Director of Digital Technology @TrekBikes, Father, Musician, Cyclist, Homebrewer
I finally received my PS2 to USB connector I ordered from Best Buy. My HP laptop doesn’t have a USB connector, and I wanted to hook it up to my monitor and keyboard, etc, and I don’t own a port replicator. There are two USB ports on my laptop, and the wireless keyboard/mouse I own has two connectors, USB and PS2. So now that I have the connector, I can plug the keyboard/mouse into one USB port on the laptop, plug in the monitor, and away we go. Pretty sweet!
Well, I got a visit from the repo man. I had a friend who was storing his car in my garage, and he sort of “went away” a few months ago. Well, I was stuck with this car, and since I pay 35$ a month for a garage, I figured I was wasting my money.
Anyways, I cancelled the garage, and I needed to get rid of the car. I was thinking of just pushing it out on the street, but never got around to it. I called the bank that was on the title, and it took them 3 days to figure out that they were even on the title. Finally I got a call from a repo company telling me they would come pick it up (it didn’t run anyways). So Friday, a guy and his girlfriend came with a big diesel truck and towed the thing away. Good riddance!
Napster.
The long forgotten music downloading application. Well, a while back when the “new” Napster came out, I signed up for it, downloading some singles at 99 cents a piece. Well, today I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for Napster Premium for like 12 bux a month, and I am getting a free portable player to boot. I have jacked tons of music from the net for almost 10 years, so I figure it might be time to go legit. The premium service is cool, you can download as many tracks as you want, and listen to them online or offline. The downside is you can’t burn them, but you can transfer them to a portable device, which is cool. If you wan to burn a track, you need to purchase it standalone from your premium subscription.
Some other things that kind of irk me are that some bands don’t have any tracks (The Beatles are the biggest I see), so you can’t get all the music you want. When I first signed up, 311 didn’t have any tracks, now all their mainstream albums are on there! Still, there are almost a million tracks, but you won’t find the “bootleg” tracks for artists, so you are left to searching the net or using a p2p app to look for those.
CD Burning is built into the application, and there is radio/magazine/message boards, with radio and message boards only available to premium members.
Today as I was just hanging out, VH1 had a “Surreal Life” marathon on, I am guessing the first season or something. Anyways, what a stupid concept. Lets go find six celebrities that haven’t worked in about 5 years (at least), and make them live together for two weeks, giving them missions to do. The celebs in this season were Vanilla Ice, Ron Jeremy, Traci Bingham, Tammy Faye, Erik Estrada, and Trishelle.
Vanilla Ice was a spaz the whole time, about how he wanted to bury his past. Ron Jeremy was just a hound, trying to cop feels and hook up with every chick. Traci Bingham was the ditzy chick of the group, and also the vegetarian who wore leather hats and furs and things. Tammy Faye was nice to everyone, except she only did like 3 missions since everything was morally impure for her. Erik Estrada was the most down to earth of the bunch. Trishelle was the leftover from some other reality show, a 23 year old drunken college chick, not really a celeb, but they just threw her in there for a mix.
There were some amusing things that went on. Gary Coleman did a guest spot, went mental and left. Vanilla Ice sang Ice, Ice Baby on karoke. Other than that, it was just a bunch of ex-celebs crying on how they lost their edge, etc, etc.
By the way, isn’t VH1 a music channel? WTF happened to the videos. I suppose they thought they had to compete with Music Television (MTV), so they have the least amount of music as possible. Oh well, worthless time wasters are needed every now and then…
Last weekend my mom bought me a new guitar, for my birthday (a few months late), but still it was still nice of her.
It is an Olympia guitar, black, solid face, electric acoustic guitar. The sound I get out of it is much better than my Samick acoustic. My parents bought me the Samick for my 16th birthday, and I never played it until after I graduated high school. It has been a good guitar, makin the round to many fireside parties, and other gatherings. It still works, but the nuts are weird and it makes it hard to play anything above the 10th fret without it sounding very bad. My new guitar has a cutaway so you can play the higher frets with ease, which makes it cool. Also, being that it is an electric-acoustic, makes it even better. I really have never played an electric acoustic and I would have to say it adds a lot to playability.
We picked up the guitar at Chuck Rupar music in Hibbing when I was up for the weekend. He is a friend of my parents and his bad Nightshade played at their wedding back in 78. Anyways, he was cool and explained things to me about all the guitars, gave my a gig bag and some strings so I would be set to go. I searched the web, and he has a website, but not much content. I will give him to linkage anyways.
Needless to say, the new guitar rocks, and I still have the old guitar to play at parties and the like. Hopefully one day soon I will hook up the new guitar to my computer and record some songs.
Strings….nice tool. In Unix/Linux, there is a utility called “strings” which you can use to search files/directories for strings (duh). Anyways, if you want it for Windows XP, you can download it at sysinternals (along with a ton of other cool tools.) I use it alot…for example: In Visual Studio.NET, you can set words to use in comments that will show up in a task list, like ‘TODO, ‘HACK’, etc…and then that line with show up in your task list. Well, when I have to do any classic ASP coding, I use textpad, and it doesnt have a cool task feature like that. If I still use those words, I can mimic a task list. So in my ASP code, I write
‘TODO: Add more logging
and various others on all pages in an application. Then, when I want to build a task list, I fire up cmd.exe, and type
>strings -s serverdirectory | find “‘TODO”
and it will list out every page and line that I have written that. Very cool.
There are tons of other unique uses for this utility also, you should check it out.
Wow..Cisco Netflow. What a pain in the a$$. Anyways, I think I am going
to have the only .NET Netflow Capture and Parsing program in the
world. Hopefully. It really is tough to parse the packets and decode
the correctly, but I am on the right track. Ethereal helped me a bit in
that department. Ethereal has a built in netflow decoder (CFLOW) which allowed me to view the packet part by part, to they byte level and then see how the packets are set up.
I have coded a WinForms marquee scroller program in VB.net/VS2003. Everything works great, but some users have noticed a bug.
When my program is running, IE stops displaying tool tips (TITLE and ALT tags). When my program is closed, they start working again.
I have debugged and went through all the code, and seemed to have found the culprit.
Private Sub tmrTicker_Elapsed(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs) Handles tmrTicker.Elapsed
lblMessage.Left = lblMessage.Left – 7
End Sub
That line of code causes the tool tips to disappear. It is also the key line of code that causes my marquee to move from right to left. I have tried making the control a label, textbox, rich text box, and they all did the same thing.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is it a bug?
I have tested, and Mozilla allows tool tips when it is running (the TITLE tags at lease, Mozilla doesnÂ’t display ALT tags in general). Also, Windows XP still displays them, and Outlook, etc do to. The only program that doesnÂ’t display tool tips is IE.
Well, I installed the Visual Basic Express product on my “home” laptop. It barely runs, but it still works. It is cool, a little different from VS 2003.
SQL Server Express doesn’t work on XP Home edition, what a rip. Anyways, I started on my Web Bot. You put in a URI, and then it goes to town, finding all the links,
then going to all of those links, etc, etc.
I need SQL to store the info though. I might make a VMWare image on my screaming laptop to play around with it.
More like Super Drunky Ball. Or Super Monkey Drunk. This weekend, me and some buds decided to play super monkey ball on gamecube. With a twist.
Any time you die, you take a shot of Blue 100. Geeez we were wasted in like 30 minutes. Helluva lot of fun though!!
Steve Novoselac's Blog 