Wayne D's Blog

We use irc at work on one of our products and and wanted to check out the irc capabilities of the eeepc. I tried using the IRC functionality of pidgin but I didn't find it very fucntional so I decided to try to load xchat instead. After a little bit of web research I tried adding deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list. Note that you must use sudo to edit this file. After installing xchat from this repository I got an segmentation fault when I tried to connect so I uninstalled it and replaced
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free with
deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free.
Then you have to run sudo apt-get install xchat and everything worked fine after the install. Now it's time to add it to the simple menu.

I have developed an unhealthy obsession with the Google robot. When the robot spurns my freshly minted blog postings and continues to insist a week old blog posting is my newest I despair. Please robot, notice me, update you index, I need your assurances that I am relevant. I don't think this is a good thing, I try not to look but I can't. I shall try to be strong but I to have my ego stroked and this needy behaviour is difficult to suppress.

Last night I had 120 songs waiting to be uploaded to Last.fm from Amarok. I consulted my Linux guru who after contemplating his navel offered nothing beyond an inscrutable gaze. I scoured the net until I came across bernieda's post on the ubuntuforums. His suggestion was simplicity itself and it seemed unlikely to work but I gave it a try none the less. Woho! success. What was the great mystery that had stumped many? Go to Last.fm and set change your password to be the same as the previous one. Whoosh, up they went and my submission queue was empty.

I know I promised no more double topic post, c'est la vie. I have posted a picture of my new toy on this entry. Showing this one off is one of the few times having women comment on how small it is will not turn a man into a quivering mound of insecurity.

Quick edit, I was browsing Last.fm and noticed this song go by. I thought it was great so I thought I'd try embedding it here. Take a listen and tell me what you think. The artist's name is Laura Marie. Click the little play button to hear the track.

Hanging Around If you like it you can download a free Mp3 at Last.fm or buy her album at cdbaby.com.

I was searching for something on Google today and an ad popped up for sessions.aol.ca. I spent much of the afternoon watching the performances. Fergie, Rihanna, Michael Buble,John Mayer and Bon Jovi. The video is ok, the sound is really good. They currently have 83 available. Strange thing was that I couldn't get them to play in Firefox on Linux but they worked fine on Seamonkey. No such luck for AOL radio, it's a windows only product probably because of the DRM.

With 10 tracks still remaining this month my emusic.com picks are Single's of the 90's from Ace of Bass and Ron Sexsmith's Blue Boy.

Today I bought a 4 GB eeepc from Asus, more to come about that.

I forget where I heard about it but I stumbled across live.yahoo.com. Part webcam, part chat room it seems likes a very interesting idea. Yahoo used to have user created text chat rooms which eventually were shut down because they attracted an undesireable element and you can already use your webcam in Yahoo chat so this seems like a natural devleopment. I found the site strangely compelling, this afternoon I watched a couple renovating a storefront space for their new gallery. At one point the man stopped working and juggled in the middle of the room. The woman spent 30 minutes painting the door and talking on her cellphone. Later on another woman was singing requests in a deep sultry voice. Perhaps I need to find a life but I think I'll be back to see what develops.

I've decided that instead of mixing two topics in a posting I'll stick to one and do more posts. This assumes that I don't run out of ideas. I'm kinda' pissed at Google right now, they haven't updated their index for my stuff in over a week when they used to do it every day. Darn, I think I just mixed two topics in a post, so much for that idea.

For many years Bonus.com linked to my Snakes and Ladders java game. I finally got around to checking my server logs and noticed that the traffic to that page had really dropped. It used to be the most popular page on my website but around September of 2007 its traffic dropped. When I went to Bonus.com I found out why. They have changed the focus of their site away from a collection of links to games hosted on other sites to games hosted locally. I guess I didn't make the cut since they didn't contact me. They seem to have skewed the site more to the over 13 demographic where my Snakes and Ladders game is more for very small children. I wish Bonus.com the best of luck with the new format, I expect it will be more lucrative based on the number of ads on the site.

One quick whine, I was just watching Bones on Global and the audio level on the commercials was more than annoyingly louder than the program content. Come on Global, get your audio act together.