Suguay Productions

So, I had a birthday last week. It was one of the big milestones. I think I am much more enthusiastic and positive about it that many people have been in the past. I certainly have no problem telling people my age when the ask. Ok, I don’t really look it. I’m getting close. I don’t act my age that’s for sure. I still love my blue jeans and rock music. In fact in two weeks is the anniversary of Levi Straus patening blue jeans. I think I may have a party to celebrate the occasion. I love my Levi’s. I digress. So I don’t look my age, I don’t act my age so it makes little difference to me to tell others my age if they ask. Actually, I get a kick out of it. Most people don’t believe me, I’ve had to produce my driver’s license as proof even to friends or co-workers. As a result I had little issue with approaching such an epic birthday.

I don’t mind birthdays really. Birthdays mean I’ve made it another year, and I’m still here. It means I’ve had another year of experiences and opportunities to touch the lives of others. Birthdays are fabulous things and given the alternative, well I’ll take getting older any day.

Birthdays do tend to mean we are getting older and our bodies don’t alway take to the aging process as easily or as gracefully as our minds and spirits do. As an example, last year I had to get new glasses. I do a lot of work on the computer and I’m a big reader. So it was inevitable that I was going to need bifocals at some point. It so happens that point was last year’s Eye Doctor visit. It’s only the smallest change they can make; however, there is still that need. In addition to being a reader and such, I’m a bit stubborn. I’ve figured out how to read around my glasses for a while now. Old habits die hard. I swear it has taken me since last July to figure out just where to look to get the maximum comfort out of these things. And sadly, I must admit, I only this afternoon truly embraced the need for the bifocal. Sigh. 

I sigh not because of the defeat of getting older. No it is due to the inefficiencey with which I must now learn to scan my pages. I am accustomed to having fairly good peripherial vision even for a myopic eye glass wearer. It doesn’t work so well with bifocals. I have remembered and tried to grasp what the technician told me when she gave them to me. “Point your nose at what you want to read.” Ok. I didn’t realize this meant that I was going to have to point my nose and nearly every single word and actually move my head down to the next line. Ok, it’s about 4 words and 2 lines. Still you get the point. I am accustomed to just moving my eyes. Sigh. This is just inefficient. 

Still Birthdays mean I’ve kept the world on its toes for yet another year. 

Cheers

Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.

It’s been a busy week. This turns out to have been a really good thing. I’ve been a bit on the go all week. Most nights I wasn’t home until almost 9pm or later. Ok, for some of you this is no big deal. For me, this is definitely a change in behavior. It really started at the weekend before.

I had been puzzling over how to handle Monday. See my niece had a soccer game that I really wanted to see and Fleetwood Mac was in town and I really wanted to see them as well. So on Friday I had pretty much decided that I would just do both. I get off work early enough to make it to my niece’s soccer game, it was about an hour and a half and then I should have about an hour and a half race back across town, near where I started, and catch Fleetwood Mac. 

I am so glad I did that. My niece’s team lost the game 2 to 1. However, they played much better than the last time I saw them and the last time they played that team they lost 5 to 2. It’s a really improvement. Oh and Fleetwood Mac

was really good. It was the longest concert I think I’ve been to. No opening act. They came on at 8:15, (tickets said the show started at 8:00 so that’s really good), they played for almost two and a half hours. No joke. I really enjoy Mick Fleetwood’s drumming. It was interesting watching Lindsey Buckingham play guitar, he has to have the most cramped playing style. No wonder he was shaking his hand out after a few songs. It makes my hand cramp just to think about. Stevie Nicks was… Stevie Nicks. What can you say. No Christine McVie, she gave it all up a few years ago. John McVie was there. In my opinion, he would have to be. It wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac without him. I’m really glad I went. I would have been very disappointed to find out this was their last tour and I had completely missed them. 

And so that was Monday. Keep in mind. I still had to work on Tuesday. My plans for Tuesday were not near as elaborate just more stuff to do. Work, the gym, and then I meet with a friend and his girl friend to discuss some stuff for his website. He’s just got his site and was ready to figure out how to make it do what he wanted. He’d offered dinner in exchange for knowledge. It was a good trade off. We nearly closed the place down. So for Wednesday you’d think I’d be aiming to get home earlier and relax. Yeah, that didn’t happen. I worked late, hit the gym and then a trip to Borders. They have been having a great cd sale. It was 50% off on most cd’s. Well, I spent a bit of cash on that. I got some things I really wanted and a few things that, I like the artist or a few songs and might not have gotten at full price. I’ve got about two thirds of them in my computer. I’m learning to love the DJ function in iTunes. That’s a whole other story though.

So on Wednesday at work our department admin says our new boss, (this is also a whole other story however, I try to keep office stuff out of this blog), wanted to take us all out to dinner on Thursday. This was the day I had been counting on for some chill time. Nope. Work, the gym and dinner downtown with the boss and the rest of the crew. It was a really nice dinner and a pleasant outting all together.

Friday…I finally made it. Our company is only open a half day on Friday this should help. Ok, so it did. Work, the gym and then the haircut that I’ve needed for two weeks and then home to get cleaned up and have a bite before going out to drumming. I did have a some time to relax in there. It was a good week though.

It seems there is, or maybe for me, an added bonus to being so busy and having so much to do. I lost weight this week. I’m not saying it’s the only reason. I did may the gym a few times and I changed some eating habits and they likely helped as well. I do think the activity had to help. 

Now we’re to Saturday. My birds that have felt neglected all week because I haven’t been home to let them out to play, decided 8:00am was as late as I was going to get to sleep. And even after getting up they were determined to make sure I wasn’t going to try to go back to bed. I’ve even been dive bombed a time or two. They are going to be so pissed off at me when I make them go back in their cages so I can go out and do all the things I’ve got planned for today. I’m not going to get it all done, that’s ok though. 

How was your week? 

Cheers

Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.

I can’t say there has been that much of note lately. At least not that I thought was really worth writing about. Something happened at my parents’ that I thought would make good fodder for this blog. I’ve forgotten it so I guess not. Oh, wait. I remember it. It will be fun. Guess you’ll have to look for it in a day or two. I’ve now even written it down. This will help.

I did go see my niece play soccer for her school team. This is the first year/season she has played for her school. She has played several seasons for the YMCA league. My sister played soccer when she was a kid. She was fearless. I’m really glad to see my niece continue in the sport. I have to say I really like the sport though I admit to not always understanding some of the finer bits. I never played the sport for anything other than Phys. Ed. in school and even then, they sort of kept the ball far away from me. I sure do enjoy watching though. I managed to get shouts of encouragement in, in between my conversation with my nephew about the finer points of the coloring of the planet Mercury for his science project. 

I’m in the process of that thing people call ‘Spring Cleaning’, except not really.

My living circumstances changed last year about this time. I’ve spent most of the year aquiring the furniture and things that I needed to complete my home. Things like a bed, a dining table and chairs, certain pots and pans. I’ve had help along the way. Some very generous students of my mother’s gave me a couch, chair and two ottamans, and another gave me a large tv. And of course there was the Winter Holiday and my parents gave me some nice cooking items. So I haven’t had to put it all together on my own. I didn’t have to worry really about my office as I brought all the furniture I needed with me to my new home. Now however, I’ve discovered, it’s really not what I want. 

Now I am in the process of figuring out what I want. Things like a desk, not a computer table. Taking height into consideration is quite a challenge. I’m short. My current computer table is too tall. I have to raise my chair and use a footstool for my feet in order to type comfortablly. I think I want doors and drawers. I’ve got stuff sitting on shelves that really could go in drawers. I don’t need it out all the time. Oh, and then there is the surface area. I want to be able to compute, write bills, and draw or make other art. This is giong to be a challenge. 

I am looking forward to a new desk though. I’m hoping to replace two pieces of furniture with it and make room to setup my easel. Oh what fun. 

I had a nice, interesting, somewhat annoying though surprisingly not too challenging time at work last week. It was much more frustrating and challenging for our network team. Our primary domain controller went down. Ok, pretty much gave up the ghost and called it quits. So they had to switch over to a different one. As I understand it, it was definately it’s own challenge. They were mostly down for about 3 hours that I can say for sure. I didn’t get emails on the blackberry from about 5:30 pm to about 8:45pm. So since I work mostly in the desktop support area, this wouldn’t be too big an issue. Except…I also support our Hyperion environment for the accounting and finance people and it is utilizing active directory for user authentication. So some changes had to be made. Fortunately, I have recently setup our development environment for  hyperion so I was able to try and test it there first, since I was doing this remotely, and find out I was going to be better off waiting until I got in the office the next day to fix this. Things were still processing and I had a backup plan if I couldn’t get the active directory to work so better not to  mess with it yet. The story ends with me having them up and running by my lunch time and everyone was able to get back in and work their little hearts out for the rest of the day. Hooray for me.

That was really all the week I could take. Though, after my niece’s soccer game my parents and I stopped at a ‘mexican’ restaurant for dinner. That was interesting. The only other thing I will say about it is this…they had Greek cheese, and American cheese and NO Mexican cheese. It’s a Mexican restaurant…What’s up with that?

Stay tuned folks. I promise to add more stuff and articles. I’ll get onto Games about another article or two. In case you didn’t notice, we’ve added a poll. We’re just curious as to what you’re reading so we’ve given you some choices. We’re looking into a few new addon’s for the site. Not sure yet if they will show up here for use or if you will just read about them. I’ve got some new requirements for another site that I help out with and I’m probably going to need to test more software. As always, I’ll try to share the experience. Just in case you don’t want the pain of experimentation yourself.  There will be some interesting stuff coming up. 

Cheers.

Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.

A repair guy for where I live came by to look at a problem I turned in to the office. We got to talking about music. I play guitar and have one or two sitting out for ease of use. It was great. We got to talk about the different recording issues we’ve both run into with some of the stuff on the computer. We’re neither one big operations. We just thought it’d be great to be able to record our music. We talked about different guitar things and pianos and such and I had a great time. He couldn’t fix the problem that day so we scheduled for him to come back the next week.

The next week was Friday, I was the last stop for the repair guy and we got to talking again.

We broke out the guitars and started some playing. I mostly play classical style stuff. I’m trying to learn flamenco, slowly. I know a few popular things, I can read music and chord diagrams so I can strum play a lot of stuff. I haven’t really been working on learning a lot of songs though. This guy new several more well known songs off the top of his head and he plays a blues style stuff that I’d like to figure out how to play. I want to figure out slide as well. *sigh*

I had a great time playing music with the repair guy. I learned something interesting. I have always been modest and apologetic about my playing. I am mostly self taught, though, I read music. I’m not very good at playing by ear. My music theory is very limited. I run into these people that either have all the theory or are phenominal players that have learned by ear and I don’t  figure I can compete.

Well, I can’t. However; it is not because I am not good. I am very good at playing what I know. I don’t know a lot of songs because I am thorough and single minded when it comes to learning a song. I play classical style guitar with a fair bit of finger work. When start a new song I will practise it for several times in a row. When I sit down to play/practise I will play the songs I know already first to keep them fresh and then I will play the song I am working on several times. Then I go back and play the familiar songs again and then the new song. I will do this over and over until I get to where I can play all the familiar songs and the new song without any notational reference. 

The really cool thing about getting to play music with the repair guy is, he was just as impressed with what I can play and I was with what he could play. How cool is that.

I am currently not the most versed or versitile guitar player and that’s ok. Maybe some day. And maybe now that I know this about playing music, I might find in me the need or desire to learn some of those other songs, and maybe even the ability.  It’s so cool what you can learn Playing Music.

Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.