A couple things have happened in the last couple days to put me in more into the dork category. Music itself would not push me in this direction but my action do put me in the dork area.
The first thing that happened is related to a band I saw when I was in 7th grade. That band is Edsel. I won tickets for a concert from the local radio station. It was a school night so I was only able to see one or two of the opening bands. One of these opening bands was Edsel. They completely blew me away. After the concert, I spent the next couple days tracking down their two CD's. I ended up buying them from CDNow (which was taken over by Amazon sometime ago.) At that time CDNow didn't take charge so you had to place your order and then send in a check. They released another full CD in 1995 or 1996 and an EP in 1998 or so. I got the full CD but I could never justifying paying the high cost of the EP ($10 after shipping). The EP only had 4 songs on it, so I always kept an eye out for it on Half.com and Ebay.
Last weekend I couldn't sleep so I started searching for any info on Edsel. I've done this previously and never came up with any results. Most of the results came back regarding the car. I did remember that they were from Washington, D.C. so I included this information in the search. I came across a new page that listed the names of the guys in the band and a little update of what they were doing. There was a site that was linked in the article. I checked out the linked site and on the page was a contact link. Not too promising. I went back to the article and found the lead singer's name and typed that into Google to see what I would hit. One of the top results was the page with the contact link. I thought what they hey, I'll send off an email to see if this person is connected to the band to see if I could buy a copy of the EP directly.
To my surprise the very next day I got a very courteous response. It was indeed the website of the lead singer. He gave me a quick update on all the guys of the band. Unfortunately he did not have any copies of the EP I was looking for. He did offer to post the MP3's of the album and some other rarities. I quickly responded with a enthusiastic yes for the MP3's. A couple days later I got a link from him for around 100 megs of music. I just downloaded the zipped file and am listening it as I post this.
On another dork, I finally broke down and bought into the satellite radio. Target had a great deal on the receiver after a rebate and my employee discount. I haven't listened to much radio besides 89.3 the Current. I looked through what both XM Radio and Sirius had to offer and decided that Sirius had more offerings that Michelle and I would listen to.
I told Michelle that I had made the decision that we were going to get it and her response was "Who is going to install it?" She didn't like the idea of me trying to tear apart her car trying to get this thing installed. The receiver has an antenna that mounts on the top of the car and a power cord that plugs into the cigarette lighter. I got the receiver mounted very quickly since it's just a suction cupped to the windshield. I decided just to place the antenna on the dash and it seems to be working. I think we are in an area that had repeaters on the ground because the receiver says the terrestrial signal is 100%. I don't see any reason to go through the hassle of mounting the antenna if I don't need to. The power adapter needed to be hidden under the dash and I thought this would be easy enough to do. I searched the internet hoping to be able to find directions on how to remove the dash in my wife's Santa Fe. When I told her that I would need to remove her dash console I could tell she was a little worried.
It took me awhile but I finally stumbled into a Santa Fe owner's message board. I found step by step instructions on how to remove the console, so I was ready to go. After a twenty minutes of "firmly" pulling on the dash, I got the pieced removed. I have never removed a dash on a car so I was having problems with the firmly part. It took more force than I thought it would. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't busting anything since Michelle would have killed me. I got the power adapter run and the dash back together without any other problems. My wife told me that everything worked fine during her drive to work. She did run into some interference because the receiver is using a FM transmitter to get the signal to the car's stereo.
The added bonus is that I can stream Sirius to my computer at work. I can listen to Alt Nation all day long. Alt Nation plays all the best 90's alternative/grunge that I grew up with. I love it.
Dork: May 2005 Archives
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.
