shwango! blog

redhat announced version 7.3 of its linux os today. nothing too ground-breaking in the release, but i’m looking forward to playing around with kde 3.0.

wahoo! it’s the one year anniversary of me moving in to my house! i love my house!

that was one hell of a terrific weekend! the weather was awesome! i was able to sleep late, cut the grass, edge and trim, weed, wash the car, read in the sun, grill out and even plant some flowers and tomatos! (ok, my mom and dad helped a bit. mom’s a real green thumb.) did not want monday to roll around!

i’ve wanted a laptop for quite a while now. i’ve had the chance to play around with several, include hp’s omnibook 500 (now the 510) and it was great – 802.11b and all! but alas i had to return it after our show with hp was over. {sniff, sniff} now alienware has introduced the area-51-m. this thing is sweet! high power, good graphics, lotsa ram and decent hd – at a great price! it’s designed for gaming, but it’s just all around great to me. the only thing is that i tend to like the “eraser” mouse instead of the touch pad. (i always end up tapping the damn thing while i’m coding!) maybe i’ll be able to afford one soon!

also, the mj-12 ddr looks like a pretty sweet desktop.

i’d love to give wasted a facelift with dual athlons!

i love techtv! they’re now showing max headroom! i loved that series! one of the best “hi-tech, low-life” series’ – with that great ’80s charm. sci-fi channel used to show it, when they were good – “the dominion”. (sci-fi channel now sucks in my opinion.)

techtv’s also got a new show called eye drops which features cool computer animation – similar to the old mtv show liquid television.

it was a beautiful day today! it was our founder’s birthday and we had a grill out and played frisbee. it was great to be outside.

(technically i’m a founder too, but that’s what it says on his card.)

poor wasted. i think i’m killing her! mt is moving pretty slow nowadays… i gotta boost that ram! i think i’ve proven how stable linux is and how much it can do with very little resources, but that 64 megs is too slow nowadays!

ok, i guess one doesn’t usually rejoice when finishing a book, but i’m going to! i read very slow! i think i started the book last year – no, i don’t just mean 2001 – i mean a full year, maybe even february, 2001, ’cause i didn’t have the house yet. started it at the old apartment… sob, i miss clifton. anyway, i finished the 910 page monster – plus the appendix about the “solitare” encryption stuff. i thought it was great. now on to snow crash… well, after i watch dark angel of course!

note: techincally i did read other books during this period, but they were all non-fiction works such as java servlet programming, java 2 and various other java and xml books and a bazillion tech mags. i also think i re-read hackers: heros of the computer revolution (yes, the classic by levy) during a bout with insomnia at the old apartment.

i should have mentioned this earlier… well, if you don’t know, i’ve got a little web radio station over at shwango! radio. it gets like zero traffic – mostly from myself, but a few friends listen from time to time, as well as a few lurkers who stumble upon it. it’s just for fun. then, a few weeks ago, i got a letter from SESAC, supposedly the third largest music publisher after ASCAP and BMI. the letter was addressed to me c/o shwango.com – at first i was amused by it. but then after reading through, i realized this was a license agreement they wanted me to sign – and cough up $77.00 every six months. $77.00 is the MINIMUM! – the actual calculation is something like .0077 times the average number of “page hits”. so really it would be only .0077 * 100 (i don’t get many hits!) = $0.77! i could deal with that! well, then i get an email from them as well. i’m not even sure i’ve got any songs that they publish – at least none of my searches returned results. we’ll see what happens! this could mean the death to many little stations like mine…

i’m all for supporting the artists and writers, etc., but come on! i buy cds – shwango! radio is almost entirely made of cds from my personal collection. i go to a fair amount of concerts. and i promote the artists i love via conversation, web sites (like shwango! radio and myjoy), etc. if shwango! radio generated even a decent amount of traffic, i’d have no qualms about the licensing – i understand that, but i think this is silly. of course if i did generate that much traffic, our t1 would be saturated and my boss would kill me!

there could be more bad news for us little sites. for more info check the save internet radio site.

for great music, both internet and radio broadcast, check out 97X! i’ve been a listener for many years – since like ’85 or so!

since no one reads this, this is more of a public display of me over-ruling myself. up until recently, almost all links i did used target=”_blank” to force a new browser window. now i’m sick of it. it’s so much easier to right-click and “open in new window”. aaron, thank’s for the push as well.