Is it just me, or is ESPN’s Erin Andrews more ESPN eye candy than a sideline reporter?  She sure looks a lot better than she talks.

You’ve probably seen the commercials - some average guy getting tackled by hot girls simply because he was wearing the new Tag Body Spray.  While in Wal-Mart recently, I saw Tag in the aisle.  Without specific objection from my wife, I decided to test this new product.

It’s been about 2 weeks now, and I’ve not been tackled at all.  Not even once.  Maybe the stuff has caused a general decrease in my overall repulsiveness, but it’s certainly not had the effect that the commercials led me to believe it would.

The really depressing thing about this is that the wife went along with the test…as if she knew no body spray could ever cause hot girls to tackle me.  *sigh*

In a mall last week, my wife and I saw this:

This vending machine was full of iPod accessories, and it even had iPods you could buy.  Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’d buy an iPod from a machine.  Would you?

Well, it’s been a busy week for us.  I finally got a little down time from the office.  The kids were with my parents, so we acted like teenagers, as I mentioned in a previous post.  We stayed close to home, stayed busy, and had a really good time acting young.

Vacation ended with an Andrew Peterson concert on Wednesday night in Opelika, Alabama.  Andy had fellow Square Peg Andy Gullahorn with him at the show.  I got a chance to talk with AP after the show for a little bit and was reminded what an awesome guy he is.  We chatted a few minutes about a few random things, and I left with a renewed excitement about a little group of songwriters in Nashville.  The renewing of excitement wasn’t because of any specific news or update; it was just from being reminded of the dedication and passion they have for their work.

So now the kids are home, we’re back into the regular swing of things, and it’s life as usual in the Davis home.  I enjoyed the vacation, but now it’s time to get back to the grind.  But first, I’m going to enjoy the way my back side feels on the couch and watch baseball until I fall asleep.

The kids are with my parents this week, and today we acted like teenagers:

• We slept in.
• We ate an unhealthy breakfast.
• We went to White Water (a water park in Marietta).
• We ate lunch at 3pm.
• We played video games in the afternoon.
• We listened to music our parents wouldn’t like.
• We went shopping.
• We had a milkshake shortly before supper.
• We ate pizza for supper.
• We are staying up late to play more video games.

This “being young” thing is wearing me out.

We took the kids to see the Cars movie about a week ago.  I really enjoyed it.

It seems like everything out of Hollywood these days is just some hippie pushing his liberal agenda on unsuspecting moviegoers, but that wasn’t the case with Cars.  It was just a good story with a good ending.  The thing that I really liked was that the cars each had the personality of the type of people you would stereotype driving that car.

It’s not the greatest movie you’ll ever see, but it’s worth your time.

I think this post might just be more about a venue than a concert.  There’s this little church down in Conyers that has been doing a summer concert series for 3 years.  The first year, they did one concert per month.  Last year and this year, they’re doing one per week.  And they’re free.  Atlanta has needed a venue like this for a while, and I’m glad to see Rockdale Community Church stepping up and being that venue.

Last night I went with Team Redd, Tex the legend, and my wife’s brother to see Derek Webb and Sandra McCracken play at Rockdale.  It was an impressive standing room only crowd.  They had to pull out folding chairs, seat some people on the floor, and make room for others to stand in the back of the room.

The extra-exciting bit of news from last night is that Sandra’s new CD was available.  It wasn’t supposed to be around until September, but I guess they got things finished up ahead of schedule.  I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I’ll post about it when I have.  The new stuff she played last night was really good, so I expect the CD will be as well.

Next up on the string of concerts is Andrew Peterson in Opelika, Alabama on Wednesday night.  Look for me if you’re there.

Well, another MLB all star game has come and gone.  The American League won (again).  I knew they would.  Maybe the Chicago Cubs’ luck has worn off on the whole National League?  This, yet another, victory for the American League means the World Series home field advantage will once again go to the American League team.

I know the whole “this time it counts” marketing for the all star game is because Bud Selig is trying to save some face for calling the all star game a tie that one year, but deciding on World Series home field advantage isn’t really fair.  Home field advantage in the post season should be decided by which of the 2 teams had the better record.  If the records are the same, go on their record within their division, or even their record in interleague play.  To award a team home field advantage because the NL all stars aren’t as good as the AL all stars is just not a good idea.

It’s not fair to the teams playing, it’s not fair to the fans watching, and we all know Bud Selig is an idiot anyway.  Let the all star game be the meaningless, awesome display of talent that it used to be, and stop trying to make it into something it’s not - just for the purpose of making people forget that the commissioner is a moron.

Andy Osenga mentioned that Christianity Today reviewed his latest project and gave it 5 stars! Read the review, buy the CD, and turn it up loud. Then tell your neighbors “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”

I’m going to listen again now.

I had an IT problem that I had trouble finding the answers for. That doesn’t happen a lot, so I’ll post it here and hope that this post gets indexed in Google so that people searching for it find an answer.

The problem was that I had unexplained high CPU utilization on a Windows 2003 server. In the task manager, no processes listed were showing any CPU use, but the system reported processor utilization between 50-60% when idle.

The answer was that the Logical Disk Manager Administration Service was running (and was apparently hung). The thing about this server that I hate to put in writing anywhere is that we tried (despite my warnings, btw) to run software mirroring on an extremely large drive with an insane amount of disk access. When we saw performance issues, the software RAID was the first thing to go, but that service remained running (I’m not sure why).

Anyway, we’re going to be making this server a hardware RAID like it should have been in the first place. My database replication is working and will hopefully be done sometime before midnight.

I hope that at some point in the future a network admin reads this and says “Yes! I told [my boss] we should have gone hardware RAID on that new server.  Software RAID was just a stupid thing to try.”  If that happens, do me a favor and reply to this.  Chances are good it’ll brighten an otherwise painful day in our IT department.