BrainWyrms

I have been looking around for a while for a good wordpress theme that would allow me to have most post fragments on the landing page.  I played around with one, gridblog, that was extremely plain and simplistic.  I kind of liked that though, as it plain and simplistic sense of style.  [cough cough] But when I ended up having to hack the theme in order to get the plugins to work, and again to get the front page to show snippets of the posts.  That just didn’t work for me.  I started using wordpress because I do not want to waste the time that it would take for me to learn PHP well enough to code my own CMS and then to take the time to actually do the design, coding, testing, etc.  I wanted something more versitile than my setup, deadjournal via javascript output.  So hacking a theme to barely function was not acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing around with a variety of different themes lately. I’m trying to find a nice magazine style to use, and so far I have found a few nice ones. Except that they all seem to either have some piece that doesn’t fit my usage style or they seem to require a manual and a dozen plugins. Read the rest of this entry »

As an unabashed fan of Mr. Tom Merritt, I have noticed a recent upswing in his appearance on ‘foreign’ podcasts.  I cannot help but think that this is calculated to raise his ‘brand’ among the new media set.  I hereby predict that he will be moving to a higher profile position sometime in the next year.

To over-reach my prognostication, I think that he will be going on to cover the CBS Nightly News desk.  [cough cough]

Links for Tom Merritt:
Subbrilliant Corporation
Buzz Out Loud
acedtect on twitter
Sword And Laser

‘Foreign’ Podcasts featuring Mr. Merritt:
Geek Cred #26
How I WOW #10
TWiT #164
Cranky Geeks #136
Phileas Club #6

Muxtape was this weird little online analog (digital analog?) of the old mix tapes that we used to make with the dual decks.  But it is gone now.  At least for now.  The mafia side of the music industry is working on making them die now.  ”Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

But from the ashes, something must rise… right?  This time, it is a new opensource software program that enables practically anyone to -be- Muxtape.  It is called Opentape and pretty much all it takes to get running is a web host with PHP5 and an FTP client.  

So instead of everyone hosting their analogous mixtapes at one central location, now anyone so inclined can host their mixtape on their own site.  To see it in action, check out my BrainWyrms mix… Right at this moment, I’ve got Nine Inch Nails from Ghosts I.  I’ll probably add some other “open-source” music as I find it.

I got a Google Alert for BrainWyrms the other day. The crawler had dug up an old image on DeviantArt with my magic name. Pretty damn cool.

Brainwyrms by ~kiyo

Last night, on the way into work, etherius twittered:

Anybody want to contribute some background voices to Metamor City? Need a bunch of volunteers for a minute’s worth of audio…

The scene has a bunch of people in a dance circle watching one guy show off his moves. Need cheering, whoops, clapping, & encouraging words

This sounded like a fun little way to actually get involved, to at least pretend to be contributing to a medium that I spend a LOT of time on.

In reality, what I found was A> I can have stage fright in an empty house. B> I suck at pretending out loud. C> I suck at cheering in general. It was rather ridiculous that I was sitting there choking up in front of my mic. Blah. So I pulled up youTube to help me out. I appreciate good dancing, and I figured that I would find it easier to respond for real.

Ha!

I was wrong about that. I normally just sit there silently appreciating. I am watching a real dance off and I have to force myself to vocalize the appreciation for… well, what I am appreciating. Those dudes were pretty impressive and I certainly enjoyed the girl with the long hair, but a grunt here or there with maybe an “ah!” thrown in for good measure is all I would normally do.

I don’t even clap at events. This was soooo uncomfortable.

But really cool, because now I can -feel- how much harder it must be for the guys and gals who are making these audio dramas and podiobooks. On the one hand, this makes me want to get involved even more. And on the other, I don’t think I could do this unless the house was totally and completely empty.

[display_podcast]

Podcast: Play in new window

Molly Wood, co-host of the Buzz Out Load daily tech news podcast (amongst a host of other things), posted on her blog the other day about why her Zune is dead to her now.  She lists five reasons that have caused her feel this way, and I have to say, yeah… she’s dead on.

I think the worst part of this is that the hardware itself is rather nice.  Not quite as nice as a click-y wheel, like the iPods and some of the Sansas, but still a good thing.  And ruining everything is the software, and to a lesser extent, the firmware/UI.

Maybe they’ll release a less than craptastic bit of programming with the 3rd gen Zune hardware.

HaHaHa Ha Ha!  Sorry, I crack myself up sometimes.

I spent several hours over the past few days working on getting my Zune 30 to sync with my Zune software.  (I was craving my Buzz Out Loud.)  During this period of time I re-downloaded and installed all of the latest software, drivers, patches, etc.  I uninstalled the software.  I manually deleted the registry entries (since the uninstall doesn’t bother with this.)

After doing an uninstall followed by a registry cleaning and a reboot, I was able to at least get the software side of things working in a very stable manner.  Until I tried to connect the Zune.  When given the option to sign in as a guest or to make this “new” computer my home, I chose to move.  After that, I was given the option to start syncing things or to wait on that.  It was when I chose to sync my podcasts that the software failed out.

I detached my Zune 30 and executed the software again.  Still looking good - even on the podcast tab - until I connected the Zune 30.  Boom!  Down and out again.

Re-run the software, change the settings to NOT sync.  Connect the hardware.  Stable… check the podcasts tab of my “collection” and still holding strong.  Poke around and around and still looking good.  Poke too far, this time into the podcast tab of my “device” and Boom!  Down again.

Okay.  This is what I am thinking.  I’ve got a corrupt something or other.  It is on the my Zune 30, not on my HDD.  I think it is one of my podcasts or podcast feeds, but it could be the photos or the music or the videos.  As long as I don’t try to update the podcasts or look at them on the player, I’m good.

So I go in and hand wipe everything from the player.  No more music.  No more photos.  No more podcasts.  I have a fit and leave my Roswell Pilot episode on ‘cuz it took literally hours on the old machine to transcode and copy onto the player.

Then I start setting up my sync options.  And so far, everything is holding steady.  I’m still having some really odd moments, like how the hardware says that I have still got four artists and some 20-odd tracks but the software says that I have a single artist with no tracks at all.  But so far… so far, my luck is holding.  I have about 20 of my 103 feeds resubbed and synced up again.

I’m taking it slow and hopefully will be able to identify where things go bad IF I hit that suspected corrupt file again.  But I’d much rather just have it work and continue working.  Because I really do need my Buzz Out Loud every single freakin’ day.

My Zune hardware, despite having a somewhat anemic battery life (but don’t they all) and a defective hold switch (it wants to fall off and it occasionally turns itself on mentally), is a fairly good piece of podplaying tech.

The software, on the other hand, is a mental reject.

To be fair, I realize that part of the problem is that I just ripped the guts out of my box and replaced everything but the hard drive. So Windows XP wasn’t happy with me, and neither was Microsoft’s overly DRM-happy Zune software. I had to reinstall first XP and then the Zune software.

Why didn’t Microsoft follow in Apple’s trail and name the freakin’ software something else? It’s stoopid that I have to say Zune S or Zune H every single time. St00p1d!!!

To continue, even after patching XP up to date and re-installing all the bits of Zune S (’cuz it’s not just point-and-click), the program faulted out every time that I opened it. It was at this point that I discovered how bloody crappy the official information for the Zune really is. If you want help with your problems, then you are going to have to either look outside of the official channels or be some sort of Knowledge Base ninja (’cuz I sure couldn’t find any useful information - on ANY topic.) Eventually I found a posting on a forum somewhere that suggested the DRM must be corrupt and to delete the DRM directory under “Documents and Settings/All Users/”. I feel that a !!!!! is warranted at this point.

That worked for me. I deleted the DRM dir and was able to actually update my podcasts for a few days. Syncing the Zune H worked fine and all was well. Until something when glitch and an in progress sync session was interrupted. After that, I haven’t been able to update my podcasts becuase every single time the Zune S fails out as soon as I click on the Collection - Podcast tab. Boom! Fails out with what amounts to no error message for me to trouble shoot with. Of course, it does not check my feeds, download new tracks, update the Zune H, or remove old tracks either.

The delete the DRM folder trick didn’t work this time. I uninstalled the software and re-installed it. It took 15 seconds to reinstall, so I was pretty sure that it didn’t actually get rid of anything. The Zune S failed out as soon as I hit Podcast. So I deleted the DRM folder, uninstalled and deleted the Zune S. Rebooted! And then reinstalled the software.

That actually worked.

For 15 minutes.

I’m back to square zero. I can’t seem to find reliable troubleshooting information for the Zune 2.3 software. As far as I can tell, the error code being sent to Microsoft is something like #0000000005. I haven’t found any information on that error. At this point, I’m going to have to get out Regedit and start pruning things away in a manner that always makes me nervous. Or find a new podcatcher program and manually transfer the ‘casts in and out.

I wish that the software just worked. I also wished that there was any good podcatcher software out there. (Don’t bother telling me about some ‘catcher software that is sooo great, cuz it isn’t. I’ve tried most of them and they are all suckbags in more than one aspect.) I also wish that ID3 tags included a field for “played”. I bet that would catch on really fast as a way to get around the monoliths of podcatching.

P.S.  I didn’t really get into the issues with the software when it is actually working.  I’ll come back to this sometime.

I’m listening to NewsGang Live 03.31.08 and once again getting confused AND riled up. I can’t understand what Gilmor is trying to express, he keeps using terms and jargon that have other more normal meanings. It took him forever to explain what exactly it was that Google had done that was ‘breaking the social contract’ but he finally had it choked out of him a few days ago and now I understand.

And once I understood, I started to believe. Hey, what-do-you-know! Google is doing something a little strange with sharing my data.

But then today, Gilmor is back on the topic of @. And I’ll grant that he does have a certain point, in that the @ replies in twitter are largely unnecessary. Start a convo with it, and just run from there. This is open communication ladies and gentlemen, so deal with it by being open.

Until he revealed that half of his problems are related to having no idea what the mobile half of twitter does. Oh and this NONSENSE about Apple holding ATT down and how Blackberry only released the WiFi enabled handsets because Apple was restraining ATT. WTF? How can you comment on the state of things if you don’t know the history? Heh?

Which is my que to shut up.

Thankfully I rarely listen to my own good advice.

I’m done listening to the Gang and the NewsGang.  It takes too much of my very limited time.  However, I have this feeling that Gilmor is pulling some sort of SnowCrash or Neuromancer and that in 15 years everything he is saying about gestures and “links are dead” will be plain common sense.  He’s misunderstood in his home, just like all prophets.