Technobabble – Page 9 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Weekend update

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It was a good, good weekend.

The anniversary party was (in my “humble” opinion) a huge success.

Drop Trio was awesome and even brought out a refurbished Arp 2600 which has uber-geek appeal.
A pleasant and well received surprise came when they performed the Technology Bytes theme song.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and I was able to relax and enjoy the company of some great people. Saw some old friends and made some new ones.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Pictures at http://www.geekradio.com/gallery/Kaveh-Kanes-070805

Crazy Apple Rumors

With all the talk about iPods lately I thought I would share this from www.crazyapplerumors.com

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Apple Special Event To Reveal New Music Features.

At an event scheduled for July 7th, sources indicate, Apple will announce iTunes 4.9, an entirely new lineup of iPods and the ability to play AAC-encoded music on ham sandwiches.

Apple will improve upon iTunes by adding podcasting, will upgrade the storage capacities of all iPods and, most excitingly, will do the seemingly impossible: allow music to be played on pork-based meat between two pieces of bread.

“Pork fat is highly magnetic,” an Apple engineer on the project said. “Thus it retains digital files in their purest form.”

According to our source, the AAC on ham effort is the result of a meats-as-storage-medium skunk works project in the mid-1990s during Apple’s heyday of research into pretty much anything anyone could think of no matter how high they were.

Several sources in the know indicate the guy who thought up this was extremely high.

“Black Forest ham works best,” the engineer said, “but any ham will do. Even your generic Safeway or Giant-brand hams. Ham in a white box that says ‘HAM’ on it in black letters will even work. But it has to be ham. We tried turkey, roast beef, salami… baloney… Braunschweiger…

“By the way, don’t try Braunschweiger. Ever. For any reason. Even if it points to magnetic north and you need to find your way out of a canyon filled with rabid coyotes. Better to turn and charge headfirst into the coyotes than to taste Braunschweiger.”

Reportedly, mustard, cheeses and the type of bread have no impact on the audio quality, but bread must be present for loss-less playback. With no visual interface, the functionality is similar to the iPod shuffle, but with a rainbow shine after several days of play.

Asked how Apple intends to make any money off of this discovery, the source said that the company will port the operating system powering the iPod shuffle to the ham sandwich and provide a whole series of ham sandwich peripherals, perhaps even ham sandwich socks.

Users will be free to make their own ham sandwiches, but Apple is confident that the tight integration the company will be able to make between the ham sandwich and the Macintosh will even lead to a ham halo effect, increasing the Mac’s market share.

Apple declined to comment for this story, but area residents report that representative from Carl Buddig have been seen coming and going at One Infinite Loop.

Technolgy Bytes is now podcasting

If you have an iPod and want to subscribe to the podcast for my show Technology Bytes you can do so using this RSS feed.

In related news, Technology Bytes is celebrating 10 years on the air in Houston, TX on the Mighty 90, KPFT. We will be partying down with our bad selves at Kaveh Kanes in downtown Cowtown on Friday, July 8th. Party kicks off at 8:00. Admission is FREE!

Drop Trio will be providing the music and everyone is invited so come on down and party like a dorkus-malorkus.

Kaveh Kanes is located at 912 Prairie and offers a fine selection of beer, coffee and desert.
They also have free Internet access (both wired and wireless).

Everything’s coming up Milhouse

I received not one, but TWO e-mail messages from The Houston Press this weekend.

The first one was to let me know that my band, The Flying Fish Sailors, has been nominated for the 2005 Houston Press Music Awards and also invited to play at the showcase. The last time this happened was in 2002 when we were nominated (and won) in the Celtic Music category. It’s nice to get some recognition. We’ve only been together as a band for about 17 years.

The second e-mail was to let me know that I have been nominated for the upcoming Best of Houston issue. Every year they publish an issue that contains what they believe to be the best that Houston has to offer. The categories range from best bar, restaurant, etc to best place to have your car repaired and so forth.

In years past my radio show, Technology Bytes was recognized with the title of “Best Technology Talk Radio” beating out Michael Garfield, Houston’s own (so-called) High Tech Texan. In 2002 my partner Peter Hughes was recognized as “Best Radio Sidekick”.

This year I have been nominated for the title of “Best Tech Geek” for my efforts on the show as well as my weekly Help Line column in the Houston Chronicle.

Search me!

As I was parsing my log files and I was noticing the search terms Internet users were googling that caused my blog to show up in their search results. I decided to cull them out and list them here for your pleasure.

I broke it down into 3 categories. Searches that included the term “bald”, searches that included the term “heretic” and the rest.

Here are the results.

BALD

bald+back
bald+belgium
bald+is+good
bald+pics
bald+woman+head+pic
home+taken+pics+of+bald+kids
pictures+of+bald+people
she+bald+beautiful
william+bald

HERETIC

famous+heretic
Heretic+of+Venice
irish+heretic
medieval+heretic
peter+the+heretic

MISC

40+gig+ipod+soft+reset
broken+nose+did+not+bleed
capt.+spastic
cecily+livejournal
da+vinci+the+heretic
donna+hailing+a+cab
dumon+chocolate
easy+tag+Westpark
History+of+Champs+Elysse
Los+Skarnales
monotonous+langour
pictures+of+night+trains+in+europe
pisa+leaning+tower
rome+train+to+paris
sean+condon
sean+condon+amsterdam
sean+reefer+andrea
skarnales
timothy+dehaas
train+trip+in+europe
uss+fanning

Spam-be-gone!

There are these robots that scan the Internet looking for blogs so they can add a comment to a post. These comments are advertisements. Spam for your blog.

Fortunately my WordPress evangelist Katie tipped me off to a wonderful WordPress plug-in called Spam Karma.

This nifty tool not only blocks comment spam but sends a nifty report with information about blocks…and it has a sense of humor, too!

—-

Spam Karma Digest Report:

10 comments digested since last report (mmm, yummy!):

=+ Comment #1
Reason(s):
Waaaay too many links: 14
URL/IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx blacklisted by RBL bl.spamcop.net (127.0.0.2)
URL/IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx blacklisted by RBL sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org (127.0.0.6)
Comment text: ‘I was Born In A Dumpster… You?

Are you ready to rumble?!?

The important thing is this…

In the Jay Lee vs. The iPod conflict, I emerged victorious.

That is why I do what I do.

iPod is go for launch

All the bugs seem to be worked out.
The iPod now successfully interfaces with my laptop and with my camera.

Yesterday I took my Sony DSC f828 camera and shot 228 5 megapixel images on my 512 MB memory stick.
When I arrived home I dined on delicious home made sloppy joes that Cynthia had made for dinner.

I was upbeat and optimistic and ready to take on the iPod for the final round.

My first order of business was to connect the iPod to the laptop and download the 300+ songs Cynthia had ripped (so far) from our CD collection.

*side note; The iTunes software is pretty damn amazing. Cynthia is not all that technically savvy and does not warm up to new software applications very readily. That being said, she has pretty much mastered the ripping process and has even begun to create some nice custom play. This is a HUGE bonus as it has sped up the process of digitizing the music collection.

I connected the iPod and, as it should, the iTunes software fired up. iTunes allowed me to name my iPod and initialized it correctly for Windows use. All 300+ songs were uploaded to the iPod in less than 10 minutes.

The next step was to connect my camera to the iPod and pull off the 228 images. All went as planned and the iPod brought up the proper menus and allowed me to offload the entire memory stick. It took approximately 30 minutes to transfer the whole load and used about 1/3 of the battery charge to do so. I deleted the memory stick using the iPod and disconnected.

Now for the real test. Could I recover the images from the iPod?

I connected to the laptop and looked under the “My Computer” icon. The iPod showed up as an external drive and I was able to browse the contents. There were my images in a folder. I copied the folder to my laptop in under 5 minutes. I then deleted the files from the iPod which took another few minutes.

All in all, a huge success and a much less painful day than the one before.

At this point I feel confident that I made the right choice. I have a solution for handling my pictures while traveling overseas.

And the bonus (as previously mentioned) is that I have an iPod.
I’m sitting at my desk listening to Cat Stevens as I type this.
On top of that Cynthia can use it and she is even excited about it. The idea of having access to some of her favorite music on the flight or when riding on the train has great appeal to her.

So, in the end, I not only have a practical solution for a problem that was presented in the planning for our trip, but I also have a gadget that will enhance the travelling part of the vacation for Cynthia.