Posts Tagged ‘ramblings’

Were gonna be short on Ramblings since it’s another fun filled weekend.

Happy Independence Day

I am writing this on July 4th, so I shall say it. If you are not in the US, shoot off some fireworks anyway. It’s fun – unless you are in a country that doesn’t make it fun, then just read on.

We spent the majority of last night blowing stuff up. I can say that I enjoyed the night a lot. Being with friends and just relaxing to the warm sound of BANG! POP! BOOM!

Tonight, we play in the Dells, and although that’s fun too, it’s a different group.

Summer of Podcasts Contest is Underway

Wednesday marked the start of the Summer of Podcasts contest. PC Mac Smackdown, Simon Sez IT and Bageltech News are the first show to listen to. Collect the codeword, then go to Podcastmadness.com and enter it in.

New Studio

I worked in the initial videos from the new studio this week. Still have a little work to do. Nonetheless, the new studio will have a lot of great advantages to it. I am looking forward to this new opportunity.

Starting Back up the LIVE SHOW?

It’s been a few months since the last episode of the Geekazine LIVE show was aired. I think it’s time to bring it back.

Problems in Banking

If you use Paypal, it can be great for money transfers. However, it can also become a nightmare. Especially if something goes wrong. I am not going to talk too much more about it right now, simply because there are still things pending out there. Nonetheless, I did have some issues this week.

Blogworld – New Media Expo

Started getting prepared for this show in October. A lot to plan – flight, hotel, show, which shorts I am going to pack, etc.  I will definitely be there. Even if I have to sleep in the alley by the convention center.

That’s all for now. It was a slow week. Next week will be chuck full of goodness, so stay tuned.

Busy Week
Thanks for coming to the site. We had another great week – busy week. It was a lot of fun and really productive.

Post – HPTF

Of course, we went to Vegas the week before to cover the HP Technology Forum Expo. Andy McCaskey, Kara Karsten and myself were working hard with interviews, product reviews and more. This week was planning to get some of the videos out to you. So far, we’ve posted the HP POD video on Friday and have a lot more coming soon.

Summer of Podcasts – Podcast Carnivale

This is what really took up the majority of the week. The last month I have been working hard in getting prizes together. Now it’s time to put a contest together. That is where the Summer of Podcasts comes in. Each week, Podcasters will be giving out codewords during their shows. We will be giving away a USB wireless VGA from IOGEAR (See the video below), a WebAround Web privacy screen and a lot more. The best part is a lot of prizes are from the Podcasters themselves. Caffination is giving some Coffee, Bageltech News gave a NYC canvas print, Bwana.org is giving Team Fortress 2 for PC and a T-Shirt, SDRNews is giving a MagicJack, Techpodcasts (Geek News Central) is giving an iPod Touch: there is a lot more.

Wednesday, July 1st is when the contest starts. Check out the site before hand to which shows are giving codewords for the week.

Bands

It’s summertime, so the band ramps up in it’s playing. It’s all well and good – I enjoy taking the trips and playing the gigs. This last weekend I played 3 shows and it wasn’t even Sunday. This afternoon is one more show. Next week is just about the same.

Interview

This last week, I was interviewed on the Isthmus – a local tabloid – style paper in the Madison area. The interview will be out next week, when that happens, I will post it.

PC/Mac Smackdown

Had lunch with Cal last Wednesday. He said – “Hey, why don’t you come on the show”. I said “Sure, why not?”. Therefore, I was on the PC / Mac Smackdown with Cal Davis and Rachel Baker.

Windows 7

Pre-Orders of Windows 7 means a significant discount. I have Windows 7 RC on my Dell D600 and really like how it works. What is even more interesting – Windows 7 works a lot better on that machine than when I put on Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu would lag when I was working – and I mean REALLY Lag. I would litterally select something, count to 5, then watch it execute.

I am really impressed with this OS, so I am excited this is coming out.

MJ, FF and EM AND BM

It was a sad week for a lot of people. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson took the Trifecta this week as all three passed. Ed McMahon was the sidekick of Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, Farrah Fawcett was the poster girl of the 70’s and of course, Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. While I was never a big MJ fan, I do appreciate his music and also how he let Weird Al Yankovic to make fun of his music.

I remember when I first heard “Eat it” 0n the radio. While I never listened to “Bad”, I did have the “Even Worse” album which featured “Fat”.

*Update – Just as I published this, the Internet found out that Billy Mays – the Oxy Clean promoter (as well as Mighty Putty, Big City Sliders, Kaboom and a lot more) was found dead at his  home. He was 50. I guess it’s more than a Trifecta…

Studio

This week was a lot of work with the studio. Only problem – I can’t find my staple gun. I had it, then it dissapeared. I am not sure where it went. AUGH!

Still, the new studio is doing well. I am hoping to record the first video there by Mid-week. My bedroom is getting cluttered with PC stuff and that needs to head down to the Dungeon. The door to that room is the main reason why I call it the Dungeon.

Looking at Phones

I have to admit, I have been looking at the iPhone 3GS. The one thing I like is I have fatter fingers. I was able to use the screen a lot better than with the 3G. For instance, when I hit the “N”, on the 3G, I would always miss and hit the “M”. However, with the 3GS, I have not done anything different and seem to be hitting the “N” key and actually getting an “N”.

I still have some tests to go. I am also looking at the Palm Pre, but in order to do that, I would have to switch to Sprint, which I don’t know if I am ready to do. Android is a possibility, but I really don’t want the G1. I am waiting for the Lenovo version.

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That’s pretty much it this week. Keep watching the site for more info on the contest. Of course if you want to give a prize for the contest, let me know.

Day Off - Sort of
A late Ramblings this week as I decided to stay offline last week. It was a long week and I was playing all weekend. It has been a while since I last took more than 24 hours off a computer, so that is a big feat for me.

HP Tech Forum

I had a fun time talking and working with Andy McCaskey and Kara Karsten with SDRNews. We had such a blast. We also put forward the mobile interview booth rig. We call it the “MacGyver” rig. Nonetheless, it was connected to uStream and we were able to conduct a few interviews for the event. Check out all the info on the Twitter log at #HPTF.

Great to meet some new bloggers: Shane Pitman of Neowin, John Obeto of AbsoluteWindows. We had a great week along with Halley, Tom, Calvin and Rebecca from HP and Buzzcorps.

Fryes at Vegas

Also got to go to Vegas again. While we didn’t run around town as much as with CES (everything was contained in Mandalay Bay), we did venture out to go to Fryes. It’s actually my first time at Fryes and I was pretty impressed. Of course, it was Vegas, so the store has a big slot machine up in it’s store front and stacks of coins as barrier posts. The inside was very big and complete. Andy had to get a new scratch drive since the one he brought died. We got what we needed and headed back to the safe Mandalay Bay

Mandalay Bay

Wow. This is a city contained in a building. That is, if you have the money for it. My room – which I call the “Bob Newhart” room – was decked with all the amenities. TV in the bedroom and the bathroom. You can connect an external device easily and be watching a movie while soaking in the tub.

The casino area was always hoppin. There were bands both on the “Sushi Pop” and “House of Blues” stages. Restaurants all over the building. A small walk and you are at “theHotel”. They even have their own beach – where we watched the Beach Boys play a set. Well, it was a short set for me, since I had a flight to catch.

Podcast on the show floor

I had the unique opportunity to record the show from the HPTF Expo floor. It was great because I didn’t have to set up a rig, do a show, rip it down and go to another area to post. I would also like to thank Simon Calder for helping out with the show notes so I could focus on other things.

What I got out of the show

Of course, there were a lot of things I have learned from this event. I have run server rooms before, but I was a little out of touch with the current technologies. FCoE was the big one I learned about. Also building a server is a lot different than before. Greener, more powerful and reliability were the best parts.

The Keynotes were just amazing. Learning about how these big companies are working on green technologies is amazing. Dr. Michio Kaku and his views for the future were amazing. A “Smart toilet” is definitely something to get excited about.

The Weekend

I got back to Madison at 8 AM on Friday. It was a long trip (5 hours, turned into 7 due to timezone changes). What was worse was on the trip back, I was not really impressed with the airline I flew. The one thing I noticed is they were not really friendly.

An example: We flew through a couple storm fronts during the trip. Most airlines would say “This is the Captain. We are seeing some turbulance, so please remain in your seats and buckle your belts. Thank you.”

The airline I was on? Well: “Please buckle your seatbelts”.

The airline also had screens drop from above. While I would normally invite this, I was in a evening flight. I had difficulties sleeping when something like a video monitor is playing. Of course, I didn’t pack my sleeping mask. Therefore, I was stuck watching “Confessions of a Shopoholic”. While other people loved this movie, I didn’t find it as interesting.

I got home around 9 AM, in which I proceeded to collapse on the bed for a couple hours. Woke up, caught up on some work I missed during the week, then headed off to play a show. Since it was out of town, I had to pack for another night away from home.

Band Gigs

Saturday was a day of playing. We played a friends graduation, then it was up to the Dells for our regular show at the Baja bar. There were 4 different Bachelorette parties that night and they were not in the Baja at the same time. As one party left, the next one showed up. Crazy.

New Guitar

While we were in transit to the Graduation party, we stopped at a local music store. There, I found a used Acoustic / Electric guitar. I picked it up as a spare for future shows. It needs some work to it, but not much to make it ready to play out.

Lazy Sunday? Not.

Of course, the day started out with this post. A quick breakfast, then it’s getting things ready for the week. Have to work on “Week in Tech History”, then I have to figure out how to put together the new video studio. Lots of soundproofing to do.

I suppose I should get to it. Thanks again to everyone for a great week. How do you top that?

Just got done playing Bratfest – a weekend of music and sausage to raise money for various charities. All the bands donate their time and our band was no different. We had a lot of fun and it was officially our first big stage show of the season.

I am packing. Moving to a new place – TBD. Yep, in 5 days I have to be moved out of my place. The finalization on the new diggs is not set, but these things work themselves out. Podcasts will go on as scheduled and so should ‘Week in Tech History’.

The video is getting a new home. http://www.tvazine.com is where you can get all the Geekazine Video. We have signed up with Mevio to host all our video. Once I get new digs, we will be putting up a lot more. TVazine is the newest part of the Geekazine portal. And there is still one more new site coming real soon!

That’s it for now. I had a lull between Holiday shows, so I thought I would put this out. For all that celebrate, have a safe Memorial Day weekend and we’ll see you when you get back from the cookout. Eat Brats!

Well, this week I started getting everything in order. The packing is going pretty well as I did almost nothing yet… Kidding. I packed away all the promotional and review items, then started getting all the computer stuff straightened out.

However, it’s tough to pack computers when new ones are coming in. It’s a startup side project that I am working on where we are looking for older – yet still useful computers. We need older P4’s at least 1.8 Ghz in speed if you have any lying around. Dell machines preferred because of their ability to turn on at certain times.

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty laid back week. Podcast went well. Been talking to a new sponsor that could bring more to the video section. If you haven’t checked it out, I recreated the Duke Nukem character on Bitstrips. I did a full video demonstration and shortened it to 7 minutes for easy watching. Backing music is by a band called “Sunspot”, friends of mine that do “Punk Arena Rock”.

Last week we kept running into server issues. I am hoping we fixed all the errors, but I am still keeping an eye on things. If all is well, then we will be working on a new site in the portal. It will be exciting to see this site come up for I will have nothing to do with it after it’s creation.

If you want to blog about something, let me know. I’ll put you into the portal.

We are going to run a contest in June – keep your eyes and ears peeled for more information.

That’s all for now. Hope you have a great week and we’ll see you for the Week in Tech History on Monday.

For those who don’t know, tonight I am going to the Madison Area Music Awards. I was nominated for 3 awards including cover band of the year, country song of the year (which was weird) and Unique song of the year (a remix of a song by another artist). It’s pretty exciting that I was nominated on all 3 areas – 2 of them I had expectation on .

While I’ve been waiting for tonight, I had some interesting issues come up with the site. In PHP land, if there is a issue, it will create a ‘core’ file. That file might have 0 kb or megs of info. I had over 300 of them on the site.

To counter, I cleared out the offending ones, made sure all updates were solid, backed up and cleaned content and wrote a CRON job to tell me if this happens again. Take THAT, PHP.

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About 5 minutes back from Chicago and am I taking a nap? No. I’m back on the site. What am I, crazy?

What a great time with Andy McCaskey and Kara Karsten putting together 2-3 days worth of content. Lots of video uploaded and produced.

Also learned a lot about CMS systems. Most people there were either Drupal or Joomla shops, with a couple Plone and Alfresco speakers. Still, there was a lot of content to go around. Met some real influential CMS experts.

There was a Joomla vs. Drupal theme going, though. They even wrote songs about it. I posted them both up – not great quality, so be forewarned.
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This last weekend was a roller coaster of a ride. Last week we saw some issues with the site when I cleaned up the system. For some reason, the mySQL was going off the charts. Therefore the Service Provider decided to counter by putting the whole site into a 403 error. Both Geekazine and Dorkazine were affected, as well as a couple other sites I run on this host.

We worked hard at it and the problem fixed itself, at least that is what the support agent told me. At any rate, the system was fixed and I was able to get shows up.

Or not.

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I just bought my first case of 16 oz bottles of Mountain Dew. All I can think about is “10 minutes fueling Geekazine, forever in a landfill”. I need to figure out something to do with these bottles so they don’t end up there.

My mom used to take the 2 liter bottles, cut them up and turn them into wind spinners. She had a template that she cut from, used a soldering iron to make a more precise cut and then decorated it to put out in the yard. Not that our house was filled with those things – but it definitely was a crafty project that she liked to do.

My Dad, on the other hand was into wood crafts. He used to make cribbage boards. It all started when he saw a semi-truck cribbage board. He said “I can do that” – And he did. He then moved to other items. This one is a lighthouse he made a few years ago using an old AOL CD.
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The best part is this is the last snow of the season and hopefully it won’t be as bad as they say. Just wet slush. Just a small annoyance, then warm weather.

Now on to some cool stuff. I stopped by SWAP – Surpluss with a Purpose the other day. Basically, it’s a shop that gets furniture, computers and other interesting stuff from the University and other government offices. They then refurb and resell.

I was at the shop the other day and picked up a couple SATA hard drives for a few bucks. I went there looking for office chairs and couldn’t resist the deal. Didn’t get a chair though. Keeping my eye open for the right one.

We have some cool stuff happening. The big news on Tuesday in which I cannot really talk about, but some other great news is that we are starting another website on the Portal. Will be talking more about that soon…

Had some great numbers of listeners for Week in Tech History and the Podcast. Thanks to all that downloaded and listened to both shows. Next week we’ll be introducing a new sponsor.

Frank has been doing some great stuff on the site. The Dell Mini video has been watched by a lot of you. Expect some more cool stuff from Frank.

Started up the other videos for the upcoming weeks. Should have the first one next week. Also going to be recording some video with Andy McCaskey in the next few weeks. Should be a lot of fun.

Band has a few weeks off. Good timing, too. I have a lot of work with the new site coming up.

That’s it for now. Keep tuned in for the special announcements next week.

So last week on Thurs. I got sick. Didn’t think much of it, took some nyquil and slept the day. That night I was feeling much better, but Friday was a different story.

That night I was ok and Saturday I was good until I wasn’t. We did a show and when I got home, I knew it was something more.

Sunday was a blur. Monday was a semi-blur.

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