Wayne D's Blog

I just finished downloading my emusic.com tracks for this month so I thought I'd tell you all about them.

• First is vox humana by Mel Watson of Fruit. I saw Fruit in concert a few years ago and was really impressed with their high energy show. This album from one of the members of Fruit has a pop feel with some nice horn backing.
• Retriever by Ron Sexsmith was another of my choices. I heard him on this week's Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean and was impressed enough with his music to pick up some of his songs.
• Dances like Flames from Tanglefoot is also on the list for next month. I've seen Tanglefoot in concert a few times and always found them quite entertaining. Tanglefoot has added a female vocalist and fiddle player who adds a new dimension to their harmonies.
• I also picked up 5 tracks off of Hungry Ghosts by Doug Cox and Sam Hurrie. Some of the tracks on the album were a little too bluesies for my tastes so I didn't get the whole album but the more folk focused tracks I did download were quite satisfying.

If you want cheap, legal, DRM free, indie music emusic.com is the place to get it. If you want to sign up and get 50 free tracks send me a message and I'll send you a referral. That way I get 50 more free tracks too. Not from emusic.com but also new to my iPod this month is The Phenominal Ruthie Foster a new album from (surprise, surprise) Ruthie Foster. I bought this one from Amazon.ca using my Telus $10 off discount on purchases over $40. It works out to be less than buying on iTunes after the discount is taken into account.

I finally gave up on using the radio to cassette adapter in my car and switched back to the FM transmitter. It's gotten to the point that the cassette adaptor gets ejected by the cassette player ever 30 seconds or so. It works fine in my wife's car so I think it's the cassette deck in my car.

Now I'm off to rip more of my old CD's to add to my music library, on the pile is No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom, Exchange - Into the Night, Natalie MacMaster - In My Hands and Randy Newman - Faust.

After writing about Tiki Bar TV a few weeks ago I hear that Steve Jobs mentioned the show in a speech last year. So as always I am late to the bandwagon.

The weather is almost too nice to be cranky but I'm going to crank a little bit anyways. I have noticed a disturbing trend among people to be detached from their present physically reality. On Flickr's day of Flickr I went into the dollar store to buy some batteries for my digital camera. I got in line behind a woman who was talking on her cell phone. She paid for her purchase and left the store without ever making eye contact with the clerk. As I left the store I saw her going to her car still talking on the phone. I wished I had brought my camera because she passed another woman who was almost yelling in her phone and it would have made a great Day of Flickr photo. It illustrates how many people aren't mentally present where they are. That's why people are always talking on their cellphones in the cars. They really don't want to be there. The clerk in the dollar store was just another car on the road that had to be passed. It must be quite a dehumanizing experience to be serving someone in a store and they don't even look you in the eye. I prefer to engage with the people around me, I talk to store clerks. I ask the name of the wait staff at the bar.

An update on my inability to stream Global TV shows because they think I'm not in Canada. No response from Canada.com yet and it's still broken for me.

I was clicking around last night and made my way to the Global TV web page. Well actually I was checking to see if they were going to show Bones and noticed that they offered streaming episodes of Heroes. I have been pretty hard on Canadian rights holders because they were slow to offer streaming TV shows because the U.S. network websites block Canadian users. I clicked on one of the Heroes episodes to see what the quality was and received the message Sorry, this video is unavailable outside of Canada. When did they move Richmond Hill outside of Canada? What kind of idiot geolocation service are they using? My IP address is in the rogers.com domain, when did Rogers start offering cable service outside of Canada? I decided to complain, clicked on the contact us link and was presented with a list of Global locations across the country. There was no option to comment about the website. Sigh. I guess it's off to the bit torrent network for Global TV shows if you are a Rogers customer. I sent feedback to webmaster@canada.com but I'm not holding my breath.

Yahoo TV still sucks. I went to the Yahoo TV listings last night and saw that Global was showing a repeat of House so I clicked on the episode to see the synopsis to check whether I had seen the episode and here's what came up: House treats a teenage supermodel who gets into a catfight on the catwalk and then passes out. When her tox-screen shows heroin, she's treated for addiction. Unfortunately, her symptoms continue after she's weened off the drugs. It turns out that she's actually a "he" with undescended testes. House fights off increasingly bad leg pains. Cuddy helps him with what she later confesses was a placebo. They spoiled the whole episode, both story lines. House is about solving medical mysteries and Yahoo gave the mystery away. Compare Yahoo's synposis with the episode info from TV.com: House uncovers a startling secret when he treats a teenage supermodel for heroin addiction. Meanwhile, Wilson hopes the increased leg pain in House's leg is an indication his leg nerves are regenerating. I know the episode is over a year old but why spoil the show for someone who hasn't seen it?



I ran across a couple of new podcasts this week. Geekbrief.tv offers fast talking Cali Lewis in a three minute video podcast on the tech issues of the day. She's cute, funny and at more than three hundred words per minute packs a tonne of content into a short podcast. Even though the show often covers the same territory as Buzz Out Loud it worth watching for entertainment value alone or if you don't want to devote thirty minutes to listening to all of Buzz Out Loud. I'm also sampling Tiki Bar TV. Tiki Bar TV is too hard to explain, it's entertainment not information and the best thign to do is to go to the webiste and watch an episode and decide for yourself if you like it or not. Episodes are five minutes long so worst case is you lose five minutes. Geekbrief TV can also be viewed on the web, no iPod required.

www.flickr.com w_d's May 5 photoset

Flickr is going to publish a book of pictures taken by their members on May 5th. For those who don't know Flickr is a social networking website that facilitates picture sharing. The trouble is that each member can only submit one picture. Now i need help deciding which picture to submit. Click on the upside down eye and pick out your favourite then click here to communicate your favourite if you aren't a Flickr or Yahoo 360 member. Flickr members can leave comments on the Flickr site and Yahoo 360 members can leave comments here. I wanted to create a poll but Yahoo 360 doesn't allow 24 choices in their polls. I know it's kludgy but it's the best I could come up with using the available tools.

Wow, long gap between entries. Well it seems long to me. Spent the weekend in the woods with the Explorers. Now my jacket smells of wood smoke. We managed to get stuck with a big pile of wood with a slightly red centre that was very hard and burned very poorly until it got really hot.

I have really got to start writing my ideas down, I had something brilliant to write for this post but it has fled my overactive mind. I do know it was a gripe about something. I am getting quite curmudgeonly in my old age. I'm about ready to heave my car radio out the window. It has refused to work with my iPod to cassette adaptor. The same adaptor works fine in my wife's car but in my car it trys to change direction every 30 seconds or so. Very irritating. I was reduced to listening to the radio this evening and it was beastly. I couldn't find anything I wanted to listen to and ended up pushing the scan button and listening to 15 seconds of every station on the FM dial multiple times. By the end of the trip I had decided that I was going to crawl under the dash and figure out a way to get the iPod line output into my radio or else. Why would anyone listen to the radio when they can program there own station with their iPod?

My upgrade to Centos 5 was mostly successful except that I haven't managed to get Firewire working yet and my printing is totally screwed. I had installed a number of wonky fonts before the upgrade and now whenever I print I get mostly blank pages. I guess I should dig into it and figure it out. They upstream provider did recommend a fresh install, now I know why. The good news is that it the webcam driver I couldn't get working in Centos 4 does work in Centos 5. Three steps forward, one step back.

I feel less guilty about not blogging so now I can go to bed.