thelennards.com

That’s right, after all of this time, I have finally updated the look of the site.  Who knows?  I may even change it again very soon.  With the makeover, I’ve given it to basic logic and changed my blog software one more time.  I’m now usingWordPress. So, I have hundreds (if not thousands) of themes created by folks that can actually draw a straight line. Many thanks to them!

I still have to decide how I want to make the weather pages look. And, I’ve left all of the old archives and photo galleries in place. So, if you miss the good old purple, there are still plenty of places to visit. All layouts aside, the real reason for the big change was the fact it is more flexible in terms of add-ons and posting. With our big San Diego vacation coming up, I want to make culling the photos an making the entries as easy as possible.

Hopefully, all of the new tools WordPress provides will make it much easier. And, now I don’t have to try and maintain everything myself. It is open source, so by default there are thousands of developers out there adding their tweaks. Reminds me of the old WWIV days. Tom or Donnie – I expect a fully functioning system running soon. More to come soon, but once again I’ve let it get to late for me to continue jabbering. Perhaps that is for the best.

For once, it isn’t really my fault that the the updates to the blog have been slow in coming. My hosting company was bought out and moved all of our websites to new servers. During the interim, I avoided making any posts in order to keep the two sites synchronized. The move is complete now, so I’m finally getting a chance to post the updates.

One of the changes that came along with the move to the new server was a switch back to using Blogger as my hosting service. I’d been using GreyMatter for quite a while. With the move to the new server, we were having difficulty getting the settings just right again. Blogger has really updated the service since I last used it, so it was an easy decision to make the switch back. You’ll still find all of the olds posts if you get hungry for history. Just check the archives. Ed’s Note: The RSS feed is down temporarily. I’ll get that fixed soon.

We’ve been spending tons of time playing with our new holiday gifts. Becky wanted a new digital camera small enough to fit in her purse so she would have one at the ready all the time with Rachel. Santa was kind enough to bring her a Canon SD-450. Needless to say, I’ve fallen behind on posting pictures as well. She has been snapping away, so I have literally hundreds to post. I promise to work on getting them up over the next few evenings.

My Christmas present occupied much of the time when I wasn’t able to work on the site. I’m the proud new owner of a NetGear MP-101. We originally tried one of the Media Center Extender’s for my PC running XP Media Center, but I could new get it to perform consistently. After a couple of weeks struggle, I decided to downgrade to a unit that only streamed music. That was my primary desire anyway. I wanted the ability to rip my CD’s to hard disk and then stream them to my home stereo wirelessly.

Nerd Alert!The following paragraphs may bore some of you to death. Only those of like-minded geekdom will care or possibly enjoy it. Danny and I ran ethernet cable to the desk downstairs in the living room where my laptop sits. It is the computer with XP Media center installed. We did this because when I was attempting to install the Media Center Extender from Linksys it stated the unit would not support two wireless hops. One of the devices – either the PC or the Media Center Extender – had to been connected to the router via cable. In my case, the PC seemed the logical choice. Or at least it seemed at the time…

Suffice it to say running the cable unnecessarily turned into a multi-hour fiasco which could have been easily avoided. I could see my old man shaking his head as I made amateur mistake one after another. I’ll spare you the gory details. If you’d need a laugh at my expense, ask me about it some day.

Back to the matter at hand, streaming wireless music to my stereo receiver. Hooked into my router via Ethernet, I have a Linksys Network Storage Link connected to a USB 2.0 Maxtor 300 gig drive. It supplied plenty of space to record my entire CD selection to the drive in .WMA format at 192 kbps.

It took endless hours sitting at the computer and ripping discs, but I finally managed to get them all to drive. I also took the time to catalog them using Catraxxx. It allowed me to move the CD’s out of their jewel cases and into CD books. I placed the CD booklet and CD itself in the books. It allows me to get for CD and booklets per page. I was able to chunk the ugly CD racks, store the jewel cases in the attic, and consolidate my collection down to two books. I setup custom fields in Catraxxx that tell me exactly where any CD is – Book, Page, and Slot on that page.

Now that everything is in place, I can use the remote on for the MP-101 to pick any song in my collection by Album Title, Artist, Genre, or custom Playlist that I create. You can listen to your favorite albums, randomize from your entire collection, or listen to a single genre. The playlist support will be lots of phone when we have friends and family over, too.

It supports .M3U playlists, so I am able to create them out of Catraxxx. Since you can create any custom filter you need in Catraxxx, it allowed me to create several playlists in just a few minutes. I created several genre playlists to replace default genre that Windows Media Player pulled down while ripping the CD. 95% of the time, Media Player’s choice was far too broad. Catraxxx uses GraceNote which seems to be much better in its categorization. Still not perfect, but far better than Media Player!

Well, enough geek talk for one evening. After all, I’ve got hours and hours of music to enjoy! More to come for the visitors seeking the pictures soon.

It took me a little longer than I originally expected, but I’ve converted the blog over to Greymatter. It was written in Perl and doesn’t require any database for the data. Two things that worked well with my web service and allowed me to install the system relatively quickly. (The only delay was the time it took to get the correct permissions set by ReadyHosting. I still love them as a provider anyway!)

Have all of the non-technical readers fallen asleep by now? I’ll try to make it a bit more lively from here on out for those of you that don’t know your bit from your byte.

Becky and I went out last weekend and bought bicycles to add more exercise to our new eating habits. We went to Bruce’s store, XL Cycle. {Obligatory Brother-in-Law Plug} In all seriousness, Bruce was a tremendous help in explaining all of our options and picking a bike that worked best for the type of riding we expected to do. We ended up with Sport Comfort bikes. Becky’s is a ’04 Raleigh SC30. I walked out with a ’03 Diamondback Wildwood. The colors shown in these links match our bikes. I’ll take a few photos of the “hogs” later this week and put them up so you can see how we have them “outfitted”.

“It can take quite a while for a Web page to appear on your screen. The reason for the delay is that, when you type in a Web address, your computer passes it along to another computer, which in turn passes it along to another computer, and so on through as many as 5 computers before it finally reaches the work station of a disgruntled U.S. Postal Service employee, who throws it in the trash.” Dave Barry, Dave Barry In Cyberspace