Activesteve.com is Born…

Well, break out the resolutions, it’s out with 2006, and into 2007, the year of James Bond (007). To properly bid adieu to another great year, and welcome a new one into our lives, Jody and I had a bunch of our good friends over for a little New Year’s eve party. From what I can recall, a good time was had by all 🙂 We started out by having a cheese fondue and raclette with Alix, Meghan, Dave and Matt, then moved on to the main event, with people popping in and out, although most people stuck around for the duration. After all, at the stroke of midnight, what better place is there to be then at the Nanaimo Bar?? (Don’t answer that) I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone for coming out and making it a great celebration. My laziness the next day tells me things went pretty well. I only mustered up the energy to finish cleaning up the mess, which was quite minimal, and going out for a nice family walk too. Apart from that, it was video games all afternoon! Yay!

Hello everyone in Blog-land! As seems to be the trend lately, I’m about two weeks late getting a post put together to let you know what I’ve been up to. As usual, there really aren’t any really good excuses, I’ve just been traveling a bit for work lately, and doing lots of training, as well as hosting Jody’s parents for a week. However, I’ll fill you in a little bit on the latest happenings. The most significant news of late is of course that I’ve earned another candle on my cake of life. Yup, on May 31st I turned the ripe old age of 32. Or as Jody decided to put it on my birthday cake, I was celebrating my sweet 16 times two. To celebrate, we decided to have another little party at our place. Read on for a few more gory details of the evening in question. You can also check out some pics.

Thought I’d pop in another post on the progress being made on the bar front. Things have been going so slowly that I ended up actually taking a day off work to get some work done on this project! Actually, I had a ‘personal day’ that was going to expire if I didn’t use it by the end of the month so I figured it would give me a chance to get a little extra work done on the bar, not to mention get laundry and my taxes done! Pictured to the left here is my attempt at capturing what the oak pieces look like after two coats of stain and three coats of varnish. Shiny, isn’t it? What you see is the product of almost 2 weeks of effort. Every step takes me an evening, because you have to let the stain / varnish dry thoroughly before either sanding it or re-coating it. Plus, most of these pieces had to have both sides done, doubling the time! The good news is that I have about 2 other ‘groups’ of pieces that I have to work on, and most of these are simpler pieces with a lot of 1-sided finish coming up. After those are all done, it’ll be the true building time. Can’t wait for that stage! I have to question the people who submitted testimonials on the website where I got the design saying it took them 3 weeks to build the bar! Okay, maybe they truly meant ‘build’ and not prepare. In my opinion, there’s no way on God’s green earth someone could possibly do all the cutting, routing, sanding, staining, varnishing, dry fitting, and putting together this whole bar! NO WAY!! Maybe if they worked full time on it. Naw. Granted, I had to learn a lot of things along the way (namely how to properly use a table saw and router), but just these last few steps of finishing take so long…

Hello out there. as many of you know, I’m curretnly trying to save all my pennies for an extended trip to New Zealand for a biking / racing adventure. As such, I’ve had to seriously curtail my extravagant ways. That’s hard for me to do, since I’m a serious gadget guy. Well, for some unknown reason, this morning I got to thinking about a little gadget of Kev’s, the Squeezebox. Mind you, he does have a slightly older model (not nearly as cool looking ;-), but still equally as cool a little device. Kev got his a while ago, and blogged about it in the past. He even mentioned me, but I never took the bait on it. Basically, this thing can allow me to hook up to my music library on my PC, and play it back through my stereo. That’s where things get a little trickier for me. You see, I’ve already got a whole-house sound system, integrated with my computer. I can currently play music on iTunes, and have it routed to the computer room, the rec room, the living room, the kitchen, and even the outdoor speakers all at once (can you tell I dig music?). This has been great for parties. But my big beef about that is that I have no ability to control the music unless I’m at the computer in the basement, which isn’t fun when you’re entertaining. So essentially, I’m thinking of getting this thing simply as a moveable head-end for the PC-based music. Basically, I could move the unit wherever I wanted (provided there’s a plug), and then use the supplied remote to change music on a whim. The key to making this work is that I’d use a wireless router (dirt cheap at about $70), which can talk to the head end, and then use a 3rd party application known as SoftSqueeze, which allows synchronizing the PC playback to the Squeezebox playback (not to mention the ability to stream my library over the web and such if I’m at a party elsewhere and wanted to call up a tune I own!)