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My Bike Virginia (BVA) experience began with a 5-hour car ride to Roanoke on Friday, June 24th; I arrived around 6:30PM and checked in (a relatively smooth process for a 2000+ rider affair). After my dad arrived a little later, we set up our tents in the already-crowded "Tent City" and took the convenient shuttle bus downtown to find some food. We ended up having beer, chicken fingers and fries at the Cornerstone Bar and Grill and headed back to Tent City a little before 10. We planned to be up at the crack of dawn on Saturday for the first ride, so we got to sleep early.

I created a dedicated podcasts RSS 2.0 feed for the last 15 podcasts that link directly to MP3 files. It works with iTunes 4.9, although for a full-featured podcatcher for Windows I recommend Doppler.

Not all the content will be available forever - I just sent in the cancellation notice for podcastech.com today. Perhaps if there's demand I'll see if I can't get Scott to host the stuff that's currently there.

I'd compiled my favorite Extreme songs a little over five years ago and recently started listening to the CD again. At the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, Brian May said that Extreme was "probably the one band that most understands what Queen was all about." I think it's a little harsh to call them "hair metal"; funky metal with lots of vocals is how I think of them. Here are the songs:

1. Mutha (Don't Wanna Go To School Today) (¡)
2. Get The Funk Out (¢)
3. Color Me Blind (£)
4. Evilangelist (%)
5. Help! (live) (*)
6. Kid Ego (¡)
7. Suzie (Wants Her All Day What?) (¢)
8. Rest In Peace (£)
9. Shadow Boxing (%) (the first time I heard the beginning of Porcupine Tree's "Mellotron Scratch" I thought of this song)
10. When I'm President (live) (*)
11. Play With Me (¡) (the first Extreme song I ever heard - it was used in the "Beethoven in the mall" scene of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure)
12. Hole Hearted (¢)
13. Peacemaker Die (£)
14. Our Father (£)
15. Stop The World (£)
16. Hip Today (%)

• (¡) from Extreme (1989)
• (¢) from Extreme II: Pornograffitti (1990)
• (£) from III Sides To Every Story (1992)
• (*) from Tragic Comic (single) (1992)
• (%) from Waiting For The Punchline (1995)

Happy Independence Day to all us Americans.

We finished painting our master bath on Saturday, so were able to head out to my parents' yesterday and enjoy some time with them. We went to the impressive Downpour pool complex at the Algonkian Regional Park. I enjoyed diving and the slides, and Ryan enjoyed... just about everything. Probably the best pool I've ever been to. My dad cooked us a great grilled pork dinner Saturday night and we caught up on The Tour via DirecTiVo. There were no local fireworks displays there on Sunday night, so Ryan and the ladies went out and got some fireworks for us to shoot off ourselves.

Today we went to a kid's day at Claude Moore Park, where Ryan took his first-ever ride on a pony. We also took a hayride around the park and made a necklace craft with him. We were going to go over to the Reston Zoo but their admission fees ($10/adult, $8/child) scared us off. Sorry, didn't feel like dumping $50+ on what appears to me to be a geographically challenged zoo. This is one case where Hershey may have the better deal.

Melissa and I have "forced vacation" from work this week, so we're going to be tiling the lower half of our master bath walls and painting our master bedroom. I'll be glad when it's done!

We've been at work on the tile for the last two days and found near the end of our work today that we're about 20 tiles too short. We should have some more by Friday so that we can get them all pasted and ready to grout. Moral of the story: always assume you're going to cut more tiles than you think. Our vendor converted Melissa's area measurements into a square footage estimate for their ordering purposes and they (hence we) underordered a little bit. Each 10 sq. ft. case contained 80 tiles. Based on her measurements, Melissa predicted we'd need 409 white tiles for the project and we bought a total of 400 (5 cases); you do the math. Corollary: listen to the engineer!

Our attention focuses on painting the master bedroom tomorrow. We're hoping we can bang that out in a day.

A little late for me now that Enterprise has been cancelled, but our local UPN affiliate's digital station is now carried in Comcast's HD package on channel 236.

Sounds like Melissa's interested in us seeing Fantastic Four this Friday. Cool!

We got our master bedroom painted yesterday and picked up another case of tile to get that done last night. We'll be grouting tomorrow.

I'm tweaking and listening to ICYG this morning. I had taken the compressor offline for a few days, which resulted in the streamed audio having a lower overall volume and larger dynamic range. I added it back this morning, after A/B'ing it and finding that for a radio-style mix it really does work. What a mix -- thanks for the submissions, guys.

We're going to see FF this afternoon; I'll let you know how it is, Don. ;)

The Fantastic Four movie was definitely a mixed bag for me. I'm a Marvel fan, but I always followed Spidey, the X-Men, and the Avengers more than the Four. Hence I don't know the exact origin story very well, nor the origin of Dr. Doom, the villain of this picture. If you liked the X-Men movie and don't require an airtight plot, you'll probably like this one.

Light spoilers follow if you'd like to read on.

I may be attempting the swap of my two main computers (mentioned here) today; if ICYG is down, that's why.

I batted .500 with the computer swap. The move of my server's hard drives went well; the change in system archictectures (i875-series chipset to i845-series) was great enough to cause me to have to run an in-place OS upgrade repair to get the OS to boot again. Once that was done, Ghostrider was up on my homebrew Northwood P4-2.4GHz system happily and I got everything up pretty quickly.

However, the move of Earthshine's (my upstairs multimedia system) drives to the Dell PowerEdge 400SC chassis (P4 2.4C with HT) couldn't be saved by the same process. However, I'd left about half of the first hard drive (30 of 60GB) unpartitioned so I went ahead and installed WinXP there. I'm moving docs and app data over in a controlled manner to get it all back before I get all my remaining multimedia software reinstalled. Sometimes it's good to do a fresh install, so I'm not too disappointed.

The main reason for doing this was to quiet down the office for critical listening, and I have to say, this'll do the job. The 400SC is whisper-quiet most of the time (so far). I'm very pleased with the change.

Today I realized I lost one of the more obscure things I've ever lost; the hinge bolts (update to self: they're called "hinge pins") to the bathroom door we took off last week when we started tiling. I have a feeling they either got put with something that then got packed away, or something that got thrown away. Next time, I'll put them in a bag and tape them to the darn door.

The Home Depot will now make a little more money off of our project.

I just sprayed the first coat of sealant on the grout. Soon I'll put the toilet back together and we can start using the bathroon again. I wasn't too much of a fan of doing this project, but I have to say, the bathroom looks pretty sharp -- even if it is yellow and white. ;)

Update: Stanley 4-pack of hinge pins - $2.40. The door is back up!

Scott and I will be recording our "warm-up" BDFL pre-season podcast this coming Tuesday at 9PM. Don will be joining us, so there's no telling what else we might talk about. ;) If you want in on the fun, you can join our Skype conference call (Skype me at "aharden"). It looks like I can host two more people on the call. We'll probably be on for 40-60 minutes.

Please leave a comment, email or Skype message if you're planning to join. Thanks!

Thanks to Niall's MT template (with a minor tweak) my Atom feed is compliant with the Atom 1.0 spec. Thanks to Tim Bray for the heads-up.

Mom and Dad are here this weekend as Manolas participated in downtown Chambersburg's Old Market Day craft festival yesterday. The weather was rainy here but it cooperated there; it rained on our way in, stopped as we found our spot and started to set up on S. Main Street, and then gave us a little sprinkle around lunchtime. We really lucked out. It was a large and well-trafficked fair; Melissa thinks we reached a new one-day sales high. She's gotten several large e-orders lately, so business isn't bad at all (for a side business).

I downloaded the first MT 3.2 beta and will probably throw a test site up soon to check it out. The new administrative features are what I'm most interested in; it'll be interesting to see how much the product evolves for this point release.

I haven't developed much on ICYG lately, but I did just update it with a new version of the Continuator plugin (which continues to improve). I've thought of a method of regularly scheduling podcasts on ICYG that should be dynamic enough to keep up with the latest downloaded version for a particular feed. Now I just have to pick shows/feeds, determine a schedule, and get to work! I'll probably use the post-download feature of Doppler to run a script that drops the newest podcast in a particular feeds directory into a location known to my ICYG playlist-making scripts, which will call a file that includes fixed-schedule data. We'll see how it goes.

I received the Klipsh brackets for my surround speakers, so now I just have to go get some speaker wire and conduit to get them mounted and looking nice. Probably later this week.

I wasn't going to check out the new show "Rock Star: INXS" on CBS, but it was on last night & my parents recommended it. Melissa mentioned her mom thought I'd like it as well. I did enjoy it. Think "American Idol" with a hard rock backing band (actually very talented) and contestants with (for the most part) 1000% more chutzpah. I didn't care for a few of the performers, but most of the 14 I saw were entertaining.

Of course, it will be interesting if this catapults the resulting INXS project to a wider audience, for artistic reasons rather than television ratings. I think it would be interesting for a female contestant to win, however it might be difficult for them to sound good on the older material that Michael Hutchence sang in a lower register.

Back in the "Kick" days, I did listen to the hits but never bought the CD. That's about the extent of my INXS knowledge.

I found some stuff over at Ty Tabor's site to tide me over until the new King's X album comes out in September. Thanks Alien Beans!

Getting all my audio gear set up for the podcast. I'll probably have a few kinks to work out after this session. We will be starting at 9 or a little earlier. Email or Skype me at "aharden" if you want to join the conference call. And make sure you're running the latest version of Skype!

James Doohan passed away today at 85, but Scotty will live forever. Rest in peace, Mr. Doohan.

This blog is now three years old.

23.4MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 51m 16s (Torrent courtesy of Prodigem.)
23.4MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 51m 16s (Courtesy of Nitevilla.net.)

This is the first Brutal Deluxe football podcast of the 2005 season. Scott, Don and I talk about the league's new team, the upcoming BDFL draft and our keepers, what's currently going on in the NFL, curling, hockey, and fantasy baseball. It's a veritable sports smorgasbord! (Recorded yesterday, 7/19 - I incorrectly dated it 7/18.)

Please note that my torrents-only podcast RSS feed has changed. Thanks to Prodigem for providing the feed.

Links:

• SportPodcasts.com

Credits:

• Mixed, recorded, edited and mastered by me.
• Music: "One Big Holiday" by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD.

Check out FreeiPods.com

Apologies in advance for the occasional shameless plug. I'm still just one completed referral away from qualifying for a free 20GB iPod or 6GB iPod Mini. I'll be the first to admit it would make it easier to listen to podcasts untethered, seeing as synchronization isn't a part of my Hi-MD's feature set.

Please use my referral link above if you'd like to check out the site and possibly sign up.

Have a great weekend!

Finally got a lot of the finishing work in the master bath done today. Installed matching chrome/white hardware: knobs and handles on the vanity, a new TP holder, and a towel rack I was dreading installing. I wasn't looking forward to drilling holes in our nice new tile, but I got the right bit for the job and it worked out well.

I also finished wiring up the mounted surround speakers and the finished system sounds very nice. It would be better if the surrounds were able to point down a little more, but I'll take what I can get. "Deadwing" in surround is excellent test material.

We have a week of work left before we head out for a week-long trip to the Williamsburg/Virginia Beach area next Saturday. Finally, a family vacation this year! I've never been down there before; should be a great time.

I've been geeking out the past few nights playing with software that might enable me to fairly use the high-resolution content of my new Fragile DVD-A. I've had trouble getting the eval versions of WinDVD and PowerDVD to properly play the hi-res multichannel version of the music. I think it has to do with the fact that I have a multi-channel sound card that's not a Creative Audigy2. My current goal is to convert the tracks to multichannel 24-bit/96KHz FLAC files so that I can enjoy them in their full glory with Foobar2000. I'm not interested in burning a DVD-Audio disk. At this point I believe I need a tool that'll convert MLP files to either multichannel WAV (and swap channel order around to accomodate PC multichannel mapping vs. DVD-Audio mapping) or directly to FLAC. And the content companies wonder why users might not like content protection. Sheesh.

Rock Star: INXS is about the only new TV I'm watching right now, besides the occasional looks at the NFL Network. The band seems very serious about this; they let two contestants go last night. For the first time, the INXS drummer and bassist replaced their counterparts in the house band for the low-vote-getters' performances of INXS songs. It's amazing how much better some of these contestants sound singing INXS songs vs. non-INXS.

We'll be out of town for about a week starting Saturday. Can't wait.

I've started using the new Google Homepage this week. Very clean and malleable. It's pretty dry compared to My Yahoo! but it's very customizable. Check it out.

If you aren't subscribed to my link blog you might have missed the articles I linked to about the whole Sony payola thing. Precisely the reason I rarely listen to the radio to find new music.

Combine this excellent DVD-Audio reference page with this instructive page that includes a link to this archive, which contains a Win32 port of mkisofs, and you too can figure out how to make a correctly-laid-out image of a DVD-Audio disc on Windows. (Given the appropriate source files.)

(35¢ local calls are nice; I'll be dialing up regularly during our vacation.)

We had a bit longer of a drive down to Williamsburg, VA, than we expected today; we experienced the kind of stop-and-go highway traffic on I-95 and I-295 that only brake parts makers like. Having left at 10am, we arrived and checked into King's Creek Plantation at about 4:45. My initial impression of the townhouse we're staying in was (and still is) very positive. Very roomy and nicely furnished, especially in the kitchen. There's enough stuff here to accomodate 6 guests and there's just the three of us. :) Ryan couldn't get over the fact that there are 4 TVs in here. I'll put some pictures up sometime later in the week.

We went and had a quick (and good) casual dinner at Bones Rotisserie and then went to the local Food Lion to stock up our temporary kitchen. We'll do breakfast here every day, and make spaghetti and pizza dinners during the week to save some money. I cheaped out on coffee for the first time in a while; I'm drinking Chock Full O'Nuts instead of Starbucks. ;)

Sounds like we're going to check out Colonial Williamsburg tomorrow and Monday. We're right near all the attractions here, so we should be able to enjoy KCP as well; we're right across from the pool. The drive out to Virginia Beach later in the week may test our patience as we get back onto I-64, which wasn't an easy drive with all the traffic and rain earlier today.

I'll check in again tomorrow or Monday...