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The family and I are down here in Allons Tennessee again for the 4th Holiday. We got in yesterday morning and decided to head to this little school down the way, that looks straight from the 1930’s. It’s no longer used as a school any longer, but it is used for community get togethers and what not.

Every Saturday they have a get together (which I am unsure of what the name of it is, if it’s named at all) where they play music by locals. From what I hear, it starts at 6pm and goes on as long as people are willing to play. My mom took us up there to show a little of what goes on.

We get there, and there are people wondering through the hallways of this school. They still have the plaques, trophies, and class pictures from the past. I think the last one that we could find was from 1987, and as early as 1952, but I’m not sure when the school was built. I will have to ask one of the locals next time. We we walked in the assembly room (I assume) there were 7 people playing and singing. I could feel the stares from the people in the room as Melissa and I walked in with the kids. We ain’t from around these here parts.

It was definitely cool to watch a little bit of history and know that these types of gatherings still go on somewhere. Being from the city I haven’t seen anything like this (short of a hippy drum circle at ComFest). The fiddle player that was there last night was amazing. I don’t necessarily like country/bluegrass, but I can appreciate the musicianship of these people. From what I was told, I guess anyone that wants to play just needs to show up and hop in with the “House Band” (pictured below)

We stayed up there for probably a good hour or so before the kids got anxious and were a little bored. But my mom took her Canon XTI up with her and I got to take some pictures with it.

I still need to get all my pictures from fotki on the site, and I plan on using the blog to write updates for pics. Hopefully you will see more soon!

Anyway,  I have been super busy doing other crap other than this site, like work, kids, my 360, bought a new car, kids, kids, and more kids.

So I had some extra crap laying around that I finally put up on ebay. Melissa has been getting on me about getting her “own” laptop so I started looking a few weeks ago.

Finally ended up buying her another Gateway. I sold our old Gateway to her parents for cheap since they didn’t have a computer, and it was perfect for what they need it for.

Anyway, Office Depot had this new Gateway for $849 with a $150 rebate. (no longer $150 off)

17 Inch Screen 1440×900

Intel Dual Core 2060

160GB Drive

1GB ram (which I am going to upgrade to 2GB)

DVD/CD Burner

Vista Home Premium

and most importantly (at least for Melissa) it has a full size keyboard. With her being a Realtor now it is somewhat of a pain to type numbers on a laptop keyboard.

Not bad for $699

I am having a hard time figuring out which photo program to use for the thousands of pictures that I have to get back up that were on Fotki.

My options are:

Coppermine Example

Gallery2 Example

Both of those are free (opensource)

In addition to that, I paid for one a few months ago, but it is a little more difficult to operate. It does in fact look better in my opinion.

SlideShowPro Example

After a long absence from updating this, I think I am going to get back into keeping this up to date.

I have had a lot of things going on around here recently and have spent my time doing other things. I’ve been working on remodeling my kitchen, raising two kids, working my ass off, and when I get some spare time, playing a little Xbox360.

I have grown into an “eclectic” mix of interests in the past 6 months. Photography/PhotoShop, Video Games, my website, my wifes website (www.melissaschwandt.com) , Watches, Open Source Projects, and the Virtual Computing World.

There is tons of stuff that I would like to put on here, but if I actually do it, that’s another thing. I know that I will for certain put all my pictures from Fotki on my site since I let that expire. I saw no use in paying for that anymore when I have this site at my finger tips. Now it’s only a matter of teaching the wife how to use it!