Phew, I’m busy.
Business is getting frazzlingly brisk. Two or three appointments a day takes some serious scheduling! But that’s where I want to be so…
I went to a Bi-zone conference this weekend. I was the facilitator for the SOFFA (Significant Other, Friend, Family, or Allies) panel. It went well. It occurs to me that this was the first time I had ever been a panel facilitator. It went just fine.
I got a snazzy Neovo 19″ LCD monitor last week. I’m very happy with it
My Amazon.com product review:
– It looks very slick on the desktop
– the front plastic shield has protected my friend’s trade show monitor well
– it folds up smaller than the average LCD monitor (though it’s not height adjustable :-( )
– You can really crank the brightness and contrast up
– It’s viewable from any angle
– competitive price (free shipping from Amazon too)
– 3 year warranty, including burnt-out pixels (no burnt out pixels yet)
– cool name
Things are going very between PPG and I.
The Eleventh President and I are doing very well. We went to Washington Rock State Park recently. That was cooler than either of us thought it was going to be.
April 7th-11, I think I put on 10 lbs. It was great. Stevie came by for a couple days. Steak and Optimator! Saturday was a Seder with PPG and family. (PPG noted that matzo should be called “the bread of freedom” not “the bread of affliction”; I mean, think about it) Food! And then Easter with my cousins in Aberdeen. THAT was a great meal. And the leftovers were just as good! I tell ya, driving home with the steering wheel in one hand and brussel sprouts in cheese in the other is dangerous and delicious!
I keep not hearing from The Frog Princess, which makes me sad.
My cousin Jay and I had a business idea for Computer Guy. It might create a lot of business :-) Time will tell.
He was on his way back from a trade show. And look what he had just sitting in his trunk.
The laptop on the left is a 3.4 Ghz, 1 gig RAM, 1920×1280 resolution, gamer video card, DVD burning laptop. It came off the assembly line a few weeks ago and is the fastest gamer laptop obtainable. :-) Working for a company that specializes in 3-D visualizations has its perks.
Let me just reiterate that Spenix is a good internet hosting company. Inexpensive and FULL featured. You should use them.
I just took out a one year ad in the back of my local church’s weekly bulletin. I didn’t want a whole year but that’s the only way I could buy it. Wish me luck! I bought the ad from my new friend Ben I.
But that was MY idea!
Yesterday I opened up EMedia Magazine, saw an ad for an industrial multi-CD burner and again thought about an idea I had a while ago. Use fast CD burners to make a live recording of a music concert just minutes after the show is over. I had this idea maybe a year ago while looking through a similar magazine. So last night I went out to my local music house, The Stanhope House, to spec it out.
Perfect. The place held about 150 concert goers. I guessed that maybe 10% of concert goers would spend the money on a CD… That’s 15 CDs…. such a burning rig would cost under $2,000… working 3 or more nights a week, it could make money. The Stanhope House already had a good permanent mike setup. I could tap into that. There wasn’t much room in the soundboard area…. hmmm… and it wouldn’t be cost effective to have me come out and mix the album for just 15 sales. I could make a small box with 2 or 4 burners, a mini PC, maybe running Linux with special software and just a few buttons on the case. Buttons for “Start recording”, “Stop”, “Next song starts here”, “No music here”. The sound engineer could make the CDs. But what music licensing when a band plays a cover? Ah. The Harry Fox Agency is all about music royalties. For just $0.08 per song, we can burn a CD of a cover… Figuring out the exact royalties to be paid is a technical task…. But well suited to the computer: it could keep track of every song burned and at the end of the month export a list of who gets paid what. But that means the track names (and authors) have to be inputted into the computer as it’s being burned, to give proper credit. Hmmm. The sound engineer might need to have a keyboard and screen, tied to the Harry Fox music database. That’s ok, it’s doable.
I called my sister, asking about Greatful Dead bootlegs (she knows about such things). She offered good advice (except for the part about my idea being dumb and unworkable, but hey.)
I was getting ready to call the owner of the Stanhope House today or next week to talk about my plan. I called up TJIC to mull the idea and maybe look for programming support. He said, “Oh yeah. I read about something like that in the New York Times a while ago.” ERK! What? No. It’s MY idea. So I go online and…. fuck.
…the Who jumped on the idea and wound up grossing $1.2 million on live CDs from their 2002 tour. Early this year, Phish made every 2003 show available — within forty-eight hours — on livephish.com; the band has sold more than 150,000 of the recordings and earned more than $2 million.
There is probably room for me in this industry. I could probably even make a living at it if I worked hard at it. But it isn’t my idea.
And then there’s Farsite (from the dates on the website, the project appears dead), xFS (dead and not what I’m looking for), Oceanstore (did I mention that already?),
I had something stuck in my teeth for about a week. It was driving me crazy and it was starting to ache constantly instead of just when I was chewing. So I broke out the dental floss, the toothpicks, the fancy dental pick, I scrubbed with my toothbrush, I fiddled with my toothbrush…. but NOTHING. You see, I could feel exactly where the thing was stuck in my teeth: between my rear and second from rear left lower molars. So I worked at it and worked at it. But I started getting suspicious when a serious dental flossing turned up nothing at all. So I tried something different. I tried chewing on my toothbrush handle, feeling out exactly which teeth were unhappy.
Now mind you, I could feel EXACTLY where this piece of junk was stuck in my teeth so I was just humoring my curiosity. But low and behold! It wasn’t my lower teeth that hurt, it was my upper teeth! Damn referred pain! I took dental floss to the space between my UPPER rear and second from rear left molars and found junk and blood. Today, a few days later, my teeth are feeling almost back to normal.
It’s kind of spooky about that referred pain. Dentists have told me about it before but I didn’t -really- believe them. But here I am… I felt I could point exactly where the problem was but I was wrong… about my own body. Weird.
Read The Strange Tale of the Denial of Service Attacks Against GRC.com. (local PDF copy) Find out detailed information about the seedy underbelly (whatever that means) and lots of great and very specific info about IRC DDOS attacks.
Sentry safe A5889(2 cubic feet, electronic lock, water resistant, 2 hr fireproofing) , MSRP $561.88. Staples price $309.99. Staples rebate -$50. Staples coupon -$15. Staples Teacher Rewards 10% (-$24.50). Shipping (on a 206 lb safe) $0.00. Amex miles earned 220 (value about $2.20). Total price paid: $218.29
