What’s Earl watching?

Good Lord, trust me when I say you don’t wanna know. But I can tell you what I’m hearing. At least when I’m at home. I spent an hour or two today tinkering with another WordPress plug-in, this one easily the most involved of the bunch to date. (I had to manually mess around at the SQL level, if that tells you anything. And I still don’t even know what SQL stands for. Squirrel Quandary Layer? No, wait. That sounds like a new anime series.) But the long and short of it is that you can now see what music/sound file I’m currently listening to on my home PC. (For obvious network security reasons, there is absolutely no way in hell I can install this at work.) When the PC isn’t playing anything at all, it’ll show you what the last track played was.
Just to make sure it works and to keep it running tonight as an experiment, I built a playlist of…well…every MP3 on my hard drive. Seriously. Doctor Who sound effects, video game background music, Brahms, Beatles, Betchadupa, Black Sabbath, Blue Man Group, Brent Bourgeois, the lot of it, just for laughs. I don’t normally have quite this broad a musical potluck dinner going on, but hey, it’ll let me know if it works. 😀 Kind of a neat plug-in, despite some more complicated hoops than usual to jump through to get it working, and the first one I saw which didn’t require going through an intermediary service such as Audioscrobbler/Last.FM, Shoutcast, or the likes.
My next addition may be to get a webcam, hook it up to Orac, and point it out my window at the front yard for a live view of the sheer number of Special Guest Dogs visiting my yard. I like dogs, but this development isn’t making me happy. Othello can’t set one paw out the front door without a strange dog suddenly showing up with a less than healthy interest in the feline race. The other day I let Othello outside for a little while, since Xena was also right on the front porch with him, and then I heard a lot of barking – not all of it Xena’s. When I stepped outside, I saw three strange dogs in my yard – and no sign of Xena or Othello. I shooed the dogs away and then went looking for my pets – and found that Xena had chased Othello into the back yard and up onto the back deck next to the door. Xena isn’t prone to chasing Othello and Chloe, so I’m guessing it was a tactical thing to remove the cat from the other dogs’ consideration. (At least I’d like to believe that. It could also be that the pack mentality took over and everybody chased Othello until they got to the gate leading to my back yard, which is strictly Xena’s territory. Either way, poor Othello wasn’t thrilled with how his trip outside to munch on some grass went down.)
Othello isn’t a big fan of spending his outside time in the back yard, but he’s going to have to get used to it.