Archive for November, 2007

Just a soundtrack to a life

By Sephyroth on November 21, 2007 at 9.52 pm · Filed under hump day hmm, music, nablopomo, youtube

I’ve discussed the music I like to listen to; there’s a list of the posts that I’ve done in the occasional Friday Music series at the bottom of the post. In the post about Duke’s 3 Suites, Forest talked about his being a child of the 90s and how he came up with his own music.

I replied to his comment, in part, with a story of my musical background -

Believe it or not, I was brought up with, first, 60s music, and then country music when it was popular in the last decade (I actually have almost the whole Garth Brooks CD collection, and a first edition of his “Double Live” album). It wasn’t until I was in high school that I started to listen to jazz. When I was in college, I started to discover some of the bigger indie groups like The Killers. Now, and I have to give props to Snoskred for this one, I’m beginning to get my footing in rock music and actually listening to Metallica and liking it.

It is true - when I was young, the most common station that we would listen to in the car would be the oldies station (in fact, that same station, now owned by conglomerate Clear Channel, still plays older music, though they’ve expanded into the 70s and 80s, and will be going into all-Christmas mode soon). There could be no end to the argument when my Aunt would come up from Chicago and switch the radio to a radio station that is renowned for playing a particular style of music.

Then, sometime in the early 90s, we switched from that station to listening to one of the two country music stations in the area. In fact, I still remember on one of our long car trips that we used to take back then when it seemed every country station between here and Huntsville played the same song over and over again. It got to a point where we wound up, somewhere in the middle of Illinois or Kentucky, turning on a hard rock station just to avoid listening to this song.

Now, of course, being someone who remembers small details like this, I remember that the lyrics contained the words “thank the bank for the money and thank god for you”. Thanks to Scroogle, I now am reminded of the name of that song - “Thank God For You” by Sawyer Brown. Of course, there was a video of the proper version of the song on YouTube, but as with anything decent, it’s been taken down due to copyright violations. However, I think that this karaoke imitation is suitably funny to act as a stand-in.
Click here to watch (you may have noticed that I had embedded the video here before, but apparently you can’t display unembedable videos anyway…

You would think that this would have been the end of us listening to country music, but that was definitely not the case. We would stick with country for quite a few more years, even attending a Garth Brooks concert when he was at the peak of his fame (and, get this, the tickets only cost $17.50 each - and that was for a seat in the lower tear of the arena; all tickets were the same price - there was a line that went around the store because of the demand). As I had mentioned in the comment, I do have almost all of his CDs - the only real exceptions being the recently released box set, the original editions of his first six albums and the CD that he put out as the fake rockstar.

Then, an interesting thing happened - I got into High School and started to get involved in listening to jazz and a lot of classical music. It didn’t hurt the cause that for one year, I had to get to know a whole lot of operatic works back and forth, along with the stories of the operas that the songs came from. The next year, we had to know a whole bunch of jazz, along with the stories of the artists who did the songs, and the other year I participated in this particular activity, we had to do “world music” - something which I do not remember anything about, honestly.

It was also during this time that I really separated from most of the popular music (though realistically, I never had that much connection to it). Thanks to the Internet, I don’t think I really missed out all that much with music - especially since I had the opportunity to, ahem, acquire the music I’d missed out on on the net. ;)

The next major milestone in my musical development would have to be when I was in college. Sure, I was aware of the major file sharing networks of the day (Kazaa Lite anyone?), but for the most part I was still searching for older music and jazz, along with a variety of country and some songs that, when I go back through the CDs I burnt of those songs, make me wonder why in the world I ever downloaded those songs.

In 2002, after I had come back from going home in February, I was watching the Olympics from Salt Lake City, and there was a concert on the TV by the Barenaked Ladies. Amazingly, for some reason, the music clicked with me - it was good and it was fun music to listen to. It was through them that I started to get some connection with popular music, though I still didn’t totally follow the ups and downs of current music.

Then, after I left college, I started to listen to another of my local stations - one which has gone downhill quite a bit after their longtime morning team have split apart and the station decided to bring in outsiders to front their main program in the morning. Then, I was starting to listen to actual music that was, at least that I thought was, the music of “now”. There were the occasional gimmick hours - 80s played at 1 and 8 pm, and Fridays would be dedicated to the Flashback music. I liked listening to that music.

However, the biggest revolution to my listening habits has come as a result of meeting Snoskred - I’m sure she’ll say something in the comments about this, but I was really the most clueless sod when it came to musical references (and quite a lot of other references, but that’s for another day ;) ). However, she introduced me to some of the greatest music I’d ever heard of, and I’ve even gone and discovered music on my own.

Most of the time, I am playing music from the same playlist - it’s been through a lot of different iterations (and in fact, I have a song that I need to add to it - Trees). You can check out my current Winamp playlist . Yes, it is true that I have Madonna in there, but really, that particular album is great “club” music - I would have never seen myself liking that type of music, but sometimes it’s cool to have a driving bass beat going along on the subwoofer. :)

If you want to keep up with what I’m listening to, you can always check out my last.fm profile and add me as a friend if you want ;)

The Friday Music Series

About the title

The title is a line from a Badly Drawn Boy song - “You Were Right”; the video of it is below.

This post is part of the Hump Day Hmm - which, this week was about music - the music of our lives, really, the soundtrack of our life. For me, this is it, and it’s still very much in formation :)

Comments (3)

Get the most out of your Firefox Search Bar

By Sephyroth on November 20, 2007 at 7.25 pm · Filed under blog, firefox, how to, tech, tuesday think tank

For the Tuesday Think Tank this week, I’m departing slightly from the planned HTML topic to talk about something that can help you diversify your searching - the Firefox Search Bar.

It is that thing that you always see at the upper right of your window in Firefox (usually next to the address bar on the Navigation Toolbar). In previous versions of Firefox, you could hide the bar and a popup would appear, but they changed that in Firefox 2.0.

In fact, There was a time when I was against upgrading my browser, because of it not allowing the popup. However, soon after posting that, I installed the new version and have come to love the redesigned search box. It is actually one of the most powerful tools that come with Firefox now, in my opinion.

One of the coolest features is the ability to add as many search engines as you want to it. As it stands right now, these are the search engines in my search bar -

List of Search Engines

Most of these engines have been added when I’ve visited various sites, and for the most part, I’ve kept it fairly stable with what is in there; in fact, most of the additions to the bar have been made over the last couple of days.

How do I add a search?

It’s fairly simple to add a search to the search bar. There are a couple of ways to do it.

Directly Adding at a search site

The first, and most common, way is to go to, say, Technorati - and take a look at the upper right of your browser window. It’ll look something like this -

The Blue Box

Click on the blue box, and your list of search options will pop up, with something added to the bottom -

add Technorati search

Click on Add “Technorati Search”, and Firefox adds it to your list of engines and selects it -

New Search in browser

Adding Search Engines via Mycroft Project

You’ll probably have noticed by now the last item in the menu for search engines - Manage Search Engines. When you select that, a quite powerful window is brought up.

Manage search engines

Here, you can move the search engines in your list around, delete search engines, and gain quick access to the Mycroft Project. All you need to do is click on Get more search engines… and you will be taken to Firefox’s main Search Engine add-on page.

At the bottom of the page, there is a link to Browse through more search engines at mycroft.mozilla.org - simply click on that link, and you’ll be taken there. Now, you can search for your favorite site. For example, if I wanted to find a plugin for Dogpile (a site which doesn’t automatically pop up the blue box), I’d search for it and be sent to a result page.

When at the result page, click on the version of the search engine you’re looking for and a window will pop up verifying that you want to install that search engine.

Confirm install of a new search engine

Click Start using it right away if you want it to be your search engine of choice right away, or else you can just install it and switch to it later. :)

How do I change the Search Engine I use?

That’s a simple process. Just know that when you change the search engine in the upper right, you change the engine that you use when you do a right-click search. For example, with Technorati as the default search, I can search for words I come across on a website by selecting them and right clicking, which will bring up this menu (which I will add is quite a bit longer than most right-click menus ;) ) -

Context Search

To change the search engine that you use for both types of searches, it’s as simple as going back up to the upper right and clicking on the icon of the current search (the same place that you click when it turned blue), and select your new search engine.

Using the search bar

To use the search bar, you can do one of three things - first, click on the bar and type your search in. If you prefer to use the keyboard, you have two shortcuts - Ctrl+E and Ctrl+K, both of which focus to the search bar. Type your search in and hit enter or click on the magnifying glass. A new tab will open up for you which will have your search in it.

Over to you

Taking advantage of the phenomenal tool is quite simple. If you haven’t tried it out yet, give it a go, and let me know what you think in the comments. :)

Also, as always, Snoskred and I are open to suggestions for future topics to be covered in a Tech Tuesday Think Tank. If you have something you’d like to be explained, feel free to drop a line via the Contact form. :)

Comments (3)

This was the Week that Was, Vol. 22

By Sephyroth on November 19, 2007 at 2.22 pm · Filed under blog, bumpzee, nablopomo, tw3

This week, I’ve tried to use a new system to put together the links; there are less than normal because I haven’t had much time to go around and read many posts this week.

Posts I liked -

New blogs this week in the US Blogs community at BumpZEE -

Keywords -

  • do i dress like an old man - I don’t know, and something tells me I don’t want to know!
  • edwyn versace - Who?

This week around the blog, I talked about another element of HTML - Fonts, and Snos talked about one of the basics of HTML - the Horizontal Rule.

I also discussed moving your feeds from Google Reader to Bloglines - by the way, I just found out that Bloglines beta has a feature that replicates the “Google Preview Enhanced” Greasemonkey script, which I think is sweet. ;)

I showed off some more of my world in pictures - there’s a post coming up in a couple of weeks with more pictures; I’ll link to it when it’s posted :)

I weighed in on the recent actions of Google, and said that I’m not going to fully boycott them, but use this as an opportunity to diversify where I get my information from.

That ties neatly into what I’m going to be talking about in the Tuesday Think Tank - how to use alternative search engines in Firefox. It involves something I whined about before upgrading to version 2.0, but the reality is that the new version makes it a lot easier to add search engines. You’ll see how tomorrow. ;)

‘Til next week y’all! ;)

By the way, if you’ve commented over the last couple of weeks, I did a lot of replying to comments last night, so be sure to check that out if you weren’t subscribed to the posts :)

Comments

The Week in Walks, etc. Vol 17

By Sephyroth on November 18, 2007 at 9.03 pm · Filed under goals, personal, pictures, walking

I’m using some perogitive here and changing up the walks wrap up. Instead of my putting notes about the walk (which really are boiling down to, it’s cold outside and I’m wearing three layers ;) ), I’m going to stick to photos and their descriptions, with the distances. If something unusual does happen, I’ll note it. Hope y’all don’t mind. :)

Sunday, 11th November

Walking 11/11/07

Pardon the blurriness, but time exposure shots handheld are kind of difficult, even though I’ve learnt a new trick to increase stability while holding the camera. However, the effect on this shot is cool - you should be able to see the reflection off of some of the cars in the passing carrier. :)

Total distance - 5699 steps, 4.55km

Monday, 12th November

Walking 12/11/07

These trees can cause me some confusion from time to time because when the wind passes through them, it sounds like it’s starting to rain. Of course, it’s just the leaves blowing around, and I probably should be less paranoid… ;)

Total distance - 5374 steps, 4.29km

Tuesday, 13th November

Walking 13/11/07

A look from further back at the trees above, however in the background you can see the lights of an approaching train. It turned out to be a container train, likely loaded with products coming from overseas. I would guess that there were other types of cars on the end, but I didn’t see those as I kept going after taking a couple of pictures.

Total distance - 4790 steps, 3.83km

Wednesday, 14th November

Walking 14/11/07

This plane kind of surprised me as it wasn’t flying any higher than about 400 feet; thus I actually got a halfway decent picture of it, and not out of focus. Now, just if the light was better… :)

By the way, in case you’re wondering about these low step totals, I am walking the same route I have been walking, but I think I’ve been interfering with the pedometer’s freedom to count. It might just be a situation where I might need to find a different place to put it.

Total distance - 4392 steps, 3.46km

Thursday, 15th November

Walking 15/11/07

A look through the trees at the setting sun, which now sets more towards the Southwest since it’s up in the sky for a shorter time of the day. As I was walking out of the park, I spotted a car pulling to the side of the road by the gate; as it turned out, it was someone walking his dog. All’s well that ends well in this case :)

Total distance - 4560 steps, 3.64km

Friday, 16th November

Walking 16/11/07

Ah, another attempt at the handheld shot. I went walking later than normal because of my volunteering commitments, and didn’t make it much past this point; I hardly slept overnight because I had caffeine; however, I did go out for a short walk after I got back, even though I was really tired.

Distances:
4:19pm - 2359 steps, 1.88km
5:27pm - 4113 steps, 3.29km
end of day - 5288 steps, 4.23km

Saturday, 17th November

Walking 17/11/07

No points for guessing the substance here. ;) It’s snow; our first small snowfall of the year, though it didn’t stick to much other than the car in the driveway. I did manage to get a decent length walk in though. :)

Total distance - 4536 steps, 3.62km


In other news, I had my first full appointment with the therapist on Monday; there wasn’t too much new information learnt about myself, however this week we’re going to look at one of the things that I have a tendency to do.

With a scant 2+ weeks until my driving test, I’m becoming more comfortable with my driving skills. Once again, I had the opportunity to drive home from my volunteering and took it (actually, I got to the car first, so the choice was pretty easy). I also had the chance to drive the car on my own (granted, it was over a total distance of about 100 feet; baby steps, hehe ;) ), and got some practice handling parking stalls. Also, I had the opportunity to drive in the rain yesterday. I did not know this, but if you put the rear defroster on, it will clear the back windscreen of water that has accumulated (though my idea of cleaning the back at the gas station worked decently for about a minute).

This week is Thanksgiving week, so I know that I won’t be volunteering on Friday (the office is closed); I’m need to get in some of the “fine” skills practice - i.e. parallel parking and y turns - this week; I need to speak up about that because there’s a chance we could have a snowstorm on Thanksgiving day, which is fine because the Packers are playing anyway :)

Comments

Sorry, Y’all, I’m not doing a Full Boycott

By Sephyroth on November 17, 2007 at 10.24 pm · Filed under blog, google, nablopomo

There’s been a lot of talk about the sheer crap that Google has been putting a lot of people through, including stripping well-meaning people of all of their PageRank. If you’re not familiar, PageRank was introduced as a way for people who used the Google Toolbar to judge the “worth” (in Google’s eyes) of a website.

However, Google have made it possible for outside organizations to access a site’s PageRank and as such, it has become a tool for sites to judge the “value” of a site for various money making enterprises. Recently, there has been a rash of people getting penalized for committing various “fouls” against some rule or another, especially selling advertising on their websites.

For many folks who blog, they do it because they love it and the fact that we can make money from it is a great thing - I’ve personally made some money blogging and I enjoy doing it quite immensely. However, Google see it almost as their mission in life to screw with everyone who is making a little money on the side (or for folks making their only money online) by pulling this stunt of dropping PageRank on some sites involved.

That brings me to something that has cropped up in the last couple of days - boycotting Google. For those of you who are going to a great length to remove Google from your world, I say good for you for taking a stand and trying to make do without them in your world.

However, I will not boycott Google completely. Yes, I’m definitely taking this as an opportunity to diversify where I do things - for example, using Yahoo and Live for my searching in addition to Google, however, I find that Google has always given me the best results for my searches, so I will still likely use them as a reliable backup to Yahoo and Live.

I’ve already started to use Bloglines for reading feeds on an infrequent basis, and I can easily import my feed list into there from my Google Reader. There are posts that I’ve marked in Google Reader and items I’ve placed into special folders which don’t get exported when you export your feed list from there, so I will still check in there on a regular basis - over time, I may transition all of my feed reading over to Bloglines on a permanent basis.

As far as email is concerned, I like Gmail, especially because I can use Thunderbird to send mail through my Gmail accounts; I can’t do that with my domain account as my ISP block me from using the standard mail port for any accounts other than my ISP account. One thing, admittedly, I haven’t tried, is to send mail from my domain email address using my ISP’s mail server. Let me try that now…

As a matter of fact, I can send email via my ISP’s outgoing mail server for my domain accounts, so I’m not dependent upon Gmail or my personal ISP email account for sending mail from Thunderbird. Sweet! However, my main “personal” account will still be a Gmail for the time being; I always have the option of opening a Yahoo Canada/UK/Australia account so I can have free pop access. By the way, if you ask me, Yahoo’s not offering free pop access on US accounts is one of the biggest scams out there.

So far, I’ve found alternatives for just about every Google application, except for a couple - first is Google Maps. By far, they have the best online map, especially with their drag and drop routing options. Their satellite is also great, and so is Street View. Windows Live Maps and Yahoo Maps have been catching up, and I really love Live’s Birdseye view mode - it’s taken from a plane not flying too high in the sky. Another option that you can use for an online map is Flash Earth - it lets you choose from a variety of maps and satellite pictures from the same window.

The other main Google application that I don’t believe there is an alternative to is Google Earth - it’s a fun tool to play around with, especially when I want to have some perspective on how things are positioned, and I might not find it on a regular online map. I only use it every so often; mostly when I’ve been asked to get a shot of how something looks from the sky. ;)

A couple more Google-owned products that it’s difficult to go away from are FeedBurner - they bought that this year, and as far as I know there aren’t any alternatives out there to it. I did see a post about using WordPress plugins to replicate the service, but I have to admit that I would prefer the feeds to be through FeedBurner because the traffic from the feed fetchers is going to their servers and not the one my site is hosted on.

Another product that is ubiquitous is YouTube - they’re owned by Google as well, and as you all will know are the major clearinghouse for videos on the web. There are alternatives to it, and there are definitely advantages to each site, and the content is different on all the sites. Here’s just a small taste of the sites that I have used a bit -

There are also other niche sites for videos, but they’re really “gray market” stuff, which really shouldn’t be mentioned in the open; I’ll just say that I get some really nice videos (and no, they’re not pr0n, I’ve seen other sites that let you download free pr0n tho…maybe i should download some :lol: :twisted: ) from there. If you’re interested in auto racing, Aussie/NZ TV or UK TV, you probably know these sites ;)

Another service that Google provides are the Google Alerts - I don’t know of an alternative to it either; if you do, definitely feel free to leave a comment.

Below is a list of a lot of links. These are some of the best articles that are out there about the recent goings-on by Google:

I’d like to hear your opinion - am I less of a person for not boycotting Google totally? They don’t receive any money from me, and compared to a lot of people, I don’t give them a lot of traffic (as it is I block Adsense ads, and most other ads for that matter). I’m also not a shareholder, so I have no financial stake in them. To them, I’m just another IP and another cookie, and not much else.

Comments (6)

« Previous entries · Next entries »