Michael P. O'Connor

What a morning

Well this morning I am on my way to work. Driving up to an intersection (going maybe 5 MPH) some one in front of me coming to a Yield sign, we both look to the on coming road and see traffic coming, the person in front of me stops, I go to stop, nothing, try the breaks again nothing, shit there is ice. I look to the left, if I go there, I will get rammed by a car, if I do nothing I will ram the care in front of me, look to the right, see a snow "wall" thinking well that should stop me. I turn my wheel to the right, and pray that I can still control the car, while keeping my foot on the breaks. Well I do hit the "wall" of snow, but instead of stopping it breaks, turns into a ramp and
Good news is that no one hurt, and no damage to the car.

At the Lamb's high Feast We Sing

I love the hymn that I titled this post after, the church I am going to in Alexandria, VA we sang it on Sunday and it has haunted me all week, I just love that hymn.
The music http://www.lutheranhymnal.com/lutheranworship/lw126.mid
here are the lyrics
I wish I could play this hymn on my Tin Whistle, but the problem is that it goes down the middle C and the tin whistle stops at the D just above the middle C. I guess I could try to transpose the tune up a few steps to the key of D (going from the current G and go up to the key of D) But I fear if I do that I might also move some of the higher notes in the hymn above the range of the Tin Whistle. It is such a great Easter hymn, we sang it as a Eucharistic hymn on Sunday, and it does fit both well, but when we sung it on Sunday I was drawn to Easter, but of course we should be drawn to Easter every Sunday as in the the Sacraments we receive the gifts of the Death and Resurrection of Christ.

Musical Fun

Well today I meet up with 2 friends and we played some music together, it was a bunch of fun. Jess was on the Guitar, and Joe on the Alto Recorder and me on the Tin Whistle, it was a blast, I love playing music in a group.

fsck comcast

I am so pissed at comcast right now. I get told we will have a tech out there tomorrow, be home from 1 to 5pm. So I have to take time off work, well I am there from 1 to 5 no one comes, I call in and get "oh you did not have to be home it was the technician for outside" I still don't have high speed internet. I am so pissed that I called verizon to see about fios (and for those of you that know me, know I hate verizon) and that is not available in my area. Now wondering what my other options are. Edit: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r23220976-How-to-get-service you can see some people tring to help me work it out at that post (I am mpop, like I need to tell any one that would read this site)

Discrimination alive in the US still

Well this last week proved that discrimination is still alive and well in the US. What am I talking about, I am talking about the dropping of Rush Limbaugh from the group buying the sports team. It was done because (and only because) he was an out spoken Republican. Sure the liberals will say it was because he said this or that, or he did this or that, or some other phony reason, but it was only because he was an outspoken republican, so yes Discrimination is alive and well in the US, it just not based on race anymore, it based on if you are Republican or Christian or both now.

Cleaning up my Itunes

Well I am going though all my Music and Podcasts on my Itunes and cleaning it up. There are some podcasts I just don't listen to anymore, and I don't think I will be again, so I have deleted them from my computer (freed up over 50 Gigs of room).

Some music by Joe Bossard and me

Last sunday my friend Joe and I recorded some of our playing, I was on the tin whistle he was on the alto recorder and here are the products
Come Thou Almighty King

Look Ye Saints the sight is Glorious

Lord God We Praise Thy Name

The Lords my Sheperd

Yes I know we are not the best, but this is what we do for fun many Sundays after church.

Funny

Time between Bible study and church today, I checked my mail box here at chruch. In it was a copy of a newspaper called "The Christian News" (still don't know how they got my name at the church but oh well) Headline was "Augsburg Confession still Relevant" and the first thought though my head was "Why not just have a headline read 'sky is still blue'". If one does not know that the Augsburg Confession is still relevant to today's world then well they have not read it if you ask me. I just find headlines of the most obvious nature funny.
Well just have to finish setting up to record the sermon for the churches podcast.
Edit: well it does not look like today's sermon is going to get up. My laptop fried during the service after the sermon. I should have known it was going to happen with the sound the hard drive was making.
Well when I got home it failed to boot up 3 times, then tried to boot the repair system, 4 failures, all 4 times no hard drive, then after that it just tried to do dhcp boot itself. Yep laptop is toast.

Old stuff

Well today I started some "cleaning" out of the apartment. You know the kind you pull the boxes of stuff you have stored in the closet and just trash stuff that you don't need. I ran across a lock in one of the boxes. Now why did I ever keep this lock, it is the lock I used way back in high school on my locker, it looks like it is still in good working order, tested it and it seams to work with no problem. The key was left in the lock it self so it is a fully working lock now do I keep it or trash it. It seams a shame to trash a perfectly good lock, but at the same time what the heck will I use it on?

Sunday

Well on Sunday our church had our semi-annual voters meeting. Up shot from it, I am now a trustee for my church again. And it has been made "official" I will be representing my church at the LCMS Eastern District convention this coming weekend. I just have to read though what this years proceedings are going to be.

Fun last night on line in game

Well I was playing a game I love playing on line (World of Warcraft) and they have in this game a private messaging system called tells. Also in this game they have a currency gold. Well much against the Terms of Service people have started to sell gold in game for real life money, and they have taken up to sending tells to players in game offering to sell them gold for real life money (for the life of me I don't know why any one would pay real money for gold in game as gold in game is really easy to get, I wish money in the real world was as easy to get). Well I was board standing around wanting for something else to happen when I get a tell from some one offering to sell me gold, normally I will just right click their name and report them for spam, but I was board at that moment and it was 20 minutes till the event I wanted to do would start, so I decided to see how far I could take it. Well after about 5 minutes of me just sending stupid tells to this spammer he puts me on ignore. This is a feat that is just great as I got a spammer to decided he did not want to deal with me or try to get me to pay him money. All I did was send the same stupid phrase over and over and over again to this person, I know not that creative but hay I got on a gold spammers ignore list.

Biking

Well about 3 weeks ago I got back on my bike and went biking with some friends, well we pushed my limits and did 17 to 18 miles on that first day. Well for the next 2 weeks my right knee was in major pain, so bad that at times I could not walk. Well on the 25th of last month we tried to go biking again, I could not even make it 2 city blocks before the pain got to great. Well last Saturday we gave it another go. This last time I was able to get about 3 to 4 miles in before my knee started to act up. It was not bad, but I decided better safe then sorry so I called it when the knee started to act up. I hope that maybe next Saturday I might be able to get a good 6 miles in, and start to build up from there.

Interesting

I have a friend that asked me to take http://www.netaddiction.com/resources/internet_addiction_test.htm for a research paper he was doing, he was asking several people to do it. I personally got a score of 29, I would have guessed my score would have higher, but I guess it is a good thing I did not score higher.

Tax day

Well I put it off and put it off and put it off, and today I finally did my taxes. I don't know why I put it off, it only takes maybe an hour to do all 3 of them, it is not like it is that much time. Oh well they are done for another year.

Interesting read on how to use LinkedIn

Well I am now trying Linked In to help me find a job via networking, right now my network there consists of only 9 connections. 9 does not seam so bad for only starting up my account there on Friday. But I found this post over there 10 ways to use linked in I thought that it was a very good list of ideas, and I am going to try to put them into practice.

Currently looking for work

I am currently looking for a Job as a C/C++ programmer. Here is a link to my current Resume I have in this copy removed my Home address and phone number, for obvious reasons, but if you are looking for a Programmer in C/C++, you can email me at mpop@mikeoconnor.net

Happy Easter all

Happy Easter.

Polotics?

Question, when I stopped doing political posts, I kind of started letting the site slide, should I continue trying not to do political posts, or shoudl I say forget it and just post political stuff if the fancy hits me.

Photo section

Well did some work and got my photo section back up and running, also looked around the site to see what was up and what was down (needed to do this as I have not done much site up keep in a long time) took some areas off of the list at the front, and cleaned up the photo section a bit too.

20 man of OS

My guild decided to do 20 man of OS tonight, here is the results.

Happy Reformation Day

Happy Reformation Day for all the Lutherans out there

Illidan Cousle down

I seen the bear mount drop

Yesterday, I was running with some friends, they needed me to to replace their normal resto druid in their ZA runs since she just had a baby.
(click image for better view)
I am happy to finally see it drop, I wanted to be able to say I seen it drop. I don't want it, it is the ugliest mount in the game, but to be able to see it drop as part of a team where we run the 4 timers (and have 2 minutes left over)

Fun at church tonight

Well I went over to my church to hang with some friends tonight. First off we played a game called "Dukes of Hazzard" that was fun. Then I pulled out my Fluxx deck, if you know that game you know how much fun it can be, we did 3 games, the first 2 were fast 10 minute ones, the last one lasted about an hour, you know those ones, long but funny as all get out. Then after that, Joe and I went and started to have some fun playing music, he had brought his Alto Recorder and I had my Tin Whistle on me, so we spent about 30 minutes on that, and by that time it was 10 at night so we called it a night.

A Shout out

I want to put a shout out to the following people Johnathan and Kata Ward. Joel Martan I recently had my cell phone break, and lost all my numbers, and so I lost your numbers. I am sure you still have mine (or so I hope) Give me a call, or drop me an email and say hi. Sadly since you are no longer in the area finding you guys will be harder then not.

Links

Well as you might have noticed I just did some major link clean up on the right side of this page. I have lots of work to do to get this site back up and going. I need to work on the photo section and all the other sections, but first order of business is the blog then the photo section and we will see where I go from there. The question now is should I clean up the Sections, or should I leave the old sections in and just add on to it. Cleaning them up will allow me to more focus this blog, but leaving all the old ones will let the old posts keep their old sections, and I do not wish to delete any old posts.

The blog rises from the dust

I am going to look at reviving this blog. And bring it back, there will be some changes on it, if you find your way back here and read it again, you might notice some changes. I will refrain from political stuff, and aquarium stuff, I will still be doing stuff about the Tin Whistle, and Biking (next year) and all that fun stuff. I will also be doing more on the game I been playing World of Warcraft. I will also be updating the links on the right side of the page.

Vista sucks more the xp

Well I got a new computer this week, on Wednessday, it crashed 5 times on the first day before I even installed anything. It is running slower then a computer 5 years older then it. It is a crap shoot if the sound will work. I have been told by other people that work with winblows all the time, I will be better off to upgrade to xp.

fedex fails to deliver again

Well I have a package being sent to me, the sender made the mistake of using fedex, the sent it last Wed. I have yet to get it, I sent it to my office, where we have guards there 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. fedex claims to have tried 2 times, and there was no one there. So that tells me fedex is full of liers. I talked to Mike in security, and he verified that tonight at 6pm when fedex claims to have tried a delivery, there was no attempts by fedex. fedex fails to deliver again. Heck I got the recite in the post already.

Upgreaded my OS on my Linux box

I have been running Fedora 2 for the longest time on my Linux box well today I just put Fedora 7 on it. I am still in the middle of the install, aka I am downloading the updated patches for the system.

I got to meet Todd Wilken of Issues Etc

My favorit Talk show is Issues Etc, and when I was in Huston I got to meet the host of the show I also did get Todd Wilken to pose for a picture with me, check it out

1000 and 1000 and 1000's of spam

I just looked at the comments on my photo section, I have spent 2 hours so far deleteing all the 1000's and 1000's and 1000's of spam, I am not using the interface privited by the system I use, it is just slow, I am deleteing them straight from the database. I been thought 3 pages of 1000 entries at a time, and still have alot to go though. I am at the point I am just blind deleteing them, aka I am not even looking to see if there is a real comment. I have set the max langth of comments on my photo section to 0 so that should help prevent the spam. And it all is perverted stuff. Why do spammers think that a web site others put up is there place to put up their graffie? I hope if they ever put up one for them selfs, they get 100x the spam on their site as they produce. I hope the worse for them, I know that is wrong, but I loss so much of my time because they are such SOB's. 3 hours today.
I also set the comment feild in the database of the photo section to be read only, so no comments should be accepted. The final count was 7K spam posts.

Finally

I just got my bike out of the shop today, I dropped if off on the 12, need a new rear wheel casset, new chain, another tune up for the year, and I was hoping they could work on the front derailer. Well they did get all that done, and finally the front derailer works the way I think it should work. For the last 3 years the front derailer would not move the chain down to the smallest gear, unless I was going a high speed (just the opposite of what I needed) On the ride home I tried it out, and wow -- it dropped down to the smallest set with such ease.

Back from huston

Got back from Huston on Friday, and I am so glad to be back. I will post my thoughts on the LCMS national convention, but I will do that later, I want to choice my words with care.

My head started to get bigger this week

Well this week my head started to grow to a large size, I had 2 people (one is the call screener for my favorit Radio Show "Issues Etc" and some other random guy) said they read my blog. The second guy was a person that works for CPH and we were talking about sheet music and I was talking about needing it in the key of D or G, for an instrument I play, he asked what it was, and when I said the Tin Whistle, he asked "Oh are you Michael P. O'Connor" (my name tag only had Michael O'Connor, and I had earlier said I was from Pittsburgh) I was shocked that some random person could guess my Middle Inishal, he did mentioned he has read my blog.

What a way to end the day

I go out to get some food today after the session ended for the day here. Well Huston have most things closing down at 7pm. I finally end up at a Subway (along with a bunch of other people from the convention, this turned out to be very varable as you shall see soon)
Well as I get up to the point to order my food some guy about 3 people back bangs the window (from the inside) and started to threaten to kill himself. Not some thing you want to deal with when you are tring to buy dinner after a long day. So taking a quick look at him (to get a bit of a discription), then after getting my meal rush out the door (as if I was leaving), called 911. the problem I ran into right then is, appently you get connected to a central service, and I had to 1st id the city, then if I wanted the police/ems/fire. Well I never dealt with something like this so I just said I don't know some guy is threating to kill himself, I then got connected to the huston police. After I give all the info I had, and the call ended, I went back in to "eat" Well there were other people there from the convenstion, so 4 of us get the guy to site down and "eat" with us untill the athorities arived.... what a way to end the day.

Don't bike for a day and your legs will never forgive you

Well for the last 2 days I been doing alot of sitting, I have not gotten any biking in at all, and right now my legs are killing me for it. You would think that not biking would not cause pain, but for me for some stupid reason, it hurts when I don't bike.

At the synodical convension

Well I am now here at the LCMS convension. One good thing that did happen was that my favorit talk radio show host was here, Todd Wilkins, and I did get to meet him in person, he does a readio show called Issues Etc (I usally listen late via the podcasts. I will post pictures of the convention when I get home, and I hope to see if I can get Pastor Wilkins to pose with me in a picture.

Biking and stuff

I know I have not posted much on it, but I am still biking alot, I bike to work every day. I have not done as much biking as of late as I would like to have, but I have a lot of other things on my plate, and I do want to dedicate a bit more time to other things.

Amazing Grace

Here is my attempted at playing the Spiritual Song Amazing Grace, still not sure it made it into the new Lutheran hymnal, it is a great song and all, but not a hymn. Click here to hear the recording of it, and some rambalings by me

More Music

Click here and if you have an idea what the music is please post a guess, comments are open only for a week (this is an anit-spam thing, less posting time less spam)

We finally did it we it

The guild I am in BlackFlag we did it we beat The Curator in Karazhan Click here for a pic of the downed boss or here for one with out the loot showing

The new Linux box

Well I been messing around with this new Linux box I build this weekend and I think it seems to be working out well. I still need to update the OS from FC2 to FC7 I am working with the old hard drives so I have all my old data, the hard drives were not to bad, heck they were greate when I build the old system and they are still very good now, one is a 250Gb one and the other is a 100Gb one, so I should not feel any crunch on space for a long time to come still.

Todays bike ride

Today our church had it's annual picnic, well I talked a friend of mine from church into biking up to it, it only took about 1 hour and fifteen minutes. At the place we had the picnic they also had a pool, so Joe and I ended up swimming for about 3 hours before riding back. My main problem is I never put sunscreen on, and now my shoulders are yelling at me now. But it was a good time. But now I have a major headache, don't know if it from not drinking enough or from the sunburn. I did drink only 1.5 litters of water -- not enough.

My Blog

Now that my Linux box is back up and running I probably will be posting more often to my blog. So if after all these months you are still checking this blog it is now again alive.

Got my Linux box back up

Well I went to get a new CPU for my Linux box today, well I could not get one to fit my mother board so I had to get a new mother board, and new memory, but at lest I got my Linux box back up and running it feels nice to have my Linux box back up and running.

Photo section back up

I got the photo section of my web site back up and running so you can see here

I think I got the spam problem down

Well it has been 3 days, and I have not seen spam, I know that is going to be the lowest and I will get more spam later, but it is 0 down from about 100 a day.

Here is a picture of my character in WoW

This should help stop the spam

I issued a sql command to the sql server that holds my blog, basicly said that if the comments section says allow, turn it to disallow, the timed ones should have all timed out, except the most resent ones, we shall see, if in a week I have over 100 spams again I will know that it did not work. But it should, since the spammers try to hit older posts, and I have all posts now set to disallow or allow comments only for 1 week after they are posted.

Tried to get a new CPU for my linux box today

but it looks like Best buy does not sell them any more, well atlest that is what I was told when I said I wanted to buy one. So I guess my photo section will be down for a little bit longer.

Tin Whistle music

Well here is another post. I have recorded some music that I played on my tin whistle click here to bleed your ears out

I forgot how bad the spam on my blog was

But I am getting about 30 an hour now. Spammers are the scum of the earth. It is not like they will ever get their stuff posted here, nor will I ever use their trashy stuff.

Bowling

I went bowling tonight with some friends of mine from church. It was a lot of fun, my first game I got some where in the 60's my second game I got a 112.

Tin Whistle

I know some people would like me to post about my latest stuff with my Tin Whistle, well back on Easter Tim Palmer and I played the last hymn at church. Usally this is done on the front lawn for easter Sunday but this year it was to cold. "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" was the hymn that we played.

The mail is starting to come in

Well I have been elected to represent the South Western Pittsburgh circut at the LCMS national convention in Huston TX this year. Well I am starting to get a lot of information in the mail, and I am thinking I might not be able to read it all. But I will give a try; I will prioritize the stuff to, convention business, should read, and probably will not read if I don't have the time.

I know it been a long time since I have posted here

And some of my friends at church and one of my friends from WoW (darkmessiah) have been incuraging me to post so ok I will post and I have a few posts to do today, so watch out.

Got my first bike ride in for the year

Well I biked to work for the first time this year, it was great to pull the bike out of storage and bike to work, what a thrill, there is nothing like a great morning bike ride, I pity the people that have to drive to work. I will update the mile count on top of the site later on tonight or maybe tomorrow.

Got an email today asking about my tin whistle playing and if I am still doing it. The answer to that question is yes I am still doing it. lately I have been practicing the following Easter Carol "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" I have been doing well, well at lest I think so. maybe I will record it later on and put it the blog.

No posts as of late

I have gotten 2 email in the last couple of days asking why I have not posted much. Well during the colder months there is not much to talk about, no biking. I use to do political but politics have been so full of hate lately I really don't think I want to deal with the hate that is in politics, in the last 8 years I have basically seen some candidates campaign only on "I am not that other person" Well I am starting to wonder do I want to really meditate on that stuff much.

Photo section down for a bit

Until I can get my linux box back up and the backup of my photo section back, I have deleted it since some asshole hacker thinks he is cute by hacking the site. Sorry to any one, I hope that kid that did it suffers some massive painful event soon.

I hate spam

It does not matter how big I make my mail box quota, I just upped it again I upped it by another 100Mb it was only 100Mb, I get a phone call almost every other day I get a call that mail is bouncing again. I get so much spam that my personal email address is now official useless. I wish we had real laws against spam in all countries to get ride of it, I am about ready to close down the email address and leave the world of email, 99.99999% of the email I get is spam.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas to every one.

I must be the only one that does this

(Young single guy that is . . .)
My mother dropped off my presents for Christmas that she and my dad got me this year at my apartment, I must be the only single young guy that did not rush to open them, they are still wrapped under my tree (well except 3 since they are to big to fit under the tree so they are still wrapped under the dining room table, oh and the tree is a 3 foot fake tree) I will probably not open them till Christmas Afternoon.
I will admit there is this one box that has my curiosity peaked. Oh well I have my World of Warcraft game to keep my attention for the next few days. I still have to send out my Christmas cards, I probably send them out tomorrow (yes I know late but that is how I am, and most of them are local so they should be there the day after.)

Tested the bulbs in my Christmas Tree Lights

I just tested all the bulbs in my main 100 light strain, there were only 17 that worked, and 83 were bad. I need to find a place that I can get some replacement bulbs for it. I know I could just by a new 100 strain but I don't see it good to just trash the strain. I hope to be putting the stuff up on the 14th.

I should check my spam folder and sorry to my friends

Well my account was full, I was wondering why I did not get any email for the last few days, well over 50 Megabytes were full of spam in my spam filter folders, I have deleted those, and clean up some room on my account. I have deleted some photos from my photo album (Biking 2004 and Biking 2005)

Bus Pass

Well the cold drove me off my bike for the season, so I was walking to work, it was not that bad, but it is getting colder. So I picked up a bus pass, I miss my free bus pass when I worked at CMU.

World of WarCraft

I know I have not tried this game before, I did not like the idea of posable going around and people coming up and just killing you for no reason. But with a free 10 day free trial, what have I had to loss except a little bit of time. Well it turns out you can set your character up on a PvE server so people can not attack and kill you, the worst you can do is accept a duel, but you don't die at the end of it, you are left with only one HP, so you can heal yourself afterwards, I don't do duels but.
If you happen to be on the server of Korialstrasz, run across a Night Elf named Drun, say hi to me. As of today I am up to a level 19. I have spent more time then I should have on the game, and found I do like it, so I have upgraded to the full paid account.

Well it is finally finished

Well today was the day we did the caroling over at Family House, those months of practice have come to a head. Over all I think it went well. So I the first time I did a public performance is over, and I am glad it is over because I was so nervous.
I wanted to record one of the practices we did, but every time I did, I was getting clipping on the recording, so I could not record anything that would be worth putting up.

Walmart sales down

I just saw on Fox news that Walmart sales for yesterday were down 10%, but they did not report why, but I think I know why. I got this email from the AFA on Nov 21 of 2006.
click here to see the email (259 words)

Cool

A year or two ago, my parents gave me a DVD "Creating The Lord of the Rings Symphony" In a tune labeled "The Shire" I hear a familiar sounding instrument, I look over at the screen (I am listening to it and not watching) and I see a Tin Whistle, I think to my self that can not be right, the Tin Whistle in a classical piece. So I watch as the guy fingers the instrument and try to copy it a bit, well, other then being about 3/4th of a beat off it sounded the same, the note the pitch, and the sound wow, after seeing that IF said Symphony ever comes to Pittsburgh I will want to go see it.

Happy Thanksgiving All

I am over at my parents place, but I wanted to just log on to wish all a happy thanks giving, I hope you had a good one.

It still gives me a rush

This still gives me a rush. What is it, it is where I give a first run test of some code I wrote. When I run it for the first time, and the code I wrote runs as I had planned on as I wrote it. It gives me such a rush when I see my code run.

I did record the practice tonight

I just have to edit out the talking, we did a lot of BS while we where practicing and I want to take some of that out. I just don't have the time tonight. (I still have to post 2 other podcasts that I have the recording for too.)

Due to Bandwidth theft

I have turned on Hotlink protection for my site. If you find a page on my site set, mikeoconnor.net hamradiobb.com please let me know what page. I do not wish to let myspace people steal my bandwidth.