As mentioned in my last post, we headed down to St. Louis  on Saturday to, among other things, see the OmniMax presentation of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon.  We left springfield at about 10 ’til 8 in the morning and were parked at the Science Center at around 9:30, with tickets to the 10am showing.

The show was awesome, it looked amazing.  For the first 15 minutes that is.  That’s when the fabled Howerter Curse kicked in and the projector broke!  We couldn’t believe it, we just sat in our seats almost dumbfounded as they were announcing the refunds/vouchers.  We were able to get our money back, and spent the rest of the morning walking through the Science Center.

For lunch we brought sandwich-making materials and had a nice picnic in Forest Park.  The temperature in the shade felt about 15 degrees cooler than the blistering heat (for this time of year) we felt whenever we left the car – that combined with a good breeze made for an enjoyable lunch.
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Well the beginning of summer is upon us with Memorial Day weekend.  We have a pretty busy few days coming up – heading to St. Louis on Saturday with Jay and Katherine to visit the Science Center and whatever else we feel like.  Magnificent Desolation Walking on the Moon is currently playing at the omnimax and we preordered tickets for the 10am showing, so it’ll be an early start on Saturday.

On Sunday, Ana and I are headed to my grandfather’s house to visit with relatives.  We’ll be taking our Bocce Ball set with us and hopefully get a tournament going.  Based on how well everyone liked the game last time, it should be a lot of fun.

I also need to get my grass mowed at some point.  But that’s no fun.

We took our bikes out for a spin tonight, the first time this year.  We need to get into the habit of riding them a couple of times each week, it’s definitely great exercise.  The 11 miles tonight has my legs feeling a little tired!

Thanks to my anniversary gift from Ana, my new hard drives are on order and waiting to be shipped along with the necessary raid controller.  I also ordered a USB2 -> IDE adapter to attach my 20GB tape drive to.  I’m not sure what I’ll end up using it for now, but surely something will present itself.

In other news…

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As I mentioned before, they’ve done a terrific job on the new stadium.  I’ve placed the pictures I took in my photo gallery, feel free to check them out.

When we first arrived at the stadium, and drove past it on our way to park the car, the first impression was how sharp it looked.  All of the corners are sharp and crisp, the walkway support beams on the inside peak through the beautiful brick and create a pleasant contrast.  Speaking of the brick, it really made it stand out in a landscape of construction and parking lots.  You can’t help looking at it, even if it just caught the corner of your eye.  The old Busch just didn’t pop like that.

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Tonight was our first game at the new Busch Stadium, and a good one it was.  I was able to purchase the three tickets about a month ago when the Cardinals said they were further along in construction than planned and released a decent chunk of tickets.

So I was able to hop online on a designated day and make a purchase.  The seats were in left field, in what’s called the Casino Queen Party Porch.  They weren’t cheap seats, but they also weren’t terribly expensive either.  I bought 3, for myself, Ana, and my dad.

We arrived at the new park over an hour before the game so we could walk around and check some of it out beforehand.  The place is amazing (I’ll save that for another post) to say the least.  Very well done.

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When I ordered my new server, I added Backup Exec 10d QuickStart Edition (or something like that).  Dell didn’t have much information on their website about what this software was comprised of, and Veritas/Symantec didn’t list that edition as a product, so I was a little concerned about what I was going to be receiving.  Granted, my needs aren’t complex; I was even planning on not backing up to tape anymore and just dumping to a RAID array and then across the wlan to Jay’s RAID array.

After installing and some configuration, I’m very pleased with the software.   It’s capable of way more than I need, but allows some things I wasn’t planning on and definitely makes my backups a lot cleaner.  One of these is the ability to use the remote agents to backup stuff on Ana’s desktop since she doesn’t get data onto the fileserver often.  Because of its media append/expirations times, I’m probably going to reattach the tape drive (with a usb2->ide adapter) and use it to continue periodic tape backups.