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Quick background; Yours truly was recently staffed for what looks like the better part of 5 weeks in Roseville (about 15 miles past Sacramento) in California and he is not too stoked about it…

So after the first week, I can now present to you the Top Ten List of things to do when you’re staffed in Roseville…

1. Work
2. Sleep
3. Eat
4. Shop
5. Work out
6. Climb the indoor wall at REI
7. Think about things to do
8. Play minigolf
9. Find bigger rims for your truck or a deal on new boobs
10. Go night skiing in Tahoe after work

Any suggestions to improve my list?

PS. The map is of California’s original “Gold Country” so I guess the 11th thing to do is dig for gold…

Yesterday I finished ripping every compact disc in our house into mp3 format for storage on my NAS or Network Attached Storage system. I got the Linksys EFG80 a few weeks ago, for general backup of our laptops, but also to replace the print server in my failing router.

The NAS is awesome, but that’s a discussion for another forum. Having all of our CDs in high quality mp3 format, available to any computer on our network is great. Nearly 300 discs took 25 GB of space and a lot of cpu cycles on the two laptops I had running in parallel.

The real goal is to replace my old laptop serving as a music server with a stereo component that can play mp3 format music straight off the network over the stereo speakers. To achieve that, Turtle Beach has a product called the AudioTron that goes beyond similar attempts by Onkyo, Sony and that like because it doesn’t require any server side software to be running to serve the music files. The AudioTron can play music from any computer on your network that has shared mp3s, an important feature as the linux running NAS doesn’t allow for server software to be installed.

I’ve read about every review, forum, and mailing list post raving about the AudioTron. Some even compare it in value to their TiVo, but TiVo is still King in our house. As soon as Turtle Beach releases their already announced new versions, I’ll be snapping up an AudioTron and you’ll hear about it here. In the mean time, if you have any CDs I could borrow, I have another 40 GB of space to fill….

Is there any wonder why these are my favorite animals on the planet???

* The U.S. Navy will bring in trained dolphins this week to hunt for seaborne mines in the waters around Umm Qasr, Navy officials say.

Navy Sgt. Andrew Garrett watches a dolphin training near the USS Gunston Hall in the Persian Gulf. The coalition expects to use dolphins in looking for mines in the region.

[Editor's note: Picture has been resized and moved to the right]

Bush just gave a very powerful speech. By far, the best speech of his presidency. I support the president. Good luck to our troops.

I gotta give props where props are due. I bought a set of Callaway Big Bertha imitation irons from PineMeadowGolf.com (they are $150 as opposed to $950 for the real thing) which were custom fit to my 6’4″ gorilla swing. I have played a few weekends since I got them, gone on golf vacations in Spain and Florida and they have been great. However my aforementioned gorilla swing (100 mph+ hitting the ball with the bottom edge of the club head) resulted in breaking the low irons (the 3 and 5 irons).

I called up PineMeadowGolf and got a return material authorization to return the irons. They first sent me two new irons (charged me full price as a deposit), i sent them back the broken ones and they fully refunded me. It was sweet.
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My Grandfather, Nicholas Anthony Buzolich Sr., passed away last Tuesday at his home in Irvine, California. My Dad said, “His big heart finally gave out on his big body.” He was born 3 October 1918.

When I’d ask him where his parents were from, he first said Yugoslavia, then more specifically an island off the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. Now when I think about it, the country his parents left to come to America from what was then part of Austria, and he came before and lived longer than Yugoslavia.

I’ll never forget we he took me fishing, long before I learned the value of quiet reflection. On my fifth or sixth birthday, he showed up having shaved his beard…I didn’t recognize him.

I remember building a glider airplane and him laughing at how I’d pick up the glue. He taught me how to walk up a steep hill with my feet turned perpendicular to the slope so I could clean the spiders out of the sprinkler heads in their backyard.

At 6’6″ tall, he towered over the basketball players of his generation. When I passed my Dad’s 6’2″ height, we would joke that height obviously skips generations.

Sara asked my Grandmother on Sunday where they went on their honeymoon. She replied, “The Northeast.” My Grandfather was on the professional tennis tour which took them around New York and New England after their wedding.

He will arrive in Heaven sailing a Sunfish, probably the one he built himself.

From the Orange County Register:

Nicholas Buzolich, 84, of Irvine, a high school teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District, died Feb. 25, 2003, of natural causes.

Nick on the Web:

* All-America Basketball at Pepperdine: 1944, 1946
* All-America Tennis at Pepperdine: 1945, 1946
* Athletics Hall of Fame at Pepperdine: inducted 1980
* Plaque on the San Pedro, CA SportsWalk for Basketball and Tennis
* Highest Scoring Average in 1944 NCAA Basketball Tournament: Scoring 22.5 ppg (45 of Pepperdine’s 85 total points.)
* Member of Harbor Soaring Society where you can find Nick’s Views