Here's a series of Morning Walk panorama shots -- a nice perspective on the farm. I have a new camera that has this cool setting where it takes 100 pictures as you swish it across a wide scene and then immediately stitches them together for you. Not technically-better pictures. But really neat pictures... Click on the thumbnails so you can see the big versions.
I decided to take a picture of the current state of the music workstation. I wish I'd done this a few times in the past so I could reflect on how it evolves but there you go. Anyway, here's the first in a series.
List of Stuff
Computer -- home-brew PC (hidden behind a wall so's not to noise-pollute the mic when I'm podcasting)
Software -- SONAR 8.5 Producer, Jamstix
Keyboards
Yamaha PSR-1500 (my favorite for banging around in a jam session)
Yamaha S-08 (the "serious hard-core" keyboard)
Edirol PCR-300 (the little one -- super handy for composition)
Tenori-On -- a gizmo I'm still trying to figure out
Audio -- Crown Powertech 3.1 (500 watts/channel at 8 ohms) into EV Sx300 speakers, couple Behringer mixers, MXL-2001 mics
UPDATE
Ooops. The law hasn't passed yet -- I misunderstood Rick's letter... Here's the salient quote (down near the bottom)
pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!)
Sorry about that. I'll leave the original stupid/mistaken post here, but you can ignore it. On the bright side, I'm hoping for the opportunity to write another "Woohoo" post if the bill does pass.
Sorry about that...
Mikey
_________________________________________________________________
Woohoo! We did it!
I just got this great news from Rick King, our chair. Here's his note. The one thing I'd add is that his leadership is what made this bet worth taking.
All,
I am not a betting man. Had I been one, I would have placed a pretty big bet on the Task Force succeeding as the odds would have been against me. I mean, seriously, who would have thought that 23 people, with diverse backgrounds and conflicting interests, would have worked so well together? That we would put an agreement on paper and influence others enough to likely pass legislation to codify our recommendations?
Well, we did it. And today, almost two years after its inception, the Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force ceases to exist. In what seems like the perfect farewell gift, the Minnesota Legislature approved a bill and it was recently signed into law by the Governor. Is the new law what I would have written had I had a magic wand and lived in the Land of Unlimited Resources? Maybe not.
Is it, however, wise, forward-looking legislation that positions Minnesota as a leader in the nation. Now, with the National Broadband Report released, I think our wisdom as a state shines even brighter.
While the Task Force’s report was almost 150 pages long, our key recommendations were narrowly defined: we wanted universal access to Ultra High-Speed Broadband in Minnesota, we defined Broadband as a minimum of 10 to 20 megabits per second download and 5 Mbps upload, and we wanted the state to set a comparative goal within the U.S. and the world. Furthermore, we felt that there had to be some sort of ongoing institution to ensure that the objectives were pursued. It’s all in the bill.
With this, my last letter as Chair, I would like to recognize the talent and the hard work of each and every Task Force member and the supporting staff and friends across the state who freely gave us their work, ideas, advice and enthusiasm to create the report and pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!). It has been my privilege to meet and work with each of you.
Together, we have contributed to making Minnesota a better place to live and work. And, a leader among the States in our great country.
I should have placed that bet.
Warmest regards,
Your ex-chair
This is one of a long series of "notes to myself" which won't be very interesting to normal people. I've been diagnosing blog and wiki problems for weeks and never found a blog post that had this solution, so I'll post it here for others.
I've been rasslin' with two kinds of trouble -- our WordPress blogs all started throwing "missing a temporary folder" errors when we would try to upload pictures. And logins stopped working on all of my Mediawiki based wikis. You could logon just fine, but then it would flip right back to not being logged on, and you couldn't do anything or edit pages.
Here's the solution. Raise, or eliminate, the user-file quota for the IUSR account on the server. This is a problem unique to the WIMP stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) which is why there probably aren't many blog posts about this. Most folks run these kinda servers on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Here's how to check to see if you're running into the same problem I had.
Once you know that you're in the same boat I am, you've got all the usual choices -- raise the quota, delete some files, etc. The big breakthrough for me was just discovering that bottleneck. In my case, I turned off the quota system altogether. Our photographs are what's burning through that quota and I'm OK just leaving that feature turned off. Your mileage may vary.
ah... The taxes are done, with hardly any damage to the checkbook. This is the goody I found when I took a little tour of teh Internets as a reward for a job well done...
Click HERE to read a great post (and discover a great blog) about getting rid of surface noise using wood glue of all things. And then click HERE to get the latest and greatest -- 'turns out that thread generated a LOT of discussion.
The key deal -- the kind of wood glue makes a big difference. The gang on that blog tend to think that Titebond Extend is the bees knees. I may have to try this out. The results are pretty darn spectacular.
... that really do a good job of summarizing the security situation and the dilemmas it poses.
Leading off with Michele Neylon's post which explains his reasons for skipping this meeting and the need for thoughtful discussion (comments are really good on all these posts by the way)
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2010/02/13/personal-reflections-on-icann-nairobi/
Maria Farrel posts a very balanced/detailed note about the situation here (Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO, posted in the comments)
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/12/14645/
Kieren McCarthy (until recently the ICANN staff person responsible for remote participation) posted a followup here -- which really does a great job of turning lemons into lemonade in my view by saying that this may be the event that really pushes the remote-participation capability to new levels
http://kierenmccarthy.com/2010/02/12/why-icann-nairobi-may-be-a-blessing-in-disguise/
Nick Ashton-Hart (current ICANN staff person in charge of remote participation) posted this in the comments to Michele's post;
"Thanks Michele for your thoughtful and balanced post. I, too, would like to echo the call that people respect each other's choices about attending or not attending the meeting. I think that characterising the choices of others in negative terms doesn't really benefit anyone.
We are working very hard internally on remote participation for this meeting; I'm the overall coordinator of the effort. I think everyone will find that things RP-related at Nairobi take quite a leap forward from previous meetings.
You will find that when the schedule is posted on the 15th, detailed information on remote participation for all sessions is published along with the session information. More details will follow shortly thereafter too."
I'm still on the fence -- read those posts for the reasons why I'm still leaning towards going. But we'll see...
This just in from The Onion News Network
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_law_would_ban_marriages?utm_source=onion_rss_daily
Thanks for the tip Wayne!
Ah bafflegab. A word steeped in tradition. This word was invented in the early '50's by a fella named Milton A. Smith -- who received an award for inventing it. At the awards ceremony, he was asked to define it. here's his response;
"Multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies."
You can read the whole article i stole this from here -- http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-baf1.htm
I know. I should have upgraded MySQL long ago. But I didn't realize how easy it was, so I put it off until... now. The latest version of WordPress (WordPress 2.9) doesn't work on really old versions of MySQL like my ancient 4.0.27. Further complicating things is the need to cut blogs and sites over one at a time so's to be a little prudent about all this. "Big bang" upgrades seems to result in just that for me -- a big bang and then lots of screaming.
I figured out a pretty tidy way to do this, with tips from Garrick VanBuren and Natn Johnston. Rather than go into lots of detail about what didn't work, here's what did work. This little recipe is mostly for me, since I'm not going to do all these at once and I'll likely forget some critical bits if I don't write them down.
Ingredient 1 -- multiple instances on MySQL on the same box
This way, I can move the sites over one at a time rather than crashing them over all at once (and most likely breaking things)
in-the-new-mysql-bin-directory> mysqld --defaults-file="c:\program files\mysql\mysql server 5.1\my.ini" --console
Ingredient 2 -- loading up the new version of the database
in the old-mysql/bin directory> mysqldump -uYourMySQLUserName -pYourMySQLPassword YourBlogDatabase > YourBlogDatabaseDumpFile.sql
in the new-mysql/bin directory> mysql -uYourMySQLUserName -pYourMySQLPassword YourBlogDatabase < YourBlogDatabaseDumpFile.sql
Ingredient 3 -- new WordPress Code and new wp-config.php file
After all, this is an upgrade, right? I was extra-conservative this time through. Normally, I just dump the new WordPress files right on top of the old ones and it all works fine. This time, I made backup copies of the directories just in case things needed to be rolled back. Here are the steps I went through.
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost:3307');
/* define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); */
Try it out!
After all, what could go wrong?? Go to the wp-admin page of your blog. If things are according to plan, WordPress will want to upgrade the database. Once that's done, things should be working normally, except you're on the new version of WordPress.
What if it breaks?
Oh well, so who's perfect. Replace the new WordPress files directory with your old files (I'd rename both directories -- so you've still got new stuff to play with, but your blog's running again). With your old files back in place, your old blog should reappear since it's now using the old files and the old wp-config file is pointing at the old database. Then, sit down and figure out what went wrong.
Click HERE for a graphic developed by Brian Solis and JESS3 called "The Conversation -- the art of listening, learning and sharing." Sorry guys, I'm not trying to steal your Google love, it's just that all the places I found your picture made it so small I couldn't read it.
This is a great 2009 snapshot of a bunch of different platforms that are out there to conduct that Conversation. It'll be interesting to check back in a few years and see how the landscape has changed.
OK, so here's a dead-simple idea. Shorten your own dang URLs instead of letting the URL-shorteners steal your Google-love.
Step 1 -- get yourself an abbreviated version of your domain name.
This site is my old standby blog. A dumping ground for all the ideas that can't find a home on one of my other sites. It used to have the HAVEN.com domain-name but I lucked out and sold that name a few years ago so now it's on the HAVEN2.com name. Not bad, six letters, pretty short. But shorter is better. So I just ran off and got HVN2.com and loaded it on the server so it points to the same site as HAVEN2.com.
Step 2 -- load up the "non-WWW" version of your new shorter domain-name
Egad! Another 4 letters wasted if you have to put that on your URL! Make sure that your site answers to the shorter version as well as the "www." version of your spiffy short domain name.
Step 3 -- WordPress users -- use the "ugly" version of your links
Here's a great post from SheepTech that describes how your WordPress blog is already providing you with a darn short URL. Click HERE to read his article. In short, your WordPress blog creates a short "ugly" URL in addition to whatever "pretty" URL you've specified. So you can save a bunch of characters by using that ugly URL. The format looks like this (using the URL for this post);
That's pretty darn short! Way shorter than the "normal" URL for this post, which is;
http://www.haven2.com/index.php/archives/shortening-my-own-urls
It's not quite as short as the URL-shorteners, but the nice thing is that it's MINE. 
I got going on an idea during coffee with Amalia Deloney yesterday. She was saying the LPFM stations have a tough time filling the hours with programming and my thought was to replicate the old NFCB Tape Exchange using RSS feeds. Here are some ideas to get people started.
Problem - Not enough programs to fill the day
Idea - Use podcasts (blogs with RSS feeds and audio programs) to aggregate content from a federation of LPFM stations. Garrick Van Buren built a great gizmo to do this and you can see an example of his system at PodcastMN. I'm sure Garrick would be happy to help with this.
Problem - Not enough volunteer hours to do the "program director" function for a single station
Idea - Share a program director between a federation of like-minded LPFM stations. Let the person be the aggregator of multiple feeds similar to the one Garrick does, and then create a feed that drives the daily programs on multiple stations. The stations could subscribe to this "network feed" and break away whenever they want to do local programming.
Problem - Not enough volunteer hours to operate a single LPFM station
Idea - This gets a little geeky, more for you engineer types. What about using multiple RSS feeds as the command and control network to operation the stations? Each station would generate an RSS feed of what it's doing (playing a file, changing transmitter settings, losing/regaining Internet connectivity, temperature sensing, etc. etc.) and those RSS feeds are monitored by a centralized C&C system that sends station-commands down one RSS feed per station. Monitor the RSS feeds pretty often (once a minute?) for granularity. One could use this for both program control and technical control of the station.
Problem - The station isn't on the Internet
Idea - Use the podcast program-distribution network anyway, but burn the programs to CD and carry them to the station. What the heck, we used to do this with audio tapes sent through the mail. This would still provide a really good, cheap source of programming for the federated stations even if they weren't on the 'net.
Problem - The station goes off the Internet (thus going out of control)
Idea - Lots of ham remote-control their transmitters (including me). Many of us have built configurations that poll the Internet and, if the station loses Internet connectivity for some period of time, shuts itself down. Here's a link to my configuration, you could use this as a model. And here's a link to the remote-controlled power switch that actually monitors the 'net and shuts the station down if the station goes offline.
Problem - LPFM station doesn't have any money
Idea - The only thing in this page that costs money is that little switch. The rest of this stuff you can do for free.
... Just a thought...
More life-hacking. Here's a cool concept -- from Japan. Keep track of little everyday things that make life easier. Click HERE for an article to get you started (a link to a great book is at the bottom of the article).
This book saved my camera a couple days ago. I dropped it in the snow, the camera was warm so the snow started melting before i could brush it off, the result was a really wet digital camera. The Urawaza trick was to dump the camera in a bowl of uncooked rice (which acts like those little dry-out packets that are included in lots of electronics). After a few hours in the rice, the camera emerged dry as a bone and works perfectly.
Ok, this is a life-hacking post. Mick Souder changed my life. Maybe I'll change yours with this post.
I haven't slept well for years. I have ears that will pick up a gnat sneezing from a half a mile away, so I hear all the little night sounds. Furnaces, water softeners, dew dripping through downspouts, trains, trucks, etc. etc.
All those little sounds wake me up, and once awake I start "processing" stuff...
Mick gave me some earplugs about a year ago when we dropped by his place in Durango and I forgot about them (I was sick at the time and didn't feel like trying them right away). I finally got around to trying them on our recent RV trip when we were parked close to a freeway.
ASTOUNDING! Complete silence. I slept through the night for the first time in 25 years. I've been using them ever since with the same result. I sleep like a teenager. I notice a huge difference in my energy level, my frame of mind, etc. etc.
These gizmos can be yours for about 15 cents a pair -- a box of 200 pairs cost me about $30 at Northern Tool. I like the Classic flavor (the kind Mick gave me).
Click HERE to look at 'em.
