You might recognize this from a particularly excellent movie; a movie I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until I saw an even greater film, Ghost World. Tonight I tried to have a delicious and enjoyable dinner. I decided I would eat some of those left overs in the fridge. That chicken tasted really funny so I let the garbage disposal have its way with the offending poultry. I then decided I would eat the last of those fries Liz made. They were even worse off than the chicken. My last attempt was the chili. Bad News Bears - if you know what I mean.
It’s at times like these, when I need some relaxing times, I have to go back to my roots. I have to stick with what I know. Beef Franks. That’s right. I got out a plate, placed two hotdog buns down, inserted the Beef Franks, applied cheese to the top of both, and microwaved for 1.5min. Afterwards I garnished with ketchup and mustard. I won’t even go near saying they’re anything as amazing as a wiener wang, but since I don’t live in Japan I can’t exactly get my hands on some Suntory.
Smitty had an idea a long time ago about creating a shared blog where us techie-people could share our experiences about blogging and it’s many facets. I thought this was a great idea and we’re now in the process of setting things up.
I have a tendency to work on things until they’re functional and then quit. This is why I have many unused plugins installed or in use that don’t do much or are cluttering things up. Setting up this new blog has re-invigorated me to start making some changes to things. If you haven’t seen my movie blog then you might not notice the changes. I imported it from Blogger to Wordpress about a month ago and tonight I changed the theme to K2 and have been changing some of the plugins and modifying a few other things. The long term goal is to update the look of this blog too.
This weekend Schnaps, Soulman and I got together for our annual January pow-wow. This year we were back in Columbus and on Saturday we caught a midnight showing of The Big Lebowski at Studio 35. A few people dressed up to one degree or another and one guy was definitely looking like The Dude. The theater had a full menu of snacks, pizza and sandwiches available. I know the pizza comes from down the street, but I’m not sure about the other food. Maybe everything came from that other restaurant. They also serve beer if you’re into that.
It was my first time to see The Big Lebowski on the silver screen. I’ve seen it on some pretty big TVs and even on a projector before, but never in an actual theater. Studio 35 did seem a bit rundown, but I really felt like this is the kind of place The Dude would go catch a movie at. The price was definitely right, the staff was cool and the overall experience was pretty great. If I actually lived in Columbus I’d definitely go back more often. I had thought about maybe trying to interview some people for my podcast, but decided I didn’t really want to mess with it. I did wear my sweatshirt though and advertised I was going to be there on our site. If you’re interested in other Lebowski showings, I’ve started up an area on our forums for it. Feel free to post any we don’t have listed or you can contact us and we’ll add it for you.
If you’re looking to do some podcasting with Wordpress, I’d highly suggest checking out the PodPress plugin for podcasting. It will insert a player into your posts, keep track of stats, options for iTunes and other podcast directories, setup a separate RSS feed, and many, many other settings you can mess with. I’ve started using it on my movie blog for the audio reviews we’ve started using.
A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I had purchased an Olympus DS-40 and TP-7. My original plan was to post some files I had recorded as examples of what it can do, but I obviously never got around to that. I would like to report that the DS-40 is amazingly meeting my needs for podcasting. We took it with us on our recent roadtrip-interview and it worked beautifully. The built-in mic on the DS-40 compared to the mic on the WS series is at least 10 times better in my opinion. Hiss and background noise are greatly reduced. The DS series has three separate settings for mic sensitivity along with different filters and quality settings you can set within the menus. The manual even gives you a chart with different circumstances and suggested settings configurations. I’m a big fan.
The TP-7 also worked wonderfully. I couldn’t quite tell how it worked by the picture, but it made much more sense after I physically had it. It’s an earbud that plugs into the mic jack of your voice recorder. On the back side of the earbud is a microphone. You put that into your ear and then talk on a landline-phone or cell phone to record your conversation. The mic picks up pretty well, however, it picks up background noise as well. I did a test call to Liz and it sounded a little breezy because there was an air purifier running about 3 feet away from me. So I would suggest recording your phone calls in quiet area if you’re concerned about background noise.
At work we’re looking to outfit one of our academic labs with touch screens to be DyKnow ready. Anybody have any recommendations for monitors? I know at DePauw they have these cool touch screens that adjust from being parallel with the desktop all the way to being perpendicular with the desktop. There’s a handy little lever in the back you pull to adjust them.
I recently started embedding some video on my Joomla site. I thought everything was working fine until I realized it was requiring you to be logged in to view that content. This seemed really weird so the first thing I checked were the permission levels on the two content items and everything was set to “public,” which is the default setting.
I had used the embed code from YouTube so my next plan of action was to try a plugin I already had installed and was using for some audio - AllVideos. It took me a couple minutes to figure out what exactly to snag as the YouTube code and get it setup, but that didn’t work either. I then decided to stream a local video with AllVideos. This worked, but I still couldn’t figure out why.
I posted on the Joomla forums, talked to a couple geek-friends and pondered on it for most of a day. Do you know what finally fixed it? Completely starting over. I just deleted the two offending content items, re-created them and everything worked fine. Wish I had thought of that right away.
In case you’re having a hard time trying to decide who to vote for in the 2008 presidential election, my Amy from Amyville can help you out with her thoughts on Mitt Romney.
Saturday, Liz, Gunner and myself all drove down to Louisville to interview Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell for the podcast. These two guys are also known as the Founding Dudes for their creation of the Lebowski festivals that have been going on for 6 years with two international festivals in the UK last year.
This was definitely a big step for us on the podcast. We’ve had several guests in the past year, just not anybody really connected with the movie. We would pick a topic to explore the movie and then we’d find people who were “experts” in that field. We were joined by an English professor to talk about feminism and a Philosophy/Religion professor to talk about Dudeism for example. This time we were talking with two people that are readily know to the true Achiever, which is the self-applied term for fans of The Big Lebowski.
We weren’t really sure what to expect, but I don’t think it could have gone any better. These guys were like us, fanatical fans that aren’t too fanatical. They invited us to their tree house, otherwise known as The Lebowski Fest World Headquarters, and we sat down for a chat about the cult status of the film. We also touched on their recent book, I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, and the festivals of course. They even gave us some posters and stickers on-the-house as we were heading out. We really appreciated both their hospitality and generosity.
Icing on the cake was just being in the great city of Louisville for the day. We got to drive around a bit more than planned, due to getting lost and streets having multiple names and sometimes no signs, but this gave us the opportunity to get an idea of our surroundings which we explored after the interview.
We ending up eating dinner at a barbeque joint called Mark’s Feed Store. Liz got a small rack of ribs while Gunner and I opted for the barbeque bacon cheeseburger with spicy fries. Some extra entertainment were the estimated 20 cops getting a bite to eat and the wait-staff’s enjoyment of them. I would highly suggest stopping by sometime if you’re hungry.
We also checked out WHY Louisville, Scott’s store, and picked up a couple copies of their book to give out as podcast prizes at a later date. Bardstown Road was an amazing part of town full of unique shops and restaurants. We’re looking forward to going back sometime in the future.
Like I said in the previous post, all you need to do to migrate your Deep Freeze Administration software is to make sure you know two things:
- The Customization Code you originally installed it with
- The IP address or name of the machine you’re installing the software to
From there it’s a piece of cake. You just install the software on your new server or machine and then tell your computers to point to the new administrator machine*. I was able to have my original console and the new console up simultaneously by remote desktop’ing into the new location. I was then able to update my machines using the old console, watch them dissapear and then re-appear on the new console.
After you’ve pointed all of your machines to the new console you just have to link to the new console yourself. Faronics (Deep Freeze) has instructions to do that. It’s not too bad. They also have great tech support if you need to call or email them.
* When changing the network settings to tell a computer where to report to, I had to make sure I checked LAN/WAN instead of just LAN. I work for a university and we have computers all over campus in different buildings on different VLANs, switches, etc. While having LAN checked, I was only able to see computers in the same building I was in.
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