What do you get when you mix New Castle, listening to music, writing a web page, and a dog chewing on a bone?? You get my Friday night.
I have been using J. River's Media Center for a couple years now. The program has skinning and plug-in support. Back in college I spent many hours working on a skin that I called Simpleton. I want one thing that the program doesn't offer. In that case I wanted a slim skin. All the skins available at the time were huge. I just wanted a line that told be what song was playing and playback controls. So I spent countless hours in Photoshop Elements creating the skin. This did expose me to XML and how it worked I still haven't used it much but I have a good understanding of it.
The project I'm working on now for Media Center is s visualization. This will display the album art, title, album, artist, and a couple other random facts. The visualization is basically a HTML template so I'm trying to work my way through that. I figure this will be a little warm up for when I redo the layout of the site. I want a new layout but I don't seem to have the creativity to come up with what I want. I've tested out some new colors but I can find anything that I like. I want something in the green family, but it's either too pastel or too dark. Most likely it will be a long while before I finally decide on a new layout and I doubt anyone really reads this anyway.
More on the dork front I got a new cell phone. I have been waiting for the phone to come out for a couple months. I saw an ad in one of my smut magazines (Maxim, FHM, or Stuff). The phone I got is the Sanyo VI-2300. My previous phone was a Sanyo and I loved it. I had Sony and Samsung phones before, but my old Sanyo had the best reception out of those. As a result I am now a loyal Sanyo customer. My old phone had a cracked screen for about a year. Dust has started slowly working it's way under the screen. I saw the ad in the magazine for the phone and I immediately knew this is the phone I need.
If you haven't shopped for cellphones lately let me recap the landscape of the cellphone market. Your choices are either dirt cheap phones with low quality or phones with all the bells and whistles for $500. The only thing I wanted from a phone was a sturdy flip phone without a camera. The 2300 fits the bill perfectly. It is a quality phone but it excludes the camera I don't need. The phone came out about a month ago but I just got it this week. Sanyo is a manufacturer that is finally realizing that people like to stand out. They have started making their phones in different colors. This phone will be available in 6 different colors. They first released silver and a blue. I wanted a black one so that's why I had to wait a month. I called the local Sprint stores once a week to see if they had the black phone in stock. After a couple weeks they finally had it in stock and I was able to go look at it. I was happy until they told me that they couldn't get my saved numbers off my old phone. With the help of Michelle I was able to enter in all my saved numbers manually.
Something else that I have been fascinated with lately is Audioscrobbler. This is a site that you sign up with and then install a plug-in for your media player. It tracks what music you listen to and builds a profile based on it. You can look to see what people who have similar tastes are listening to. You can also look up to see what is the most played song. You do have to take into account that this isn't something that the people who listen to pop do. This may explain why Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, and others show up while Britney isn't there. A cool thing with the profile is that it's linked up with Last.fm. You can launch your personal radio station based on bands you have previously listened to. The Audioscrobbler site has had some major issues in the past two weeks, but I think they are up and running at 100% now. Check it out.
That was my Friday night. Not much fun for most people, but I had a good time.
