Jolayne and I got back in from Ohio on Tuesday night after a drive that we definitely don’t mind only making once a year. Despite being bookended by long hours on the road, our trip was a good one. It’s amazing how quickly 10 days can fly by though. It would have been great to have had more time to spend with everyone, but at least I got to see a lot of people even if for just a quick visit. I hung out at Phil and Carrie’s in Dayton for Phil’s birthday and our semi-annual Chu Chu Rocket gaming session/freakout. My nerves may be calmed down enough by next year to do it again. There was much craziness, a little WoW, and I got to be in the live studio audience for a podcast recording. In Columbus I got to see Ben, Matt, and Tobin and had my first experience with the excellent Katamari Damacy, one of the games that might yet convince me to pick up a PS2 someday.
As for the holiday itself, our first married Christmas (cue the “awwwww”) was awesome. We spent Christmas day at Jolayne’s parents and my parents came up from Dayton later in the day for dinner. It was a great family get-together and I think everyone had a good time. Being married can make trips home a little more hectic though as it can be hard to spend enough time with both families without spending the whole trip driving back and forth. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll have Christmas at our new place and force everyone to come to us?
Jolayne totally suprised me by getting me the digital camera that I’d been crushing on, the Panasonic Lumix FX9. It’s an awesome tiny little camera with a gigantic LCD display, a great lens, pretty impressive battery life, and most importantly for me, image stabilization. (ok, maybe I should just cut out the caffiene and then I might not need that so much) With my old camera I managed to blur up just about any picture in a slow shutter situation so this is definitely a nice improvement. I certified my dorkdom by being most likely the only person in the world to read an entire owner’s manual (all on Christmas day no less). Following that I think I made Jolayne regret getting it a little by constantly reciting the features to her (”And look, you can see the light meter onscreen as a histogram!”) There’ll probably be an increase of photos on Flickr soon. Especially since while our cat Cleo was terrified of my old camera, she hasn’t yet caught on to the fact that the new camera is also a camera. It’s also much quieter (just the sound of my old camera turning on would send her running) and can take less blurry pictures without the flash (her mortal enemy). So yeah, there will probably be more cute kitty photos in the future, the one thing the internet always needs more of.
Friday was the night of the Buzz’s yearly christmas show and despite having to leave for Ohio first thing Saturday morning Jolayne and I had decided to go. In retrospect, maybe not the best idea. It seemed reasonable enough when we’d bought the tickets but by the night of when we realized that we still had a bunch of packing to do and a 12 hour drive the next day we decided that maybe we were crazy. On the other hand, it was a pretty good show. We got there just in time for Alkaline Trio’s set. I’d been wanting to see them for a long time, but the set was only 6 songs long and the sound was pretty crappy. (The sound all evening was generally not great, but this was the worst) I still enjoyed them, but I’d like to see them again in a better venue and when they can play a full set. Next up was Hot Hot Heat, and while I hadn’t really been that excited to see them I had to admit that they did put on a pretty fun show despite the singer being a little on the annoying side. Following them the Psychedelic Furs took the stage, one of the main reasons I’d wanted to come to the show. You never know what you’re going to get whenever you have a really influential band that reforms years later, but they were more hit than miss I thought. They’d definitely succumbed to the generic “aging rock star look”, but come on you’ve got to cut the Furs a little slack. It was awesome to see them do “Love My Way” and “Heartbreak Beat”. About halfway through their set Jolayne and I turned around to see Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio standing right behind us watching the Furs. He kept getting interrupted by teenage girls coming up to have their picture taken with him, but he was definitely enjoying the show. Death Cab was the final band of the evening, and they were as good as the first 2 times I’d seen them. Their set wasn’t too heavily based on their most recent album, which was fine by me. I hate it when bands are touring with a new album and play 90% of their set from that album. I think they actually played more songs from their previous album, Transatlanticism, than their new album, Plans. The show started pretty early so it didn’t get out too late and we only got a slightly later start for Ohio than we had intended the next morning. We got to Jolayne’s parent’s out in Waldo, OH at about midnight on Saturday, and that’s where we’re staying over the holidays. Amazingly enough, despite not having enough cell phone signal out here to be able to make calls from my phone I’m still able to use it as a modem. In fact that’s what I’m doing right now. It’s a Christmas Miracle™!
I’d been wanting to create a favicon for the site for some time, but I’m a fairly inept pixel pusher, and using a stock icon just didn’t seem too interesting. Fortunately, I came across this site that will convert any image into a 16×16 icon that can be used as a favicon. Couldn’t be simpler. I used it to turn a screenshot of the site into an icon. Probably not the most creative route but hey, if I’d wanted creative I would have made one from scratch to begin with.
It’s always nice to learn that you’ve been doing something the right way all along. In this case, it involves my choice of mp3 encoder and the vindication comes from this Wired article on audio formats. The article talks about how people sometimes decide to go back and re-rip their CD collections in a different format or level of quality and endorses LAME as a high quality mp3 encoding option. I’ve been using LAME since I first starting ripping my collection 4-5 years ago. Of course I can’t really claim that was due to any knowledge of its quality but rather that it was just kind of the obvious choice as a free encoder. That’s why it’s reassuring to see that apparently it was a good choice. This is also good to know because eMusic, the source of almost all of my music these days, seems to use LAME for their encoding (if the tags in the files are correct anyway) and that’s just another thing in their favor. All of their stuff is variable bitrate encoded, while all of the stuff I’ve ripped myself falls between 128kbps and 192kbs. I’m no audiophile though, and honestly I can’t tell the difference in anything above 128kbps anyway. If there’s one thing I would do differently about ripping my CDs (and if I had known how dirt cheap hard drives would be in a few years believe me I would have) it would be to make a master copy first in a lossless format like FLAC and then encode mp3s from that. If there’s anything that’ll ever get me to take on the task of ripping all my collection again, that would be it. However, unless I end up stuck on a desert island with nothing but my CD collection, a computer, and a couple massive hard drives I doubt I’ll be getting around to that anytime soon.
The 1.5 release of Firefox seems to have changed a really annoying behavior of the previous versions where if it was set as your default browser and you clicked a link in another app (email, instant messenger) it would open in the currently open tab of the browser replacing whatever you had open in it already. With 1.5 it seems to do the civilized thing and open that link in a new tab instead. I don’t know maybe this was possible to do in previous versions with some setting, or maybe it was only on the Windows version, but it certainly bugged the crap out of me. I guess the point of this post is that if you haven’t made Firefox your default browser yet, now there seems to be one less reason not to do so.
Notice anything different about the site? Hopefully not. Over the weekend I finally got around to converting my MovableType database from Berkeley DB to MySQL. Exciting stuff, I know. I couldn’t even tell you why I initially went with the BerkeleyDB when I had a perfectly good database just sitting there waiting. It’s embarrasing, frankly. Let’s never speak of it again. I’d been putting it making the change forever because I was convinced something would go horribly wrong in the process. In actuality it was very simple and everything seems to be working fine since then. The official help page for upgrading MovableType databases was really helpful. The whole thing went so smoothly that it’s actually got me considering taking the big step and upgrading to from MT 2.661 to MT 3.2 or whatever they’re up to these days.
A couple weeks ago I noticed one evening that our internet connection was getting a little flaky and then the following morning it was totally out. At first I assumed it was our ISP’s fault but a quick look at our router, an early model Linksys WRT54G (about 3 years old), proved otherwise. Its diagnostic light was on and all the other lights were flashing on and off together, and it wouldn’t respond to resetting the hardware. Really this was probably my fault. I’d been running a third-party firmware for quite a while and using that to boost its signal power beyond the intended level, which made it run a little hot. I wouldn’t be suprised at all if that’s what lead to its demise. I was still otherwise pretty happy with the router other than that and I figured I’d get another one. After a quick trip to Best Buy to get a replacement I thought I had lucked out. They 2 rebates on the WRT54G, plus they were giving out a $10 gift card with the router. Not a bad deal it seemed, and hey, I figured that since the model had been out for a few years the current version would probably have some improvements on the older incarnation. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. I just happened to stumble across some information about how while the first 4 versions of this were a really good product the 5th version has taken a turn for the craptastic. This just happens to be the version that I just got. Apparently, in version 5 the system memory was cut in half and its reliable Linux firmware was replaced with a proprietary firmware that may be somewhat buggy currently. While I haven’t run into any major problems with it, the biggest thing is that it can no longer run 3rd party firmware. The biggest problem I have with all of this is that they made these substantial changes (downgrades really) and there’s no way to tell what you’re actually buying. The model number is the same, it doesn’t list any of those internal specs on the box and for all I knew I thought I was getting the same powerful, open router that I had before. While I know that none of these things probably make a difference to the vast majority of people that buy this product, it still seems shady to make those kind of changes without any indication. Linksys has made the older version available again as the WRT54GL (L for Linux) but unfortunately before I knew about any of this I’d already cut the UPC out of the box my new router came in to get the rebate so it’s too late to return it.
As of about 10 am yesterday Jolayne and I are now officially homeowners. We closed on our house, a nice little split level in Parkville, MO (How about that, the Parkville community website recommends FireFox. That’s certainly a promising sign) It’s a nice town a few minutes northwest of downtown KCMO. One of the things that we like about it is that it’s not too suburbish and has its own little downtown/main street area with a bunch of local shops and restaurants (including the excellent Piropos) So yeah, we really like the area it’s in. We really like the house itself too (which is, you know, probably a good thing). It was the 10th or 11th house we’d looked at I think and as soon as we walked in we knew that would probably be the one. We’re not actually moving in until the end of January though, the former owners are going to be renting from us until then (that’s right, not only are we homeowners now, we’re landlords. I may have to add that to my resume.) That works out really well because our apartment lease isn’t up until the end of February anyway. The hard part is waiting until then, but on the other hand I’m not looking forward to moving everything (but who does, right?) At least the only thing we really need to do before we move in is some painting (the bedrooms and one bathroom). I’ll probably get some pictures up of the inside once we start moving in.
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