A reminder to anyone coming in to town on Saturday for BloggerCon, but not actually going on Saturday, there is a Red Sox game, a playoff game at that. The time is still TBD, but still, it means the T will probably a bit extra crowded. Also, the Kenmore Square area will probably be chaotic.
September 2003 Archives
Music group settles with 52 file sharers
Though the rest of the article just makes my blood boil, I love this line:
"RIAA says 863 song swappers request amnesty"
And they say there are 50 million people doing this? Is that the latest number? or is it higher than that. OK, so some math:
863/50,000,000 = 0.001726% of file swappers have asked for amnesty. Good work RIAA!
What a nice thing. I had to get up early this morning to move my car due to street cleaning. So, being in work at a decent hour, I got to leave at a decent hour. The nice part about leaving early? You can actually do stuff when you get home. I stopped by my friend's place to drop some stuff off and then went to the grocery store and bought some actual groceries, now sitting down for a somewhat healthy dinner. Yay me!
The BloggerCon 2003 Press Release
I should be around day 2. Also, we may be trying to get some people from #joiito who will be around on Saturday, but only going on Sunday together. Joey and I have already talked about trying to possibly find some Guinness around Boston. Somehow I think we will succeed in that quest :)
College science course: Harry Potter
Wow! A college course that I would actually enjoy!
Am I the only one who has no interesting whatsoever in seeing this?
Do you really want to tempt the fate of 180 years of baseball? I would much rather the Sox play anyone else (and I would assume Cubs fans (well, maybe with the exception of Bogie) have no interest in playing the Sox). WAY WAY WAY too much riding on these games if it happens and I don't want to taunt the baseball gods like that.
(and yes, expect lots of Sox related material this week, I'm all pscyhed up for the playoffs, especially since the Pats can't even fuckin remember they should kick a long field goal)
From mlb.com:
Paint it red: Nixon and his teammates would like to spread a message to the Fenway faithful before they return to Boston for Game 3 of the Division Series on Saturday."I think most of the players thought it would be pretty awesome to just challenge the fans to be a sea of red out there," Nixon said. "They always talk about painting the town red. We wear red BP tops now. It would be great to see the entire stadium with red T-shirts, or Red Sox T-shirts, that would be pretty awesome. I know for us, it would be great to have a sea of red there when we come back there Saturday. I don't think we have to challenge our fans too much to do anything because they're going to do anything. But it would be good to see that."
So, if you are going to the game, find some red!
This weekend was an interesting weekend when it comes to friends.
Friday evening, while watching Identity, I was trying to figure out who one of the actresses was, so I popped open the laptop to an IM on my screen. Now being that it was Friday night at 11, I couldn't figure out who would be saying hi, since all my friends should have been out and about. What I saw was the message "Greetings from Iraq!" and had to do a double take. It was my friend Juris. He's a helicopter pilot for the army and is currently stationed in Iraq. He's been on my mind a lot lately due to hearing lots of things about soldiers dying, so it was great to see his typing (the Internet equivilant to hearing his voice). We talked for a while. He told me about the things he has been doing and how the conditions are, etc. He seemed to be doing very well. This put a smile on my face for the rest of the night because I knew my friend who I have been worrying about a lot lately was doing well. He also said to pass along hellos to everyone, so anyone who reads this who knows him, he says hello.
Then on Sunday, I had the flipside. My good friend Craig, who has become a reliable drinking partner since Craig went to Houston (yes, they are both named Craig), is moving to Indiana (no, no one understands why). So, last night we went out to say our goodbyes. A smaller group of us first went to Maggiano's for some dinner. There were about 18 of us, so they do the food family style. Too much food came to the table over the next couple of hours, all delicious and very filling. After that, we headed over to Clarke's to see Chad and Stu play and meet up with some other people. Silliness ensued as it always does. I was too full to drink all that much, but that was probably good, since I had to get up early this morning to avoid yet another ticket. Craig seemed sufficiently intoxicated when I left, so mission accomplished.
It sucked losing friends. I lost one a year ago and it was wonderful to hear from him this weekend to know he is doing well. Now I am losing another one (to Indiana no less). I wish him all the best and I know I will see him soon (the current over/under on when he will be back is 6 months ;)
So, in the closing, I am currently accepting applications for a new drinking partner. Said partner needs to be able to go out in a pinch on pretty much any night of the week. Be able to hold their liquor and also know how to have a good time. Please e-mail me drinking resumes :)
Slacker that I am, I had let my Dream Theater site kind of go to waste over the last few months. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon and got it all up to date on current happenings including a bunch of information on their new CD coming out in a few weeks.
Joel on Software - Bionic Office
So, Joel built this super cool office. I totally dig the idea of seperate offices for everyone, I like all the wiring, extra ports, way the desks are laid out, etc. The biggest problem I have? Where's the wireless? I mean, if you really want a totally high tech office these days, don't you need wireless? It would be much easier to be able to walk from office to office with my laptop and stay connected. I understand having lots of ports at your desk, but the mobility of wireless would be much nicer. Think about the area with the couch and plasma screen. Woudln't it be nice to sit back, throw in a movie and hack some? I think that is the one thing I can see missing so far. I may think of others though :)
Red Sox have clinched a playoff birth for the first time since 1999. Wooooooooooooooooo!
Dave Matthews Band plays Central Park
Dave played Central Park last night for a charity gig to raise money for NY's schools. My sister went (for a hefty fee was actually going to be in a VIP section), I will have to call her and see how it was. Set list looks very nice.
Setlist
Don't Drink the Water
So Much To Say -->
Anyone Seen the Bridge? -->
Too Much
Granny
Crush
When The World Ends
Dancing Nancies
Warehouse
Ants
Rhyme & Reason
Two Step
Help Myself
Cortez the Killer *
Jimi Thing *
What Would You Say
Where Are You Going
All Along the Watchtower
Encore
Grey Street
What You Are
Stay
* Warren Haynes on guitar
That asterik there is the most important part. Warren joined them?!?!?!? AHHHH!! I was almost supposed to be in NY this week and was going to try and go, but WARREN coming out blows my mind, that must have been sick. If ANYONE has a recoding of this show, I would love to hear it, especially those two songs. I can't believe CNN didn't even MENTION him coming out.
SAMBA 3.0 has been released. Biggest new feature is compatability with Active Directory. I need to set up some Samba shares at home, so I can mount them with both Linux and Windows (well, I guess others can mount them with Windows, since I don't have any Windows machines). Will have to look in to this some more. Maybe I can get some single sign-on / centralized authentication stuff going here.
Red Herring is back! Somehow I think they are doing web only right now, but we'll see what happens. I was a subscriber, but not a very good reader for a long time. So, my first question ... where's the RSS feed?
At least someone thinks I have a good blog name
If anyone is still linking to /junt instead of just http://www.skadz.com/ PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE update your links.
Thanks!
I've spent the last few days at work trying to get a lot of loose ends tied up. Things that I said at one point or another I would do, as well as doing general maintenance and clean up on the systems I run. Yesterday, I finally got myself to a point where I feel I have a lot of those loose ends tied up.
Now, I have to go back to my main project. The problem? I haven't touched this project in almost a month. Between a week of vacation, a week at Oracle World, playing catch up and being sick last week and now tying up loose ends this week, I just haven't had the time to touch the project.
So, I went in to the directory where I have the code and diff'ed it to CVS. I see that last time I did some work on this project I started to add in an interface to the program for outside users to use, I guess you could almost call it an API. This is good, I'm glad I never committed this because now I am slowly able to recall where I was on the project. The problem with the long wait though is that I now have to go back in and read all the code I had been working on and figure out exactly where in this coding I was.
Hopefully I will be able to spend a lot of hours over the next few days really trying to finish up this program and eventually move on to something else. This has turned somewhat in to the never ending project since my life is very interupt driven here at work. If I can spend some good time on this now, I hope to finally get this done and start trying to get myself more organized at work.
Court blocks anti-telemarketing list
"In a ruling filed Tuesday, the District Court in Oklahoma City said the FTC acted without statutory authority in creating and implementing the national do-no-call list."
Well, that's no good. I wonder if they will go after the Massachusetts one next.
People who don't use GUIDs. My aggregator is NOT very good at figuring out updated posts versus new posts without em. So, please folks, use GUIDs. It will make aggregators much happier. Thanks!
This public service message brought to you by the letter Q and the number 3.
Ya gotta love it when incompetence on the part of others causes what was a very productive day to become one of an inability to concentrate you are so pissed off.
ICANN | Letter from Russell Lewis to Paul Twomey | 21 September 2003
Fuckin Verisign. That's all I can say right now.
I finally watched The Curse of the Bambino which I TiVo'ed off HBO.
It was a very interesting look at the Red Sox. They talked about how the Sox traded Ruth away, many of the untrue stories about the trade, etc.
They then went in to the history of racism in the Sox. This was very interesting to me. I didn't know a lot of pieces of that piece of the history. It was strange to hear that the Sox were the last to integrate, 12 years after the first team did. Also, it included some references to Tom Yawkey being racist, due to his southern roots.
Next they covered some of the loses that the Red Sox went through, years like 1976. They even mentioned Buckey Fucking Dent. They then had a long piece on 1986. The fact that I am a Sox fan today is amusing to me, because in 1986, I was at my godmother's house, watching Game 6. Seeing that the Sox had pretty much won, I started to fall asleep. I swear I woke up about 10 seconds before the infamous ball that went through Buckner's legs. I was still half asleep when it happened and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Why was I watching? I was (and still am) a Met's fan. I can't mention that around too many people in this area, but I am.
The final piece was talking about what would happen if they won. Would people lose their interest? I don't think so. The one thing I do think? Boston would be a drunken party for about 3 days. I headed downtown after the Pats won and it was chaos in the streets. Imagine what would happen if a team that had not won in over 80 years won the World Series? Everyone from 1 to 100 would be on the streets going crazy. I really hope I am still here in Boston when it happens.
I kept it on the TiVo, I figured I will probably watch it again, but all in all a good look at the Red Sox and their curse.
Hmm, I hope this doesn't happen to me. :) But after using some pausing of live TV tonight, I fear it may :)
Good. This could have been stupid and ugly.
Anyone gotten the TiVo Desktop working under Linux? Wine doesn't seem to like it all that much. Is there another way to share files to home media besides usin the Tivo Desktop? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Since I am going away tomorrow and wasn't sure of my neighbor's schedule for the evening (it turns out he will be out all night, so I could have hijacked his TV and phone lines), I decided this morning to bring my TiVo to work. I figured, we have a TV and some analog lines, I can get this puppy up and going and just bring it home, plug it in and be off.
Once the rain slowed some, it was pouring when I got in, I brang the TiVo in to the office. I proceeded to hunt down an analog line and the TV. I hooked the TiVo up, fixed some dialing settings and off it went. I headed to grab some lunch, thinking it would be done by the time I got back. Coming back, it had failed, the call got interupted, damnit! Set it off again and went to do some stuff. About 30 mins later, the call had failed again. Starting to get unhappy and thinking I would be sleeping in the office, I set it off again. This time, it stayed dialed in for a long long time, probably about an hour.
Once done, it said it needed a restart. I restarted the system and it said it was installing new software, YAY! After this, it said it needed to rebuild the database and it would take a long time. Don't you hate it when electronics or computers say a long time? I'm impatient, a long time to me is like 10 minutes. This long time was only about 20 mins (well, it was 20 mins after it started that I checked in on it).
First thing I noticed was that it had a) an option for wireless, b) a mac address for my wireless card. Hot damn! Since I didn't want to have to re-configure the wireless when I got home, I decided not to configure it and just connect to TiVo again (I still needed Home Media and a Program Guide). It connected via the phone, this time for about 10 or 20 minutes. It started processing data which took about an hour and it was done! Just for kicks I dialed in one more time and it had nothing to do. Woo! TiVo read to go.
Now, I have to work for a while longer and try to sit patiently before I can go home and really start hacking on this thing and try to get some information in to it.
I am definitely of the same mind as Calvin
Is there anyone out there who's work is not helped to some degree by the availability of e-mail and the web? I find TONS of information out between e-mailing with people and using the web on a daily basis, how the heck can someone say that it was hurting their business?
Halley asks Was EVERYONE Hanging Out In Cambridge Last Night?
Nope, I was home in Boston relaxing and watching last years season finales of NBC's Thursday night show in preparation for the new season to start next week. Oh yeah, and being sick :(
Having all sorts of trouble getting my system to do WEP.
I downloaded Linux-Wlan and compiled and installed it and the prism2 driver seems to work well with my WPC11 with an unencrypted line. The problem is trying to figure out some of the cryptic settings in the configuration file to enable WEP and then what needs to match between it and my WAP.
My WAP is a Linksys BEFW11S4, which is basically just the Wireless-B Broadband Router. I think I sort of understand how to get the WEP set up on there.
I try and get the two working together and they just don't seem to want to talk.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
Long Island, Philly, Boston, hear I come!
The Boston date is slated to be a 20th anniversary show too. That show should be just amazing. Gonna fight tooth and nail to grab tickets for that one.
And if somehow I hit the lottery in the next few days, New Years in Miami!
So, anyone got a nice perl programming contract that is gonna make about $1300 they want to throw me? Really, it would help :)
at being a pain in the ass, as can be seen over at cms's blog. Hopefully he finally is all done playing with it and will now just keep posting.
Crap, fall is coming. It's getting dark early again. That means driving home in the dark. I HATE driving in the dark. I am really going to have to attempt to start getting in to work earlier so that I can drive while its still light out.
Can someone explain to me when it became fun for kids to just scream at the top of their lungs sounding like they are being beaten? Seriously, I get worried sometimes these kids are actually being hurt, but no, they are just screaming. And they do it all day and all night. Very annoying. I need to empty my neighborhood of all the kids.
Yahoo! News - Bush: No Proof of Saddam Role in 9-11
I usually don't make political comments, but this is just funny. The only reason that anyone thinks that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 is because of Bush's administration basically making them think that he did and now Bush comes out and says he didn't. Any chance this has something to do with people like Howard Dean constantly saying the current administration is lying to us about these things?
Well, it looks like the 4-8 hours of processing the TiVo claims it has to do is done, yet I don't see any difference. I was hoping to bring it over to my friend's place this evening, but he is now sick and thinks he was just going to crash. I'm hoping I didn't get him sick by going over there last night. Hopefully he will be better tomorrow and I can get over there and get the 4.0 upgrade and get this damn wireless working, so I can start using this thing.
Yahoo! News - Bill Gates Gives $51 Million to New York Schools
Sweet! Now the schools should have plenty of money to buy cheap PCs to put Linux on! ;) (yes, I am a wise ass)
Not sure if that is really a word, but I love having WiFi again. Now if I can just get the TiVo working with the WiFi, I will be super WiFi happy.
It's so nice being able to sit on the couch without all the wires tangled up between the table and my lap. Now I can just pull it off to my lap and hope that I don't run out of power. Some day we will have some sort of wireless power (or at least fuel cells, so I can sit here for hours on end and have no power worries).
The BloggerCon 2003 Weblog: Blogroll for BloggerCon
You should head here to sign up for the Blogrolls for BloggerCon if you are coming to day 1, 2 or both.
I'll be there for day 2.
People who have full feeds to their sites (which I think EVERYONE should have unless they are trying to make money off of it) who do something (most likely upgrade their software) and end up NOT having a full feed anymore. This happened to one of the sites I read about a month ago and now happened to another one today. No pointing fingers, but it is VERY annoying.
Stephen King receives high honors
"King, brand-name writer, master of the horror story and e-book pioneer, is receiving this year's medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters."
I've loved Stephen King for many years. Own just about every single one of his books, read most of them (with the few I haven't sitting on my window sill for reading). Good to see him awarded this way.
So, now that I am wireless once again at home, the hippie in me says that I want to leave the access point open. Now, everyone and their brother right now is probably thinking I am an idiot, but hey, I don't care if someone uses my bandwidth for a bit.
Thing is, I would like to possibly have people have to go through a form of some sort to be able to get on the web. I'm trying to think about how to do this. How do the hotels and such do this?
My initial thought is to set up a DNS server with a wildcard so that all addresses point to an internal web site that people could fill out a form and then they could get new DNS servers. This works in some respects, but a) it means a user changing settings, b) someone could easily avoid it by just changing their DNS servers immediately, etc.
My second though would be to proxy all requests out to 80. How would I do a transparent proxy though? Anyone know of any good tutorials on doing this? I think I would have to have DHCP give a different server as the default gateway, but that wouldn't be too hard.
Any other ideas?
OK, now we are getting somewhere. I now have the intial data downloaded to the TiVo. It says its going to take 4-8 hours to process. Once that processing is done, I think I am going to have to take it back to my friend's house and download the latest software (4.X) since I am still only running 3.X and my wireless doesn't seem to be configurable with it yet.
I do now have the IR stuff all working and watching Live TV and switching channels all works well too. Just need to wait for all this data to get loaded in to the system and then we will be on to the next step. Hopefully more updates on this tomorrow (cuz I can't freakin wait to have this thing working).
Well, plan 1 has failed. Not paying enough attention to what I read on the web and got a wireless USB net adaptor that won't work until I get up to software version 4. Damnit. Luckily, I just called my neighbor and he is going out this evening, so I am going to go borrow his apartment and phone line for a bit and get this damn thing working. Hopefully I will be all TiVo'ed up by nights end.
I also was BAD at Best Buy. I picked up a Linksys Wireless Broadband Router and a Linksys Wireless USB adaptor. Woops. At least I now have WiFi in the house again.
I guess sick day turned in to technology day.
So, to my great suprise, the buzzer went while I was home sick today. The man said "UPS", so I head down curiously. There was already a box in the entranceway and the nice man was carrying over a big orange box with TiVo written all over it! Yay! Thanks Dad! Dad got me a TiVo for my birthday (as I had asked). 80 hour Series 2. Sweet!
Now the bad. Going through set up, it wants a phone line :( I don't have one. From doing some reading on the web, it looks like I MAY be able to get this going over my broadband, but it means I need a USB ethernet card. Now, the smart idea says, GO GET WIRELESS. I broke my WAP a while back and really would like to get a new one. The problem? A WAP and a USB wireless ethernet adaptor are going to cost some cash, where I can get a wired USB ethernet adaptor for like $30. So, I think for now I am going to have to stay the smart financial route (especially if I am going to go off and buy Home Media :)
So, in my weakened condition, I think I am going to head over to Best Buy and get some supplies. Wish me luck!
Not sure if I just didn't notice this in the past or what, but just saw a commercial for UPN and the background music was none other than Robert Randolph and the Family Band! It was the song Going in the Right Direction from the album Unclassified.
Very cool for him. Not that it gets him a lot of exposure, but at least it will be some extra (and some extra cash :). Anyone who is in to good jam band type music who doesn't own this CD yet, should definitely go right out and buy it. Robert and crew put together a good mix of rock, jazz, soul and gospel and throw in a bunch of jamming to just put together a great sound that is a lot of fun to listen to. And if you have the opportunity, DEFINITELY go see them live!
Red Sox faithful receive a TV tribute
HBO will be showing a special at 10PM this evening on the Curse of the Bambino. Sounds like they have a lot of Boston natives in it to talk about the curse. These people inclue Ben Affleck (the narrator), Dennis Leary, Stephen Wright, and Robert Parker.
From the article it says it will focus on the pain the fans have endured over the 85 years since 1918. I think we are all sitting around hoping that pain will go away this October, but who knows.
If you can't catch it tonight, Yahoo's TV listing for Comcast Digital has it on many more times this week.
It amazes me with the prevalence of technology in both the workplace and the home these days that people are still very incompetent in the technologies they seem to rely on more and more. I had an issue with some of the folks I work with this morning where they were getting an error trying to download a file from their browser. Basically, the browser instead of just showing the file as text (as it was a .txt file) it tried to parse the XML and threw up an error. They came back and told me they were having issues downloading the file. I checked and my browser nicely showed the file just perfectly as text. Once I saw the error, I sent them mail back to just right click on the link and download the file. Don't people do this all the time? I know I do. Why was this situation any different. For a program that people use every day, I would assume that people know the ins and outs of it. Very confusing to me that people don't know how to use programs that they use very often and basically rely on.
Stayed home sick today. Woke up with a nasty sore throat. No good at all. Some drugs and some OJ has helped some, but nowhere near as much as I would have liked. Not smoking is the hardest part right now. The fact that it is muggy outside and my apartment is just gross isn't helping all that much either.
I've also noticed I am not very good at being sick. I've been e-mailing back and forth with work all morning, trying to make sure I don't fall behind by a day. I'm also channel flipping, reading blogs, doing personal e-mail, etc. Aren't I supposed to be like sleeping or something?
This post is for Brier who wants me to post to test his aggregator. Everyone say hi to Chris! (who doesn't even update his blog, the lazy bastard.
I do not like this one bit. More when I really have some time.
Pictures of my rock star room at the Hotel Palomar in San Fran.
This makes me happy:
1 1/2 back from the Yanks.
1/2 back on Oakland
1 1/2 up on Seattle
It's September and the Sox are playing well.
Something is out of alignment on the world. :)
Let's go Sox!
Made it safely to San Fran this evening. Settling in to the hotel and then going to get to bed. Have to be up early to get started on setup and still be able to catch the Sox and Pats games (which are both on at 10 out here. I hate time zones.
Flight was easy, staying at the Hotel Palomar, way too classy for lil ol me :) More tomorrow.
I'm older today. Happy Birthday to the following as well:
Lynn
Vaughn
Jay
Happy Birthday Yesterday to:
Tim
Michelle
Yes, I know too many people with birthdays this weekend :)
Expect some downtime tonight, going to try and upgrade the server some time this evening.
Ahhh, slowly feeling accomplished. Been running around the house with cleaning products and a vacuum all day trying to get the place all cleaned up. Almost looking good at this point. Trying not to spend too much time in front of this damn machine or the TV and doing pretty well so far. A little more cleaning and this place might actually look like someone takes care of it.
Man, I thought the third time would be the charm, but I guess not. Tried to watch the Phish Vegas DVD tonight for what would have been my third attempt at watching it, but alas, I will fail again, falling asleep on my keyboard at this point. Argh. Night world.
I am on vacation this whole week. I figured since I had Monday off and I would have taken Friday off for my birthday, I might as well just take the whole week. Haven't had a vacation in a while, so I figured it would be nice to have nothing going on.
I'm not going away or anything, just getting some needed relaxing and stuff. I really hope to spend a lot of time catching up on life in general. Want to try and get all the little things I have been putting off for all too long done. I head back to San Francisco on Saturday for OracleWorld on Saturday, so I hope to head there with a clear head and with a feeling of accomplishment.
The biggest worry is I do what I did today which was a whole lot of nothing. Didn't answer the phone, played on the computer some, watched too much TV, etc. Tomorrow I definitely need to get up and get going as quickly as possible instead of getting comfortable in the house.
Inconceivably went off the air in the last few days. No fun.
I definitely wish there was an iTunes for Linux. As I have been going along and trying to learn more and more songs on guitar, I have noticed I don't have some songs that I'd like to learn. It's difficult to learn a song without being able to listen to it a few times, even if I know the song well. So, it would be very nice to be able to go to something like the iTunes Music Store and buy the song for $0.99 and be able to learn it. If I have to buy the whole CD, it's a pain in the neck, especially if I just want one song.
What I don't understand is why Apple doesn't just do the port? It would really just be a GUI port, as OS X is based on Unix. How bad is the conversion from Cocoa to something like a GTK or a QT? It would be a big win for Apple, as they would very quickly get a lot of Linux users like myself to pay $30 or $40 for the software and then be able to start buying music. Supposedly they are doing a Windows port, but I think a Linux port (hell, even things like FreeBSD, Solaris, etc etc could have ports, its just a GUI port) would be quick and get more people using the service much more quickly than porting to Windows.
Update:
More evidence no one selling MP3s likes Linux:
Thank you for visiting BuyMusic.com.In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com's offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.
Doh!
This is post 600.
