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Plasmas beat out sports cars and diamonds

It appears that if guys want to really score with chicks these days, you’re better off going for technology than you are for the bling in order to woo(buy) her love.

Diamonds are no longer a girl’s best friend, according to a new study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.  […]

The Girls Gone Wired survey of 1,400 women and 700 men aged 15 to 49, which was conducted by market researcher TRU, found that given the choice, women would opt for tech items rather than luxury items like jewelry or vacations.

The study found 77 percent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 percent would opt for a new plasma TV over a weekend vacation in Florida.

Even shoes lost out. The study found 86 percent would prefer a new digital video camera to a pair of designer shoes.  [wired]

Interesting that TV’s win out here.  You can get something that would make her want to stay inside and be a couch potato versus going out and actually doing something fun out of the home.  On the other hand, it is Florida we’re talking about here.  I might want to stay home and watch Anderson Cooper report live as yet another hurricane slams into the sunshine state in high-def.  I also feel like I should be making a correlation here of this to obesity rates and laziness.

Still, and I think Rebecca would agree with me, we’ll take a trip before we toss down money on a flat panel TV.  Tech can be cool, but memories last a life time.  So does screen burn in on a plasma.

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Getting clear on the whole story

I was checking out BlogCritics today and found this post about Charles Whitman[wiki]. He’s a guy that I had always known about, but never knew who he was. You know what I mean? There are things you know that happened in history, but you never know the whole story.

Here in Austin this was a big day in the media, though not one recognized nationwide. Forty years ago today a troubled ex-Marine named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower of the University of Texas administration building and began to gun down students and passersby on the south and west malls of the University and on nearby Guadalupe Street.

Before heading to the University Whitman had killed his mother and his wife in their home, leaving behind a detailed suicide note with instructions to give his estate to psychological research and do an autopsy to determine if there was something physically wrong with his brain. As it turned out there was a tumor in his hypothalamus which may have been pressing on his amygdala and altering his emotional state.

He was able to get a footlocker and a small wooden crate full of guns into the building and to the top of the 27-story tower, including a Remington 700 rifle with a hunting scope, an M1 Carbine, another rifle, a shotgun and a variety of small arms. He started firing at 11:48 and ultimately killed 16 people and wounded another 31. [blogcritics]

Weird part is that I’ve been to Austin for SXSW and seen that tower. I never knew that’s where this event took place. You see this story copied into TV shows and movies all the time. It’s a morbid thought, but now I’ve got the facts a little more straight.

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Audacity is great when it works

I’ve been fighting with editing a bunch of audio that we recorded in Stanley Park over the weekend. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and Rebecca was happy to accompany on a little adventure through the park, on and off the trails. We had a lot of fun and got lots of great stuff recorded, but it’s not that I am fighting with the pains of editing it all.

I’ve become comfortable with editing within Audacity when it comes to projects like this. However, I got bit by not living by my own mantras, “save and save often.”

I was nearly three quarters of the way through everything when Audacity puked and quit. And from beginning edit to where I was, I hadn’t saved a thing. Heartbreak doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s more along the lines of constant profanity for a good fifteen minutes. I’m fighting with starting over, and it’s so depressing.

After the meltdown, I got curious and decided to check on the latest news about Audacity. If you’re strapped for cash, it doesn’t get better than using this program to edit because it’s completely free. It’s fairly powerful with what it can do, but you have to really master it until you become comfortable. I’ve used my fair share of applications to edit audio, so the task wasn’t overly daunting. Obviously, it can’t always be relied upon for it’s stability.

It’s been stuck at the same version for a while now. There is a newer, beta version going through the trial process, but that has been a constant for a good number of months. This is open source development at its best. One can’t expect things to be done at an incredible rate when there isn’t a lot of money to be exchanged. Just make it more stable, guys. That would be great, mmmkay?

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October came early this year

I knew the season wasn’t going well for the Cubs, but this is the nail in the coffin. Declare the season over and get ready for next season. Maybe Maddux[wiki] and Normar[wiki] can compile notes to write a book on the black hole that seems to hover over Wrigley Field[wiki].

The Chicago Cubs dealt Maddux to the Los Angeles Dodgers for infielder Cesar Izturis ahead of the 4 p.m. ET deadline, agent Scott Boras said.

Maddux waived his no-trade clause to join the Dodgers.

Maddux began the season with a 5-0 record but the 40-year-old has won just four games since. He is 9-11 with a 4.69 earned-run average in 22 starts.

Maddux started his career with the Cubs before leaving after the 1992 season as a free agent to join the Atlanta Braves. He spent 11 years with Atlanta, where he won four Cy Young Awards as the National League’s best pitcher, before rejoining the Cubs in 2004. [cbc]

Start warming up your chops now. Ready? Now say it with me… Next year is- ah just forget it.

Edit: I missed the news of Todd Walker being traded to the San Diego Padres[tsn] in exchange for a minor league pitcher.  Good luck, Todd.  You served us well, but why a minor league guy?  Rumor had it, we almost got Morgan Ensberg from Houston for Walker.

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Bring back the old because the new bites

The recently leaked, new Buffalo Sabres logoI realize that the statement that I am about to make might make me seem incredibly judgemental and like one of those people who are against change so much that I should just relax and take it like a man. I really don’t care. I don’t like this new logo.

The Buffalo Sabres are apparently ditching the threads they have been wearing since about 1996. The original colors are making a come back, which I’m not totally against. I also think it’s great that they are bringing back the original blue and gold digs for their third jersey for the coming season.

This logo, to me, stinks. I like the one they’ve had for the past ten years, but perhaps change isn’t the worst thing to happen after that long of time. But Reebok designed this, and it’s the best they could come up with? It makes me think, “Wooosh!! Buffalo!!” I might toss in some spirit fingers and glitter, too.

I’m not the only one kinda depressed by the design. Fix The Logo is a website devoted to getting it changed. Sign the petition if you please. I can’t say I’m a Sabres fan by any means, but their fans deserve something better than… that.

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Proper pet etiquette in Vancouver

Aside from pigeons and seagulls, which are mutated forms of rats with wings, I’m generally an animal person. I’d almost lump crows into the disliked category, but I have this hope that one day they will rise up against the already mentioned varmits and destroy their empire. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that I’d like to see this happen in a West Side Story[imdb] battle to end all battles, but I digress.

When I see some one walking down the street with a dog that’s about the size of me, I have an overwhelming, child-inside-me urge to run up and pet it. This is after I have the thought that the person who owns this beast is probably living in an apartment that is in the 600 square foot range, give or take a hundred or two. Animals of this size need room to roam. That why they have four legs, right?

chiuaua = three pointsI don’t get as excited by little lap dogs. Rebecca and I like to call them “puntables”. Rude, I know, but if you are not watching where you are going while walking along a busy, downtown sidewalk, you can give one of those things the boot.

The struggle I have is the correct and incorrect thing to do when it comes to interacting with these creatures. They’re not mine, and for the most part, I try not to try. There are some owners who are visibly ok with anyone coming into contact with their pet. Others give you a scowl. I’m sure that old lady walking her chiuaua couldn’t kick my ass as much as I could send her little doggy through the uprights from fifty yards out. Of course, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

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Apple recalls batteries to certain Mac Book Pros

Just passing on the word for those who might not pay attention to news like this like I do.

Apple has initiated a worldwide battery exchange program for certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006.

We recently discovered that some 15-inch MacBook Pro batteries supplied to Apple do not meet our high standards for battery performance. To give our users the best experience possible, we will replace these batteries for customers free of charge. [apple]

These exchange programs are relatively painless. Go to the Apple page, find out if you have a battery within the serial number range they are recalling, and fill out the form on the web. Apple ships you the replacement, and all you have to do is put the recalled battery in a prepaid, preaddressed shipping package of some sort. Usually this is done through FedEx, so the final step is tossing it into your nearest drop box or arranging for pick up.

I had a buddy who got bit by this once, not knowing that his power adapter was recalled until it over heated and died. It only took a few days to get the replacement, but if he would have been aware of it before hand, the lack of power for his laptop could have been avoided.

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Dealing with long term effects of change

Snippet of code from the RadioZoom RSS feedAs of today at noon, I have made a change to my podcast feed that could have some hefty impact. Allow me to further explain.

When I first started out with my adventures into podcasting, I did my RSS feed[wiki] by hand. Well, not literally, but I wrote the code myself in the way that I have learned to do things most of my life. I surfed all over the web to find tutorials and hints, looked at the code of what other people were doing, and then applied that to my stuff until it worked. Doing all the audio was a piece of cake. This part, on the other hand, took some learning.

In the history of RadioZoom, there have been three different feed addresses, the one that I currently run through FeedBurner being the last[http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiozoom]. The first version was rough, to say the least. But was it Feed Validator compliant? Not at all. That brought on the second version, which brought it up to standards and changed the address slightly, but was still hand coded. FeedBurner was the end solution that took the blog feed for the podcast and turned it into something podcatchers could fully understand, all being done automatically.

I stopped doing all manual updates around sometime in early 2005. I sent out alerts to subscribers to those feeds around that time, feeling pretty good about the switch working out in the end. About the time that I moved to Vancouver, I noticed that I was still getting errors from some one or some thing trying to get to those feeds. I decided to try redirects, but heard from fellow podcasters that this solution was working for about half of the services people were using to subscribe to podcasts.

Continue reading “Dealing with long term effects of change”

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Let’s just remember, Ubercaster is still in beta

I love the idea of using this program to do podcasts. The moment I launched the beta version of Ubercaster, I got it. It didn’t take me too long to start figuring out the ins and outs of the program. However, the major downside to being in beta, there are no help files yet. If anything, I just wanted a quick tutorial on the keyboard shortcuts, if there are many to speak of, but the maiden voyage went along pretty well.

My only, major complaint right now is quality. In the experiments that I did before actually producing a regular episode of the podcast, I found the MP3s that Ubercaster would encode itself to not be on par with the results I got from using GarageBand in conjunction with iTunes. The 96kbps/44.1kHz MP3 sounded more like a 64kbps/22.050kHz encoding, at least to my ears.

In episode #429 of the Daily Source Code, Adam Curry mentioned the development of Ubercaster in relation to the recently released Podshow+ and how no one had sent in any feedback to him about the program as of that time. So I took the opportunity to record a two minute audio feedback to send to him, using the built-in setting of Ubercaster of creating an 128kbps/44.1kHz MP3. Sadly, the quality was on par with the previous encoding that I described. We’ll see if Curry puts it into a future podcast, but this just kinda bummed me a little more.

Another issue that I found was with playing long sound clips, such as songs or bed music. When the clip would end, there would be a slight gap in the recording, causing my vocals to cut out. In my broadcast engineer mind, I’d compare it to hitting the dump button on a seven second delay. You might not notice it while listening to the episode itself, but it would sound like I would stop talking in the middle of a word or sentence, almost comparable to a vocal stutter.

I have been on the Ubercaster forums to post feedback on some of these observations. Like I said, this is a beta. I’m just trying to offer some more observations on those wondering more about the program at this time.

On the positive side, I love this program. There’s too much to list, but I’ll try to cover some of my favorite aspects that I discovered with this initial use. And don’t leave me a comment saying, “yeah, yeah, CastBlaster already has all that.” I’ll be honest to say that I’ve been long jealous of that program and crossing my fingers for a Mac version for quite sometime.
Continue reading “Let’s just remember, Ubercaster is still in beta”

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Oh boy, I can’t wait to go to camp

Via Kris Krug[post], I’ve signed myself up for BarCampVancouver.

Who?
Tech creatives: Local technologists, geeks, innovators, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, tech writers, tech managers, bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers and hangers-on. We can only accept ninety people, so register early.

What?
A 24-hour ad-hoc, all-play unconference where everyone who attends participates by presenting or helping out.

Where?
Bryght Offices, 1 Alexander St. (suite TBD); Gastown, Vancouver: Map

When?
Friday, August 25, 6:00pm to Saturday, August 26, 6:00pm

Why?
Because it’ll be a fun party and totally informative, all at the same time. Here’s the full rundown: https://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver

[barcamp]

I think this takes me into a whole, new classification of geek, but that might not be the most horrible thing. There are a lot of really interesting people in the Vancouver that are going to be at this event. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to contribute, but once you get me talking about podcasting, it can get difficult to make me stop. Just ask Rebecca, who will be in attendance as well.

I’ll have to think about doing something with making a recording while I’m there. maybe even a few. With hope, Ubercaster will improve to make it more efficient to do it on the spot. That would be sweet, but more on that program another time.