Eleya went to the The Birchmere last night to see the Superstars of Bellydance tour. It was a fantastic show with great dancing all around, and even a pretty good local troupe. Check out the tour’s Web site, and go out and see them if they stop in your town, it’s well worth it.

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p>In other news, the symposium where I’m scheduled to teach in a couple weeks is having major planning problems. The instructor who was handling the other half of the Linux track has just bailed out due to being fed up. I can’t say I really blame him, but this leaves me in a bit of an awkward situation… should I teach his labs, or just let them go? I will have equipment there for my labs and would be able to handle his subject matter, but it would be lackluster at best, since I haven’t spent much time with the material, nor did I prepare it. My thought is that I’m better off teaching what I signed up for, and forget the rest. Oh well, back to finish up my presentations….

The WRNR show went very well last night. I picked everyone up in the Golden Funk Machine at Leah’s, Before we went there, we stopped by one of Rich’s and my old haunts, the Middleton Tavern, to have a couple pints. Then off to the station to get set up! We played “You” and “Obvious” off the new record and had a great time, and hopefully picked up some new listeners. Both Damian and his producer Michael were true gentlemen, and just stunningly nice guys to boot. Then we wandered around town looking for sushi, but apparently the sushi chefs all retire pretty early. We ended up heading back to Middleton for a snack, and then back to Leah’s, whence we scattered back to our respective homes.

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p>I also picked up a couple CD’s for myself yesterday, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (which for some reason I just hadn’t gotten around to buying), and Mark Knopfler’s The Ragpicker’s Dream. Both are simply amazing (in completely different ways, of course). Highly recommended!

Leah’s new album, Zero Dollars Spent, is in! I now have a copy in my hot little hands. We are heading up to Annapolis to appear on WRNR, Damian’s Local Diner show, at 9:00 p.m. Back with more later; hopefully we’ll have a tape of the performance, which will be two live songs along with two tracks from the album. Woo-hoo!

You know, there’s nothing like that cool blast of refreshment when a water pipe erupts over your desk. It’s like bringing a little bit of nature and springtime right into the office! I kept thinking some of those Herbal Essence chicks would pop up, but no such luck. I think I saved most of my books from permanent damage, although a few of them are swelling up to the point where I stacked other dry ones on top of them after towel-drying them. Thank goodness there was no powered equipment running under there.

Near as I can figure, this is all working properly now. Your bookmark for my site should now be:

http://paul.frields.org

And it’s for real this time! More later…

Back from class! Fortunately it picked up during the last two days. I learned a lot of spiffy information, including a very minimal primer on LDAP. Plus, I now own the frields.org domain! You can expect to see some changes around here for that reason, as soon as I have some time to plan and implement them. I’m shooting for end of the month, or maybe early August.

Saw Terminator 3 on Monday night, which was far better than I had expected, although it still didn’t measure up to T2. The RH253 class, on the other hand, has not fared as well in my critical opinion. Our instructor, although obviously a smart guy and with a lot of experience in the subject, does not do a good job of relating subjects to the couple of people in the class who are new to the subjects being covered. He also tends to get derailed on war stories quite a bit, and uses some questionable language which, if he had a larger or more culturally varied student body, would likely land him in some hot water. This is the first Red Hat class where I don’t feel like I’m really getting my money’s worth, I’m sorry to say.

Added weather stripping and caulked like a maniac over the weekend to see if I could stop the leak into the basement that was so devastating the night of those really bad storms. When our contractor re-set our french doors down there, it looks like he inexplicably removed all the weather stripping from around it, which would explain the cascading waterfalls down the inside of the door. I wonder if these guys take care of their own houses that way. >sigh<

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p>Saw two really good movies this weekend, Adaptation and The Hours. Both highly recommended. Look around the web and you’ll find plenty better reviews than I can muster this morning.

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p>Speaking of which, I’m off to Raleigh today for a Red Hat class (RH253), mostly to make sure my boss stays on top of what we’re doing. Plus it fulfills my job’s “continuing education” requirement for the remainder of the year. I think I’m going to go ahead and renew my RHCE in fall or winter, since mine was issued under version 7.0. I’ll be home on Friday night.

Our show yesterday at the Reston Festival went quite well. No major wreckage occurred, other than a spontaneous rearrangement of “Get On With It,” our opening number. Fortunately, all of us were pretty much connected at the hip, musically speaking, so it was most likely unnoticeable to everyone but ourselves. Our set, unfortunately, got cut about ten minutes short because the organizers decided they were running a little over and we ended up the victims of the scheduling guillotine. Nevertheless, we wound up with a strong tune and the audience seemed to enjoy it. If you were there to see us, and we didn’t see you, thanks for coming out, and make sure to check out the new CD which will be available shortly.

Last night we had some tremendous storms which, when combined with the crappy job that our contractor’s employee did resetting our outside door, contributed to a huge leak problem in the basement… right against our newly-finished floor. Fortunately we were home at the time, and took the time to check out the situation before the rain started getting really bad. Using a huge load of towels we managed to wick most of the water out from under the moisture barriers, with minimal damage. The threshhold is a lost cause, but fortunately cheap and easy to replace. The quarter-round moldings haven’t been installed yet, which was a blessing in disguise, since I still have the ability to fix this problem without having to remove any of them.

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p>Today it’s off to Lowe’s to gather supplies, and hopefully diagnose and fix this problem. I almost wish it were another drought-plagued summer. If you’ve got any experience fixing leaks around outside door frames, perhaps you’d like to let me know (don’t forget to remove the “foo”). And if this weren’t enough, the dog appears to have developed a habit of elimination overnight, so she now has to go to the vet to see if something is physically wrong with her. Oh yeah, and Evie pretty much was the Devil last night… we kept expecting her head to spin around 360 degrees, or pea-soup projectile vomit, or something. Hoping today is a better day….