Fixing the Piano again

Once again the broken parts of the piano have become annoying enough to tear it apart and fix them.  This time I have a worn piece of leather on one of the hammers that I've never had to fix before - I decided to tear it off, turn it around, and hope for the best.  Another little pin was outta place - an easy fix.  While waiting for the glue to dry on the felt I ran across this article: Worlds Smallest Piano Wire - which is interesting - but I've never worked on the wires (the musical wires) in my piano - I leave that technology to the tuner guy.

Meeting Video online

The publicly available town meetings are now being posted on google video (by a non-town-employee I might add), and I think it's a great thing.  Last weeks planning board meeting is up, and it can be referenced by timestamp, so I can do things like post this link to me making an adjustment to the minutes.  I can only imagine it'll be a good thing, but I'm sure someone will make a mashup eventually of all the silly things someone says.  Alone it's pretty boring, but with some good indexing it could be a usefull tool.

37 Signals

Discovered the 37 Signals Site while I was reading a post in the Google Reader Blog. Leads me to believe the google reader team is impressed with their web 2.0 abilities.  The tools look very solid, but I don't have a use for them right now, which is why I'm blogging the link so I don't forget it - probably a better way to keep track of links (probably a dozen actually) but this is my way today.

37 Signals

Discovered the 37 Signals Site while I was reading a post in the Google Reader Blog. Leads me to believe the google reader team is impressed with their web 2.0 abilities.  The tools look very solid, but I don't have a use for them right now, which is why I'm blogging the link so I don't forget it - probably a better way to keep track of links (probably a dozen actually) but this is my way today.

A wired saturday

Woke up on the lateside and dragged myself to barCamp Manchester, which turned out to be usefull even though I was only there for about 3 hours.  I was met up with Kreblog after the first session and we were partially responsble for a hallway meeting where a lot of "something dropping" went on.  Similar to name dropping, but URL's instead of names.

Came home and had some quality time feeding the monsters, including playing with the RC Metal Detector that my sister got one of the kids last year - it's really fun toy, a SLOW r/c car is part of it - and teaching my son what is metal and what isn't has to be worth a couple dad points.

Kreblog turned me to Twitter and I actually got it working on the crappy cell phone I'm now forced to use.

Spend a while learning how to develop google home page gadgets.

Wardrobe

I am woefully behind on laundry, and with winter approaching I'm thinking about re-engineering the entire set of clothes I own.  The new job has zero dress requirements, and I realized about 30min before I had to leave for a wedding this weekend that my only suit has been attacked by moths (and a couple dance floors) and is un-wearable.

So the engineering begins.  What does a min-30's guy with no work-dress requirements need?  Another big part of the equation is the skiing stuff - I've got a bunch of that.  I believe I might have to buy a new piece of furniture to hold it all too.  The current chest-of-drawers is next to useless for some reason.  I think I actually want to buy a "wardrobe" thing.

Windsheild Problems

I've been vexed recently with windshield problems.  I just can't seem to keep both sides clean and fog/smudge free.  I've tried the gas station solution+squeegy on the outside, and windex on the inside, but it's still foggy or smudgy every night when I go to drive home.

The defog(?) setting on the car's climate control does a pretty good job, but there's this layer of "something" that makes it hard to see through.

Our brand new minivan has a perfect windsheild, I wish I knew how to get that type of clean.

Practice

I really like the concept of this article: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/index.htm?postversion=2006101715? - as it speaks to me.  What it says is that you really can become very good at anything you want, and stop using the excuse that your not "born" with the talent.

The Music Collection... sigh

I have once again reached a crossroads in the music collection problem.  I'll spare you the detailed history (which I'm sure you have your own version of) and just give you the current situation... in order of "possibility I'll listen to it."

1. iPod : I love the device, it works in my car for my 15min commute, I listen to podCasts, but I still hate iTunes. 

2. mythTv : this is the families main center for entertainment: we watch DVD's, TV, downloaded content, and I've started ripping a few CD's to it so I can play them through the slightly better speakers.

3. Portable USB hard drive: This is probably my biggest collection - and I copy it to my work machine periodically, but I rarley listen to it.  Phil at work is really good at spinning some good stuff so I let him be in charge or the airwaves at work.  This collection is completely unorganized - no tagging, lots of low-bitrate-mp3 and probably a few songs I would NOT want the children to hear

4. CD Collection: Suzy did a great job of putting all our CD's into folders, getting rid of the cases (not the inserts, just the plastic boxes).  If I had to guess I'd say about 1/5th of that collection is included in the above listed collections.  At some point I will break down and rip it all, but not until I'm sure the effort will not be wasted.

5. Various Storage: This is the worst managed collection - the laptop hard drive, Suzy's old hard drives, some hard drives in the basement not hooked to any computer, some FlashRam in the palm held sutdio thing Suzy got me - possibly this is the most unreplaceable stuff - things that I won't be able to find - or things that are actually original that I recorded (me, the kids, crappy quality, but high sentimental value)

So that's the problem... and I'm thinking I better come up with a solution soon - becuase I want the kids to be listening to music as much as possible, and I know that the house feels happier when there's good music playing.  My brother-in-law John (a major audiophile) has a great collection of CD's and Vinyl that he plays constantly, and I'd love to be able to spend some time with his collection and get a copy of it for myself while also providing him the ability to play it all anywhere anytime.

Sorry for long post, thanks for sticking with it.

Myth: Still a few problems...

I've got the system so watchind DVD's and downloaded content works pretty good.  It records TV fairly well, but there are a few problems that make that less than perfect:

1. Time doesn't stay synched - if you reboot the system looses 5 hrs or so until I run ntpdate bitsy.mit.edu

2. Sound resets to zero - there's a master mixer I think, amixer or something, and I need to run it from the console window after reboot to up the volume

3. Web access - this is probably a firewall issue, but I can't get to the mythweb from outside my network - would be really nice to schedule/check on it remotly

A huge help - the control-alt-F1, and F2 etc... (F7 returns to normal) is something I wish I knew about a LONG time ago - it gets you into a terminal window to execute command line stuff.