jimsjournal
| Muddled Mind-- 04/11/03 |
jimsjournal |
|
|
I'm tired and my mind is muddled. I've spent far too much time over the past three or four weeks channel surfing from one 24/7 cable news station to the next. Five minutes of news padded and stretched to fill the hours. The news, however, has been good. The fall of a dictator. The liberation of an oppressed people. The end of a fascist reign of terror and torture. The statues of Saddam coming down like the Berlin Wall. I've also spent too much time on the Internet, going from blog to blog, from news source to news source to opinion source to debating forum, around and around. Haven't entered much here, I've been too busy posting in the comment sections of various blogs. It's Friday -- I looked at the Friday Five -- First question was what was the first band you saw in concert (I assume that means real professional group not local rock groups in some road house) and I think that group was The Four Freshman [note, this name has been in use for half a century; these are obviously not the original group] in the main auditorium at SUNY/NewPaltz, probably in the fall of 1963 (or maybe early in '64). But the other Friday Five questions want to know favorite song today, favorite album, etc. and I can't narrow things down like that, it varies from one day to another. (I really don't like "What three books would you want on a dessert island?" type questions.) However, I will tell you that while attending SUNY/New Paltz I also saw Fats Domino in concert there (and he is one of my all-time favorites) and Gale Garnet (her biggest hit was "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" -- I can't find a webpage for her and amazon.com only lists that one single, no albums at all -- and yet I know I once owned two of her albums) and Dion & the Belmonts (and, hey, I still like "The Wanderer" and "Run Around Sue"). I was at Woodstock -- the original in 1969. And I saw a few concerts at Binghanton University over the years and also at the arena in town. Saw Bob Dylan in Montreal back in January of '74 and saw him again in Binghamton several years later. He was at the new arena at URI this winter but Nancy is not a Dylan fan -- I said Hey, you want to go? and she replied I already saw him with you once -- and no, neither Sean nor Jennifer had any interest either. I have seen a number of groups at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, a popular rock club in Providence with my daughter and her friends. We had tickets once for Foo Fighters there back in '98 but I had to go out of town on business and couldn't make it -- so Nancy drove Jennifer there -- and two songs into the performance of the first of three opening acts she decided that both the music and the sheer over-amplified volume of it was too much for her, so she arranged for Jennifer to ride home with another local parent who was there and she escaped. (I like the Foo Fighters and I would have enjoyed the performance.) It's Friday afternoon and I have so much work to do that I will probably put in several hours of work over the weekend. I just have more to do than I have time to do it in... or maybe I'm disorganized and distracted. *sigh* Partly it is a question of fighting with my tools. I'm not happy with the software we have been using to create our courseware (both graphics and word processing) and we have been supposed to switch to new software and also to be using templates developed by another part of our company, but the process of explaining the way this should function keeps getting postponed for various reasons. In the meanwhile, a couple of us decided to charge ahead and try using the new stuff -- but we've run into technical problems using these templates in a set of unfamiliar tools, to the point where we have both thrown up our hands and gone back to using the old tools. Grumble, grumble. So that cost me a bunch of time that I can't spare and now I'm scrambling to catch up to where I want to be... because I know that in a few weeks I'll probably have to convert everything I'm doing over into the new platforms anyway and that will eat up more time that I don't have. At least the weather is supposed to be wet and gloomy on Saturday. I think Sunday is supposed to be sunny and milder, maybe in the upper fifties, so maybe if I spend most of Saturday working I can be free to enjoy some of Sunday. |
|
|
previous entry |