cygweb

I'm disappointed to hear that this is the final season of Enterprise. Assuming there is no new Star Trek franchise on the air next season, 2005-2006 will be the first TV season since the premiere of ST:TNG in the fall of 1987 (when I was in high school!) that there hasn't been new Trek on TV. I can still remember watching that first season with my family and enjoying it.

In my estimation, the Trek series have had many more ups than downs. I hope that we'll at least get some decent Trek feature films in the future.

CNN.com: Super Bowl to feature tiny 'Turf Cam'

Fox Sports has planted so-called Turf Cams around Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida -- including four on the field where the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles will play Super Bowl XXXIX. Eight more of the Turf Cams aren't in the turf at all -- they'll be mounted at the end zones.

"They're so tiny, they're effectively the size of an eraser on a pencil," says David Hill, chairman of Fox Sports and a driving force behind his network's use of technology during sporting events.

[..]

Two of the Turf Cams will be placed around each 20-yard line facing the end zone, and the other two at the three-yard lines where snaps are done for extra points. The cameras will be placed at 45-degree angles prior to the game. Video will be fed to Fox's production truck and, if it's good, they'll put it on the air.

This is Fox; I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to sneak some cameras under the cheerleaders. :) Seriously, this sounds like they could provide some interesting footage.

19.3MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 42m 17s (Torrent courtesy of Prodigem.)
19.3MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 42m 17s

This is our weekly Brutal Deluxe football podcast. Scott and I talk more about the upcoming (finally!) Super Bowl matchup and about the joys of Manolas Handmade Soaps.

Links:

• SportPodcasts.com
• Podcastech Forum
• Manolas Handmade Soaps (Valentine's Day Gifts In Stock!)

Credits:

• Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by me.
• Music: "One Big Holiday" by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD & "Dirtbag" by Brad Sucks from the CD I Don't Know What I'm Doing.

The NFL's all-time leading rusher, Emmitt Smith, has retired as was rumored the last few days. He made the announcement in Jacksonville today. As Scott mentioned in this week's podcast, he doesn't exactly go out with a whimper; he rushed for 937 yards and 9 touchdowns last season with the Arizona Cardinals.

Emmitt has always seemed like a class act to me. Even though two of his Super Bowl rings came against my beloved Bills, he was one of the few Cowboys players I enjoyed watching year to year. Congratulations to Emmitt on a record-setting career, and his certain trip to Canton.

I set up a virgin FB2K v0.8.3/Oddcast v3.0.3 instance on my server a few days ago and let it run randomly through the ICYG song library, adding in various processing and features to the point where it was just "production-ready" yesterday evening. After going live last night, it's been healthy! The only feature I've taken away for now is the detailed ICYG block here. It had been generated by a periodic query of the HTTP Writer FB2K plugin. I think I'm going to rejigger that process to query a specially-crafted current-song RSS feed generated by the ICYG website as opposed to by the FB2K instance itself. I don't necessarily think that that component caused the Oddcast instability; I had a lot of plugins in the old FB2K instance.

This means Jonathan can check out the ICYG MP3 stream again...

Update: It started crashing again, after I had started fiddling with settings on the "Continuator" DSP that provides the pleasant crossfading. I tried setting Continuator back to its default settings, but FB2K still ended up crashing a few hours later. I've removed it for now to verify whether or not it is indeed conflicting with Oddcast. The FB2K crash reports cite Oddcast as the source of the crash, although that's probably because it's the last DSP in the chain or it's trying to handle a song-changing scenario that's complicated by Continuator.

What kind of a geek posts an entry during the Super Bowl halftime show? I'm sure there's more than just a few of us... ;)

Aside from the Eagles' turnovers, it's been a close game as expected. (Whoah! McCartney's taking it off! Oh, just his coat... no nipplegate this year. :) ) I'm glad both teams' defenses are playing as great as they both are. Go Eagles!

Best commercial so far: FedEx Kinko's "10 Things...". Worst: Ameriquest's "Don't Assume". The most smackdown-deserving item so far. Most surprising commercial: Ford Mustang Convertible's "Frozen Guy".

The Fox HD coverage before and during the game has been quite good. No technical problems in the transmission. Haven't been able to tell if any of the "turf cams" have been used. I like the fact that so much more of the non-game programming is in HD. A good 1/4 to 1/3 of the major commercials have been HD, and many of Fox's promos have been.

Yes, I'm posting from home. Our plans to get together at our friends' house fell through (they had to travel today and didn't call over before the game). Still loving the game from here!

Back to football!

It's official. Bill Belichick is the new Blake Carrington.

It was a close game, but the Eagles weren't able to take more advantage of the downfield passing game. I'm totally surprised at how big a factor T.O. was, and how bad the Eagles running game was.

We'll break down more about the game in the next BDFL podcast.

We haven't carried long distance on our landline for years, since we rarely use it; like many families, we're increasingly keeping in touch via email. For the last few years we had used BigZoo as our calling card LD service. They folded on 2/1, unbeknownst to me; they say they emailed a warning in November. I haven't gone back to check yet. After a quick Google, I found a reference to a company with a similar service called OneSuite [my referral link, should you decide to sign up] and signed up with them yesterday. They have slightly lower rates than BigZoo did, and multiple local access numbers (BigZoo had none in our area). I'll let you know if I have any problems with them.

Via Scoble, Scott, and Ross, I present my BlogMap:

TV's Wil Wheaton is going to be guesting on CSI. Cool.

Congrats, Wil!

22.9MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 50m 13s (Torrent courtesy of Prodigem.)
22.9MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 50m 13s

This is our weekly Brutal Deluxe football podcast. Scott and I review the Patriots' Super Bowl victory over the Eagles, take a peek at the Pro Bowl, talk about the ending of the NFL season, and look forward to next season's BDFL draft.

Links:

• SportPodcasts.com
• Podcastech Forum
• Manolas Handmade Soaps (Valentine's Day Gifts In Stock!)

Credits:

• Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by me.
• Music: "One Big Holiday" by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD & "Dirtbag" by Brad Sucks from the CD I Don't Know What I'm Doing.

Via Dan Gillmor: 'Reporter' Gannon is Gone

Thought the Armstrong Williams payola was bad? This is even more questionable, in my opinion. Interesting lunchtime reading, that's for sure.

Google results for "Jeff Gannon"

I'll be at the meetup this coming Wednesday, mainly to harass new attendees. ;) Hope to see plenty of you locals there.

I'm very disappointed that ESPN isn't carrying the Pro Bowl in HD.

...then maybe you'd understand why I received a Claiborne "Spark Seduction" cologne/aftershave gift pack for Valentine's Day from my wife. I think it's a testament to the fidelity of our marriage. ;)

Happy Valentine's Day, honey. I love you.

I've been very occasionally checking the state of my freeiPods.com referrals. I'm happy to report that I'm now over halfway there; I need two more referrals to complete an offer and then I'll have earned my free iPod. I've had 12 total referrals so far, many of whom I don't know, so, thanks!

If you're considering joining up with freeiPods.com, please consider using the links on my site.

I was pleased to see two Ogg Vorbis podcasts come though today on the Indy Media Radio podcast feed I'm subscribed to. Both were mono 22Khz spoken-word 'casts at ~35kbps (probably quality 0) and sounded great. Thanks to their producers for helping to push Vorbis in this space.

We had a good meetup this evening. I had the pleasure of meeting Ed Hidden in person for the first time, as well as Dean Betz from PennLive and Alan Hayakawa of the Patriot-News (who handles the Know@Noon newsletter & site). We spoke with Dean and Alan for a while about our blathering blogging and other tech interests, and they let us know that they're interested in linking to our locally relevant news and fostering the blogging community of Central PA. As a result, I'll probably try to focus a little more on blogging about my Harrisburg-area-specific experiences as a way of providing content of interest to more than just "us geeks".

Thanks again to Ross for hosting the meetup and Dean and Alan for taking some time to listen. Maybe this local news will get me some linkage from the PL crew. ;)

Know@Noon's entry about the meetup

Update (2/17 11:45am): Alan included a writeup of the meetup (and a link to my blog, thanks) in today's Know@Noon.

27.9MB 64kbps 22KHz Stereo MP3 1h 01m 03s (Torrent courtesy of Prodigem.)
27.9MB 64kbps 22KHz Stereo MP3 1h 01m 03s

This is our weekly Brutal Deluxe football podcast. Scott and I talk about the AFC's victory in the Pro Bowl, look at some of the current NFL news, and review who we think who each of the BDFL franchises should keep, going into next season's draft. (Correction: I referred to the NFL Network's Rich Eisen as Kenny Mayne. Oops. Sorry, Rich!)

This will be the last BDFL podcast until around the NFL draft weekend of April 23-24. However, keep your podcatcher tuned to Cygweb and Nitevilla for more podcasts.

Links:

• SportPodcasts.com
• Manolas Handmade Soaps

Credits:

• Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by me.
• Music: "One Big Holiday" by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD & "Dirtbag" by Brad Sucks from the CD I Don't Know What I'm Doing.

Due to Ed's talking about them last night, I'm now subscribed to the Dawn & Drew Show and WebTalk Radio podcasts. I'm now subscribed to 16 podcast feeds; here's my OPML subscription file (generated by Doppler). I'll try to keep that up to date.

Of course, I don't have time to listen to all of the content that flows in, but it gives me plenty to pick and choose from.

Bills will release QB Bledsoe; Losman to step up

Granting Bledsoe's request to be cut, the Bills announced Wednesday they will waive the 12-year veteran Feb. 22, the first day NFL teams are allowed to officially release players. The decision came after the Bills informed him last week of their plans to give the starting job to J.P. Losman, Buffalo's second of two first-round draft choices last year.

``I completely disagree and can't understand their point of view,'' Bledsoe said during a conference call from his home in Oregon. ``Do I think this is fair? No, I don't think it's fair. But I'm also aware that that's how it works, and I understand that.''

[..]

He will be one of several veteran quarterbacks on the market: Cleveland is releasing Jeff Garcia and Kurt Warner is leaving the New York Giants.

Bledsoe said Dallas would be a possible spot for him. Cowboys coach Bill Parcells chose him for New England with the first overall pick in the 1993 draft. The Bills have given him permission to negotiate with other teams.

I guess we knew a change was coming; Drew obviously thinks there are enough vacant starting QB spots in the league that he could fill. I wish him good luck and thank him for helping the Bills get back to at least .500 territory.

Thanks to the power of Brandon Fuller's MT Enclosures plugin (namely, its "include" parameter), I've spawned off two dedicated podcast-entry RSS feeds, one with Ogg Vorbis enclosures and one with MP3 torrent enclosures. They're listed in the "Subscribe" section on the front page of this site. My main RSS 2.0 feed will continue to carry direct-download MP3 enclosures for podcast entries.

I've been a little under the weather yesterday and today, with a head cold that I'm hoping doesn't develop into the flu bug some of my co-workers and friends have had the last few weeks.

I'm looking forward to my parents' visit with us next weekend, as well as a trip to see Don and check out Blackfield's NYC show on March 10th. Don and I will do some recording while I'm there, both for a podcast and for an ICYG-only segment (recalling our WFFT days). Should be fun. I need to get to work and get a good agenda together for the 'cast.

The weekend after that, Melissa and I will be selling Manolas Handmade Soaps at Central Dauphin High School during the Band Booster's craft show. I invite you to come out and support us.

As previously reported, the first of the Enterprise two-parter dealing with the two looks of the Klingons, "Affliction", was last night's episode. Good stuff.

Does anyone else but me think that Enterprise could live on as a direct-to-DVD movie series? I know I'd buy it.

My usual programming language at work is Winbatch, since it's geared towards automation and administration on the Windows platform. Today I took a fresh look at our Active Directory site definitions, which are a combination of the mapping of IP segments to site objects and the linking of the sites according to the network routing topology. I realized that if I could pump out the IP addresses of clients that reported they weren't in an AD site, I could concatenate and compare them to our list of segment/building mappings and produce a list of IP segments (and possibly entire buildings) that need to be added to the site definitions. Based on all the string manipulation I've done with Python with ICYG, I figured as long as I could get both the event logs and the network information in flat text files I could breeze through them with a quick Python script to produce the list.

But first I had to export the AD domain controller event logs into a predictable text format. Enter MS's recently revved Log Parser, which I had heard about, but hadn't yet played with. After a trip to the Log Parser forums and four attempts to get the syntax right for what I wanted to do (export the event messages for all events with ID 5778), I had a CSV with the relevant client info created. I quickly scraped together the network info text files from some webpages and have everything set up to script against tomorrow morning.

And here I thought I'd never get a chance to use Python at work...

Cowboys reunite Bledsoe, Parcells

Apparently Drew (and/or his agent) made the right call in asking to be released from the Bills. From the looks of things, he will go to Dallas as the Cowboys' unquestioned starter. It should be interesting to see how his play in the coming season compares to Testaverde's performance last season. Both are pocket passers, although I would assume we'll see more downfield passing from the Cowboys this season.

Just as the snow was just about done melting off (sound familiar?), we're getting another blanket tonight. It's pretty wet stuff, so I'll get a good workout tomorrow morning. ;)

The Oscars are coming up this Sunday. Unlike last year, where I was really pumped up to see ROTK do well, I won't bother trying to make predictions. I haven't yet seen any of the films up for Best Picture, although I do play to see Ray and Sideways at some point. I usually watch the Academy Awards to cheer on the sci-fi/fantasy genre films; most years we only see them in the technical categories. Melissa's a bit more cynical about the awards than me, in fact she's writing a guest blog entry that'll be posted in the next day or two.

I'm slightly bummed that the Blackfield show I mentioned has turned into an acoustic gig, but since it'll be the first time I've seen Steven Wilson or Aviv Geffen live I think it'll still be a great experience.

In my quest to make the PennLive weblogs list, here's local news: no Central Dauphin school buses have yet rammed into my mailbox this season. They got it last year.

The following essay is from my wife, Melissa. She's thrilled about the Academy Awards show tonight:

Well, it's Oscar time once again and I am none too thrilled with its taking up valuable prime time on Sunday. Every year I become more and more irate with the awing, oohing, and just plain ridiculous fascination the American people have with these so-called "celebrities". Where else but in America would we be ok with "honoring" these multi-millionaires several times a year for a doing such a great job at pretending to be someone else. No, it doesn't stop at the Oscars - there are the SAG Awards, the People's Choice Awards, the Tony Awards, the Emmy Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, and the Golden Globe Awards. Oh, and don't let me forget the precious award they receive - a handmade statue dipped in 24K gold and hand delivered by the artist himself! Since we know that these actors are so under-paid, the fashion designers and jewelers offer their wares for free! Oh, aren't they so generous?

Well, I can't completely blame these professional fakers - it's not all their fault. Once again our wonderful media is to thank for turning our average worker into the insignificant. Why would we want to see a hard-working American change the world by curing a disease, or saving a child from a fire, or developing a new wonder-drug to save the world from harmful diseases? Where are the 24K dipped awards and free designer clothes for these heroes? No, it's much more fun (& informative) to marvel over a world 99% of Americans will never enjoy. So - we are left to wonder what it would be like to not have to worry about corporate layoffs, losing jobs to China, and figuring out how we can afford to take our annual family vacation.

I'm waiting for the day that America and the media are interested in making our every day worker the true celebrity. I, personally, would be ecstatic to see many award shows honoring the real people who work hard every day of their lives and most likely aren't getting the pay or the respect they deserve.

CNN: Music download prices rising?

Just as legal music downloading is taking off in earnest, the major record labels are in talks to raise the price they charge online retailers for song downloads, a newspaper reported Monday.

The Financial Times, quoting unnamed music executives, said wholesale music prices, thought to be around 65 cents a song, were originally set artificially low in a bid to stimulate demand. The executives noted the success of Apple's hugely popular iPod digital music players, the report said.

[..]

"If you're looking to have this market develop, this is a really bad time to increase rates," said Michael Goodman, senior analyst for The Yankee Group. "You need to be careful about killing the golden goose. If they do raise rates, they're just getting greedy, and they're running a very significant risk of seeing those rates decline significantly."

But greed and ethics are not the issues -- supply and demand are, according to Forrester's Bernoff, who noted the music labels have been battling illicit downloading services for years.

"The right price has nothing to do with greed," said Bernoff. "It has to do with demand."

Do away with the pre-show interviews. The hosts sucked and the clips were hastily pasted together on the fly. Jann Carl even committed the faux pas of saying "and the winner is..." when anyone who actually watches the awards knows that it's "and the Oscar goes to...".

I found about 25% of Chris Rock's act funny. I think the message he sent to African-Americans who were watching was "make more meaningful films". The recorded bit from the Magic Johnson theaters would probably have elicited the same responses in many predominately white theaters, so it wasn't really that inventive. He did some of the playful digging that all Academy Awards hosts do, however some of his comments (Jude Law?) seemed caustic, given his "outsider" status.

My favorite recipients:

• Morgan Freeman, Best Supporting Actor (whom I've enjoyed ever since hearing and seeing him on The Electric Company)
• Brad Bird, Best Original Screenplay (The Incredibles)
• John Dykstra, Achievement in Visual Effects (Spider-Man 2) ("Boy, am I glad there wasn't a fourth episode of Lord Of The Rings.")

I liked the best original song nominee performances, especially Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas' rendition of Jorge Drexler's "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" from The Motorcycle Diaries.

The HD production, which I watched from about 10:15p on, was actually quite nice.

On review, I didn't like the fact that the "behind the scenes" winners weren't afforded the luxury of the full walk down the red carpet and onto the stage. The aisle shots and the stage lineups were time-saving measures that didn't work for me.

Please come home, Billy Crystal!