Being a fan of the NPR program, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, and knowing that one of their live tapings would fall on my birthday (this past Thursday), I sent an e-mail to NPR trying to be picked as a listener that could get Carl Kasell's voice on my voice mail.

Well, I was one of the listeners that was selected, but instead of answering at least two of three news questions or limericks correctly, or to try to find the true story in the Bluff the Listener round... I was selected for the Not My Job segment (of which the chances of winning isn't very good) with tennis legend Monica Seles. Unfortunately, Monica came up with goose eggs when trying to answer questions about the Guinness Brewing Company.

So... I won't be getting Carl Kasell's voice on my voice mail this time (which would have been great as a birthday present, of sorts). Instead, for the consolation prize, I get my name mentioned on the show by both Carl and Monica.

My adventure into the world of digital SLR photography officially kicked off around four weeks ago when I placed an order for a Nikon D300 digital SLR camera with a Nikkor 18-200mm DX VR lens; of which came from a couple of months of pondering and researching cameras, such as: a Canon 450D, 40D and 50D cameras and Nikon D90 and D300.

Ever since getting the camera, I have been learning as much as I can about photography in general and taking many, many pictures. Many didn't turn out too well, many were blurred due to not keeping the camera still enough (I don't have a tripod or monopod for it yet, that will be my next investment), and there were the random gems.

Then... there are those photos that were born out of pure curiosity and experimentation. I have posted some of those photos on Picasa. More successful (and several failed) experiments will be uploaded over time. I will also be posting additional albums as they seem fit.

Speaking of Picasa, while I use Picasa 3.0 to caption and sync photos with my web albums, I use the included Nikon ViewNX to tweak and export the photos as JPEG or TIFF files. It is nice that Picasa 3.0 supports the Nikon NEF format (which is the only format that I currently shoot, uncompressed at 12-bit), but it just does not provide the same level as photo tweaking compared to ViewNX.

As with any hobby in photography, a camera body and one lens is not enough. Over time, I plan on adding new lenses to my collection. I have posted the lenses that I am considering on one of my Amazon wish lists.

Just wanted to post up a short update to the list of depressing songs.

While listening through my collection of Dan Wilson and Semisonic albums and singles, the song "I Wish" from "All About Chemistry" hit me pretty hard. The following part of the song tends to make me feel like I'm imploding:

I wish I could turn into somebody far, far away
I wish I could make myself satisfactory in every way
I wish I could know whether you really know what you need
If I could only be somebody else
I wouldn't be myself
And maybe you'd want me

The other song comes from the first soundtrack from the new series of Doctor Who called "Madame de Pompadour". The instrumental plays very well towards the end of the episode in which the Doctor tries to return for the Madame, but she passed away between visits.

That's about it for now...

Yeah, it has been a while since I have posted an update on the site.

Recently, I decided to learn how to write documentation using the LaTeX typesetting system in order to avoid the hassles of word processing systems or dealing with minute styles and formatting. Instead, I get to focus on writing and structuring documents.

Even though I have not used LaTeX to typeset technical documents yet, I decided to use it to typeset a short, introspective story that I am writing about the enigma that has been my life. So far, LaTeX has been quite simple to use and has given me a chance to think more of what to write and remember (or not want to remember in some cases).

As far as the story, it is a long-term project which I will post portions and/or drafts regularly. The resultant story will be released under an appropriate Creative Commons license (I have yet to decide on which one to use).

More updates to follow.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I purchased a Slim Devices Squeezebox (version 3) a couple of weeks ago as a way to get music from my file server out to my living room. Before purchasing the Squeezebox, I connected an iPod dock to my receiver and used one of my iPods to play music. The three biggest problems with that setup is that I had to walk over to the iPod to skip or repeat songs or change playlists (the cost of a newer dock and a remote was not worth the cost), it was impossible to see what song was playing from any other spot than standing in front of it, and the iPod does not natively play Ogg Vorbis or FLAC audio tracks.

Having been blue over the past several days, it gave me a chance to expand the list of depressing songs and why I find them depressing. The new additions include:

• Matchbox Twenty: Unwell and Bed of Lies
• Lifehouse: Everything

As well as a couple of songs by Barenaked Ladies.

Now that I have a Squeezebox in the living room, it is much easier to queue up depressing songs on-demand. At this point, I do not know if that is a blessing or a curse. (by the way, a brief review of the device is coming up in the next week or two.)

Ever since I was a kid, I love watching PBS on the local station, OPB. I can remember watching everything from Square One, 3-2-1 Contact, Hometime, various high-school and college math courses (which would explain my elementary school years), and Doctor Who.

But, if there was one thing that would always spook me out was at the end of several shows. It all starts off with a black screen, then came a flash of orange and some odd, loud and electric sound that fluctuated... it was the WGBH identification and stinger. Not only that, but the next thing I would see is a picture of some forest with the words "Portland Nursery". For a long time, I would immediately switch channels when either would come up, mostly when it lead to the introduction sequence for "Mystery!"

Back to the present, I now am anxious and sometimes excited to see and hear the WGBH identification and stinger, mostly after watching "Frontline". The experience is even better on a large screen with the speakers turned up.

With this post, I am starting a semi-regular series called Hardware Bytes which will contain various thoughts and opinions of various hardware news and topics. The topics can include anything such as: new processors, network switches, security (or lack thereof), servers, and storage.

The topic of the first brain dump in the series is regarding the new servers that Sun has released using their latest multi-threading processor, the UltraSPARC T2

I has been two weeks since I got my hands on a 160GB iPod Classic with the intention of replacing my 60GB iPod Photo so that I can carry more music with me, and maybe an occassional video or photo collection.

As reported on my last two review "journals" on the iPod Classic, there are some things about the iPod Classic that are good and some that seem like a step backwards. This journal entry focuses on a significant user experience issue with the iPod Classic and iTunes: music management and sync-ing between iTunes and the iPod Classic is painfully slow.

Each time I add a new song or podcast track to the iPod Classic using iTunes, iTunes will hang for about 10-15 seconds while using 100% of the cycles on one of the two cores on either my laptop or my desktop (both have Core 2 Duo processors running Windows XP SP2). During that time, the status message on the iPod Classic goes between "Connected" and sync-ing. I have tried connecting the iPod Classic to various USB ports and tried three different Apple USB sync cables, each came with the three iPods in the household.

If I drag over several tracks, the hang does not occur until near the end of the bulk transfer. As you can guess, this has made loading up my iPod Classic an adventure of playing with my patience and cursing out loud. The problem does not occur with neither my iPod Photo or an iPod Nano. Both iTunes and the iPod Classic are running the latest software.

After sifting through the Apple Support Discussion forums, it looks like I am not the only one with this problem.

In combination of the painful transfer hangs, the somewhat sluggish user interface of the iPod Classic and the problem of radio station presets when using the Radio Remote, my experience with the iPod Classic has not left me with a good taste in my mouth.

Apple really needs to resolve the user interface performance issues and the iTunes transfer/sync issues that are plaguing the iPod Classic.

Tonight, I went to my ten year high school reunion primarily to get out for an evening and to see if I would remember some of my classmates.

I was somewhat surprised that I could recognize a fair number of people, while others I do not remember or could not recognize at all. For many, they looked like and had the same personality from ten years ago; others the faces were familiar but the demeanor changed dramatically... at least from my perspective. Someone who had routinely picked on me for a while back then seemed to be a lot more friendly.

I came to the reunion knowing that I would mostly likely leave depressed and disappointed with myself; obviously, that's how I felt driving home.

I also knew that I wouldn't see a certain person at the reunion, I still left with a heavy heart when she didn't attend the reunion.

Even after ten years, the reunion just felt like almost any other day in high school: felt lonely, distant, shy and overall, a mixed bag.

About seven years ago, I wrote my first article for Dæmon News about my experiences of installing FreeBSD on a Compaq iPaq desktop which would become my web and mail server for about six years.

About a month ago, I purchased a pre-owned HP dc7700 Small Form Factor desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.86GHz, 2GB of RAM and came with an 80GB SATA-II hard drive. I decided to purchase a new hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB SATA-II hard drive and keep the 80GB drive untouched. Since the system had quite a bit of processing power and resources, I decided to not only replace my aging web and mail server, but also to consolidate internal network services on to the new system.

After using my new 160GB iPod Classic for about a week, I have noticed that the UI responsiveness of going between menus and loading playlists has gotten more sluggish as I continued to add more songs and podcasts. Although the UI was more sluggish than my 60GB iPod Photo, skipping between songs on the iPod Classic seemed to be much quicker. With my iPod Photo, skipping between songs would have anywhere from a 0.5 to a 2 second delay, while it seemed nearly instantaneous with the iPod Classic.

As reported by GameSpot and Ars Technica, the Wii Virtual Console will soon get three games released on the NeoGeo console! The three games are World Heroes, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, which I fondly remember playing and wasting unknown number of quarters on Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting.

For over a year, my portable audio player of choice has been a 60GB iPod Photo which I have loaded a good chunk of my music collection and podcasts that I have been downloading (manually I might add; I have yet to find a podcast download tool that fits my requirements). Unfortunately, I started running out of space on the iPod about 6 months ago and have been juggling podcasts and albums in order to keep a little bit of free space on it.

During Apple's recent iPod announcements, I had been hoping for an iPod that could hold more than 80GB of storage. Thankfully, a 160GB iPod Classic was announced, and while the iPod Touch was enticing, the limited storage (8GB and 16GB) put it off my list immediately. Sure, the other option would be an Archos 705 player with a large touch screen, WiFi, various video codec support and a 160GB model, but I didn't care much for portable videos and didn't really like the feel of the previous model.

Over the past two weeks, I have finished entering panelist and guest scores for all of the 2005 "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" shows. Also, bar graphs have been added in the "Panelist Statistics" section to show the distribution of scores for each panelist. The updates are available at the WWDTM: Show Details and Statistics page.

I am now in the process of filling out show breakdown and notes for the 2005 shows. Once that I have finished with that, I will start to add information about the 2004 shows.

[2007-09-12] Update: show descriptions have been entered for all but a few of the 2005 shows and I am now moving on to 2004. The basic data structures for 2003 has already been put into place, with 2000-2002 to follow in the next couple of weeks.