July 3rd, 2009
It’s unlikely that anyone outside of the town of Berlin has heard of this, but there’s this little political mess that our town is going through. As I understand it, the town council decided that the town would migrate from manual trash pickup to automated trash pickup in July of this year.
Well apparently, politics being what they are, there was a last minute referendum to reject the new trash service. On June 23, there was a vote (I wish I was more aware so I could have voted), and the referendum passed to NOT go with the automated trash pickup.
So here’s where it gets hairy. The town had already signed the contract for the new service, and the voters had already approved the budget which included the cost of the new service. Beyond that, the new trash barrels had already been bought by the trash company (to be delivered the week after the vote). So now, even though the vote was to not do the automated trash pickup, the town is facing a much larger issue. The town will probably be sued by the garbage company for breach of contract, which very well could run hundreds of thousands of dollars. Beyond that, the town has to find a new company to collect the trash, because the last company doesn’t want to do it any more (Berlin is one of the last towns in Connecticut that doesn’t do automated pickup).
The bottom line is that there is this big mess… over trash.
Posted in General | No Comments »
June 30th, 2009
I know it’s not going to be the norm, but Zachary slept 8 1/4 hours straight last night (2 hours more than he’s ever slept before). It would be nice if he does this more often!
Posted in Baby, Short | No Comments »
June 30th, 2009
I really don’t get Twitter. I mean I understand what it is, but honestly it makes no sense to me. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, or maybe it’s because I’m not all that prolific. Here’s my problem: My blog isn’t really meant to be consumed by the public. Occasionally I may have a nugget of wisdom, but really it’s more about recording my thoughts and getting them out of my head. I do this for me, not because I have a following (because I’m pretty sure I don’t have much of a following). Blogging is permanent and public (for the most part).
More »
Posted in General | No Comments »
June 29th, 2009
A little over three years ago I made a post about my iTunes library as part of an internet meme. I thought I’d post and update.
As a note I’ve added 1,633 songs in three years (that’s just about 1.5 songs a day). My library has increased in size almost 10GB.
*Total volume of music files on my computer:*
107.33 GB (stored on a RAID 0 hardware array)
17,618 songs
51 days, 4 hours+ of music
*Last CD I bought was:*
Chickenfoot by Chickenfoot
*Five songs I listen to a lot these days:*
(I rarely listen to singles, I usually listen to mostly complete albums, so the five albums).
* Chickenfoot: Chickenfoot
* Worlds Collide: Apocalyptica
* The Sound of Madness: Shinedown
* Way To Normal: Ben Folds
* Indestructible: Disturbed
As an additional note this doesn’t include the movies and TV shows that I have in my iTunes library (which is an additional 36GB).
Posted in General, Movies/TV/Music | No Comments »
June 27th, 2009
Friday Jr, and I went and saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Although I’ve decided that putting movie reviews up on my blog really doesn’t serve a purpose, this is a movie wort talking about. First, though, I have to say that I like Michael Bay, almost without fail his movies are some of my favorite “popcorn” flicks ever produced. Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, and the first Transformers movie are some of my favorite guilty pleasure movies.
That said, Transformers: ROTF is a train wreck. It’s so much of a train wreck that I don’t even know where to start with its problems. With a run-time of almost 2 1/2 hours it’s an exhausting ride.
More »
Posted in General | No Comments »
June 25th, 2009
Cool gMail trick: you can add a “+” and extra text after your name in your email address and it will still get to you. Then you can filter your email based on this. For instance jons+spam@gmail.com would still be delivered to jons@gmail.com. This is extra cool because it works even on domains that use gMail for their domain email (like I do for driestone.com).
Posted in Computing | No Comments »
June 16th, 2009
For Justin’s bachelor party I decided to print up shirts commemorating the event. I wanted to do something unique, so I decided that I would print up funny quotes for each shirt (so each shirt is different). I also wanted to print a custom logo on the back with the year and the event name “Fin Du Monde”
As I’ve mentioned before I get a little insane about things. I could have printed this stuff on white tee shirts for super cheap and been done with this, but the artist in me didn’t like that idea. White shirts are cheap because you can print on them just like paper (a la Cafe Press). Darker shirts require screen printing or creating a white base to print on, which is why I did both.
More »
Posted in General, Tee a Week | No Comments »
June 2nd, 2009
Earlier I mused about the progression of age, and how my son will always be 37 years younger than me. That started me thinking about the things that he will see (or the things that we will both see in the future).
To judge the possibilities I started thinking about things in regard to “how long before I was born”. What happened in the 37 years before I was born? 37 years before my birth was 1935. In the mid-30’s the jet engine was built, the photocopier was invented as was FM radio (not to mention the thousands of things since then).
It’s a little bit of a useless exercise, but it does encapsulate the idea of progress pretty well. I think that’s kind of amazing. More »
Posted in Baby, General | No Comments »
June 1st, 2009
I’ve been on this earth 37 years now. It’s weird, 37 sounds so old. I don’t feel old, but the number sounds old. I’m closing in on 40 which is sounding quite old. I think back to my parents and my perception of them. When they were 37 I was 12, I don’t think I had a gasp on what was old and what was “older”. Then again, I don’t know if I ever really thought about my parent’s ages until I was well into my 20’s.
So I guess this is poignant because today is Zee’s first day of daycare. This started me thinking of the other events and our relation in age.
More »
Posted in Baby, General | No Comments »
May 27th, 2009
I’ve always been a sucker for animated shows. For me it was less about the Smurfs and Bugs Bunny (although Bugs is a hero of mine), it was more about action and adventure. The fact is, when I was growing up, special effects were still pretty limited and limited to a few minutes of screen time, even in major motion pictures. There is no such limitation when you’re drawing frames on paper.
I stumbled on IGN’s top 100 Animated TV Series the other day, and of course I reviewed their list to see if I agreed with their assessment (it sucks that you have to click through each item). I have to admit they didn’t do too bad. There are several shows that I never had an interest in watching show up pretty high on the list. I was happy to see that M.A.S.K. (#99), and Robotech (#34) made the list. That’s not to say that I completely agreed with their assement.
More »
Posted in General | No Comments »
