a star is born...

click here to play-->"chromatica rag" (requires windows media player)

alaina's much anticipated piano recital was tonight. i wasn't familiar with "chomatica rag" when she firt started playing it but rest assured i will recognize it if i ever hear it played again. it has been played in our living a million or so times over the last several months. she did a good job and brought it home in the end. well done.
this is my first attempt at posting video here. sorry quicktime lovers, this was a hastily thrown together job, that involved several steps, including converting analog to digital and learning (on the fly) the intervideo windvd software that came with my fujistu laptop. a windows media file was the easiest way to go.
more later...

what do you think?

if you have your own website, blog, myspace page, whatever, you know it can be a lot of work to make it over. if i added up the hours spent re-designing this site, it would probably add up to 15-20 hours minimum. even with todays "push-button" publishing technolgy, a lot of work goes into making sure everything looks right, the links take you to where you're supposed to go, etc. the bulk of the work took place in the wee small hours, after wifey and kids went to bed. the biggest change is my photo album which is now run by zen photo. thanks to jcs for offering some tips on getting this up and running on my server. i haven't off-lined the previous web pages yet so if you try to get to my old images page, they're all still there for the time being. i'll probably delete all of my old pages off the server in the next week or so. that said,a few of my old links, especially in my archive may now link to pages that no longer exist. there's really no way around that that i know of short of manually hand-coding all of the old reference links and that's just not gonna happen. anyway, hope you like the new look and that it looks right with your browser settings. it looks fine with display settings at 1024 x 768 in both i.e., and firefox, (in my extensive lab testing).
have packed a lot into the holiday weekend already. we got the new washing machine on thursday and without going into too much detail here it's up and running splendidly. friday i painted the girls room a nice shade of sherwin-williams topiary tint green, friday night the wife and i went to the twins game and watched the twins beat the mighty mariners of seattle. saturday we went to rochester, mn and spent some time with my sister's family. enjoyed a predictably rough round of golf, and some good home cookin'. hopefully tomorrow will be spent doing a few things around the house and then maybe a little cookout action before the work week begins. that's all for now. more soon...

stayin' clean...

i have to admit, i've kind of taken my washing machine for granted. it and the dryer came with the house. i was vaguely aware of its presence in the basement, and even done a load or two over the past couple of years, but for the most part, i have not appreciated it as much as i probably should have. it's not that i don't do chores around the house. trust me, my wife would be the first to admit i do my fair share, but she would prefer i stay away from the laundry, which is fine by me. she steers clear of the snoblower and mower. this weekend the washer appears to have died. or at least gone into a coma of some sort. turns out there is some sort of electronical problem which is causing the circuit to trip whenever the agitator is activated. washer stops, water doesn't drain, not good. we are in the process of determining if it makes sense to get an estimate on a house call & repair, or if we should just replace the 20+ yr old washer with a new one. chances are, we'll go with a new one. major appliance shopping is not on my top-ten list of ways i like to spend my free time.

Happy Birthday Mom!

mom is next up in the recent barrage of birthdays in the family. mom - hope you have a great day! thanks for being one of my few loyal readers! lots of love.

cheer for the minnesota twins today...

took the wife and kids to our annual family night at the twins game tonight. despite the twins dismal start to the season and recent lack of run production they won 8-4 have now rattled off four straight victories and have moved into third place in the american league central.
we dropped owen off with the grandparents and took the light rail from fort snelling. the kids enjoyed the game, (and snacks) but the highlight was definitely getting thier pic snapped with T.C. the Bear. see the rest of the pics.

birthday weekend wrap...

alaina enjoyed her "birthday weekend". saturday we had dinner at ihop (her choice) and then to a local carnival for a few rides. today the grandparents came over for round two. she got her own portable cd\mp3 player which turned out to be a big hit. she also scored some narnia books, a dvd and some money. catch the digital stills here.

Happy Birthday Alaina!

hard to believe our little girl turns 9 today. mom & dad love you very much!

error 261...simple fix?

i like to think i am pretty handy with itunes. i've been using this app as my software of choice for managing music files for several years now. i've mastered the ins-and-outs of importing, burning, mixing, creating playlists, etc., BUT this one had me stumped. recently i tried burning an mp3(only) cd-r disc. no big deal, i've done it a million times. i created my playlist with 193 mp3 tracks, well under my 700mb limit on a cd-r, and proceeded to burn the cd. it would check my playlist, and then begin to burn but almost instantly i would receive the message, "the attempt to burn a disc failed. an unknown error has occurred (261). hmmmm. i checked my "advanced > burning" settings, looked good. checked " preferred speed" - ok. i repeated variations of these steps until i had produced three shiny new coasters.
decided to google the error, and lo and behold, it seems that this unknown error is NOT so unknown. i renamed my playlist by taking out the apostrophe (') and bada-bing, my disc burned error - free. apparently the disc burn will fail with characters "&" and "'" in the names of the playlists. did i miss something in itunes school? is this common knowlwdge? a known issue?? is this only itunes under windows and not macs??? if this is in fact a bug, it would seem like apple should be able to fix this rather easily, (or at least warn people that it's a problem). it should be said, i am using an older verison of itunes (5.0.0.35) , perhaps this was fixed in the latest upgrade? anyway, if this saves 1 person from banging their head on the desk trying to burn an mp3 disc in itunes i guess it was worth it.

why the long face?...

my co-workers, hard at work.