So I’ve had a week off already and it’s only felt like a weekend.  Time is flying.  Right now I’m waiting to get the oil changed in my car and only found out that I’m going to need new tires too.  Grrrr. 

Christmas Eve I woke up to having to help shovel snow at my parents….well I shoveled and dad drove the plow…

Christmas was fast.  Up at 6am, and on the road by 7:30am.  Down to Brighton before lunch.  Then gifts then leaving by 5pm to head to Lansing.  Then back to GR the next day.  Thursday (today) started out early with a funeral followed by some basic shopping.  Now the oil change.  Tomorrow off to Detroit for a Pistons game and then Saturday Down to Monroe.  Sunday back to GR to pick up a new family Member.  A new little kitten.  Don’t have a name for him yet, but thinking, maybe Mario, Curby, or Aspen.

Well the oil change is down.  That’s it for now.  Now off to Meijer.

BigRedsPlace.com had a few hiccups, but overall it should be up and running again.  There were some carry over issues with the data center migration.  I had some issues with the domain pointers, but I believe the admins have fixed the problems.

One thing I’ve noticed is SPEED.   If you’ve had complaints before in the past, I hope they’re gone cause when you look at the photos, the hope is that they load as fast as picasa web or flickr’s site.  Feel free to browse http://photos.bigredsplace.com  and see if you feel its running any faster.  Clients can check out their proof pages too.

I wanted to give a shout out to a website that some of you might be familiar with already but for anyone else it??s worth checking out if you like music and not just the same old artist.

Pandora.com is part of the Music Genome Project. Information on the project is at http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml.

Basically the Pandora is a music player that you put in the name of an artist and or a song and it will play HI QUALITY music similar to or music by that exact artist. The music has been selected that has the same sound which includes everything from the beat to the style of chords the artist uses when strumming their guitars.

The Music Genome Project

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 6 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy – but now that we’ve created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe. We hope you enjoy the journey.

Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project

Best of all it is FREE. The legal mombo-jumbo goes pretty long. If your like me and don??t?? really care about downloading songs or buying CDs and only listen to the radio or music while sitting in front of the computer, I encourage you to check this out. Pandora.com will auto start up the radio player. (no software to download) They also have a blog: http://blog.pandora.com

Well, its about time.  Today I receive an email from Site5, my web hosting company.

We are excited to inform you that your server (*******) has been scheduled for migration to our new datacenter The Planet located in Dallas, Texas
The new server at ThePlanet has the following specifications: CentOS 4.5, dual 5130 Xeon processors, RAID 10, and 4GB RAM.

The old server was located in I think Lansing MI, and was much less in quality.  The new data center has cookie cutter servers so when one goes down, its a swap in – out.  I’m looking forward to this upgrade and hope that I have better speed, and less downtime.  The upgrade will be going on from now until Sunday, the 23rd.  So, with that said, we may see some sort of down time for a short time, but that’s out of my control.  See you all on the flip side.