For several years The Independent (great local free paper) has put on Hopscotch. Last year I went down town during the event and there were a lot of excellent parties at various locations and I said I would make sure to attend the full event this year. So as soon as I saw the event posted I went ahead and purchased the all shows wrist band. Hopscotch is a bit different from any music fest I've ever been to. So far everything was out in the woods somewhere, on a large farm, etc. However Hopscotch takes place across 12 different downtown clubs and music halls over three nights with 105 bands. There's also a lot of day parties but unfortunately I didn't make it to any of those.

Wednesday evening I spent an hour or so listening to all the bands available for Thursday evening. I planned out where I wanted to go. Thursday I left work early to go pick up my wrist band, did a quick stop by the gym to account for the forthcoming indulgences and I was ready for a good time.

Unfortunately most of the venues I wanted to hit had long lines and I'd rather not waste my time standing in a line so I started hitting other venues and listening to bands that were generally good but not exactly my thing, the sort of stuff where it's like two college sophomores with christmas lights on their mic stands and obscure slide shows projected onto a sheet. So knowing now that I'd have to contend with lines I'd have to start showing up to shows a good 20 minutes early if not more. Thursday night was Oneohtrix Point Never then XRay Eyeballs and Cold Cave. Cold Cave was pretty awesome, the others were good as well but not quite awesome.

So Friday I knew the game, I was ready but some friends wanted to meet for dinner. I hit Drive-By Truckers until we met up for dinner. Then I got started. I hit up King Mez, which I'd seen before at The Pour House along with Kooley High, he was much better that first time when accompanied by other hiphop artists and a crowd that was much more into hip hop, oh well. Tried to get into The Pour House to see Braids, everyone I knew was talking about them but unfortunately I gave up after standing in the line for twenty minutes or so. Lets go to Slims, that place is never packed. Ran into Maria from work with her husband and a friend, chatted them up a bit on the street. Nothing good at Slims, ok lets try Apple Juice Kid back at Tir na'nog. Wow, those guys were great, mostly just mixing together random hit songs in interesting ways but they had the crowd moving and I was dancing like a fool the entire show, they're local, I should make sure to check them out more often. I knew the next show I wanted to see would be packed so I made sure to go ahead and get in. Japandroids are this awesome hard driving rock band but it's just a guitarist and a drummer, truly amazing sound for such a limited band.

Woke up late, but made it to the gym on Saturday somehow. Feeling a bit like crap, I thought I'd come home take a short nap and head out for some of the day parties but that didn't happen. I ended up making it out at about 6 to see the two big shows at City Plaza. Superchunk ok i guess. But The Flaming Lips were where it's at. Such an incredible stage show, they really know how to get the crowd into things. They of course played their hit She Don't Use Jelly which sounded awesome after not hearing it for about 10 years. I left a bit early to catch All Tiny Creatures then Toro Y Moi which was pretty great. I also enjoyed that The Lincoln had a live DJ spinning on stage during the set changes, nice touch. I stuck around to see a bit of Future Islands but I gave up, couldn't stand the lead singer's constantly strained voice. Headed back to the same place I'd gone every night for the last show, The Pour House to catch Budos Band and even got a bit of D-Town Brass before they left the stage. Budos Band was awesome as every late show at the Pour House had been so far.

Sunday woke up late late late but was treated to a nice lunch courtesy of marinka_mku with my good friend Bryan and her neighbor. Hit the pool relaxed, watched a bit of a movie and was even given a second meal much to my surprise. Even with a full day of relaxing Monday was a struggle to keep up and I ended up working from home so that I could focus on my tasks with as little distraction as possible. All in all it was an awesome weekend.

Photos, though crappy cell phone photos, available for your viewing pleasure.

A lot has changed. I know I can't explain this to your satisfaction so I won't waste the effort. I thought I could find what was there years ago but it didn't happen. You say I didn't try but trust that I did. Sorry.

A lot can happen in 90 days.

• Almost 90 days ago I turned 30 and decided I wanted to change a lot about my life. I wanted to improve my health and improve my mindset.
• Roughly 90 days I met a great new friend.
• Roughly 60 days ago I finally decided to pursue my goal of better health. My new friend and I decided to join a crossfit gym together. I've been at least 3 days a week since and I hope to start going more frequently.
• Roughly 30 days ago I doubled down on the gym thing and started a new diet which forbids many things I thought I needed. Mainly processed foods, grains, and dairy. I don't miss any of the foods I've left out of my diet.

Today is roughly 90 days since I decided to change. I'm happier now than I've been in a long time for many reasons. Today I've lost 40lbs. My jump rope is still only passable, I'm still winded after a 400m run but I'm feeling much better in general. Today I'm healthier than I've been in at least five years. I exceeded my health goal by 30% and I effectively completed it in two months rather than the three since the first month I did nothing.

Today I'll set new goals goals. They'll be much the same, continue improving my health. I realize I can't expect to lose as much weight as fast as I have the first 90 days, but I'm going to try as hard as possible to do so.

I don't think I did very well on my goal of being a better person so I want to make sure I focus on this as well. I tend to throw away friendships and I'm not very happy about that. If we've not talked in a while I'll probably try to get in touch, if I don't you're welcome to get in touch with me, though I suspect no one from my past will read this. Email is best, sdodson at sdodson dot com.

Oh, and the guitar that's been sitting on its stand since I moved into my town house, I want to learn how to play again. Maybe after 15 years I've finally developed a sense of rhythm.

Friday, I received e-mail that my Pandaboard had shipped. This was much faster than I had anticipated, most people were telling me to expect back orders of 3-6 months. I wonder if the decreased lead time is due to TI's announcement of the OMAP5 platform. I suspect a fair number of people are now waiting for OMAP5 devices to hit the market as it looks like a very impressive platform.

My ultimate goal is to put together a set top box but I imagine it will take a while to get up to speed on the platform so I'm not going to rush out to purchase the necessary accessories to get it set up in the living room. For the time being I'll start preparing the development environment. It looks like Fedora 13 is pretty much ready to go for ARM which should make things pretty easy. If this works out well I'll need to look at a 24/7 storage device, currently I have no systems which run 24/7. I could probably attach a USB drive to my wifi router, I don't see myself needing to have more than a TB or two online.

I have no idea what I want to do. In fact, right now I'm being asked what my job title should be and I'm somewhat drawing a blank. It's currently "Sr. Systems Administrator" which doesn't really line up with what I do on a day to day basis. The work I do is mostly development support, configuration management, and release planning. Basically I work with a development team to manage their development environment and get everything ready to hand off to our IT department for daily operations.

I think right now I'm leaning towards Solutions Architect work with focus on JBOSS technologies, essentially deeper knowledge of the tools and platforms I'm working with now. Oh and not "Solutions Architect" in the pre-sales sense, I don't like the conflation of that title / role, yet another problem.

So apparently I've got two claims as a member of a class action suit in Pettet vs State Farm of North Carolina. I normally don't pay attention to class action suits because it generally ends up being something like a free coupon for some piece of software I'd never use as in the DRAM suit. But this one seems different, the documentation lays out how they legal staff will be paid and what we'll receive being a member of the class. It turns out that the legal staff will be paid not out of the settlement but out of a different set of funds and that the class members will receive a full refund for the premiums that were potentially overcharged.

I'm not sure yet if I'm entitled to a refund, but I'll definitely pay more attention to class action suit mailings I receive in the future.

Fake A Call, $2.99, by Great Life Church: Schedule a fake call to get your out of a sticky situation.

I'm not sure what Great Life Church is, searching around the web didn't find anything that seemed to be associated with this application. But I find it quite funny that they're publishing an application designed to make it look as if you're taking an urgent call so you can excuse yourself from whatever boring obligation you're engaged in at the time.

Thou shalt not lie... but faking is cool!

Where's the source browser in Launchpad? It's like they don't want me to look at it. Particularly https://launchpad.net/gwibber

Additionally, the only reason I really want to view the history is because the author provides no Changelog, wtf?

RAGE

I'm just going to keep editing this as I find my way around Launchpad.  I found it, I guess I should have known to click on the little yellow yield looking sign, that's so intuitive.  Anyway, it occurs to me that perhaps Launchpad is trying to abstract away what things really are, simplify them so it's more approachable? I keep trying to figure things out based on what I already know, clicking on the big link that says "trunk" hoping to find the history of the trunk yet finding the same useless screen only a manager could appreciate. Details aside I feel like I'm stuck in a loop on Launchpad, perhaps remove some links?

There's two things I've noticed while trying to get anything running in Wine. First, Ubuntu users seem to rate everything as gold even while there are tons of flaws which I'd say preclude an app from being rated as gold. Second, it's a sea of mindless "sudo  wget -O - http://somesite.com/fuck-my-system-up-royally.sh | /bin/sh" crap. winetricks seems legit but there's a ton of other bullshit

I know all Ubuntu users aren't clueless, for example btm and teferi are sharp people, but there's enough clueless Ubuntu users to piss me off such that I don't want to deal with that community at all.

I'm thinking I should stop tagging things as rants because that's all I write about these days.