Last week I was having a discussion with about music, and the topic of the Phantom of the Opera came up. I love this musical, lately buoyed by the recent extremely well done film remake.

Dave was surprised to find out that I really like that musical. I know I have posted about this in the past, but I really do like the character of the Phantom, his artistic representations, and the interplay of good and evil that he represents.

The Phantom’s personification of being reclusive, outcast, lonely and fragile but at the same time brilliant speaks to human nature itself. Even the songs themselves reflect the very essence of depression and lonliness… he calls everyone to join him in his music of the night… a depressed, covetous, single threaded insane existence that everyone has glimpsed at least once in their days.

In the end the story unfurls and the Phantom realizes how to let it all go. Redemption, in a way. I find the whole work masterful and it doesn’t help matters that the music is downright awesome.

So that, in a few rambling paragraphs, is why I love Phantom of the Opera. It is pure art, both visually and audibly. This is what happens when I am forced to be awake waiting for support resources to arrive.

So I got antsy and decided to install the new Fedora Core 4 onto my MythTV machine. I took this opportunity to install the new hardware.

I was fully expecting a gigantic pain in the butt and only got a minor pain in the butt. The Fedora installer apparently didn’t like creating my logical volumes the first two times. The third time was the charm, however, and my Fedora goodness installed like the good little OS that it is.

I got as far as the yum repository update when my cell phone rang, and support has taken over my personal time once again. I’m waiting for call backs from our support providers, so I thought I’d put this little update together.

As a result of my new upgrade, my Gyration wireless keyboard and mouse works!! Clearly the best $35 I’ve spent, thanks woot! It is so nice to be able to sit on the loveseat and control the computer. What a great invention.

Tomorrow I will dive into configuring MythTV proper, and hopefully those trials will be few. I’m looking forward to it, 0.19 has some great new features to enjoy!

I have received the go-ahead from all concerned members to upgrade my MythTV hardware and software starting on Wednesday. Hopefully I will no longer have as many severe problems as I have in iterations past, but expect to see one or two status updates as I get into this project.

The new version of MythTV came out this week with a lot of new interesting features. One that is most interesting to me is the fact that they are storing videos in native .mpg files which will make backing up shows much easier. Version 0.20 is going to have support for animated menus and various other cool things, so it will be a fun wait for that one.

My New Years Resolution to eliminate debt met up against serious opposition over the weekend. It all started with picking up my mail on Friday night.

There was a small customer appreciation card from Dell’s Employee Purchase Program. It offered 20% in additional discount on selected Dell laptops and desktops. I got as far as pricing systems out before I realized that going cheap wasn’t going to completely satisfy me, and going for the system I wanted would’ve been a serious compromise of my resolution.

I made every argument in the book to myself… we’re getting ready to pay off Tasha’s laptop, so its just continuing the payment to get one about the same price… the discount is really good and it would be the most “worth it” now… my other computer isn’t performing as well as I would like it to, etc. etc.

In the end, I slept on it. I decided that it would be in our best interest to wait, get some more of these credit cards taken care of, and then be able to really get what I want and be able to enjoy it. There will be other sales to take advantage of.

Delaying gratification is hard.

If anyone needs to study the intricate interactions of people, dogs, and static electricity you need go no further than my living room. I’ve zapped poor Teddy so many times that I am surprised that he even comes up to get petted anymore.

It has been AWFUL this week. I wish I could just get up off of my couch without sending blue-white sparks everywhere. I am marginally concerned for the well being of the multitude of electronic devices that reside in our living room area. So far there have been no mishaps, but it only takes one to really ruin a day.

Spring can’t come fast enough. 😛

I always felt a little criminalized when exiting Best Buy or Sam’s Club… it is good to know that I can just refuse if I wanted to.

I know it will probably mortify my lovely wife if I get all rabid on that poor spiky haired kid at Best Buy that checks receipts, or those wrinkly old ladies that insist on leaving the highlighter print at Sam’s Club. So I probably won’t be doing this… when she’s with me. 🙂

This morning’s workout consisted of and I knocking out 14 Sochin in preparation for the demonstration at ICC. My fifteenth for the day was done in front of a live studio audience.

That being said, I will move onward to said demonstration. It all started innocently enough… Matt and I were tapped to devise an “attention getter” break. We decided we didn’t want to do anything that was being done during the main program, so we came with the idea of Matt breaking with his patented heymaker roundkick.

It worked. Too well. There is both photographic and video evidence of his roundkick smashing through the board with such force that it careened off of my forehead (leaving a neat little divet) and flew over my head and bonked one of our young girls from Mapleton dojo right in the forehead.

As noted, I think she was more embarassed/surprised and quickly became tearful and ran off for a minute or two until the scare was over. I generally attempted to ignore the small trickle of blood that was growing on my forehead, I did try to wipe it off with my hand pad in between sections but it didn’t work that well.

The rest of the demo went off without a hitch. Obvious crowd favorites were the Kid Power Stranger Danger skit, Womens Self Defense skit, and of course, the breaking demonstrations. To this day I have no idea how Sensei Brewer and Sensei Hartman are able to concentrate so much power into such a little space.

Sensei Hartman’s four way break was so quick it all but folded over the boards in the hands of the people holding them. Sensei Brewer hit his stack of three board with a reverse punch that rattled with such power that the front two boards were shook out of the hands of the holders, causing them to drop the third board. A quick reverse punch later and it too broke. Very impressive.

The environment was among the more unsettling that we have had demonstrations in… it was a small rectangular area with really slick carpeting that reminded me of the PTEC building at Pekin High School. It made doing Sochin quite interesting, as my feet tended to heat up and skid on this surface. Matt and I did a respectable enough job though, and continued into our full speed match. I won this time around, but it was a far cry from the quality of the last Mapleton demo.

The part that was most unsettling was the fact that we were surrounded on all sides by children and parents. Usually our demonstrations are up against a wall or a closed stage somewhere, this caused me a lot of anxiety because of the board breaking that was involved. Luckily, aside from the slight snafu of the opening break nothing else unexpected happened, and I think that everyone was pretty pleased with the end result.

I had several kids come up and ask me questions and tell me how neat they thought everything was. I encouraged them to come down and join us, and they seemed to be pretty engaged. All in all, I think it was one of the better demos that we have done in awhile. Everyone involved did a fantastic job!!

I spent another hour or two tonight playing my guitar. I’m still figuring out a good portion of Jenny Wren, at the same time getting reacquainted.

I wish fingertip callouses were permanent. When I was playing semi-regularly (for me, that means monthly) it didn’t really hurt my fingers to play for awhile. Right now its uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable to keep me from doing it.

I did some chord progressions and practice strumming tonight, which is by far my worst skill. So far it has been pretty fun. It helps to have my cousin available because he is so good and can kind’ve “sound out” things that I don’t have tablature for. Then he shows me how to play it and its easy to learn. Trying to dig through it on my own is much harder.

Its good to get back into this somewhat relaxing hobby. 🙂

Who would’ve thought that a novelty sport like snowboard cross could teach a little something about arrogance. This year, there was a new event at the Olympics, like motocross only on snowboards. The point is to make it to the bottom first and don’t get knocked over by the rest of the racers type of event.

The US women’s favorite for this event pulled way ahead of the pack during this race and thought she had it won. She went over the last jump and decided to showboat a little and “tweak” the jump and dumped on her ass. The next girl flew past her to win the gold… she threw away the gold medal because she couldn’t just finish the race, she had to be arrogant and rub it in (or flourish as she crossed the finish line, depending on your interpretation).

The lesson here: don’t celebrate until you’ve won. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t be fancy when simple will do the job.