Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

OK, I admit it - I don’t get out much anymore.  Three kids under seven at home will do that to a couple.  But sometimes you just need to get out of the house.

I am a long time karaoke junkie. I’ve been haunting the best (and worst) karaoke bars in the Bay Area for 12 years. When I heard about Rock Star Fridays at Stump’s Supper Club at Channelside, I just had to check it out.

102.5 The Bone has been pushing this heavily the past few weeks and had folks from the Cowhead Show on hand as well.

The cover was very reasonable, only $5.  They offered $1 Bud drafts all night, plus well prices are reasonable. If you have never been to Stump’s, it’s very nice. We sat at the bar towards the back, which has an indoor portion and an outdoor area on the water. My wife smokes, so this is where we ended up. We still had a good view of the stage and could hear everything, despite being outside.

The Jimmy James Experience, led by Tommy Tutone bass guitarist Jimmy James, is the house band for Stump’s. They’ve been there seven years now. They are an awesome band, but for karaoke night they played without their normal sax player and female lead vocalist. But the sound was really tight.

I was nervous, I had never sung before such a large crowd. There were probably 100 people on the dance area in front of the stage and the place was filled to capacity with patrons. Add to that the excitement of being on stage with a real band, and I was in need of some liquid encouragement.

The only drawback is that they do not have lyrics on a monitor like a standard karaoke show. No “bouncing ball.” So I would recommend that you pick a song you know well. I chose one of my 80′ s standards, Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.” I did alright, I know I was a bit tipsy and flubbed a little, but the crowd did not seem to notice, they really got into it.

OK, and now for the icing on the cake. They put your video on YouTube. From the looks of it they get to it midweek, so Tuesday or Wednesday the videos from the previous Friday are posted. Just add famousleo to your subscriptions and you’ll get the new ones as they are posted.

I highly recommend Rockstar Fridays. I will definitely be back for it.

Looks like WebRunner grew up a little in the past week. Version 0.8 is now known as Mozilla Prism. Now all you need to do is run Prism and set up your own “web apps” on your desktop, start menu, or quick launch bar.

So what makes this cool for the non-geek out there? You can make a web application look and feel like a desktop application. Without all the “chrome”, the stuff that makes a web browser look like it does. No address bar, no status bar, and none of the plugins. Granted, the plugins are what makes Mozilla Firefox so cool, but they do tend to slow things down a bit. I have found many uses for this application. I have several on my desktop, including GMail, Facebook, Google Calendar and Google Reader. They load in its own very frisky browser window with no frills. Just the app, ma’am.

I found Prism very useful to help create a “walled garden” for my five-year-old. I make apps for sites that I approve. Anything else is blocked, as I have Firefox disabled on her profile. Wicked cool.

Wow.  I mean… wow! It was great meeting everyone that showed up at Bobalouie’s on Friday. Tommy, Wifey, Brett, Bob, Micheal, Miguel, Mariella, Lisa and more. Would have been nice to have a bigger turnout, but for short notice it was great fun.

It hearkened back to the “glory days” when we had the Tampa Bay Blogger Fest meetups in fall of 2004. We had one at Splitsville in September, and the turnout was great. Then, it was SoHo’s turn to host and we had a Blogger Pub Crawl in October. It was decided to put the TBBF on hiatus until after the holidays, and it was set to resume in February of 2005. I am not sure how or why but it all fell apart.

I think the problem with the TBBF was we tried to outdo the last one, make it bigger and better than the one before. There was a website, a forum, etc. We also had a web ring (remember those?). But it kind of collapsed under its own weight.

I would like to see something maybe monthly along the lines of the Happy Hour. Just a meet and greet, we’ll put on those silly “HELLO MY NAME IS _____ ” name tags and get to know each other. Spread the word from our own blogs, and of course here on Sticks, and see how may bloggers we can fit in one room. We’ll talk shop, have a few beers, and just socialize and fellowship.

I would be willing to spearhead this effort. Hell, it’s about time I did something here on Sticks (right, Tommy?). I think all we really need to make it work is word-of-mouth to other bloggers. Maybe a mailing list or something to communicate, but above all just keep it simple and fun.

Discuss…

In case you missed it, there’s a new search engine service out there. It launched as a live public beta on Wednesday, August 8, 2007. Oddly enough, it’s called Spock. It’s a people-based search engine.

It uses information from profiles on social networking sites, including MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn, so you can find out about even those who have not yet found Spock: Spock Search Tommy Duncan Tampa. In addition, Spock allows users to edit and add their own information to the search results. Spock claims they have already indexed around 100m people, and is adding a million names every day.

You can “tag” people you find on the service to make searches easier. I am finding folks I know and tagging them. I have even found a few people from high school using Spock. Since it indexes multiple social network sites, it was a breeze to use.

So far, personally, I have had a ball consolidating all my crap on the web into one place. It is not without issues. I am sure it’s just the fact that it is new. Digg/Slashdot effect, probably. Despite the numerous 500 and 503 errors, and the nondescript “Uh-Oh” errors on some functions, Spock has been pretty cool. I spent the better part of the morning consolidating all my online presence into one place on Spock.

Spock users can “claim” their name and upload pictures, friend others etc., all of which will affect the search results tied to their name. All this makes Spock a very interesting mix between a search engine and social networking tool. The only thing I have not been able to do is claim my LinkedIn profile. I put in the correct login information, it just cannot seem to connect.

So feel free to “Spock Me” I made a link to my Spock profile. Try it, it’s actually pretty cool. Anything named “Spock” has got to be cool.

Linkage:

Daves’ Spock Profile
Spock Website

I was in the Circle K getting a few things. Ahead of me walked in three men. One was in US Army ACUs and the others looked like teenagers. The Army guy checked out ahead of me with three items; he had a Red Bull and two quarts of malt liquor. They all three got into a car with government plates. My thought at first was he was a recruiting sergeant. And the two kids with him were potential recruits.

Does anyone else find this picture a little disturbing? Were those guys underage? Was that recruiter buying them beer? Kinda makes me wonder just a little what sort of recruiting tactics the military is stooping to these days.

Traffic was snarled last night around 8:30pm (Tuesday) on Hillsborough Avenue as a westbound car careened across the median, three lanes of oncoming traffic, a light pole, a FENCE, and impacted in our apartment building and into a neighbor’s kitchen.

My building. Like right next door to my place. Eight feet further and the car would have lodged in my 18 month old son Jaxon’s crib. Needless to say, my wife, an overly nervous mommy to begin with, was not amused.

Not seen any media coverage of the crash, though there were helicopters overhead. The car mainly went through the window frame of the kitchen in the apartment adjacent to mine. SO damage to the building’s structure seems minimal. The car was crushed by the big metal streetlight pole. The driver had minor injuries.

The residents of the apartment were in their bedroom at the time of impact and also escaped injury. However, the woman who lived there had just been released from the hospital with heart problems. So they took her in as a precaution.

Crazy, man!

Editor’s note: ATTENTION ALL STICKS WRITERS! Please be ready for some disaster to your home. Joel’s next-door neighbor had a fire. Now Dave’s next-door neighbor has a drive-thru. Bad things happen in threes.

I wanted to make my first post here on Sticks to actually mean something. Be a little streetwise, savvy, and have some bearing on the city. I wanted to make a real impact. But I have got some personal news to share that is making a deep impact in my life.

Don’t worry, I will be back to post something of journalistic greatness. I took on a role here at Sticks and I am determined to keep up with those responsibilities. But this… this is important.

So where to start? I thought I would put my blog on hiatus. I thought I had nothing left to write about. I thought the well was dry and there were no more stories to be written. But a hiatus was not meant to be. As an agnostic, it is hard for me to talk about God or any higher power out there in the universe. But I will say this. God has a sense of humor. Read on.

There are a few of you out there that may wonder what my problem has been the past few weeks. I have been a little out of sorts. Tense. Maybe a little irritable. And I gave up on my blog. What’s up with that?

I have had a lot on my mind. And I have been harboring a very large secret.

I was reluctant to let the cat out of the bag. Many of my “friends” will take this opportunity to ridicule me, make jokes, and otherwise take advantage of the situation. But the more I think about it, these “friends” are not that at all. My true friends will see my secret as
the blessing that it truly is.

My wife DyAnn and I are expecting our third child. She is 13 weeks along, our due date is July 24, 2007. Mommy thinks it’s a girl, but we won’t know for certain for some time.

Yes, it is the sixth child I am responsible for in the world. Yes, we were using birth control. Yes, I have “strong swimmers”.

No, I am not raising a private army. No, I am not a rabid horn dog. OK, maybe I am just a little.

All I ask is that my true friends step up and share in our happiness. We are already toeing the poverty line, but we figure we can handle another lifeform in our universe. Any of my “friends” who have nasty comments to make can just keep it to themselves.

As for the blog, for the next seven months it will be a daddy blog again. Talk of pregnancy, family, stress, and all the joy and pain of bringing another life into the world. Yeah, I’ll probably be pissy, and snarky, and have a lot of bile to release into the blogosphere. But you know what?

You wouldn’t have me any other way. It’s good to be back.