Achieving music

I was trying to find some music for this weekend's event, and I was having a problem locating a particular song for download in MP3 format. No luck on Amazon.com, iTunes, LaLa (which I'd never heard of), or any other legit download service. The only place I could find it was on legalsounds.com. If you aren't familiar with legalsounds.com, it's a Russian-based music download site that sells music for around 9 cents a song. Yeah, so you can get a whole album for about the cost of a fountain soda from McDonalds.

Needless to say, the legitimacy of such a site is...questionable. The site claims to be legal in Russia, but even if that's true, it's almost certainly not in the USA. Of the 9 cents per song they take in, I can't imagine any of it makes it back to the artist. So the dilemma is, is paying a shady company 9 cents a song more responsible than just straight up pirating it yourself? Something to ponder.

During this process, I did learn that PayPal has a service that will generate you a temporary credit card number for one-time use. So if you need to purchase something from a site that you don't really trust, you can create yourself a credit card number without worrying about it getting stolen. Pretty awesome, in theory. I'm not positive how it works though, because the stupid site kept failing every time I tried to get myself setup for it.

Weekend Update - Happy Retirement to Me!

Today marks the first day of my retirement! Yesterday I DJed Katrina's wedding, which is the last wedding that I am scheduled to DJ, hopefully ever (except for Chad's wedding, but that doesn't really count because I'm not really DJing it). It's somewhat of a bittersweet thing - it is a lot of fun to do. But, in order to charge more and make it actually worth killing an entire day, I'd have to invest a lot of money into better equipment (hah, at least some equipment that I didn't steal from my brother =) and music from more legitimate sources. I really would need a subwoofer & amp - unfortunately, adding that would certainly mean that it wouldn't fit in my car, and I'd have to get a van or something. Not to mention lights...yeah, the list goes on and on, all stuff that I have no interest in spending money on. And that's ignoring the stress of actually doing the event. Somebody's wedding is a big deal! So moral of the story, I'm retired.

The wedding yesterday was pretty good, no major disasters. I was having some equipment problems in the past (loud nasty noises randomly, not cool) which I was worried about, but they never cropped up. I'd like to give a shout out to my good buddy Pete who sorta tricked himself into helping me out, and thus had to stay for the entire duration of the reception (and help me tear down). Thanks Pete!

I think I've mentioned that softball and volleyball both started a couple weeks ago. Plus I've been playing frisbee a lot on Thursdays, so most of the time, my week looks like this:

• Monday: Monday Night Raw


• Tuesday: Softball doubleheader


• Wednesday: Volleyball


• Thursday: Ultimate frisbee/Thirsty Thursday at the Lugnuts game


• Friday: ??

Ah summer! But that's okay, it's good to get out and do some exercise. I really need to look into a winter sport. I know a few people that played indoor volleyball last winter, and I'd like to get involved with that when the time comes so I'm not totally out of shape in the springtime. I think it might be a little more competitive than my skills should allow, we'll see.

June actually isn't jam-packed with stuff yet, which I'm a little surprised about. There's a couple baseball games I've got on the agenda, and that's about it. I'm not real worried about being bored though, I manage to keep myself plenty busy it seems!

Speaking of busy, as I mentioned in an earlier post, my server appears to be fully moved and working, good news. I've got some more work to do on the MythTV side, but it's on its way to being awesome, slowly.

My housemates and I went to see the Terminator: Salvation movie the other day. It was pretty confusing, and really not that awesome. I didn't expect a whole lot, and I didn't get a whole lot. I guess it met my expectations, which isn't really a good thing in this case. I also saw "A Few Good Men" for the first time recently too (not in the theatre however). It was good, I enjoyed it. However I really wanted to choke Tom Cruise for the first 75% of the movie. Ugh, really obnoxious. Another movie I saw recently is "Crank: High Voltage". I'm not sure if I posted on this before, but that movie was quite awesome. As you might expect, very action-packed, violent, and outstanding (and funny!).

Off to conquer the day - I've got to unpack from yesterday, and who knows what else.

Gallery is back up

Good news, I think I restored the Gallery installation to its original working order. I know you've been waiting to get your photo on, so now is the time. Go!

Quick shout-out

Just want to let everybody know that I'm still here...I haven't legitimately posted in quite a while, I know. I've been busy trying to get my new server setup and into shape. I'm real close, hopefully tomorrow I'll have it fully up. The hardware is significantly more powerful, so the sweet JavaScript slideshow on the Gallery installation might actually be usable for everybody, which would be awesome. I moved the data to a temporary location, and I didn't lose any, so that's good news. Hopefully I can repeat that magic and we'll be rocking and rolling in no time.

P.S. We split our softball games tonight. I'm not sure what happened with the loss, we just didn't seem to have our heads in the game. It was a good time though. Also my Age of Empires 3 home city is up to level 40, which I'm pretty excited about. Just throwing that out there.

Gallery downtime

In relation to my MythTV project mentioned earlier, the Gallery server will be unavailable for a bit. I'm working on building a new server, and I'm cannibalizing the old server in the process. It probably will be a few days before it's back, but with any luck I won't have lost any data. I hope.

Face Detection

iPhoto 09's face detection feature makes me laugh.

Kosher hot dogs achieved

MythTV Proof of Concept is Working!

Good news, I have my MythTV box working...sorta. I got a video capture card last week from eBay. Unfortunately, I have a variety of PCs around that are missing various features that are needed - so it's currently installed in a less-than-awesome system. So it's more of a proof-of-concept at this point. (If you're confused about what MythTV is, see my blog post from over a year ago now on the topic)

But it is recording video, and if I'm using the system as a frontend and a backend, I can even watch it! I've also got the mythweb plugin setup, so I'm able to set things to record from a web browser on another machine. That means anywhere with an internet connection, I can see all the listings and set it to record. It is also streaming video via the web browser to other computers, which is pretty sweet.

I'm pretty excited that it's this far. However, I've determined that none of the hardware that I have is going to work...everything that I have here has some kind of missing feature. My main computer doesn't have a cable outlet anywhere close, so that won't work. The machine it's working on now is slow, and doesn't have SATA for the 750gb hard drive that I bought 6 months ago. The server I have currently running markdehate.com has only one PCI slot available (needed for the video capture card) and that's taken up by the SATA card. The arcade cabinet can't really be on all the time, and there's no cable outlet near there anyway.

And past the hardware, it was rather painful getting to this point. I had attempted to use a variety of different operating systems and shortcuts before determining that wasn't going to work, and the best bet would be just to use Ubuntu and set it all up manually (that's a long story that includes a lot of failure and is pretty uninteresting, so that's all I'm going to say on this). However, I've definitely learned a lot and have a lot better idea now of what I'm doing than I did when I started...I think anyway.

So. I've decided that I'm going to have to get some new hardware for this (which doesn't break my heart, I'm not gonna lie =). I think I'm going to get a full-size ATX system and replace what's running markdehate.com with this new server. I'm not terribly fired up about transferring all the pictures to a different server for the 10th time, but at least I'm getting pretty good at exporting MySQL databases and transferring my Gallery installation. Since the idea of a DVR is that it's on all the time, it would be pretty stupid to have two servers running. And this MythTV box will primarily be a backend, so it can hang out in the basement, no big deal if it's loud or big or whatever.

I still haven't solved the issue of a frontend though...at this point, I'm just ignoring that problem of actually being able to watch the stuff that's recorded on the TV in the living room. Oh well. Minor details =)

Tournament of Kings

Jabroni

MythTV update

Posting this morning made me realize how much stuff I have not posted! So you may remember a while back I was all fired up about MythTV, right? I had put that project on the backburner because I was unsure what I could record from my digital cable. Well recently I had an epiphany.

A friend of mine built a MythTV system and I couldnt figure out how he could record from the cable. I realized that Comcast sends out both digital and analog signals of their channels - the digital signal is likely encrypted, so I can't record it. But the analog signal, that's where the good stuff is, and that's why it works! I know, not very exciting, but it took me a long time to figure that out for some reason.

The bad news, is that without digital signal, that means no HD. And if Comcast ever stops sending analog signal, then I'm hosed. But in any case I ordered a video capture card from eBay and am looking forward to making some progress.

The video quality may be pretty ugly on a HD tv, I'm prepared for that. But at least I'll be able to stream recorded video to my PC, arcade cabinet, and iPhone (!). And now that I think about it...I won't have any front end connected to the living room tv...hmm. Well, I guess I'll worry about that later. Apple needs to man up and upgrade the AppleTV so I can buy one!

on the morning...

If I could wake up at a reasonable time (8am), and sit around in my bathrobe for an hour bumping old school rap and eating cereal for an hour before going to work every day, my life would be so much better. *sigh*

Heading to Vegas...

Tonight I'm going to Vegas! Molly and I are heading out this evening for what promises to be a good time in the desert. I'll be sure to post some pictures here of our adventures. In the meantime, I've got a billion things that I want to do today before heading out of the eastern time zone. The question is...will I be able to stay un-distracted long enough to get them all accomplished? We'll see.

In other news, I'm not sure I mentioned my Twitter feed before officially on here - but I've been using Twitter a bit these days, and you can see my posts on the right side of this page in a little column. Twitter is pretty sweet, and I think it may be part of the reason that I'm posting less on my actual blog. I see my friends Dave and Kristen both have blogs now (hooray to you guys!) so I don't want them showing me up blog-wise... I'll try to step it up for you all =)

First on the list is to get my oil changed...so I guess I should put on some pants. Fair enough.

Check out the dudes in hats on idol

The Odyssey, a video gaming classic

I present to you, two YouTube commercials for classic video gaming systems. First, the Magnavox Odyssey, where you taped a piece of plastic to the TV:



And second, the Odyssey 2, which featured a sweet speech synthesizer:

Obama trading card

Awesome.

Chuck Norris book