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I can't seem to shake this cold. I went to bed kind of early yesterday, but still got up this morning with the same sore throat , oh well. It's rainy out, and it's 46F - crazy for this time of the year. Can't wait for the summer to come.

I may have to go to Charlotte, NC this weekend, to be decided today. I also will be in Kentucky for sure between 6/1 and 6/5. Additionally, I will most likely be in L.A. 6/11-6/15 and then possibly in Cinci. Activity is picking up again.

I heard from a friend, Marlena, yesterday afternoon via txt'ing. Also talked to Bill for a while - he is at a conference in Cleveland.

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

Ran a few errands today. Terrible weather, about 10 degrees below where we should be for this time of the year. Raining all weekend. I think it's supposed to rain all week too.

Talked to my parents this afternoon, they spent the weekend in the beach, nice

Somehow I had this awful sore throat this morning when I got up. Still have it. Going to bed, hopefully it will be gone by tomorrow.

So, Jeff's dad passed away yesterday. That's too bad. I had met him at Jeff's wedding in Hilton Head, back in 1999, he was a gentleman.

Bill called tonight, we talked for a while. He is still seeing Andrea. Talked to Kaye as well, we may do something this weekend, not sure. Txt'd with Jen some yesterday, we hadn't talked in a few weeks. Not much going on, she was kinda moody.

I have to go see the new Star Wars one of these days. It's supposed to be good.

I'd like to talk to Doug too this weekend, he has been so busy we haven't been able to catch up at work.

I may go out for a bit, I am still very awake.

Had dinner at Kittichai to welcome Jennifer, a new employee. This is a very hot and popular restastaurant in Soho. Excellent Thai food and atmosphere. Here are some of the quotes from the papers:

"One of the most remarkable restaurants I've ever been to..." New York Observer

"The city's best Thai in a sultry, alluring dining room" New York Times

"A bit of Bangkok in the middle of Soho" Vanity Magazine