Weekend Update, for serious

NOTE: I upgraded my Gallery server last week to the latest version. You should check out the new slideshow feature, oh man, it is AWESOME! Major points go out to those developers!

What have I been doing lately? My goodness. Let's go back a few weekends...About a month ago, I DJed Aaron Jones' wedding back at Fraser Twp Hall, good times, good times. Then Molly and I took an extended weekend to go visit Evan in New York. We went to Watkins Glen (pictured left), hit a couple wineries, and generally hung out. Evan and Molly apparently got a little lost one day walking in the early morning fog, while I continued my sleeping. Seemed to work out for me anyway =)

The next weekend we rocked a corn maze here in the Lansing area..."BestMaze". Creative name guys. They might have the worst website ever too, which is quite a feat. I do enjoy a good corn maze, I'm not gonna lie. Also that weekend, Molly and Katie and I went to Saugatuck and the southwest part of Michigan doing some more wine tasting. Saugatuck is a little creepy if you ask me, but we had a good time anyway. I think I was probably bringing down the ladies' shopping experience.

Then the highlight of the month was October 19th, when Rock Band 2 came out! Totally awesome. We had a little release party and played pretty much all day. Way awesome. On the Rock Band online servers, our band was once ranked #256 in total points. I'm not sure what we are now, but probably something like 10,000. Oh well. Anyway the game is still sweet; definitely they made a lot of little changes that make it so much better.

Last weekend a friend from work got married here in Lansing, then Guitar Hero: World Tour came out, which another friend got and we rocked out to. Also pretty sweet, I'm not gonna lie, but I think I like Rock Band better. Kinda a toss-up though, both have their pros and cons.

This weekend the Ogemaw Herald's own Eric Young gets married back in P-Town. I'm excited to see everybody from out-of-town again.

And, it's Halloween this Friday! I'm preparing my Halloween costume, which you'll see pictures of I'm sure. Hopefully it works out like I'm imagining it will. Monday (Sunday night actually) I'm going to a conference in Chicago for work. I'm way excited about that, because I've never been to a real business-type conference before about stuff that I care about (i.e. not just to collect free things). Plus it's at the Westin hotel in downtown Chicago, which Molly tells me is where Oprah's guests stay. Sweet!

Alright, so if you wanted to know what I was/am up to, there you have it. The posts here have been a little light lately mostly due to the arcade cabinet....most of my free time had been sucked into that project. And as the other post I made tonight details...there's more time to be sucked, unfortunately.

Only a few more months until Lost starts back up...

Arcade cabinet update

So last I posted on the arcade cabinet, things were looking good. I posted some pictures when it was almost done, and after a 2:30 am night I finally completed it! Good times. The next day I went about hooking it up, and there were a few issues discovered...

I got this controller board that all the buttons hooked to, translating button presses to keyboard keys. Unfortunately, after some 4-player testing, it turns out it can only support 12 keypresses at a time. Which seems like plenty, but when 4 people are playing NBA Jam it's a problem. So I've got to figure out what to do about that...from all the documentation I read, that shouldn't be the case. I don't think I screwed anything up hardware-wise. That's pending.

But unfortunately, that's not the major problem. You may remember one of the major things I was working on was the LEDs - each button has an LED attached, which will be used for lighting up the buttons, which will be sweet. It was a TON of work, mostly due to the billion solders that I had to do on the various parts. So I tried hooking up the appropriate controller board for this guy, and nothing was working. What the heck? I did some looking at the instructions, and it turns out they sent me the wrong instructions for my board! I emailed the people that sold it to me, and moral of the story is that I hooked up all the LEDs backwards. It didn't break the LEDs (I think), but all the wires are cut exactly to length, so it's not really feasible to just turn them all around.

(In case you're wondering, I had the positive end of the LED hooked to the resistor, then the controller board. The negative end was hooked to a common ground. I assumed the controller board would provide power...not so. It should be positive end to the power, and negative end to the resistors then controller board, so says my big brother anyway. Oops. Who thinks to hook the negative end to the controller board, honestly???)

To be fair, the instructions being wrong really didn't have much to do with me screwing this up...had I read them a little more carefully, it would have been pretty obvious they were for a different device. And regardless, I think they were telling me the right way to hook it up anyway, which I apparently ignored.

Anyway, I'm not sure how to solve this. The panel is usable without the LEDs, but I put a lot of work (and money) into them so I'd like them to work. Assuming I do something, it's probably going to make the wiring way more screwed up than it already is.

I have a whole bunch of pictures that I planned to put up, along with a little description of the entire process. Hopefully someone can use it when they are trying to attempt the same thing, because as I mentioned before, there wasn't a ton of good information on the internet on doing what I wanted to do. I had it all planned out, but with the LED setback I lost a little motivation to put it all together. One day.

That's the story. I did make a sweet molex connector though, you'll be fired up when you see it in pictures. Maybe. =)

Internet Radio

A long time ago, I used to be pretty excited about internet radio. It was back in the dial up days, I used to listen to Imagine Radio, a pretty non-descript internet radio service. On dial up, it was pretty terrible all around. They played weird music, the quality was terrible, and it cut out constantly. But it was RADIO over the INTERNET, so it was by default totally sweet and amazing. Fair enough.

It wasn't long after that though, that Napster occurred (moreso for me, AudioGalaxy and FTP servers). Napster WAS the radio, and it played as many songs as my measly bandwidth would allow, and I could keep them! So for me, internet radio was largely forgotten.

Until now. Again, I'm excited about internet radio. Two (free) sites I've ran into recently are totally awesome. First, Pandora.com. It's based off something called the "Music Genome Project", which is an attempt to categorize music based on a variety of characteristics. What Pandora does is let you create your own radio station, based on a song or artist that you choose. Then what it does is give you a whole "station" full of music that is musically similar to whatever you put in.

If you aren't sure how cool that is, let me assure you, it's awesome. I put in Dr. Dre, and it plays me songs from artists that sound similar to that...other west-coast style rappers, like Snoop Dogg and Warren G. Maybe you want to get funky with Tower of Power? Then you'll hear other songs with "flat-out funky grooves" and "active horn sections", like stuff from Earth, Wind, and Fire and James Brown. If you think you'll get sick of one type of music constantly (which is reasonable), you can tell it to play songs from a variety of the stations you've created. Good to go.

So I highly recommend Pandora.com, go check it out. Another site that I recently discovered is last.fm. This site is similar, but with a social twist. The idea is you create a profile, and then submit all the songs that you've played to the website (that's called "scrobbling"). There are plugins for iTunes and other music applications, as well as support for songs played on iPods and other MP3 players.

So everything that you play, it will submit to the website. This builds a profile of what music you listen to, and last.fm will create a radio station based on your profile....either things that are in your library (or at least by the same artists, I think), or songs that last.fm thinks that you will like based on your listening history. Here the recommendation is a little different from Pandora...it's not based on the audio, but it's based on what other people with similar musical profiles also listened to.

I'm more excited about the musical-characteristic part of Pandora for musical recommendations, but there's still some really cool things about last.fm. It's all based on the social experience, so you can create groups of people, and everybody can share a radio station and compare listening histories and such. Also just having it keep a tally of what you've listened to the most is pretty cool so you can compare with other random people.

All in all, two sites you should check out if you want to rock out a little bit. I really dig Pandora for it's ability to find new music that I might like, something I'm always looking for.

Radio!

Progress 2

Progress

The wires aren't all hooked up yet, but I finally got all the sticks
in place and I had to see my goal! Just a few more disconnects and
this puppy will be rocking!

Cha-cha-cha-CHIA

Q. What do these stores have in common?

• Meijer


• Wal-Mart


• Kroger


• Walgreens


• Petsmart


• Lowe's


• Home Depot


• Pet Supplies Plus


• TJ Maxx


• Target


• Big Lots

A. None of them have the Chia Pet! Are you kidding me???

Chase credit card activation

Earlier this week, I got a new Visa Signature credit card in the mail. I'd been expecting it for quite a while, as I got a letter earlier in the summer talking about how I was going to be upgraded. It didn't seem like a big deal...I get free concierge service, and any number of other services that I won't ever use. Okay, whatever, let's do it.

So finally it came in the mail, and it came with a little sticker on it, wanting me to activate it. I called the number, and after I put in my last 4 digits, it said it was going to connect me to a representative. Hmm, that's weird, this should be a human-free process. I hung up and tried again, same story. Okay, so I'll see what this person has to say.

The person that picked up was from a call center overseas somewhere, which wasn't terribly surprising. A lot of people really get bent out of shape about that, but really it doesn't bother me all that much, it's business. The guy asked me a couple questions, trying to get me to transfer balances, other random little things that really didn't apply to me because I use this card rather exclusively. Then he said something like, "okay, we're almost done, I'm going to go over this last part. Should be about 30 seconds and the call will be over". The guy starting reading something rather quickly, but I'm pretty sure he was trying to enroll me in some kind of fraud reporting service. I'm still not confident in what happened, but at the end I told him I declined and I made sure that there wasn't any shadiness added onto my account.

Whew, crisis averted. But I started thinking about it...why exactly did I need to activate this card? It's the same exact number that I've had for years...no different expiration date, even the little number on the back is the same. What the heck? Obviously, it was to get me on the phone and try to sell me on something stupid. How lame is that? And then when you call (which is getting served once), they give you a little notice saying the call is almost over, so you just say "okay" at the end to get off the phone, and that enrolls you into something you certainly don't want (getting served again). Because really, who wants whatever service they try to sell you? Nobody does. I'm pretty sure the only people that are signed up don't want to be signed up. How can you sleep at night knowing your business exists mainly because people are trying to get off the phone as fast as possible, and only signup on accident. Then they stay signed up because they are too a) lazy b) busy c) afraid to call.

And all because you tricked them into calling you in the first place. Are you serious Chase? If it weren't for your 3% cashback....

Light bulbs

I was at Meijer today, and the compact fluorescent light bulbs were on sale. Except, it was only the "soft white" variety, the "natural white" kind were not on sale. Seriously?