Wayne D's Blog

As part of my attempt to catch up to bleeding edge of technology I took my EEEPC to the Marlies playoff game last night. I was supposed to be conducting the Marlinotes for the first part of the game while our fearless leader jetted in from NYC expecting to arrive just around game time. New rule for '08, don't rely on airlines. His flight was delayed 3 hours before it left leaving me holding the clipboard and marker. My plan for ustreaming our perfromance at the game came a bit unhinged as I tried to juggle mt beer cup, eeepc and song list while not missing a cue. The challenge in playing at a hockey game is when you get the cue that you will be playing at the next whistle it could be anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes later. Keeping an eating, drinking, and chatting band on their toes and ready to play in this situation can be a tad bit difficult.

After the first intermission I did manage to get the EEEPC online using the free wireless at the Ricoh Centre and streaming to an audience of at peak 5 people. The cool thing was that one of them was a former bandmate who now lives and works in Japan and saw my tweet about the Marlinotes on ustream. Another one of the viewers was an Argonote band member from Waterloo who saw that I was streaming through my Facebook status. The experiment was not a complete success, after about 45 minutes we lost audio, a band without audio isn't much fun so I terminated the experiment. I did record a couple of videos but they didn't turn out well enough to keep. I'd would have liked to try streaming with the Argonotes at the Rogers Centre but for some bizarre reason Rogers, one of the two major ISP's in Ontario doesn't offer free wireless in their own facility. Perhaps they have reconsidered and we can expect to see it this year, especially since Rogers is getting ready to announce the iPhone. You may be wondering why I used ustream after writing about live.yahoo.com so much. The simple reason is that Yahoo has still not resolved the audio issue that live.yahoo.com has on Linux. Maybe now that they aren't all polishing up their resumes they'll get a chance to look at it.

Why am I slagging the iPod touch? One of the Marlinotes is a big Cali Lewis and Geekbrief like myself and she has an iPod touch. Cali was also streaming on ustream last night and guess what the internet enabled iPod touch won't do, flash video? Guess what everybody and their dog on the internet uses for streaming video, flash video. I graciously loaned her my EEPC so she could get her Cali fix. She and I are both figuring out how we can get Cali and Neal up to Toronto during the big trip. The big trip is a trip she and her husband Neal plan to take in an RV starting this summer. Fifty states in fifty weeks and hopefully at least one Canadian province. We figure we will at least have to pay for the gas for their RV and perhaps get them some media exposure when they hit town. There must be tonnes of Geekbrief fans in the GTA who could make time for a meet up.

You may have noticed that I have changed my blog skin. This was because I realized the other skin wasn't putting the right sidebar on the individual posts. Probably something I messed up, now I'll get another wave of search robot hits as the notice the changed pages and rampage through the site.