*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I was asked this question the other day. “What kind of music do you listen to or like?” At first I thought, well, I sort of like a little bit of everything and then I like some music more than others. Then as I thought further I came to the conclusion that I do have certain genres or “types” of music I despise. Literally, I wouldn’t walk across the road to hear certain genres played live. And honestly, anyone that listens to the genres that I don’t like (I’ll elaborate more later), I always find myself not really having much in common with them. It is like we come from separate worlds or something. With that said, let’s jump right in.

Music I Hate
My number one hated genre is Gangster Rap and or Hip Hop (whatever it is called today). Everyone has heard it I’m sure. Just roll down your window at any red light and some dumb ass will have his loud enough for you to hear it. Enough said, this genre is useless to me and only propagates kids into wearing their pants down to their ankles and t-shirts that are 8 sizes too big for their body. This is pretty much why I avoid channel 20 on XM Satellite Radio which plays the top 20 hits of today played over and over. Number two genre on my list is pretty much anything played in dance clubs today with the boom-chic boom-chic boom-chic sound (hopefully you know what I mean). Some might call this genre Techno or Electronic/Dance I guess. I don’t have any respect for anyone that creates this type of music because I myself could do it given the equipment. It isn’t that hard, not very mind bending and is pretty much a lot of the same thing over and over and over and over and over… you get the idea. It is a shame at how many in the younger generation are listening to classic songs re-made in this style. The other day I heard a Def Leppard song re-done in this style and one of my co-workers I was with thought it was one of the best songs they’d heard, yet little did they know it was a remake. Number three genre on my list is extreme metal. Now some metal music I like, but the reason I say “extreme metal” is I’m talking about a particular type where the singer kills the song simply by screaming. I mean honestly, no one knows what the hell he is saying. He is just screaming whatever comes out of his mouth. This is a shame in a lot of ways because metal is fast, hard, and even harder to play which is why I like some it, out of respect for the musicians. Note to metal bands, if you want to get more people to buy your music, stop screaming and actually sing, otherwise you just look stupid!

Music I Like
In most all other genres of music I like something. Here’s an easy break down into some various areas:

• 70’s Rock (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd)
• 80’s (love the 80’s, that’s when I grew up)
• Early 90’s (I say only early because then a lot of music from the top two genres I hate is being produced)
• Alternative (although we need a new name for this one because alternative is no longer alternative, it is now main stream)
• Jazz
• Classical
• Some country (older country because I know it better)

If I didn’t list something you thought I should have, trust me, it is probably on the list of like. Here is my take on music. If the song is decent, well thought out, has a nice melodic line (not a one noter), and is well done I usually like it. Notice I didn’t say anything about the words. Words for the songs are secondary to me. For me it is just another “instrument” in the mix. Lots of people like certain songs because of what the singer is saying. I think it is mostly because they can’t hear what’s happening underneath. I appreciate what is happening underneath more than the words and as a consequence, I suck at the words to most songs. 9 out of 10 songs the music is written first then words are put to it anyway so obvioulsy the music itself carries more weight. To understand what I mean by words not having that much meaning for me, here is how I try to explain it. First, pick a song, any song and have that song re-arranged so it is played by instrumentalist only. In other words, no singing. For example, take a song and have it re-scored for jazz band, marching band, wind ensemble or orchestra. Then, have 1,000 people listen to the song played by instrumentalist and see if it passes their inspection. If you listen to JUST the music then you are hearing what my ears hear. If the instrumentalist version passes inspection by the majority then you probably have a pretty good song that will stand the test of time and will probably interest me a heck of a lot more than another one.

Head over to http://www.powertogether.com and watch 3 web casts and you get a copy of of Vista for Business and Office 2007.

I found out the other day that I will be speaking at CodeMash in Ohio during the warm month of January.  What am I speaking on?  I’ll give you one guess.  You guessed it, Smart Clients, ClickOnce, Web Services, SOA, etc.  It is a small world sometimes too.  The email about me speaking came from Jason Gilmore who I met while at Microsoft this past September during an ASP.Net Summit.  Jason and I talked about Media Center and tons of other stuff.  Who knew!  He was also on the bus when we got struck by some crazy chic.

The resort the conference is at is going to be really cool.  Not to mention the entire event is put on by the community and covers tons of technologies.  From a .Net presenter perspective these are usually tougher venues to speak at because you aren’t speaking in front of a bunch of people that swallowed the blue pill.  For me though, I don’t think that will be a problem since I can talk Linux, OS X, PHP and open source with the best of them. 

If you haven’t gotten signed up, what are you waiting for!!!!!!!!!

Last year when Ellen and I moved into our new home we were excited to cook our first Thanksgiving meal in our new home. That was the general feeling until we spent ALL day in the kitchen preparing the meal. While the meal was excellent, it wasn’t worth a whole day of effort and roughly $300.00 of groceries. I vowed next year I wasn’t going to spend my day off cooking. There had to be a better way. I am a smart guy, couldn’t I figure something out? Turns out there are lots of ways to have a really nice Thanksgiving dinner without all the fuss. This year we ordered Thanksgiving dinner off the Internet and had it shipped all the way in from Dallas, Tx via Mr. Billy’s Cajun Market. The meal costs $129.00 and included all the sides (mashed potatoes, green bean caserole, etc). The meal we got was the Spicy Cajun Fried Whole Turkey Dinner.

The meal included:

• Spicy Cajun Fried Turky
• Green Bean Caserole
• Mashed Potatoes
• Crab Cakes
• Giblet Gravy
• Bread Pudding Pie
• Geaux Juice
• Crawfish etoufee

The package arrived very nicely packed via Fedex on Wednesday around 2:00 PM. Here are some pics we took as we unboxed it:

This is a picture of Mom and me. This may be her Blog debut, I’m not sure 🙂

How everything was packaged.

Everything unpacked.

After everything was unpacked we placed it in the fridge and then headed to town later that evening to get some items to round out the meal. Ellen made a strawberry cheescake and brocolli caserole, mom made a caramel cake and the dressing and Ellen’s mom brought a caserole dish. As you can see our cooking was really at a minimum this year. Besides putting the turkey in the oven and heating up everything it was relatively painless and I even got to watch a lot of football earlier in the day (always a plus). So how was everything? Honestly, if you had came over and eaten with us and I hadn’t told you, you would have never known we ordered it. As a matter of fact, we never told Ellen’s mom we ordered it and while she was somewhat in disbelief that I cooked crawfish etoufee, crab cakes and had a spicy cajun turkey fried for Thanksgiving, everything had a home cooked flavor. This was my first spicy cajun turkey and I don’t think I can have Thanksgiving without it again. The turkey was tremendous and easy to heat up, just 5 minutes per lb. All in all it was a great meal and no one killed themselves this year trying to cook.

In Part 3 of this series we learned the x64 ISO of Vista originally uploaded to MSDN was corrupted As a result of this I installed the 32bit version of Vista on my AMD machine.   Once the DVD nightmare was over,the installation of Vista went really smooth and offers some new features that are welcomed. 

During the install I was happy to be able to load drivers for RAID controllers via USB drives.  The installation is completely visual this time around (no more dos looking boot screens) and even things like formatting and partitioning are done with a mouse.  One time I forgot to plugin my USB mouse and even though I was in the middle of the install it detected it.  Very nice. 

Once the install was completed I wanted to checkout my machine’s Vista rating.  This seems to be a common practice among those who want to see how there system stacks up.  Here’s a screen shot:

As you see, the overall score is the lowest score which in my case is the AMD 3400+ processor.  Apparently Vista loves my BFG 6800 GT video card since it gave the highest possible rating of 5.9.  My hard drives running in a RAID 0 configuration faired very well with a rating of 5.9, the highest. 

Overall the system is running very fast, and the interface looks gorgeous.  If you have Vista installed and if you have a windows key (which is between alt and ctrl on most keyboards) press the window key then tab combination. You’ll get something like this:

There are tons of enhancements to Windows Vista, too many too mention.  Start by looking at the Windows Vista Home Page.  There you will find a lot of information on the various versions of Vista and which features they include as well.  Here are some nice haves that I am enjoying on Vista:

• Address Bar – Right click on the task bar and then go to the Toolbars tab.  From there choose “Address”.  You can see it in the above screen shot.  It allows you to jump to any URL quickly.  And just like in IE 7, the shortcut keys work there as well.  For example you can type in “msn” then press ctrl-enter.  It will automatically add http://www.msn.com as the URL and launch IE 7.  If IE 7 is already open, a new tab will be created.
• Windows Photo Gallery – One of the things I missed from my Powerbook was iPhoto.  Windows Photo Gallery is now included with Vista so you can easily organize photos.  Someone hurry up and write a Flickr plugin!
• Search – Search is baked into the start menu and I haven’t noticed any slow down in the PC.  I also find myself using it all the time to lookup emails, programs (instead of the old start->run), pictures, etc.  For example, I knew I had this email from a vendor the other day, but I couldn’t find it.  A quick hot key of windows key -> “cajun turkey” and I found it instantly. 

There are tons of other features  and little niceties that I’ve noticed here and there but you’ll have to get busy installing Vista for yourself to really get the feel of it.    By the way, I also installed Vista on my Media Center PC and have been running Media Center on Vista Ultimate for the past several days.  I’ll try to write something up on it later on.