Lee.org

Getting ready. The House is an absolute mess. I’ve been packing and packing and packing. When moving, there are just so many little things you have to do, especially for such a big move like this… I’m moving via UPS. I will pick something up, and realize that it has to be “acted upon”. Then I will be running around the house for half an hour trying to do the thing that I have to do with the thing. For example, I found a pile of tax records from 10 years ago; I can throw most of the stuff out but I had to sift through it and find stuff that would be best that I keep forever.

I found this huge trophy that I had won in 1983 and I didn’t have a box that was big enough for it. I was running all over the house trying to find a box big enough and would be in a proper category. It would not have been right for me to put it in the big box with all of my camping gear because my camping gear is going with me on my car trip. I can see it now: the little man with his outstretched torched pounded 18 inches upside down into the earth because I didn’t have room for tent stakes.

So there I was, standing in the middle of the room with boxes strewn about me, waving this trophy around shouting “where does this go?!” I finally decided to throw it out. But before I do, I have to take a picture of it. So of course that means I have to get out the camera and set up my mini photo studio with the lights and backdrop. It’s already mostly set up because I’ve been taking pictures of things to sell on eBay but argh!

I’m planning on leaving on the ninth and leaving about 10 days for travel cross country. It would be a five-day trip if I drove it straight.

It’s admirable that most email mailing list providers offer a double-opt-in system. That’s when you go to a web site, click on a link to subscribe to a mailing list and then you receive an email (the double part) verifying that you actually want to be subscribed.

Why is it that 80%+ of the email systems don’t have a double-opt-out system? The vast majority of the time, it’s even more shallow that. You click on a link in an email and it jumps to a page that reads simply, “You have been unsubscribed.”

Duh. What if I clicked on the link accidentally? What if I don’t want to unsubscribe but change my subscription? When I ran a large list, fully 10% of the requests I processed were address change requests. It is often a real pain to find the link to subscribe… such a pain that it’s not worth doing.

Well, if I’m going on a cross country road-trip, I’ve got to have tunes. Along the way, there will be spots where geography and the laws of electromagnetic propogation will conspire to reduce my musical choices down to God fearin’ Radio and God Fearin’ radio. So I got me a Pioneer DEH-P6700MP CD receiver with MP3 / WMA playback with Organic EL display. It is so tech. I just hope the display doesn’t pull a Trapper Keeper on me.

Quickie review: It sounds -nice-. The tuner is a tiny bit better than the tuner in the stock radio. MP3s sound sweet. It sounds very “full”. I’m a little worried that I’ll blow out my speakers if I crank the bass too much; the factory sound system has something like 12 watts, now we’re cranking 40+.

I freaked out when I was driving home in the dark. The display kept inverting every 10 seconds… first white on black, then black on white. It was as if my (ficticious) little brother was sitting next to me and flicking on a flashlight every couple seconds. After 5 minutes of that, I was screaming at the radio, “Cut it out! You’re driving me crazy!” I vowed that if I couldn’t find a fix, I’d have to return the radio. It turns out that…

Demo Modes: This unit has a Reverse Demo Mode and a Feature Demo Mode. In Reverse Demo Mode, if you do not perform an operation for a period of 30 seconds, the display begins reversing colors. It continues reversing colors every 10 seconds until a button is pushed…

What the frig is that “demo mode” for? Whatever. I turned it off. Chalk up 1 “win” for the day.

Here is how to disable the annoying “Demo” mode

1. Turn the radio off.
2. Push “Memory 5” for just a second (you’ll hear a little beep)
3. Done!

There is another demo mode by pushing “Memory 6”. Read the comments for more…

One problem down, one to go. I just have to figure out how to make the screen about 1/2 as bright at night and I’ll love this radio.

(actually, I’d -love- if it could do .ogg or .flac but I’ll live. It just takes 5 minutes to convert an entire CD from one format to another.

update: Here is the Operation Manual for the Pioneer DEHP6700MP. And here is the Installation Manual.

(this entry was originally written 5-14-05. It was updated on 12-31-05)

There is a pretty good fan-created Star Wars movie called Star Wars Revelations. They made the movie available in DVD format as a .torrent file. Their torrent tracker had been down for a few months starting in early May 2005 so I hosted the .torrent here. Their server is back up so I’ve stopped hosting.

The Revelations DVD and the behind the scenes DVD are available via Bittorrent on Lysator again.

My site served the Revelations .torrent file almost exactly 15,000 times from May-December 2005. If 10,000 copies of the video were created from this, then 34 terabytes were moved… virtually for free. Bittorrent works.I recommend the Azureus bittorrent client.

I was a substitute teacher in Hackettstown High School today. It went fine. I was a little worried about being able to wake up early enough for school but it ended not being a problem.

In the last period of the day, my class of sophomores were to watch two TV shows… an episode of Discovery Channel’s Extreme Machines and Mega Machines. The shows were fine enough but I would have rather been teaching them than babysitting them. Well enough…

Then there was this discussion:

TV: The sugar from one truckload of cane from this truck will feed a person for 428 years.
Kid: Wow, we eat too much sugar.
Lee: Well, it’s not that much sugar when you think about it.. 1 person for 428 years or 428 people for 1 year is the same thing. Thinking about the population of the United States, that’s not much at all. [half talking to myself] Let’s see, what’s the population of the U.S.
Kid: Like 10 million people.
Lee: [Stopped dead in my tracks. Wide eyed stare, mouth agape]
Another kid: [Seeing that I thought the first kid was way off] No, it’s like a billion people.
Lee: [Mouth closed. Mouth opened. Mouth closed]
Lee: [Walks up to the TV and shuts it off] [Speaking to class] That was really interesting. What did he say about how much sugar one truckload contained? ……..

A discussion ensues in which most of the kids shout out guesses as to the U.S. population, all of which are wildly wrong. I have them take a stab at the world population and they fare no better. New York City population? Zero for three. :-(

We talked about populations for a few minutes, I gave them some facts, and then we got back to the program.

I would have liked to turn it into a full discussion about scale…. “How many people are in the room? School? Town? State?…” Especially after hearing one student in the class claim, “A friend told me that Hackettstown is in the Guiness Book of World Records as having the most number of fast food restaurants in a 1/8 mile stretch.” A discussion ensued in which some kids believed that, though I doubted the claim. He asked to go look it up on the internet and I gladly consented. (for those of you not in the know, Hackettstown is a small far-suburb town about an hour away from New York City. The strip he was referring to has about 8 fast food joints on one side of the street, all on lazy, large plots of land) After a few minutes of googling, it was the end of the period and he hadn’t come up with anything. He said that he had, “a hard time logging on” but I had been glancing over his shoulder every couple minutes…. he likely needed a lesson in how to do an internet search.

My main music tools are Winamp, CDex and FLAC. I would use Vorbis Ogg since it has significantly better sound quality per megabyte used (192kbps is indistinguishable from the real thing. In MP3, 256kbps is almost as good)

Support tools I use for music:

flac112a.exe – The FLAC tools so that CDex can convert files to FLAC. Note settings in CDex:

• Encoder: External Encoder
• Encoder path: C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe
• Parameter String: -8 -o %2 -T “artist=%a” -T “title=%t” -T “album=%b” -T “date=%y” -T “tracknumber=%tn/%tt” -T “genre=%g” -“
• bitrate: doesn’t matter
• file extention: flac
• Make sure that in the generic tab, “ID3 tag version” is set to “none”

FLAC plugin for Winamp – FLAC_plugin_with_library_support for Winamp.exe by Michael Facquet. It lets Winamp read FLAC files. Library support means that tags are read correctly :-) Winamp Reference.

out_lame – A Winamp output plug-in to create MP3 files directly from Winamp. IE: if it can play through Winamp, it can be converted into an MP3, which is great for building CDs for my car’s new mp3 player. Reference.

SqrSoft ACF Disk Writer – It will write ANYTHING that can be played through Winamp to the disk, including streams that usually can’t be. Winamp Reference. Homepage.

The Random Image script that I had gotten from Photomatt was ok but it isn’t able to show images when it’s run from alternate folders.

I’ve replaced Matt’s script with a slightly modified version of Matthew Dingley’s Random Image Generator. The code is a bit more elegant, runs quicker and it runs from arbitrary locations.

I’m very happy with the new script. You can view the results in the upper right corner of each blog page.

Here is the source code for it.

I’m not The Computer Guy anymore. I just sold the business to a guy in the neighborhood who is doing the same kind of thing that I was. He didn’t have nearly as many clients as I did, but now he does.

It was really a bit of shocking news when I was standing there at his place; I had just signed a contract and was looking at the check he gave me. It suddenly dawned on me that if one of my clients called me tomorrow, I would have to refer to them to Charlie. I didn’t have any clients. I’m not The Computer Guy.

This is an official demarcation point in my life.

Got’cher nose!

Many years ago, there was this fantastic bit that they did on the Carol Burnett show.

The scene: two men wearing suits sitting in an office. Blueprints sit on the desk in front of them

Owner: I have to thank you again for doing such a great job on this building. 64 stories tall, and you built it faster than expected and well under budget. And you got more office space inside this building that we originally thought you could! You are a genius!

Architect: [looking visibly nervous and disturbed] Yes well, I’m glad that you like it. I’m just… Yes well, we did a very good job. I’m very… happy… Well you know, this building isn’t without its flaws.

Owner: Yes but, everything is looking really good. We can clean up any small flaws that were made with the money that we saved in the construction and the increased rents that I’ll be be getting.

Architect: [starting to look despondent] Yes I’m sure you’re right. We can work this out.

Owner: We can discuss these problems after lunch. But first I have to go to the bathroom. Where is it? I think I saw it on the way in. Is it down the hall and on the left?

Architect: No.

Owner: Where is it then? Is it on the other side of the building?

Architect: [putting his hand into his hands] No.

Owner: [looking quizzical, and then with the look of happy realization] Ah, I see, you only put bathrooms on every other floor to save money. That’s how you did it! So is the men’s bathroom one floor up?

Architect: [starting to pull his hair, and speaking with a whimper] No.

Owner: [starting to realize that something is up] Then is it one floor down?

Architect: [he looks up at the owner and silently nods “no”]

Owner: Two floors up?

Architect: [he stares into the owner’s eyes and doesn’t flinch]

Owner: Two floors down? Seven floors up? Ten floors down?!!

Architect: Just a few… small flaws. I only forgot that one thing. [He sets his head down on the desk and puts his hands over it]

That brings us to today’s fatal flaw.

Since the tape deck in my car broke several months ago, I’ve been looking for a replacement, a way to play recorded media. I tried using my Pocket PC and a radio transmitter as a poor man’s iPod but the user interface isn’t all that good for automobile use. I came across a really groovy 20 gigabyte MP3 player the the car. The Omnifimedia DMP1 Mobile Digital Media Player. It sells in some places for $600, but I came across it for $149. (I later found that it sells in many places for under $200) So I looked into it. It looks like a fantastic device. Rugged, reliable, attractive, and an all around great marriage of technologies. You can even download your music from your home network using WiFi, pretty cool.

I came across a review on Amazon.com that mentioned that the device has no fast-forward button. That sounded ridiculous. I considered how I would probably be listening to very long MP3s, things like four hour long concerts, hourlong radio programs, 30 minute long pod casts and the like. I found the manual online and gosh darn it, it’s true. Tape decks and CD players have fast-forward. You can skip forward with vinyl on a turntable. But not this device. The last device I’ve heard of it didn’t have a fast-forward button was an 8-track tape player.

What’s old is new again.