I’ve been looking for a new theme for this site for a while. And I’m honestly too lazy to make my own from scratch, so I found this one. Modified it a bit to suit my needs, and voila. Here we are.

I’ve added back in the “Music” section, which isn’t complete yet, but it’s almost all of the lyrics to songs I’ve written in my lifetime.  I haven’t written in years, and I’m hoping seeing all of my past stuff on the site every time I come to will inspire me to write something new.

So, there you have it.  Read away. Comments are turned off for the lyrics, but feel free to send me a message if you’ve got any feedback, or even comment on this post.

Note of warning, try not to read anything from the ’90s, I was just a kid and wrote cheesey meaningless crap back then.  2000 and 2001 were good years for me, at least I think so.  Anyway, enjoy. Or not.

I was downloading a backup this morning from the fairly new dedicated server:

Dedicated download speed

Note the 1.5 MB/s downspeed, from a server! Get that with a shared host. I dare you!

A good friend of my wife’s, who’s since become a good friend of mine (Trish) confused me the other night, at the party, by saying that my gift was “being made in New Jersey” and that it would be a few days late.

Confused, and wondering, I forgot about it. Until last night, when Christine brought it home.

I opened the bag to find a bunch of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit schwag.  Trish knows it’s one of our favorite shows, and also knows that both my wife and I have crushes on Mariska Hargitay who plays a Detective on the show.

My gift also includes an autographed photo of the entire cast, and one just from Mariska.

Mariska Hargitay - it says "To Mike Happy Birthday"

My friends rule. Thanks for calling in the favor, Trish!  Great gift!  I’ll certainly frame both of the pictures, and hang them up in our place!

It’s my second day in my thirties, and my back’s killing me.  I know, I’m old.  But I have a good reason.

Last night was the party to celebrate my 30th birthday, and we did it in style. With the things we love. Movies (well, a movie theater), Rock Band, and pizza. Oh, and friends and family were in attendance, as well.

As any big event in our lives, the wife and I like to do something big. So we (read: she) rented a private screening room at Coolidge Corner Theater.  Seating for 45, and a huge screen.

We packed up our XBox 360, Rock Band 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, our plastic instruments and headed to the theater around 6:30 to set up.  My back’s killing me is because I lugged a ton of that stuff a whole buttload of blocks since we had to park farther away than we should have.

Anyway, aside from back hurting, I feel pretty good today.  We had an awesome time last night.  A bunch of people from work, and past jobs, and family showed up to celebrate.  We played Rock Band for a whole bunch of hours, and people that had never gotten to play before got to play. And from the talk this morning, they enjoyed it.  It really is a game that everyone likes.  It’s impossible to not like the game, really. I challenge you!

Getting older is a weird thing.  Obviously I know I’ve turned 30, but I don’t feel any different. I honestly don’t think I’ve noticed my age at all since I turned 18. I don’t feel any older, I just feel like.  Obviously I can’t do all the things I used to be able to do, physically, but it’s not like I’m in a wheel chair or anything, so that’s good.

So far, 30 hasn’t been at all bad.  I rung in my new year with friends, family and gaming. What more could I want?  It was a great night.

Mac Pro day is rapidly approaching.  I was going to get it yesterday, but waited.  I asked for Apple gift cards for my birthday, so I wanted to wait till I got those, so I didn’t spend any extra money when I could have used gift cards.  So Mac Pro day has been pushed back to (I believe) October 9th, which should be enough time to allow for getting paid for the month of September, and the check clearing.  I’m super psyched, and will post before and after photos once I have everything set up.

Big thanks to everyone who came last night and celebrated, and for all the generous gifts everyone gave.  We’re definitely going to rent the theater again in the near future, and host another Rock Band night, since it was such a hit.  Next time we won’t use Facebook to invite people though, since that seems to be uber-ineffecient.

As big of a music fan as I am, I’m horrible at using the “features” of iTunes.

I use it to rip music, and store it.  Between Christine and I, we’ve got just over 80 gigs of music, which is all digital now. (I’m sure there’s plenty more CDs I opted not to rip, when I ripped ‘everything’ we own.)

I have one playlist, and I only created that so I could sync it to my iPhone.

I’m a terrible iTunes user. I know.

I’m home alone this weekend, and just upgraded to iTunes and decided to give this “Genius Mix” thing a shot.  I’m usually too impatient to wait for it to finish “delivering” results.  After all, it takes a while for iTunes to index that much music.

I let it finish (it took about 6 minutes or so), and have to say it’s pretty accurate.  It created 12 playlists for me. 12 Genius Mixes, I should say.  Here’s what it grouped, based on the 4 albums it makes thumbnails out of:

• Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Green Day, Nickelback
• Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Aerosmith
• Disturbed, Dream Theater, Metallica, System of a Down
• Foo Fighters, No Doubt, Lifehouse, (more) No Doubt
• Kelly Clarkson, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, David Cook
• Bon Jovi, Tesla, Firehouse, Poison
• REO Speedwagon, Billy Talent, Waltham, Hits of the ’80s
• Van Halen, Queens of the Stone Age, Journey, Guns ‘n’ Roses
• Linkin Park, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit
• Katy Perry, Jason Mraz, Howie Day, Teddy Geiger

Not bad mixes.  It’s certainly better than just playing all 13,000 tracks on random and skipping ten in a row, till I find something I like.

I’m gonna give the Genius Mixes the benefit of the doubt and let them play for a while.

My normal nightly routine coming home from work includes waiting at North Station in Boston for about 45 minutes for my wife to arrive, to we can commute home together.

Last night something extraordinary happened.  Standing in my usual spot, I watched a man, obviously intoxicated beyond belief, wander in through the East doors.

He slowly seemed to collapse, sort of a passing out very very slowly.  He lay on the ground for a moment or two, before someone notified the MBTA folks, who promptly called paramedics, just in case.

It took the paramedics 11 minutes to arrive.

In that 11 minutes, I counted 20 people in scrubs of some form come in through the doors the man lay on the ground just inside of.

Of those 20 people in scrubs, 18 of them stopped.  That’s 90%.

The other two?  They didn’t stop because someone else in scrubs was already checking on the passed out drunkard.

It made me think: do I care that much about what I do?

On their own time, for no pay whatsoever, these people stopped to help someone in need.  I don’t know if they were doctors, or nurses, or research assistants, or what.  All I know is these people stopped to help.

No one else did.

Be sure to thank your doctor, or nurse, or whomever else does their job to help you.

We’re now a mere 54 days away from my birthday/Mac Pro Day,  and I’m getting more and more excited.

Over the last month, I’ve gotten so reliant on using my iMac at the office, that when I get home, I’m discouraged having to use Windows.  I often press my mouse button down, expecting Expose, and am saddened when that doesn’t happen.

I’ve also begun finding more and more applications for the Mac to perform things I do on the PC.  While I’m more comfortable than I was at the time of my last post, I’m still not convinced I can switch to OSX without at least having Parallels installed on my Mac.  There are still a few things that I need to do that are PC only.

However, I’ve also found a few new applications that I’m in love with, that are Mac only!  I know, right?!

For starters, I think MailPlane is a godsend. Especially since I’ve started converting all my domain mail to Gmail.  MailPlane is just like any other mail client, except that it’s like having a bunch of Gmail accounts open at once, for all your different email addresses.  No more logging out and logging back in to another account. MailPlane keeps you logged into them all, and gives you a notification when you’ve got a new message.  The UI for the app is identical to Gmail itself, and has all the same features (keyboard shortcuts, searching, labeling, etc.)  Very handy.  Weeding addresses out of my Thunderbird inbox at home has never been more satisfying.

Another app I’m loving is Adium.  It’s like any other IM client, but better because it’s Macified.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but I much prefer Adium to Digsby (which I use at home.)

I feel like once I get the Mac at home I’m going to want to switch all of my hardware to Mac.  Router, keyboard, mouse, external hard drives, etc.  It’s not unlikely.  Everything would look stellar all white and shiny.

As we get closer and closer to Mac day, I get more and more excited.  I can’t wait to make the switch.  Once I do, I plan on documenting the things I find that are hard for someone who’s used PCs as long as I have, in hopes that I can help other switchers along the way.