Pronunciation: ‘jü-b&-(”)lE, “jü-b&-’lE
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French & Late Latin; Middle French jubilé, from Late Latin jubilaeus, modification of Late Greek iObElaios, from Hebrew yObhEl ram’s horn, jubilee
1 : often capitalized : a year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land
2 a : a special anniversary; especially : a 50th anniversary b : a celebration of such an anniversary
3 a : a period of time proclaimed by the Roman Catholic pope ordinarily every 25 years as a time of special solemnity b : a special plenary indulgence granted during a year of jubilee to Roman Catholics who perform certain specified works of repentance and piety
4 a : jubilation b : a season of celebration
5 : an Afro-American religious song usually referring to a time of future happiness
[Source]
I guess I’ve been swimming in bad karma or something lately. First, I broke the nice set of Sennheiser HD515 cans I use at work leaving me with the craptacular closed Aiwas I’d used before seeing the light. Then, I broke the belt clip on my cellphone. Fortunately, superglue seems to have solved both problems.
Then, I realized my Thinkpad wasn’t charging like it should. Everything indicated it was charging, but the battery meter kept getting lower. I pulled the AC from the back and reinserted it and the resulting sparks and burnt electronics smell tipped me off that something was amiss. Turns out I had 3 weeks or so left on my 3 year warranty, so I called up support (Monday) had it shipped out the next day (Tuesday), they had it in hand end of the next day (Wednesday), were repairing it the next (Thursday), and according to online tracking have fixed it and should be shipping it back out today (Friday). Assuming it comes back fixed, I’ve been pretty pleased with the overall experience. Added bonus: the support center I talked to was in Atlanta and not India. Seeing as I’ve had this thing for 3 years now and this is the first real problem I’ve had (well, ignoring the part where my cats chewed on the AC adapter), I’ve been quite pleased with the build quality on this machine. Beats the pants off the Dell I had that broke a keycap off the keyboard in less than a month…
On a sadder note, Merry sort of knocked over my external hard drive while it was running, and it sort of ended up running upside-down until I noticed it, and shortly thereafter it started making a weird siren noise and refused to spin up. And since hard drive manufacturers have been pushing capacity/performance/price as hard as they can, they’ve had substantially more reliability/quality control issues than when I first got into computers (I’ve had drives that ran close to continuously for 5+ years before I retired them when I needed more capacity). Now most of them have 1 year warranties if you’re lucky, and mine ran out in January so I’m out of luck.
Maybe all this has been happening since I’ve been so frustrated at work. Who knows. Just seems like a lot of bad juju all at once like this.
Rachel and her roommate Tammy (who’s a hoot btw) came down Friday night to catch the show at the Canopy Club featuring The Living Blue, Tractor Kings, Dark Country, and The Dolphin. We showed up some time during the Dolphin’s set and all I have to say is weird. I couldn’t really tell whether they were playing something or just getting setup and making random noises on-stage. We elected to wait out at the bar until after their set was over.
Thought Dark Country put on a pretty good show, but I would’ve liked to hear a bit more (they were only able to play a handful of songs). Hopefully I’ll get to hear more from them in the future… perhaps an EP?
I’m not quite sure what I think of the Tractor Kings. I will definitely say I was impressed to see one of them playing a 12 string acoustic guitar as a part of their act. I might have to check out more of their stuff to see what I think. Seemed like fairly subdued music compared to the other acts, but maybe that’s just me. Guess I should also check out the old 57s (er, I think that’s what Tammy said they reminded her of… not sure since it was kinda loud in there).
I’ve seen the Living Blue previously, and they fit with what I’d remembered. Clearly most of the people there on Friday night had come to see them play as they swarmed around the stage when they got started. I will say I thought their show I caught at Cowboy Monkey was more entertaining (perhaps because it was a more intimate venue and the place was comfortably packed).
Good stuff overall. Was kinda fun getting to hang out with Rachel and Tammy in their natural habitat so to speak.
<rant>
Although a lot of their associates clearly don’t think very highly of CU… sort of reminded me of all the Chicago Bears fans who had the nerve to come down and ruin our poor little town for a weekend (several times over the course of a season while the Bears were playing at our stadium while theirs was under repairs/construction) and then to have the nerve to complain about everything (there’s too much traffic… well duh you guys were the traffic, it smells bad… well duh you’re in farm country, etc etc).
</rant>
Looks like their calendar solution has gone “live”. Looks like it has most of the stuff I’d like… add events via web, multiple calendars, publish all info or free/busy info (or nothing), subscribing to other published calendars (such as the UIUC Academic calendar courtesy of ACM’s Macwarriors), import CSV/iCal, export XML/iCal, assorted notification options, some sort of ability to auto-add event invites, manage who you share a given calendar with (including giving them the ability to manage events).
You can check it out at http://www.google.com/calendar/.
…and if you hadn’t guessed, I’m having trouble falling asleep…
Uploaded some new kitty pictures to flickr. Some cute pics of Sammy lounging in the laundry hamper and Spooky lounging on our bed. Spooky’s getting so big!
