Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

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.

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.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had found a way to sync one install of FeedDemon to another. It’s simple in theory but a little more complicated when you actually do it. Alex Hunter asked me to explain how to do it.
All of the information about how you’ve configured FeedDemon is stored in the C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\Local Settings\Application Data\Bradsoft.com\FeedDemon\1.0 directory. The exact location will probably vary on your machine unless you name is Mike as well.
What I do is zip up the entire 1.0 directory and upload it to a directory on some web space. You could do the same thing with removable storage, but online storage works for me.
When I’m at a computer where I want to sync up FeedDemon, I simply download the zipped file and unzip it into the same C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\Local Settings\Application Data\Bradsoft.com\FeedDemon\1.0 directory having the unzipping process overwrite any existing files as needed.
Boot up FeedDemon, and viola, it is configured just as the location I zipped the files was configured. It’s a little complicated but I think that in time the process can be automated within FeedDemon itself. It might take some time for this to be done, Nick Bradbury, the author of FeedDemon, is having neck surgery. Amazing, since I was just playing kickball with in February at SXSW. Until then I can manually sync the aggregator.
Perhaps I need to learn how to write a simple script that executes the zip and upload for me. I think that winzip allows for command line scripting. If you figure it out, let me know.

In the New York Times Health section, there was a great article on caffeine intoxication. All you coffeeholics should read it. Some of you have that darting eyes look about you and can’t seem to pay attention well.
After reading that, go check out the list of caffeine content of various drinks. Another list shows slightly higher values.
Putting this in perspective, a single large Starbucks coffee (500+ mg caffeine) has roughly the equivalent of FOUR cans of Red Bull or a SIXPACK of Mountain Dew soda in caffeine dosage.
So people please, watch your caffeine intake. Try to keep to the recommended 250 mg per day.

Last night was Passover.
I am not a religious man, but I have to say that Passover is my favorite religious holiday. Like many holidays, it is a time when family gathers together for a meal. Different than many holidays, Passover is a living, changing holiday. Passover is about the journey of the Jewish people both today and thousands of years ago. Unlike some holidays that are locked into events that occured long ago, Passover examines the continuing quest of the Jewish people for a better life.
The basic idea behind Passover is for the youth to be told the story of the deliverance of the Jewish people out of Egypt and into Israel. Quite a good tale, if all the movies about it are any sign.
The story has been told over and over the centuries as the Jews have been through good and bad times, to remind them that in the end, their current struggles will subside and things will get better. Even while in the concentration camps in World War II, the Jews celebrated Passover, looking toward the future. As new history is made, so changes the story of Passover and the path to peace that lies ahead.
This year I was proud as my eldest daughter, Zoe, read the four questions in the Haggadah (the script for Passover). It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was reading the same questions from the strange book with the pages backward.