this.  They argued that “bars are places for people to smoke and drink, if you don’t like that, don’t go to the bar”.  Of course, I reply “there is a reason I don’t go to the bar, and it’s because your smelly self is down there”.  While I don’t go to bars with the same frequency as these folks (2-3 times a week is just a bit too much for swill beer and darts), I would definitely go out more often than I do currently.  Hell, a local organization I’m in is running out of activities and meeting places because they only seem to want to meet in bars, but no one wants to go to a smoky bar (2 of the 4 heads are smokers).

Oh well, hopefully we non-smokers can all come together in 2010 and absolutely crush their attempts.  I would love to see a 95% to 5% vote….  I’d drive people to the polls to get it even.

About 3 PM yesterday, I decided it was time for a personal day.  I was at 94.5% of my max on annual leave (PTO, vacation), and would max out in 6 weeks, and I really didn’t want to do what I had planned to do at work on Friday, so I punched out.  Got the approval about 8:30 Friday morning…  good thing I got approved

Watched two movies (yes two in one day!), sprayed the weeds, got stuff together for mowing the lawn up north, and watched the family puppy.  Think I freaked out Mike a bit when I said I had a redhead that had her head in my lap…  the level of shock that came across MSN lead to a sad boosh.  Funny boosh, but sad boosh.  Thanks Mike for being shocked, lifted the self-esteem.

Still gotta get this place cleaned up, mow up north, maybe practice at the driving range a bit, wrap a Father’s Day gift, and hit up Oahe Days.  Local summer festival where I need to snag my Grandmother a funnel cake.  Good times.

Oh, the class I taught ended up with 7 people, and we had a little photo shoot thing for the fact that I’m the first ever instructor in the new university building here.  Still don’t have my check from it though.  Sad boosh.  But I did get an apple from a student.  That was… interesting.

Last week I called into the academic coordinator for my learning seminar I’m teaching at Capital University Center on June 17th to find out how many students are signed up.  Doing so helps me figure out handout count, demos I can do, etc…  Well, unfortunately, only 2 people were signed up at the time, and 3 people are signed up at the time of this posting.  There is a minimum of 4 people signed up in order to hold a class, so I have until Tuesday to find more students, or my class is cancelled.  Sadly, when I found out that there was a good chance that I’m not teaching on Wednesday, I changed my weekend plans from prepping to teach to anything but prepping to teach.  My luck, we will get enough people, but I won’t find out until Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll be in a mad rush to get things put together and the class will suffer.  Technically, I can cancel it right now if I want, but it’s not that much work, keep my name out there, and a quick 50 bucks for an evening, so I’m still hoping it happens.

In addition, I find out this past week that my new boss (ok, boss of a year) became the regional VP of an organization I belong to, and that he will be in charge of the 2010 Western region conference.  And unfortunately, both he and my former boss (aka the former president of the whole organization) have already said that most likely, I’ll be stuck doing a lot of the work in prepping the conference and making it happen.  i.e. putting presentations together, running the video cameras, webcasting, running the social events, etc…  While this sounds like fun somewhat, those that know me know that I’m not the most social, so setting up social events won’t be my strong suit.  But, most likely, it will be in Rapid/Deadwood (sorry Sioux Falls, but you don’t have enough things to do that out of state folks would be interested in), so I can make do out there.  Casinos, 1880 train, badlands, Deadwood tours, etc… all would be fun material.  At least I have a year to worry about this one.

Our annual golf tournament is changed around a bit this year too.  Instead of a large event, looks like we are scaling things back a bit.  For anyone that wants to play, looks like the end of July will be the tournament.  Rules are simple, 4 person best ball scramble, must use a driver from each member of the team on the front nine and back nine, all kinds of skins/prizes (and not for talent either, shortest drive won 20 bucks one year)…. oh, and drink a lot.  We’ve had 2 beer a hole players before that ran their cart into the clubhouse and other players.  That was interesting…  we loaded 9 people onto a 4 person team once, 5 people on one cart (2 in the cart, 1 on each wheelwell, one hanging on the back, and yes, we tried to roll the cart, didn’t happen).  Even had a guy get so drunk he took off his shirt, swung it around his head, and chased a “mink” into a sleugh by hole 12…

Who wants to play?  Oh, and if I hear anything about skeet, I’m mailing a bomb to Nashville.

Normally not a big fan of these sorts of things (forwards, chains, etc), but given some of the crowd I saw at the airshow back in May, I had to pass it along.

Mullets Mullets Mullets - A Link About Mullets!

And no, that picture is not me, but thank you Wikipedia entry for Mullet.

Obviously, this group of ours had an event this past weekend.  The Seth got himself hitched.  Lots of pictures, lots of miles traveled, lots of bad luck on the part of Midget in terms of travel, lots of good times, and a lot of alcohol.  Sounds about normal for us.  Besides holding the first annual “Toss the Midget” contest, which I believe Zombie Dan won, somehow I was convinced to perform a dance.  Looking at the pictures (taken with my own camera without my knowledge), it just reaffirms why I do not dance (and that I still have a few more lbs to drop).  Oh well.  Congrats to the Larsons!  And just wait for the fun I will have with the various pictures I took…  Sonja, you scare me :-)  For the rest of the crew seeing this, good to see all of you this weekend, and to the people I met for the first time, like those mentioning B, and L, and on F and the like, hope to see you again soon

After that, during the trip back, as explained by Mike, somehow the group got me to go to a movie in the theatre.  The Hangover (Mike has the IMDB link, go there for it).  First time I’ve been in a theatre since The Dark Knight, and Casino Royale before that.  All in all, pretty good show.  Not sure it falls into the list of movies I can watch 20-30 times, but I don’t feel like I want my 8 bucks back.  I would take 3 though, as it’s only 5 to go to the theatre here.  Well, as that technically counts as my movie that I watched for the month of June, I should be covered for a while, but I actually watched a bit of Waiting tonight while feeding my nephew Alex (2.5 months old and starting to stand up if you balance him).  I might be covered for a while, but I will probably end up watching a few more movies this month.  Hopefully I can find something decent.

The week to come, well, I do have my first time babysitting both of my nephews at once.  3 years old, and not quite 3 months.  The 3 year old can take care of himself mostly, and hopefully the little, little one will be a good baby for me.  And apparently I have a bit of HIMYM to watch if I get around to that.  Need to get things setup to watch it on the main display in the living room via the 360 or something…  might be a Wednesday project.

Well, since it’s been a month or so, I’ll throw out some random comments.

- Work is interesting with no budget…  most all my projects are on hold, so it’s catch up time

- Nephew #1 turned 3.

- Nephew #2 number 2′ed on me the other day…  I actually took time off work to watch him, and that is what I get…

- I’m on Shrooms! (for some reason, I think this is funny)

- The car is looking better after the cleaning it is getting (see, random)

- Got a new neighbor…  the old man that went to bed at 4 PM moved out.

- Trying to pick out my movie to watch in May.  Took care of April early, so it’s been a while.  And not much is coming to mind as something good.

- Looking at starting to watch Burn Notice, but I think I better catch those in order.

- About ready to pull the trigger on dumping the Midco DVR and go back to TiVo.  Couple more bucks a month, plus the initial expense, but it whips the Midco POS with a stick.

- For those I’m picking up on June 4, I should be in Sioux Falls by 11:30 AM.  Hopefully earlier that morning unless I decide to head down Wednesday night.  Make sure you have my cell number before I get there so we can meet up.

- I might move the desktop to Win7 RC.  My Ultimate DVD is 32 bit only, so I need to either find the 64 bit media (have the key, wrong media though), or go 7.  Thinking 7 won’t be bad…  but I’ll have to reload in October.  Yuck.

- Fat Tyre ale sucked.  I want my 3 bucks back, plus the 3 for 1554.  The other I might try yet.

That’s enough randomness for today.

Oh, need a random video…  nsfw, and before Dan says “old”, yes, I know it’s old… it’s also random.

The last few weeks have had me plugging away on a side project helping out some local parents with something for their Senior-Parent party for the graduating class of 2009 at TF Riggs, my old high school.  For several months, a small group of parents began putting together a slide show, as they do every year, with a slide for each student containing embarassing/cute photos of their kid as they grew up, with the final snapshot being, usually, one of their senior portraits.  In the end, there is a giant presentation, several hundred meg in size, with a ton of emotional attachment, timings, and such going with it.

About 3 weeks ago, I get an email from one of these parents (the boss’s wife).  The email is addressed to about 8-10 of us in the office, asking simply “Can any of you convert a PPT to a DVD?”   Knowing that PowerPoint itself (on Windows) does not have an option for this, and also knowing that Office for Mac 2008 (and probably earlier versions) has a Save as QuickTime option, I grab my Mac, fire it up, and write her back, saying bring the presentation in, I’ll give it a run.  This will be called “mistake number one”.  Not that I offered to help these folks, but that I thought it would be this easy.

I get the machine with the PPT on it, and just grab the massive file, pop it on a flash drive, move it to the Mac, and try to open it with PowerPoint for Mac 2008.  Oops, they used a special font…  no worky on the Mac.  Oh, and the resolution was wrong, all the photos were moved, and the text boxes were resized.  In essence, I would need to re-do several hundred slides to do this.  No. Dice.

Try opening in Keynote…  that was worthless.  Got to 84%, fail.  Repeat, repeat, repeat…  Gave up.

At this point, I think “Camstudio“, that freebie Camtasia ripoff.  Just capture the slideshow as a movie file, burn, done.  Yeah, that would have been great, but the codecs that came with it, and that I could get into Camstudio, wouldn’t keep up, and it was choppy.

Camtasia has a 30 day trial…. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be watermarked.  It wasn’t thankfully!  Something went right!  Oh, but wait, I need to capture this on the machine with all the fonts and such on it.  Which means I needed to capture this on a M285 tablet pc… with no power adapter.  I have long enough on battery to run the capture once.  Didn’t capture like I wanted.  Got the power adapter.  4 more attempts to get the codecs like I wanted and get all the transitions smooth, but that worked fine.

Got the video file now…  now to add the music they wanted.  That was easy, had the files, quick storyline view, all was happy.  Burn to DVD, tested it in my home DVD players.  Worked great.  Took it to the parent for replication.  She takes it down to the replication guy… and he says it’s not finalized, and it’s not the right disc.  I call BS on this one.  I prove the disc works over and over.  He said it doesn’t at all.  Basically, he wanted me to burn it on a -R disc, not +R.  The parent bitches this guy out and admits that finally.  So I do that, test it, and the replication works great.

The presentation is shown at the party, and the DVD’s are handed out to all…  all seems well.  Until about Monday of this week.  I get an email saying that one parent didn’t get their pictures in, and would we make a new DVD with their kid added.  The parent making the slideshow agrees, hoping that I’ll do all this again.  I did.  I capture the presentation again (keep in mind that that process takes an hour or more).

I go to produce this DVD, and I notice as I’m adding the music that there are pop-ups…  I have overlays on the content.  Turns out this tablet PC that had all the fonts, etc… went with this gal to a conference, where they recommended some application called Jing.  This app put stupid reminders all over the screen, over the PPT slide show, at random.  Ruined the capture.  Had to do it again, another hour burned up.  But I got that done…

This morning, another parent points out a typo in the slide show on their child’s name.  And would we fix it and get them a new copy…  So it gets fixed, and I teach, via email, the parent making the slide show, how to capture the slide show, and tell her “just get me the .camrec file, I’ll take it from there”.  She captures it, brings it to me at 4:15 today.  4:20, after I get the file and she leaves, new email… another typo, would we fix it…   it never ends!

She recaptures it, and they drop off a flash drive tonight with the file, and I was able to produce it all tonight into a test file and test disc that I will drop off tomorrow for their testing and approval.  Hopefully that’s the end of this saga.

Oh, and I did change some music around as one of the kids in the class I know hated the song playing during his slide.  That was easy, no big deal.  But I did have to reject one fix as I didn’t have the source files… apparently some baby picture was on the wrong kid.  But I won’t go into the side reasons on this as it gets deep fast…

Before anyone says it in the comments, I tried Pack and Go, didn’t work.

So in the end, stupid PowerPoint for not having a export to DVD function or export to movie file.  I should have made these guys buy the 50 dollar program that does this for you…

Come home today after accomplishing a lot of tasks…  This happens…  I’ll let you figure out how.

At least it’s the door with the old cat door in it, so that can go finally…

Well, it’s offically spring, and I say I want my money back.  This weekend should bring us our third winter storm of the spring.  That’s just not right.  I’m growing tired of wanting to wash my car, and finding that I shouldn’t, as it will be ruined in two days.  And, it’s snowing bad enough to close most of the state, but not Pierre.  Wasn’t bad enough to warrant closing the office…  that kind of sucks.  I had high hopes for a snow day.

Other news, I’m an uncle again.  Little fella is doing well (oh, so is Mom).  Not sleeping through the night, as usual.  He finally stayed awake with me for about 20-30 minutes, so he got to experience my bad jokes and over use of rattle toys with a 1 week old.  But hey, he won’t remember a thing of it in a week, so all is well there.

Two months to Game Over for Seth.  Need to lock in the schedule for the week of that event.  I’m leaning towards heading to Sioux Falls on Wednesday night, grabbing a room, pick up all the necessary parties, then head to Iowa on Thursday morning for the tux stuff, rehearsal, and whatever else they have us scheduled for.  Probably head out on Saturday if that fits in the schedule for the rest of my carpool…