Greyhawk's Meanderings

Technorati: future dumb wal-mart

I know I should never, ever go to a Wal-Mart. The place is pure evil, and by going there I am always reminded about how idiotic and rude our culture has become here in the US. Here's what happened this afternoon.

After work I had to pick up an accessory for my XBox. So I went to department in Wal-Mart and had an employee unlock the accessory for me, and ring it up. As we are going to the register in his department, a teenager with full Hot Topic ensemble and mussy hair asks the employee 'Duuuude, where are your Whoopie Cushions?' The guy wasn't sure what he meant, so the teenager asked again, and when the employee tried to point him to the Furniture department, the guy was like 'Oh my god Dude, I can't believe you don't know what a Whoopie Cushion is! Pathetic dude...' And he walks away.

The employee was funny about it and asked me if I knew what a Whoopie Cushion was, so I explained it and we laughed. The employee said 'Wow, I'm really upset that I didn't know that...' with a nice dose of sarcasm. The employee was cool, but the teenager was Dumbass number one.

Next, I went to the parking lot. There was a woman whose car was backed into her spot. She was unloading stuff into her car. When she got done, she left the cart in the spot next to her. This was while the cart return was RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER CAR. She would have had to walk an extra ten feet, but NO. Dumbass number two.

NOTE: This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. One time I saw a guy do that so I blocked him in with my car and purposefully took the cart he discarded and returned it to the cart return while he was forced to wait. Nowadays I would probably get shot for that, but anyway, that's the level I detest these people.

So I leave the lot and start to drive home. On the corner is someone holding a sign advertising a local pizza place. It's about a four foot by three foot sign and would be a nice advertisement... IF HE WASN'T HOLDING IT UPSIDE DOWN! [sigh] Yes, the moron who's only job was to hold a sign got it wrong. Dumbass number three.

One trip to Wal-Mart, ten minutes, three complete idiots. I fear for our future... I honestly do. I try to combat it by raising smart, polite, good kids. The only problem is that the idiots are too dumb not to over procreate, so we'll always be outnumbered... gah.

Permalink | Posted at 7:09 PM | Add/Read Comments (4) |          

Technorati: mp3 drm music rip

Okay, so you have a large collection of music, and we'll assume that it's on CD at this point. You want to get your music into a format you can play on your computer and other digital devices. You do this by converting (or ripping) the songs on the CD to your hard drive in some computer format. There are tons out there: Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV, MP3 etc.

Each format has strengths and weaknesses. I myself am going to recommend MP3. For me the choice to do so is pretty simple. MP3 can pretty much play on anything. Computers, home media streamers, all music players including iPods, Xbox, Playstation, many new car stereos etc. MP3 is simply the most supported format for music in the world. It will give you the most flexibility to play pretty much wherever you want because it has no Digital Rights Management (DRM) tacked on.

Now MP3 is a lossy format, which means that when you convert a song from your CD to MP3, it's going to lose some quality due to the compression. If the best quality is all you are after, then you will want to look at lossless music formats. Just be aware that many of those will NOT play everywhere, have much larger file sizes and will probably limit you quite a bit.

Okay, so if you trust Uncle Greyhawk, you'll choose MP3. Now you have to get music off of the CD and into the MP3 format in a process commonly called "ripping" the songs. If you look it up online, there are TONS of rippers and jukeboxes you can use. You can do the research and find the program that works the best for you, or you can even use the program that came with your computer. On Windows it's Windows Media Player and on the Mac it's iTunes. These programs generally want to rip to their own formats, but if you look in the preferences, you can change them to choose MP3 as your format of choice. Here's what the changes look like in iTunes.

Now, when you choose MP3, there is also a thing called bit-rate. Without getting into particulars, just know that the higher the number, the better the sound quality. It also makes the file size larger as well, so you'll want to find a quality/size balance. My recommendation is 192 kps. But, you can try for yourself. Try ripping one of your favorite songs at 128 kps, 160 kps, 192 kps and 256 kps. Listen to them all and see where the quality is acceptable for you. When you find the quality you like you can set it and forget it.

So now all you have to do is put your CD in the computer, the ripper will try to figure out the names of the artist and the tracks, and then you rip the songs to the MP3 format somewhere on your hard drive and we're ready for the next step. Starting your library. Until Next time, play it loud...

NOTE: I know that people will want to know how to get cassettes and vinyl and mini-disc and the like into MP3 files. I'll get to that later

Permalink | Posted at 2:06 PM | Add/Read Comments (4) |          

Technorati: mp3 drm music

Welcome to Greyhawk's Digital Music Class. I decided to start writing some posts after several people (in the blogosphere and real life) asked me how I manage my (hedonistically large) music library. I'll try to put these posts out there once in awhile, and I hope you get something out of them.

I'll give you a little background on myself and on my music collection. First off, I've been a music fan since my first 8-track at 5 years old. I've always loved music, and have been a collector since I started saving money. In college I became a disc jockey at both the college radio station and the local 100,000 watt classic rock station. Through my (five) years of college, I did every job they had at the college station including two stints as the station manager. I also worked nearly 40 hours a week at the classic rock station. Sometimes it was commercial copy writing and production, but mostly it was on-air jocking.

During this whole time, I continued to amass titles in my collection. I would snag freebies any time I could, and at the college station, I worked with record company reps that liked me enough to send me multiple copies of every new release. That allowed me to have one and another could go to the station. During that time I also got on the guest list of hundreds of live concerts. The point it, music is a lot of what makes me, well... me.

I've tried a lot of things to manage the collection. In the past I've done things like have three 400-disc CD changers tethered together and to a computer to be able to manage it all. Besides the cost and the sheer size of that solution, it just became too cumbersome to find the music I wanted at any given moment. In recent years I've taken the majority of my music library and digitized it into MP3 format so I could catalog it and use it anywhere. This has freed my musical spirit considerably. I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want, and I can even transport almost my whole collection on a single 160GB ipod. It's liberating. I'll help you get to where I am, and avoid the pitfalls along the way.

In the next installment we'll talk about how to get your current library into the digital realm, without DRM.

Permalink | Posted at 1:04 PM | Add/Read Comments (3) |          

Technorati: adobe lightroom lightroom adobe photography

Today Adobe released version 2 of my favorite image management program, Adobe Lightroom. I use Lightroom to manage my entire digital image library. I keep everything in RAW (and you should to) then I adjust and export (i.e. develop) when I need a JPEG to send to people or to post on places like flickr.

I've been really excited to see the new version, and I can't wait to get home tonight and start playing around. The new 64-bit support and memory management on my iMac should make the program just scream.

To see some of what did and didn't make it into Lightroom 2, check out Scott Kelby's post entitled Lightroom 2 Vs. My Lightroom 2 'Wish List'.

EDIT: Tons of information on the improvements here at the Lightroom Journal blog too. Camera Profiles, Multiple Monitor Support, better keywording and tagging, a killer adjustment brush, better SDK. This thing rocks...

Permalink | Posted at 7:53 AM | Add/Read Comments (0) |          

Technorati: intranetjournal lotus notes sntt Show-N-Tell Thursday

This month's Intranet Journal article deals with customizing your Login Forms to your Domino Intranet using domcfg.nsf. I'm always surprised when I see logins at places that are still the default when it's so easy to at least swap out for your own logo. So hopefully I've helped beautify the world of Domino web apps a little bit.

Permalink | Posted at 5:33 PM | Add/Read Comments (0) |          

Technorati: science animals birds

Been quiet for a couple weeks, sorry about that. In the middle of my dry stretch I had a work trip to Las Vegas where we set up our new VOIP system in the Vegas office. It works great, but it was three days of cable testing and plugging in phones in the desert. In the evening I got to gamble a bit and I came out ahead $22 after about 5 hours of $11/hand Pai-Gow Poker. So it was a productive trip both on the business and fun side.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is because I thought something we went through here was really cool. My eldest daughter had a robin family set up a nest on the window sill right outside her window where her bed is. When we first noticed it, it had 3 blue robin eggs in it. Well my girls checked on the nest all the time until one-by-one, they all hatched into little chicks. One disappeared early on, but the other two were nurtured into little baby robins and yesterday they set off on their own. The picture below was the final baby before he left the nest.



This was the second cool circle of life we've seen this spring. Early on, the girls found a furry bear caterpillar. They brought it in and put it in a jar. Shorly after, it created a chrysalis. For two weeks the chrysalis sat until one day a bright orange moth emerged. They took it outside and let it fly away.

We homeschool, so to have two instances of life science like this just fall into our laps was a wonderful thing. The girls loved it and learned a lot.

Now I should probably tell them that the baby bird ate the moth

Permalink | Posted at 8:15 PM | Add/Read Comments (1) |          

Technorati: lotus notes community intranet journal

My latest for Intranet Journal is out now. Collaborating in the Lotus Community is an article I had planned months ago, so it became rather timely when the whole iPhone discussion and John Head's call to action happened.

Hopefully the article is a great jumping off point for those new to the Lotus community. If you have someone who wants to expand their horizons, please point them to the article and also point them to John Head's community slides.

I'm really proud to be a part of this community, and the more people we can have join us the better!

You may ask yourself, why do I care about any of this? Well the reasons are simple. By becoming part of the Lotus Notes user community you can easily gain access to some of the best minds ever to wield a Notes client. You can make contacts with these people, interact and learn a lot.

For me, if you join in the fun, I get to hear another voice, another perspective and ultimately we all wind up stronger as a community. It may be pure unbridled selfishness on my part, but in this case, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Permalink | Posted at 2:48 PM | Add/Read Comments (1) |          

Technorati: social networking microblogging social

There are so many new social networks and microblogging tools out there now, that it's hard to figure out which ones to use, so basically I've started subscribing to all of them to figure out which ones are good. Currently I have accounts on the following:

• Facebook - Personal Social Networking
• MySpace - Personal Social Networking
• Linked In - Business Social Networking
• Twitter - Microblogging
• Pownce - Microblogging
• Jaiku - Microblogging
• Tumblr - Microblogging
• Plurk - Microblogging
• Ping.fm - Post to all of the above at once
• del.icio.us - Personal Social Bookmarking
• Digg.com - Social news site
• Flickr - Photo hosting and social networking
• Friendfeed - Aggregate all of the above content into one place

I imagine I'll keep all of the microblogging tools, so that anyone that wants to follow me can do so at whichever one they want. To me it's kind of like having IM accounts on all of the systems and using one client to hit them all. Most of my effort is spent on Twitter though as conversations generally take place there.

Friendfeed is better than I expected, and a nice place to kind of put everything. Gotta see if there's an easy way to widgetize it or put it on a webpage on my personal site too. Or is there a better overall aggregator out there that I should be using? Profilactic looks kind of decent, any of you readers using it?

So the question is, are there any really good sites I'm missing? Are there any that I should completely avoid? I've pretty much written off Orkut, and Brightkite and their ilk don't appeal to me. I don't need people knowing my physical location all the time. In fact, I prefer that they believe I just live in the ether... I'm not a big fan of MySpace either, but I maintain that just to talk with people who only have MySpace, or to check out band stuff.

So how about you folks, are you getting overwhelmed with all the options, or just using one or two, or avoiding social tools altogether. Am I a complete nutbag for using this many? Let me know...

Permalink | Posted at 8:32 AM | Add/Read Comments (2) |          

Technorati: rape child rape death penalty

To me, there's nothing more despicable than violence against a child. People that sexually violate a child are the worst scum of the Earth. In fact, I've often thought that the death penalty should be applied in these cases. Child Rapists (as well as molesters who were entrusted with a child's care) should just be put down in my opinion. End of story. Unfortunately it looks like the Supreme Court disagrees with me (by a 5-4 margin.)

From the majority decision:

Based both on consensus and our own independent judgment, our holding is that a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

I don't like the decision at all, but it looks likes its based on constitutionality. [sigh] My only hope is that these bastards repeatedly get some karmic payback in prison, if you know what I mean.

Permalink | Posted at 1:01 PM | Add/Read Comments (7) |          

Technorati: planetlotus lotus rss feed reader

I'd been meaning to post this for a little while, but a couple things today made me decide to finally do this. Now, let me clarify things first. I LOVE PlanetLotus.org. I think it's a wonderful contribution to our community and I think it's an incredible way to get people into viewing the Lotus blogging community. In fact, I have an upcoming IntranetJournal article where the first thing I share with the reader is PlanetLotus.org. So realize this, I think it's cool. There is NO hating going on.

That said, I will take a feed reader over planetlotus.org only any day.

I've seen a couple people recently say they've stopped using RSS readers and only use PlanetLotus.org now. That scares me, and leads me to believe a lot of people are missing some great content. So here's a few reasons I think a FeedReader is much better than PlanetLotus.org on it's own.

• Unread marks - An RSS reader will have unread marks associated with all the posts. It's easy to see what you have and have not looked at.
• Speed - An RSS Reader pulls down the text of post and stores it locally. So, when you go to read it, it's immediate. On planetlotus.org you have to click the link and actually GO to the website in question. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, sometimes the site is down.
• Offline ability - Since the posts are downloaded, you can read them offline. So sync your feed reader, then take it on the train, under a tree, anywhere you might not have access.
• Archival ability - I can mark a post as flagged to keep it for later. That way I can keep all the best posts available.
• Grouping - You can group blogs together in folders based on anything you wish. If I wanted all admin blogs in one folder and all dev blogs in another, or all Quickr blogs in another. I can do that and easily separate content I want.
• Keyword searching - If I don't want to group, I can set up my feed reader to flag everything with a particular keyword. I can have it show me everything with Quickr in it if that's what I'm currently interested in.
• Synching amongst locations - I use NetNewWire on Mac, FeedDemon on Windows and sync it all through the NewsGator online service. Unread marks and archives and everything travel between my various pieces of software. So no matter where I read stuff, everything syncs up.
• I'm in control - I don't have to see blogs I don't care to read in the midst of my headlines. With PL, I get em all, whether I want to or not.

Those are just a couple technical reasons I like using feed readers better. Another one is this, and I believe this is the biggest thing:

If you don't read planetlotus.org every hour or so, you will miss stories.

It's true, because of the amount of posts, things scroll by fast on PL. If you aren't refreshing PL all the time, you run the risk of missing good stories. Also, I believe most users won't scroll past that one screen. Right now I see about 20 stories on my screen, and normally if I go to PL, I look at those stories and MAYBE I'll scroll past that to the bottom of the page. But I've never clicked NEXT PAGE.

And what if you make a post that isn't while half the world is awake? Will people around the world completely miss your post? It's a possibility, and that kind of sucks. With an RSS reader, you can walk away for a week and come back and still have access to all the content that happened while you were away. You can do that with planetlotus.org, but it's a lot of clicking. And it's clicking that I think people just won't do.

For me planetlotus.org is the gateway drug. It's the way to get people interested in Lotus blogs. And for casual readers, it's the perfect end solution. But for someone who really wants to follow the community more closely, I think adding feeds to your RSS reader will ultimately be a better solution for you. Right now, I use PL to search for blogs I don't already subscribe to. When I find ones I like, I add them to my feed reader.

So for me, I almost never visit PlanetLotus.org even though I find it highly valuable. And since I never click on a headline on PL, I never contribute to what is hot or not. Sometimes the numbers on what are hot kind of baffle me, and that's one of the other things we can talk about. Maybe in the next post.

So my answer is, promote the hell out of PlanetLotus.org and once you get people hooked on the blogs, get them into using a feed reader. They'll thank you.

Permalink | Posted at 12:10 PM | Add/Read Comments (5) |