WillChatham.com

I just added an April 2006 section to Ye Olde Photo Gallery. Get yer fix on. Some of the pictures are old and from my cell phone, which I tend to forget about downloading to my PC. Some are from Easter weekend in Columbia, some are from An Event Apart in Atlanta, and some are from our trip out to Brevard today. We went to see our friends Jenni and Jay and their daughter Lilah. Our friends Dave and Celeste were there with their son Frank too.

After looking at these, I realize I need to take more pictures of Dax. It’s kinda easy to forget about him because all he does is sit there.

What was anticipated as being the Best Week Ever is now over. It was quite a week. Two extremely exciting events were tempered by a run of bad luck.

As you know, the week started in Atlanta at An Event Apart, which was exciting, fun, and fulfilling. I got to meet Eric Meyer:

I came back home to a very sick family. I worked one day with Position Builders, my part-time gig, before I had to take the rest of the week off to take care of my family. Double ear infections, vomiting, walking pneumonia, and sinus infections have all been present in this household over the last 2 weeks. I have escaped all of this, somehow.

Bring The Noise
Friday came and all was set straight. I went to see Dinosaur Jr in concert. I cannot describe how much the second album by this band, “You’re Living All Over Me”, influenced my drumming, my tastes, my life, and my musicianship as a whole. I was extremely upset the night I didn’t get to go see them in Lexington, KY in 1990.

Then the original lineup split ways and things were never the same. Until last night.

Lou Barlow, J Mascis, and Murph were all back together, bygones being bygones, and they absolutely rocked my socks off. I had tears in my eyes at one point. The raging sound that they managed to tame into this beautifully orchestrated barrage of power absolutely floored me. It was the loudest show I have ever been to, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I felt like I was cheating myself and the band by even considering putting in the earplugs I had in my pocket.

They played only one song beyond the first three albums. This was a good thing for me, though I could tell many people there were expecting to see the poppy Dinosaur Jr of the early to mid 90’s - the Lollapalooza version that was not at all like the original trio.

I think they played all but one song from “You’re Living All Over Me”. They even played their cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” - complete with Lou’s gutteral chorus line and the abrupt ending.

The level of stokedness I still cannot describe.

What more could I ask for??? I am still in awe and unable to grasp the sheer magnitude of what bombarded my soul last night. The cycle is now complete. The circle is unbroken.

So with two weeks remaining at my current day job with the Air Force, I have found myself in a time of major change and decision making. I have sent out about 50 resumes with only a couple of responses; interviews that I have yet to take part in. The long of the short of it is there are really not a lot of I.T. jobs in this town, and I have been lucky to have the ones I have had thus far.

Alicia and I had a long talk while my parents were here watching the kids this weekend, and we came up with a plan. Unless some company offers me a deal that is too good to turn down, I am going to do what I have always wanted to do, and that is go it on my own.

As a foundation, I have picked up a part-time gig with a local company called Position Builders, who are a search engine optimization company. This alone is a really cool deal, because it has a lot of potential to develop into something big, and I am getting in as the ball is picking up momentum.

In addition to that, I will be trying to get as much business as I can for what was until now my freelance business, Asheville Technologies. AT has been pretty much a hobby thus far, adding a little spending cash to my wallet each month, but I think with some help from some sales-oriented friends I can push it along into something that will carry us along.

The prospects of all this are exciting, nerve-wracking, and satisfactory. Of course there are a lot of “what ifs” and the potential to fail, but there is also the potential to succeed, and there seems to be no better time than now to try it. We have developed several Plan B’s in case none of this works out, but I am hoping we won’t need to go there.

So, does anyone need a web site or some PC support/training/consulting? Let me know.

You probably noticed the new curtains. Finally, I got around to creating my own design for this site. There are still elements of the previous theme here, and I will be changing them in time. For now though, I can at least call this my own.

Today in the car, I asked Gray what his website address was. He knew.

I heard a song I liked on Radio Paradise the other day, and I looked up to see what it was. Turned out to be by Belle and Sebastian, a group I had previously avoided because I didn’t like the name. I ended up downloading the whole album, called The Life Pursuit, and am digging it. I continue to suprise myself, as I never would have liked such artsy pop-rock 10 years ago at all.

I just added the pictures from February to the Ye Olde Photo Gallery. I still have one hour and 12 minutes left before March starts. How you like them timely apples?

I figured I better go ahead and get them up there as I am about to get slammed with a bunch of side projects. That is a good thing though. They all seem to come at once, and really haven’t let up much since October or so.

At my day job I finally got Apache 2 talking to Tomcat via the mod_jk connector. It has been a problem that has had me befuddled for the last couple of weeks. Turned out to be not anywhere near as simplistic as it was in the Apache class I attended a few weeks ago. I found it odd that not until I was a week into this did I learn that mod_jk2 is depricated, and that mod_jk is what I should have been dealing with all along. Seems like they would have mentioned that in the class. The silver lining in the cloud is that I am now much more familiar and confident with both Apache and Tomcat now.

TTFN

I posted a new gallery, January 2006, in the Ye Olde Photo Gallery.

I thought I had more…don’t know where they went.