I’m moving my photos from my old personal website to Flickr, seeing if it works better as a general photo album hosting site. The album organization features are better on Flickr, after the recent upgrades they’ve done, and the varying levels of photo permissions are very nice. I’m a bit concerned, though, that the need to sign in might be a bit much for a few of our computer-challenged relatives. We’ll see how it works out.
The attached photo is the cruise ship from our honeymoon.
Someone asked me the other day what I was cooking for Easter, and with me not being a celebrating-Easter kind of guy at the moment, I said, “Chili.” So, I put up my favorite chili recipe on my food-blog:
It’s good. Try it, but you don’t have to cook it for Easter.
Well, I was never really a rock star. I was in a band, Blue Nova, for a short while around in 1996. In honor of our tenth anniversary, I’m rereleasing our one and only album, Songs from the Groove. Don’t feel a need to listen to any of it, but my favorites in random order are Scared (both regular and club mix), Tie Dye, Taking Over the World, Shoelaces, and In My Room.
I played guitar. The rest of the band was Andy Minton on guitar, keyboards, and vocals, Albert Christy on vocals, Aaron Bjork on bass, and Tony Marra on drums. We practiced in a barn on a friend’s farm.
This album was recorded on one long night in my church’s basement, on a single-track cassette karaoke machine with one microphone for vocals and another for all of the instrumental stuff. I later transferred the songs from the cassette to my shiny, new Pentium 75 Packard Bell and cleaned them up as much as I knew how using Cool Edit. Given our poor equipment, our non-existent sound engineering know-how, and our general lack of talent, the songs turned out to be not too bad.
Without further ado, here is Blue Nova’s Songs from the Groove:
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Side I: Taking Over the World Losing My Head Belle Boy Tie Dye Down Here |
Side II: Scared Shoelaces Strange This Day In My Room Scared – Club Mix |
For anyone who’s planning on buying some Mariners tickets this year for a game a Safeco, I just saw this handy blog post (from USS Mariner):
I sent Comcast another e-mail asking about their high definition coverage for Seattle Mariners games (see my previous post). Here’s their reply:
Dear Mike,
Thank you for contacting Comcast.
Most Mariner games will be aired on FSN and a good number on KSTW. We do not offer either of these channels in HD. Comcast is committed to deploying HDTV service. We are working to provide as many high definition channel broadcasters as possible. At this time there have been no announced plans to add either of those that channels to your HD lineup. Please keep an eye on your monthly billing statement as the announcement of any channel additions will appear on those statements.
Thank you for choosing Comcast.
Sincerely,
Eric
Comcast Customer Support
They don’t seem to be committed to working all that hard, since FSN lists the Mariners as one of the teams that offers HD coverage (from FSN HD FAQ):
Which teams offer HD games on FSN HD in their respective regions?
NBA teams include the Bucks, Grizzlies, Jazz, Lakers, Magic, Mavericks, Sonics, Spurs, Suns, Timberwolves, and Trailblazers. Major League Baseball teams include the Astros, Brewers, Devil Rays, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Mariners, Marlins, Pirates, Rangers, and Twins. NHL teams include the Blues, Coyotes, Hurricanes, Kings, Lightning, Panthers, Penguins, Stars, and Wild.
Also, Tacoma’s Click! Network carries FSN HD as part of their standard HD package, so it’s clearly available to broadcasters in the area.
It looks like Comcast is committed to making business decisions that give their customers a poorer-quality product. I’m going to have to consider switching my cable television and internet over to Tacoma’s home-grown services.
I upgraded the hard drive in my tivo this past weekend. The old 40GB drive made a constant, high-pitched whining noise that has been bugging me for a long time. I had to go to Fry’s to pick up an external hard drive for my wife, so upon seeing a $40 160GB internal drive, I decided to take action and relieve tivo of its misery.
I followed the step-by-step directions at Interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions. It was a fairly simple procedure: remove the hard drive, attach both drives to my old PC, boot the PC with a special linux boot CD, run one command to initate the data transfer, and attach the new drive to the tivo.
I also changed the fan, since that was also pretty loud.
The results:
The whining noise is gone and I’ve quadrupled the storage space. Now that the whine is gone, I can hear the actual drive access clicks and whirs, which is a little distracting. The new fan also didn’t make a difference and may even be louder than the old one. It’s hard to tell, since the old fan noise was drowned out by the loud hard drive.
I’ve uploaded a few more photos to a Flickr photset.
We just got a Sony Vaio SZ140. It’s pretty cool: lightweight, great screen, nice performance, and all that. There’s one thing that bugs the heck out of my wife, though. When she’s browsing the web on battery power, some not-insignificant number of the pages take a long time to load, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. These hanging page loads are on major sites like Google and Amazon, so it’s probably not a problem on their end. Also, the problem seems to go away as soon as the notebook is plugged in. Even stranger (to me, at least) is that when the browser is just waiting there for the page to start loading, a second click on the same link will invariably load the page very quickly.
I’ve never noticed this behavior on my PowerBook, so I’m not really sure what’s up. Unless the battery vs. plugged-in behavior is a red herring, I’d guess that it has something to do with the power management stuff that happens in those situations. It seems like a strange symptom of that, though, especially noting the second-click quick page loads.
Any ideas?
Technorati tags: vaio sony techsupport laptops
An abadoned flowerpot left in our driveway by the previous homeowners is blooming. Looks like spring is coming!
I’ve been browsing craigslist car listings, tossing around an idea to buy a cheap car and convert it to an electric vehicle. While it’s still a fairly low probability that I’ll actually get around to doing that, it’s still fun to look through car listings. My favorite so far had the following:
And here’s the kicker, 4 reasons you will never hear from a used car salesperson of why you should buy my car:
1. You will make new friends. My volvo is rather distinct, and I’ve been driving it for a while now, so anyone who sees it on the road will think its me driving, they will give you a super friendly wave, and then have a moment of realization, have an akward laugh, thus, giving the two of you an icebreaker. My friends will soon be your friends.
2. She has character. It may be hard to believe, but the character vibe that surrounds the volvo, it’s not just me. It is the car itself. Thats all I can say really, you just need to be near it to understand. Have a good lean against her, you’ll be sold.
3. She is the perfect place to hang out. Thats right, you don’t need to find somehwere to go with friends, just somewhere to park. You can chillax in the back, on the hood, or my personal favorite, in the trunk. Not when the trunk is closed of course.
4. You will be cooler. Yeah, I’ll go there. Driving this car will actually make you cooler. It will change you, for the better. You won’t even need to feel embarassed to sing in the car with people watching. You will make the people who don’t sing ashamed. Yeah, you and the volvo will put others to shame.
Unfortunately, it’s an automatic and therefore not a great candidate for conversion.
Tor Books, a publisher of science fiction books, it going to be joining forces with Baen Books to release Tor’s books in electronic formats. The most interesting part of this is that the books will be DRM-free. Here’s a nice blog post from one of Tor’s authors going into detail why the DRM-free move is a good idea. Some choice quotes:
Tor’s not doing this because it’s a golly-neat idea, they’re doing it because it makes money — or at the very least, makes money for Baen, a book publisher who happens to be in the same line of business as Tor.
The problem with digital rights management for literature is that there’s a huge analog hole in the security called “books.” Over at Baen’s Bar, the online bulliten board run by the Baen folks, one of the members there describes how he’s made an unofficial personal e-book version of Old Man’s War with “a hardcover copy, an Epson scanner, FineReader 6.0, and some eyeball sweat.”
The major problem for authors is not piracy but obscurity, as I and so many others have noted again and again and again and yet again after that. I’m doing pretty well as far as readers go, especially as a newer-ish novelist, but I wouldn’t mind having more readers, and people sharing the book is one way to do that. Please, folks, won’t you let your friends borrow a copy of my book? I thank you for your evangelism.
It’s good to see that not all media distributors are adding knee-jerk DRM to their products and making the electronic consumption of their works a difficult thing for their honest customers. It’s also good to see that going DRM-free is starting to be seen as a good business decision.
