Guerilla Theatre, Corinne and Nate Duet "I Need You/I Run to You"

A little medley thrown together for a Guerilla Theatre performance.

I Need You / I Run To You

Toscha Baby Shower

Laura went to Toscha's baby shower.  I wasn't there, but Laura did a pretty solid job with the camera in my stead. 

Anton in Show Business

Sunday we went to see Anton in Show Business at Shenandoah. Corinne was the enthusiastic Texan ingenue Lisabette, flanked by her roommate Shannon as Cassey. In five words, it was funny, funny, funny, funny, tragic. With an emphasis on funny. With a tinge of tear-jerking tragic at the end. DEFINITELY a must-see, but if you didn't see it, it's too late, it only ran three shows. You would think I should have some pictures of the show, or if taking pictures during the show was a problem, maybe pictures of the cast after the show. Or pictures of the whole group of us going out to dinner afterward. Apparently no, I was just in it for my own selfish entertainment.
If I had not waited until the last performance to go, I would have gone again.

Company picnic at Perryville Park

Beautiful day for a picnic at Perryville Park, and as luck would have it, we had one scheduled!  A little warm in the sun, a little cool in the shade, light breeze and clear skies.  PLENTY of food from crabs to hamburgers and hot dogs to pork shoulder and more salads and desserts than I could count.  If you're not actually IN the company, the pictures won't mean anything to you...

Mustang Football drops game three to visiting Kent Island

Oops, kinda spilt the beans right there in the headline.  I missed the game, so there's not much I can add.  Chris was out on account of injury, but he was also sick.  The team went up 13-0, and took a 13-9 lead into the 4th quarter, but couldn't hold on.  Kent Island rolled up three touchdowns in the quarter to end the game 29-13.  Don't quote me on the score, I wasn't there.  No word yet on when Chris will return to football.

9/12 March on DC

Conservatives from across the nation converged on DC to demonstrate for fiscal responsibility and limited government, because it's important and nobody seems to be listening.  And nobody listened.  Or did they?

Nobody can give a good official headcount of the demonstrators.  I think conservative estimates are around 75,000.  Some say over a million.  I was there.  I have trouble believing it was a million.  It was hard to see everybody because they were EVERYWHERE, but I find it hard to believe that there were only 75,000 there.  If I had to guess, I would have guessed between 200,000 and 300,000.  If not from an actual count, take my word from what it felt like: wall-to-wall people, more signs than you can read in four hours, impressive turnout.  I saw representation from Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, Mississippi, Kansas, TEXAS, Montana, California, and Alaska. 

I went down on a bus trip from Bel Air, Maryland.  A guy was going to get 3 or 4 buses chartered for the trip, but he tells us that people kept bringing checks to his house saying they wanted a seat on the bus (like me!).  He ended up chartering 12 buses at 52 seats/bus from Bel Air alone.  This was all by word of mouth, there was no advertising.  We kept things on the DL at work, but ultimately eight of us from work were on the bus.

The march down Pennsylvania Ave to the Capitol was cool.  Very densely packed, especially in the beginning.  I am pretty sure DC hadn't expected that many people, and failed to close enough streets.  Once we bounced around the Capitol trying to find a suitable place to claim some turf (concrete, as it turns out), it was a little less exciting.  There were speakers, but we couldn't hear them really.  I don't think they prepped a sound system suitable for a crowd of that size.   So we sat/stood while speakers spoke, then wandered around the crowd a while and worked our way back to the bus.  No biggee that we didn't hear the speakers, we mostly just wanted to be counted.

Were we counted?  Did we make the news?  I don't really think we made the news.  A mention, maybe a little understated/mis-stated by network news.  Fox News covered it of course, but as far as I can tell, didn't blow it up to be any bigger than it was.  It was a nice day for a march.

Mustang Football hosts Delmar Game 2

9/11/09, C Milton Wright Varsity football defeats Delmar at home 16-7.  Chris is still out with shoulder injury.  Nasty wet game, but still have pictures.  Not good pictures, granted, but hey, I made the effort.

CMW Mustangs host Linganore for Game 1

Chris is out, still healing a separated shoulder.  Pics:

Bound for DC 9/12

I have my bus ticket to  go to DC on 9/12!  I heard this evening on CBS News (which I don't normally watch) that they were expecting about 3000 people in DC for the rally.  The Bel Air, Maryland contingent alone will number something more than 400, so I estimate that their estimate is off a little.  The guy who arranged the buses that I'll be taking explained that people pestered him to get a couple of buses because they wanted to go to the rally.  He obliged, but people kept showing up giving him money for seat reservations.  Two buses became four, then five, and I believe at the close of the reservation period was up to 8.  We were generally close-lipped about this event at  work, but somebody asked the question and in the blink of an eye 6 people were registering bus reservations.

This will be my third such-themed event, the first being the Annapolis TEA Party April 15 (rained horribly, and the umbrellas made it difficult to see the speakers--or much of anything else for that matter), the other being the Bel Air TEA Party July 4.  There was some participation (and maybe some organization) in Bel Air from Campaign For Liberty (Ron Paul).  I don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with the Libertarians, particularly with regard to foreign policy, but that doesn't detract from these events.  They certainly are not libertarian rallies--so far they are not partisan at all.  I didn't post pics at that time for some reason, so here's a few shots from both events, including a few shots ripped from a Campaign for Liberty Blog Page, cause I was in them.

Saved by some good free software

For simple utilities, I try to find free software.  I look for stuff that is free free, not free to try, or free but there is a PRO version that you can buy.  The good free stuff doesn't have a financial agenda--often distributed under the GPL GNU public licensing, so they don't pack a bunch of glitz and bloat.  Small programs that just do what they are supposed to do are gems.  I like XNView for image work (where Paint just isn't good enough), CutePDF for generating PDF files, PDFTK Builder for assembling and disassembling PDF files, Crimson Editor for text editing, Launchy which I use for a super fast folder finder at work, Gimp for a high-end hard to use image manipulations (I used this for collages, NOT user friendly but very powerful). 

Recently I ran into a problem where I had to download a upgrade file for work that was about 150MB, then had to download another set of update files that totaled an additional 600MB.  Even with a fast connection, this is asking a lot.  I downloaded the 150MB file twice, and each time had an error at the end of the download, a big time consuming failure.  Frustrated, I tried to find a good free download manager and found Free Download Manager.  Certainly a good download manager, maybe not the best I've used, but more than up to the task.  One of the things you lose if you don't use a download manager is the ability to tolerate a network interruption, and for long downloads this is a real risk.  Also, a download manager like this will let you pause (or prioritize, or schedule) the download so that you can do other things with your internet connection and not suffer excruciatingly slow page uploads.



Another little program I found that was worth the download is Folder Size.  This does nothing but add the size of the folders to Windows Explorer.   Doesn't seem like a big deal, until that's exactly what you need!  I was running out of disk space and couldn't figure out why--this program helped me find the offending culprits.  The offending culprits were indeed junk, and I safely deleted the lot of them, recovering LOADS of space.