DRM is bad
There is an interesting article on DRM at http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt. I'm not sure I agree with everything he said or that it was the best written thing, but I definitely appreciated the underlying point.
By the way, the Tour de France starts Saturday. WOOOOOOOOO.
Also, Monday marks my "Endurance" training beginning. I have 8 week blocks of endurance and drills for the rest of the year to get me ready for my two cycling goals of next season; 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo, and El Tour de Phoenix. I'm trying to keep the training times reasonable so they don't eat up my life like two years ago.. We'll see how well it goes. This first block's goal is to simply get some fitness, get used to the bike again, and lose some weight. I don't have huge goals for the first eight weeks, just simply get out and ride regularly with a focus. I will ride 6 days a week, with times varying from 30mins up to 3hours and 20mins over the eight weeks. I'm writing it down here so I'm held to it. No more slacking off!
the sky is falling (asleep)
I have been having a horrible time sleeping the last coupld of weeks and it's really gotten to the point where it is starting to impact things. The insomnia is classic of what I had a few years ago, and the solution is simply to start getting regular exercise again. Too bad I can't seem to get in a consistent cycle with that.
My insomnia did help me have time to create a new skin for the web interface to control the Squeezebox2s though. It looks pretty cool on my Palm. Picture is at http://www.mikeb.org/Handheld2.jpg and tarball is at http://www.mikeb.org/handheld2.tar.gz
Tausha is working this weekend to make a few extra bucks for school so I don't get to spend any time with her. I'm hoping that lets me get a few extra things done around the house, but would quite frankly rather see her. I think I will stop by the bar this evening and say hi since Jamie is having a graduation party down the street anyways and Melissa is trying to get me to go.
GNOME vs KDE
Funny comparison;
http://www.illusionary.com/GNOMEvKDE.html
Also, Apple has said they won't do anything to stop Windows from running on their new Intel-based hardware. Very cool.
health
Friday I finally felt 100%. I went to a party (well, work party..) in Queen Creek ~40 minutes east of my house in the middle of nowhere. I imagine the homes are cheap, but I would rather be close to the mountain preserve and pay more. When the homes get out to the San Tans, complete with mountain bike trails, I'll be there with my checkbook.
Speaking of my checkbook, I put together all my liquid assets and debt yesterday. It's depressing to look at it when you include your mortgage but not the value of your home. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see the final number at age 24. I couldn't have hoped for anything this good 10 years ago, but hey, it is still negative =).
I also drove all the way back to the same house last night to help a Brian move in. It was windy on the way out there, and driving through the farm land caused some low visibility with the blowing dust. I would hate to be driving out there during a monsoon storm, I can't even imagine. My bad night vision came into effect as Tausha called me for our nightly chat during the drive down Ironwood to US60 through darkness. The bunch of oncoming traffic didn't help either. Where were those people going?
Fedora Core 4 is my friend
The last piece of my "make sure everything is backed up" and move all my computers around to better support music project is to get a backup machine in another room of the house. I'm doing it on an old laptop with a PCMCIA Firewire Card/External hard drive, PCMCIA 802.11b, USB to USB hub with Bluetooth adapter and power to the fan cooling the laptop. Needless to say, CompUSA generic Firewire cards and Bluetooth cards didn't give me the warm fuzzies. Much to my surprise Fedora Core 4 had next to no issues with the Firewire/802.11b. This was after Debian 3.1r0a installed even better on the Firewire Drive, but crashed at boot, and never saw the wireless card. FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE didn't see any peripherals at all.
The USB Bluetooth adapter is a whole other story. This is going in so that I can surf the web around the house (and control the squeezebox2s!) with my Palm Pilot. I actually have it working right now, with range that covers the whole house with good speed. I am pleasantly surprised, even if it isn't working perfectly (requires one manual piece every time I boot, but hopefully I can fix that) after about 5 hours.
Enough geeking, I am feeling much healthier after more days of sitting on my butt not doing anything. I am looking forward to getting some exercise this weekend for the first time in two weeks. Father's Day is Sunday, don't forget to call your Dads!
Open Source Solaris
Sun finally joins the open source movement by opening much of solaris;
That leaves .. the MacOS GUI and the entire Windows family as the only major OS platforms that are still closed source.
A S U!
This weekend went off without a hitch (no more ants!) outside of the diamondbacks losing horribly while I was at the game on Sunday. The bullpen is just horrible. On my season tickets this year the diamondbacks are 1-4, being outscored 15-53. I went to two games outside of the season tickets, one they won 2-1, and the other lost 4-5 in 15 innings in San Diego. That's 2-5 outscored 21-59. It might as well be last year.. On the upside they're beating the best team in baseball 8-1 right now.
On the flip side who can forget ASU knocking out tournament place #6 Cal State Fullerton to head to the College World Series! Of course, now they have to play #3 Nebraska. Go Sun Devils! It's definitely good for them to knock out the team that knocked out Arizona.
I'm unfortunately still feeling the effects of being sick, although I did return to the working world today. Well, I worked at least.. I did it from home, so I really didn't return anywhere.
ANTS
I have ants in my house. I walked into the kitchen, set down my water cup, walked to the refrigerator, grabbed the pitcher of water, turned around to fill up my cup, saw an ant, smashed the ant with my cup, walked to the sink to refill the pitcher, and saw a few hundred ants.
Yes, I have ants in my house. I haven't exactly been diligent about keeping up with my home extermination regimen, and it finally bit me... so to speak. I spent a good 45 minutes cleaning up all the ants I could find and then exterminating the inside and outside of the house. It was an exciting evening while sick.
At least the diamondbacks won.
sickness, baseball, and squeezebox2s
I've been sick all week and it isn't any fun. It's nice to take a break from work but I would rather be taking it while healthy. I wasn't very encouraged to cough a bit of blood up this morning, but it seems to have been a short term thing. I am feeling a bit better today but just want this crud to go away.
Going to see the diamondbacks while sick last night wasn't the best idea. I felt alright during the game, but by the time I got home my throat didn't feel well at all. It wasn't a good game either. Since last Friday's game in Philadelphia was rained out they had to play a double header on Saturday. That screwed up the whole pitching rotation so we got to see Claudio Vargas instead of Javier Vazquez. Vargas was completely horrible, as expected, while facing one of the best pitchers in the game; Johan Santana. I usually refuse to leave games early, but not feeling well and losing 8-0 after 6.5 innings was motivation enough to get the hell out of there.
On a positive note my squeezebox2s arrived. You can check them out at http://www.slimdevices.com. They are set-top 802.11g (or wired Ethernet) MP3 players. They read the music from a "slimserver", which is a Unix, MacOS, or Windows machine running their software. The software is open source perl, so it can be run in probably any environment. I have my FreeBSD server where my MP3 collection is stored running it for both squeezebox2s. The audio can be synchronized between players or controlled separately. The displays are flourescent vacuum tubes that look amazing. They can be controlled via a web interface or via the infrared remotes that come with them. Enough of the advertisement, they do have some bugs, but it seems be mostly problems with the server software which I can attempt to debug and fix myself.
mikeb.org is here
www.mikeb.org now points here. This will considerably slow down picture viewing since "here" has limited bandwidth, but it will ease my management of the site. So deal with it.