Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Happy Olympics. I’m almost as tired of the countdown of how many days until the Olympics start as I am of the warnings about analog TV going the way of the dinosaurs.

Somehow, I can’t get all that excited about the Beijing Olympics. I can’t name one star athlete from any country going to them, despite all the hype and articles in the paper and on TV. By next week, it’ll be just one more week of nothing worth watching…

Just a quick post… today the TV news announced that the major sponsor of the Saturday concerts in North Tonawanda, Labatts Brewing, had withdrawn from the concert series. That pretty much seals the deal for ending the shows for the rest of the season.

Well, at least they still have the Wednesday and Friday concerts. That ought to be enough for any city, right?

In fact, that’s downright greedy. There is a certain synergy between these concerts, offering free shows to bring people into a certain place. Buffalo has Thursday at The Square. Lockport has the Molson Concerts on Friday. Lewiston has Jazz on Mondays. Artpark has, well Tuesday and Wednesday… NT had Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Continue Reading…

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After quite a bit of playing around, the mini PC is finally pretty much done. I got the OSx86 partition running and the menu at bootup to choose between operating systems is tweaked to work with all three. Almost everything that should work, works on all three OS’s – sound, network, video, DVD burning. Even filesharing with my local network is almost there and that’s sometimes problematic even between two Windoze computers.

After some time playing around with Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX Leopard, I’m getting used to finding my way around them pretty well. Continue Reading…

After the North Tonawanda Police cited vendors at the Gateway Park concert two weeks ago, the State Liquor Authority has pulled the liquor license putting the event in jeparody for the rest of the season and forcing the promoters to move this weeks headline act to Buffalo. [Tonawanda News article]

The story really begins–like much misery in my life–with the overzealous North Tonawanda Police Department. A few weeks back they dispatched an underage, undercover girl to buy beer at one of the Labatt Blue Light canal concerts. The dumbass working the tap sold the girl beer, and as a result, the state liquor authority revoked the promoters’ alcohol license, making it impossible to raise enough money to pay Mr. Hornsby’s appearance fee. While the NT police still haven’t caught the Booby Bandit that has been loose in the city for the last week, they wrapped up “The Case of the Girl We Hired To Buy Beer” lickety-split. [Middleman web site]

Continue Reading…