What's A Few Notches Below "Internet Famous"?
One of the topics that I could talk about but is rapidly turning into "old news" is the existence of the Jonathan Coulton concert DVD called Best. Concert. Ever. This is a concert recording of a show he did in San Francisco (with Paul & Storm) back in February 2008. I was aware it was coming out from Coulton's Twitter or RSS feed but I'd seen the show live so I wasn't in a major hurry or anything. Then shortly after it came out I got an email from a friend saying that Karin and I showed up in the audience "several times". So thus reminded I ordered the disc.
First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven't taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I've been wanting well ... ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny.
I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the "Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink" drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought "man, people are crazy. I haven't seen either of us at all", then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered "Oh that's right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit." We quickly went from "this would be a sucky drinking game" to "Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots" to "No, this would not be a shot-drinking game" to "Oh no, you wouldn't even want to play this game with a mild beer". In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through ....
So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that's all you can manage.
One of the topics that I could talk about but is rapidly turning into "old news" is the existence of the Jonathan Coulton concert DVD called Best. Concert. Ever. This is a concert recording of a show he did in San Francisco (with Paul & Storm) back in February 2008. I was aware it was coming out from Coulton's Twitter or RSS feed but I'd seen the show live so I wasn't in a major hurry or anything. Then shortly after it came out I got an email from a friend saying that Karin and I showed up in the audience "several times". So thus reminded I ordered the disc.
First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven't taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I've been wanting well ... ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny.
I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the "Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink" drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought "man, people are crazy. I haven't seen either of us at all", then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered "Oh that's right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit." We quickly went from "this would be a sucky drinking game" to "Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots" to "No, this would not be a shot-drinking game" to "Oh no, you wouldn't even want to play this game with a mild beer". In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through ....
So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that's all you can manage.
First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven't taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I've been wanting well ... ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny.
I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the "Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink" drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought "man, people are crazy. I haven't seen either of us at all", then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered "Oh that's right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit." We quickly went from "this would be a sucky drinking game" to "Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots" to "No, this would not be a shot-drinking game" to "Oh no, you wouldn't even want to play this game with a mild beer". In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through ....
So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that's all you can manage.
Quick Note for iPhone Upgraders
Here's a quick tip for people who are upgrading their iPhone: when you restore from backup it doesn't restore your Keychain so you need to re-enter all of your passwords.
You may say "Well, duh Tim! Everyone figures that out fairly quickly!" And yes, you probably put your email and your WiFi passwords back in fairly quickly. If you use MobileMe though, it might not occur to you to go re-enter that password. If you don't then the the iPhone just silently stops syncing. Eventually this will cause you a problem if you think that entering appointments on your phone puts them on your main calendars.
Once you get into the proper screen you'll see that the Password field says "Required" instead of a series of dots, but Calendar or Contacts will NEVER say "Hey, you know we haven't been able to sync for the last week."
Here's a quick tip for people who are upgrading their iPhone: when you restore from backup it doesn't restore your Keychain so you need to re-enter all of your passwords.
You may say "Well, duh Tim! Everyone figures that out fairly quickly!" And yes, you probably put your email and your WiFi passwords back in fairly quickly. If you use MobileMe though, it might not occur to you to go re-enter that password. If you don't then the the iPhone just silently stops syncing. Eventually this will cause you a problem if you think that entering appointments on your phone puts them on your main calendars.
Once you get into the proper screen you'll see that the Password field says "Required" instead of a series of dots, but Calendar or Contacts will NEVER say "Hey, you know we haven't been able to sync for the last week."
You may say "Well, duh Tim! Everyone figures that out fairly quickly!" And yes, you probably put your email and your WiFi passwords back in fairly quickly. If you use MobileMe though, it might not occur to you to go re-enter that password. If you don't then the the iPhone just silently stops syncing. Eventually this will cause you a problem if you think that entering appointments on your phone puts them on your main calendars.
Once you get into the proper screen you'll see that the Password field says "Required" instead of a series of dots, but Calendar or Contacts will NEVER say "Hey, you know we haven't been able to sync for the last week."
Wait, Where Were We Again?
Blog posts! We should have some blog posts! I hear the desperate wheeze of the iron lung that is keeping this sucker running, so maybe I should make some content!
I think there's been so much recently that I may need to declare "blog bankruptcy". You know when you read those stories about people just throwing away all their unread email and sending out a big "Sorry, please try again" email to the people they care about? I feel that way about blog topics.
Did I ever discuss redoing my desk layout? I don't think I did. I got rid of the two dead soldier tower computers sitting under my desk and much more importantly got all of the cables off the floor. I mounted a pair of powerstrips under the desk and cable tied all of the wires along the frame of the desk itself. Now the only computer items that touch the floor are the Mac Pro itself and the UPS (oh, and the subwoofer for the speakers). It looks a lot better and I think the improved airflow means the computer is running better. It also means there's no rat's nest of cables that can't be cleaned and thus attracts big tumbleweeds of cat hair. I installed a keyboard drawer so I can have almost the entire expanse of desk free for materials, and I got a laptop stand so my laptop screen can sit up at the height of my monitors. Lastly I ran a LED "light rope" along the underside of my windowsill so at night I can have a bias light behind the monitors for reduced eyestrain.
Did I just start off by saying "here's a topic I'm not going to blog about" and then blog it? I think I may have.
Well, since we're here, if you're a Mac user and you have both a laptop and desktop machine you may want to look into a piece of software called Teleport. What it does is it lets you move your mouse to the edge of a screen and then onto another computer. While your mouse is away the keyboard controls goes with it. So I have my laptop on the stand to the left of my monitors and I can just sweep the mouse across all three displays. I can now use the laptop to VPN into another machine, or run tail -f commands or whatever, while I use the main screens for work. It's pretty slick. I also tend to leave email running on my laptop which means I can look at mails on that screen while I'm looking at code maximized on my main displays.
Blog posts! We should have some blog posts! I hear the desperate wheeze of the iron lung that is keeping this sucker running, so maybe I should make some content!
I think there's been so much recently that I may need to declare "blog bankruptcy". You know when you read those stories about people just throwing away all their unread email and sending out a big "Sorry, please try again" email to the people they care about? I feel that way about blog topics.
Did I ever discuss redoing my desk layout? I don't think I did. I got rid of the two dead soldier tower computers sitting under my desk and much more importantly got all of the cables off the floor. I mounted a pair of powerstrips under the desk and cable tied all of the wires along the frame of the desk itself. Now the only computer items that touch the floor are the Mac Pro itself and the UPS (oh, and the subwoofer for the speakers). It looks a lot better and I think the improved airflow means the computer is running better. It also means there's no rat's nest of cables that can't be cleaned and thus attracts big tumbleweeds of cat hair. I installed a keyboard drawer so I can have almost the entire expanse of desk free for materials, and I got a laptop stand so my laptop screen can sit up at the height of my monitors. Lastly I ran a LED "light rope" along the underside of my windowsill so at night I can have a bias light behind the monitors for reduced eyestrain.
Did I just start off by saying "here's a topic I'm not going to blog about" and then blog it? I think I may have.
Well, since we're here, if you're a Mac user and you have both a laptop and desktop machine you may want to look into a piece of software called Teleport. What it does is it lets you move your mouse to the edge of a screen and then onto another computer. While your mouse is away the keyboard controls goes with it. So I have my laptop on the stand to the left of my monitors and I can just sweep the mouse across all three displays. I can now use the laptop to VPN into another machine, or run tail -f commands or whatever, while I use the main screens for work. It's pretty slick. I also tend to leave email running on my laptop which means I can look at mails on that screen while I'm looking at code maximized on my main displays.
I think there's been so much recently that I may need to declare "blog bankruptcy". You know when you read those stories about people just throwing away all their unread email and sending out a big "Sorry, please try again" email to the people they care about? I feel that way about blog topics.
Did I ever discuss redoing my desk layout? I don't think I did. I got rid of the two dead soldier tower computers sitting under my desk and much more importantly got all of the cables off the floor. I mounted a pair of powerstrips under the desk and cable tied all of the wires along the frame of the desk itself. Now the only computer items that touch the floor are the Mac Pro itself and the UPS (oh, and the subwoofer for the speakers). It looks a lot better and I think the improved airflow means the computer is running better. It also means there's no rat's nest of cables that can't be cleaned and thus attracts big tumbleweeds of cat hair. I installed a keyboard drawer so I can have almost the entire expanse of desk free for materials, and I got a laptop stand so my laptop screen can sit up at the height of my monitors. Lastly I ran a LED "light rope" along the underside of my windowsill so at night I can have a bias light behind the monitors for reduced eyestrain.
Did I just start off by saying "here's a topic I'm not going to blog about" and then blog it? I think I may have.
Well, since we're here, if you're a Mac user and you have both a laptop and desktop machine you may want to look into a piece of software called Teleport. What it does is it lets you move your mouse to the edge of a screen and then onto another computer. While your mouse is away the keyboard controls goes with it. So I have my laptop on the stand to the left of my monitors and I can just sweep the mouse across all three displays. I can now use the laptop to VPN into another machine, or run tail -f commands or whatever, while I use the main screens for work. It's pretty slick. I also tend to leave email running on my laptop which means I can look at mails on that screen while I'm looking at code maximized on my main displays.
A Second Zany Week!
Life continues to be a bit hectic, so blog posts continue to be sparse. A lot has happened lately and I suppose I could blather on quite a bit about WWDC or MaxFunCon, and i got a iPhone 3GS yesterday so that could merit some discussion. (I've been running the 3.0 software for about a week and a half now - I installed the GM partway through WWDC.) But instead I'll talk about something else altogether different!
Unheralded by me after all my ranting and complaining we really did shut off analog NTSC broadcasts on June 12th. I wasn't even in town when it happened. So far so good, but then something not-so-good happened. ABC (KGO-7 out of San Francisco) for some crazy reason decided to move their digital off whatever good UHF frequency they had back to VHF 7. Which can't quite reach my rooftop antenna. And SHAZAM! ABC disappeared from our digital lineup. The last episode of Pushing Daisies was unwatchable.
Now in all fairness my antenna is supposed to be UHF-only, although it pulls in some VHF frequencies. NBC 11 from San Jose broadcasts in VHF, but they are so close they come in anyway, even though the antenna is directional and pointed away from them. But I had forgotten that KGO was going to do this so I was caught off guard when they disappeared. Now I could no doubt buy a VHF antenna, get somebody to go up there and put the antenna on the mast and splice the two signals and so forth. End result though is that I'd probably be paying several hundred dollars in order go get a single channel. It just doesn't make economic sense, even if I do have to buy the last season of Lost from iTunes. (That's what I did for the last episode of Pushing Daisies.)
There's some talk about KGO being on their "Auxilliary Antenna" for another month and then something ELSE going on until October. As I understand it Sutro Tower (where all the SF stations broadcast from) is a crazy hodgepodge of temporary stuff while they were broadcasting both analog and digital and I think now they are taking all of the analog "hacks" down. We almost get KGO now, so if the main antenna does something better then maybe it will work once the maintenance finishes. Still I thought it was humorous that the HD reception got worse as soon as they shut down analog broadcasting. How did that help again?
Life continues to be a bit hectic, so blog posts continue to be sparse. A lot has happened lately and I suppose I could blather on quite a bit about WWDC or MaxFunCon, and i got a iPhone 3GS yesterday so that could merit some discussion. (I've been running the 3.0 software for about a week and a half now - I installed the GM partway through WWDC.) But instead I'll talk about something else altogether different!
Unheralded by me after all my ranting and complaining we really did shut off analog NTSC broadcasts on June 12th. I wasn't even in town when it happened. So far so good, but then something not-so-good happened. ABC (KGO-7 out of San Francisco) for some crazy reason decided to move their digital off whatever good UHF frequency they had back to VHF 7. Which can't quite reach my rooftop antenna. And SHAZAM! ABC disappeared from our digital lineup. The last episode of Pushing Daisies was unwatchable.
Now in all fairness my antenna is supposed to be UHF-only, although it pulls in some VHF frequencies. NBC 11 from San Jose broadcasts in VHF, but they are so close they come in anyway, even though the antenna is directional and pointed away from them. But I had forgotten that KGO was going to do this so I was caught off guard when they disappeared. Now I could no doubt buy a VHF antenna, get somebody to go up there and put the antenna on the mast and splice the two signals and so forth. End result though is that I'd probably be paying several hundred dollars in order go get a single channel. It just doesn't make economic sense, even if I do have to buy the last season of Lost from iTunes. (That's what I did for the last episode of Pushing Daisies.)
There's some talk about KGO being on their "Auxilliary Antenna" for another month and then something ELSE going on until October. As I understand it Sutro Tower (where all the SF stations broadcast from) is a crazy hodgepodge of temporary stuff while they were broadcasting both analog and digital and I think now they are taking all of the analog "hacks" down. We almost get KGO now, so if the main antenna does something better then maybe it will work once the maintenance finishes. Still I thought it was humorous that the HD reception got worse as soon as they shut down analog broadcasting. How did that help again?
Unheralded by me after all my ranting and complaining we really did shut off analog NTSC broadcasts on June 12th. I wasn't even in town when it happened. So far so good, but then something not-so-good happened. ABC (KGO-7 out of San Francisco) for some crazy reason decided to move their digital off whatever good UHF frequency they had back to VHF 7. Which can't quite reach my rooftop antenna. And SHAZAM! ABC disappeared from our digital lineup. The last episode of Pushing Daisies was unwatchable.
Now in all fairness my antenna is supposed to be UHF-only, although it pulls in some VHF frequencies. NBC 11 from San Jose broadcasts in VHF, but they are so close they come in anyway, even though the antenna is directional and pointed away from them. But I had forgotten that KGO was going to do this so I was caught off guard when they disappeared. Now I could no doubt buy a VHF antenna, get somebody to go up there and put the antenna on the mast and splice the two signals and so forth. End result though is that I'd probably be paying several hundred dollars in order go get a single channel. It just doesn't make economic sense, even if I do have to buy the last season of Lost from iTunes. (That's what I did for the last episode of Pushing Daisies.)
There's some talk about KGO being on their "Auxilliary Antenna" for another month and then something ELSE going on until October. As I understand it Sutro Tower (where all the SF stations broadcast from) is a crazy hodgepodge of temporary stuff while they were broadcasting both analog and digital and I think now they are taking all of the analog "hacks" down. We almost get KGO now, so if the main antenna does something better then maybe it will work once the maintenance finishes. Still I thought it was humorous that the HD reception got worse as soon as they shut down analog broadcasting. How did that help again?
Microspam!
Oh look, Microsoft decided to spam me (again)!
Know what you don't see there? You don't see an unsubscribe link! (See this post if you want to see me complaining about the same goddamn thing last September or here's where I explain why I ever even touched the Zune software in the first place.)
So yeah, I reported it as spam to Google. Fucking Microsoft sends emails I don't want about a service I don't use and I can't unsubscribe? That's spam. By any definition.
And you know what? Ever time I see the damn spam I'll blog it. I'm doing my little part to make sure Google hears that if you ever download Zune you get emails about it for life, even if you were tricked into downloading the software under false pretenses.
Microsoft can add all of the "HD" you want to their media player, but as long as they are spamming about Zune I wouldn't even think about dealing with the damn thing. I get email from Apple about iTunes as well, but at least that has an unsubscribe option, like a modern, responsible company.
Oh look, Microsoft decided to spam me (again)!
Know what you don't see there? You don't see an unsubscribe link! (See this post if you want to see me complaining about the same goddamn thing last September or here's where I explain why I ever even touched the Zune software in the first place.)
So yeah, I reported it as spam to Google. Fucking Microsoft sends emails I don't want about a service I don't use and I can't unsubscribe? That's spam. By any definition.
And you know what? Ever time I see the damn spam I'll blog it. I'm doing my little part to make sure Google hears that if you ever download Zune you get emails about it for life, even if you were tricked into downloading the software under false pretenses.
Microsoft can add all of the "HD" you want to their media player, but as long as they are spamming about Zune I wouldn't even think about dealing with the damn thing. I get email from Apple about iTunes as well, but at least that has an unsubscribe option, like a modern, responsible company.
Know what you don't see there? You don't see an unsubscribe link! (See this post if you want to see me complaining about the same goddamn thing last September or here's where I explain why I ever even touched the Zune software in the first place.)
So yeah, I reported it as spam to Google. Fucking Microsoft sends emails I don't want about a service I don't use and I can't unsubscribe? That's spam. By any definition.
And you know what? Ever time I see the damn spam I'll blog it. I'm doing my little part to make sure Google hears that if you ever download Zune you get emails about it for life, even if you were tricked into downloading the software under false pretenses.
Microsoft can add all of the "HD" you want to their media player, but as long as they are spamming about Zune I wouldn't even think about dealing with the damn thing. I get email from Apple about iTunes as well, but at least that has an unsubscribe option, like a modern, responsible company.