The first batch of PDF DVD orders is out the door! Thanks to everyone who’s spending their stimulus checks with me. I hope you find the results stimulating. Wait, there’s got to be a better way to word that…

I’m waiting for the arrival of another new pair of Avid drive cables to test out a new (to me) pair of Avid drives that I just got. I’m a bit nervous about the drives in question because the fellow who sold them to me put both of them, with ABSOLUTELY NO PACKING MATERIAL, in a standard Priority Mail box and shipped them off. No “fragile” written on the box, no nothing. WTF!? It’s bad enough that, due to having a slightly older generation of Avid hardware than what’s in use now, I have to buy other people’s used drives. It’s even worse, however, when those other people turn out to be total freaking idiots.

Speaking of massive hard drives, the project to transfer my media files to the 1TB drive is more or less complete. I’m terribly terribly pleased with this drive thingie. It also passed the “breakout test” on Friday morning as a nasty storm blasted through - I got it shut down fairly quickly, and the plugs pulled. We didn’t have to take shelter or anything, but I also didn’t want it to get zapped by lightning. I could’ve very easily picked it up and walked off with it at that point.

I finally finished my official write-up on the Oklahoma City show; you can read that here. Rob also has his review posted here, with a bit on the afterparty here, which as usual I couldn’t stick around for long because I had to be back home the same night. If I’m ever well-rested for one of these shows, or I’m actually able to stick around for a while afterward, fear for your lives, for it is a sign of the apocalypse. Speaking of which, one thing I couldn’t find a place to mention in my review without it being a total non-sequitur was that, just as we were about to get on the interstate from Alma (which is kinda sorta more or less where we both live…near…), Kent and I saw a Delorean toodling down highway 71. No Mr. Fusion, just a Delorean. What makes it even funnier is that we both stared to see who was driving this thing through Alma of all places, and almost in unison we looked at each other and said “Wilford Brimley.”

Nothing else immediately spring into my sleep-deprived mind at the moment, so I suppose this concludes this core memory dump. Please check back later, I may have something coherent to say. (Though I’ll admit that the likelihood of that is very low.)

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I’ve been calling for backup for months, and at long last, backup has arrived.

I’ve spent most of today transferring files to a new 1 terabyte network drive that’s now sitting on my network. It’s a nice LaCie “big box ethernet drive” (hey, that’s what it says on the box!), which, I’m going to say judging by the size of the casing, is probably two 500GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. It’s got a lovely big blue eye that flashes when it’s being accessed. It hasn’t gotten extraordinarily warm, despite the fact that it’s sitting in a warm corner of a warm room (said corner also contains 3 other PCs and 5 LCD monitors, along with speakers and other gear). Very importantly (at least to me), you can configure whether or not you want it to be media-streaming capable. Remember the whole blow-up a few weeks ago with the crippled cell phones? Mass storage devices like these are starting to fall victim to the same problems: my friend Kent has a similar device, except made by Western Digital, which he got at a fire-sale price right before Christmas. But the pricing wasn’t just seasonal: WD wanted to clear the decks of inventory and get a revised version of the MyBook 1TB ethernet drive in the stores, which came with complimentary crippleware demanded by the RIAA which prevents the drive from streaming music or video files. Hey, thanks, RIAA, for assuming that the consumer’s a crook! Maybe we’ve ripped our own CDs to our own hard drives for use in our own home, ya know? Inconceiveable, sure. But it might happen. You never know. This LaCie drive has no such crippleware; those wishing to use it in a small business setting have the option to switch media streaming off. The security is scalable, you can assign passwords and user accounts from an insanely intuitive admin console accessed via browser, and for someone like me who might want to use it as a “breakout drive” (i.e. turn it off, pull all the connections, and evacuate with it in the event of fire, tornado, etc.), it’s not overwhelmingly big or bulky. I hope I never have to do that, but it’s yet another option to have in mind. I’m terribly pleased with it.

Anyone wanting to snatch one of these puppies up is more than welcome to pick it up in theLogBook.com Store; I managed to find the links for it in nearly every country except Canada, whose Amazon subsidiary doesn’t do the electronics thing. (What gives, Canada?) I heartily recommend it. It’s not cheap, but for someone like me who’s got a heap of media crowding out the other computers’ drives, and occasionally keeping work from getting done (this thing even takes up some slack for the Avid), it’s a beautiful thing. Should I ever completely fill the thing, additional storage can be added via a USB port on the back of the drive, and the casing is designed so that the additional drive - well, assuming you get the LaCie 1TB USB add-on drive - can simply slide into place on top of this one.

A shot of the newly revised desktop on the Avid, which I network to the other machines to shoot graphics, audio and video files back and forth so often that I leave permanent shortcuts on the desktop. (For those occasions where I have to pull something from a less-frequently used directory, I keep the ol’ Win2K Network Neighborhood icon around under “Home of the WOPR” - WOPR being what I call my LAN.) As you can see, I very quickly named the new network drive Queeg - so stop shirkin’ and start workin’!

Oh, in case you can’t tell from the funky wide angles in these photos and yesterday’s accidentally humorous shot of Evan vs. Bowser, I’ve also replaced the fisheye lens I misplaced in Las Vegas. That helped to turn what would’ve been an otherwise innocuous shot of Evan chattering away into everyone’s favorite photo of the day. Speaking of which, you’d better believe that the gobs of baby photos have migrated to the new drive too.

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Here’s a scene I saw when I came around the corner of Evan’s room the other day, just routinely checking on him:

Oooooookay. Oh, it gets better. Continue Reading »

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So my wife got a new Samsung Hue phone from Alltel - nice little gadget, bluetooth, camera, the whole works, and pretty cheap too. I was even thinking about seeing if father’s day might come a little bit early this year after seeing it in action. The one hiccup she’d really had with it was when she tried to pair her bluetooth headset to it - she couldn’t ever get the two devices talking to each other, and had to go back to the store to do it, where one of their sales/service people took the phone and the headset behind closed doors and got them to work. That really should’ve been a red flag right there.

She wanted me to put the slideshow of Evan pics on there that we’ve both had on our Nokia phones for ages; this was basically an animated GIF that cycles through numerous pictures of the little guy from the day he was born up to the latest round of professional pictures we’ve had taken of him. With the Nokia phones, I was able to just bluetooth the GIF across and be done with it; this also accounted for the bizarre collection of ringtones that both of our phones sported, everything from the Lexx theme to Katamari music to the haunting Torgo theme to Starcon 2 tunes to a gob of ELO MIDI ringtones (don’t ask me how that happened).

Anyway, I couldn’t just send the files across to her new phone via bluetooth. After going through the documentation (custom printed for Alltel) and finding them extremely, almost suspiciously lacking in information about the use of the bluetooth feature, I did a little bit of digging around online and that quickly got my blood boiling. Here’s the deal: Alltel cripples OBEX file transfer on the Samsung Hue phones. You can’t use it. Only they can, on their premises. They’d rather charge you extra for a USB cable and their proprietary software, when in fact neither of the above should be necessary. They don’t want you to bluetooth your own MIDI files to your own phone in your own home. They don’t make money that way. They make money by you buying ringtones, etc. through their store, or through their affiliates who give Alltel a kickback to thank them for letting them sell to Alltel’s customers. They don’t want me beaming a few MIDI files across from my computer.

Via a member of the family, we actually have the ear of one of Alltel’s VPs, so we tried to play the old nepotism card, a phone call which yielded another very interesting fact: Alltel only sells one phone with all the features unlocked, and that’s the Motorola Razr. So hey, if you’ve got one of these unweildly, non-user-friendly bricks, there’s finally a perk in it for you. Yay for you!

In a few minutes we’ll be going to pay them a visit at the store where the phone was bought, point out that we were looking at getting a second one just like it, and then insisting that we can’t buy another one - or for that matter remain as customers of Alltel with any phone - unless this feature is unlocked so the phone works as advertised. I’m not glued to my cell phone 24 hours a day, I don’t txt my bff all the time (zomg!), I’m not really a “power user”. We just like having our kid’s smiling face on our cell phones, and a few oddball ringtones. Is that so wrong? Apparently Alltel thinks so.

I have a gut feeling we’re going to walk out of the Alltel store looking for a new cell phone provider.

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The living room media PC project continues; installing Nero has solved a lot of problems; stuff that was playing with no audio is now playing with full audio. Yay! There are still some kinks to work out in getting theWindows audio/speaker settings, Nero’s audio output settings, and the living room’s occasionally baffling Dolby Pro Logic receiver to cooperate with each other, but that’s a job best left to the A/V engineer in the family…oh, wait. I guess that’d be me. I did conquer the mystery of why MP3s weren’t streaming from Zen (turns out the m3u playlist files use relative file locators instead of absolute ones - i.e., if the playlist is for an album contained in my “ELO” directory, the playlist entries are actualy “../elo/*.mp3″ rather than the full network address leading to the right machine, the right drive, and the right branch of my directory bonsai tree. Obviously that’s not gonna get you jack from another computer - it has to be called up song-by-song. This is just a wee bit of a pain in the butt…but, as usual, I have - as they say - a cunning plan.

In the meantime, while my friends in Oklahoma and Missouri have been digging themselves out of a fresh glacier that’s been dumped on their heads since this time a week ago, we’ve just been getting rained on. A lot. This has resulted in, somewhat predictably, a very soggy dog. I let her in tonight and wrapped a towel around her so she could dry off somewhere other than all over the living room carpet. Lo and behold, she actually kept it on while she ate her specially prepared dinner consisting of dog food and, from last night’s dinner (ours, not hers), green beans and ostrich steak juice. Yum.

Xena later wolfed down another bonus helping of “human food”, some leftover scrambled eggs. Actually, saying she wolfed it down is underselling it a bit. I thought she was just going to eat the damn plate the way she was going after it. We have a kitty who loves biscuits, a dog who likes eggs, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a cat here who doesn’t like a bit of bacon. Smart money says the dog would make quick work of any available sausage too. Breakfast is therefore served here at one’s own risk. (We also have a cat here who likes dog food. I’ll let you guess who.)

And what’s Evan doing during all of his dog-drying and media meddling? He’s workin’ that binky, of course.

Evan has started making this great gurgling/burbling/rolling-R sound (and he’s not even Scottish!). If I can just teach him to say “Mercy!” before doing his rolling-R thing, then look out, Roy Orbison.

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After all the hubbub a few days ago about “OMG, I’m gonna buy/build a media center PC!”, I finally realized that if I tweaked the settings on my wife’s slightly decrepit laptop, it would happily be the hub of that operation. There are a few kinks yet to be worked out with this system, but thus far it’s working…kinda okay. As Flack pointed out, streaming is not gonna happen over a wireless network, especially not one with as much activity as mine sees at any given moment, so video files have to be copied to the laptop’s hard drive…which takes about as much time. It’s not quite the instant access thing I was envisioning - this is more like having to prepare food that’ll take an hour to cook. Probably still going to put Nero on there though - it’s just my favorite video app for a variety of reasons. And I think we’ll still be wanting, at the very least, an IR add-on mouse. As it is right now, if you even so much as need to pause the thing, you virtually have to hug the entertainment center to reach the laptop to do that. The running joke around the house is that I’m the most reliable remote control that my wife has, but for now, that’ll do - I remember some saying about beggars and choosers, or maybe it was a saying about po’ folks, that seems to apply here.

If only all of my “I’m gonna do this someday” goals fell together this quickly.

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After hearing about Flack’s PIVO experiment, and having seen a similar setup of Kent’s working for the past year and a half or so, I’ve decided that we really need something similar here. With all the UK shows that I download, and having sucked all of the music in the house onto my hard drive, this whole business of hauling shiny round things from room to room is a bit of a dinosaur’s game. So I’ve started laying out in my head what I need for the living room media PC: Continue Reading »

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Tuesdays are my wife’s day off, so about half the time they wind up being my day off from Evan. I feel like a bit of a heel for looking forward to Tuesdays. My wife has the baby most of any given Sunday, but that’s because I’m off at the farm working my butt off - not much of a day off for daddy. I love my kid, but it’s kinda nice having a day to myself once a week. His mom has hauled him into town for a pediatrician’s visit (normal) and his first round of shots (which I don’t think he’s gonna like). Then she’s got some other stops to make - and quite frankly, I think those have everything to do with showing the little guy off.

In today’s “this day X years ago” posts, this topic cropped up, and I thought I’d go and take a look at what my music directory is like now, two years later. Survey says…about 120 gigabytes! Of nothing but music/audio! That’s almost exactly 1/3 of my main PC’s hard drive. Good Lord. This is part of why, the last time I was at Kent’s place and saw his Western Digital external drive, I’ll admit I popped a bit of a woody. That thing is nice, and it’s a RAID drive to boot (pitiful pun intended). Needless to say, that’s gone right onto the old wish list (right up there with the Wii I’m never gonna get at this rate ). Here’s hoping Santa think I’ve been a really good daddy this year.

That’s all I’ve got in my brain right now. (Ain’t much, I know.)

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