Wayne D's Blog

Yahoo live went down for a maintenance outage last night and when they came back it was magically working for me again. Well probably not so magically, what they broken Sunday they fixed again. I wonder how it will be before it gets broken yet again. I wonder if Yahoo will continue this grand experiment or will decide to pull the plug.

I have slowly been replacing the Ferrari concealed hinges that are installed on most of the cabinet doors throughout my house with Blum hinges. The Ferrari hinges wear out on door that are used frequently like the door on the cupboard with our glasses and plates or the door under the sink where our garbage can used to be stored. After a while the Ferrari hinges leave a black deposit and don't properly support the door. The Blum hinges have a lifetime gaurantee though I suspect that the hoops required to get them replaced when they do fail will be more cumbersome than just spending another $3 for a new hinge. When I went to Home Depot this time I wanted to buy a 10 pack of hinges. Unfortunately they sell them in two pieces and only on of the pieces still had 10 packs available. Sigh, why not either package them together or stock the two pieces in equal quantities. I did notice that Home Depot now has buttons scattered throughout the store to allow you to summon help. Looks like they can fell Rona's hot breath on their neck.

After waxing poetical about how neat I thought live.yahoo.com was over the weekend yahoo broke it. No matter what I do when I click on the GO LIVE button, it doesn't. No error message, no nothing, the big NOT BROADCASTING banner shows across my live video preview and in the main window. For the record I am using Firefox 1.5 on Centos 5. The worse thing is that since Yahoo broke live.yahoo.com is that if I try to navigate away from the page it hangs the browser. sigh.

After mentioning nekomimi_lisa she seems to have abandoned live.yahoo.com for justin.tv. The good news is that jusin.tv does work for me, I wonder if she is a linux user too. The two edged sword in this case it that people have reported to me that they couldn't get into justin.tv to see the video or comment in the chatroom. I guess these two cases show that personal streaming internet video still needs some work.

A quick one. I was having trouble getting the text chat to work correctly in live.yahoo.com. The text chat would start ok but would stop working after the camera became active. I was able to fix it by upgrading to the latest version of flash. It was the difference beween 1.0.48 and 1.0.115. The moral of the story, first thing to try is to download the latest version of flash.

We decided to go to Montana's cookhouse for our Valentine's dinner. The portents were not good whe we arrived and were informed that the wait would be 25-30 minutes. The boys were happy as we settled into the bar and they found 5 credits in the bar video game. Things turned south again when none of the bar tenders enquired on whether we would be interested in having a drink even though one of them moved me out of the way twice to get out from behind the bar. Next we were seated beside the kitchen and only feet away from the roll of paper that they use to cover the tables. Every few minutes we would here the sound of ripping paper as another table was bussed. I wonder if Montana's and Jack Astor's are owned by the same company since Jack Astor's also uses the paper tablecloth technique. In both restaurants the wait staff also write their name on the table when they come to introduce themselves. Our waitress' name was Bez. It wasn't really Bez, she told be that was her nickname andd it was easier to write. I neglected to ask Cait when I was at Jack Astor's if that was really her name or also her nickname.

By this time I was very hungry and thirsty. Drinks came, food came, for more details refer to my twitter feed for yesterday. Everything was fine. We received an unexpected bonus when instead of the 8 oz. steak my wife ordered a 12 oz. showed up instead. When we brought it to Bez's attention she told us that the other girl who was trailing around with her had entered it wrong and the bill would be corrected. The other girl looked like a trainee, I expect they probably docked her pay the $4 though I hope not. That would be a serious bummer, we didn't want to get anyone in trouble.

After cooling my heels in the bar I was in a bit of a surly mood, the table placement didn't help but Bez saved the evening. I do know that I am not going to Montana's for my birthday, I don't want to wear that mangy horn hat while they sing to me.

I seemed to have picked up a bit of a cold so I am stuffed up and feel poorly on this first Family Day long weekend. I have found that blogging on the eeepc can be a bit of a challenge, the text if pretty small and my fingers are pretty big so extra copy editing is required to fix the mistypings but all in all I am very happy with it. Now I am fatigued from the gargantuan effort of writing this post so I think I'll rest for a while.

While browsing around live.yahoo.com I ran across nekomimi_lisa's channel. She has a webcam at her office, one in her house. This morning I found out there was no snow on the ground in New York City because she carries a cellphone cam on her walk to the subway. Her yahoo live profile lists the various places and services you can see her on.

Some people have mentioed Jennicam to me when I talk about Yahoo Live bu the primary difference I see is that all you need is a webcam and flash to go live. Nekomimi_lisa uses free services to do her broadcasts so a great deal of technical prowess isn't required as contrasted with the Jeniicam era.

Today I went out to lunch wih my old friend Brian and I took my eeepc along with me to show it off. I pulled up my yahoo live channel to show Brian the fake plant in my office on thee free wifi in the restaurant. I introduced him to nenkomimi_lisa. It was a bit surreal, us in a restarant in Toronto chatting with and looking at someone sitting in an office in NYC. Why would someone decide to webcast their life? Why would someone decide to write a blog? Questions to ponder.