Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Calendar Available

The Google Calendar is one of those things that I think is just plain cool. Being able to access my calendar from anywhere is extremely valuable. For now, I'm just noodling with how I can make some things public vs. private, etc..

If your interested in subscribing to the calendar (e.g. you participate in Game Night, etc) try this link:

Monday, October 23, 2006

Dallas area BizTalk User Group

If you’re looking to get into a little community involvement with BizTalk Server, you’ve probably seen where they are starting a user group here in Dallas. This is just a reminder that they have a meeting coming up; details for which can be found on their website: http://biztalkusergroup.com/

They have a couple of notable charter members:

I Wanna be a Rock n Roll Star

ok..maybe not. Playing for my own enjoyment and relaxation would be enough.

But when my son received his first guitar back in July, it was a little "First Act" acoustic. I tried to ignore it, I really did. It just seemed like I'd find myself with these conflicting emotions; either smash the guitar since it was so out of tune (and my sons incessant strumming) or to pick it up and try to make something with it.

Late at night, after everyone was in bed, it would be there silently whispering my name :'zaaaaaach'.

With disdain for such a cheap feeling instrument written all over my face, I finally caved, and picked up the guitar and started noodling with it.

I used to play guitar, you know. Back in the day. Then Life happened and the thousands I had invested in guitar equipment over the years turned out to be worth only hundreds when liquidated.

First things first. I had to somehow get it into tune before I gave into the dark side and smashed the damn thing. Sending out feelers through the 'net I found a gem of a site called guitar.about.com.

There I found all I needed to get started. Even with a downloadable recording of low E to use as a reference note when tuning. In hindsight, I could have used our piano's E and been in tune with it.

In addition to the 'How to Tune a Guitar', I found other valuable refresher lessons. The only chords I could remember were D, G, A, E. Before long, I had trebled my chord repertoire and regained some basic scale knowledge (I used to be a big scale hound).

A little more sifting through digital goo turned up another gem: guitaretab.com. Within minutes I had tab to hundreds, if not thousands of songs!

The 'First Act' was a good starter, and I'll keep it indefinitely to cover my acoustic(when in tune, it sounds remarkably good), however, I just ordered an Ibanez ARX300CRS from guitarcenter.com. If your like me, and the name doesn't mean anything, here ya go! Its what I believe is going to be the Ibanez offering against a Gibson Les Paul, or Epiphone. We'll see...I'm not completely sold on the body style, but they have a 30 day guarantee I can take advantage of if I decide I don't like it.

Here it is Monday morning and low and behold I just discovered I only used The Computer this weekend for searching for guitar related info. Barely read email, no feeds and certainly never fired up Visual Studio!

What did I accomplish? I rekindled a love affair with music; I'll try to keep the flame from burning out this time! Rediscovered an old classic jam song: Led Zeppelin's, "Bring it on home"; with a little practice I was back at it. I also rediscovered the joy of the burning sensation in my fingertips because i don't have any callouses yet...right now they feel like I touched a hot skillet!

Ahhhh, but its worth it.. :)