This happened in the stands last night at the Bruins vs Canadiens game in Montreal.

These are the same Montreal fans who were so offended by Zdeno Chara last season that they called 911.

I am the master and commander of the entire animal kingdom.

No, really!

This morning the cat was spending more time with Jen than with me so of course I wanted to do something to make the cat super jealous.  I opened up the shade on the bedroom window and looked outside… 

Nothing.  No animals.  So I called toward the window, “Here deer deer deer,” and then I started putting my shoes on.  I looked up a moment later and lo and behold, a deer was walking by in the woods, about 30-40 yards from our backyard!  I called, and it came!  It was a doe again, probably one of the two who still visit us from time to time.  We haven’t seen the whole family of eight or so since last fall.

I think the deer in our woods might have been part of a genetic experiment to cross breed white tail deer with chameleons, because when they are back in the trees and walking around I can see them, but when they stop walking… woah, they vanish.  Perfect camouflage.  It’s a little creepy.

However, I now know that when I want the deer to stop hiding and come out and play with us, all I have to do is summon up my new found superpower and call them.  It’s true, I control the animal kingdom.

And you thought I was just some random goofball with a Google account.  This makes you want to treat me with a little more respect, doesn’t it.

I did a little reading up on iTunes Match crashing on a couple of Apple forums. One suggestion was that there is a file in my library that is causing the problem. It showed how to view a file’s cloud status and I had a bunch in error status. I was able to determine why for all but three of the songs and I removed them from the library. Hopefully it will be able to finish now. I also started the process on my desktop in order to get some of the songs that are missing from my MacBook.

Wish me (cloud) luck.

I mentioned the other day that I bought into iTunes Match.  I tried setting it up the other night.  I had 23,000 or so files in my library.  Over 19,000 of those can be matched… I think.  The reason I say I think is that I saw a message along those lines pop onto my iTunes screen just before it crashed.  Well, just before it crashed one of the times.  I continuously try to get the Match process underway.  The first time it hung up on me while searching for matches.  The next 10 or so times it crashed either as the matching step is completing, or as the upload is starting.  I am getting seriously pissed off.  I haven’t had a chance to poke around the interwebs looking for people bitching about similar problems, but I doubt I’m the only one.

One more brief mention of last night’s band practice.  When I was in high school I played in my first cover band.  By the time I hit music school I didn’t want to play covers anymore.  I didn’t do it again until 2002.  Things are so much different here in the 21st century than they were back in the stone age of the late 80’s and early 90’s.  When I was young and the band wanted to play a new cover, we all had to sit down and try to learn the song by ear.  Occasionally we would admit defeat and go to a music store and try to buy sheet music, but usually not.  We also had to share tapes of the songs with each other so that everyone could have a copy to try and learn from.  Today we don’t have those troubles.  Today if you want to hear a song you can go to YouTube, or search myspace music, or just Google the title.  If you can’t figure out a song by ear you can Google the title along with the word “tabs” and in almost every case you will get a link to a guitar or bass tableture that you can use to easily learn the gist of the song.  It’s so easy now.  How did we manage when we were kids?  It seems like so much extra work!

The Bruins are playing the Canadiens tonight.  It was a pair of losses to Montreal that marked the low point of Boston’s horrible 3-7 start to the season.  Since losing that second game they have gone 8-0 and managed to jump from last place in the Eastern Conference all the way up to a playoff spot.  Let us hope that the win streak continues and we put Montreal back into their place. 

In other hockey news, Sidney Crosby is going to play tonight after having been out of the Penguins line up since January.  This is great news for hockey fans, as the league finally gets its best player back.  It’s bad news for Eastern Conference hockey fans as now the already excellent Penguins are going to get 10 times better.  I don’t expect him to put up MVP numbers tonight, but I also don’t expect it to be too terribly long before he starts.  As much as I loathe seeing Pittsburgh win, I am very happy to see him back.  Now if we could just get Marc Savard back too.  Hang in there, Savy!

As for the Red Sox… Really?  Bobby Valentine?  Really?  Ummm… Really?

Urgh.

I for one was not sad to see Dale Svuem (spelling?) go to the Cubs.  I still remember his stint as the Red Sox third base coach in 2004 and 2005 and I can only imagine that if he’s the overall boss we’d be seeing him having base runners trying to score from second base on bunts.  Hey Dale, would it kill ya to put up a stop sign just once?

But at the same time… Bobby Valentine?  Really?

That was the busiest weekend in a long time.

On Saturday we went to Bank of America and officially closed our accounts.  $5 fee to use our debit cards?  No thanks.  The President of the company telling us that Bank of America “has a right to make a profit”?  No you don’t.  We’ve changed banks and moved on to bigger and better things.

In the process we learned that if a charge is under dispute and the account the charge is attached to is closed, the company the complaint is made against CAN REOPEN THE CLOSED ACCOUNT without the owner of the account’s consent.  Apparently, one of our newly closed accounts is going to be reopened without our permission today so we have to re-close the account.  Buh Bye, Bank of America.

From there we went to piano lessons and karate class, and did a lot of cleaning around the house and raking in the yard.  Then it was off to Mike and Tammy’s daughter’s fifth birthday dinner at Texas Roadhouse.  The reservation was for 12 people.  The staff tried to seat us in two booths.  As in, separately.  The punch line is that the two separate booths were next to two adjoining six seat tables.  Umm… can we have the table please so that our group can actually… ya know… be a group?  Thaaanks.

After that we went home and met up with Jen, who had been at work, and did some Thanksgiving supply shopping.  While out we stopped at a craft store and the kids picked up a couple of paint by number sets.  Talk about a hit!  It’s almost all my step son has talked about ever since.  They both are having fun working on their paintings.

On Sunday morning we had the Dead Relatives Tour 2011.  We all went to the cemetery to visit the graves of my mother’s parents, and my father’s mother, brother, aunts, uncles, and cousin.  After the visit we all go out to lunch together.  I tried very hard to explain to the kids that this event is a happy occasion where we all spend time together and focus on the happy memories.  My step daughter is having a tough time with the concept of death these days.  I’m not sure where that came from, but she’s had a couple of upset moments.  She was fine yesterday though.  My step son could not get enough information about my relatives.  He asked a thousand questions.  He was fascinated with everything, especially my father’s uncle Jimmy, and my uncle Johnny.  Mostly because I’ve talked to him about both of them.  We have a couple of pieces of furniture that once belonged to Jimmy, and both kids have some memories of their mom and I going to Johnny’s wake and funeral.  Of course, after going to great lengths to explain how it was a happy occasion, there was a moment when my step son was asking why some graves have flags, and I was explaining what it meant, I told him that when Uncle Jimmy was buried two soldiers presented a US flag to Uncle Johnny and how proud we were and just lost it.  Both kids were quick to give life saving hugs though and I felt better.

Lunch was so much fun.  The niece and nephews are so cute it’s unreal.  Both babies had moments when they absolutely cut the rest of us up, and the older kids were so much fun.  The only negative was my brother having a migraine.  Last year my cousin’s son had a migraine and had to leave the table and sit in the car.  This year it was my brother.  I hope this does not become a trend.  The only thing missing, now that I think of it, was the guy who normally comes around making balloon animals and doing magic tricks.

Finally last night it was time to play some music.  We were singer free, but we managed to muddle through a few things.  We’re going to do it again next Sunday, and this time we have specific songs to work on, and we may have a singer trying out too.  It was so much fun, but I was worried about Jen and the kids being stuck in the house while we were making all of that noise.  I tried to prepare them for the volume, and I guess I over did it a little.  They were all surprised by how “quiet” we were.  The kids enjoyed the whole experience.  Especially my step son.  Jen told me he was rocking out the whole time.  He snuck down the stairs a couple of times to watch too.  It was cool to see him enjoying it so much.  This morning he was talking up a storm about how he wants to learn to play the guitar and the drums.  He’s awesome, that little man.  Both kids have also volunteered to join the band as singers or keyboard players.  It might be tough to get a bar gig with an 8 and 10 year old in the band, but maybe it will be worth it.

The whole weekend was great, and it’s all thanks to Jen and the kids.  They make my life so much fun.  I love them all very much!

I just wrote a longish, happy post about tonight’s inaugural band get together, but the effing blog app I used crashed before it could save. Piss. Me. Off.

So Mike, Steve, Kevin and I got together in my cellar tonight and jammed. None of us really knew anything that anyone else might have known, so we did a lot of random noodling on easy, well known riffs. Among them was “Working Man”. We also managed to get all the way through two or three songs, which was difficult without a singer. We managed though. Among those songs was “2112: The Temples of Syrinx”. No other band that I’ve ever played with ever gave any piece of 2112 a shot, but we did all right.

We will play together again next week. You know, I haven’t really played with a band in about six years. I had forgotten just how much fun it is. Even when the band sucks out loud, and we certainly did, it is more fun than words can describe.

I had a blast.

Jammin’ in Methuen tonight? Better change my strings.

Well, I took the $25 annual plunge tonight and signed up for iTunes Match.  You access it from the iTunes store (assuming you’re using the latest version of iTunes) and it gives you the little sales pitch.  The deal is it will search through your iTunes library and any files it finds will be added to your collection in the cloud.  Once that’s done, it will upload up to 25,000 additional songs.  So if iTunes has your song you get to listen to their copy of it from anywhere you have an internet connection (on up to 10 authenticated Apple devices) and if iTunes doesn’t have your song you can listen to a copy of your file from anywhere you have an internet connection.

I’m game.  $25 a year seems a touch on the silly side, but I absolutely LOVE the idea of having my entire music collection available to me on my phone from anywhere I can get a signal, so I bit the bullet and went for it.  iTunes Match has the advantage over Google Music in that it will play my DRM songs that I purchased from iTunes over the years, as well as being integrated into the Music app on my iPhone and iPad.  The fact that Google Music doesn’t have an iOS app, and their iOS web app blows, and that it keeps telling me I am at the 20,000 song max when I am still at less than 17,000 songs, all add up to me sticking with Apple for my cloud based music needs.

However, I hit an unexpected snag when I tried to sign up.  It told me that my library was too big.  Too big?  Didn’t the sales pitch just tell me that the 25,000 song counter would only start running after the Matching stage was complete?  I had a little more than 26,300 files in my iTunes library.  Fortunately about 1,500 of those were audio book files and I have no interest in moving those to the cloud.  I removed them and tried signing up again and it worked.

The set up for iTunes Match runs in three stages:

1. Gathering information about your iTunes library
2. Matching your music with songs in the iTunes store
3. Uploading artwork and remaining songs

I am still on step one, and have been for a while now.  Maybe an hour or so.  The status bar for step one is still only about 1/3 of the way through.  This could take a while.  I have a lot of music that won’t be matched with iTunes store files, so I expect the upload process to be long and tedious, but if the service works the way they are selling it, it will all be worth it in the long run.

I had one other Apple music related comment to make.  I’ve been meaning to throw this out to the public ever since I installed iOS 5 on my iPad and iPhone.  I had all sorts of trouble with the Music app (formerly called the iPod app) since the update.  Let’s put aside the fact the the new user interface on the iPad is crappy and pretty much just blows and concentrate on whether or not files would actually play.

Almost every file I had on both devices would fail to play after taking the update.  Sometimes I would tap on a song and it would skip to the next one, but usually it would just hang at 0:00.  Also, on the occasions when it would skip to the next song, the next song in question would be the one to hang at 0:00.  Anything uploaded after the update played fine.  I got so fed up with it that earlier tonight I deleted all of the music off my iPad and reloaded it from iTunes.  I haven’t done the iPhone yet, but that will probably happen tomorrow. 

My question to you, oh internet, is am I the only person this happened to?  Jen still hasn’t taken the updates yet so I can’t compare notes with her.  I’m curious if this is a more widespread issue that I just haven’t heard about in the rabid Apple press.  At least the files I reloaded tonight seem to be playing.  Well, one playlist that I couldn’t play earlier today is playing.  That seems like a decent test to start with.

Anyway, step one of iTunes Match is probably about 45% done now.  Progress is our middle name.

This craft store sells non Cub Scout approved Pinewood Derby kits!

I won the Pack 49 Pinewood Derby once!