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It's Memorial Day Weekend, officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11, and first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states.

All in all, pretty quiet, relaxing weekend. It rained and got cold in the evening yesterday, but it was fine during the day. It's nice out today too. Went out for dinner with Kaye last night to a place called Casa Mono, a Spanish tapas restaurant. Here is a couple reviews, good stuff:

Restaurant maestros Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich's newest is a tapas bar in wolf’s clothing.

A spirited tapas bar breathes new life into Gramercy Park's dining scene.

We stopped by Flute for a drink after dinner. Nice atmosphere.

It's almost the weekend. Debating whether I want to go out for a bit tonight or not. I was falling asleep earlier, but no longer. Listening to music - Paulina Rubio . Just took a shower. Weather a bit better. Watched the finale of America Idol yesterday. Carrier won, which is cool, I liked her better.

Had a network problem at work today, Doug took care of it - he is the best

Heard from Blerina, an interesting friend from Albania.

Next week I'll be in KY for CRM meetings w/ Valvoline. Hans will be in Cinci visiting his family w/ his wife, so I will try to swing by and hang out w/ him, Doug, Charles, and a few other friends.

I have bread in the oven, getting ready to eat and watch some TV. Still 48F out. I know I've been bitching about this for a while, but the weather is just way lame for being almost in June. I heard from my parents today and it was 88F in Barcelona.

I talked to Kaye for a while this evening, very interesting conversation, it was good, she is cool. Incidentally, I also heard again from Marlena and Pinky, via txt messaging.

My parents are planning a trip to NYC this summer, it will be neat , they've never been here before.

That's it for now, not much else going on.

I've been playing with Sound Forge, a software package for professional digital audio editing and mastering. I had used it years ago, but I hadn't tried any of the recent versions after Sony bought it from Sound Foundry. I was glad to see it still has the great no-nonse interface and powerful features that made it popular.

I recently subscribed to Yahoo's Music Unlimited service. For a small yearly fee you can download as many songs as you'd like from the catalog of over 1 million titles, not bad. Even thought their music engine (itunes-like) is still in beta, it compares positively to other services. You can download songs to your local drive, but they encrypted using MS WMA's DRM technology.

What you can do, with Sound Forge or other much simpler Shareware tools, is perform an D/A/D conversion using your soundcard Stereo Mix as the output. No cables are required. This generates a WAV file (you have to be careful to adjust the volumes properly and avoid clipping), which you can turn into an MP3 just as easily (I recommend using LAME as your Encoder, it's the most accurate.) A freeware tool like dbPowerAMP will do that for example.

There you go. That's my geek talk for the day