| Charitable Work |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|11:34 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
I've worked for a few charities in the past and now find my mornings taken up this week and last doing online charitable work.
Fund raising for a cause is an odd combination of emotions and social skills. You want to passively implore someone to help without making them feel guilty. You want to make them feel good for helping without being patronizing. You want to graciously accept for those who cannot give and yet more graciously support those who do.
It is a difficult task to do. You want to be gracious, polite, and well spoken while also somehow working past the shield that people rightly form to protect their hard-earned money from the countless charities, good, band and worse, that try to get them to open their wallet.
In the past I've considered starting a non-profit related to music and music education. I shelved it because I don't think I have the time to give it its proper support. This little taste is confirming that thought.
Anyway, here's hoping this endeavor works out. We're just a smidge shy of 40% of our goal. |
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| *snicker* |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|10:56 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Banana Splits theme | ] |
Apparently playing the Banana Splits theme in your cube causes co-workers to cease working and stare. Awesome. |
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| Whee. |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|03:37 pm] |
The day, she is scattered and scatterbrained.
- Started a side project this weekend to help a friend out in need. Have been quietly trying to pass the word around into places I think it should go. So far it seems to be starting ok.
- Swapped the ancient workstation at work with a Fit PC Slim. It's a PC about the size of a pack of cards and currently seems to be perfect for remote controlling for VMware tools and outlook. The locak PC guy noted that the dust bunnies in my previous box probably out weigh my new one.
- Last week I found an olympic bench press bench and bar for sale cheap. I had already picked up a french curl bar, and some plates from salvation army. To my astonishment and so far for less than the cost of a month or two of gym membership, I've built a considerable gym at home. Up next: handbell rack, more handbells, more plates, and a preacher rack.
- This week is a week off from music, and then the great Christmas season is upon us. Maybe I'll arrange a few clarinet choir or quartets for it.
- I've got a few business and other ideas I'm pulling together. Not sure where they will all go, but it seems right to be working on them
More later. |
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| Toot! |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|03:51 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
This is what I do in my spare time and for sanity:
Duel of Fates (MP3)
Molly On The Shore (MP3)
Two clips from last weekend. The concert had a little of everything in between this: death struggle music from John Williams and a devilishly difficult Irish Reel from around 1900. |
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| two plus two is two-ty two. |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|07:00 pm] |
I've been having some interesting fun of late.
I've been trying to get all the various mini-business ideas I have together and have their receipts nicely organized for tax time. Goodness help me, I am trying to do some proper accounting and draw up balance sheets. One of these days, I'll have a CPA.
Anyway, as part of that process I am trying to resolve all of the costs and donations that macrophile.com has had over the years. When I opened donations, several users suggested I draw this up and have "open books" so to speak. I think it's a good idea and I'm finally getting a chance to total things up.
I'll post the grand totals later after I dig up some historic bills for electric and internet, but I have to say, I've been surprised at how frugal I have been. I've served a relatively hefty niche community for a decade now and have done it for a fraction the cost that other sites regularly demand as they need to stay alive.
Anyway... back to the calculations. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|11:18 am] |
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Dear Cowboy Admin in my department: Making changes without telling the rest of the team is the problem. It's not the small you-should-have-known-better mistake that you did and apologized for. Your apartment is on the way to work. If I have to be up at 3am again for this type of problem, I might fix the root cause on the way to fixing the problem it created. |
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| Yay! |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|05:32 pm] |
Music was awesome. The roommates came out and enjoyed the concert. I think we did a great job and hope it sounds as good on the CD.
A few problems with the horn may have generated a bit of a futzed attack here or there, but I think I have that cleaned out now.
I should be good to go for the recording session tonight.
Man. Is it me or are the days just flying by? Halloween already? |
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| Music this Sunday |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|01:12 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
The OWO (http://www.ohlonewindorchestra.org/) is going to have their opening concert of the season this Sunday afternoon.
Selections include works by John Williams (including the Harry Potter suite), some English folk tune pieces, a broadway selections number, and the Jaeger solo concerto for percussion.
This is going to be a good concert. This is one of those ones I would recommend folks to look into if they are interested in catching one.
2pm. Fremont. $15. Directions and further info on the above website. |
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| The shattering of the internet |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|10:44 pm] |
I'm getting annoyed at the internet shattering. Really I am.
I think you know what I mean. A few years back there was one major site for this. One major site for that.
Now it seems like a regular part of my day is split between randomly sorted groups. Some folks I know are in livejournal, some in facebook, some in twitter, some in blogspot, etc. etc.
As time has progressed, I've watched this spread to other fields. At my first tech job I kept a single chat program open. Depending on the day how I may have 3 different IM clients representing about 8 brands of IM, an IRC and a muck client all open. I need to have another monitor just for the chat programs. And while IM and chat used to be something I had running for purely fun, most of the chat clients are open because the are now required as a part of my job.
The same is true for something as simple as Furry. As the fandom has grown, what used to be mostly a text client had become people using websites, IMs, IRC, and goodness knows what else to trade the genre.
I think for the working furries out there it is doubly-annoying. Usually you have a face that is your private and furry stuff, and another face that is your professional account. That's usually a 2x bonus on the number of accounts you end up having.
I don't think this is a harbinger of doom. I do think it's partly a symptom of the urge that everything being built on the internet now seems to be required to be a "social site" like in the 1990's everything had to be a "portal." Some programs that support multiple avenues have made headway in the chat world, but I don't think the social sites will care that much about making it easy for users to jump ship.
Mostly, I think it's annoying. Anyway, off to post something similar in other places. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 12th, 2009|12:12 am] |
Some nice person decided my van needed 1 less window.
Maybe the alarm scared them away from taking anything else. Or maybe they just wanted to break a window.
Gotta love the people in this valley sometimes. |
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| Happy music... |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|02:57 pm] |
Downloaded a pile of digitized 78s.
It's been sweet Jazz all morning. |
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| It's simple! |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|03:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | amused | ] |
Bossman: Can you possibly build a quick database schema for these data files? The DBA wants to charge for a few hours over the weekend for it.
Me: Sure boss! That's a quick command line.
(Types out)
echo > temp.sql; for file in *.tab; do echo $file | sed -e's/.*\.\(.*\)\.tab/create table \1 (/' >> temp.sql; echo ' mr_username varchar(25) not null,' >> temp.sql; echo ' mr_store varchar(25) not null,' >> temp.sql; echo ' mr_load_date datetime,' >> temp.sql; echo >> temp.sql; head -1 $file | tr "\r" "\n" | tr "\t" "\n" | awk '{ print " " $1 " varchar(50)," }' | sed -e 's/id\(.*\) varchar(50)/id\1 int/' | sed -e 's/\(.*\)date varchar(50)/\1date datetime/' | sed -e 's/\(.*\)price varchar(50)/\1price decimal(10,4)/' | sed -e 's/ varchar(50),//' >> temp.sql; echo ' primary key(mr_username,mr_store,)' >> temp.sql; echo ');' >> temp.sql; echo >> temp.sql; echo >> temp.sql; done Bossman:*:D and D: at the same time.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|01:56 am] |
Hello LJ. It's been a while.
Work might be changing soon.
I've got a lot of neat stuff I should be working on.
And I'd like a few days off.
More later :) |
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| And the technology grinds to a halt |
[Sep. 14th, 2009|11:54 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | bouncy | ] |
One of the coworkers keeps finding ants in his cubes.
All work has ceased.
It must be a Monday :) |
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