Man, I know I rant about Sesame Street way more often than an adult should (in that I ever rant about it at all), but I just saw the tail end of another episode, and SLIMEY TALKS NOW. What the hell.

Also Gordon had a desperate look of "What the hell have I done with my life?" about him.

802.11 channel slots are 22MHz wide, but are spaced only 5MHz apart. As a result, only channels 1, 6 and 11 are viable — any frequency overlap between two networks will cause congestion and so on. This means that any network which is placed on a channel other than 1, 6 or 11 will make two of those slots degrade in performance.

Most routers are preconfigured to channels 6 or 11, making 1 the most viable in general. However, since channel 1 is at the bottom of the 2.4GHz band, using it tends to cause it to overlap with other wireless protocols (such as cordless phones), as well as receiving interference from microwaves and so on. As a result, only channels 6 and 11 are really viable.

Just got this email today:

Dear Speakeasy Members,

Today is an historic and exciting day for Speakeasy.

I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and the top consumer electronics retailer in North America. This is a significant milestone for our company as our new relationship will help us realize our goals of becoming the No. 1 provider of voice and data solutions to small businesses. It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

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Haha, I was having so much fun at karaoke that I forgot to close out my tab. Thankfully, I'm a regular there and the bartender was cool about it when I called her on the phone. That and they (quite rightfully!) hold your credit card when you open a tab, in case this exact thing happens.

I usually pay cash up-front so I forgot I had a tab open.

I was just having too dang much fun though! I'm sort of a celebrity at the old Steel Pig now. People were wondering where I was last week! (I took a week off from karaoke since I was so dang tired from getting ready for the big show next week.) And tonight I did two Britney songs. And did a lot more dancing while on stage. It was a hit.

Woo.

Right now I'm borrowing my officemate's eyeTV Hybrid to see how well it'll work with my setup, and whether I should get it (and possibly an Apple TV).

Just got home from seeing Kultur Shock (who were awesome) with Jay and two of his married friends. Then the four of us hung out and chatted a lot. Lots of small-world-itis; they're friends with my manager's manager's manager, and live right next to the girlfriend of a contractor who was helping out on $SECRET_PROJECT for a month (who I already knew was best buds with said upper-level manager). Of course the husband used to work at Amazon (two years ago), as did the contractor, so it makes sense that they'd all know each other anyway.

Jay's pretty cool. I hope we end up hanging out more often in the future.

anyway zzz bedtime

These things are so cute. I must have one or two or fifteen. (via the often-entertaining Music Thing)

Why does converting a database from postgres to mysql have to be so dang impossible?

Why do all the webhosts out there have to be either mysql-only, really fucking shady, or hella expensive?

Looks like the American Idol downloads shop is actually selling the studio versions of the contestants' tracks as unencumbered 320kbps mp3s. Surprising!

The videos appear to be encumbered WMVs though (they say they specifically require Windows OS, and the Mac WMV solutions still don't support WMDRM).

I've been getting a lot of negativity from random Internet people lately about how lame my website is and how stupid my webcomic is and blah blah blah. It gets pretty grating after a while. Some of these people just bring it up in completely random contexts, too, like when asking about relationship advice (namely, how the hell do I get into one) or a discussion about Internet censorship (like, "hurr hurr well maybe your webcomic should be censored" or whatever). It's not that I believe them or anything but I already feel down on myself as it is, and I'd like some objectivity. Failing that, ego-stroking from people who still read my crappy weblog for whatever reason.

Hey and this is totally going to add more fuel to their fire! Hooray!

I'm finally watching season 1 of House, or more specifically the pilot episode. I only started watching House in the middle of the second season, and it's amazing how different the early episodes are. The pilot in particular is extremely cinematic, with pretty complex camera work and a much higher caliber of special effects than usual. It also has some pretty interesting color and lighting design, with a good part of the episode is entirely in sepias and whites. It's almost off-putting, especially considering what I'm used to seeing in the normal episodes.

Also it's strange to try to come to grips with the characters not having developed their interactions with each other just yet.

The second episode switchek to more traditional TV production values though.

2007-03-05

2:56:09 PM letsgo2themall17: hi

2:57:13 PM letsgo2themall17: hi

3:12:57 PM letsgo2themall17: hiiii

Indie Guitarist: Maximizing Your Recording Time. Really good to know about, since this means I have everything I need to record concerts after all.

Now that there's Amazon Unbox on TiVo I'm actually kind of interested in getting a TiVo. Though on the other hand I've been kind of thinking of just putting an ElGato HDTV tuner on my G5 and have that serve up content over the network, either for my mini or for an Apple TV, since it still seems silly to pay $12.95/mo for a TV listing service. Plus, true HD reception is still way better than the 480p stuff Unbox sells (and my G5 would actually be able to handle recording it, not to mention there's probably a better TV signal in the room the G5 is in).

xkcd always says it best

Election results. Personally I voted 'yes' on viaduct, 'no' on tunnel. Seems that most people hated both options, though. Too bad they didn't provide an election for 'surface streets' which seems to be what most people want (actually that's what I'd have voted for as well if it were an option, though I'm not sure how that'd work without making the waterfront even harder to access than it is already, so at least in terms of practicality I think sticking with the viaduct would be best).

Yesterday I finally got a checkup and a full series of blood tests, and today the doctor called to consult me about it.

OGGTours produces pretty slick audio tour guides for various cities around the world. I found out about them via Jamglue, since they used one of my audio tracks in their introduction to Central Rattanakosin (Bangkok, Thailand). (Though I don't know if they honor the CC 'by' license on that track on the purchasable version, since they don't seem to have any credits listed on the tracks on the website.)

(Also, wow, Jamglue's embed player code has gotten so massive that it doesn't fit into their text box anymore. Both ugly and broken!)

Will you be my friend?

A nice mellow, somewhat dry red wine, with a green olive aftertaste. Rather nice.

So of course, it turns out that the Treo is really dang unstable, and loves to crash. Especially during sync. Argh.

It'd be nice if I could figure out if it's some particular app causing it or what. It'd also be nice if all the billions of little library things on the "delete" menu would say what they're for so I could know if I could safely delete them. Whatever happened to Palm apps being self-contained?

Not sure what the point to Twitter is, but feel free to friend me. OMGLOL. etc.

Ugh, tonight I ended up leaving karaoke early. For the first hour and a half there was practically nobody there and so I burned through all of my good songs, then suddenly the place got packed with a bunch of drunken assholes who were of the sort who go out of their way to do as bad a job of performing as possible, and many of the songs they did were ones that I like to do or like to hear other people do, and they went to a complete extreme level that I've never heard before (shouting into the mic as loudly as possible, purposefully doing an extremely bad job, etc.) and I have very little tolerance for that. Meh.

If one of the biggest environmental concerns is to reduce the amount of carbon in the ecosystem, doesn't recycling only make sense if the total carbon emissions of the recycling process were less than the amount of carbon which would otherwise go to a landfill?

How does the amount of carbon emission created by, say, paper recycling (which is a huge positive amount) compare with the amount of carbon emission created by, say, growing new forests (which is a huge negative amount) and processing it into paper (which is a positive amount, but ostensibly less than the amount of recycling alone)? That's also assuming that recycled paper were perfect (which it isn't) and that the use of recycled paper completely removed the need to make new paper (which it doesn't).

I think Wikipedia's article on mammals could use more "appeareances in other media." Things like, "Mammals have been prominently featured in many television shows such as 24 and Alias," or "the song Oops! I Did It Again is sung from the perspective of a mammal."

The latest Sockpuppet track "tw3rp" is on Song Fight. Go there and vote for your favorite, even if it's mine.