I have been away from the Hackintosh community (and the 1525 community) for some time now, as updates have been easy and I haven’t had to do any DSDT modding or replacing of a larger number of kexts on an update to update basis, but I knew 10.6.8 in preparation for Lion was not going to be just your normal update.  So, I went out and did my reading… Hackintoshin’ is all about “community” and it’s this community and the many sites together that all compliment one another and create the community as it is.  I suggest EVERYONE visit them all and READ, READ, READ!

I want to thank and give FULL CREDIT to Slice (for all his offerings to the Dell 1525 community, especially for the modded DSDTs), the Voodoo/Chameleon crew for the massive number of updates between RC3 and RC5!, Nozyczek for all of his super hard work supporting the 1525 and the various updates for Snow, and lastly Jomijoy.  Between visiting InsanelyMac, nozyczek’s site, and reading the comments from Jomijoy at MacYourPC, I was able to gain enough information about what had taken place in my “down time,” and what was expected and needed for the 10.6.8 update.

When you get to 10.6.8 and realize how much of the OS and what is needed is now vanilla, it will blow you’re mind.  The 1525 is getting closer and closer to a “real” Mac everyday with all of these peoples’ hard work and experimentation.

I’m providing here the steps needed to get to 10.6.8 and have your HackBook Pro 1525 running better, booting faster, appearing generally more snappy, and being more “native” than it ever has been before!

Step 1:

MAKE SURE YOU ARE UPDATED AND RUNNING IN-FULL ON Snow Leopard 10.6.7 *AND* that your Dell 1525′s BIOS is at A17 (not A16 or A15, etc.) The BIOS must be at A17 as that’s what Slice’s modded DSDT was created for, and it’s the only way to guarantee that things will work as they should.  And, of course, you should have performed a FULL SYSTEM BACKUP prior to any of this!  I am not responsible for you killing you machine, you solid install, etc., etc.

Now, you might say you have a problem as you can’t update the BIOS (EXE) in SL, and you’re right. But, if you have access to a Windows machine, here:

Download ‘Bootable USB Drive Creator Tool 1.0′:

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Bootable-USB-Drive-Creator-Tool-Download-179880.html

This will allow you to image FreeDOS or MS-DOS to a USB stick and have it be bootable right into that OS.

Dell’s A17 BIOS Update, while appearing as a Windows app, will also run in DOS, so let’s download that at:

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/1525_A17.EXEs

This is the latest A17 BIOS image for the 1525. Copy this to your newly formatted DOS-based USB stick. Put the stick into the Dell, power on, and hit F12 to select the Boot Menu. Boot from the USB stick. After getting into DOS, type ‘dir’ to ensure you see ’1525_A17.exe’. If you do, you’re ready to update the BIOS.  If you don’t, then you did something wrong. Repeat the above steps.

At the DOS prompt, type (don’t type the ‘A:>’ or whatever drive letter, just what comes after the ‘>’ sign):

A:>1525_A17.EXE (and hit Enter)

The BIOS should be flashed to A17 within a minute or so.  When done, continue on. If you have issues where the app reports that you must be on AC power or have the battery plugged in, and you already do, then at the DOS prompt, type:

A:>1525_A17.EXE /forceit (and hit Enter)

This will bypass the warnings and flash the BIOS anyway.

So, let’s carry on…  Now, you should VISIT:

http://sites.google.com/site/nozyczek/home/hackintosh/how-to-install-snow-leopard-10-6-8-on-dell-inspiron-1525

… and READ — and, READ AGAIN!  Since we’re not doing a complete reinstall, you will need to utilize only a portion of nozyczek’s instructions and tools.

Step 2:

Backup your old trackpad.prefpane in /System/Library/Preference Panes. Copy it to your Desktop or somewhere so you have a backup.

Step 3:

Download:

10.6.8 Combo Update from Apple’s Site:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399

nozyczek’s Dell 1525 10.6.8 Autoinstaller (Note, if you have a 1440 display on your 1525, download the other Autoinstaller!):

http://cl.ly/7wpJ

Step 4:

Run the Apple 10.6.8 Combo Update Installer (DO NOT RESTART when the Installer completes)… You do and YOU’RE TOAST! Leave the finish dialog up and ‘Restart’ button pulsating!  Then, leave this alone until directed…

Step 5:

Rename the /Extra folder on the / (Root) of your Snow Leopard volume.  Do NOT delete it.  You will need to pick pieces and parts from this copy to place and/or edit into a new /Extra folder that will be created in the following step.

Step 6:

Place nozyczek’s Dell 1525 10.6.8 Autoinstaller folder on the desktop and run it. (Again FULL CREDIT goes to nozyczek for such a KILLER script! And, for taking into account all that is handled in Slice’s new DSDT vs. what kexts are now needed in the /Extra directory! All of you will be amazed by what few kexts are now required!)

Here are the steps as to how (… if you’re no good with the cmd line):

Start Terminal (located in ~/Applications->Utilities->Terminal)

Type:

sudo -s <enter your password when prompted>
cd ~/Desktop/hackintosh*
./installer

• Select the drive you wish to install to, i.e. your Snow Leopard volume
• Select the “i” option and hit Enter to start the Autoinstaller
• Then, just sit back and wait for the installer to finish
• Hit ‘q’ to Quit at the end and terminate the Terminal session

When done, run ‘Disk Utility’ and ‘Repair Permissions’ on the SL volume you installed to.

Step 7:

Now return to the 10.6.8 Combo Update dialog and click the pulsating ‘Restart’ button.

Step 8:

Your 1525 should boot into the OS without issue.  But, you will not (maybe) have Wireless support and the Trackpad prefPane will need updated.

Step 9:

Install your former IO80211family.kext from your old /Extra folder (Remember, the one you made the backup of?!) using KextUtility or KextHelper. This will replace any version that might exist in S/L/E. (Note, I did not need to do this as Apple brought back the driver for Broadcom chip in the Dell 1505N WLAN mini-PCI card in this version.  It was there in 10.6.5, and disappeared for 10.6.6 and 10.6.7, only to reappear in 10.6.8.   Nice!  Here’s to hoping it’s in Lion as well!)

Step 10:

Copy the trackpad.prefpane you made a backup of to in /System/Library/Preference Panes.  Replace the one already existing.

Step 11:

Again, run ‘Disk Utility’ and ‘Repair Permissions’ on the SL volume.

You’re done!  You should now have a fully operational 1525 at 10.6.8!   And, You will notice that amount of custom kexts required is down to just a few!  Amazing work from the community!  Sleep now appears to be native!?  Slice’s DSDT has limited the amount of required kexts even more.  Refer to nozyczek’s site (link provided) and go to the bottom to see only what kexts were applied on top of Apple’s.  Things just keep getting better and better!  I have A LOT more research to do to see exactly what has been done in the past year or so, but progress has no doubt been made!

Past these steps, (and you don’t need to do as I did, but…)  I updated Chameleon from nozyczek’s r1088 to r1095, added the Chameleon RC5 PrefPane which makes customizing your com.apple.Boot.plist a dream (me, I use it just for reference; I still edit mine via TextMate), and corrected my Yukon2.kext binary to reflect the correct MAC address of my internal NIC (instead of the default 00:11:22:33:44:55 — a couple of these defaults on the network and things are likely to get a little confusing depending on your network set up).  I also brought back my custom theme and a few other simple and cosmetic com.apple.Boot.plist items to “make things as they were,” so to speak.

Note, I only posted this here so that everyone that enjoys OS X on a 1525 could benefit.  The more consolidated information for the 1525, the better.  Although, you all should be visiting all of the sites mentioned to do your OWN homework and give your own thanks.  It’s only fair to all of people that helped provide you all of this good stuff.  I you wish to share this, feel free to do so, but just give credit for the compilation.

This said, I hope this guide helps some of you out!  Good luck!

With all the fun I had on this one, I’m diving in again and will be attempting to get Lion going within the next couple of weeks.  With the progress I’ve seen and being that at 10.6.8, we’re prepared for Lion, I can’t expect that we all won’t be able to be enjoying Lion on the 1525 in the near term.  I will post anything eventful to the other sites as I find and figure things out.

… but sadly doesn’t care about your “paper” subscription or your years of loyalty. Or, do they? Could it be that Apple’s Magazine Subscription Model is strangling publishers into having to set prices so that Apple can get their 30% (if readers purchase the subscription via the device itself, from the magazine’s app), thereby eliminating any discount that the publisher might have offered the loyal, paper reading subscribers when they switched up mediums?

When getting a new iPad 2, one of the first things I wanted to do with it was put my favorite magazine on it; I wanted to experience this new concept of tablet-based magazine reading and subscription. I assumed that being subscribed to Popular Science for a couple of decades would count for something and I would get a discount when moving over to the “digital version” and maybe even the possibility of stopping delivery of my paper version to save a few trees. I assumed wrong. I had to pay the same price for an annual subscription as I would have should I had never picked up and purchased a Popular Science magazine in my entire life. Paper subscribers are required to buy a whole new digital subscription. It would seem logical to assume that a publisher would want to reward their current, long-term subs by allowing them to purchase the subscription at discount. Apple’s model likely precludes this. There is probably not even a feature that allows it and the publishers can’t offer one as Apple is taking 30% of the cut because I bought the subscription via the magazine’s “free app.”

Having first-time readers and decade long subscribers have to pay the same price when originally purchasing or when switching over to the digital subscription, respectively, is a bitter pill for those of us that have had subscriptions for generations, my family for example. Again, I am aware that dealing with Apple’s subscription model was probably hard enough — for now. But, both Apple and PopSci have hurdled that first milestone. And, while I respect both companies, it just seems like there is work yet to be done. One, don’t make PopSci’s long-term subs feel like they’ve been forgotten about, especially knowing that technology like the iPad would be adopted by most of them. Subscriptions, both digital and paper, should be bound to each other; or, the subscriber should at least be able to tie both paper and digital subscriptions to any one reader that might be taking advantage of both. Currently, it does not appear that this is being done — by Apple or Pop Sci. Or, if it is, it is not apparent. Two, why continue sending subs a paper subscription when it’s possibly no longer desired? For the sake of the environment, the option should at least be provided.

With how far things have come technically, at times, huge advances seem to be mired by features that seem contradictory to the advancement. Subscriptions can’t be known and linked? Paper can’t be replaced for bits and touch-screens, exclusively? I know they can be:

“Next Issue Media is looking to expand its tablet-based readership to Android users, as well. Beginning tomorrow, people who bought a wireless-enabled Samsung Galaxy Tab from Verizon will be able to purchase single copies of, or monthly subscriptions to seven magazines from the so-called “Hulu of Magazines,” which includes Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc., and News Corp. Users already subscribing to print editions will receive free digital subscriptions, though they won’t be able to purchase both print and digital combo packages (that’s on the way). Publishers, meanwhile, will be able to set their own prices and, according to Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther, will receive “at least” 70-percent of all transactions — the same percentage that Apple offers. Under this new Android deal, however, all of Next Issue’s members will be able to freely access their subscribers’ credit card information and other personal data — something that Apple has steadfastly denied them.”. — Engadget, May 2011

So, at present, it’s obvious that some publishers are thinking a bit more forward when it comes to their digital models and what to do with their current readers and paper subscriptions once the reader has transitioned, digitally. It’s just amazing to me that both Apple and Popular Science seemed to ignore or not make known these important aspects when creating what is a fantastic, beautiful, and immersive “digital magazine.”

I hope PopSci can appreciate this. I don’t mean to be critical of them, but I know I can’t be the only long-term reader who’s a bit puzzled by the current digital subscription model.

Let Popular Science know what you think at: letters (at) PopSci.com

During the last week of April, Microsoft released four updates for Windows 7 x64. They rolled in like normal. I selected all of them and let them do their thing when I was planning a reboot, assuming they would want one. They did. They performed some “configuration” prior to shutdown displaying some text prompting me to this effect. And, when restarting, Windows paused again, running more “configuration” against the new updates. After a few seconds, I was prompted with, “Failure Configuring Windows Update… Reverting Changes. Do not Turn off the Computer.”

Of course, when the machine came back up, I logged in and the same updates were there, wanting to get applied. I tried again. Fail. I tried one by one. Fail.

The update packages in question are:

• KB2515325
• KB2522422
• KB2492386
• KB982018

All four of them will just keep repeating the installation, posting identical entries in the Event Viewer-> Windows Logs->Setup

You might see something similar to:

• Package KB2515325 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB2522422 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB2492386 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB982018 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.

The System Log entries are:

• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2515325).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2522422).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2492386).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB982018).

Again, manual updates failed, so I looked for all of them in the ‘Microsoft Download Center’ and was able to download a self-contained (*.msu) update for each one. Using these, I was then able to install each, individually, in order, rebooting after those that prompted me to. After a few reboots, all was well and Windows Update no longer showed any required/optional system updates. I can only think that the update cache or downloaded updates were corrupted or being installed as a batch where one might have had dependencies on the other. . . Not sure.

Downloading the MSU and installing each manually will correct the issue. Here are the links for the four updates in question:

• KB2515325 Windows Update Package
• KB2522422 Windows Update Package
• KB2492386 Windows Update Package
• KB982018 Windows Update Package

I’m sure there are other fixes out there, maybe deleting the contents of the update repository (c:\windows\SoftwareDistribution), etc., but the above worked well for me. Hope this is some help to you also — for those that might have found their way here.

So… I was getting sick and tired of having to convert my videos (and RAW photos when I had to pull an impromptu slideshow for the family) on the PC/Mac and copy them to a USB stick, just so I could shove the drive into my 47″ LED Vizio to play them back. Now while the flash USB-in for video, photos, and music is an outstanding feature on the Vizio, the TV is still somewhat finicky in what formats it will decode. This applies to video, audio, and photos. Yeah… yeah… I have a UPnP DLNA client built into my DirecTV box, but I don’t think it has seen any development in years, has been stuck with a Beta label long enough outlast Google’s products, and frankly works about 50% of the time. So, it’s really not any solution at all to the “get content from my PC to my TV” problem.

Then, along comes Apple’s AppleTV, 2nd generation box (or puck). I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the little black piece of plastic as it was purely designed as a hobby by Apple and was nothing more that another device that allows iTunes rentals and purchases, helping Apple pad their pockets with yet more of peoples’ hard earned cash, as if the iPhones, iPads and associated AppStore aren’t enough?! In this form, it wasn’t anything that excited me to much, although it did get those iTunes purchases off your PC and to your TV. That was nice. But, then good things happened… Apple not only developed a great little piece of hardware, but made the fantastic choice to run iOS on it as well. This opened the device to a whole bunch of intelligent and creative hackers, hackers that could retool their other iDevice efforts and put them straight into practice (for the most part) on the AppleTV2. And, given a few months, they did just that. They not only jailbroke the thing, but started coding applications for it like the mad, up all night, energy drink fueled crowd they are. The little puck that could(n’t), could now do a whole lot more than it was ever originally designed to do!

Present day… All it takes is $99 and some time and you can have a very nice little media streamer that works in conjunction with Macs/PCs and a whole slew of OS’s. It all starts by jailbreaking an out-of-the-box Apple TV 2. Installing nitoTV is the first step. In the past, installing nitoTV involved first jailbreaking, then some tedious SSH’n and terminal commands, but today, Greenpois0n (RC6) is all you need. Not only will it perform an untethered jailbreak, unlocking Apple’s grip of the device running firmware v4.2.1 (which you should update to if the unit you purchase doesn’t have it installed by default), but the latest release will also install nitoTV right onto your little black Apple puck. There are numerous other custom jailbreaks out there for the Apple TV 2, and all have some differences, but Greenpois0n makes it really easy to get moving along once installed.

The good stuff…

Okay, so the puck is jailbroken, nitoTV is installed, now what? Well, XBMC (XBox Media Center for Apple TV – Info), of course. Quick instructions…

Plug your Apple TV 2 in, boot it up, and SSH into the device. Then, reference: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Install_XBMC_on_ATV2

I’m not going to go into a lot of details regarding how to get things installed and set up, but the lins above have about every piece of info you could ever want to make your ATV2/XBMC experience a dream. When you’re done picking one of many different skins, getting things set up and customized, you’ll be able to stream almost every video and audio codec known to man, organize your video, audio, and photo libraries, and present this all on your beautiful, large HDTV. You can also set up playlists for those family slideshows I was speaking about earlier.

Note, once set up, regardless of the skin used, ‘Weather’ will function when set up for your local, however, no weather condition images will be displayed. These were not included in the build or nightly builds, I believe to keep the package size small. However, if you wish to enable them, they can be harvested from the Mac edition of XBMC and installed via SSH to the Apple TV’s filesystem. Credit goes out to whoever created these, but to make things easier on you, I broke them out and packaged them up. You can download them right here: Apple TV 2 XBMC Weather Images

Once downloaded, unzip, SSH into the ATV2 and place the /128×128 and /64×64 sub-directories in: /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/temp/weather

Restart ‘Lowtide’ via nitoTV or reboot the ATV2 and when accessing the weather, you will now have nice images to match your local weather conditions.

So, long and short of it, if you wanted or were looking for a solution to get content from your PC to your TV, look no further. $99 is hard to beat, and with little effort, this small puck can do as much as or exceed the capabilities of many dedicated media streamers out in the market costing twice as much. And, it does so in a beautiful way. Don’t forget either… Even with the addition of the XBMC side of things (and this is far from the only customizable app that can be installed), the device still retains its original Apple functionality, allowing you to stream your entire iTunes audio library, play Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ titles, YouTube clips, and more.

I can’t recommend it enough! Please feel free to leave comments and/or ask any questions… I will try and field them as time permits.

In recently updating my Dell 1525 Hackintosh to Snow Leopard 10.6.3, when installing Chameleon 2 RC3 (or RC4, for that matter), I noticed when booting that I’d get a quick flashing debug message stating, ‘efi_inject_get_devprop_string NULL trying stringdata‘.  The message was fine, it didn’t make the install fail to boot or not work.  Things operated exactly as they should, however, being the perfectionist, I didn’t want to see it.  So, I set about trying to figure out what it meant and how to get rid of it.  After much searching, there really wasn’t any one good — EASY — solution. . .

The Dell 1525, when loaded and configured correctly for Snow Leopard, doesn’t require any ‘device-properties’ string injection, which is great and makes things much easier when installing to this particular machine.  Chameleon, being the excellent bootloader that it is, allows for this; and, many platforms require usage of it to work and operate correctly.  However, when the Chameleon developers compiled up RC3 and RC4, they inadvertently left the debug message noted above being shown on boot regardless of whether or not you were booting verbose or quick and quiet.  And, for the 1525, the message means nothing as the platform doesn’t require any injection, so it’s just completely benign debug output logging.

One solution to get rid of the message was to recompile Chameleon 2 RC3 or RC4, changing the ‘printf’ that displays this debug message all the time to a verbose logging message so that it only displayed when booting verbose.  Well. . . Recompiling the whole bootloader was way more effort than I wanted to get into just to get rid of some cosmetic “blip” that was annoying when booting.  Still, I wanted the message gone!  So, I came up with the following fix. . . which seems to work fine for me, and should for any other Dell 1525 Hackintosh user out there that’s not using device injection (and, you shouldn’t need to on the 1525), but that is using Chameleon 2 RC3 or RC4.

So, a quick and dirty way of getting rid of the message. . .

Download and launch EFIStudio (Google it up and download it.  It’s a great utility to have even outside of this post…) and look for your Ethernet adapter through the ‘Select Device’ combo box. Click the ‘Add Device’ button; you will see some hex output in the lower window of the dialog that presents.  Copy this string by selecting it or just use the ‘Hex String to Clipboard’ button.  Then, we need to add the following code to your com.apple.Boot.plist in /Extra off the root of your Leopard/Snow Leopard volume.  The code you need to add should look like this:

Of course, the string variable you use for ‘device-properties’ should be your own (and not formatted as the above is), or in other words, use whatever was returned to you from EFIStudio.  It might be the same as the above, might not.  Either way, when you’re done adding this, save the file.

When you next reboot, you’ll notice that the debug message is now gone and you’ll have a nice, clean boot, absent of any debug output — as you’ll satisfy the bootloader, giving it something other than the NULL injection it was complaining about.  I tested the above fix — or better, work-around — for a while and from what I found there are no adverse effects to using this method to get rid of the debug boot string.

Last week at some point, when using Firefox, a XP machine I’ve got developed an issue when hitting slashdot.org,  theregister.co.uk, and other sites I commonly check out and read on a day to day basis.  When hitting  the sites, the browser would load the header and then attempt to hit 74.55.39.45, and then just sit there with the status bar reading ‘Waiting for 74.55.39.45…’.  The browser would sit in this state for minutes before finally timing out on the connection and finally rendering out the page for me.  It was amazingly annoying.  I did a lookup on the IP and it didn’t turn up much, but further browsing seemed to show that the issue would present on ANY site that contained AdSense content.

Now, yes, I might have visited some “suspect” sites in the weeks prior, and yes, I might have installed some suspect software as well.  But, one thing for sure, this needed correcting!

At first I thought it just might be Sprint’s T1 service having some temporary routing issues, but if I used ANY browser other than Firefox, the issue did not present.  Hmmm… It was local to my machine. Investigation began.

I first checked out my HOSTS file.  It was clear and didn’t show anything suspect.  I then checked out my add-ins and plugins in Firefox.  They all looked okay as well.  Regardless, I began to disable most all of them.  This did nothing to clear the issue either.  So, off to Google the problem.

Seems a bunch of people ran into this annoying malware.  It was hard to tell it was malware however as Trend, AVG, Norton, and McAfee turned up nothing.  I finally found a link that pointed me to an AV product called Prevx.  When I ran this, it returned 10 or “infected” files and registry entries.  Eight of these were not “infections” at all.  I use SlimFTP, a small FTP daemon; Prevx identified this as a problem executable along with another few benign apps.

There was two entries that were suspect though.  One, a file called, MicrosoftDocProp.dll that was located in \Common Files\Microsoft.  The file had no version info.  Pulling up a process viewer, I found the file attached to almost every running process on my box!  There was also a registry key that loaded it under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\.  Using the excellent XP utility Unlocker, I was able to delete the file outside of a PE environment and kill off the reg entry.  Of course, this shut down Explorer, as it was attached it as well.  But, after killing both the file and reg entry and rebooting, all was well.

I’m not sure that if you run into this that the file and/or the reg entry will be the same, but it definitely seems that Prevx will help you identify the culprit and help you kill it.  You can either buy Prevx and have it clean for you, or do the killing yourself, as I did after running their free download (it will scan and ID, but won’t clean until you buy a license).

In any case. . . If you run into this, I hope this helps.

After initially installing XP and transitioning it across multiple platforms over the years (not to mention all the SP updates on top of that), I found the other day a few low level, boot time devices that were failing to load or ‘Start’ correctly (i.e. Code 24 marked with an exclamation point when viewing Hidden Devices->Non-Plug and Play Drivers in Device Manager).  Now, many of these were devices that were no longer even installed in the machine, so the fix for them was easy, uninstall them.   Many of these were former drive and/or RAID controllers.  While uninstalling them however, I noticed that PartMgr, an integral part of the Windows OS, and an important one as it controls how Windows communicates with all of your partitions, was still sitting there with an exclamation point, and an error that stated that the driver couldn’t start, was not present, etc., etc.  When looking at its Properties, things became even more confusing as the Driver tab was telling me that the driver/device was started at boot-time, however was still stopped, not present, and failing for whatever reason.  Searching the Internet, I came across a lot of people that have run into this issue, but not one that actually got the issue corrected.  Being that re-installing Windows, doing an “in place, upgrade” was not an option, I dove into the issue and got things fixed up.  For those out there that might run into the same, here’s how to correct it. . .

I’ll take it you know you have the issue.  If you’re not sure but with high disk usage, probing around your file system and having Explorer lock up or do strange things, you might want to check.  To check, reference how above using Device Manager.  Remember, you must ‘Show Hidden Devices’ via the ‘View’ menu.  Once identified, here’s the steps…

• Access REGEDIT (you can run this from the ‘Run’ menu, located within the Start Menu) and locate the following key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
• You will notice in the right-hand pane a ‘Name’ of string-value, ‘UpperFilters’.  This name should have a data value associated with it.  This data value should be a string of ‘PartMgr’.  Ensure this exists.  If it does not, add it.
• Now in REGEDIT, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PartMgr    This key should have a ‘Enum’ subkey.  Click on the ‘Enum’ subkey.  In the right-hand pane, you should see a list of every drive you have located in the machine.  If you do not see all of your drives, you now know why things broke down and the driver started to fail at boot.  When I first accessed this key, all that was present was the main root key, ‘Root\LEGACY_PARTMGR\0000′.
• If the ‘Enum’ key appears to not match what drives you know you have in the machine or is empty, it’s time to have Windows re-enumerate all of the drives in the machine.
• To re-enumerate the drives is easy…Simply delete the ‘Enum’ key located under ‘PartMgr’ and reboot.  When the machine reboots, it will re-enumerate all of your drives and add them back to PartMgr’s service key.  When this is done, the driver will now know what hardware its controlling and it should start and begin doing its job correctly again.

So, that’s all there is to it.  It took a while of digging and referencing other “running” machines to understand what the problem was, but in the end, as you can see, the fix is incredibly easy.  After I corrected things, the random issues I was having with Explorer locking up and permanently hourglassing when trying to delete and/or rename files went away.  Boot times decreased.  And, overall things seemed much better with the health of the machine.  Of what research I did, I saw that many people seemed to experience this when installing Intel’s Application Accelerator on hardware that didn’t necessarily support the installation of the software (Nice install Intel!).

Anyway. . . hope this helps some of you out there that might come across the issue.

Not much to type here, really… The video speaks for itself.

Early in my flight training, I’d often grab one of the video cameras we have here at work and take it to the flight school. I’d give it to a passenger or my instructor or stick it up on the dash in the window of the Cessna 172. I found a tape I’d shot late last year and threw together some of the better shots of the hour long flight. It’s certainly nothing amazing, but it does show you a little of how pretty flying around Savannah and the Coastal Islands of the low country can be — especially at twilight. Yeah, yeah… for those pro aviators out there, the landing leaves a bit to be desired, but, “Hey!,” it was only a little over a month into my training. And, as the infamous aviation saying goes:

Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing.

Needless to say, after eight more months, my recent landings are straight down the runway center-line and a lot more coordinated.

You can click on the above image or link to check out the video… I’ll see what other video(s) I can dig out of the archives over the next few months and post more when time permits. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this short segment.

I’m not too sure whose idea it was to allow VFR (Visual Flight Rules) pilots — meaning you have to be able to see outside to avoid hitting things — to fly at night. Don’t get me wrong… It’s nice to not be grounded by the absence of the sun. For instance, it is great that you can take a flight in the late afternoon knowing that it will terminate well into night and be able to do so legally having only your VFR rating. It’s great that you can fly at dark, in darkness if you want. But, night is a little more than contradictory to the “visual flight rules.”

At night, there are plenty of times where you can’t see anything at all — no horizon, no lights, nothing. Times like these leave you having to rely on your instruments only. That’s not a bad thing and it’s not crazy scary or anything, but to me it is a little more than contradictory to what the VFRs constantly pound into your brain. Such was the case light night over open ocean (You can see last night’s flight in the above pic. Clicking it will take you to ‘Flight Watch’ where you can track all kinds of flights. Cool site… But, I’m wandering here…). So, yeah… last night’s night flight… I took off from Savannah and headed to open ocean, enroute to Charleston. When over water, you couldn’t tell the difference from a star versus the light on a buoy. If banked, turning 30 degrees (which is a lot), you can’t see the turn and you can’t feel it. (see JFK Jr.) You have to have total reliance on your instruments. VFR prohibits you from flying into clouds. Well guess what? At night you can’t see clouds until you’re in them. Then, when you are, you have this nice dimmly lit gray fog surrounding you that lights up with the strobes on your wingtips every second. It makes the propeller do that cool, disco strobe freezing thing. So, you have to fight your way back to ‘legal’ and get out of the clouds. That’s fun when they’re low and there’s lot of them. Then, you have to find your airport, which most incidentally have no runways lit for you. You need to turn on the lights yourself. (You do this with your radios by clicking the mic in succession.) Then, you have to land. You get some landing light from the plane cast on the runway when you’re about 50 feet from it.

All in all, night is quite an experience in an airplane. And, experience is something you’ll definitely want when you fly at night. Me… other than the flights that intentionally take me into nighttime, I’ll wait for those perfectly clear, full moon lit nights once I get my license.

So… Anyone want to go night flying?

(It only took 2 months for me to post this… I’ve been a bit slow as of late. But then, the last post being eight months ago should have made that fairly obvious.)

In March, the powers that be saw fit to allow me to fly an airplane solo. On March 10th, I soloed a Cessna 172SP through 3 full stop landings in Statesboro, GA (KTBR). At 21 hrs. I didn’t do a half bad job, especially considering that I had just come off a business trip from Mexico, was half sick (ears popping, coughing… you know… general funk), and hadn’t flown in quite some time. It wasn’t anywhere near as intimidating as I thought it might be. And, in many ways, it was actually a relief to have the cockpit all to myself. Instructors can actually be a distraction sometime — if you can believe that. I got a chance to make my own decisions; no one was there to tell me what to do. And, in a strange way, this made managing the cockpit much easier in my opinion. The whole experience was more tactile, more conscious, and well, “it’s all you or you’re dead.” I guess that’s just about enough reason right there to make sure you probe down deep in those brain cells, pay attention, and from the depths, grab the knowledge you’ve learned to date and put it to use. All in all, at the end of the solo flight, I had executed all the pattern flight and maneuvers within tolerance, did a fairly decent job on my radio communication, and had a nice, leisurely flight back to Savannah’s Class C airport (KSAV).

Since my solo flight I’ve put another 12 hours of solo time in the logbook and completed my cross country flights. I need a minimum of 10 hours of solo (and more dual, with an instructor) before I can take my written and get my FAA check ride — the final test to getting my private pilot’s license.

A few of these solo flights were quite routine — go to an outlying airport, run the traffic pattern, make 10 landings/take-offs or so in different configurations, and fly back to the home airport.

The last flight I took, however, I decided to make something a bit different. The weather was perfect. I grabbed my camera, some latitude/longitude coordinates, and hit the skies to take some aerial photos — photos of a couple of friend’s houses. One place (7 or so miles SW the airport) sits a 1/2 mile from a 1500 ft. tower with guy wires running out an 1/8th of mile, borders a very active Military Operations Area (Fort Stewart’s MOA) about a mile to the Northwest, has a 500 ft. tower in the back yard, and off to the West has a “tower farm” consisting of three, 1700 ft. transmission towers. I, personally, didn’t even think I’d get clearance from ATC to even head towards all this “madness” at the low altitudes I was requesting (1000 ft.), but to my amazement, I said everything they wanted to hear and they gave me clearance — even though I did get the old, “So… Where do you want to go?!? And what do you want to do there?!” thing — twice. But, after responding again, I guess I told them exactly what they wanted to hear. They nicely cleared me. I headed off, made my way around the antennas (looking over 2000 ft. at the first and seeing 500+ ft. of tower above the plane was reminding me to exercise the caution this area deserved), orbited the property and started snapping pictures. I had to circle the 1500 ft. tower to get a good angle out of the window — and fly the plane at the same time. I circled a few times in order to get some decent photos of the property. ATC was nice enough to vector other traffic away from me once I reported that I was on station. I hung out for 10-15 minutes and headed off North — to the next station (aka. my friend Eric’s place). Overall, a great time and a great flight. Flights are much more fun and interesting when you have a goal or destination in mind — that is, in contrast to just flying around and practicing things all the time.

This flying “stuff,” for lack of a better word right now, has giving me a new reason to actually add more entires to this “blog.” (Yes, I still hate that term and thankfully the general public is slowly killing it without me having to do anything. Yeah! Soon I’ll be able to just type the word “write.”) Ironic that I ‘write’ this at 35 thousand feet; I’m on my way back from another business trip that I had to take — this one to Bogotá, Columbia. Considering I had some hours to kill, it seemed as good a time as any to finally make a flying entry. It’s something I’ve thought about doing for a while now. I’ve just not had the time. But, following the last entry (a long time ago), it seemed appropriate…

There’s quite the flying community out there and there’s lots I can learn from all of them. I hope to take my VFR Private’s to IFR as soon as I complete my ticket. I want to continue flying as often as I can throughout the rest of my life. Being able to fly (especially IFR) will open the “world of adventure” I’ve always so desired more than ever. Meg (the wife) and I can hop in an aircraft and hit all kinds of places in the States and the Bahamas.

I’ve added a new heading to the top menu where I’ll be attempting to start document my flights and progress… as time allows, of course… which, based on the recent past, won’t be too often. I also have a ton of pictures that I need to post. I guess I need to find the time to post them as well… Soon… Soon…

Over and out.

Mildred Natalie Stinaff, my great aunt, was born in Akron, Ohio in 1912. People referred to her as Millie. She was the daughter of Charles and Lillie May Stinaff. She had two brothers, Charles Lloyd Stinaff and Girdwood Stinaff, my grandfather. As she grew into a young woman, she developed a great love for aviation, which was itself still in its infancy, and still a profession mostly only enjoyed by men. I found a newspaper clipping quoting her as having said, “Why couldn’t I fly the mail and take passengers as well as the men?”

She saw no boundaries, obviously; her interest in aviation was so strong, that in June of 1929, at 18 years old, she began taking flying lessons to realize her dream of becoming a professional pilot. My grandfather, Girdwood, helped finance her insatiable desire to fly. She began her lessons at the Akron Air Lines School under instructor Hap Roundtree and later with Byron Newcomb. She flew almost daily in order to build up the required hours necessary for her private pilot’s license. She became so proficient that after only 20 hours, she took her first solo flight. Not long after her solo, she got the license she so desperately sought and became only the second woman in Akron to learn to fly and one of the first 99 women to obtain a pilot’s license.

Flying led her into a job at the airport, working for Akron Airlines, Inc. She continued to fly and went on to receive additional instruction in aerobatic and commercial flight. In January of 1930, at the Mid-City, Akron Municipal Airport, she made 42 consecutive inside loops and set a world’s record for the most loops performed in an aircraft piloted by a woman. The next best had been 28 loops performed in Houston, Texas. She went on to thrill audiences, performing loops, stalls, and spins in many local air shows over the next year.

June 13, 1931, Millie accepted a job as acting secretary and hostess at the new administration building at Akron Municipal Airport. It was said that she had a charming personality, was very well liked, and quickly became a very popular figure at the airport. She was soon to complete her commercial pilot’s rating and was preparing to retake the looping record she set the year prior. June 23, 1931, just ten days into her job at the airport, she took off from the airport to perform some stunt maneuvers for an air show. She completed her first loop but lost control. The plane went into a spin at 1200 feet. Ultimately, she was able to shut off the motor, but was unable to recover from the spin. The plane crashed, severely injuring Millie. She was rushed to City Hospital, where 37 minutes later, at 8:45 p.m. she died. She was only 20 years old. Following is one many news clippings, this from the ‘Akron Beacon Journal’, printed many years after her death:

Personally, I wouldn’t think she minded dying the way she did. If there was ever a case of “Well, they died doing what they loved,” this was it. In fact, I’m posting this article as my mother, upon finding out that I, myself, have been taking lessons to get my private pilot’s license, sent me a large package of pictures, newspaper clippings, and letters that proved to me just how much she enjoyed and truly loved what she was doing with her life. After going through them all, I can’t see that she would have had any regrets. Not one.

Before her death, Millie became a charter member of the The Ninety-Nines (License No. 10491), the first 99 women in organized aviation. The group has since grown, but virtually all women of achievement in aviation have been or are members of The Ninety-Nines. This is an amazing accomplishment and made me finally realize after all these years, how truly important all those stories my grandfather told me about his sister really were. He talked about her often. And, when he did, no story would be remiss of that enthusiasm she had for flying. I wish I would have had the chance to have met and gotten to know her… She was a pioneer for women, in aviation and in life, was no doubt brave flying those early planes — and flying them aerobatically at that, and had a burning desire to live life.

Simply said, I admire her a great deal. I posted to some photos of Millie to the gallery.

To learn more about The Ninety-Nines, you can check out the following web sites:

The Museum of Women Pilots – The Ninety-Nines
The Ninety-Nines, Inc. – The International Organization of Women Pilots

It’s become clear that without titling and commenting my photographs individually, something which I simply don’t have the time to do — it’s amazing I do as much as I do on this site as it is — that a lot of the wider, Internet public, was not able to view them… Why? Well, they couldn’t find them. There was nothing that contextually made them apparent or known to the search engines, so only the people that know of this site or received mails to check the images I posted, got to see them.

I created a Flickr account almost a year ago and posted images from Harbour Island (in the Bahamas) to the account. I had all but forgot about the account until doing some work this weekend where I was finally directed back to it for whatever reason. When I got there, I found a comment from an advertising agent. She noted that her agency wished to license some of my photo work. Too bad she left the comment 7 months ago! (Not really getting back to her in a timely manner — so, the “deal is off,” I would think. I’m sure she was looking for pictures of Harbour Island and that whatever they were working on has long since been completed.) Also, I found that many of the images were tagged as a lot people’s favorite images. Go figure?! Anyhow, it was clear that the Flickr images were getting hit a lot more than those in the gallery on this page. And, isn’t the reason I post images so that people can have a look at them? Well… it is.

So, I’ve taken the time today to add some of my images to Flickr and to “join the community,” so to speak…

Since I’ve been messing around with my photos as of late and actually posted to the site, I hopped out of lazy mode and decided to post the pictures I took while visiting the Rocky Mountain National Park last March. And, with the pics, I have to also and tell my story.

A business trip took me to Comcast in Denver. Business only lasted a couple of days; I took the remainder of the week/weekend to adventure around some of the parks in Colorado. I got everything done, work-wise, by Thursday. I went a few places outside Denver — Colorado Springs & The Rocky Mountain National Park to name a few of the big ones.

I got up Friday at 4:30 in the morning and hit the road towards the Rocky Mountain National Park. I had planned on entering the park near the entrance in Estes, Colorado at sunrise; from there I was going to drive to a trail head at Bear Lake and hike a mile or so into the mountains to Emerald Lake. All went as planned. I made it to the park just as the sun was rising. It was so early, the entrance wasn’t even manned by rangers yet, so I saved my $30 entrance fee. I drove a few miles into the park… There were Elk feeding. It was beautiful. After a half hour of driving, I finally made it to the Bear Lake trail.

On the trail, I hit ~11,000 feet at the highest point and hiked about 3 miles round-trip around the Rockies before all was said and done. I’ll remember to take snow shoes if and when I ever go to the Rockies in winter next time! I knew I should have, but I wasn’t going to buy a pair for this one trip. I followed the “path,” if you could call it that. You couldn’t see any clear sign of a trail. Best I could do was stay on the hard-pack. Being there in the morning and it being 30 degrees was more important than I thought as the day went on, but I’ll get to that later… I hiked for an hour or so, found a rock, and sat to catch my breath. Being alone in the vast silence, staring at the Continental Divide, was quite the experience. It was one of those Thoreau, “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…” kind of moments.

After resting, I continued on. I knew I had to be getting close to Dream Lake, the second lake in on the trail. I finally saw people — a couple. They looked at me, said “Hi.” and then looked at my flat, rubber bottomed, casual dress boots sans snow shoes. It was at that point I knew they took me for some amateur nut-case likely to be a casualty of the Rockies. Everyone (and I only saw about 5 people) had snow shoes — everyone! The couple said I could never make it to the “lakes” in the shoes I had on. So, after they left and I lost sight of them, I showed them what will really was when I met back up with them about 20 mins. later — at the furthest lake on the trail, Emerald Lake. The wife told me her husband said there was no way they’d see me again in the shoes I was wearing. I hung out with them, had a granola bar, and talked with them for 20 mins. or so. Nice people… They lived in Estes right outside the park — retired there. They took off after a while; I hung out and took some pictures. I had made it to where I wanted to, and as the clouds rolled in and killed any good picture taking, I decided to head back to the car.

Coming back down the mountain was a lot easier than climbing it. I skied on my boots most of the way, making sure to stay on the parts of the trail I knew had been pretty packed down by traffic already. I was literally downhill skiing in my street boots! That is, until I found myself “off the trail” and started “post holing” (legs just gone) up to my groin in around 10 foot snow… I thought I might be stuck, but I calmed myself and pulled the army crawl about 30 yards back to hard pack (after I finally was able to find it) or I’d a been stuck in the snow for the rest of the day — I told you it being morning and 30 degrees was important. It was. At this point, it wasn’t 30 anymore — it was in the mid-40′s now. As the temperature rose, the snow softened. As the day went on the snow got softer and softer. It was good I started at around 6AM (everything was ice at that point — which was still pretty difficult in the shoes I was in… I used about twice the energy it would have taken vs. having snow shoes). Anyhow, I was off the snow/trail by 11:30-12. Any later in the day and I wouldn’t have been able to make even a 1/4 mile on the trail without sinking each leg into the snow with every step. I’m glad no one came trucking by while I was sunk to the waist in snow, looking like someone cut my legs off… I would have had to pull the Jedi mind trick, “Nothing to see here. Just chillin’. . . (literally). Please move on.”

So… long story, yeah… Pictures are here. The pictures pretty much follow the story, chronologically.

Nothing beats not working, like really not working, heading North to escape the deadly heat of Savannah in the summer, and heading out to hopefully catch some walleye on Lake Erie — even though it was pretty much the end of walleye “season.” The day started early for me — 7:30. Now, that’s not normally early, but when the night before, you were hanging out, drinking, until 3 o’clock in the morning, it’s pretty damn early — trust me! The day slowly turned from utter agony into excitement once I got my bearings and the hang-over started to wear off. By the time my buddy Chris and I reached Lake Erie I was almost back to 100%. Almost. I was amped to get out on the water and start the “fishing tournament.” We got lucky with the weather… Erie was as flat as a pancake. The weather was an overcast, 72 degrees. The 89% humidity was a little annoying, but compared to Savannah, I was in heaven. We zoomed out 2 miles on a glass-like Erie (which doesn’t happen often) and started fishing. The “Erie pancake” didn’t last long though and before we knew it the lake started throwing 3-5 footers at us. My boy Chris would laugh every time a 5 foot valley came heading towards the back of the boat, ready to swamp us. Good stuff! No problems though… Fishing was on! We beat the boat and our bodies up zooming from place to place, but managed a great day of fishing out on the Great Lakes. We finished the day with four walleye and a small mouth (that saved itself by cutting the line on the prop) — and we didn’t even get injured or stranded 4 miles out when the engine decided to die on us. We beat the odds and the fish! We got some pictures of the day… Now, I just need to get out on the rivers and do some more fishing in Savannah; that is, when the heat decides to drop below 106 degrees, but that’s a whole other story that I’ll write about if and when I get the time…

I’ve been a little slack on doing anything with the web site in the past half year or so. So, I figured this weekend that I could escape my real duty — doing our taxes — and play around with something I’ve been meaning to do for some time now. Over the last 10 months, I slowly worked on the 1200+ images I took while in Paris with Meg last July. I had every intention of editing most out of what was posted to the site, only leaving the best. I managed to get rid of many of them — so to make going through them not as painful and, well, let’s face it, as boring. I really wanted to try and get the collection down to around 200 or so images, but found it impossible. There were just too many photos that were great to look at and that brought back the good times had while there… So, the gallery gets 621 photographs. What?! I cut it in half! That’s got to say something?! Doesn’t it?!

Anyway, all the pictures are in the Paris Album. I hope you enjoy some of them. Drop a comment or rate one if you dig an image.

I have to say… Paris is without doubt one of the most romantic and beautiful cities on the planet. The fact that most of what you see hasn’t changed in centuries is amazing. It’s a great contrast to the ever evolving landscape and architecture we’re used to here in America. I heard this story once — about when the Germans were occupying Paris and they had to retreat back. They wired Notre Dame to blow, but they had to leave one guy in charge of hitting the switch. And the guy, the soldier, he couldn’t do it. You know, he just sat there, knocked out by how beautiful the place was. And, then when the allied troops came in, they found all the explosives just lying there and the switch unturned. They found the same thing at Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, and a couple other places I think… I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I always liked the story. Paris is just an incredible place. Each visit — and I’ve been five times now — is just as exciting and eventful as the first. I hope Meg and I can go again soon…

I kept a journal while I was there… I’d get up early every morning (well, almost every morning) and hit the laptop and type the previous day’s experiences while Meg slept. Coffee, an open window in a great little room, a nice breeze, Paris… It was a great place to write and a great way to spend the early hours. (Check out the pictures of the room, desk, and window where I wrote.) It’s so easy to forget your experiences over time. Re-reading this has shown me that much! So, if you really have time to waste, check it out.

Keep on adventurin’!

Peace.

… that is the question — between me and the wife. I had this idea to paint the foyer a darker color – you know, to help separate it from the rest of the bigger room it’s attached to. The foyer, if you can even call it that, is a little alcove off the “great room.” Prior to painting it, it didn’t really stand out as much of anything. My idea was that if we painted it a different color, we could make it appear almost like another smaller room, giving it more emphasis. The wife didn’t agree and had reservations about my “brilliant” idea. Well, when she was at work yesterday, I had a couple of hours to make “a run for it.” I grabbed some paint and went to town. I had the thing done in a few hours, cleaned up, and got everything back in its place. When she got home, she didn’t even notice!

Anyway, take a look at the picture attached to this post (before and after) and let us know what you think… Did the thing look better before or after? Paint or no paint?

You guys judge… I figure objective views would help paint a more accurate picture (or, foyer, in this case).

In late June of 2006, my wife and I visited my family in Northeast, Ohio. This gave us an opportunity to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s, Fallingwater. I have been a huge admirer of Wright’s for many years and had made plan after plan to visit the house; I think it took more than 8 years in total before I was finally successful.

The wife and I set out early Friday morning and headed east towards Pittsburgh. Bear Run, where Fallingwater is located, is only a short drive from Pittsburgh. We arrived at the property around ten in the morning. It was a beautiful morning, mid 70s — the weather couldn’t have been any nicer! I might not miss the Northern winters, but the summers are beautiful. I have great nostalgia for the summer months up North.

Visiting the house is something that everyone should do. When you consider that this “modern” house was built in 1935, you can help but note and appreciate Wright’s genius. The term “organic architecture” becomes apparent immediately. The home is literally part of its landscape. Cantilevers strap the house to the rock that lines the riverbed, allowing the river to run right under the home. Pieces of the home wrap and form around tree trucks; the home was designed around them. Stairs rise straight from the river bed. Boulders, rock, and running water intrude right into the home making a seamless connection between the outside and in. It’s an amazing place.

I took some photographs that can be seen in the photo gallery. Take a look at them here.

60 Minutes has been on the air since 1968, a year before I was born. In the 38 years since then it has become known as the nation’s preeminent investigative television program and the “news magazine” to which all others attempt to live up to — but don’t. In terms of ratings, it has been in the top ten 23 seasons in a row, never falling out of the top 20 for as long as it has been on the air.

But, as the show grows older, so do its people — the people that have made it what it is today. Ed Bradley’s passing today (Nov. 9, 2006) reminded me of how the 60 Minutes that I’ve grown to love, that I was raised watching, and that has become part of most all my Sunday nights won’t be the same forever. Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney, and the show’s creator, Don Hewitt, are all getting older; they won’t be part of the show for the rest of its life on the air. But then Harry Reasoner wasn’t part of it forever either. His leaving didn’t destroy the show… I guess it’s just that people die. (No surprise there, huh?!) I just hope that my ideal of what 60 Minutes is doesn’t die along with them. This is not to say that the rest of the cast is not top notch, but for whatever reason, it’s the people that I’ve watched all these years that made the show what it is — for me.

Long live the ‘show of all shows’! And, farewell Ed… You’ll be missed.

The year was 1996. Location — 3 miles off Harbour Island in the Bahamas. It was a clear day, the sun was shining, the seas were calm, we had a boat, some beer, all the dive gear you could want, and the hangover from the night before was wearing off just fine… A couple of young, adventurous mugs were ready for some drama on the high seas. We persuaded a local Bahamian, Kenny, with a bottle of rum to help us navigate to a shipwreck located not far off the Devil’s Backbone, a huge reef that runs the length of the island.

The ship was The Cienfuegos. On February 5, 1895, The Cienfuegos, an American steamship went aground on the “Backbone.” Thanks to the native Eleutherians, not one passenger or crew member lost their lives. The Cienfuegos did, however. Down she went. Flashing forward a hundred years to 1996, here we were, ready to pillage. A couple of dive masters told us on shore that they’d give us $500 if we could rip off one of her port windows, so we packed the tools before leaving port. We were bound and determined to take something from that wreck — anything. (Yeah, you’re probably not supposed to do this kind of stuff, but it’s the Bahamas; the laws are interpreted loosely if you know what I mean.)

I’d write more of the day and the ensuing adventure, but I finally took the video footage we shot that day, put on my best film maker hat, and made it into something that speaks well enough for itself. I’ll let it do the work for me.

So, in all its Technicolor glory, here it is…

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

(It runs about 21 minutes; so, if you get bored, the good stuff happens around the 15 minute mark.)

I’ll keep it short and sweet… The W² Software dudes have been hard at work addressing people’s problems, adding functionality, and just plain making Random Playlist Creator with Genres a whole bunch better than it was before. An app barely alive… We rebuilt it… We had the technology. We had the capability to make the world’s first bionic playlist creator. Better than it was before, Stronger, Faster… (Queue in the theme music now.) It’s grown one whole version number, 1.0 to 2.0. Amazing. It’s got to be better then, right?!?

Go download it and try it out. It’s the perfect app for making those random playlists to throw on your player of choice. So, when you’ve reached that point where you just don’t know what the hell to listen to, but you know you don’t want to listen to some genre(s) or artist(s), look no further… Download this and stop hitting that track forward button all the time.

Peace, out!

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A co-worker of mine turned me onto Pandora.com a couple of weeks ago. I have to say, this music service is pretty damn impressive! I’m not a big fan of having to have a browser window open to listen to music on the ‘pute (which you have to do with this service), but Pandora does offer you a cool way of finding new music and artists amongst some genre or “mood” you’re wanting to explore. There have been a bunch of bands I wouldn’t have ever listened to or found if I hadn’t come across — or been told — about this service.

The basic gist of it is, you put in an artist or tune you like and it will, based off of thousands of other “votes from others,” direct you to a streaming station that it feels compliments what you entered. You can even send this “station” to others. Underneath, the service is powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy – but now that we’ve created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.

We hope you enjoy the journey.

Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project

So, there you have it… Now go try Pandora.com for yourself and let me know what you think.

Okay, gonna bust out some geekness on ya! I’ve been using this “application” for over a year, but since RSS feeds are becoming so prevelant across the Internet, I figured it was about time to inform those out there that might not know what to do with them (and even those that do) of a cool way to manage them and actually “read” them.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” which infers a way to provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called a RSS feed or WebFeed. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website’s readers to track and read updates on the site using an “aggregator.” What’s an aggregator? Well, this is where Pluck comes in. It is the aggregator (or reader) — or, at least, one of them. And, a darn good one. It plugs right into your browser, is supported under both IE and FireFox, is easy to use, and it’s free. So, try it out…

Then, whenever you see an icon like the one that’s plastered on this post (or at the bottom of this page) or the letters or , click on ‘em. If you don’t have Pluck or some reader installed all you’ll see is a bunch of code you probably won’t be able to make much sense of. Installing Pluck will allow you to read and use the feeds as they were intended to be used. It’s a cool new way to organize and check for updates on the sites you visit most often. Pluck also makes things easy by allowing you to see that the site has been updated without you even having to visit it.

So, if you didn’t know what all the RSS “hype” was all about, now you do. And, you got a tool to make RSS something other than a bunch of garbled text.

I wanted to show the film to my wife recently, so I rented it again. It was as funny as it was the first time. Firstly, to warn you, the guy might appear a bit off to you. He regularly dresses as a woman during his performances. Strange, yes, but does it matter? Not in the least! He’s, after all, just a male lesbian. After reading some things about him, I found he’s just as “normal” as anyone else — he’s been in a bunch of movies, done stand-up, slept with women, you know? And, who cares as long as the stand-up is as well written and funny as it is? (I tried to turn one guy onto it; he refused to watch it because of the transvestite thing, but I have to wonder what he was so afraid of? Ya know what I’m saying?! He doesn’t even know what he missed.) So, get over the inconsequential and rent ‘Dressed to Kill’ as soon as you possibly can. Go to NetFlix now and add it to your queue. What?!? No NetFlix?!? I’ll save that topic for another time.

Bottom line, rent this flick! You’ll laugh. Promise. Don’t and I’ll — I’ll — well, I’ll do nothing, but… I’ve never seen or heard comedy that was capable of giving you a history lesson, providing you with some good random facts, offering you a foreign language refresher class, and again, making you bust a gut — all at the same time! Genius, I’ll tell ya! Don’t believe me. The show got an ’8.4′ on Internet Movie Database. If you don’t know what that is — well, again, that’s a completely separate post. But, anyhow, an 8.4 is good — really good! There’s not many movies, shows, or whatever, that bust into the 8′s.

I’ll stop rambling about it and link in a little clip. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I assume that video clips are worth a lot more. And, they’re definitely worth more than my words!

Click the above picture to view a clip from Dressed to Kill

(Should any “legal” counsel, production peeps, etc. notice this clip and find it in violation of copyright, other such legalese, or blah, blah, blah, let me know. I’ll gladly take it down upon request. Me, I thought of it more as “promotion” than anything else; I apologize in advance. I didn’t make the quality so poor by accident.)

I’ve boasted enough to all the folks around the office, so I thought it was about time to lay it out to everyone… Bob Schieffer is one cool cat and one great news anchor. After the whole 24 years I started going to “sleep” watching Dan “Not the Man” Rather (he actually wasn’t that bad early on… but, he didn’t ripen well with age) it’s a blessing to watch CBS News’ replacement for Rather.

I guess it would help put this post in better context if I mentioned that I have a strong allegiance to CBS News. There’s no good reason behind it other than nostalgia (watching it every night at the dinner table as a kid) and having great respect for the outstanding news men that have tenured at CBS over the years — Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, and the always enjoyable Mike Wallace (who is retiring from ’60 Minutes’ this year, which is a huge disappoint to me). But, I digress… Back to Schieffer…

CBS had to come up big after the “Rathergate” scandal last year. Finding a replacement to compete with the great anchors at the other networks, I’m sure, was no easy task. But, I hand it to CBS for taking the leap of faith and heading in a completely different direction, not only with “their” anchor, but in contrast to all the major network’s anchors, as a whole. Schieffer’s layman’s approach to presentation and point-blank questioning of his correspondents is a breath of fresh air.

If there’s a fire across the street,” Schieffer says, “you don’t walk into the newsroom and say, ‘A raging, three-alarm fire, whipped by 40-mile-an-hour winds, ripped through the home next door.’ You say, ‘There’s a fire across the street.’”

It would be easier for you to watch CBS News than for me to continue rambling about it, so I guess that’s the point of this post. Watch it. See what you think for yourself.

From the Washington Post — Schieffer has been enjoying a wave of positive publicity, not least because reporters who cover television are fixated on ratings. For the season to date, the “CBS Evening News” has gained 183,000 viewers, from what had been a low point under Rather. By contrast, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” which is still rebuilding after the death of Peter Jennings and the injuries suffered by Bob Woodruff in Iraq, has lost 845,000 viewers and “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” has lost 741,000.

At the same time, Williams remains the undisputed evening news leader, averaging 9.87 million viewers to 8.78 million for ABC and 7.66 million for Schieffer’s broadcast.

So, CBS still sits in last place in terms of the major network news ratings, but with Schieffer in the seat, more or more people are coming back to CBS News by the day. There has to be more to it than just what I see…

I, personally, hope the trend continues and that CBS’s claim of “temporary anchor” was nothing more than a misnomer. I expect if the ratings continue the way they have, it might just be just that.

Links:

Yahoo!
Washington Post

UPDATE: I had to update this post today (3/27)… A few days after my inital post, irony reared its ugly head. It seems that the organization that I asked you to give so much of yourself to has now been implicated in what could be wide spread theft — theft of money or goods, or both.

You know things are in bad shape when Congress has to coerce an organization like the Red Cross to begin investigations into blatant oversights and mismanagement within its own organization. So, for now, if you still even feel generous, I would look for another institution in which to provide your time, money, or donations. I’ve taken down the donation banner on the page indefinitely.

So, February 28, 2006 marked the 6-month point since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. I’ve watched, read, and listened to a lot of documentaries, specials and, of course, news stories in that time. Some was good news — heart-warming stories of hope and perseverance. Others paint a pretty grim picture. The level of neglect, confusion, and chaos that is still affecting the victims, and our country, leaves me in disbelief at times. In many ways, the brunt of the storm is being felt more now than it was initially.

Over the weekend, I heard that the government is asking a good deal of the people that received relief money to send some back. They “accidentally” sent them too much. WHAT?!? Okay, I understand that a storm of this magnitude had to affect the systems we had in place to assist in the aftermath, but story after story continue to show the mistakes and mismanagement that has gone on over the course of the effort. I also know that there are two sides to every story…

It’s easy to isolate all the bad — the initial F.E.M.A nightmare, the ‘Superdome’ problem, blah, blah, blah. And, I don’t want to do that; that’s not my point. Again, there has been a tremendous amount of good done as well. But, in light of all of this, you can’t see and read these stories without thinking about it on a more personal level. I live on the coast. A hurricane could just as easily come and wipe everything my family has off the map as well.

That brings me to the gist of this post, my personal responsibility to the victims of that storm and to this country. While working in the yard this weekend, I thought about all the stories I’ve digested over the past six months and realized that I could continue helping, my own way. The government is doing what they can, but the victims and we, as a country, would be nowhere near where we are now if people hadn’t made the individual efforts they did. I couldn’t think about the victims without thinking about myself — how fortunate my family and I, really are, comparatively. Life has been nothing but kind to me. I consider myself to be very lucky. There’s been a whole crap-load of hard work, luck and serendipity that has brought me to where I am now.

So, I did what I did — what I could. I hope it helps; I hope it makes it somewhere and to someone that needs it. Yeah, I don’t know with all certainty that it will, but who does? If there’s any kind of truth in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed, but, who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.

(I’m getting off my soapbox now… I put the ‘Katrina Banner’ back up in the right corner of the page and directed it to a new link at the Red Cross. Should you feel so inclined, do what you can. If it helps, remember, you can get 15 cents on the dollar back from your donation on your next tax return. )

I figured I had to turn out a nice Valentine’s gift for Meg this year. I didn’t want to go out and spend a bunch of cake on some material, piece of pointlessness. So, I decided a month before V-Day that I would make something for her. After the “creation” got passed around and shown to enough people, those people wanted to send it to others, and those to others, so I figured it would just be easier to post it and make it available to everyone.

I left some flowers, a card, and a note for her to press ‘Play’ on the DVD player when she got home. This is what she saw. . .

So, here it is, Meg’s 2006 Valentine.

Well, it took a while, but if you search for “Dave Wolf,” I finally seemed to get “The Blog” (Man, do I hate that word. In fact, I’m going to have to stop using it, I think. . .) to turn up on the first page of most all the major search engines.– you know, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, blah, blah. . . It wasn’t an easy thing to do, especially with that friggin’ astronaut that stole my name. He was a tough one to beat out! And, it’s amazing how much work you really need to do to get up there in ranking. They don’t make it easy.

Just wanted to drop a quick post about WinAmp, SHOUTcast, and a great Internet radio radio station I found back in the day.

Firstly, if you listen to MP3′s on your PC, you must use WinAmp. There’s no better decoder/player out there. It’s lightweight, feature packed, efficient, and the least invasive PC based player out there. Forget all the rest! Best thing of all, SHOUTcast was developed in conjunction with it. SHOUTcast enables people to run “MP3″ servers, giving them a way to create their own “radio” stations.

In all of my cruising the different stations, one of the best ones out there — in terms of its diversity and droppin’ the jams, is BlackDogRadio.net. No commercials, no gaiety, just a good eclectic blend of tunes. So, install WinAmp if you don’t have it, and check out the BlackDog. It’s good s%!t, man!

(Note: Other “Media Players” will also tune and play SHOUTcast stations, but WinAmp is the granddaddy of all of them, so why bother with the other?!?)

Now that the gallery is back up and running correctly, I finally added the pictures Meg and I took while in England. Yeah, it took over a month, but it seems everything has been takin’ longer to accomplish since the new year.

We got a few nice shots in the album. So, click the link and check ‘em out. Meg took a bunch of great pics herself. I must say, she’s got quite the eye; she took some great shots! Her pictures start on page nine of the album — shot 438 on. Yeah, I know, I know. . . There’s a billion pictures, but whatever — check them out anyway. We deleted a ton of them and were still left with hundreds. That’s how it goes when you don’t have to worry about running out of film anymore.

Remember, rate the pics you like! We’d like to know which ones you feel are “frame worthy.”

I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version of Coppermine, the PHP, mySQL based photo gallery software I use in conjunction with the rest of the site. Was there any good reason to? Was anything broke? Did I need all of the couple new features they added? No. So, that’s why I did it. It made perfect sense. (Confusing, ain’t it?) So, anyhow. . . I upgrade it. Then, after I upgrade, I find out that the theme that took me weeks to create — to match the rest of the site — didn’t work with the new version. Not good! I started have that bad feeling you get when you know you’re screwed. Why? Because the new version modified the mySQL database — which is the foundation for the entire gallery. I made the attempt to “go backwards” and reinstall a prior version, using a version that was compatible with my theme. Things looked good at first. . . at first. About 90% of the gallery’s functionality remained intact, the other was kaput. This left me with no other choice other than rebuilding. In the end, it was all for the best as the gallery is now back up, organized better, and using a newer, more secure version of the software than it was prior. So, things are good once again.

I did loose all of the comments, ratings, and views — which, in all, was no big loss since no one even bothered to comment or rate anything. But, now that things are back up, clean, organized, & working, I ask you all a favor. . .

Go into the gallery and rate 5 pictures you like. (Click on the stars – under the intermediate sized pictures.) It’ll take you all just a couple of minutes. And, it’ll give me a good idea of which pics might be worth working a bit more on, printing, and hanging on the wall.

Your patronage is kindly appreciated.

– The Management

Just happened by Microsoft’s new map, driving direction, satellite, close-up geographical image deal, website, thingy today. They’re really trying to compete and one up ‘Google Earth‘ — which has been out for a while now and is pretty damn impressive in its own right. Got to say that Microsoft is doing a pretty good job! Google was able to get some pretty clean satellite images of most all areas of the United States (and World), but are missing out on a lot of areas — where their gamut of satellites haven’t yet taken “super detailed” images. One of Google Earth’s best places, in terms of image detail, is Cambridge, Mass. (It has something close to a 6 in. resolution — or something crazy like that.) Check it out, you can make out people on the sidewalks!

I thought that was cool until today when a work associate showed me the competition, Microsoft’s Live Local site. Damn! This site has some seriously close-up, detailed imagery — not to mention providing maps, driving directions, and satellite views. But, the super detailed stuff I’m not even sure how they did (technically), as you can get down to the ‘Bird’s Eye View’ which has up to a 20 yard resolution and is in 3/4 perspective! Google Earth has the ability to change perspective, but it’s a “faked,” flattened view. Check out Meg and the Kid’s crib from the Microsoft site:

(It’s much more impressive larger — on the site.) But, nutty! Again, no idea how they are getting these types of images. I don’t know of any kind of satellite that is producing these things. Check out your address and see what your neighborhood/house looks like to a bird (make sure to click on the ‘Bird’s Eye View’ on the left, top of the frame). Technology wars… The wars are going to produce some pretty neat things for us masses over the years.

… well, my !#$% — and they did! Just when you think it’s winter and don’t need to worry about the ants for a while, you end up getting stung ten times all over the legs and, well, another areas that shouldn’t EVER have ants around ‘em!

I was over at FattKidd’s place shooting guns; next thing you know I start feeling little stings all over my legs and “other areas”. (I knew the damage was done already.) I got to investigatin’. MY GOD, MAGNUM! I had a bunch of the things all curled up just loading me up with poison. For those of you that don’t know what the fire ants are like, well, THEY SUCK!! They have stingers and some of the most toxic poison on the planet. You can barely see the ants they are so small, but the damage they do it huge! The poison is an alkaloid venom that kills tissue — so you get the necrosis going on; that’s always good for ya. The poison kills some people. 24 hrs. after the bite(s) you have all these nice pits and pustules starting to show themselves. They itch, get infected instantly, take months to go away, leave purple scars for that last forever, blah, blah… Long story short, they SUCK! In the years I’ve been down here, I must have been bitten over a hundred times. By the time I’m old, my legs are going to fall off.

The ants are impossible to get rid of. You can just mildly control them (with chemicals). And, at best, you just move them to another area. But, they always seem to come back sooner or later.

Go ahead, read about the immigrant f@%*!@’s: The Story of da Fire Ants (They ain’t natives!)

NOT GOOD! But, come to the South (especially the Deep South) and be ready! I can tell you this much, they’re ready for you!

If you haven’t by now heard of Wikipedia.org by now or, at least, checked it out, it’s about high time you did. I have never found something on the Internet to be so useful, practical, and relational than that of Wikipedia. Well, Internet Movie Database comes in somewhere not too far behind (they get props in that I’m a movie buff and all), but a movie database is not really going to provide much “practical” knowledge. But, I do know a hell of a lot more movie trivia now, so you’d be advised to keep me away from the pink categories when playing Trivial Pursuit.

I went off on a tangent there, but then that’s what the Wikipedia is all about. You go to look up something — even the most obscure stuff and 99% of time you’ll find something. When reading about a subject, you’ll be given a thousand (okay, well maybe not a thousand) links to other subjects directly or sometimes not so directly to other subjects. Sometimes a simple reference turns into an hour long study session. In that time you might have learned three or four things you didn’t know the previous day.

I think I heard it put best as…

I think perhaps Wikipedia is one of humanities greatest achievements.

… and, I have to agree, if not just to piss off FatKidd, who is highly suspect of its Wiki (Wiki carries it’s own definition — look it up!) nature. For some, the architecture is just too open. Anyone can add, edit, or modify the content of the “encyclopedia.” Yeah, you can imagine that with this being the case, there has to be a lot of false, inaccurate crap posted. Well, not really. For every one person that posts crap, another comes along and corrects and/or deletes it, so in the end, it all balances out. And, for a company/site with only 3 permanent employees, it really is a remarkable achievement. Check out the founder’s personal appeal and explanation of the site:

Jimmy Wale’s Idea of the Wikipedia

So, use it, support it, and see why it is becoming one of the most visited, talked about sites on the Net. And who said a combined effort from the people of the world couldn’t produce and organize something so successful and practical — and not have to be managed by some higher authority, other than themselves? Gives me signs that there’s hope for this world yet — maybe — it’s possible — kinda…

UPDATE – Jan. 20, 2006

As I said, Wikipedia can be one of the greatest resources or one of the best places to confuse, mislead, liable, or slander. It’s the people of the world that must police each other. There have been some good stories recently. Must share them (they told me it was good to “share” when I was young):

• Wikipedia Science 31% “less accurate” Than Britannica’s
• There’s No Wikipedia Entry for ‘Moral Responsibility’
• Wikipedia Editing Hobby Goes Nationwide — in England

So, pros, yes… cons, yes. Will evil ultimately triumph good — or visa versa? Who knows. But, it’ll be fun to watch. Research suggests that the site’s contect continues to just get worse and worse (as in more inaccurate) by the day. But, at present, Wikipedia sure beats the hell out of the ‘World Book Encyclopedia’ I had to use as a kid in the 80′s — even if it led me to have a few of my “facts” wrong on my “The Capital of Oklahoma: Oklahoma City” paper I turned in in 5th grade.

Guess it comes down to a personal choice. Use it, knowing you’ll need to confirm most of what you inquire about. Or don’t, and loose all that knowledge — good or bad — that you could have otherwise filled your brain’s gray cells with.

So, I go up to the in-laws place for Christmas, having a good time — someone asked me about my photos and wanted to see some. I told them I had a bunch out on this web site. So, I go over the computer, sit down, type in my domain, hit enter and, Wow! My site got the hack job put on it!

… Site Butchered By [g00n] MurderSkillz …

What a nice Christmas present! You know, there’s nothing that says Christmas joy like an unborn fetus being knifed from its hacked up mother’s womb by a couple of ugly ass, half decomposing, skeleton dudes all covered in blood. Butchered at Birth. Like that one too! But, nothing says “love” like:

Ohh, the joy of being “Pwned”. I ran a trace route on the IP and ended up somewhere in some Slavic, eastern block, gray sky shit-hole where the kids are obviously depressed, angry, and have too much time on their hands.

I guess I should have taken note and heeded the call when WordPress said it was imperative that you update to version 1.5.2 due to security issues. Oh, well… I like living on the edge. It took me all of five seconds to fix things. To put it another way, it probably took them a lot longer to put up their shitty page and tell me to “take a seat” than it did for me to throw it all away and return things to normal.

Oh yeah, forgot all about the person that was waiting, watching for me to show them pictures.

They think I’m really weird now. But, what else is new?!

It’s been some time since I heard any decent music… you know, music other than this processed, copied crap that gets cranked out for the baggy-pants wearing, juvenile delinquent types. (Probably gonna piss a few peeps off with that one. Oh, well… I enjoy the heat.) Fortunately however, the past few weeks of Nettin’ have acquainted me with a couple of new acts. I’ve been diggin’ both of ‘em, so I’d thought I’d shared the wealth.

The first is Blue-Eyed Son. Andrew Heilprin, a California singer/songwriter whose moniker gives a nod to Dylan (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?”) put out “West of Lincoln” last year. It’s a nice, mellow album; much along the same lines of Elliott Smith, albeit a tad less depressive. The first track, ‘Step Away From the Cliff’ is a great tune and a great, catchy track to start the album. The album continues with another eleven tracks, all of which have a different vibe. Some good… some okay. But, all in all, a great voice combined with some killer melodies and lyrics. If you like Elliott Smith, you’ll dig Blue-Eyed Son.

Step Away From the Cliff (Clip)

The second act is John Gold. The album – “Eastside Shake”. Again, still on the mellow side of things, and still reminiscent of Elliott Smith, but how can that be all too bad? It can’t! That’s the point. I guess this guy is best summed up by Miles of Music’s description:

The Eastside Shake offers the kind of piano-based pop that draws you in to its spacious environs and massages your head with subtle effects and opposing colorations. This is the second release from LA-based singer/songwriter John Gold, who has an effectively plaintive voice that paints broad, sorrowful strokes over these thoughtful, baroque arrangements. Its a soulful collection of heady urban troubadour musings. Effectively simple at times, lush and epic at others, strangely inviting an ELO-meets-Squeeze-as-interpreted-by-Elliott Smith comparison. But you want to praise him for being what sounds like his painfully honest self. The LA Weekly refers to this quietly gifted singer-songwriter as having a semisweet chocolate baritone and a slew of idiosyncratic arrangements, all of which we think are beautiful.

Again, there’s good and not so good, but the album as a whole is a lot better than most of what I’ve heard recently. Simple, but effective.

It’s Going (Clip)

Both of these guys are on semi-independent labels; their albums can be purchased on-line and both have their tunes for sale on iTunes. I wouldn’t mind hearing more from them, so if you like them, make a contribution to the fight.

Feeling sensitive and creative, I decided to try my hand at writing a plug-in for WordPress. I wrote a small, simple plug-in to parse Slashdot’s RSS feed and return the top headlines. You can specify the number of headlines to return and whether or not to return the headline description with each headline. The headlines are returned as links, so you can click into them to link to Slashdot’s full stories. It’s a nice plug-in to throw into your sidebar (or wherever) — after all, news for nerds is stuff that matters! Here’s a sample of plug-in in action:

Slashdot.org Headlines

You can download the thing here. My PHP skillz are what you would call – slim to none! So, if the code is messy and not very logical, don’t blame me. I’m working on it. At least the thing works. Hope some of you find the plug-in useful.

This is an entry built on irony and coincidence. I must have seen something yesterday morning that triggered me to strike up a conversation with a work associate of mine about those big posters made up of thousands of tiny pictures — the ones that kind of remind me of Chuck Close paintings, which look something like this:

We talked about them for a bit and both said we’d look for some software we could use to create them. It all died there — we both forgot about it past that conversation.

Later that night, sitting on the couch with Meg, I looked over at her while she was reading ‘Cooking Light’ and noticed that she had just flipped a page in the magazine that had one of those “posters” on it. I asked for the magazine and sure enough, there was one of those images. So, now I remembered what I wanted to do earlier that day. I began my quest. Having no idea what they were called, I searched Google for an hour with no luck. I was just about to give up when I happened by some kid’s blog where he was explaining how to make posters from your digital camera shots. The posters were nothing like the collage images I was looking for, but the kid’s site was interesting. I read some more of his content and clicked a link to take me to some of his previous posts. And, what was there? – a blog entry discussing a Mac product used to make ‘photomosaics’. Total luck, as my Google search had nothing to do with what I found. But, I knew the word to search for now.

After searching for ‘photomosaic’ for a couple of minutes, I found the product I was looking for — Mosaic Creator. This app is one killer piece of software. I have to hand it to the guy who wrote it; he threw about every possible feature imaginable into the thing. And, after using the app for some time (the thing kept me up late), I realized not only how feature rich the thing was, but how complex the math had to be in order to create a detailed image out of 30 thousand other tiny images. I’m sure there are some intense calculations going on — which is pretty easy to determine by the fact that a 3GHz CPU stays maxed for ~2+ hours in order to create one of these things.

Features — the thing takes a target image of whatever you give it and offers you the ability to represent it as ASCII art, text art, or a photo-mosaic. In addition to that, there are another 100 or so parameters you have control over — cell size, duplicity, etc. There are enough controls to fine tune the app to create exactly what you have in mind. Cool stuff!

Here are some samples from my first trials:

Original Image

Photo-mosaic Version
(Click image to check out larger versions)

This gives you an idea of what I was trying to figure out how to create and now what you can also use. I need to look through all my images and try and figure out which one would be a good one to use as the source image for a 20×30 poster. The poster sized image was what I had originally started to look into this for. Making a family portrait out of family pictures, a wedding portrait out of wedding pictures. . . there are some killer contextual images you could make. I thought it would be neat to make a large image, as not only are they “cool,” but you could stare at the image for hours just trying to make out all the other images within it.

Anyhow, I’m one step closer to that big ‘ole cool image on my wall. . .

Only one hour left and the Kid officially becomes thirty-six. Nutty. . . Feels like I was just a kid a few years ago. If years start going by any quicker though, at seventy they’ll seem like days! Whoooa, boy. And, does this mean I have to grow up now?

A work associate and myself have started a small shareware venture — W² Software. . . Well, not really a venture, but a webpage with some software we created and a donate button. (Get it, donate button. . . meaning, send us cash! ) The software was mainly born out of our needs for some small, utility type apps — apps we couldn’t find anywhere out on the Net. After creating a couple of them, for our use only, we felt that they might also be useful to others. Thus, the webpage was born. Over the next couple of months there will be more apps added — they are in progress. For now, the primary app is a Random Playlist Creator. When generating a playlist with it, you also have the option of being able to exclude specific genres based on the mood of the playlist you are trying to create. You can read more about it on the software page. Check back to the page from time to time to see what other cool utilities we add. I’ve littered the apps on the shareware pages on the Net. We’re hoping people download them and find them worth while.

Okay, it’s official. I was diagnosed with ‘Site Deficit Disorder’. The symptoms are apparent; just look at the number of postings that are present on this site since I created it. Maybe it’s because I think blogs are a bit ‘gay’. I don’t know. Either way, I’m going to try and fight the disease and start posting to this thing more regularly. If anything, it will be cool to come back to the site 20 years from now (Wow, that’s going to be a lot of cake going to DreamHost — my hosting service) and see how retarded I really was. So, expect more posting in the future. Must. . . remember. . . to. . . post!

Took a trip with Meg this last weekend — up to Charleston. My Mom had hooked us up with a nice weekend in Charleston as a Christmas gift last year. Went and saw ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ at the local IMAX. Nice! I wish that all features films were filmed in IMAX! The movie was okay — better than I expected it to be. Anyhow, took a bunch of pics a few of the places we went. So, click the link or cruise to the gallery and check them out.

Peace.

Okay, for those of you in the video world, there is an open source application that, if found, will become the backbone of all your video processing. That app is, AviSynth. I found this app many years ago and shelved it. It did what I needed back then — putting frame numbers on each individual frame — but was thin on other functions. Well, recently going back to see where it was and what it had become, I was simply blown away. This is one of the finest applications I have ever seen written for a PC. There are a lot of video applications out there, but very few actually do things correctly. AviSynth allows you to get down to field based operations. You can convert PAL to NTSC — maintaining the temporal/spatial ordering of the fields by repeating fields, telecine film content into 29.97fps video, motion comp deinterlace content, process video for encoding with advanced pre-processing filtering, etc., etc. And, all of this done in a way where the final frames are handed to other video applications, DirectShow, etc. as AVI frames. In other words, you can take a DivX file, a MPEG file, whatever file, process it with AviSynth and hand the resulting frames to any application that understand how to parse an AVI. Incredible! Anyhow, if you are into advanced video stuff, check it out. You won’t be disappointed! I assure you!

You want to get some laughs yet learn an immense amount of sometimes practical information? Well then, The Straight Dope is for you. The basic gist is, people write in with these questions — questions ranging from the semi normal to the absolute bizarre. Then, Cecil Adams, the world’s most intelligent human being, answers them. They say he, (1) he knows everything, and (2) he is never wrong. And, after reading a bunch of these, you’ll see that’s not too far from the truth. The amount of thought, research, proofing, etc. that is put into answering some of these most insane queries is nothing short of, well, a whole f-’in lot. So, check it out. I’m sure you’ll dig it.

Okay, whoever you may be. . . I guess I never really explained my intentions for the “gallery.” I went with this involved, comprehensive, feature rich gallery to try and have all you wonderful people give me some feedback on the shots that I posted up there. Yeah, I want you to just be able to look through them, but it would also be great if you could take a second to rate and leave comments on some of them. I thought, by visitors using these features, that it would give me a good idea as to what shots are liked vs. what ones are. . . well, not liked. A lot of what I posted can be much improved upon in Photoshop. (I just posted some simple, automated, RAW->JPEG conversions for the gallery — so they look pretty crappy.) The comments and ratings will give me a good idea which ones I should even attempt to do extra processing on. So, if stopping by and checking out the gallery, please take an extra second to rate and/or comment the individual photos.

You assistance would be much appreciated.
Vous aide seriez beaucoup appréciés.
Sie Unterstützung würden viel geschätzt.
Le ayuda apreciarían mucho.
Assistenza molto sareste apprezzati.
Você auxílio seria apreciado muito.

Hope I covered the bases here.

Well, a day after I posted the ‘Popular Science‘ item below, I received a message from them. The subject was ‘Popular Science – Seeking Permission. At first I thought that I was going to get some heat (the usual for me) for posting an old magazine cover of theirs, but to my surprise, they informed me that they wanted to list my blog item in their June edition. How about that! Here’s what they sent:

Mr. Wolf,

Thank you for your compliments! May we have your permission to run your comments on our Letters page, under “From the Blogs?” Your blogsite and url will be credited, along with your name as “Dave Wolf”–unless you’d like something else.

Best,
Jill Shomer
Managing Editor
Popular Science

So, anyhow, this was a real surprise. And, it nice to know this newly created blog is actually being read — even if found by some IT guy probing his server for sites that link to it. So, check out the June issue of Popular Science and the hit counter at the bottom of this page. I suspect that it’ll be going up a bit come June. I guess I need to try and find some more cool content share. . . but then, now I’m just rambling.

A few months ago I finally caught Penn and Teller’s new show — well, really not that new — on Showtime, Bullshit. And, let me tell you, this has got to be one of the best shows on the air right now. The shows basic premise is to attempt to bebunk common myths and misconceptions about all kinds of stuff we deal with in everyday life — from yoga, to recylcing, to the even more popular, tantric sex. Here’s a summary from Showtime.com; this about sums it up:

In Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, the crusaders utilize principles of magic and trickery, as well as good old fashioned “hidden camera” sting operations, to smoke out these nonsense peddlers and reveal how they operate.

No matter how popular a form of bullshit is – and regardless of what deep pockets or beloved figures support it – Penn & Teller are pit bulls for the truth, poised to tear down these myths in the most jaw-dropping fashion possible with their trademark wit and off-center comic sensibilities.

So, catch it if you have Showtime. You won’t be disappointed.

I should really get a job at Popular Science. I push this magazine on people as if it were the Bible or something. My dad had a subscription to this magazine since the early 70′s; I can remember it since I was a wee little shortie. I would always grab it from the mailbox and read it before giving it back to him. The ‘What’s New’ section of this magazine is what makes it. Gadget central. And, who doesn’t like gadgets? In the recent years, they have added another feature section, ‘How 2.0‘, which comes a very close second. Check the link out and tell me they don’t have some cool little projects. Tell me! For the technically interested the magazine provides an excellent broad resource to keep you abreast of the latest, greatest, and not so greatest innovations. So, get a subscription already!