Yes, I made it to Montreal…with my parents.  For many months Montian (the host of the Montreal Musician’s Meet-up) had been talking about wanting to play with a fiddler….so dad brought his violin along after a bit of badgering.  I’m so pleased he did.  He thought perhaps he’d get in a little “jamming” time with the Second Life musicians out of the “limelight” perhaps, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.  We all arrived in the village of Ste Anne du Bellevue and started setting up in a little chapel called Adair Hall just off the main campus of John Abbott College.  We were treated to a full day of music on two stages that were streamed live into Second Life.  At the dinner break Montian got in a corner with my dad and they played through a few tunes for maybe a half an hour.  I was so pleased that he got the chance to play with my favorite artist…and then Montian turned to him and said he was going on stage with him for his 10pm set!    lol   

So, I now have the coolest videographic keepsakes of my father and Montian playing together.

That was just the “soundcheck”..you can see the rest of the set at my channel on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/user/steorling

and from Lucy Jharmin

http://www.youtube.com/user/LucyJhamin

and from Bree Birke on her blogs sidebar where she’s also linked all the photos from Lucy, Gwampa, and herself.

http://www.breebirke.com/

The Beast…my beloved but much-maligned-by-its-maker laptop was sitting out up and running after a conference call with the Netherlands.  We were packing and having dinner and I did the unthinkable…  I tried to pop up off the floor to put my dishes in the kitchen from where I’d had dinner and managed to slide across the oriental rug and pour 20 oz of Dt. Pepsi into my poor beast.  *sigh*  *shaking head*  *groan*

I dried it out…aired it for 24 hours…did all that good stuff and the Beast, in its usual contrary way, decided to revive.  It ran fine for about two hours…and I put it to bed relieved.  The next day, however, it had reverted to hospital mode…and the geeks tell me its hard drive is fried and the motherboard is probably not far behind.  It seems the intermitten reversion to “I’m fine, let’s go vroom”…is just it finding its brain by accident on the spinning disks at start up.  Ohhh, poor beast.

***Now, for those who care about such inanities and ironies…  I should give some history.  The rest of you can ignore this middle section, as I’ve ranted about it in other places before.

My beast is the Edsel of laptop computing…namely, an HP Pavilion ZD8000 CTO (that means I chose the configuration myself from their website…so it would BE beasty)  It’s the first 17″ monitor they produced, but also the replacement for all the ZD7000 that were recalled in a class action suit.  It has an issue….namely, it was designed by a first year engineering student who flunked out.   The following I have from the second tech to rebuild the beast, a very sweet guy in Canada who wanted to warn me that even after the “rebuild” if my laptop was hot enough to burn, I should shut it down or it “could” burst into flames.  You see, the battery recharger requires different amperage than the rest of the computers components, so owners of the ZD8000 have been sent alternating adapters since day one.  If you use the one, the motherboard fries taking the monitor and all else with it within three or four months…if you use the OTHER adapter, your battery life is nil, the palmrest heats up to the point it WILL actually burn flesh, and eventually burns out the monitor and then the whole rest of the computer within about 6 months.  SO, my beast has been rebuilt more than 3 times by HP in the three years it lived.  Completely rebuilt, three times.  THREE.  On HP’s dime, mind you, because I’d already had ONE HP laptop fiasco and wasn’t having another.  SO, the beast dies at my hands, true, after being completely rebuilt by HP about 4 months ago.   {Don’t ask why HP wouldn’t cut their losses and just replace it…I’ve asked everyone I could find an ext to at that company why for three years.  They will not admit it’s because they’d have to admit the error and reimburse all the uber gamers who built their own systems on this models platform.}  Fun party game….  type the words “zd8000″ and “class action” into Google search sometime.  ROFL.

** rant over, back to the regularly scheduled blog.

So, with the beast dead, I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement.  Firstly, I have very little money.  This is the first paycheck that hasn’t gone to my doctors’ bills from the summer (which, are all gone now, thank heavens) and while I have about $300 I could spend…the cheapest laptop I can purchase that does what I need it to is …gasp….  an HP!!!   (Oh lord..no, not again.)  It’s also on sale at Best Buy for $650 (plus $300 for 3 year warranty) …so I need about $650 in financing if I want to be all “impulse shopper” about it.  Great, Best Buy is doing their whole “18 months no interest so when you spend lots at Christmas and can’t pay we’ll nail you with 29% retroactively” credit card promotion.  I only need about three, maybe four months to pay this off.  So, COOL.   Uh, yeah, except they rejected my application.  ROFL.  

They tell me they’ll “send a letter” to explain why…but I already know why.  Just like we all REALLY know why our economy is in the tank.   I have no credit rating…because I have no debt.  I paid off my car a year and a half ago, I’ve owned two houses for a total of four years and paid all my bills on time, etc…but none of that appears on my credit report because it’s not “now”.  (Though, the credit companies are still reporting my address as one I haven’t lived at in twelve years, so how NOW is that?  LOL)  I don’t have anything on credit cards, all my recurring bills come out of my bank accounts or my paypal account.  I can’t get credit…because I have no debt.  {They missed their golden opportunity to enslave another one.  lol}  What’s fun, of course, is that my contemporaries (30 somethings) are drowning in debt….20-100k in student debt…credit cards multipling and maxed..and they can get ANY credit they want.  Yep…  Americans are idiots.  Our financial institutions are crumbling and we’re surprised?   Oh please. 

So, now I’ll have to be wise despite my momentary lapse into “impulse” mode, because there’s no way I’m applying for their 22% card for “losers” like me to buy a computer from a company I can’t possibly trust to back their product as they should.  lol  I know, it sounds like I’m resentful, but I assure you it’s the farthest thing from the truth.  I’m thoroughly amused and not a little giggly over the fact that NOW I can plan and save and get something beasty, not just adequate.   The fact that Microsoft is ditching Vista at the end of this year is also adding a thoughtful pause to my laptop musings.   More on my quest for the next Beast once I’ve done some shopping…  

Well, this year was one of the first in memory where I didn’t want to go to school one morning..and it was only the third day of school. Why is long, complicated, multi-faceted, and was helped along by the fact that I’ve been breathing at about 50% capacity for most of the summer and I’m just exhausted. I came home and decided I needed a “dramatic renewal of purpose” as Berkeley Breathed once put it in his Bloom County comic strip. So, since I don’t have any video from the Regan era, I turned to YouTube….and Taylor Mali on What a Teacher Makes. I share it here in case you’re wondering why you didn’t go to flip burgers at McDee’s instead of going through those big double doors.

A little widget showing off the organisms I’ve created in the Spore Creature Creator demo version.   You can get the demo for free, the full creature creator for $9.99, and the game for a lot more…but not for 17 more days.  This is the one my gamer friends AND my nephews are looking forward to in the near future.  It is oodles of fun, highly open-ended for creativity…and still manages to be a bit of a biology lesson.  Physics applies and, if you build a bad conformation into it, the creature will manifest this in “play” mode.

This was also my first introduction to the various social bookmarking services (Del.cio.us, Spurl, Furl, etc.) and their even more varied ala carte menus of features. We spent some time exploring a sampling of “citation” and online research tools ending with Google Notebook which I’ve been playing with for a few hours now. I have a new addiction, I’m never cutting and pasting to a word document again! lol I already have four notebooks up and running, speeding around the internet like an idiot snatching anything that fits in any of them…and the notebook does all the citation work, keeping every link and dateline! Such fun. = )

Ah, well, let me just say that the guys at the Writing Center did a great job. They gave a handful of teachers the responsibility of revamping a defunct zine called the Sentinel. We discussed all sorts of design and concept issues, looked at several really interesting examples of both good and bad website design before launching into our own designs. I had a blast…and it turned out suprisingly good. I know a few of the “experts” who were helping us were frustrated by Nvu at moments, but they’ve been spoiled by DreamWeaver…lol Not going to be appearing in my budget anytime soon and Nvu does a great job anyway. I actually ended up with two drastically different designs, playing with a more “artsy” graphic journal look to the one and a very clean “educational” looking version. It’s amazing how different they look and how much you can play in Nvu….Now if I could just find a free web hosting service I liked. Shopping is not nearly as fun as designing….so back to Nvu. ; )