This past weekend, Calvin's pack traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee to visit and sleep in the Tennessee Aquarium. ( Read more... )

Sleeping in the morning trumps the best breakfast meals. I'd rather roll over and enjoy lunch when I wake up.

I'm so glad I have my dad's old over-the-ear headphones from the 70's.



I haven't used them much since getting out of radio, but I pulled them out the other day so I could listen to music while sitting at my PC (which is basically located smack dab in the middle of the living room/playroom open space. With these beautiful babes by Pioneer surrounding my ears, a little bit of volume can completely turn off the chaos around me.

I'm blissfully working now (well, not NOW, but just before coming to do the post) at the PC with some sweet tunes engulfing me. :)

The Nashville NBC affiliate had a morning show host contest. This is the profile they created for Darrell. If you watch intently, you get a 1.5 second flash of me while I ran the board during the footage in the studio.



Then, a few weeks later...you again get only a flash of me behind the sound board.

While at War College in Carlisle, PA, my parents took a trip to NYC during the winter of '94 and woke up early one morning to hang outside the Today Show studios.

I don't think it qualifies as a "film" but I must first mention Dancing Outlaw. I STRONGLY recommend anyone that loves Christopher Guest movies and People of WalMart go to YouTube and find some of the videos posted there from the documentary.

I don't immediately recall if I've said much about my problems with my laptop. About a week before Xmas, my laptop started freezing. There has been no pattern to when or why it is freezing other than the computer is on. It happens in both Linux and Winders. BUT every single diagnostic run on the laptop has shown the hardware is performing fine.

I sent it off a week ago and got it back on Monday...still not fixed. Yesterday, the guy was adamant that the next thing I HAD to do was to re-image the HD. Since we installed Linux to make the laptop dual-boot after buying it, it seems that the ways someone would otherwise access the embedded image partitioned in a corner of the HD were no longer possible...I would need a Windows disc. Unfortunately, I can't find a disc for the laptop; not at the office, not at the FIL's office, or at my house. I discover that I have WinXPPro for my PC and the disc should work for the laptop (using the product key on the sticker attached to laptop).

I called Lenovo this morning to update the info on the ticket with my situation on how I was having to reimage. After trying a few other suggestions by tech support that didn't work, I was assured that if there was a problem with this, then they would help me with a disc or whatever. I hung up, took a deep breath, and popped the WinXP disc into the laptop.

It took about 45 seconds for the setup program to stop working because it couldn't detect any hard drives. I called up Lenovo and after running through a summary of the situation, he guided me through a couple of tweaks in BIOS as well as trying one other trick to try to access the partitioned image Lenovo had embedded. The process was started again with no troubles at all during the "installing Windows" process.

But as anyone that has ever installed or updated Windows knows, it is NEVER actually ready to go when the install program says it is. There are always a ton of drivers to be found and installed, configurations/wizards to complete, and then hours of trying to figure out why certain things aren't working. It was during this extended process of getting the laptop to actually work that the computer froze up.

*headdesk*

Overcome by anguish that my current stress level from reimaging the HD was seemingly for naught, I left the laptop off and went to call Lenovo for psychiatric assistance. Of course it was when I was the most upset and impatient that I reached the tech support person with the most foreign accent of all the support folks (God bless my calls going to the support center in Atlanta and getting a good mix of folks with Southern accents I can understand). At first I'm told that it would cost $45+ for them to ship me a reimage disc since my adding Linux and making it dual-boot invalidated the warranty on the OS install. I pointed out to her that I ONLY did the reimaging at Lenovo's insistence and had received reassurance that this was going to be the solution to my problem. Now, on their advice, I was out $45 to fix something they essentially had me break and my laptop still had the original problem. After being on hold for a minute, I was told that a re-image disc was on its way at no charge.

As soon as the disc arrives, I'll do that process just for the sake of getting the laptop to working order. It will be then that I'll see if the problem continues before shipping the laptop to them for extended testing.

Samantha Fox vs. Black Eyed Peas

Evidence: "Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)" vs. "My Humps"

Facebook Folks: Go to http://csberry.livejournal.com/476195.html to see the embedded videos.)

As with the movie question in the past week, there are so many bad songs that are SO BAD that I really enjoy them. What exactly constitutes "absolute worst song ever written?" If it has a catchy hook, isn't that better than a tone-deaf composition? While I despise "My Humps" by Black Eyed Peas, I would never say it was a horribly written song. HOrrible lyrics, possibly, but the song isn't really "bad."

As far as the song that would make me writhe in agony...there is a close race between a few songs. Any rendition of "American Pie" is total torture to me. The few Heidi Montag songs I've heard would be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" if a court of law ever used her tracks in a criminal sentence. And while I never recall hearing the mix in the 80's I completely HATE the version of "Tainted Love" with "Where Did Our Love Go" blended into the end.

Right before Hannibal came to the theaters, we had a chef from some frou-frou restaurant in St. Louis come into the studio and prepare some organ dishes. I'm probably going to swap around the actual animal w/ body part, but I believe we were prepared: lamb heart, foie gras (goose liver), sheep brain, and...something else. I LOVED the foie gras, didn't care for the heart, but the brain was good (but it may have been the copious amount of garlic the brain was sauteed in.

As far as "blindly" eating some food. When I became determined to try sushi, I didn't want to know what it was that I was sampling. I definitely ate a few things I may not have otherwise tried, but it also made me never discover what some of the items I enjoyed were if I couldn't find out after the fact (my sampling of sushi usually involved picking at the large platters a sushi place in Dallas used to bring into the radio station every couple of months).

The video is dreadful, but I really wish this song was a Top 40 hit.

Not counting any of the "it's so bad, it's good" category of movies (Manos: Hands of Fate, Dirty Dancing: Havanna Nights, and Twisted I'm looking at you!), the worst movie I have ever seen (and JD and I nearly walked out of) was Eyes Wide Open Shut.

If you like Pearl Jam, you really should give Winston Audio a try. The principle songwriter, lead vocals, and bass player (Daniel DeWitt) is one of JD's cousins.


IndieATL- Winston Audio "Hey Ann" - Watch more amazing videos here

(Most recently seen via cosmosmariner)

1. I cough every time I get out of the shower. Every. Time.

2. I am very anal about organizing the dishwasher. All of the utensils are segregated to certain areas of the silverware basket. I have been known to open a friend's or family member's dishwasher to put away my dish and then dedicate the next several minutes to totally shifting everything around.

3. I can identify city skylines in TV shows, movies, etc. Typically, an establishing shot comes up, I turn to JD, and I tell her, "They're in Cleveland" or where ever.

4. My favorite drink is equal parts Mountain Dew and orange juice.

5. Every time I think about the words "New York City," I think of the old Pace commercials with the cowboys discussing salsa and they discover Brand X is made in...New York City!? Because of this fact, nearly every time I say "New York City," I can't help but do similar inflections.

6. It is rarely possible for me to say something simply and straight forward, such as "The car wouldn't start." I instead will usually say something like "I got in the car, put in the key, and the car was all like 'Grrr...rrr...rrr..ugh! Ooo! I'm dead!" and make a funny face and gestures.

7. I have about 7 different little soda can cozies of various styles and colors. I must confess that I actually take 10 seconds to look at what I'm wearing and pick out a cozie that somehow coordinates with my clothing...even if I'm just bumming in mismatched PJs.