Sheep Guarding Llama

I spent the day working on my Internet radio station. It is working for the most part but I am still having a couple of basic problems that I want to get fixed. It should be working soon, though.

I went out and bought a Compact Flash memory card for my Zaurus today and the store under rang it by $20 which is pretty cool. I was very happy about that. It was expensive enough as it was. Now I have a handheld computer with 192MB of memory. That is more than most people’s laptops that I know! I am going to try encoding a book on CD and seeing how much I can get onto it. I bet that I can get a lot – maybe five hours worth. That would be really handy to have. I have been trying out all kinds of new software on my Zaurus. I am finding a lot of stuff that I really like.

Min and I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets tonight at Pyramid Mall. I was pretty disgusted with the last movie (because it totally ruined the book) but this one was quite a bit better. The kids are definitely growing up and becoming more mature and Richard Harris does a much better job as Dumbledore than he did in the last installment (of course, he has now passed away and they don’t have a replacement for him yet.) The overall flow of the movie was improved some although it still feels like a race from one action sequence to another. The books take their time (as books can) but the movie is way too fast. It is almost uncomfortable to watch because of the poor pacing. It is so fast that the pacing alone can be confusing. But overall, it is better than the Sorceror’s Stone (Philosopher’s Stone for our Canadian Contingency.)

Emily stopped by to visit this evening as well. I haven’t seen Emily in a year and she brought the baby by whom I have not seen at all yet. Min came home just in time to see the baby and get “baby fever”. Hopefully that will pass soon. I think Emily has found herself a babysitter, though!

Very little happened today. I spent most of the day getting the Internet radio station working better and better. We still aren’t there yet but we have gotten a lot closer. Every little project that I do like this teaches me so much about Linux. This radio station is going to be pretty cool once I get it working. Hopefully I will have something broadcasting something somewhat worthwhile before Eric and I head on down to Washington on Sunday night. It would be nice to be able to show off the station down there and listen to it for myself to see how it is working.

Today is the parade. Joe and I drank WAY too much last night and had a terrible time this morning. I will leave out the gory details but you can email me if you haven’t heard. Anyway, Natalie managed to meet up with us pretty early in the morning for breakfast (in which I declined to participate) and then we all got ready to march. The parade went well even though we marched in driving snow. In was very comfortable temperature wise and I thought that it was really nice to be able to march a parade without sweating terribly.

After the parade we made the long journey home and then I drove back to Ithaca (two more hours.) It was a long day but the parade went well and I felt really good after playing.

Today is the day that Kelley’s Heroes makes their annual voyage to Toronto to play in the big Canadian’s Santa Claus Parade. We got on the bus in Caledonia at 10:30 in the morning. Yes, that means that I was up very early. It would have been a lot easier to make it out had there not been a huge tire fire in Seneca Falls and the route that I would normally take out was blocked. So I had to head on up to the thruway and then come south again back to Caledonia. It was a good thing that I left early.

We made it to the Toronto Colony in good time (after stopping at Duty Free first, of course.) Josh, Jamie, Leanne (last months llama of the month) and Jen went out to dinner at Movenpick. Josh and I have been going to Movenpick for years but we found out that this one, that we went to so often, is closing this coming week so we were glad that we made it back there one last time.

I put in a lot of work today trying to get an Internet Radio Station to work in the house. I am using Icecast as the radio server and Ices to make the stream. I finally got it up and running late today and we are just broadcasting around the house to test it out. So far so good, you can listen to Evil Petting Zoo from anywhere in the house at any time! Pretty soon we will have a real working radio station – or so we hope. Loopy and I are planning on doing our own radio show called Geek Week that cover topics from the past week that are important to geeks everywhere.