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I’m putting my first decent Garage Band song online. It’s an acoustic, folky little ditty I call Saturday Morning. Guess when I put it together? None of it is actually me playing and instrument – just an arrangement of the loops and tunes that Garage Band provides. But I think it flows pretty well.
So download the file, play it on your MP3 player, and hopefully you’ll like it. If not, remember that I haven’t had musical training since 4th grade.
Be gentle.
I’m not very pleased with UPS right now.
I’ve been looking for a Mike Minter jersey for a while, but until the Super Bowl trip, the Panthers didn’t make the nice $60 one for him, only the $250 “authentic” jersey. But after the NFC championship, they made new replica jerseys for some other players, including Minter. Cool.
I placed my order over the phone with the Panthers team store in Charlotte on Friday the 23rd, and had them ship it to me UPS 2nd Day Air, so it would get here in plenty of time for the Super Bowl.
Then the ice storm hit. The jersey didn’t get shipped out until Wednesday evening because of the ice. That’s fine, with 2nd Day Air, that means it gets here by Friday evening. Plenty of time.
So I keep checking the tracking, and I see that it gets an “Origin Scan” in Charlotte at 6:29pm on the 28th, a “Departure Scan” at 10:45pm that same day, and an “Arrival Scan” in Raleigh at 1:28am on the 29th. So far, so good, it’s in Raleigh. But the next information is from 5am on the 29th and says “Adverse Weather Conditions Delay.” The scheduled delivery date is still January 30, though.
I call UPS a few times trying to see if it’s going to be sitting in the Raleigh depot due to the delay, or if it’s going out on the truck as scheduled, since if it’s in the depot, I can go pick it up. Everyone I talk to says “No, it’s in Raleigh, but it should still go out on Friday.”
Friday afternoon, still no package. I call back a couple of times, trying to find out the status. One person says “It’s on the truck now, so it should arrive by 7pm.” They said it was on the truck – this becomes important later.
Call back around 5:30pm and get someone else. They said that they would call the Raleigh depot, and someone there would call me back with information within an hour. 6:30pm rolls around, no call. So I call back again. Explain my situation, the woman puts me on hold for a few minutes. When she comes back, it’s with this:
“I had my supervisor come over and look at this, and they explained that the scans from Raleigh are what we call logical scans, not physical scans. The last physical scan we have of your package shows that it’s still in Charlotte, and hasn’t left for Raleigh yet. I’m sorry about that – you can get a refund on the shipping charges after the package arrives, but other than that you just have to wait.”
Still in Charlotte??? What the fuck? I’d been calling for two days and the first person who provided that little nugget of information was at 6:30pm the day it was supposed to arrive. What kind of idiots does UPS have working for them?
And what the fuck is this “logical scan” monkey crap? If their tracking system says that the package left Charlotte and arrived in Raleigh, and was scanned in both places, you’d think that it would mean that the package had left Charlotte and arrived in Raleigh, not “this was supposed to be what happened.”
So I’ve gone through two days of runaround, paid $12 extra to ship second-day air, and have absolutely nothing to show for it except high blood pressure. I have serious doubts about the competency of UPS, and don’t think I’ll be using them for my shipping needs again. I’ll go with FedEx or the Post Office instead.
Fuckers.
It’s official. Holly will never again be able to tell me “Wade, you have too much free time on your hands.” Because if she does, I will point her to this site. After viewing it, the words “too much free time” will have lost all meaning.
Example nitpick from the site:
ROTK 76. Frodo is wrapped in Sam’s elven cloak (ROTK p.239) when he and Sam make their way up the slopes of Mt. Doom (ROTK p.264). Jackson has Frodo wearing his shirt but no cloak as he and Sam trudge up the slopes of Mt. Doom.
Basically this guy went through the Lord Of The Rings books and movies and and picked apart every single difference between the two, along with his commentary on why the book was superior to the movie. I mean, it’s one thing to prefer the book over the film adaptation, but this is taking it to that scary next level.
Never underestimate a Tolkien fan though, I guess.
Today marks a special milestone for me. January 29, 2001 is the first recorded date I have for my work on Mr. Voice. I’m confident that I was working on the project a month or two beforehand, but didn’t start keeping notes until January 29th.
It’s still hard to believe that the project is both still going on, and also being used by people other than me. When I started working on it three years ago, it was just an experiment, a goofy idea I had to use digital audio at ComedyWorx. I didn’t even have any idea whether or not club management and the other voices would even agree to use a computer during the shows.
Even after that, I only put the software on my website to give lunenburg.org the illusion of content – I didn’t really expect anyone else to download it and use it. But they did – I’m up to 10 other clubs at this point. That just blows my mind. I’ve got actual users. And good users, too, who offer up feedback and new ideas that I can put into the program, making things better for ComedyWorx and everyone else, too.
Just for fun, you can check the differences in appearance between Version 0.7 (the first copy I have available) and the current version. Fun fact: Version 0.7 runs with the setup with only a few small modifications. Kinda fun to see how much easier it is to use now.
So what’s next for Mr. Voice? Good question. I’m about at the end of feature ideas, so new releases might slow down. I’d like to see Mr. Voice used at other groups besides ComedySportz-style clubs, but don’t really have any inroads into other groups to start something. I’d like to polish up the GUI a little bit more, but I may be hitting some of the limitations of Perl/Tk. The documentation and Windows installer could use some work too.
So I’ve got enough to keep me busy. Hopefully Mr. Voice will still be around, relevant, and useful in another three years. Thanks to everyone who has helped make me feel like a real programmer.
Reason #1,532,995 (today) to hate Clear Channel – due to a marketing agreement, all of their stations in Chicago will stop giving traffic reports in relation to O’Hare Airport, and instead give them around the Allstate Arena. Apparently, according to the article, O’Hare has been the standard reference point for ages, and has more relevance to the average Chicago commuter than the arena does.
But, it’s just another example of how crappy corporate radio will sell out anything to make a buck. I’m sure the next step will be to report weather conditions from some of their marketing contacts.
Clear Channel sucks. Avoid corporate radio. Which, in Raleigh, means G105, 106.1 RDU, Sunny 93.9, Oldies 100.7, and AM station WDUR.
What do you do if you get an awesome PowerMac G5 for Christmas?
The answer should not be “Rip the guts out of it, cut a hole in the back, and stick an Athlon motherboard in it so you can run Windows XP in a funny case.”
Some people just can’t have nice things.
I just got this spam in my inbox, evading my filters. It has to be the most obvious example I’ve seen in a long time of the “Who are they trying to fool?” syndrome.
You are suspected of plunder 2100 $ from account Webmoney! It is necessary for you to contact employee FBI USA who has affairs with representation Webmoney in USA. We have the decision of a problem and further the decision of a problem in regional court. The complaint has acted from ID 828245830532. The full information on http://www.fbi-policy.com/webmoney.htm.
Do they really think that people will be scared that they are “suspected of plunder 2100 $ from account Webmoney”? Oh no! Not that! Someone set up us the bomb!
The sad part is that someone will probably click on that link and put in the number.
According to the news, the North Carolina Highway Patrol has worked almost 1800 accidents in the Triangle area since snow started to fall on Saturday. That’s a lot of crashes, especially since only a fraction of the people in the area have left home since Sunday.
This is nowhere near the ice storm of last year, or the big snows in 2000 and 2002, but the accident toll seems to be as bad or worse than those. I think that it’s because this storm seemed so harmless. There’s no big ice buildup on the trees, the white stuff on the ground is only an inch or two thick, it really didn’t do much during the storm itself. But the danger is that the stuff on the ground is now thick ice. Whereas an equivalent amount of snow would have been pretty easy to get around in, this stuff that looks like snow was almost impossible to move on.
The good news is that the melting started this afternoon. When I walked out this morning, it was like I was on an ice rink. This afternoon, the ice was softer, and you could see the melted water moving around under the surface. It really all depends on what the melting does tonight in the mid-20° weather as to when I’ll go to work tomorrow. If it’s still soft and slushy in the morning, I can go in somewhat normally. Otherwise, I have a feeling that once the sun’s out for a couple hours the driving will be decent. If I can make it out to US 401, I’ll be fine.
So the lesson to take from this situation is that when the Governor goes on TV to tell everyone to stay off the roads, you should probably listen.
So far today at SkilTech, we’ve blocked nearly 1900 instances of the MyDoom Windows worm. That’s one of the biggest ones we’ve seen in a while.
Even with its “focus on security” so publically launched a year or two ago, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft products in general are still a joke. Stuff like this shows that the Windows system remains wide-open to exploitation. If you try to do a stock Windows install on an internet-connected system, you’ll probably get cracked before your first set of updates finish downloading.
I don’t anticipate things getting better for Windows any time soon. Thank goodness we run a good antivirus system at SkilTech.
