johnbollwitt.com

I picked up on this video from the Apple Gazette today and found it fascinating. It was a view of what computer networks, and the Internet, would be like in the future, all in that lovable style of informational movies from that era.

The best part is the way the husband looks when he has to deal with the bills that the wife is spending money on. Obviously they saw the future of the Internet, but there was a lack of innovation for gender roles.

Not too bad. The technology is off a little bit, but the concept is there.

Delicious recently did an overhaul of their site design about three weeks ago, and many folks have already weighed in on what they thought about it.

For me, I have to use something for a while before I really give my full sense of how a redesign like this actually affects my work flow because I use their service so much.

For me, it’s way too hard for me to grasp the concept of writing it as “Delicious”. For so long, it’s been “Del.icio.us.com”, and I think that’s a large, geeky reason that I liked the site. In this redesign, they also did a rebranding and dropped the extra dots. It’s a small thing, and I’m getting over it. I always loved the clever use of the .us domain.

Otherwise, I love the new Delicious. The redesign has long been needed, and it finally matches up with how much I like the service.

For me, I read a variety of RSS feeds. Using Google Reader and Firefox, I can use their browser plugin to quickly bookmark items to either share with others or come back to later. This method might not work for everyone, but it works very well for me. Bouncing between computers at home or work, I can tag something that I find interesting.

Mostly it’s the design that has taken a little time to get used to before I could really decide what I thought. Visually, it works better than it previously did. Sure, it looks prettier, but you can make anything look good and not have function. Delicious seemed to step up to this notion of the K.I.S.S. principle that I’m a big fan of.

If you would like to see the things I tag, feel free to check out my Delicious page.

The main reason that I am making this post is for my sister-in-law’s mother, but I figure that it’s worth mentioning in a full out post. Since I’m back in the technical support realm of things in the world of broadcasting, I’ve gone back to my tricks of the trade when working in the Windows XP world, and this certainly works for those running Windows 2000 and ME.

No matter what websites you are or are not surfing while on a PC running Windows, spyware[wiki] lurks around every corner. You don’t have to download anything for it to find its way onto your machine, although that is one of numerous ways that it can get onto your machine. It can come from cookies, holes in the programming of your browser, or a variety of other ways that hackers are constantly trying to exploit.

When it starts getting painful to operate your computer and rebooting it just doesn’t fix the problem, try running the following two programs in conjunction with each other. They will scan and, hopefully, remove these malicious pieces of software from your computer. The best part is that they are completely free.

• Spybot Search and Destroy
  If you are doing this for the first time, start with this program. Download and follow the directions. Don’t forget to download the latest virus definitions and immunize your computer against future problems when Spybot asks for it. A full scan with this program can take a while, and you might have to reboot your machine and cycle through with this program a few times before it can successfully eliminate any issues you might have.
• Ad-Aware
  This is what I typically run second after already running a Spybot scan. When you first download Ad-Aware, don’t get confused between having to pay for the pro version of the software compared to the free version. Just cancel out of the window when it asks you to pay for the program. Once again, follow the directions and download the most up to date definitions so it knows what to look for and possibly remove from your computer. When you go to scan your computer, do the full scan, as this will look deep into your computer’s hard drive for anything that shouldn’t be there.

Once again, if this is your first time ever doing this on your computer, repeat this process a second time. I recommend this out of experience because it can save you from having to completely reinstall Windows onto your computer. However, if you still have problems, the issue might be too deep for this to be your solution.

In my time working in the I.T. realm of things, I can say that these problems typically come from those using Internet Explorer. There are points where you can’t get away from the browser, but if you want an extra line of defense from this happening, get Firefox and make that your default browser. It works extremely well, is less vulnerable to things like spyware, thrives in an open source community, has a strong user base, is very versatile, and is the browser that I use on both Mac and PC platforms. The learning curve isn’t that bad, but there are a variety of add-ons you can put into Firefox to enhance your use.

Just to give you a first hand account of how these tools have been effective for me, I ran into an issue with a machine where the user complained that it had become so sluggish that they couldn’t do anything with it, including shutting it down. Running Spybot, it found two issues and removed them. Never running Ad-Aware on the machine before, the full scan found 1,200 various files that were not supposed to be there. Repeated the process without finding anything a second time and turned the computer back over to the user. There haven’t been any issues since, but repeating the scans in the future will help keep the machine healthy. Well, at least until the next problem, such as spilling coffee in the keyboard, occurs.

I’m sure there might be other things out there that work well, so I invite readers to add them into the comments. And hopefully Carol will be able to fix the issues she was having with her PC.

The beautiful thing about BitTorrent[wiki] is that it allows us to pretend that we have a DVR. Well, in Vancouver, they are known as PVR, but it’s that digital video box that is so much sweeter than what a VCR ever was or can be.

Anyhow, on one of the many sites that I watch for the latest torrents that I want to grab, something popped up that caught my eye. It said “Finland” and “hockey” somewhere in the title, and there was also a “vs” in it as well. I’ve heard a lot about the Swedish, Finnish, and Swiss leagues that NHL players jump ship to play in, so I thought I would download it to see what it was.

Sure enough, it was a Finnish league hockey game, and the broadcast was entirely in the native language. HD, widescreen format with sound that had some killer, stereo quality sound. Who ever did this rip, did it with passion, and the broadcast wasn’t half that bad either.

I didn’t get a chance to watch the whole game because I was going through the collection of stuff that has been accumulating for us to watch prior to recording the latest episode of The Crazy Canucks last night. I actually needed to help free up space on my hard drive, so I parsed through it rather quick. That’s not to say that I wasn’t able to make a few observations, if not get a feel for how the game went.

First and foremost, the amount of logos on the jerseys of the players should make any NHL fan rejoice that we don’t have to endure such blatant advertising. The arena wasn’t the biggest, but the home team made quite the noise when the home team scored. I think they were the ones in the blue and orange uniforms, but I don’t really know if they were SaiPa[wiki] or Tappara[wiki].

Checking into those Wikis, there are a couple of players on these respective teams from B.C. and Minnesota. Some good ol’ North American hockey kids, dontcha’ know, eh?

Both of these teams, finding this information out while writing this post, are in the SM-liiga[wiki] in Finland. Interestingly enough, this league is regarded in Europe the same way that the NHL is thought of in North America. Playing at this level is nothing to scoff at, and watching some of the action is evidence of that. International rules or not, these guys can play.

So Tappara won, and I think I’m pretty confident that they are the guys in those blue and orange uniforms, but now I’m second guessing myself and saying that the home rink was that of the guys in yellow and black. Or was it yellow and blue?

I don’t understand a lick of Finnish, so there is no way I can say for certain as to who was who, but 4-2 was the final score, Tappara was the winner. The guys in orange and blue. At least our numerics cross language boundaries.

Thank you, mysterious Finnish league hockey fan, for taking the time to put this out there for me to discover. Like I said, I’ve only heard about these leagues but never have had the chance to really get any exposure to it. On top of that, the announcers are fun to listen to, even if you can’t understand the language. Granted that it’s no Mexican league futbol match in terms of the quality and entertaining play-by-play, but these folks get just as excited.

I mentioned it in the recent episode of The Crazy Canucks, but the NHL should really do more with the technology of bittorrent. I’m not the first one to promote or come up with the idea, but it just might help grow exposure to the league if you make games available like this as soon as they are complete. Posting games to Google Video three days after they happen is… well… hmm, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, they’re easy to forget about.

Finland, you’ve got some good stuff over there. You make me want to come visit the home of Sami Salo[wiki] and stay for the hockey.

Dear MySpace,

MySpace still sucks. It sucked from when it first started and it continues to suck. Sure, it’s a great social media platform where bands can preview some of their tracks, people can send messages back and forth, and strippers can have direct, albeit virtual, contact with their fans.

You started in 2003, so why do you still act like it? There is no rhyme or reason to the site. Where ever there is a space to put something, it gets filled. It all falls under a category of some type, but the design concept is… well, what design concept? It’s near gibberish.

You’re not Digg, and no you’re not Facebook, and there is a good chance that you never will be. Those folks still understood what the meaning of design overhaul meant for the sake of their site. It was for the better good of those who interact with the function of the website, and the effort makes those people want to come back for the simple fact that it makes sense.

RadioZoom has a page on your site, and I hate having to interact with it. Yes, it is an amazing way for artists to contact the podcast, but I deplore having to login and do anything with your site. The fact that users make it even more difficult by blinging out their MySpace pages, bands hardly excluded, makes it that much more worse. I know that’s not your fault, but if you did something about that, I would be quite over joyed.

Here’s an idea that I would like to see. As someone who throws music into their podcast, why not make it an easy way for bands to actually share music with those who are deemed good enough to download it, such as podcasters? Right now, it’s all or none for bands to select which songs their would like to have people download. If a band had the option of authorizing podcasts to grab their uploaded selections for play in a podcast episode, imagine the possibilities that could have.

You probably don’t care that I don’t like your site, and there are plenty of people out there that are just fine with it. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. I’ll still pop in once in a while to check in on things and do my best to figure out who has contacted for what reason because of the sad fact that there is some usefulness out of your service. It doesn’t make using MySpace enjoyable though.

I’ve been making comments here and there about our home network for the past few weeks, and it all came to a head about a week ago. At first, I was quick to blame Shaw about their service and lack thereof. I know for a fact that there was one day where it was their fault that we had no access for nearly a day, but the problems continued after a quick phone call about the problem.

For the past few years, I’ve been using an Asante FriendlyNET FR3004 router (circa 2002) and an Apple Airport Express to create a wired and wireless LAN. Not even a year after buying that Asante of an eye sore, it was discontinued, and the firmware updates stopped not long after. The UI for setting up the thing was never my favorite, but it worked. Well, it worked until about a week or so ago, and the Apple Airport Express has always worked well, now a very handy, travel-sizable WiFi device.

During a recent recording of The Crazy Canucks that ended up being a hodge-podge selection of material due to technical problems, our network went into meltdown. Skype wasn’t working, and the entire bandwidth ground to a halt after that. This was prefaced with slow performance in the days leading up. It wasn’t until that I bypassed the router and went straight into the iMac that the Asante was medically discharged from service.

After some research, Rebecca and I settled on getting a new router. Like my father raised me, I didn’t want to get something that would work as much as it would be a suitable replacement for at least the next three years. Looking at the specs for the WRT150N, it had a few key things that I wanted; four 100/1000 Base-T ports on the back, WPA wireless encryption, and 802.11n capabilities that would support Rebecca’s MacBook.

There were some folks recommending other versions of Linksys routers, namely Duane and Gregg, and those were very much appreciated. For the price and the performance that I’m getting now compared to what I had is very noticeable and quite loved though, and it makes me very happy. I used to think that my PowerBook’s performance over wireless was poor due to it’s age, but it was obviously the poor operation of the old router translating traffic to the Apple Airport Express. It’s nearly a new world, and Rebecca has noticed it as well.

So far, I’m really impressed with the Linksys WRT150N. I spent some time setting it up to allow better functionality with certain programs like iChat or Skype, and the wired connection for the iMac has an increase in performance when loading websites or downloading podcasts. Here’s hoping for the long term, but knowing the interesting things I could do with other Linksys models makes me wonder what other, geeky things I could do with it. I’d just have to brave to try.

I’ve been aware of the whole Ustream phenomenon for a time now, and there have been a few opportunities to get my mug into the action with some of the live streams of the Canucks Outsider that Dave put on, with the help of Roland. Outside of that and what Chris Pirillo does with the service, I haven’t given much thought about Ustream’s capabilities or uses. At least, I know that I can use it, but what would I use it for? (Do you really wanna watch me read my RSS feeds, do some geeky web-programming-podcasting-blogging stuff, and drink coffee?)

Robert Scoble dropped by Ustream’s offices and did one of his patented interviews with the people behind the scenes. After watching it, it opened my eyes to what they are doing, how it works, and, more importantly, what the real world can use Ustream for.

The bulk of what I’m getting at comes towards the end of the interview. Since Ustream is embeddable nearly anywhere you can dropped the code, there are a variety of uses for this. With a webcam(that has a good audio source) and a decent internet connection, you can stream anything you want, live and for free. It’s that simple, and many computers are built with this capability off the shelf. You just have to set it up with Ustream and broadcast what the camera sees.

City council meetings could be open to the public with no need for local access cable channels. Company meetings can get posted on internal, corporate sites that only employees can see. Or maybe you have those events that you want to get out to the public and wish that the local news station would give you more coverage than just a fifteen second mention on the six o’clock news? Now you can bypass that worry and broadcast what you want to the world, but still invite the “media” in case they want to come down. The options are endless.

It makes more sense to me now. Ustream is looking to expand what they are doing by upping their services in a variety of ways. I’m certainly looking at them with a different perspective.

The saga of WOXY is a long and interesting tale. For a long time, it was the one radio station that I wanted to have a job at, willing to drop everything to move to Cincinnati, Ohio just to work there. Then it got sold and went internet-only.

Amazingly, WOXY[wiki] is making a return to the airwaves.

That’s right, folks. We’ve been working on this for some time now, but it’s finally time to let the cat out of the bag. Through a unique partnership with Cincinnati Public Radio and 91.7 WVXU, you’ll soon be able to pick up WOXY.com on the second multicast channel of WVXU once it transitions to HD Radio in August!

Once you have an HD Radio receiver, you’ll be able to pick up our live broadcast 24/7 on WVXU HD2 anywhere within WVXU’s coverage area. Yup, WOXY.com will rock your car once again.

We’re all incredibly excited about being back on-the-air in the Tri-State and will be posting more info soon on what to expect and the best places to pick up an HD Radio receiver. [woxy]

This is an amazing bit of history. The operation has had its fair share of struggles to exist up to this point, but the ability for a radio station to hold on after losing its place on the dial is pretty amazing. Now they have a chance to make a triumphant return. Well, there is the whole HD thing to contend with.

It’s true that HD radio[wiki] is struggling with getting off the ground. There are two things that are working for it. At least I would by a radio capable of HD if I lived in the Cincinnati area so I could listen to WOXY anywhere, and the same can be said of other markets because of the extra programming you can put on an HD frequency. The prices of receivers are still on the high end, but that’s beginning to slowly change. That can only help the spread of HD, especially once more vehicles come with HD radios built-in.

Still, it’s way cool to see WOXY make it back on the air. I smell a Rain Man sequel.

Today marks another day of protest by Internet radio stations around the world, and they are doing it by going silent.

On Tuesday, June 26, thousands of U.S.-based webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent in a unified effort to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country’s Internet radio industry. [rain]

I wrote about this not long ago, and it seems that the fight goes on. More importantly, I’m bummed that I can’t listen to WOXY today. Truly, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Thinking about this some more today, I was pondering the argument of why listen to Internet radio anyway? Well, for myself, I used to listen to it all the time while at work. Yes, while working at a radio station, I listened to another radio station for the simple fact of maintaining some sense of sanity. A little dose here and there goes a long way.

The other element to consider is the growing trend of wi-fi enabled cellphones. Look at the iPhone for instance. True that it’s an iPod and a cellphone, but the wi-fi built into it as well as the ability to develop web based applications for it means streaming media galore. You can get all the YouTube you want, but sometimes you need to let go of the controls to the music.

Streaming into WOXY from a wireless hotspot while I enjoy a non-Starbucks coffee? I am all for it.

Therefore, Save Internet Radio, please.

As if they were paying attention, CommonCraft has produced another video to help explain the world of Web 2.0. I often link to Wikipedia in my posts, but there might not be a lot of people who know how it works. Better yet, there are some out there who don’t know that you can apply the same functionality that they use on that site, called Wikis (creative, huh?), to nearly any site that you want to.

Curious to learn more? Watch this video.

Click To Play

Call it being a late bloomer, but I have seen the light when it comes reading all the RSS feeds that I do. Ok, you can all start laughing at me now, at least for those of you already in the know. Google Reader? I’ve made the switch over the past week and am quite happy.

I made a post sometime ago about how I was using Vienna for this purpose, and that endorsement still stands. Great open source application, but too tied down to a single computer. Happily, we’ve made an addition to our collection of computers, and that’s on top of Rebecca’s MacBook that she got about two months ago.

Bottom line, I need to have the ability to get to my stream of information from all three locations; my laptop, Rebecca’s laptop, and our iMac.

The interface was something that I was instantly enticed by, and it truly makes for being efficient. Instead of a third party, stand alone application, I can have everything focused in a single browser window, open a string of tabs, and parse my way through pages of text to read. I call that being effective.

Still need a reason to buy into reading RSS feeds? Lee LeFever, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Northern Voice last February, put together this short video to explain RSS quickly and simply. Get educated and then get efficient.

When I first heard about Joost, I thought not a lot of it. On demand video over IP. I love my TV in doses that I can control, but there really wasn’t much more that made me want to check it out. That changed this afternoon when I got myself an invite to try out the beta, so here’s my initial thoughts on it.

Addictive. Turning it off was, I admit, difficult to do. Anytime you can give me access to watch content from around the world, I’m curious. I don’t care what language it might be in, but that won’t stop me from checking it out. Even this beta version has a lot of content that I can see myself getting into, I’m more curious about other things that are slated to come on board, namely The Soccer Network. On top of that, get me on demand Cubs games and I’ll be uber hooked.

I only spent about twenty minutes watching the content that is currently available on Joost, and the quality wasn’t that bad at all. In fact, I found myself watching Fifth Gear[wiki] for a few of their clips. I’m not a car guy, but now I get why people are so hooked on this show. They do cool things about cars that I’ll never own or care about. Still, that shows the effectiveness of technology like this. I might actually stop and watch this on the “normal TV” if I stumble onto it.

I think it’s pretty cool. I’ve heard other people complain about it, but the guys behind Joost are working on making it better. At least I hope that’s the case.