I first saw Ratdog in 1996.

It wasn’t because I was a fan, hell I had no idea who they were.

My buddy told me that we just had to go to Further Festival and who was I to argue. I was 24 years old and an all day hippie festival at the Virginia Beach Amphitheatre in June sounded ideal to me. To be real honest, I wasn’t that interested in the music. The only names in the line up I recognized were Bruce Hornsby and Los Lobos. I only new Los Lobos for their cover of La Bamba and Bruce Hornsby was a little bit ‘Adult Contemporary’ for my taste. I’d never heard of the Headliners, billed as the Ratdog Revue. I was going for the party. A bunch of hippies, outcasts and potheads converging to take the concert experience “Further” in the tradition of Ken Kesey. You know, the guy with Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests.

A few days before the concert, some one tipped me off that Ratdog was the name of the band fronted by Bob Wier and Rob Wasserman. Now Bob Wier I had heard of, the great rhythm guitar player of the Grateful Dead.

Six years earlier, I was in college. My roommate freshman year, Matt, was a true Deadhead. He had concert tapes for dozens of shows. I was familiar with the Dead, of course, Truckin’, Casey Jones, and Sugar Magnolias. But Matt’s tapes contained another dimension of the band that I had never heard before. Extended improv jams in songs like Fire on the Mountain and Eyes of the World. Matt would tell me all kinds of things about the band, perhaps he was trying to convert me. And I heard a lot of Grateful Dead music that year.

I had several opportunities to go see the Dead in the early 90’s, but I never did. I guess I kind of assumed that I would catch them on the next go around of the tour that seemed to never end. But when Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the Grateful Dead dissolved and I would never be able to see them live. I still regret that.

But in 1996,I was going to have the chance to see Bob Wier. I was excited, if I would never see the Dead, this would be the next best thing.

The festival was great. I had a wonderful time. And considering the amount of drugs and alcohol flowing, the people were incredibly laid back. No pushing and shoving, no rudeness, everyone seemed to be happy to be there and happy to be with each other. The music was pretty good too, especially Ratdog.

We had no idea what to expect from them, would it just be the Dead minus Jerry, or would they avoid grateful Dead songs altogether?

They opened with three good old Mississippi Delta Blues songs; Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Howling and Wang Dang Doodle. Then they played the Dylan classic, Maggie’s Farm. As the music played my mind wandered back to my freshman dorm of all of those songs on Matt’s tapes the one I liked the best was Looks Like Rain. I loved the way Bobby and Donna sang and forth to each other at the end of the song. After Maggie’s Farm, Bruce Hornsby came back on stage and sat at the piano. I can’t express in writing the surge of joy I felt when I heard the opening chords to Looks Like Rain. I got up and danced. And for the rest of the night and continued to just feel the music and dance with it.

The band continued into a smoking version of rhythm and blues classic, Juke. Next a Bob Wier tune, The Winners and then into a nice Easy to Slip/ Supplication jam. A bass solo, featuring the Star Spangled Banner, set up Turn on Your Lovelight to round out the set. For an encore Bob and Rob came back out with Hornsby and Mickey Hart (and probably some others, but I’m not sure) and played Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour, Dylan’s immortal All Along the Watchtower and Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away.

A few weeks later, I went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert. The crowd was rude and there was plenty pushing and shoving. Billy Corgan stopped playing in the middle of one of their most popular songs and threw a temp tantrum cause some one from the audience had manged to throw a glow stick up on the stage. The whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. I swore off concerts, figuring that perhaps I had simply got too old for them.

I didn’t even consider seeing a concert for over ten years.

Yes, one of those days.

You know the ones? The kind where nothing really goes right. Nothing goes very wrong, but nothing really goes right. I shouldn’t even complain, there are a lot of people in the world who have it so much worse than me. But I can’t help it… today everything just seemed to be conspiring against me.

Where to start…

Work? Oh yeah, work is great. Well, not great, but actually shitty. Why? It’s hard to put it in words really, its more of a feel than anything in particular. For example, today we had our one of twice weekly project meetings. We got through the agenda, my boss said that we were done. I packed up my shit and went to my desk, cause I had shit to take care of. After a while, it dawned on me that the other Network Engineers were still in the conference room. My boss had left, I had left but they were still in there. They remained in there for about 45 minutes.

I don’t know what they talked about. What I do know is that what ever it was, they didn’t feel the need to consult or ask me about it. Nor did they feel the need to update me on what ever it was.

Wow. Don’t I feel like an important and integral part of my ‘team?’ No I don’t. Not even a little bit.

My made up club, the shitty blogs club’s domain name seems to be parked at godaddy. The fact of the matter is The domain name and hosting were gifted to me. Same thing for shitty blog radio. I think the SBC domain name expired. The SBR one will be next. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m not 100% sure why it happened, but I’m fairly certain that there is more than a reasonable explanation for it. Hell, I can’t complain about that part at all.

The problem is, since it I didn’t register it, I can’t renew it. Whois shows it as expired, but none of the registration places will let me purchase it. Is this because of a bit of lag in the whole registration thing, or did some one else buy it? I don’t know. I am powerless to do much about it. I could register .net domains, but I’m not sure if it is worth it.

The bigger issue will be when shittyblogradio.com goes… I can register the domain, but I can’t afford to replace the level of hosting I’ve been enjoying. I’m not sure what I am going to do about that either.

At the gym, I was just stiff enough to stop me from running well.

My car was in for regular maintenance, so I couldn’t drive home for lunch. So I skipped it.

So on and so forth.

Just one of those days.

I hear people complain about the injustice and the difficulties caused by the beginning of daylight savings time. I, on the other hand, couldn’t be happier about it.

I mean I hate having an hour cruelly plucked away from me in the middle of the night as much as anyone. And I get irked by the whole ’spring forward, fall back’ thing.

“How am I supposed to change the time?”
“It’s spring so we SPRING forward!”
“That’s wonderful but it doesn’t help me. Sunday Morning at 2:00 AM what time will it become?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will it be One or Three?”
“Three.”
“Why couldn’t you just say so.”

I guess I’m just to literal, but it’s much easier for me to remember what exactly it is I’m supposed to do, instead of have to decipher some cutesy little phrase.

Still, it’s worth the minor inconveniences.

The Beginning of Daylight Savings Time marks the end of my annual battle with the cold dark days of winter. Sure there will still be some cold, maybe even some snow, but it won’t last. Today I walked out of the gym at seven o’clock and it was still light. It gives me hope that summer will be here soon.

And I’m not a big fan of the Congress, but moving it 3 weeks earlier was brilliant. Way to go guys! Now if you can just address this stupid war and the failing economy, you’d be on the right track.

From me longer days signal the coming of spring. And spring means being outdoors. Camping, hiking, boating and backpacking. A few of my favorite things.

And suddenly, I don’t feel so bad.

I had plans for this weekend. I really did. They revolved around watching Sci-Fi shows I’d DVR’ed and reading comic books.

There were a few productive things I meant to squeeze in there, but I was ready to do a whole lot of not very much.

Of course, I should have known that couldn’t happen. I’m not very good at doing nothing. Saturday morning I reached the final straw with my PC. One too many little quirky things had happened. I had no doubt what the was wrong.

The computer is almost four years old. The hardware is still very usable, I over-spec’ed it when I bought it for just that reason. But in the course of four years who know what the hell I’ve installed and uninstalled on this thing. I’m a geek, a tinkerer and a bit of a hacker. If there is something new and nifty I’ve probably checked it out. Installed it, tried a few things got bored and forgot about it. The cumulative effect from that alone would cause issues sooner or later.

But let’s be honest. Not everything I do on this computer is exactly on the up and up. Nothing terrible, but I sometimes have occasion to go to undesirable sites and sometimes even brave a download or two. And sometimes I get more than I bargain for.

Whatever the root cause was, I was done with it. I took an inventory of what was installed that I actually use. (Which was a pretty short list compared to what was installed.) I moved the data that was on the C: drive to the external drive. And then I formatted the damn thing.

I seriously considered loading Ubuntu. There are some real advantages to that, but in the end laziness won out. I know what I need in XP and how to set it up pretty quickly. I didn’t want to spend the time or energy configuring Linux to see my mixer and get shoutcast working; or make it see the RAW files from my camera so that I can manage my photo.

I installed XP, the drivers, SP2 and pulled down a shitload of patches. I joined the PC to my home domain and then started installing software.

That’s when things got ugly. I was trying to install a piece of software that I had… ahem… lost the key to. I proceeded to visit some shady sites that might be able to give a key I could use… since mine was… err… lost. I wasn’t having any luck, so I downloaded a key cracker. I know that this is risky business. It wasn’t a cracker but a trojan horse. Fuckers.

To make matters worse my Antivirus engine (but not the definitions) is a couple of years old. It was one that I had a license from my last job. It wasn’t picking this thing up. I went to antivirus.com and used Trend Micro’s House Call to do an online scan. It was seeing the buggers.

I wasted no time downloading Trend Micro’s Antivirus software and installing it. It was able to get a bunch of the bastards, but some of them couldn’t be deleted. I booted into recovery console and got rid of them, but when I rebooted there were new ones. It went back and forth like this until I was able to find where it had changed the registry and hack it out.

At least I think I have.

And I haven’t so much as read a comic book this weekend.

I really am pathetic. For the last 9 weeks or so, I’ve been walking around, more often than not, angry, depressed and just plain miserable.

Today the sun comes out, the temperature climbs close to 70 degrees and I feel great. Everything is looking up.

Am I that much not in control of myself? The weather dictates my mood and I have no say in the matter?

It doesn’t seem reasonable. I think it’s been this way all of my life, although I’ve only recognized recently.

And for the last several years, I’ve asked myself the same question. If the gloom, cold and sort days of winter make me so fucking miserable, why don’t I just move some place that stays warm and sunny all year? Like Florida or Arizona.

There is no good answer. Except that uprooting my whole family and quitting a perfectly good job to move hundreds of miles away on the hope that better weather will cheer me up, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Yet… I still think about it.

There is no doubt that I will end up some place where the sun shines more often than not. It just may take till I retire and that won’t be any time soon.

At least, for now, I know that winter is nearing the end. Around here winter doesn’t seem to just stop and then spring magically starts. It seems more complex than that.

It starts with a day like today. A day that seems like spring has finally arrived. But I know better. Winter will re-assert itself. Spring will continue to pop up. Here and there. And each time, it will last a little longer, and winter will be weaker each time it tries to make itself known. Till finally winter just never comes back.

I can’t wait.

… but I think my chi is all fucked up. Or maybe it’s karma. Or maybe it’s just shit.

Things aren’t right, but I know that the root of all of it is me. There are some external factors fucking with me, but mostly it’s just me.

Nothing seems right. And I can’t fix it. As a matter of fact, quite the opposite. Whatever attempt I make to fix things, seems to make it worse.

Some times, when shit is off like this, I rage a bit and then feel better. But we’re well beyond raging. I don’t know what to do when this happens. (Yes, it has happened many times before.) So I get manic. And obsessive.

So far this week, I’ve updated my long lost forum. Well, a little bit. I’ve imported a number of Ratdog and Dead shows into my iTunes. Edited, organized and tagged several hundred photos. Researched alternatives for streaming my stupid radio show. Cleaned the kitchen. And all of that in my free time. I’ve spent most of my time at work.

Don’t think that it stops when I’m at work either. I’ve organized my files. Updated my address book and calendar. Updated all kinds of documentation.

Even my dreams are fucked up.

It’s this same manic behavior that leaves me with 4 or 5 blogs, a radio show, a forum, a (defunct) club and I don’t even know what else.

I don’t enjoy any of this stuff, I just need to DO something. Anything.

It doesn’t work.

I tend to interrupt myself to jump from one obsession to another.

I suppose this will pass, but I don’t know when. Consider yourself warned.

All the TV Weather Persons agreed, freezing rain would continue all day; effectively turning the world into a dangerous sheet of ice. All the schools were canceled. Then the government offices were shut down. Hell, my office even closed for the day.

And then… nothing. Nothing happened at all. It didn’t even rain. Much less freeze.

Nothing like a 3 day work week to throw a wrench into everything. I have no doubt that I will pay for this dearly next week. I’m also very glad that I did not put off all this paperwork till today like I was thinking about.

So I had a productive day of ‘organizing’ my iTunes, watching Doctor Who (Doctors 2 and 10) and generally doing nothing.

We did go hiking last week, and it was a great trip. I may try to find the motivation to write about it.

There should be a rule that limits the amount hype that local news channels are allowed to have about weather. The more they warned me away from go out in this freezing mess, the more I knew it would be nothing.

It happens every year.

I take my last backpacking trip in late October or early November. I say to myself, last trip till Spring…

And I mean it, when I say it.

I go on with my life. The busy holidays in December. The short, but cold and dreary days of January. And then it gets to be February. The days begin to get longer. There will be a mild weekend. And I get the itch. And it won’t go away.

Next thing you know, I’m packing my pack; wearing layer over layer of clothing; getting ready to go out backpacking in sub-freezing weather. This invariably leads to huddling in a sleeping bag, shivering, hoping to make it through the night with out having my extremities fall off.

Well, maybe it’s not quite that bad. But it gets cold. In this day and age, most of us just ignore cold. Cold is something we endure between the house and the car. And again from the car to inside of an office building, or grocery store, or whatever. But when you are out in it, with no where to go in to, it is a different thing. A persistent force to be reckoned with.

As I type this, my pack is packed and I have several layers of clothes laid out. I’m going backpacking. Tomorrow will get up to about freezing. On Sunday it will be warmer, in the high 30s, of course it will probably rain. Guessing the weather is aways hard. The mountains, even small mountains (like the ones we’ll be hiking this weekend,) keep their own weather. But I don’t think it’s gonna be pretty.

I don’t care. I can’t wait till late March. I’ve the itch. I need to get out there and be away from everything else. Even the huddling and shivering is therapeutic. It’s not much fun while it happens, but when you get back to work and deal with the everyday annoyances, they don’t seem so bad.

At least that is what I’m telling myself tonight. Monday, when I get back, I may have a different story to tell.

I do hate January. I hate the short, cold gray days. I hate that everything is dead. It’s a stupid time of year. One of these years, I’m gonna say, fuck it and move somewhere that is warm and bright. Florida, Arizona, Somewhere.

I get depressed. I don’t want to, but it seems to be out of my control. I’m sure this has to do with the general deadness of everything. And the lack of sunlight. Every year, I struggle through it.

On the bright side. I have a new toy.

After two and a half years and 100 plus episodes of Shitty Blog Radio, it seemed like it was time for some better equipment. It took me a few hours to get it all working, but after a good test drive tonight, I think I’ve got it.

Of course, new mic or not, Shitty Blog Radio will still suck. You can increase the sound fidelity but it won’t fix the content. You can (of course) tune in Thursdays at 10 PM EST to decide for yourself.

Work has been a drag. Budget cuts and bullshit politics have ground my project to halt. I am beginning to wonder if I am working in the right place.

So, to amuse myself, I follow the Ravens hunt for head coach and watch as the Patriots march on to history. And the good news is… by the time they get there, this god forsaken month will be over.

That last post was relatively upbeat. Mostly this is how I feel, but there is another side to all this.

I’m reminded of this as I sit here at a party, by myself, blogging on my phone.

In spite of my various successes, I still seem to end up alone in the crowd. I’m sure you think that I separate myself, but its not true. I really make an effort to fit in and be a part of things. It just doesn’t work.

So I find myself ending 2007 the same way every year ends. Sitting alone in the crowd. I’m doing my best not to let it get me too down.

It is, however, a reminder that there is still more work to be done in ‘08.