Ride for the Roses

The Ride for the Roses is the Lance Armstrong Foundation's annual charity bike ride here in Austin. This year, I've decided to ride the longest distance - 100 miles (161 km). Riding 100 miles in one day is referred to as a "century" in the cycling community. I've never ridden a century before, so this will require some training. I've put together a training schedule and I'll share that here in a future post.

To help with my training, I've purchased perhaps the coolest cycling toy ever. It's a small GPS receiver (Garmin Forerunner 301) with a built-in heart rate monitor. Using this, you can record all your training data, and refer to it to track your progress as you train. I then found the web site, MotionBased.com. This site allows users to post their training data, and plots the GPS data from your ride onto maps and satellite images. It's pretty darn cool. You can even share your ride information with others. For an example, click here to see my data from last night's training ride. Be sure to click on the "Map Player" tab on the top-right of the page. This will replay my ride on top of any map of your choosing (you might need to install some Adobe software to actually see it).

Success!

The surgery was a great success. It wasn't nearly as painful or uncomfortable as I thought it would be, and my breathing has improved immensely. Well worth it.

Septoplasty

I had a septoplasty performed yesterday. It'll be a few days before I know how successful the procedure was. I'm feeling a little discomfort today, but nothing some Tylenol 3 can't fix. The must uncomfortable part is the blockage in my nose, making it difficult to breath. I get the splints removed tomorrow, so hopefully that will help.

Slump

I'm officially in a slump. I play hockey regularly (about once a week). I can't seem to score this season. In the spring and winter leagues, I was one of the top scorers on my team. In this summer league though, I really suck. I think I have only 1 assist in 6 or 7 games. For the most part, my team is made up of the same guys as the previous couple of leagues, and our opponents consist of the same players as well. However, I just can't put the puck in the net or make a pass to save my life. Oh well, maybe the upcoming fall/winter league will bring me better fortune.

On the bright side, the NHL is coming back this fall. I can't wait. The Penguins won the Sidney Crosby lottery, and look like they're going to get a few other strong players as well. If they can sign last year's number one pick, Evgeni Malkin (what a cry baby), they'll be pretty stacked. Mario says he's going to play another season as well, so they should be exciting to watch.

Of course, my eyes are still on the Edmonton Oilers. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of exciting news to report regarding the Oilers. They are pretty far down in the draft order, and don't have a lot of money to sign any of the many free agents that are now available in the league. They're playing in Dallas in October, so I hope to make a trip up to big-D to cheer on my team.

Sam - World's Ugliest Dog

Sam - World's Ugliest Dog

Danko Jones

I discovered this band (Danko Jones) last week while listening to one of Yahoo's streaming stations (the Hard Rock station I think). They're really good. If you like the rock and roll music, I think you'll like them. Here are a couple of their MP3s:

   Dance
   Lovercall

Yahoo Searches

If you go to Yahoo.com and search for "music engine plugins", take a look at the first result that doesn't link to elsewhere on Yahoo.com. Where does it take you? Lo and behold, it takes you here, to the Daily Babbler. Crazy. It was the 5th item listed when I searched earlier today.

Incidentally, searching for "yellow pee" ranked this entry at number 3 when I last looked.

P.S. If you wonder how I know this, it's because I noticed that many people were getting to this blog by searching for those words and phrases. So, some people actually do search for "yellow pee". If you want to track traffic on your blog, go to StatCounter.com and sign up for a free account.

Crazy lizard

CRW_0051_edited-1
Originally uploaded by bigmac72.

Lucy (our dog) was freaking out today in the back yard, and this was the reason why. Our neigbors have a peach tree in their yard, and this little green guy was looking to get some lunch from it. Lucy was also looking to get lunch, but had little interest in the peaches.

IIS7 , Seattle, etc

I'm in Seattle this week for technical preview of the next version of Microsoft's web server, IIS7. As usual, they're not committing to any release date but say it'll be about a year or so before it's available. So far, I haven't been really impressed by it. It seems their biggest objective for the release is to make it as flexible and extensible as possible - and I'd say they've accomplished that. They have also provided mechanisms that allow you to integrate managed code (i.e. code running in the .NET CLR) into the HTTP pipeline of IIS, so I guess that's kind of neato too. I still have a couple of more days to see what else they've got planned, but I'm pretty bored by the whole thing.

Seattle is a nice city, but I haven't seen the sun in 3 days. I guess that's typical. Tonight, we went to a bar near our hotel to get a beer and some food. I kept smelling something awful and couldn't quite figure out what it was. Eventually, it turned out to be our waitress. She had the worst BO ever. Pretty gross. The beer was good though.

Sub-standard

I just had lunch from Subway. Why is it that Quiznos toasted subs are good, but Subway toasted subs suck? It's an age-old question (months old to be sure).

Improv Everywhere Mission: Even Better Than The Real Thing

This is great:

Improv Everywhere Mission: Even Better Than The Real Thing

Cars

I have two car-related things to discuss tonight.

The first is regarding the cool new Audi A3. This car has been available in Europe for some time now, but they are bringing it to the North American market. One of the coolest features that this car has is that it has 2 Secure Digital (SD) card readers built into the stereo system. This allows you to copy your MP3s to your SD card(s) and listen in your car... no need for messy cables to hook up your MP3 player, or burning to CD.

The other car discussion really stinks - literally. I think something crawled into my Mazda 3's engine area, or under the body somewhere - and then it died. There is a stench of something dead emanating from under my car. Originally, I assumed that Ewan had spilled some milk somewhere and I could not find it. I knew this wasn't the case when I continued to smell it when I was outside the car. I'm not sure what to do about this. I have looked everywhere under the hood and under the body, but with newer cars such as mine, there is not much to see unless you remove a bunch of plates and panels. I guess I will just have to wait for this thing to dry up and stop being smelly. Gross.

Guess Which Movie

This is kind of fun...

Guess Which Movie

New blog

I've created a new blog, PhotoBabbler. It will consist of nothing but pictures taken from my cell phone and posted by emailing directly from my phone. If I am feeling energetic, I might even type a word or two describing the picture, but don't count on it.

Yahoo Music Engine Plugins

As I discussed yesterday, I recently downloaded the Yahoo Music Engine (YME) as a part of my search to replace Windows Media Player as my media library management software. One thing I failed to mention about the YME was that it has a completely customizable plug-in architecture. This allows anybody with moderate software development skills to write their own code that runs inside the YME.

You want the YME to do something, but it doesn't do it "out of the box"? Write it yourself. Sounded interesting, so I gave it a go.

As a test, I wanted to see if I could search my library for tracks who's metadata did not contain a URL for album art. (I'm kind of picky about little things like that. When I play a song, I want the album cover to be displayed.) Since the YME automatically attempted to update the metadata with this information when it created my library, I was curious to see how efficient it was.

I assumed that to create a plugin, I was going to have to brush the dust off of some of my old C++ books. It's been a while since I've written C++, but I was up for it. As it turns out, creating a plugin couldn't be easier. The Yahoo team was kind enough to expose almost the entire programming interface through COM components. Better yet, they have created a mechanism by which YME will host an HTML page thereby allowing you to create simple HTML forms and use Javascript to access the Engine's API.

Anyway, I didn't spend much time on it, but I did get some results. The image below is a screen capture of my plugin after if performed the search in my library.





So that you can see how little code I wrote, here's the entire source:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<script language="javascript" src="yme.js"></script>
<object classid="clsid:5F810AFC-BB5F-4416-BE63-E01DD117BD6C" height=90% width=100% id=datagrid VIEWASTEXT>
  <PARAM NAME="CheckBoxes" VALUE="0">
  <PARAM NAME="ShowAlways" VALUE="1">
  <PARAM NAME="FullRowSel" VALUE="0">
</object>
<br><br>
<A href="javascript:startSearch()">Search</a><br>
<script>

  datagrid.AddColumn("Artist", 150, 0, 0);
  datagrid.AddColumn("Album", 150, 0, 0);
  datagrid.AddColumn("Track Title", 150, 0, 0);

  function startSearch()
  {
    mediaDatabase = window.external.MediaDatabase;
    allMedia = mediaDatabase.GetAllMedia();
  
    itemIndex = 0;
    for( var i = 0; i < allMedia.Count; i++ )
    {
      media = allMedia.Item( i );
      metaData = media.Metadata;
   
      imageUrl = metaData.GetPredefinedValue( METADATA_IMAGE );
     
      if( imageUrl == null || imageUrl.length == 0 )
      {
        datagrid.AddRow();
        datagrid.SetRowData( itemIndex, 10 );
        datagrid.SetElement( itemIndex, 0, metaData.GetPredefinedValue(  METADATA_ARTIST ) );
        datagrid.SetElement( itemIndex, 1, metaData.GetPredefinedValue( METADATA_ALBUM ) );
        datagrid.SetElement( itemIndex, 2, metaData.GetPredefinedValue( METADATA_TITLE ) );
        itemIndex++;
      }
    }
  }
</script>
</BODY>
</HTML>

I also had to manually add a key to the registry that enabled the "Al's Plugin" item to show up in the left-hand navigation pane of the YME.

All in all, I am pretty impressed. I might just keep it around a little longer.

Music Management Software

About a week and a half ago, I decided to replace my current music management tool - Microsoft Windows Media Player. Media Player is fine for simply playing music, but I found it very cumbersome for managing portable devices like our Dell DJ and Creative Muvo Micro N200.

The leading software in the non-iPod/iTunes market is Musicmatch Jukebox. I used this a few times a couple of years ago, and at that time, I thought it sucked. But, being open minded, I decided to give it a try. After a few days of using Musicmatch I decided it was significantly better than Media Player, and that it would now become my music manager of choice. It has quite a nice user interface, and it is extremely simple to synchronize my portable devices.

My only complaint about Musicmatch is that it does not have the ability to resample my media files to a lower bit-rate. Most of my music is encoded in WMA format at a relatively high bit-rate. I'd like to reduce the bit-rate to increase the number of tracks I can copy to my devices. The Musicmatch documentation states that WMA files can no longer be resampled (I guess this was possible in previous versions) because of license arrangements with Microsoft. Hmmm...

A few days after becoming satisfied with Musicmatch, I learned of Yahoo's Music Unlimited service and its accompanying Yahoo Music Engine software. I decided to give it a try. I originally decided to try only the Music Engine software. I didn't think I'd care for the music "rental" business model...

The Music Engine software is mediocre. It does not have as many useful features as Musicmatch, but it does have a few useless features that Musicmatch does not offer (like integration with Yahoo Instant Manager - big deal).

I then decided to give the Music Unlimited service a try. With a 1 week free trial, I figured it couldn't hurt. What I found is that the service is extremely addictive. Heidi and I just sat there for an hour and typed in artists and songs, found them and played them. It was pretty fun. At just $5 a month ($60 per year, billed monthly), it's hard to complain about the price. You can download and listen to any song in their library provided you pay the monthly fee.

I ran in to one serious issue with the Unlimited service though. The tracks downloaded are NOT compatible with either of my portable devices. That is a serious drawback. The list of supported devices is still pretty small but is sure to grow as the service catches on. The newer Dell DJs support the format, but my model is not supported. And from what I've read, a firmware update will not be offered that would make mine compatible. I can probably sell my DJ for about $190 on eBay and get a new one (with 30GB vs my 20GB) for about $230, but I haven't determined if it's worth it yet. I haven't learned if the Muvo will eventually support the format, but I doubt it. Besides, since our Muvo is only the 256MB model, it would quickly get filled since the downloaded tracks from the Unlimited service cannot be resampled to smaller bit-rates.

So, the jury is still out. For ease of use, features, and performance, Musicmatch is the clear winner. However, the Music Unlimited service is quite attractive. It is possible to use the Music Unlimited service for music download, and Musicmatch for music management (Musicmatch honours the DRM built into the downloaded tracks), but I'm looking for a single solution.

Guess I will just have to get an iPod and use iTunes... right Matt?

Hearing Impaired

Last night, I went to see Chevelle at La Zona Rosa. It was one of the best shows I've seen in a long time (despite the fact that they didn't have any pyrotechnics.). It was just a good, solid rock-and-roll show. I'd write more about it, but my head hurts a little today. I'm also quite deaf today.

www.benedictxvi.com

A month ago, a guy by the name of Rogers Cadenhead registered a bunch of internet dot-com domains using names he suspected the new Pope would choose (i.e. LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com etc.) He got it right with www.benedictxvi.com

He's a pretty good writer too. I enjoyed reading his blog.

I Rock

...because I just bought a Kiss belt buckle. Party on, Wayne.

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