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Just wanted to post a quick update about my grandmother, so as to not leave people hanging.
She apparently has stage 2b breast cancer, but it has not spread to the lymph nodes as far as they can tell which is a pretty hopeful diagnosis. I did some scouting around on the internet and that seemed to indicate that at this point it responds really well to treatment options. She's scheduled for surgery on the 14th of July.
So that's pretty good news, considering the situation.
By way of explaining my absence for the past few days things have been really hectic at work these past few days which means I've been dead when I get home without much energy to make a post up here. Hopefully things calm down over the course of the next week or so though...
I found out yesterday that my grandmother has breast cancer. It looks like they might have caught it early enough for it to be treatable but they won't know for sure until they run some more tests and/or get inside. She's going in today to find out more information.
It's hard to describe how I'm feeling right now. I'm not too terribly worried yet as, like I said, they think they caught it before it spread and there's a lot of advances in treatment over the past 10-15 years. I'm mostly just...stunned. It sorta doesn't feel like it's really happening. Hopefully the news today is good. Should know sometime this afternoon. My grandma is taking it as well as can be expected right now at least. She wanted to make sure she had her hair done before she went into the hospital, which is pretty normal for her. She gets her hair done before she does practically anything.
It hasn't been a terribly good week so far, so I'm hoping that it starts trending up soon...
What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.
I quite like this area, to be honest. It's city enough for me where there's some decent stores in the area when I need to buy things, but rural enough where it's not too much of a trek to find a nice place to walk around outside in the woods somewhere. I'm not really cut out for city living with people stacked on top of people. Too loud, too busy. I can visit big cities but I don't think I'd enjoy staying there.
My complaint would be that the area is in that fuzzy population zone where we're big enough to have national retailers come in for the generic stuff, but we're not big enough to really support specialty shops for people who are looking for different sorts of items. Case in point...we have one art supply store in the area and it's Michaels. To get more specialized items, you'd have to go to either Syracuse or Albany.
As I've been mentioning over the past couple weeks, I've been working on redesigning my friend's website ( http://www.wassyart.com) and I've entered the stage where I break out the design elements and create it as an actual web page.
Everything was going smoothly right up until I decided to see how horrible it looked in internet explorer 6. I freaking hate IE6. It's a non standards complaint piece of crap that should never have been released and now that better alternatives are out there should be left behind like the sack of garbage that it is.
Now only about 4-5% of the visitors to her website use IE6, but that's enough where I'd want it to be at least functional... So that's what I spent the evening doing. I got it all mostly working. Couple annoying issues but I'm almost ready to call it "good enough"
And then the fun will begin. It should move along pretty quickly once I get the basic layout done. Not much change in content, more of a facelift.
After Systematic Chaos was released 2 years ago, I doubted if I would ever be excited about the release of a new Dream Theater album. But then they released A Rite Of Passage as a single from their new release and I started getting excited and anticipating.
Well...today is the day. Black Clouds & Silver Linings has been released. I'm going to be leaving detailed impressions for a later post in a couple days once I have time to digest it, but my overall feelings of this release are pretty darn positive.
Lyrically, it's a fairly weak effort, continuing the trend started on Systematic Chaos. Almost everything with John Petrucci lyrics is fairly blah. Especially The Count Of Tuscany.
But musically, this album blows Systematic Chaos out of the water. One of the trends I was weary of was their tendancy to wedge crazy instrumental sections into the middle of songs without any transition or reason for being there. But this time out, they've pulled back from that a bit. There's a couple of rough spots, but overall, the songs have an actual structure to them and a natural flow.
Jordan Ruddess also impressed me with his restraint on the keyboards. He plays for the song more often than not and really contributes positively to the album, even on his solos.
But the real star is John Petrucci. This album contains some of his best work (and some of his worst...see Wither...but that's only one song). His solos are melodic when they need to be, technical when it's called for and overall awesome. Especially the solo in The Best Of Times. That's one of the most emotional guitar solos I've ever heard. And one of my favorites of all time.
Speaking of The Best Of Times, it's probably my favorite track on the album. An extremely emotional tribute to drummer Mike Portnoy's dad who passed away last year. The lyrics here are the very best the album has to offer, in my opinion.
Overall a solid effort that's a step in the right direction coming off of their weakest album (in my opinion). Great music tempered by very blah lyrics in spots.
Anyway, I'll leave it there for now with general impressions and I'll post up a more detailed review in a few days once everything sinks in. It's going to be a very good year for music.
We have a new pet in the apartment, adding to the growing menagerie which includes 2 ferrets, a cat and lots of fish. Several years ago, my friend Jay had a hamster which he was quite fond of. After it died he's always wanted another one but it never happened. Until Wassy gave him one yesterday as an early, early, early wedding anniversary gift. So...behold. Monk:
I don't post videos around here much but...this is just awesome. It's a group of people that apply auto-tune to news casters and politicians normal voices and make a pop type song out of it. Really, really well done
I'm quite pleased at the moment as I've pretty much finalized the new layout for the redesign that I'm doing of my friends website (Wassyart.com, might as well drop another link plug in). Now I need to rip it out of Photoshop and actually make it into a website, A process which I will be starting in a few minutes here on my lunch.
Pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm undecided if I want to post a little preview image up here or hold it until the redesign goes live. But the process was really rewarding. Well, it was also really frustrating too at times when things weren't working right. But as soon as everything clicked, and elements started falling into place it was extremely satisfying watching it all come together. More satisfying than progress on some of my other side projects anyway. I do think I'll keep doing this stuff as a hobby, at the very least. I'm excited about perusing it more.
Also last night, for dinner my friends and I went a little Indian. Our favorite keeper of the recipes, Pioneer Woman posted one for Chicken Tikka Masala. Considering this is one of our most favorite Indian food items, we decided to give it a shot. I took care of the cooking which went without incident except that I burned myself on the oven door pretty good. Owwww.
The end result was very awesome. I made it just a smidge too spicy so that next time I do it, I'll have to pull back a little bit on the heat, but we're definitely going to keep that dish in the rotation. It's fairly cheap too, now that we have all the spices and such for it. Tasty win.
Would you rather have one best friend or ten acquaintances? Why?
I've always been a quality over quantity sort of person when it comes to friends. One really good friend is worth 100 acquaintances in my opinion.
You don't really get much of a solid connection with an acquaintance like you do with a best friend. You can have a whole bunch of people you know but still be lonely because none of those people you can really talk to about stuff that's going on in your life. And once you get into a bad situation, one good friend can make all the difference whereas acquaintances are more likely to shy away.
Friends for the win.
I'm one of those guys who used to play Magic: The Gathering. I got into it briefly in middle school when it was all the rage and then about 3-4 years ago got into it pretty heavily for about a year. I played in tournaments, went to release events...the whole 9 yards. I ended up getting pretty decent at it, but eventually I realized that I was sinking way too much time and money into the hobby and started pulling away from it.
For example, I owned a Library of Alexandria which I bought for around $150. And I had 3 mana drains (english language). Those went for around $50-80 a pop when I bought them. Shortly after that was when I had my "Dear lord, I'm spending 70% of my income on a card game" moment which quickly led me to stop collecting. Last year I sold off a lot of my more expensive cards.
But yesterday I caught wind of a Magic: The Gathering game headed to the xbox live arcade. I liked playing the game...the strategy was really interesting to me. The part I didn't like was how hardcore you had to get into it and how much money you had to spend to get all the cards. While this new system isn't perfect (as in there's some limitations to the cards in the game and the deck customization) I think it'll scratch the itch for a more casual Magic experience. Sounds like they have a nice little platform for future expansion as well. Can't go wrong for $10 anyway.
Going to give it a try this evening to see how it runs.
