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Louie from Comcast came out and tracked down what he believes was the root cause of my connection problem - a bad splitter - and along the diagnosis path refreshed some of our outdoor cable connections. Just in case it was the modem, that was replaced as well. The new one is smaller than the old one, which is always good. I hope it runs a bit cooler.
On Monday, a restraining order was issued calling on [the] Seattle [Seahawks] to halt any usage of "12th Man," or "12th Mania." [Texas] A&M's chief marketing officer Steve Moore said he didn't want to ruin Seattle's fun, he just wanted to protect the university's trademarks.
What? Apparently the Aggies coined the term. Googling "12th man" yields a number of Aggie-related sites. However, I found this humorous:
The "12th man" term has been used by various American football teams including the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, Buffalo Bills, and the Chicago Bears. The Buffalo Bills and the Chicago Bears no longer use the term "12th man" at the request of Texas A&M. The Seattle Seahawks continue to use the phrase.
As a Bills fan, I know "THE 12TH MAN" is on the Wall Of Fame. Heck, voting is still open for the 3rd annual 12th Man Awards. The Bears held a 12th man contest last year. Defending their trademark? More like just trying to get in the news.
I'm checking out the current version of Mercora, and it's a slick silo of streaming goodness. Think P2P music library info sharing and real-time streaming. It's quite Vorbis friendly and as soon as you've added some stuff to your library, it starts randomly browsing through and streaming your personal Mercora station on demand. It lets you search the network and find instances of artists or songs that are either in someone's library or are currently being streamed. Pretty cool. I've got a stash of music shared on there right now. Check it out.
Recently I've been pressed for time on the mornings where I take Ryan to the bus stop. It came to a head yesterday when I neglected to send him in with a snack for his classmates, due to the fact that I was trying to get too much stuff done before we had to leave. Melissa even called to remind me and I forgot.
She rightly pointed out that I procrastinate with regards to some of the morning duties. It really woke me up to the fact that I'm doing that a lot. Since last night, whenever I've thought "I'm here and could get this done or prepared, but I'll wait until later", I've gone ahead and taken the time to get whatever it is done then. For example, I washed dishes that had been dirtied after dinner before going up last night, when before I might have left them for the next day. Something as silly as putting out the bread and knife before finding out if Ryan wants creamy or crunchy peanut butter does save time. Being a computer guy, I attribute this to lessening context switching.
I'm happy to say I got up earlier this morning (something else I needed to be able to correct this) and have time to make this entry before heading off to the bus stop. Thanks Melissa; I love you.
I requested a Hi-MD as a Christmas 2004 gift when I learned that Sony's SonicStage software would allow analog recordings to be uploaded without loss of quality to a computer. In the last year, it's been my podcast-recording device of choice, and is a great portable music solution. I think its audio quality and tweakability are superior to the iPod, but the iPod is certainly easier to use.
As Minidisc adoption has waned over the last few years, Sony has been enabling more features and usability to the line. I just got the news from the Minidisc Community Forums today that SonicStage 3.4 is out and has enabled the following features that I'll definitely use:
I think the Minidisc portable recorders are still the best-featured devices that don't require proprietary or non-removable batteries. I currently use the iPod Nano more for day-to-day listening of podcasts and some of my new music, but my Hi-MD (the MZ-NHF800) is still the crown jewel of my portable music and recording arsenal. Thanks to Sony Electronics for making it even more useful.
My biggest iTunes gripes, in the order I'd like them fixed:
In the meantime, I'm waiting for the official Foobar 0.9 release and when it's out I'm going to enable the Columns UI and try to get it as close to looking and acting like iTunes as I can. I love the iTunes interface and the FB2K audio engine/plugins.
Some big game is happening tonight. I heard a Pennsylvania team is in it, just like last year. Cool.
Here are some things that will surprise me if they happen:
See you in the BDFL War Room, if for only a little bit! Enjoy the game!
The good news in my portable audio world continues. The Rockbox project has released a working version for the iPod Nano. I got the news from the Lossless Audio Blog; thanks, Brennan! Rockbox supports, among other features, Ogg Vorbis and gapless playback. Both are said to be working on the Nano. Thanks to the Rockbox developers; I may be trying this at some point. However, for my current primary purpose, the Nano/iTunes combo is great for podcatching/listening.
Congratulations to the Super Bowl XL Champion Pittsburgh Steelers. After the first half, I wasn't so sure, but "Fast" Willie Parker's long TD run at the beginning of the second half gave the Steelers the breathing room I thought would last them for the rest of the game. Not a perfect game, but a great game nonetheless. We will be talking about the game tonight at 8:30 while recording the BDFL podcast. Find "aharden" on Skype if you want to join us.
25.8MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 56m 30s (Courtesy of Nitevilla.net.)
This is the 27th Brutal Deluxe football podcast of the 2005/2006 season. Scott, Don, and I share our thoughts about the Steelers' Super Bowl win, the commercials, and reflect on the players who did (and didn't) make it into the Pro Football Hall Of Fame this year.
Next week will be our last BDFL podcast of the season! Please send comments to BrutalDeluxe at gmail.com.
Links:
Credits:
Songbird promises to be a more open media player that's just as simple to use as iTunes. However, if they don't plan on letting me under the hood to tweak the audio chain I won't even bother using it.
It ran a little rough for me at first, but it's definitely worth looking at.
Gmail's chat interface is now active for my account. That integration is very interesting to me, since it's adding presence information to a tool I use quite often while I'm online. I've historically not been much of an IM client user, probably because I rarely spend more than 15-20 minutes on the computer at a time while at home. My availabilty for chat through Gmail will probably be overstated since I leave Gmail up when I'm away from the computer, but I'll try to keep my status accurate. If I start using the chat tool regularly I'll review it.
Overheard on NBC while watching the Winter Olympics:
TV's hottest show is moving to Fridays!
What's even stupider about this statement was that it was about Las Vegas, which isn't exactly in the Top 20...
15.7MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 34m 13s
This is the premiere episode of the much-discussed Unnamed Hockey Podcast. Recorded February 13, Scott, Don, and I share our thoughts about the weekend's women's Olympic ice hockey action, the upcoming men's tournament, and the Rick Tocchet gambling scandal.
Links:
Credits:
22.7MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 46m 40s (Courtesy of Nitevilla.net.)
This is the 28th and last Brutal Deluxe football podcast of the 2005/2006 season. Scott and I talk about the Pro Bowl (ug-ly!), give our thoughts on the latest coaching moves, and wonder if the Lions will have a productive offense in 2006. We attempt to prognosticate a little about next season, but realize it's futile.
Thanks for listening to our first full season of podcasts! Please keep us subscribed in your podcatcher; we may be back in April with a post-draft roundup. In the meantime, check out Don's Unnamed Hockey Podcast.
Links:
Credits:
I'm about to break the iTunes/Nano podcatching loop I've been using because iTunes for Windows does a crappy job of handling Windows XP's Fast User Switching. Melissa and I leave ourselves logged in to our shared computer, which is also my main music-management computer, and we switch between our login sessions to get things done. iTunes hates this, spewing out errors like "another user is using iTunes; please ask them to exit" even when that's not the case. There's also the problem of the iTunesHelper app not sensing that the Nano's been plugged in. Programming iTunes to support only a single instance per computer and continually running into these limitations seems intentional to me.
Just about the only things that set iTunes apart from Foobar2000 for me are Smart Playlists and the interactive search features. Foobar is superior in every other way. iTunes has an appropriate name; it's a song-listener's player. Foobar is a music-listener's player. With the 0.9 version, I think FB2K's autoplaylist functionality will get close to Smart Playlists, and I feel an enterprising plugin might come along to make searching a bit more glossy. I'm planning to hunker down and customize some nice columns UI views for FB2K and check out its iPod plugin. I already use FB2K as my transcoder, tagger, and listener; it can certainly handle file management as well. And I still feel like iTunes/iPod won't ever support gapless playback or threshold-based crossfading.
A substitute for my current podcatching loop will probably be going back to Doppler and perhaps loading up the Rockbox firmware that was recently released for the Nano. I could put a script in place to do a sync between my Doppler store and the Nano. The Rockbox firmware isn't as glamorous as the Apple firmware, but from everything I've seen and read, development is going quickly and it really opens up the device's capabilities. There are other pieces of software out there that support synching with the iPod's native firmware that I might check out as well. I do like the iPod UI. I don't use the song-rating feature of iTunes+iPod, so I wouldn't miss that.
Did I mention that iTunes 6.0.2 crashes every time I try to "Export Song List" on my subscribed podcasts? Good thing I'm keeping my master subscription list in Bloglines.
We watched the Olympic debut of snowboard cross tonight and saw Seth Wescott (pre-Games interview) take the gold. It was the first time I'd ever heard of it. It definitely showcases control versus raw speed, although calling it "NASCAR on snow" is stretching it. More like "Roller Derby on snow". That's not to denigrate the sport; it was fun to watch.
It's quite a contrast seeing NBC switch between Men's Snowboard Cross and Men's Figure Skating. "All shapes and sizes", indeed.
With the signing of the bill that will push television stations off the frequencies they're using for analog broadcasts in early 2009, several people I know have expressed concern about how non-digital TV sets will receive digital broadcasts. Usually, what I'm hearing is how one can future-proof themselves against the cable companies' inevitable march towards all-digital service. Even though the "DTV bill" deals strictly with airwaves, I think a lot of people are assuming that the cablecos will use the bill to marginalize their analog offerings. They're probably right.
I've noticed on our Comcast digital cable box that some of the analog stations we're not subscribed to are available via the box, but not on our analog TVs. This indicates that Comcast has already started re-allocating bandwidth to digitized versions of their analog programming. One of my co-workers found out about QAM tuners (which pick up ATSC channels via the modulation used on cable networks) and asked Comcast what channels they could pick up without help from Comcast hardware. They grudgingly admitted the local HDTV stations would be available, but pointed out the lack of other stations and OnDemand, PPV, & DVR services if their hardware was not used.
However, one of my other co-workers has an HDTV set-top box that supports QAM tuning, and he reported to me that he received most, if not all, of the digital channels (including HDTV and the Music Choice stuff), unencrypted, from his Comcast cable service. As the amount of digital tuners (both in TVs and standalone boxes like the ones the government is promising to provide) increases, I have a feeling many others will find that they might not necessarily need an antenna or extra cable company hardware to get DTV. Of course, they will have to have an active cable subscription. It'll be interesting to see how cable companies' services and marketing deals with the next few years of change. I anticipate that as more and more of their programming is converted to digital, the cablecos will lock down as much of the content as they can manage to maximize control and profits.
I've been overdue to implement a plugin on the Manolas Handmade Soaps site that would allow Melissa to input metadata for each item that would be used to automatically populate the PayPal button form. For simpler items, I asked her to put the price in the "Excerpt" field and I would generate the other unique fields from the item's entry title and number. That was a pedestrian way to do it and I've found a much better solution.
I had seen Brad Choate's KeyValues plugin and was prepared to use it. However, when I was trolling the MT Plugins site last night I found Movalog's CustomFields plugin. It was more what I was looking for, since it allows the creation of per-entry fields of different types that are displayed in the Entry Editing screen. It's going to be a lot easier for Melissa to use day-to-day. The other thing that it accomodates that KeyValues wouldn't is the custom blocks of form code we'll still have to input for the more complex items that require drop-down option fields. I couldn't find an easier way to do that with either plugin.
I've created CustomFields for an item's name, number, and price, as well as two optional fields for option lists. Now I've got to go to the category templates and add in the new template tags for the values. I like the fact that CustomValues creates unique template tags for each value; it'll make the coding easy.
Thanks to both Brad and Movalog for creating plugins like this that help me use MT for our small business. Once successfully implemented, I plan on donating to Movalog for the plugin and may end up using it here, too.
I've spruced up my feed box on the right with an "official" icon and created a valid Atom version of my Media feed. (MT template.) I still need to upgrade to Byrne's latest Media Manager and MTAmazon plugins, but I'm getting what I need out of what I'm running. I haven't really been using MM as actively as I thought I would, but it's cool.
Apparently I've missed the time warp that is Queensryche's upcoming Operation: Mindrime II. The original (it came out in '88) was my favorite concept album for a long time, only to be displaced by Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory. I saw both bands together in Baltimore a few years back, and QR still played great. It'll be interesting to hear OMII. I'm glad Geoff Tate grew his hair back. The "Dr. Evil" look didn't suit him. Thanks to Don for the news.
18.2MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 39m 39s
This is the second episode of the Unnamed Hockey Podcast. Recorded February 23, Don and I talk about Team USA's disappointing finishes, Olympic injuries taking their toll on NHL squads, fighting in the NHL, and a brief history of WHA franchises in the NHL. We also look ahead to this semifinals and finals of the men's Olympic tournament, and even talk a little ELP.
Links:
Credits:
An emailer named Stan found my RSA-640 entry from a few years back and asked a few questions about my assumptions. I hadn't thought about the challenge in a while, so I was surprised when I found out the challenge number was factored last November. Validating my theory about the factors' length, each was 97 digits.
The next-highest challenge number is RSA-704. I'll publish a new lottery script for it, perhaps with some new tricks, soon.
We made the decision to go ahead with Comcast's DVR service last weekend, so I called today and got some good news. The $5/month we pay for our HD box rental counts towards the $9.95/month DVR charge, since it's an HD-capable box. Even better was the fact that I could take my current box (the Motorola DCT5100) in and trade up at the local Comcast office today. I did that and now have the new box online. The only change I had to make was to go back to using component video for the HD video stream; the new box (a Moto DCT3412) doesn't have DVI out. HDMI is its only digital video out.
I haven't watched it much yet, but I set up a few shows (The Amazing Race and Boston Legal) to record tonight to see how the DVR feature works. I already did a little pause-rewind-replay action to test it out. It worked OK. I think I might have seen a little bit of stuttering on HD content; presumably the effect of watching a high-bitrate stream through the recording buffer. I'll have to make sure that's not going to be a regular phenomenon. I have a feeling most of our HD watching will end up being time-shifted, so as long as playback doesn't stutter, it shouldn't be too annoying. I hope it's something that Moto/Comcast are aware of and will fix.
Now I'll have to go troll some AV forums to get the latest poop on the 3412...
This page contains all entries posted to cygweb in February 2006. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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