Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Yesterday in the mail I got the Battlestar America CD in the mail. I had heard a clip of Battlestar America from a link on Boing Boing a week or so ago.
The band blends country and bluegrass with hip-hip into a great blend. As their promo card says, it’s Half Country, Half Hip-hop, All Good.
Michele and I listened the whole whole album twice last night. It’s Turn off the TV week, don’tcha know? And we don’t have anything better to do than sit int eh living room and listen to fresh tunes. We are in love with the whole thing. Scratching and fiddle are meant to go together!
The band is fairly off the radar scope, so much that when I ripped the album into the house media server, I had to enter the CDDB data for album myself. That’s a first…
Battlestar is based in New York, so you East Coast peeps might even be able to score a live show.
In any case, buy the damn album and get these people moving toward fame and fortune.
You’ll probably get a note from Rench, the frontman, just like I did. It will be worth $$$ when Battlestar is a mega-band with adoring teeny-bopper fans.

I just returned from Las Vegas after four days and nights in Sin City at the NAB convention. For the first time since Sunday, I did not have a Canadian Club & Ginger Ale before dinner.
I’ve been going to Vegas for years and have seen it change dramatically. Here’s what I noticed this year that has changed.
1) Net access – The hotel I stayed at had wired AND wireless internet in every room. After resisting for years at putting anything inthe rooms that would keep you in the rooms, the hotels are starting to do whatever it takes to peel more money out of people’s wallets.
2) Poker – The poker on TV craze has created a much larger devotion to poker in Vegas. The poker rooms are larger, busier and more popular than anytime in the past. The poker rooms we saw were packed with full tables all the time.
3) Hookers – It looks like people are taking the ‘What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas’ marketing line for all it’s worth. For the first, the hookers were blanant and obvious in a major hotel. For hours on end, new women would show up at a casino bar, chat up a guy, and soon be off to the rooms. Conversations with the dealers revealed that the casino is permitting it as long as everyone behaves. This is huge. For the big, corporate casinos to turn the other cheek to this stuff, the police and city have to be in on it.
Lastly, they have torn down a classic Vegas establishment. Yes, the Kosher Deli & Internet Cafe.

Las Vegas Kosher Deli & Internet Cafe
RIP ?-2004

When I arrived at the Mirage I was happy to hear they had broadband net access in the hotel. Upon settling in the room I was pleased to find a special laptop hookup with power, ethernet and modem connections. Looking under the desk, I saw that they used D-link wifi to ethernet bridges to distribute access. I could either plug in with a cable or use the wifi to connect to the net. Pretty advanced for a Vegas hotel.
I did have to sign up for access via the TV set and get a code number that allowed me in. A pain, but not the end of the world.
Yesterday, after dinner and drinks I finally got back to the room sometime around midnight. I tried to log on and for some reason I couldn’t get in. The DHCP wasn’t working right. I tried and tried and wrote off the failure to my state of intoxication. This morning, I tried agian with no luck.
Calling Guest Services, they told me that ‘the internet is down, we are trying to fix it’. I asked it was down last night and they said it was. Well, if you are going to provide net access in a hotel at $10 a pop, you better be able to fix it in less that 8 hours…
In other show news, there haven’t been any really new things announced. Apple has some serious deals with GVG, I heard Leitch bought Videotek, HP announced their work with Warner (which I knew about…), and not much else.
Gone are the days of Newtek and the Video Toaster where you couldn’t get within 100 feet of the booth. But that’s another story.

I’m in Burbank airport waiting for my plane to leave for Vegas. This week is the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention. Yet again, I make the pilgrimage to Sin City to look at broadcasting and post production hardware.
Let’s see, I’ve been going to NAB since ’90. I think I’ve missed two years, once when I was in Singapore and once when we launched Toon Disney. That means this will be my 12th NAB. Wowsa. That’s a lot of time walking the floor and drinking free booze at parties.
Believe it or not, it loses it’s glamor over time. It’s a good time, but Vegas is much better when you are not there for business. I wish Michele was going to Vegas with me. That girl knows how to party. 🙂
In other news, Michele and I are now the proud owners of a new mattress. We got a good one and Michele is quite happy with it. Phew. If I effed that up, It would have been a costly mistake. The mattress sits much higher than our old one and that will take some getting used to over time.
Last night Mira and I went to the opening at Sean‘s Sixspace. Pretty cool stuff. I liked the fabric work. If I hadn’t been so busy corraling Mira, I would have had a chance to look at the prices. I got a chance to talk with Grant & Jill a bit and said Hi to Sean. Mira liked the show alot and was eager to see everything.
Unfortunately, we missed the Brewery Art Walk. For some reason, I thought the Art Walk was in the evening and planned to see it on the way home from the gallery. Grant told me that the Art Walk was over. According to Jeff, I missed a good time. Maybe next year.
Have a good week. Be nice to yourself.

Last night Michele and I went out to see the Twilight Singers at Spaceland.
We had seen the Twilight Singers just a few days ago when were in Cincinnati. Greg Dooley was the frontman of the Afgan Whigs, a Cincinnati band that Michele loves. Now he fronts the Twilight Singers.
We got to Spaceland in Silverlake and waiting outside in line until the doors opened at 9PM. As we headed up to the door, the bouncer was making a lot of noise about getting our licenses out and being reader to hand them to him. In his hand was a contraption of some sort. He took our driver’s licenses and swiped them through. On the screen, our ages popped up. It was an electronic age verifier that read the magnetic strip on the back of the driver’s licenses. Damn cool. Bad news for the underage crowd, but my geekness was intrigued.
We had time to kill and took advantage of the wide set of choices at the bar. 🙂
The first band was Pilot to Gunner. They are a good rock band with some good passion and nice songs. Michele bought a t-shirt and they gave us a demo CD.
The second act kinda sucked. I don’t want to mention the name, cause they don’t deserve the bad google juice. It just wasn’t our kind of music. I’m sure some people love it, but I think I dozed off for a song or two.
Twilight Singers came on stage a little after 11:30PM and played hard. It was the same set and act that we saw in Cincinnati. Michele was in heaven and I was enjoying the show. They were still playing a 1:30 AM when Michele looked down at her watch and said we had to go. Nanny Rachel was at home watching the kids and we had to scoot.
Michele hits the road and we break multiple traffic laws on the way home.
Good times. Good times.

Meetings like raindrops
Too many to attend all
Hope for hot weather

I’ve been checking out the new instant messaging program called Xfire. Xfire looks to be the must have messaging tool for gamers.
Xfire understands games and can tell when you are playing a game. Your friends can see your status and see what you are playing. If your friend wants to join you, they can join you on the same server.
For example, if you are playing Call of Duty on a specific server, Xfire allows your friend to see what server you are on and join it easily. This is truly revolutionary for gamers. No more exchange of IP addresses, just a simple point and click. This is a great thing for guilds and clans.
Besides see your friends, you can see the friends of your friends, increasing your group of potential teammates. I haven’t played with Xfire extensively, but it looks to be a great tool once I have more friends using it.
So if you are a gamer, and a friend of mine, download Xfire and add me as a friend. I’m Argyle on Xfire. This means you BillB…

For the first time in about ten years, I did my own taxes. We had been having our accountant doing them since we lived in San Francisco. For the last several years I had been getting extensions and putting off the taxes until October each year, paying a premium for the accountant to handle things. Quite a slacker I was.
The guys at work convinced me that the Turbo Tax software on the net was completely kick ass and easy to use. I was dubious at first but I had faith and and tried it anyways. I had gathered the info over the weekend and did all the data entry in about 90 minutes. Easy as cake.
We are getting a sweet little refund direct deposited into our bank account and I am filled with relief. I heartily recommend online tax filing via Turbo Tax.

Check out this site that scraps the latest images from Livejournal and displays them.

Yesterday, I arrived back in LA from New York and saw that there was a meeting for LA bloggers in downtown LA. With Michele & the kids still out of town, seemed like a good thing to do.
Before the meetup, I went to have a drink with Len, Monique, and Darby before heading to the train station to take me downtown. They were having dinner in Pasadena and wanted to give back some stuff from the Crawfish party I had loaned them.
The Gold Line to Union Station, switch to the Red Line and pop up at Pershing Square. I was one block away from the meeting at the Biltmore. For $3 I had an all day pass and avoided traffic and parking costs. Taking the train > driving.
The group was gathered at couches near the bar and an impressive tab was building. I pulled a chair and started chatting. IIRC, I chatted with Jeff Koga, Will Campell, Kathy, Kathy’s friend from St. Louis (who’s name I forget, but remember is a Lotus notes guru), Ponzi (Chris‘s girlfriend), Sean, and briefly with Wil (trying to convince him to try Neverwinter Nights). There were a dozen more people I didn’t get a chance to meet with. They passed around a paper for people write their names & URLs onto, but I don’t know what happened to it.

Here’s a photo of the group taken with my digital happy snap with it’s weak flash. I Photoshopped in a fill flash, so pardon the quality. We didn’t seem to have any of the serious photographer bloggers in the hizzou.
I think this gathering could get converted into a regular event. The downtown Biltmore seems like neutral ground for the Westside & Valley bloggers. The drink prices were high, but other than that the spot was good, with supposed wifi lurking. Next time, I’m bringing my sporadically blogging wife. She never turns down a chance to go out for a drink.
Update: Looks like I go things confused. I was actually talking with Jay Bushman, not Will Campell at the meetup. My apologies. All the more reason we need nametags at these things. Jay is a good guy and we agreed about most things, except that Nightmare Before Christmas was a great movie. He says it was terrible. It must have been the gin talking.