All good books have dedications. So should blogs..
I want to dedicate this blog to my parents who raised me and shaped who I am as a person. I love you guys and miss you terribly and am looking forward to when I will be able to see you again.
The Comal Community Band performed it’s “Thank You” concert for First United Methodist Church in New Braunfels for the use of Wesley Hall as it’s summer practice facility.
Like my last set of recordings from the Hill Country Community Band, this is recorded from the crowd perspective. I’m sorry for the lack of volume on the first few songs as the venue was a bit loud at times.
The ZIP file with all of the songs can be downloaded here.
The following files were recorded at the Hill Country Community Band Spring 2010 Concert held on May 14, 2010 at First Baptist Church in Wimberly, TX.
These recordings are different than my normal ones – I placed the recorder to the rear of the sanctuary and left it running throughout the concert. Therefore, these recordings sound like they would if you were in the audience. The turn out was great and the concert went well.
This completes the long concert circuit of the months of April and May. The next performance will be by the Comal Community Band at the end of July and then both groups are busy on the 4th of July weekend.
If you want the full collection, you can download the full ZIP file at http://www.jeffreyrandow.org/mp3audio/hccb-spring10.zip (Corrected URL 5/15/10)
Puenteareas
Appalachian Morning
Second Suite in F: Movement 1 – March
Second Suite in F: Movement 4 – Fantasia on the ‘Dargason’
I have been neglecting posting concert MP3′s lately. This first batch is from a Comal Community Band Concert at Stone Oak Presbyterian Church on May 2, 2010. This is perhaps the best set of recordings that I have due to the acoustics of the performance venue. The second song (Texas Star) has a bit of a problem in the middle due to my recorder being knocked off of my stand.
As always, remember these songs are recorded from my perspective. Thus the sounds of certain sections will seem to be louder than what you would here in the audience (ahem, trumpets…).
Yeah, I know it hasn’t been two years yet, but I want to write this now rather than wait until next week. It’s been (almost) two years since the passing of my last living parent. For those who haven’t been following the past postings, my mother and I had a kind of “co-dependent” relationship. She was dependent on me to take care of her for day-to-day living and I suspended the rest of my life to function in that role. It was definitely worth the cost. However, I have been living with the problems of trying to re-enter society. In some matters I think I have done spectacularly. In other matters I have been a complete idiot and/or too stubborn.
My successes?
Getting out and doing more – I play in two local community bands and volunteer time at church for the tech team and coffee bar, as well as some time at the food pantry. All of this combined with work leaves me very little time each day.
Trying to get in better shape (more on this under my failures).
Getting better interacting with strangers – for those of you who know me, you could tell that I suffer from severe social anxiety. The root issue goes deeper than social anxiety, unfortunately. However I have been making a point to get in random conversations with people and try to small talk. It hasn’t been easy and sometimes it is a bit terrifying.
Being outdoors more. I probably have spent more time outside the past few weekends than the last several years combined. I’m growing a new garden (to make me eat healthier).
My failures?
Not doing enough to get in better shape. I still try to walk Rudy daily with varying distances and difficulties. I also have a personal trainer and try to work out three times a week at Anytime Fitness in New Braunfels (let me know if any of yall need a workout buddy). I find that I have made myself too busy and by the time I can go to the gym, I am so exhausted that I don’t spend enough time to do it.
I still get stressed and un-nerved way too much. Most of you know the reasons for this and you know that I haven’t rectified the problem yet. I’m working on it – that’s all I can say about it.
I have come to the conclusion that I am a complete moron in relationships. Perhaps “moron” isn’t a strong enough word. This aspect of my life is so difficult due to the fact that the last meaningful relationship I had was over 12 years ago. The world has changed and I haven’t changed with it. Throw in my social anxiety and things dot get much better.
I need to learn from the successes to tackle my failures. As many have noted, most of my problems are mental in nature. I acknowledge this, but then come to the realization that changing my mental processes is an arduous journey.
I’ll keep fighting the good fight and know that everything will work out the way it was intended.
You are seeing this post if the website that you were trying to visit (or view content from) is still not recovered. I hope to get the network blog back up by the end of the weekend. The Weather site may take longer, but the weather data is still available at Weather Underground or at http://wx.findu.com/n5snt-2.
Update 1:
OK, here is the story… I currently run my websites via a virtualization solution on my Windows 2008 R2 Server box at home. Unfortunately, I was running a slightly too unstable (that is in hindsight) Linux distribution on this webserver. On Wednesday afternoon, the box decided to scramble my ext4 partition. I then tried running fsck on it for the next two days to try to resurrect the data (I was OK with just wiping the install). Alas, my /home directory was completely trashed. Also, I had neglected to make a snapshot of data for the past few months. So I’m now forced to recreate the website from my DB backups from early this year. I’ve elected not to restore the files for now from my last backup and am just rebuilding everything. This majorly sucks, but at least I’m going to end up cleaning up things. The major suckage will be rewriting the URLs to make the photogallery work.
On the matter of the photogallery, it’s going to be a while for me to resurrect it. In the meantime, you can visit my Picasa gallery that has most of my photos. I was setting this up while I was waiting to recover the hard drive.
For now, the blog works, but none of the links that access content outside of WordPress doesn’t work. I’ll recover those tomorrow…
Update 2:
I went ahead and disabled access to the photogallery directly when accessing it from a different URL. The link in the theme still works. So if you are seeing this coming from Google, that is why. :(
Update 3:
OK, I resurrected the network blog and got the weather site to work. I’m also (slowly) reincorporating the pictures back into the photogallery. This may take a while and it will take even longer to recaption them…
Here is another set of recordings from our concert yesterday. Please note that these songs are for personal use only and are mainly intended for friends who could not attend the performance. I will remove the links upon request.
Song Notes: These songs are from my perspective in the band. So note that they are low-brass and percussion heavy. This would be what the concert would sound like if you were a performer. Also note that the IPhone has a good dynamic range, but some of these songs exceed this range from time to time. Also, the first two songs were recorded with the microphone in the wrong direction (sorry). Also note that these songs were performed after a maximum of 4 rehersals since restarting for the fall.
It seems that this has been one of worst weeks in the past year. Turmoil and sorrow at the office. Being sick and overwhelmed at the same time. Missing out on life. – Let me back up a little and start from the beginning:
1. One of my dear friends has left my office. This hurts me as much as when Stephen, Ryan, and Wayne left. Maybe a bit more. This was not her fault – I feel it was more the decisions from the powers-that-be at the office. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last time that I am completely befuddled by what they are attempting to do. Wait, I understand what they are doing – I just questions the methods and decisions that are being made. There are others there that I care about so I must press on for now.
2. I should be happy this week. The weather is more to my liking without any sun for the past three days. However, it seems that the mold in the air is kicking my butt right now. I think it is a sinus infection, but a cold wouldn’t be out of the question as of now. I left work feeling absolutely miserable at 2 PM and promptly slept for 4 hours before waking up to fix supper.
3 Due to weather and the above sickness, I had to miss my practice on Tuesday night up in Wimberly with the Hill Country Community Band and then bowling tonight (although I probably would have stunk up the game with my general lethargy that I’m feeling right now…). The concert and football game on Saturday are subject to being cancelled for me if I don’t feel a little better. Secondly, I wanted to drop by the fairgrounds and buy a sausage-on-a-stick and some roasted corn. It seems unlikely that I’ll be able to make that either.
The server migration has been (mostly) completed… I’m now running the CentOS x64 webserver in a Hyper-V virtual machine on Windows Server 2008 R2 (i.e., the server side of Windows 7). If you are planning on a Linux install on the R2 version of Hyper-V, I would recommend skipping the RC of the new Linux integration components. I get better performance without them… So I’ll wait until they are properly in the kernel sometime in the December/January timeframe…
I still need to do some Apache optimization that I was sorely lacking before.
Enough geek talk for now.. I’ll try to keep that over at the network blog…
I’ve been mulling over the writing of this post for the past few days as I try to “find my path”. This has involved taking a step backwards, appraising where I am, and looking forward to the future. I generally do not enjoy this process and am liking it less even now. What has concerned me is not that I am trying to adapt to change, but the steps I have taken to effect those changes. I must admit that change is a very necessary step in my life course as of now. The path I was following would have me wallowing in self pity, despair, and depression. However, as I take a step back to see what I have done, I have not kept true to myself. As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet – “to thine own self be true” – but then I realize that I haven’t been true to myself. Shakespeare’s advice then continues “it must follow, as the night the day, thou can not then be false to any man.” How can I be true and steadfast to others when I am not to myself. I don’t want to be a fake person. That would benefit no one, especially myself. So now I must temper myself and make sure that the changes I am making are ones that I can honestly look at myself in the mirror and say “I’m proud of that.” This realization hit me like a load of bricks this past week and my conscience has been weighing on me – convicting me of following the “easy” path.
So where to go now? My base problem remains. Most of my troubles/problems all have the same root issue – self esteem/confidence – something of which I am sorely lacking. I must make solving this issue my paramont concern because no amount of superficial changes I make to other aspects of life will have a lasting impact if I can’t solve the root problem. The question of the moment is how do I do so? I’ve made strides, but my self esteem is still much lower than the average in society in general. To conquer this, one must need to get more assertive and more willing to place a higher value on your self than others. However, at this point I run into a paradox as I value others above my own well being. Thus, you can see my conundrum.
For now, I’ll leave the deep thoughts that have been troubling me over the past two weeks and move to lighter issues:
I went to my first movie of the year – G.I. Joe. I still need to go see Harry Potter, but I haven’t had the chance.. Maybe next weekend or one night after work. Then again, I discovered that Star Trek is playing in a theater in San Marcos (I’m an engineer and MOST engineers are trekkies… I know there are a few exceptions, but … Then again, it took me until my Junior year in college to see the Star Wars trilogy and that was after a friendly kidnapping…)
Work is work.. We kinda got a day and a half of holidays back, but at the cost of now having to work a full work week whenever we have a holiday (i.e., we will close on Labor Day, but you are expected to work the full 40 hour week to include Fridays). It doesn’t seem like an improvement to me. But then I see much darker things happening in the forseeable future at the office. Contrary to what our bosses may think, the housing market is not into recovery mode as of yet. Housing values have not reset down to a realistic market value and have been kept overly inflated by the manipulation of the market by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the President of the United States. I don’t see any recovery until we hit the hard bottom. After the $8500 housing tax credit expires at the end of the year, the current mini-boom of housing starts will end and we will have a more depressed industry. Gloomy, ain’t I today? That’s why I would probably change professions if I either quit or get laid off from my current office. It would take until 2011~2012 before we can get any meaningful change in the market.
I have Jury Duty later this month.
I need to travel (both because of work reasons and the fact I need to get a recharge). Maybe TFMA and another event in the October/November timeframe. I have 4.5 weeks of PTO that I must use between now and December 20th (this may change due to the changeover in Accounting software, and if I still am working by that time…)
Football Season, baby!! If you tailgate for any of the UT games, holler at me and I want to come by to visit. I’ve never tailgated and want a good indoctrination into it…
Why did MS wait a week and half to release R2 Server after the release of Windows 7 to Technet/MSDN?
I have a lunch “meeting” tomorrow.. Will be different and interesting…
I’m calling this post closed now before I crash out on the keyboard (it’s been a long and adventurous day). Have a wonderful week and keep me in your prayer’s as I try to shake out my problems…
Comments are closed | 