A really cool “rack” story

Jeromey Balderrama

One of the coolest things happened to me late last week, resulting in an exciting addition to my drum set. On Saturday nights you’ll find me playing my drums over at church, typically week in and week out. From what I can tell, the parishioners at J23 enjoy the drums, and I’m sometimes humbled by people offering compliments about our choir and specifically my playing. After Mass last weekend, a parishioner approached me and asked me if I would have a use for some "stands"? As I could never pass down an offer for free drum hardware, accepted his generous offer and we agreed to get the stands on Thursday after a meeting with both attended.

Thursday came by and I had almost forgotten about these "stands" This person, a professor at CSU, apparently got a drum set from a student and said that while the drum set was great "These stands are simply too big.". I park my car right up next to his in the parking lot, he opens up the back of his car and pulls out a drum rack!!

For those who aren’t familiar with a rack, it’s a piece of hardware that you station around your drum set. The idea is that you mount all of your drums and cymbals onto the rack, and it’s supposed to stabilize your drums a bit, make things easier to set up and tear down, and equate in less hard-ware that needs to be carried around. I’ve wanted to get a drum rack for some time, but never brought myself to getting one – now I’m happy to be a proud owner of one. I was definitely most grateful for this gift!

So a few days pass, and on Saturday I finally broke down and set up my drum set in my apartment (something I’ve never done). Due to the noise considerations I didn’t really get to play, but it was helpful to see how the rack sets up. It looks really cool on my drum set! It makes it a lot easier to experiment with the configuration, and it simply makes my drum set look cooler!

I dug back and found a picture of my drum set from a few months back without the racks, and wanted to compare it to what the drum set looked like in my apartment on Saturday. Let me know what you think!

Without the rack – not too bad…

With the rack

Also, as I was look through my picture collections I thought I would send pictures of my drum set from a few years back, to show you how they’ve evolved over time:

I wish I had digital pictures from high school, when I only had 2 cymbals – what a difference from now! This is one of the reasons why I love playing drums – I can keep making changes and tweaks to my instrument, and the additions are limitless!

12 on the 12th for May!

Jeromey Balderrama

I managed to get my 12 pictures taken for the 12th of May.  You can find the (which includes the full-sized pictures) on my Flickr! site.  Check them out below (also, be sure to check out (my girlfriend) Bethany’s 12 on 12th)

I began the day by working at my home-office, on one of my many teleconferences.

Driving to down-town Fort Collins to have lunch with my girlfriend Bethany.

Bethany and I at lunch at Old Chicago’s in Old Town, Fort Collins.

Downtown Fort Collins

I then drove down to Lafayette, Colorado to go see my God-daughter and her family. (Driving on I-25)

This is my God-daughter, Sophia. She is playing with a coffee cup here

Sophie and I at dinner

Sophie and I with Sophie’s Aunt Jess

We fired up my laptop while I was visiting and Sophie saw my desktop background (which is a picture of Sophie and I)

Driving home on I-25

Bethany and I got together for some dessert at Whole Foods (I really didn’t put all of that in my mouth)

And a day wouldn’t be complete without spending some time in Second Life…

That should do it for May!  If you are interested in seeing more 12 on 12th check out the Daily Breakfast Forum.

12 on the 12th Coming Up – Please Join!

Jeromey Balderrama

Here we are a day away from May 12th, and another installment of 12 on the 12th! I got this idea by listening to Fr. Roderick on the Daily Breakfast Podcast. On the 12th of each month, participants are invited to bring their digital camera with them throughout the day and take 12 pictures. At the end of the day post the pictures to your blog or a Flickr! account to share with others. The hope is that you’ll give others a glimpse of your typical day through the pictures you take. I started doing this last month and am anxious to do this for the second time. Taking the pictures was a blast, and I had a lot of fun viewing them as well.

For those who are interested, it’s a simple matter of doing the above. If you’d like to share your pictures with Daily Breakfast listeners, post the link to your Flickr! area on the Daily Breakfast Forum. If you’d like to see my 12 on the 12th for April, check out my posting.

I hope to see your pictures on the 12th!

Google in Klingon…

Jeromey Balderrama

A few days ago a co-worker of mine stumbled upon some pretty funny settings in Google. In Google, if you click on "Preferences" there’s a drop-down box for "Interface Language". Check out the languages listed. You’ll see virtually almost every language of the world there, but you’ll also find some beyond our world. Here are a few funny ones that I found.

Elmer Fudd (quite annoying)

Hacker (be careful with this one, when you try to change it back the drop down entries are written in hacker)

And yes, Klingon – my favorite!

So yes, you can now search for Wabbits in Klingon! Gotta love Google!