Technology Bytes Radio – Page 2 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Geek Party

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The party celebrating the 12th anniversary of Technology Bytes was, by all measures, a huge success. We had a good crowd and a good time was had by all. DJ Amanda Robinson was excellent in the mix and The Free Radicals were quite a lot of fun, especially when they performed a version of the theme song we use to open the show each week.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Here are some random shots I managed to take in between all the socializing…

Spread the word

I’m throwing a party this Friday.
You’re invited!

Simsonized

My radio show co-host, Peter Hughes, surprised us with group rendering of the crew in Simpsons form and posted it to the show’s web site.

It’s scarily accurate.

Hey, Matt Groening! If you decide you want to use the crew of Technology Bytes in an upcoming episode of The Simpsons we’ve taken care of the hard part!

You can create your own Simpsons avatar at The Simsons Movie site.

TV Time

Got a call from Jeff Ehling over at the local ABC affiliate (Channel 13). He was putting together a story to tie in to the recent FBI press release regarding botnet cyber crime and needed a geek talking head.

Lord knows there’s no talking head geekier than yours truly and despite my fear of being in front of the camera, I agreed to do it. I try not to pass up any opportunity to promote the radio show. Plus I think I must secretly enjoy being scared out of my wits.

Much like the previous times, it went smoothly enough and I was not horrified with the results. Jeff did a great job on the story and used sound bites from me in the piece that worked well and I was very pleased to hear him use talking points that came from our more candid off camera conversation.

You can see the news story video here.

Xshot promotional offer

So pleased was the Xshot corporation with my blathering the benefits of the Xshot that they have offered the readers of baldheretic.com and the Technology Bytes blog an opportunity to pick one up at a discount.

From now until July 15th you can go to xshotpix.com and order the Xshot and use the promo code GEEKRADIO at the time of checkout for a $5.50 discount. Just type GEEKRADIO into the box that says Coupon when you are checking out.

Look at me! I’m a shill! 🙂 Just kidding, I love my Xshot!

Tron

Gearing up for our 12th anniversary, Technology Bytes Radio is teaming up with The Petrol Station and St. Arnold Brewery to bring you Tron, the original geek movie, projected in all it’s gigantic glory outdoors and on the back wall.

The event will be Friday, July 1st. and admission is FREE!

The movie should fire up around 9 PM but feel free to come on out anytime after 7:30 and join the crew of Technology Bytes for some brews and a very geeky evening.

The Petrol Station is located at 985 Wakefield Dr. here in Houston, TX.
Click here for a map

Phone number is (713) 957-2875

Good Morning Houston

So the interview on ABC 13 went well, I think. 2 minutes and 27 seconds was the total time. You can view it on Jeff Ehling’s blog by clicking here.

I enjoyed the experience. The staff that makes up the Sunday morning crew made me feel welcome and at ease. Elissa Rivas conducted the actual interview and she made it very pleasant.

When the interview was over Mark Garay (who, by the way, was wearing tennis shoes behind the anchor desk) asked me to stop by and speak with Carmin the producer on my way out. I figured they must want me to sign something or I don’t know what, but I stopped by. No paperwork, oh no. Carmin was having a computer problem and they wanted my assistance.

Turns out that Carmin’s workstation was having a problem with the time change. This was the computer she was using to manage the current on air program with all the various time blocks, story segments, commercial breaks and so forth and every couple of minutes it was reverting back to pre-DST time after she would manually set it to the correct time.

My ~~guess~~ expert opionon was that it must be synching to an NTP server and also not have the current software update to allow it to sort out the time change.

How ironic. Here we are making light of the Y2K7 problem and how it’s no big deal and the very show hosting the interview is in danger of collapsing in a Microsoft-induced DST wormhole.

There’s no way to patch the machine what with it being used to mange a live program. It would have to wait till after the show and wait for one of the ABC IT staff as I was on my way out the door.

It was a great fun and I hope to do more work with ABC in the future.

Y2K7 (The sky is falling)*

What with the upcoming time change for those of us who server under the yoke of Daylight Savings Time, this weekend is going to be interesting. As you are probably aware, we are getting to celebrate early this year thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

We’re having bit of a mini Y2K event. This time it’s called Y2K7. Much like Y2K I expect it to be a big hullabaloo about a whole lot of nuthin’, at least for most of us. I know plenty of system administrators and application developers who have been burning the midnight oil making sure all systems are fully patched and prepared for the early time change.

There are some things you might want to look at technology-wise to be prepared as a computer/technology user.

I wrote a primer for my show web site. It’s called Daylight Savings Time (DST) – Preparing for Y2K7.

I’ve included some useful links for upgrading anything from XP to Apple OS X as well as Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile devices. Pass the link along to anyone you think might need it.

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*again