Yeah I know I’ve been slacking lately. It’s a pattern of mine. I will go through a blogging hiatus for a few months and then I’ll blog so much you’ll be sick of me, and then I’ll go through another dry spell. The short version is: I blog in spurts.
Here’s what’s been going on, in no particular order.
- Looks like the daily thunderstorms in Southern Ontario are over - for now anyway. The forecast shows 0% probability of precipitation all week. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the temperature has also dropped twenty degrees. The storms decided to go out with a bang (no pun intended) and lightning hit my church on Monday night. Tuesday morning bright and early I got an S.O.S. call that their network was down, internet was down, nobody could print, one computer was fried, and one of the electrical subpanels in the basement (oddly that had nothing to do with the aforementioned) was also crispy. Of course this happened on Day 2 of their “Power Lab” Day Camp with 275+ kids running around which made the death of the network even more painful. Replaced their old and crappy D-Link router with a new and crappy D-Link router (which feeds a large IBM switch). The painful (and funny) part was that the old decrepid server (which is mostly just a print server) lacked the screen resolution to run the D-Link install to configure the router and of course, there was no manual with the router. You had to download it, which we couldn’t. So I had to run a really long piece of CAT-5 from an adjoining office to use a real computer to setup the router and then switch back. Then I replaced the power supply in the senior pastor’s HP desktop. Then I helped the electrician put the panel in downstairs. It was a busy day.
- I recently started to Twitter. (My username is netnomadca. If you Twitter, add me!) Over the course of my Twitter’ing (or tweet’ing if you prefer) I came across a friend of a friend who operates a blog with the domain of thoughtcoffee.net. If you think that’s funny that we both run “coffee” blogs, go look at his Wordpress template. Mark says he’s buying a new domain name soon, but I don’t believe him. For those of you who know me on Facebook, if you’re wondering why my status messages have been “so weird” lately it’s because everytime I update my Twitter, it updates Facebook with the same thing.
- Wordpress is annoying the heck out of me for no good reason. I hate doing the upgrades when new versions come out. It’s so time consuming (but on the plus side, I’m getting really good at it). It seems their upgrade pattern is: upgrade -> wait until Eric upgrades -> upgrade immediately.
- The cat locked herself in my sock drawer at 2am this morning. I really need to child proof that dresser.
Maybe I’ll go take some pictures today. Oh by the way, I uploaded a bunch of pictures from the Breakfast Television Viewer Appreciation Day last week. As always, you can find my Flickr pictures quickly by going to http://flickr.poweredbycoffee.net.
Late one evening, an officer was parked outside a local pub. He noticed a man leaving the bar who was so intoxicated that he could barely walk.
The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes with the officer quietly observing. After the intoxicated man had tried his keys on five different vehicles, he managed to find his car and fall into the driver’s seat.
He sat there for a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.
Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off, flicked the indicators on, tooted the horn, and then finally switched on the lights. He remained stationery for a few more minutes as more cars left the parking lot. After what seemed like an eternity, he pulled out of the lot and started to drive slowly down the road.
The police officer, having patiently waited all this time, now started up the patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over, and carried out a breathalyzer test.
To his amazement the breathalyzer indicated no evidence of the man having consumed alcohol at all!
Dumbfounded, the officer said “I’ll have to ask you to accompany me to the police station; this equipment must be broken.”
“I doubt it,” said the man, “tonight I’m the designated decoy.”
I had a weird dream last night.
I dreampt I was riding a somewhat-fast lawn mower from Kemptville to Winchester. Well, that is, I started in Kemptville. When I realized I got to the Pacific Ocean I realized I’d made a wrong turn somewhere.
Fortunately there was a Hooters in Vancouver and it was wing night.
Today is the day I am going to attack poweredbycoffee.net with a Shopvac.
The ride may be bumpy for the rest of today - Saturday July 12th.
The theme is new, and not “tweaked” yet.
Your patience is appreciated.
Quite a while ago, some of you will remember me singing the praises of the Screamer Radio internet radio client for the Windows platform. When I fled Windows (and still have no intention of turning back) Screamer Radio was one of the things I truly missed. Apple, as much as I love you, iTunes BLOWS CHUNKS as far as internet radio goes. Sure, if all the stations you listen to are on the “iTunes Approved List” you’re fine and dandy, but if you want to add streams to iTunes, the process is painful and counter-productive in many respects. For most intents and purposes, they may as well remove the feature from iTunes. It’s useless.
A few days ago, I found the answer to my prayers. It’s a Mac application called Fstream, and it’s written by a fella by the name of Julien-Pierre Averous. Yep, he’s French. I’ve gotta put aside my mostly-satirical dislike of the French on this one, because this is a truly excellent application. I almost have to wonder if it was inspired by Screamer Radio because even though the interface has nothing in common, the functionality is almost identical.
The installation is “typical Mac”. Drag the application to the Application Folder and you’re done. The prompts to do this are in French, but most of us have done this procedure so many times we don’t need instructions. Once you’re finished the installation there is nothing further in French. A window pops up once asking for an optional donation, and you’re done.
Fstream will play (and record!) streams in Ogg Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, MP3, and MMS (ASF for WMA) formats. That basically covers just about any internet radio station you will find on the planet, and speaking of which, it comes installed with a huge list of stations you can browse! The entire Shoutcast directory is available, as well as the current list in your iTunes installation. There is no longer any reason to load iTunes for internet radio! (I should note that I’ve had no problem playing AAC streams that are listed as “not playable in iTunes” with Fstream.)
Of course you can add your own streams as well, and I’ve done that. All my favourites on 1.FM, sky.fm and a few other places are all bookmarked and easily accessable from the skinnable minimalist status window. Fstream even supports growl and will generate a pop-up notification in the corner to inform you of song changes (if the stream supports it). You can even turn on voice notifications if you want, that will announce the song titles instead of using Growl.
Ever since I started searching for a Mac solution, I’ve been swarmed with commercial offerings, but I knew there had to be a fantastic free program somewhere, and I’m happy I finally found it.
The explanation and such is in the flickr comment. Click the pic to go there.
I was just looking at my calendar and noticed that July 21st marks the Five Year Anniversary of the founding of poweredbycoffee.net. Dear God, has it been that long? Not sure really what we’re going to do to celebrate - if anything - but I’m open to suggestions.
The last couple of weeks have been frought with technical problems - most of which have been my fault, directly or indirectly. You will notice the load time got a whole helluva lot faster this morning. I had one of those “Eureka!” moments last night and realized what the problem was. Suffice to say, it was my fault (mostly) and we’ll leave it at that. My wonderful web host is not to blame for any of this. Suffice to say that when you use the same server every day for five consecutive years, it sometimes gets to be a bit of a mess. I’m considering wiping it and starting over from scratch. However, since I solved the loading time problem this morning, that’s less of a possibility.
Thanks to everyone for informing me - at all hours of the night - that the site was slow responding. I really appreciate being waken up by Facebook notifications. (I thought I had the cutoff set for 9pm, but apparently I don’t.)
Anyway… things should be performing a lot better now.