Archive for the ‘Geeky’ Category


Going back to high school

Thursday, January 4th, 2007

I had the strangest dream last night. I swear that I have way too many things floating around in my head lately, and it left me thinking that maybe it wasn’t the most crazy idea to drift into my subconscious after all. I know I’ll be thinking otherwise once I’m done here.

For some unknown reason, I went back to high school. More so, I wanted to blog about the experience and report on the social structures that exist among that age group. Further more, I would try to be objective as possible to their reaction of having a person my age going to school right along side with them, almost like a psychology study or something. The dream didn’t last long enough to say if I’d be any better at various class subjects though.

I was also very into the idea of being apart of the school newspaper. However, I wanted to change the way the paper was done and make everything much more web based. Blogs, digital cameras, and so on. RSS feeds so the rest of the world could share in what the big news was at this high school that I was at.

Then I woke up. The first thought that popped into my mind was that there is no way I could do that. I’d be seen as some sick guy who just wanted to hang around underage kids. The use of blogging platforms for school newspapers was still a good idea though.

Some times I have weird dreams. Other times, I can’t stop being geeky even in my own sleep.

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Filed under: Blogging, Dreams, Geeky

Five things you (probably) don’t know

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve gotten around to doing this, but Jeremy tagged me some time ago to do this “five things you didn’t know about me” thing that’s been going around. I’ve actually thought about this numerous times and come up with nothing good to plop down. I’m going to give myself about fifteen minutes to come up with the best things I can off the top of my head. Here goes nothing.

  • I was a band and choir geek in high school. I was in all the top choir groups, but not show choir. *shudder* I started out as a tenor, dropped down to the lower octaves of second bass, and rose up to a baritone/tenor when I figured out that rock stars don’t sing with a bass voice. Of course, this is all classical vocal training, but that goes a really long way, no matter what kind of singing you do in the rest of your life. In band, I didn’t apply my talents as much, but I played baritone, euphonium, fuglehorn, and valve trombone. I’m sure you don’t find this too surprising.
  • I have a series of dream jobs that I would like to have careers in if time and money were no object, not to mention talent for said position. List off the top of my head, but not limited to: astronomer, architect, carpenter, radio talk show host, painter, graphic designer, musician, UNIX programmer, writer, cinematographer, film director, actor, professional hockey player, professional baseball player, play-by-play sports announcer(hockey, baseball, or college football), interior decorator, plumber, forest ranger, guitar technician, roadie for a rock band, and broadcast engineer. I’ve already done the last one, but that is too much fun to not do again.
  • I lived in Japan for three months in 2000. Camp Adventure is a program that sends college students to U.S. military facilities to run day camps for children. I was at NAF Atsugi[wiki], located in between Yokohama and Tokyo. Camp counselor to fifteen kids by day, played throughout the backyard of Japan at night and on the weekends. Probably the best summer vacation I ever had.
  • I play bass guitar, and drop-D tuning is my weak spot. My dreams of success were set back when I slammed my left index finger in a car door about five years ago. It’s still tender when I run the frets and probably will be for the rest of my life because how poorly the bone healed at the tip of my finger. My bass is still in the states, so that means that I’m going to suck more than I did before when I get my hands on it again. I’ve only been in two “bands” in my life but never lived an even bigger plot to be a lead singer.
  • I have Gilbert’s Syndrome[wiki]. This might be a result or continuation of being jaundice at birth(of which I almost didn’t survive). This a major reason as to why I exercise through running and strength conditioning. It seems to keep the bilirubin levels in my body regulated. Otherwise, I start to really feel like crap.

Now I have to tag five more people? I’m not too sure who has and hasn’t been tagged yet, so please don’t rag on me if you’ve already been marked. I call on The Reverend Don Deeley, Yvonne, GZ Expat, Alanah, and J.J. Even though those last two are hockey bloggers, I’m curious about those things we don’t know about some of the biggest Canucks fans out there.

This didn’t hurt nearly as bad as I thought it would. However, nothing there is ever final or complete in story. For the sake of time, I tried to keep it brief as possible. I can get long winded about things if I’m not careful.

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Filed under: Blogging, Geeky, Internet

Using MAMP for local site development

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

Those who pay close attention to the various projects that I get myself involved with will notice that I like to play around with the design of the sites. Call it whatever you want, but it always seems like there is something better that I can add or change to the way a site looks. It’s all apart of learning. You try to do something the old or stupid way, only to discover there is a new way that all the cool kids are using that makes things so much more simple.

The worst part about changing a lot of things is doing them publicly. You just can’t go in with an idea, make the change, and go about your business. When you are restless as I am, and I know there are lots of people out there with similar mindsets, the idea you tryout might not look as good as you originally thought. Even worse, it mucks up the whole site and makes it not function at all. Not a good thing, so you might try something else or go back to the way it was in the first place.

MAMPMAMP has really helped with that. It’s allowed me to install and run numerous test sites of WordPress locally[wordpress]. I play around and change things on the fly. Install plugins and surf the site in a browser with full function. Everything that MAMP can do is already there on the Mac(Apache, MySQL, and PHP) these days, but this application makes it work with far less headache. Launch it, do your work, and you’re golden. When I’m settled with what I want, the site goes into the wild.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with WordPress 2.1, and the changes to the next version are looking promising. Drupal can also be managed this way. That took me a little more thinking to get that sorted out, but I was working without an explicit, step-by-step tutorial for MAMP.

I’ve also tried to install WordPress MU, but stopped short of being successful. Actually, I hit some snags and simply gave up. Some quick searches for solutions came up short, but I know that it can work with MAMP. Will have to give it another shot in the near future.

Tricks of the trade, and this might be more obvious to some. I figured I’d share because this has made work on my projects easier, especially taking that FTP part out of the equation. There are various ways to do local installs for WordPress and Drupal development for the Mac and PC, but I can seriously vouch for this one.

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Filed under: Design, Drupal, Geeky, WordPress

I have a thing for lines of code

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

I’m redesigning the RadioZoom site again. Ok, it’s not a redesign, but I’m porting the design, mostly, into a better layout. I’ve worked so hard to not make the website look like a blog because, let’s be honest, it’s a podcast, right? Anyone can start a blog and shift it into a site for a podcast. I’m just going to stop fighting the inevitable.

The current theme that I’m using, as it is a WordPress driven site, has so much code that is cobbled and hacked together that it hurts too much to clean up. I know it’s bad taste to take someone’s theme that they put out there for public use and then tear it all apart for my own amusement, but I’m picky. It has to look right, at least to me. I ain’t no design genius either, but beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Well, in this case, the programmer.

PodPress is really the reason I’m revamping the design. Subtle changes makes it not want to play nicely with the current design. They recently released a new version of this great podcasting plugin for WordPress, so I think it’s high time to dive into fixing it. At the same time, it keeps the geek skills sharpened.

If all goes according to plan, the new design should be live next week. Don’t expect any huge surprises. It should look similar to what it is now, but functionality will be the true improvement, perhaps more so on the back end.

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Filed under: Design, Geeky, Podcasting, PodPress, RadioZoom, WordPress

Dinking with things that dink with content

Friday, December 8th, 2006

I’ve been cramming a lot into my brain over the past few days. For one thing, I’ve been exploring the lovely world of Drupal. After all the things I’ve seen and heard about it, I’ve been impressed. It’s everything that it’s said to be. Content management system, and they ain’t kidding.

I set it up locally and played quite a bit yesterday. Every time I tried to do something that would be complicated by doing it stupidly, Drupal had some sort of built-in way to do what I wanted. Very interesting. Not sure that I like it from a blogging aspect, but it has that too. It can be oh so much more.

I’m experimenting with WordPress more and more. I’ve been a long time user of the visual rich editor. However, not anymore. It’s come to be such a pain, and the WYSIWYG interface gets so annoying after a while. Being a user of only version 2.0 and on, this is what previous versions did. I’ve gotta say that I like this, non-rich editor, much more. Loads faster in FireFox and has no lag. I’ll stick with this for now.

I did find a really great Flickr plugin for WordPress. Flickr Photo Album adds a nice interface for dropping images from your Flickr account straight into a post, all from within the editor. You can already do this with Flock, but I am still not impressed with its performance. This plugin makes things simple and quick, but the setup takes a little to sort out.

I also got into some Unix[wiki] junk last night. Seems that my external hard drive has the occasional ability of renaming itself at random times and confusing some of my peer to peer programs. How else are we to have our cheap nights in with some ghetto Tivo, aka BitTorrent? This could also cause problems with some of my podcast projects. If I spent enough time with it, Unix could become another language I could start to really understand. I’ve got way too many other things on the list right now. I should get some tape for the middle of my glasses.

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Filed under: Drupal, Firefox, Flickr, Flock, Geeky, WordPress

How small the new iPod Shuffle really is

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

PC World recently posted a story about getting their new iPod Shuffle that started shipping this week. About half the fun of getting a new product from Apple is the unpacking of your new toy. Harry MacCracken added this video on YouTube to the article. I was pretty amazed at just how small this thing is.

My favorite part is how he tries to stuff it into an empty box of nerds. And that’s nerds the candy, not a box full of people much like myself.

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Filed under: Amusing, Apple, Geeky, iPod, YouTube

The seven phases of owning an iPod

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

I caught this on Podcasting News and had to pass it on. Drivl.com posted “The Seven Phases of Owning an iPod – An Illustrated Journey“, and I laughed.

My parent's new iPod NanoThe 7th is completely true. My green iPod Mini has served me very well, even though its battery life is starting to dwindle. I’m content with living in the old school age for now. You cool kids with all your fancy color LCD displays and long battery life can go on enjoying what you got.

Speaking of, my parents just got a new iPod Nano. Adding even more to my jealousy, my dad even picked up the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo for it. I doubt he’s going to start podcasting anytime soon, but that’s a setup that I could easily use for my ventures. He’ll use it more to record voice notes for himself.

This is what we do in my family. We try to out geek each other.

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Filed under: Apple, Blogs, Geeky, iPod, Portable Media

Noticing some slight bugs in Firefox 2

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Firefox 2.0 Screen ShotIt seems that every time I launch Firefox 2.0 on my Powerbook, it never likes to load Google like a good browser should(click on the image to the left to see a screen shot). It takes the logo and positions it almost in the center of my screen rather than the center of the window. Usually resizing the window will solve this and everything goes back to normal. I’m making a post about this and then sending the link as feedback for Mozilla.

There are other issues creeping up with the latest release, but they seem to not be overly critical. They are worth reading up on because users are concerned about security problems, but Mozilla is saying that there is nothing threatening about any of the problems that are showing up. I would expect an update soon, but it’s interesting to note that they are hard at work on version 3.0.

Something else to pass on is this link that I got from BoingBoing about a series of tweaks that you can implement on Firefox. Granted that these are for the more geeky individuals, but it’s really not that hard to do. If those tweaks aren’t enough for you, check out the MozillaZine Wiki for a all sorts of geeky and nerdy stuff that you can do with Firefox.

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Filed under: Firefox, Geeky, Internet

Giving RadioZoom its own legs to stand on

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Back in March, Andrew from Geek.Farm.Life was gracious enough to purchase the “radiozoom.net” domain for the podcast. He’s in a reverse situation than myself, living in Indiana with his American wife, and a long time listener of my podcast. I’ve posted about GFL before, so be sure to go read that to find out more about his podcast.

Until last night, the domain was a redirect to the site that I had setup within this domain. That’s much easier to market to listeners rather than saying “blah-blah-blah slash blah-blah-blah”. I’ve been content with the setup for some time, but the slight confusion of the podcast name combined with the actual URL for the podcast episodes was starting to bug me. It doesn’t give the podcast enough of a brand, at least for me, if you tell people one thing and they end up seeing another.

It took a few hours to propagate down the DNS chains, but the domain now has full control over the site. All the old links to old episodes still work. The change has allowed me to move forward with ideas that I couldn’t implement otherwise. These are more noticeable behind the scenes, and that really matters to me more than you. This also means that it’s less I have to think about while falling asleep at night.

Once again, many thanks go out to Andrew for helping to make this possible. Go check out RadioZoom.net and see for yourself.

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Filed under: Geeky, RadioZoom, Website

This is the MacBook Pro that I was looking for

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inchActually, I’m really torn. I love my 17″ Powerbook G4, but the processor is getting closer and closer to the low end of things. I’m probably on borrowed time until the hard drive starts to give me fits, so if I’m going to replace the whole thing, then I’m going to stick with the notebook way of life.

Just today, Apple launched some new models of the MacBook Pro that I am very interested in getting my hands on. The big thing for me is FireWire[wiki] 800. Processor speed, graphics, and memory kind of come second. However, the specs on these suckers are looking sweet.

Apple today announced that its entire MacBook(TM) Pro line of notebooks now includes the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor and delivers performance that is up to 39 percent faster than the previous generation. All MacBook Pro models now offer double the memory and greater storage capacity than the previous generation, as well as a FireWire(R) 800 port for connecting to high-speed peripherals. [macrumors]

When you go with a laptop, your hard drive is never going to have enough space on it for you. As space gets cramped, much like on mine, you need to think external. At the same time, the speed of your hard drive is critical, and very rarely do you get anything above 5200 RPMs. Why? Heat and power consumption. It’s all correlational.

With the amount of audio editing that I like to do, I have to have my external, 200GB hard drive. FireWire 800 makes it really easy to make backups and copy files really quick like, but the best part is actually doing all my recording and editing to it. Before this, the fan on my Powerbook would spin quite a bit, not to mention programs hiccuping from time to time because the internal hard drive couldn’t be accessed quick enough. The software was outdoing the hardware, but life is better when you work on the external and allow the processor more room to breathe.

Now that FireWire 800 is apart of all MacBook Pro models, it has me thinking about moving away from the large screen screen world of Apple notebooks. I know that the 15″ is not that much smaller than the 17″, but it can start to matter when you think about simple portability. Bags and protective cases for large laptops are a bit of a specialty, not to mention that you can forget how big that laptop in your bag really is from time to time. The door can and will hit you on the way out if you forget that it’s there.

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Filed under: Apple, Computer Tips, Geeky, MacBook
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