cygweb

My sister, Candace, gave birth to her second child today: Jack Thomas Bush. Weighing in at 8 pounds, 8 ounces and being 20" in length, he's a bit larger at birth than his big sister, Hailey. Luckily, they won't have much time to get jealous of each others' birthdays; they're just a little over 2 weeks apart!

Congrats to Candace & Brian and Jack's grandparents! Rest in peace, Mrs. Bush; we know you're looking down on Jack now.

I'm looking forward to meeting my godson!

Fantasy baseball is heading in to the playoffs just as I'm ramping up for the fantasy football season. Cyg's Bunters of the Money Ballz Experimental league have been #1 for a while and have a bye this week. Our franchise in the Brutal Deluxe Baseball League was in the #10 of 10 spot for most of the season, but in the last few weeks they scrapped their way into the 6th and last playoff spot. We're playing the Bad News Bears in Round 1 this week.

There's still time for you to join the BDFL/Nitevilla/Cygweb groups in the following free fantasy football games:

• Pro Football Pick 'Em
• Salary Cap Football
• Survival Football

Signup details here.

I've been following Justin Frankel's REAPER project ever since Brad pointed it out. It recently went 1.0; it's up to v1.06 now. It's a well-conceived multitrack audio/MIDI editor for Windows that's highly configurable. I've barely scratched its surface using it to edit, master, and render the last few BDFL podcasts. However, I know it's for real, and at $40 for the non-commercial license, it's a steal. Recommended. It's unrestricted shareware, which means you can completely try before you buy. It's too bad more audio software (especially plugins) isn't like that.

A note if you buy: the RegNow service's "download protection" add-on, which is offered when you make the purchase, appears to be useless. As long as you keep your issued key in a safe place, you can download the software from the REAPER site and activate it as opposed to relying on RegNow's service.

We were very disappointed that Storm was let go tonight on Rock Star. We thought that at this phase of the competition, it was known that all 5 "rockers" were great singers. We thought "they're now being tested on their musicianship", writing original songs and collaborating with Gilby. I thought Dilana had failed that test, but apparently they still like her stage presence and ability enough to keep her on until next week's finale.

Storm was the most gracious contestant. She supported everyone else during their performances, always being the first one to stand up and sing along when someone else was on the stage. Her song "Ladylike" kicked ass. She was never afraid of being in the Bottom Three.

At this point, I believe either Toby or Lukas should be picked. I think Toby's going to go all the way.

My car's air conditioning stopped working a few weeks ago. I made the mistake of asking our local Monro Muffler Brake shop (Eisenhower Blvd.) to fix it. $250, a warning that they never found a leak in the engine compartment, and four days later, it wasn't working again. I took it back and they gave me an estimate for how much it would cost to replace the evaporator: their best guess as to what was broken. That would be about $600, but they would be recharging the system for free (that is what they did for $250) because of their earlier misjudgment.

This is the first break/fix that this car (1998 Dodge Stratus ES) has seen. Everything else has been regular "wear" maintenance. I was a little stunned by the $600 number, so instead of letting them go ahead and do the work we decided to take the car into the local Dodge dealer (Brenner Dodge) for a look. There was one safety recall issue that they needed to fix anyways, so it wasn't a completely wasted trip. They also couldn't find a leak without taking off the dashboard, and they wanted $140 to charge the system with refrigerant and dye to be sure. Instead of doing that, I asked them my cost for the evaporator ($240) and decided to take it back to Monro and let them do the work.

I dropped the car off last night per their request, thinking they would start on it early today and let me know what they found when they got the dash off. Instead, I get a call in the late morning letting me know they haven't gotten to it yet, and then another call at about 1:45pm telling me that their initial estimate was wrong. They were now estimating $1200-$1400 for the repair, blaming their initial estimate on faulty software. The labor estimate went from 5.5 hours to 6-7 hours (at $80/hour) the parts estimate went from $142 (which was low for this part) to $320 plus "incidentals", like o-rings and other things they would have to use to install the new evaporator. I was trying to parse these costs on the phone and I wasn't liking what I was hearing. I also got the dreaded "we don't do this very often" line, so that was it. Classic bait and switch. I told them not to do the work and picked up the car. I'll take it to Dodge to get it fixed. Even if it costs $1200+ there, at least there will be guys working on it that know the vehicle and the job.

Moral of the story: don't trust the general repair shops with anything but light maintenance and their specialties. And don't believe every repair estimate you're given.

I already liked CBS's pregame show more than the others, but with the addition of James Brown, a new studio, full HD production, it's now quite good. I even liked the segment with Charlie Casserly. Subscribed.

I'm no iTMS fan, but the new features included in iTunes 7 make me want to consider using it as a librarian more seriously. Right now I use iTunes 6.x for podcast subscriptions (synched to my iPod Nano) and occasionally for streaming to my Airport Express. I prefer to use Winamp with the excellent Remote Speakers plugin to stream to the AX, though. I use Foobar 2000 for everything else. iTunes 7's gapless playback and Cover Flow features are the most compelling to me. However, my workflow might still be convoluted in this scenario: rip/encode/tag with FB2K/Lame/FreeDB, load into iTunes library to index & get cover art, and hope that FB2K and iTunes don't mutually destroy ID3 tags. We'll see.

Just upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.32. I hope that will prevent some of the timeouts we're seeing with some of the CGI scripts.

This weekend saw Manolas at two events: the Great Road Festival in Camp Hill on Saturday, and Fort Hunter Day on Sunday. This is the first time we've done two shows in one weekend; now we know why. They ate up the majority of our time!

We were disappointed by our sales in Camp Hill. This was our third year there, but it was our worst performance. We think less people came out this year than last. One highlight for me was taking my dad over to Holmes Cycling (we were set up right across the street from them) and checking out some Trek and Bianchi road bikes. I was partial to the Trek 1200 and Pilot 1.2. When we got home, I mowed the lawn (which was tall after our recent rain) and then we had a relaxing jazz-infused meal at Cafe Fresco.

On Sunday I was able to sate my football desires by listening to 1460 "The Ticket"; they were providing live coverage of all the games in progress. Imagine my excitement as I was hearing how well the Bills were doing down in Miami! They were one of my upset picks this week. Our first experience at Fort Hunter wasn't too bad, except for the tree in our area that was a little too short for our tent. It was nice to not be back-to-back to other vendors. We were near the children's play area. Our sales were much better than Saturday's, so it made the trip worth it.

Mom and Dad stepped up their normal weekender to make it happen; they stayed until after dinner. Mom made a great lasagna that we all enjoyed. We're so thankful they're close enough to come down to watch Ryan and enjoy these weekends with us.

After seeing the satisfaction Don has had with his Canon camera, I didn't shy away from the brand when finding a replacement for my 4-year-old Sony DSC-P50. I'm certainly not a power user, so I was looking for a camera with modest resolution (by current standards), 3x or greater optical zoom, and easy-to-use point-and-shoot capabilities with the ability to learn how to tweak later. The Canon PowerShot A530, recommended by Steve's Digicams, was an excellent value and I chose to purchase it. I've played around with some of the different resolutions in various shooting situations and have been quite pleased. It came with a 16MB SD card, paltry by today's standards, but enough to try the camera out. I've ordered a 512MB SD card from NewEgg; once I get it I'll be able to fully utilize the A530.

Melissa really surprised me tonight. We'd been talking about going to a Bills game this year, but I didn't think she'd actually go through with it...

Thanks, Honey!

So Apple is apparently going after companies that use the terms "podcast" and "pod" (as it relates to podcasting) under the guise of trademark infringement. Sorry, but this doesn't pass the smell test. "Podcast" was certainly inspired by the iPod, but it was genericized to imply "syndicated, auto-downloaded audio content" within its first year of use. I see Apple's embrace of the vernacular when they integrated podcasts into the iTunes Music Store instead of calling them something like "iPodcasts" as an acceptance of this fact. Cool your jets, Apple lawyers.

These things use coffee pods, you know...