W00T! First Post.

All new blogs have a first post, and this is that.

I had to go out and buy a laptop yesterday, since my latest one seemed to be on its last legs. When I boot it I get a warning about a bad disk. It has hung on me a couple of times, and since I have a lot of work stuff on there, I don't want to lose it. Nor do I want to lose the time of trying to restore it if it does go south. So I went and got another one so I can transfer all the data.

I ended up getting a IBM Thinkpad which unfortunately comes with not only Windows, which I have come to accept, but also Microsoft Office Professional on it. This time, since I have been doing web development, I have decided to leave windows on the box. Normally I just delete it. However, the requirement to check what I am doing in IE has become important, so I will leave windows on at this point.

Ah, I feel like I am betraying myself.

According to the local newspaper here in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer, Japanese automobiles have take the top 10 spots as ranked by Consumer Reports in its upcoming April Issue. Since returning to Cleveland, everybody seems to be talking about China and have completely forgotten the Japanese. Which is funny for this area because the people's jobs are dependent on the American car manufacturers such as GM and Ford. However, while everybody talks about China, it is Toyota that is about to surpass GM as the world's leading manufacturer of automobiles.

Seems to me like everybody needs a strong dose of coffee.

Elly is performing in American Ballet Theater's performance of Le Corsair at Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland.  The performance runs from tonight until the Sunday Matinee.  Elly is performing in all four performances.  Last week, Elly was interviewed by the Sun Newspapers, and Elly hit this week's edition.  Kenny and I will be going on Saturday night, when Julie Kent is dancing.

I was at the interview, so I was quoted as well.  They say in the article that I am from Cleveland Heights, which is true to a certain extent.  To be accurate, I lived in Cleveland Heights, then Shaker Heights, moved to Chevy Chase Maryland for two years, and the returned to Shaker Heights for my final two years of high school at University School.  Elly struck me as a little tentative in the interview, which is understandable, but Susan Ketchum, the reporter, did a good job of asking questions.  Elly was clearly uncomfortable answering questions about the differences between Japan and the U.S.  For one thing, especially in terms of Ballet, she still considers Okinawa home and a better place to learn Ballet.  I personally think that opinion is more about adjusting to a new culture and a new teacher than anything else.  She has only known the one teacher until we moved here, so I also think there is a sense of loyalty to her Okinawa Ballet school.

The reality is, though, that the very good dancers in Japan strive to come to the United States or Europe to further their careers.  The chance to dance with a professional Ballet company just didn't happen in Japan, or at least in Okinawa where we were living.  I think it'll be interesting to see what Elly's reaction is when we send her back to Okinawa this summer for ballet.  Most of the girls that are moving towards becoming professional here tryout for summer programs put on by professional companies, like the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company, or Miami's.  In fact, two of the girls that Elly has become close with at the Cleveland School of Dance are both going to such summer sessions.

I will be scanning the article and posting it here on this site.  There is a fairly good size picture of Elly to go along with the article.  We are leaving for dress rehearsal in about 60 minutes.  I gotta admit, I am pretty excited for Elly.

I am fairly annoyed. I believe that I made a post or two to this blog since the Japan Wins World Title entry, but they have all disappeared.....sigh.

As far as I can tell there is nothing in the logs to indicate what happened. I did restart the Zope instance powering this site since I had added some new products for Plone. That seems to have caused the disappearance, so I will need to see if that happens everytime I restart the site. That is kinda what this post is for.....I am going to restart the server after posting this entry.

Today I made a startling discovery. Ken is now taller than Elly. Not more than two months ago he was a good half-inch shorter, and probably close to an inch maybe two inches shorter six months ago. Ken and Elly were playing in the living room this evening, and Ken seemed to be taller. I had them stand back to back, and sure enough, Ken is about a half inch taller than Elly.

Boy is he growing fast. Last summer it was Elly that was growing fast, now its Kenny's turn I guess.

I have seen a couple of postings along the way about the COSE bill facing Congress, particularly about "Net Neutrality". While I have seen it in the blogoshpere over the last couple of days, I have not really responded much at all. As I was reading the newspaper today, I read Henry Gomez' article in Tech Ink, also covered in his blog on Tech Link, HG posited that AT&T was "ready" for the questions over "net neutrality". It pointed out that AT&T was getting ready to launch a new "Elite" service that offers a whopping 3-to-6Meg down, 384-768K upstream services for $29.99. According to Henry's article this is a "higher-speed tier" of its service offering.

Welcome to the Internet Third World, Welcome to the United States. What a frickin' joke.

I have not looked very closely at the offering or all available offerings in quite a while. Just the general search I did made me want to cry. 3-6Megs down is a higher-speed tier?! Sigh. The lowest end offering by Yahoo in Japan is 8Mb down and 0.9M upstream. The highest is 50Mb, with 12.5 upstream. And that is just for ADSL. I won't even mention bflets which I used(can you say 100Mb fiber connection to the home?)

This post is just a place holder for now. Need to get a pancake breakfast, and then wait for Adelphia to show up to fix my Internet connection.

Boy am I a slacker. There are quite a few things that I wanted to post blog entries on. Trying to find the time to do them right though hasn't been easy. I'll get there eventually.....

I have added some new modules to this site as well, which I need to get around to configuring and figuring out how to use them. For example, check out this "album": test album. Those photos are actually up on flickr. I had to create an account on flickr to try this module out. I created the account then uploaded some photos. Came back to this site added a "flickralbum" configured it to login into flickr and pull the "set" I wanted. Pretty cool if you ask me. And its related to one of the post entries I have been trying to get to that was spurred by this post by George@BFD.

Damn slacker!(yes, talking to myself again)