ZogBlog

It's 8:20a and I just got my seat. Left side, second main session near the camera. Naturally I can't see over the big and tall people. Taking pictures would be useless. Only two (oops, there's a third) non-descript women in viewing range. All in all... I got shitty seats. But who didn't? The entire front was already "protected before I even arrived. We're talking probably about a 1000 seats. Scoble was intermingling in the area... so I'm guessing they were press seats.

BTW, does anyone have any idea how weak I look blogging this event on a PowerBook? Sheesh. I've turned down the brightness so I can get longer battery life... maybe it'll last.

They are playing "I'm Coming Out" now. Usually the music is themed... so what the hell does this mean? Now they are playing the "To Be Real" song. Just curious - who's faking? Now "Stayin' Alive"... ahh, ahh, ahh Stayin' Aliiiivvvveeeeeee Oh baby!Now on to Sting's "Da do do do" song. "Their logic ties you up and rapes you"... who are they talking about?

Blah. Movie where Napoleon Dynamite slaps Bill Gates. Blah. Don Box arrives. Cool code demo's showing integration of XAML, Avalon, Indigo, Atlas in VS2005. More blah.

Microsoft is discounting a Magneto product... $850 off... and BT headset for $9.95. We get 30GB of bits.

Numerous women run out half way through. Must be a bladder thing.

ConnectionString girl leaves early (say 30mins).

Tags: [PDC05]

Last week out of the blue I got the option of going to the White House. Since I had never been, I ponied up my SSN... and waited for a ticket.

Various people from work snuck over in the middle of the day to go. I walked /metro'd over with Tom's Wife, Kids & German Au Pair (sp?). Without a flash, my phone takes crappy pictures. I tried to use the Au Pair's (Lena) Cannon... but apparently I'm not strong enough to press the shutter button. By the time I did, I think she blinked. Probably my worst picture ever...

Anyway, go take a look. I'm in a few... but mostly they are just interior shots of the dining halls. Seems like there are like 40 dining halls. Man we really should tear that building down and build a bigger/better one. Some people are rolling over right now at the thought. Hey, watch it - I'm a progressive over here!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shartzog/sets/72157594407613348/

UPDATE [12.06.2006]: A few more pics added from a coworker. Also, apparently that same morning the protesters who were outside had a woman throw a package into the yard. The joke roaming the tubes is that she will be carted off to Guantanomo. So there's that.

UPDATE [12.07.2006]: Au Pair's name is Lena. I'm told it's a German name. I probably should have snapped a shot of her so people would know what she looked like... but there is a good ch

Hello... Is this thing on? heh.

My brother got married recently in Jacksonville, AL... and now I have a sister! I certainly wish Frank and his beautiful bride Cheryl a happy life together. For all my friends: Frank is a phys-ed teacher and Cheryl is a bank loan agent (executive?).

This is the best Thanksgiving gift my brother has ever given me (not that he did it for me - but I definitely benefit from it). :)

A sister. Welcome to the family Cheryl!

You really should subscribe to Neowin: "According to a German blog, Microsoft plans to release Beta 2 Technical Refresh on the 14/15 September"

Or if you don't - subscribe to this killer German blog.

Neowin on a roll today: "Beta 2 of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 has just appeared on the Mozilla FTP in the release folder"

I'm not sure what 2.0 is going to give us (I primarily use IE7RC1 at home, and IE6 at work), but hopefully it won't randomly use 97% of my CPU like it (Firefox 1.5.0.6 - which I use because GCal doesn't work with IE7 yet) does now.

Wouldn't this be cool?

I can dream can't I? Of course this is about as likely as everyone seeing through the fairy tale of a Christian any God. "The rapture is coming, millions of people are prophesied to die. Yeah!"

Thanks to Ozymandias for bringing this photo to my attention.

A few days ago it was deleting files off my PMC (Gigabeat-S), now it is deleting, but not updating the library based on the monitored folders, not updating the Auto Playlists from the library (including updated titles) and not updating play counts in the Auto playlists after playing files.

Oh boy. It's time for beta2. What the hell is taking them so long? It's been months... meanwhile IE7 has seen TWO releases.

No. But she is:

Pong get's all dressed up at German art exhibit

SFII was released a little buggy. When my son and I played, the controllers randomly swapped places... then disabled one. I had to completely restart both controllers and the game to get it working correctly.

Considering how long they took releasing it... this is completely ridiculous. Hopefully this fix makes it a bit more stable. Well, at least no cheats have materialized like the card game (if you can call it a card game... it's no Mille Bourne's or Magic) they recently released.

Games updated that I have:

• Sid Meier's Pirates! [Sweet! I've sooo been waiting for this one.]
• Taz Wanted

I'm still hoping for updates to:

• Leisure Suit Larry
• Capcom Classics Collection Vol 1.
• Midway Arcade Treasures
• Midway Arcade Treasures 2
• Monopoly Party
• X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

And for my son (before I update him to X360):

• Shrek 2
• Scooby Doo: Mystery Mayhem
• Hulk

Autoblog: ... [that] most Saturn's are part of a small group of vehicles that don't require the installation of a lube pump to circulate the transmission fluid in order to be towed with all four wheels on the ground.

Huh. I wonder why their aren't more cars that support this. Oh, and the link talks about a new RV that can garage cars between its axles in an undercarriage.

Places I want to go:

• Machu Pichu, Peru (Incan)
• The Great Wall, China
• The Forbidden City, China
• The Great Pyramids, Egypt
• The Grand Canyon (while White Water Rafting down the Colorado River)
• Anasazi Cliff Palace, White House Ruins and cave paintings
• Golden Temple, India
• Sydney, Australia
• Taj Mahal, India
• Ayer's Rock/Uluru, Australia
• Great Barrier Reef, Australia
• Venice, Italy
• Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
• Niagra Falls
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Yosemite National Park, CA
• Yellowstone National Park, WY
• Serengeti, Tanzania
• Palenque, Mexico (Mayan)
• Acropolis, Greece
• Delphi, Greece
• Count Dracula's Castle, Romania
• Volcanoes National Park, HI
• Akihabara District, Tokyo Japan (Tech Market)
• The Alamo, TX
• Stone Henge, England
• St. Petersburg, Russia

Places I've been:

• Chichen Itza, Mexico (Mayan)
• The Houses of Parliament (aka the Palace of Westminster), London (from across the Thames)
• Westminster Abbey, London
• The French Riviera, France
• Pompeii, Italy
• The Principality de Monaco & Monte Carlo, Monaco
• Skiing in the Alps
• Statue of Liberty, NY
• Palace of Versailles (King Louis VII Castle), France
• Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
• Heidelberg Castle, Castle
• The Oktoberfest, Germany
• Christkindlmarkt, Germany
• Sail The Rhine River, Germany
• The Grand Canyon, NV
• National Gallery of Art, DC
• National Air and Space Museum, DC
• Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum, DC
• Renaissance Fair, MD
• National Aquarium in Baltimore, MD
• Philadelphia Zoo, PA (America's First Zoo)
• Smithsonian National Zoological Park, DC
• International Spy Museum, DC
• U.S. Capitol Building, DC
• Amalfi Coast, Italy
• World Trade Center, NY (top of a tower!)
• Empire State Building, NY
• The Pentagon, VA
• Puerto Vallarta (Jalisco, Mexico - where Predator was filmed)
• Las Vegas!
• Star Trek: The Experience, NV
• Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virgnia
• Afghanistan, Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, England, Austria, France, Mexico

These are all part of the human experience, and I want to be a part of them... and for them to be a part of me. But what about things that we can't do today? I doubt that any human in my lifetime will do the following... but wow, would it be cool.

• Set foot on Mars
• See the Moons of Jupiter, from orbit
• See the Rings of Saturn from orbit
• Make First Contact

Where have you been? Where do you want to go?

Yesterday after dinner at Sakura's in Woodbridge, I decided it was time to get some new games for game night.

I picked up (with their current rankings at boardgamegeek.com):

1.   Caylus (#3) [This is most likely the next game my gaming group will play.]
2.  The Gardens of Alhambra (#1064) [I already had played it.]
3. Indus (#2122) [I thought I had played this... but I must have been thinking of   Industria (#277).]

I also picked these up a few weeks ago.

1. Tigris & Euphrates (#2) [Already played it. Pretty good.]
2.  El Grande (#5) [Awesome game!]
3. Nexus (#196)
4. Trans Europa (#699) [Same as Trans America, but in Europe.]
5. Wings of War (#NA)

 It's a pretty good collection, especially since I already have Puerto Rico (#1). My next games will most likely be:

1. Power Grid (#4)
2. Railroad Tycoon (#20)
3.  Industria (#277).

I've been trying to get my podcasts in order this weekend. This, following my the migration from my G4 PowerBook to a HP zv5000 (work laptop), to a Dell M1710 (that I'm returning due to numerous issues), to my old Dell Inspiron 8200, and back to the HP zv5000. I had gradually been backing up my files to a new 500GB NAS device that I purchased not long ago - but many of my files were strewn about all over the place. Too make all of this interesting, I swapped over from iTunes to WMP11beta1, to WMP10, and back to WMP11 (with iTunes on the side for M4V & MOV podcasts). Too make things doubly interesting for Podcast management I moved from iPodderX to iTunes, to Newsgator/FeedDemon/FeedStation.

That's a lot of shit to go through. Trust me, it hasn't been easy. I've wasted so much time, that I'm reminded of all the time I wasted on managing my MP3s (mostly ripped from CDs I own), some bought online at iTunes, others at allofmp3.com. Now I use Napster+XM, and listen mostly to PodSafe music (when I'm not listening to Podcasts that is).

I feel like it's been horrendously useless to manage my podcasts. But today I finally got iTunes (for the M4V's and MOVs) and WMP11beta1 pointing to the NAS. iTunes was a lark because I was tired of FeedStation only being able to forward ALL podcasts into ONE media client. Sure, I've tried to get M4Vs and MOVs to work in WMP... but none of the trialware I've downloaded can play most of them. I really want to use WMP11, but I just can't when it comes to these files. It really pisses me off that some of my Microsoft podcasts use M4V... which is not playable with WMP out of the box. Aaaahhhh!

There I feel better. Can you feel my pain? Probably not. But then again nobody has probably read this far down anyway.

Since everyone's gone and I'm talking to myself now (those losers aren't good enough for us anyway) - dude, you are sooo cool. Heh heh.

Anyway, I ran into an interesting issue with iTunes that caused me to lose some important podcasts. Here's the steps I used:

1. Install latest version of iTunes (6.05)
2. Update iTunes directory to point to NAS
3. Subscribe to all M4V & MOV podcasts in iTunes
4. Update those same podcasts in FeedStation so they won't download or update anymore
5. Let iTunes grab the latest from each feed
6. Move my podcast files over into the new NAS into the folders created by iTunes
7. Restart iTunes

At this point (at least in previous versions) iTunes should pick up the fact that more of the podcasts are already in the download folders. But, you guessed it. Nothing. So I decided to kick it, and told iTunes to add everything to the library that was in the library folder. Bad move.

iTunes decided to help me (aka pulling a Microsoft), and just delete anything it hadn't placed in those folders. Sweet <head banging on desk>. Thank you Apple.

But lest you think my journey has only been foiled by Apple... never fear - WMP11beta one has been a nightmare. I keep hoping that Microsoft will release beta 2, but it's been months without a single update. All we know is that beta will include support for podcast management. For now:

1. the library doesn't always update based on the folders you've "subscribed" too
2. Deleting files from the folder structure is bad
3. Renaming files in the folder structure is bad
4. Any changes to the filename/filepath remove the playcount and leave the orphaned entries in the playlists until it magically decides to ask you if you want to remove missing files (usually after not finding 10 files in a row)
5. Autoplaylists occasionally update, occasionally don't
6. Syncing with a Portable Media Center (my Toshiba Gigabeat-S) is hit or miss: no files are ever removed from the device, sometimes playcounts aren't synced up with the PC, sometimes playlists aren't synced up with the player, sometimes the player dies and I have to do a hard reset

As you can see, podcast management for me has increasingly taken more and more of my precious time. So far, I haven't seen a single solution that I like. They all require WAY, WAY too much of my time - and yet, if I don't do it... I won't be able to listen to my favorite podcasts on my insane (occasionally 2 hrs, one way) commute into DC for work. Sigh.

I wish WMP11beta2 would hurry up and get here. I could use the extra stability, and I'm dying to try out their solution for podcast management.