31 Dec 05 They yanked The Morning Alternative
Radio sucks, it is worse then TV. On TV they don’t even pull stunts like this unless your name is FOX. However on radio they pull this too often. Too often shows get removed, added and completely revamped, maybe its just a Seattle thing. For example in the last 3 years 96.5 has changed names / formats 4 times. Yikes!
Every morning for some time now I have been listening to The Morning Alternative. Before that it was the Marconi Show (thank god they pulled that though) and prior to that it was Andy Savage. I listened to Andy Savage for the longest time and I woke up to his humor every morning during high school. Entercom wouldn’t renew his contract and so he left and went somewhere else, however during that moment I wasn’t living in the weee hours of the morning. I then started working morning shifts again (think Speakeasy) and I started listening to The Marconi Show and quickly switched my listening over to CDs, until I heard that DJ No Name switched to mornings. I quickly dropped CDs and listened to him. Soon Jennifer White joined and I was once again in radio heaven.
That dream evaporated last week when I heard that starting this Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 the new morning show will be Adam Carolla. One word: YUCK!. First off I can’t stand the guy. I hate Loveline and anything to do with syndicated shows (unless your Howard Stern), in my opinion it completely obliterates the local community. I don’t want to listen to some jackass in the morning talking about his stardom life in LA or NYC. I liked DJ No Name (realname Bob VanDyne) and Jennifer White because they were regular people who bitched about Seattle traffic and had fun doing their jobs. So now I am going back to CDs and maybe invest in an adapter for my iPod to plugin to my car radio (FM transmitters are a joke, no matter what anyone says). I sure am not going to listen to Adam Carolla. The guy is simply not funny and just frankly annoying. I guess it was fun while it lasted. Entercom’s The End has officially hit ‘The End” on my radio.
28 Dec 05 The magic return of my old digital camera
So it was months ago (July) that I couldn’t find my digital camera anymore. I first realized it was missing when Cam and I went on a weekend trip to Mt. Rainier in August. Cam and I looked everywhere, the apartment, boxes, my car and her car. Even since then I looked through my car and the apartment. I felt sick to my stomach every single time I thought about it. Eventually I gave up hope and just asked for a new one during Christmas. Christmas passed and I got a Canon PowerShot SD450. Amazing little camera. I go and clean up my car today because it was starting to get messy. I look behind the passenger seat and suddenly there it was… the old Canon PowerShot S400. The first 5 minutes were shock. Then I showed my parents who were shocked as well. I called up Cam and she couldn’t believe it either. My mom first offered to buy it but my dad dissuaded her as my dad wants to get her one like I got for Xmas (SD450 from Canon) so after Cam locates the memory she will her own digital camera. The charger & leather case were still in my car. All in all… I was astounded. I had checked the place where I found it at least 10 times, if not more. Oh well… I am just glad its back. I’m also happy that the camera I got for Christmas was better then my old camera.
27 Dec 05 Christmas was oh-so-good this year
I would have never expected Christmas to be so darn succesful this year, but it definitely was. Everyone was in a good mood and the presents everyone received from one another were terrific as well. This Christmas would be a picture perfect Xmas. No bad feelings and hardly any drama. My grandma even shed a tear because holiday events in the family never go this smooth (oi my mom’s brother & sisters can really dish it out around the holidays).
The biggest gift I received was a new digital camera, a Canon Powershot SD 450 with a 512MB SD memory card. Another big gift from Cam was a Maxtor Onetouch 200GB external hard drive. I received many other gifts but I will not bore myself and others listing them all, lets just say that they were all wonderful.
After the gifts we headed to Seattle for our Xmas dinner @ the Space Needle. I must say that last year it was a tad bit better on quality then this year. However we all had a splendid time.
I am going to enjoy my last day of vacation totally not sick. Tomorrow I am going to setup my Mom’s new PowerMac and I go back to work at 7pm.
Fun fun…
PS… you see the Xmas pics by pointing your browser (or clicking the link) to:
http://www.disgruntled-dutch.com/gallery/v/xmas051225/
24 Dec 05 Automator kicks ass
I’ve never used Automator until earlier this week. Automator is a new feature Apple released with Tiger this past May. Now I’ve used the other new features that Apple released with Tiger like Dashboard and Spotlight, but whenever I loaded up Automator it looked confusing and I never really dabbled into it.
This week I got pictures developed by the local Walgreens and I had them include a picture CD for each roll (3 rolls total). Now the quality of the picture CDs were disappointing, however I figure I would copy them all to my hard drive and upload them to my gallery. So I import the pics into iPhoto and select the ones from our Mt. Rainier vacation (as they were spread on to two different film rolls). I then exported them to a different folder on my hard drive so I could prepare them to upload them to my gallery. However the names were all funky.
At this point I have three options:
1. Upload the photos with the weird funky names
2. Rename each and every single one of them
3. Use Automator
I opted to try #3. There is probably a bash command which I could have done, but my fu with Bash are only limited. I load up Automator and basically you select the program you want the command to be performed under. In this it is Finder. Then basically like a flow graph you select what Automator should do in each stage. The first one is to locate the files that need renaming, thus I selected the folder where the files I wanted to import where located, dragged them into automator. Next I selected the renaming step and entered in that I wanted all files to start with mtrainier. It will add the numbers it self in sequential order.
Here is a pic of the final screen before automator automates my renaming…
I think this is the coolest feature yet, but thats just my opinion.
24 Dec 05 Battlestar Galactica Season 2 continues January 6, 2006
On digg.com
As the title suggests, Battlestar Galactica season 2 will continue its run on January 6th, 2006 on the SciFi channel.
Next episode’s title is Resurrection Ship Part 1
One word: wooooohooooo!!!
I am ecstatic that I saw this on TV today. I can’t wait until Jan 6th. Only 13 days until the premiere!!
22 Dec 05 T – 2 days until Christmas
Well christmas is almost here. Only days away. Today my 6 1/2 day vacation (half of it is paid as well 
) started. I went to bed at 9am-ish with out any problems but when I woke up at 3pm I woke up with a damn cold. Since then it has worsened as well. First it was just dizyness and just unwillingness to do anything, now I am dripping and sneezing like crazy. I know for sure I got this from Cam and her cold only lasted 2 days so hopefully with plenty of sleep and enough relaxation (which I was planning to do anyways) this curse, I mean cold will be gone from my system on Christmas.
Only three more gifts need to arrive. Today the mailbox was completely empty so I am hoping that these gifts will arrive before the 25th. Thankfully one has a tracking number and is scheduled for delivery tomorrow, but the other gifts are shipped by the unreliable USPS media mail (where it can take from 3 – 30 days and it doesn’t even depend on location, trust me on that one).
Last thing. Last week a fellow colleague (Matt) came to work with a lappie that had Ubuntu installed on it. Well last weekend I converted over (having tried Fedora, Mandrake and Suse) and I found myself hooked. Matt is right, this is comfortable for anyone to use. Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org) is based off of the conservative but very stable Debian distribution. I can honestly say that it is very stable. The only thing I had to do was update the default ipw2200 driver & firmware to a higher version. The defaults just wouldn’t talk with my Linksys WRT54G router. Only thing I hope they will add in the next release is WPA support. There is a way to get it in there but its messy. Right now I have had to reduce my wireless router settings from WPA to WEP. Not very happy about that, but I don’t think I am in any significant danger as I hardly doubt that anyone around here hacks Wifi networks for a living and if they do, my laptop can pick up on 3 other (using default shipped names & default router passwords) wifi networks.
