Wayne D's Blog

I've given myself a one hour time limit to write this entry as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is on in fifty-five minutes and I want to see it. So you get it in at the end of the hour warts, spelling errors and all. Remember how I gave kudos to CTV for making Studio 60 available on their broad band network? I spoke too soon as they don't let Linux users access the shows, sigh. Three steps forward and one step back.

Saturday night I received a one finger manicure. I went to the mall to by an iPod to cassette player adapter for my iPod to use in the car. I have tried two different FM transmitter attachments but really wasn't happy with either of them. They work fine inside my house but don't work very well in the car, I think there are just too many FM stations in Toronto that interfere with them. I bought a cassette adapter at The Source and wandered off to see who had Clerks 2 at the lowest price, I also wanted to pick up KT Tunstell's Eye of the Telescope CD. I had seen it prices at $9.99 a while ago but couldn't remember what store it was in. I found Clerks 2 for $23.99 but the lowest price I found for Eye of the Telescope was $14.99. Normally I would have bought it on iTunes butI knew I had seen it on sale for $9.99 a while ago and I figured paying the extra $1.40 for the booklet with the lyrics was worth it especially since my wife likes to sing along occasionally. The nice young lady at the Dead Sea kiosk at Hillcrest Mall did her best to sell me a nail care kit for my wife for Christmas even though I told her that I had already bought her present. She tricked me into coming over, buffed and polished one of my nails then put something on it to seal the nail and protect my cuticle. I expect she thought that having a nice young lady hold my hand and massage my cuticle would fog my judgment but I am not so easily influenced. My one nail does look very nice now, maybe I should get a manicure.

By the way, the cassette adapter works pretty well in my car radio except for the fact the my car radio cassette player occasionally decides it want to change sides and play side 2 of the cassette adapter. It always decides to switch back to side 1 which is the one that the music comes out of.

Did you know that brown shoes and belts are in fashion for men now? I didn't but Michelle set me straight at church this morning while critiquing her brother's fashion choices. We had a nice stew and soup lunch fund raiser put on by the ELW today. Stew, bread,  desserts and drinks for $5, it was yummy and a great value.

I went to Future Shop today to see how much they wanted for Clerks 2, they had it for $23.99 and also had Eye of the Telescope for $9.99 so I bought both of them. They recently renovated our local Future Shop store and moved everything around. It used to be set up like a supermarket with a line of parallel checkouts in front of the main doors. They have removed the checkout lanes and left a large empty space and moved the checkouts over to one side and arranged them with three desk on one side and two on the other side of a single, not very wide, aisle. It's a disastrous redesign. When I went to check out there was a crowd at the end of the aisle that had formed two rough queues. Nobody in the crowd knew whether they were supposed to go by the first register to the second position. It was very difficult to figure out which checkout desks past the first one was open. One desk had a clerk there but there was an open binder on the counter and wasn't calling anyone out of the crowd to the position to check out. Another staff member was trying to direct traffic without much success. I mentioned to both the clerk checking me out and to the person directing traffic that in my opinion the redesign was terrible. They gamely accepted my griping but I don't expect it went much further. It wasn't very busy in the store but it was certainly chaotic at the checkout, I wonder what it will be like when the store gets busier, I expect it will be similar to Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon. I know in the future I'll think twice before I go to the Future Shop at Yonge and 16th Ave. The experience was so traumatic I had to walk across the parking lot to the King Henry's Arms for a pint to steady my nerves.

I did quite well on writing to deadline. I still have 14 minutes left, I'll spend the remaining time proofreading and spell checking.

Good gracious, I just checked iTune and they want 11.99 for Eye of the Telescope, caveat emptor. Sometimes it is worth the drive to the mall.

The doorbell just rang, no one was there. Looks like my talk with the two miscreants didn't work. Next step is to set up a camera pointing at my front door so I can capture their pictures on videotape for easy identification.

It looks like whining does help. CTV has made Studio 60 available on their website along with a number of other shows. Now you have no excuse. Go back, watch it from the beginning at your leisure and tell me what you think.

A strange thing happened on the way to Ottawa. We were driving along in  a loose grouping of cars when a police car made a U-turn just in front of us across the median and took off in the same direction we were going. The officer had obviously seen someone he wanted to talk to. The car in front of us slowed down, as did we. The lights came on at the top of the hill as the police car pulled someone over. I moved into the left lane to give them some room  while the car in front of me stayed in the right lane. As we passed the police car I sped back up, passed the car in the right lane and pulled back in. By this time he was probably 300-400 metres behind me. He then turned his high beams on. It was only mildly irritating because the boys in the back seat had managed to partially steam up the back window. The car behind kept it's high beams on and closed the gap. I sped up to increase the distance between us. The car behind sped up too. I tried to figure out what I had possibly done to offend the other driver.  The other driver stuck close behind me with his high beams on for about 10 kilometres.  Maybe I was just being paranoid, perhaps the driver behind didn't realize the high beams were on. I was closing on a slower truck and pulled into the left lane to pass it. As I passed the truck and had gained a reasonable separation from the truck I signaled and pulled back into the right lane in front of the truck and slowed down slightly. The other car came around the truck, pulled in behind me and turned the high beams back on, there really wasn't that much room between me and the truck. Then the car behind pulled out and sped by me. I kept my eyes looking forward and hoped the other driver wasn't a psycho. Very strange.

I just finished watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip for this week. This  weeks show was great,  much better than last week,  you should really watch it. I neglected to mention that Studio 60 had been picked up for a full season. I hope that it builds an audience.


I forgot to mention in my previous post the excitment of chasing down the Nicky, Nicky Nine Door hoodlums. We have been having a bit of trouble lately with the doorbell ringing and no one being there when we answer.  When I pulled into the driveway tonight my headlights illuminated two kids hightailing it across my driveway and down the street. I parked the car and after checking that I could still see them I ran down the street in the direction they had taken. I silenced the pocketful of loonies and toonies that I had to not give the game away. I was far enough behind them that I'm sure they didn't know I had followed them and thought had made good their escape. I expected to see them disappearing in the distance as I rounded the corner at the cross street. Imagine my surprise to see them crouched down on the sidewalk. Evidently there level of fitness wasn't much higher than mine. I stopped crouched down and confronted them. I suggested that they avoid my house in the future. It was all very civil, no harsh words were exchanged. They seemed a bit rattled, apologized and we parted. My wife thought I had let them off too easy but they seemed contrite after I caught them.


When I got home my wife informed me that it was the second time that night that the doorbell had rung with no one being there. Their insistence that it was the first time that they had rung my doorbell made more sense. Of course they were lying. Maybe getting caught will make it less fun for them and they'll find something more constructive to do with their time. I think I'll dig out my video camera and point it at the front door just in case. The next time they drop by I can catch them on tape. Then I'll atke my tape to their high school and show it to the principal, that should convince them of the error of their ways.

Thank you to the reader who noted that it's iPod not IPod. What makes Apple think they can rewrite the rules of grammer? Even Microsoft isn't that arrogant.

Microsoft implemented symlinks in NTFS but then didn't include a tool to set them. Microsoft of course has to embrace and extend and calls them junctions. They are very useful especially when you want share your iTunes library among users on the same machine in Windows XP. Winbolic link is a nice visual tool for manipulating junctions if the command line makes you break out in a cold sweat.

I tried to set up Banshee which is supposed to be the best iTunes replacement for Linux. Unfortunately there is no precompiled version for Centos. I tried to use a binary for Fedora core but there were too many unresolved dependancies. When I started to compile the project I ran into more issues with missing libraries so I decided to put it off for another day.

On Sunday I participated in the local Santa Claus parade ambling the four kilometres behind the float for the Baden Powell Scouting group where I volunteer as a leader. Our recently re-elected regional councillor walked along with us and it was like being with a rock star. People were yelling out his name and calling him over to talk. He is such a personable guy it's not surprising that he does well in politics.

I don't know what's going on with this cold, It's been two weeks since I caught it and it's still hanging on. This will be a shorter entry than I really wanted to make because I just don't have the energy to write.

I've decided to join the 21st century and buy an iPod. I downloaded  iTunes a while ago while on the quest for the perfect music player. All in all it's still my favorite, what I really like is the party shuffle feature. I can tell iTunes to make a selection from my music library and then fiddle with it a bit after ITunes has made it's selections. I wish it supported a few more file formats but you can't win them all. I also have the Rogers branded Yahoo music player installed on my machine so I can listen to the streaming music that Yahoo provides as part of the package I have with Rogers. I stopped using it for a while because every time I tried to start it up it would try to go out on the Internet and then hang. That went on for a month or two. I also have the Dell branded MusicMatch Jukebox player that came with the system. It's also OK but it's constantly whining at me to upgrade which I find profoundly irritating. The one thing I really like about it is the watch folder feature which let you set folders for the player to monitor for new tracks. When it finds them it automatically adds them to your music library. Hey Apple how about adding that feature to iTunes. 

My emusic subscription means that I don't buy much other music except the occasional song from ITunes. Now that I've decided to buy an IPod it looks like iTunes will continue to be my music source for files with digital rights management. It's sad that these guys can't get their act together so that these files are interoperable across player hardware and on Linux. Maybe the Linux on iPod project will become the Rosetta Stone of DRM.

What finally made me decide to buy an iPod? Podcasts. My friend Steve told me that he had stopped listening to radio and spent most of his time in the car listening to podcasts. I subscribed to the Daily Giz Wiz podcast. I now listen to it most nights in bed before I go to sleep. I've also subscribed to a couple of CBC podcasts including The Best of Outfront and C'est la vie's Word of the Week. In anticipation of getting my iPod I spent some time on the iTunes Store today looking for other podcasts and have subscribed to a few more. We are heading off to Ottawa next weekend for a wedding and I expect I'll load some video on the iPod for the kids to watch in the back seat. It's a long drive and  sometimes it's hard to find something listenable on the radio.

Complaining about Goggle being tardy about indexing my site in my last posting worked! A day after I complained they updated their index. I'm surprised at such responsiveness from the behemouth of the Internet. Lest you think I have taken leave of my senses please realize I know that what happened is purely coincidental. Google had actually indexed my site two days before I posted my complaint. I just wish now they'd spider a bit deeper and index my java games. The one search engine I'm really unhappy with is MSN. Search for www.wdawe.com and you find nothing. The strange thing is that if you search for Wayne D's blog my article on the Six String Nation guitar comes up in the first position just like it does on Google. For some reason the search engines really like that article.

One thing Yahoo should do is look at making Yahoo 360 more search engine friendly. The long complex URL's they create make it impossible for a search engine to differentiate my Yahoo 360 blog from the other Wayne D's who have blogs on Yahoo. What this means is that if you have a friend on Yahoo 360 and you want to find his or her blog don't bother trying to use a search engine to find it.

If you are reading this article on www.wdawe.com and want to comment you need to go to the Yahoo 360 version. One of these days when I get energetic I may move my blog to www.wdawe.com but right now I don't have the energy.