My ongoing efforts to broadcast my life continue.  It’s a bit bizarre as I’m such a private person in general. I’m so fascinated to play with all of the technology involved I suppose I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy. For now.

Anyway, I played Carl in my SEC Dynasty in NCAA last night and not only did I broadcast the game, I also recorded it to my gergi-TV channel.  
(more…)

My first ustream broadcast went off pretty well.  The broadcast was a bit delayed as Dan showed up about an hour late but three other friends stayed on and watched Fresno State grind out a solid 24-7 victory over New Mexico State.  My second-straight run at a WAC title is in motion and off to a very good start.  My only regret was that I forgot to record the broadcast.

I’m a big fan of finding little tech-related projects and then seeing if I can get them to work.  Inspired by the lack of a spectator-mode in NCAA, Mike and I have been discussing various ways of streaming the game to various other members of our dynasties.  Audio/Video capture from the 360 would be ideal but we were looking for something a little cheaper — preferably $0.

Enter ustream.tv.  Ustream and others like Mogulus (shout-out for Dan!) are a new breed of web application and the ease with which they make webcasting available is nothing short of astounding.  Using the iSight on my MacBook, my upcoming Fresno State/New Mexico State game will be broadcast over the web for my other friends to watch on the newly formed gergi TV.  

Granted, the scale of nerdiness here is a bit high.  Not nearly as high as setting up the webcam to watch my cats sleep all day long… which I did today.   Nor as high as setting up Twitter accounts last night for both Argo & Beta.   That said, I have a project in mind that will put all of these nerd endeavors to shame.  Cats and blatant misuse of technology will be involved if I can find the time to work on it.

Google “surprised” the world several weeks ago when it released Chrome, a new web browser —  The surprise being that everyone was wondering why it was taking Google so long to release the browser that had been rumored to be in development for a couple of years.  Anyway, Chrome manages to up the ante on Firefox with its non-adventure-related name. Navigator, Explorer, and Safari seem so quaint now that Chrome and all its pimp-daddy aura is out and about.   

That aside, I’ve been messing with Chrome for the past few days and I’m been extremely impressed.  It has a minimal presentation that really gets out of your way and renders webpages extremely fast.  Behind the scenes, it uses the excellent Webkit library that is also used by Safari.   The one drawback to Chrome is the lack of extensions and “power”-features that Firefox has.  Several of those are essential to my job so I primarily use Chrome to monitor my GMail/GReader.  

If I was a typical user on a Windows PC, I would definitely consider using Chrome as my default browser.  Since it’s open source, I’m looking forward to Firefox and Safari adopting some of the internal features that make Chrome so fast.

Despite what Pandora thinks, I have a pretty wide and varied taste in music.  My iPod shuffles between rock, country, rap, and even classical throughout the day in my rather eclectic music collection.  I’m always on the lookout for new music.  These days, however, it’s almost always because I heard it on a TV show or commercial, in a movie or video game, or some other non-traditional means.  I almost never listen to the radio anymore and that’s because of one thing: podcasts.  Last week when I was without my Celica, not being able to listen to my podcasts was probably the hardest thing to adjust to.

Podcasts can be found on pretty much any topic though it still heavily favors news & technology — the first industries to adopt podcasting.  For me, beyond my weekly must-listen in the form of TWIT, the granddaddy and standard-bearer for all tech-related podcasts, I don’t really listen to any other technology related podcasts; I get enough technology in the hundreds of related articles I read every day.  As for news, I’ve tried repeatedly to get into the NPR podcasts but I just habitually find myself leaning more toward other podcasts.  Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me is always entertaining but more often, I pass the quick trips with ESPN’s PTI and College Football podcasts.

I’m a complete history junkie and, as far as I’m concerned, the history podcasts are the jewels in the world of podcasting.  I’m constantly searching iTunes for more quality podcasts along the lines of The History of Rome and The History Network.  For longer trips, Christina and I have steadily been listening to the in-depth TPN::Napoleon series.  Also, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is… well, for hardcore history fans… but is also an excellent podcast.

iTunes + iPod + crazy car adapter + podcasts = awesome nerdiness.

I’m making even more progress on getting my media-related situation resolved.  I figure it’s been long enough for me to go without HD service so I finally ordered a TiVo HD.  The final selling point for me was the Netflix integration they added in — supposedly the nicest integration yet on a device.  Every device and software package out there seems to be adding Netflix integration at this point — TiVo, XBox 360, Roku, Boxee, PlayOn. Most important to me is Boxee though they haven’t quite figured it out on the AppleTV yet.  Oh well, the hacked AppleTV+Boxee is doing a great job as my movie and TV show watching media extender.  A new HDTV, an HD TiVo, AppleTV, and even a 360 when the others are insufficient.  It’s been a good few months for my media collection!

One of the most popular things around the net these days is “personalized” web radio.  While the idea isn’t new, the latest crop of sites such as Pandora and Last.FM have supposedly greatly improved their “learning” systems.  You start out with your favorite band and it gradually plays music it thinks you’ll like.  As you listen to the music, you give it a thumbs up or down and as you listen.  Simple, free, and a pretty cool idea all around.  Eventually, you’ll be introduced to music you’ll like from artists you’re not familiar with.  Unfortunately, my experience hasn’t been nearly as rewarding.

I’ve been messing with Pandora for my iPhone.  What’s my favorite artist?  That’s easy: Dave Matthews Band.  First song, not surprisingly, was a DMB song.  No complaints here…  It’ll eventually start playing “new” stuff from artists I’ve never heard of soon enough.   Or so I thought.  In my few hours of Pandora usage, I’ve had exactly three artists played: Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and Jack Johnson.  That’s being generous though: It has easily been 80-90% Dave Matthews with only the odd John Mayer/Jack Johnson song thrown in.  While I’m not going to complain about getting to listen to DMB, it would be nice to discover other similar artists.  That is the point, right?

Update: As I wrote this blog post, Pandora’s ears must have been burning as they threw in a Red Hot Chili Peppers song to ruin my rant.

I’ve finally started to make progress on building a media center along the lines of what I want. My ideal solution always revolved around a media center that could handle Live TV and DVR duties as well as play music and video from a variety of sources on my home network but I finally decided to take a first step and ignore the Live TV/DVR aspect for now. I do have a TiVo after all. Plus, the solution I found can be updated later on when I do take that next step.

Apple released the AppleTV awhile back and while the interface and ease of use make it a great little device, the limited scope of functions that Apple provides greatly hampers its usefulness. It essentially has to sync to an iTunes library for video and music while integration with online video is essentially limited to just YouTube. Boring… especially for $200-$300. However, one interesting observation was the ease with which the AppleTV could be hacked and modified.

In the meantime, XMBC came along and decided to shift their development from the (original) XBox only to a general solution that can run on any platform including Linux and OS X. That instantly converted them from pointless to intriguing and I’ve been following them as they’ve developed the software. I also started watching for updates to Boxee, a platform built on top of XBMC specifically for OS X. There is also a working MythTV “front-end” solution for down the road when I start incorporating LiveTV & DVR functionality into the mix.

Recently a convergence occurred that sparked my first real step to getting the media center I want. XMBC and Boxee were ported to run on a hacked AppleTV (it runs OSX after all) and someone created an all-in one AppleTV hack + XBMC/Boxee installer. After some research, I took the plunge and picked up an AppleTV shortly before I left for Vegas last week. A couple of incompatible USB thumbdrives later and I had a hacked AppleTV ready to go.

After messing with it for a couple of days, the hacked AppleTV has lived up to its billing. Despite it’s alpha status, Boxee has really impressed. All of my media sources are brought in over the network and it uses IMDB to generate a pretty slick presentation of my video collection. I can still stream via iTunes as it doesn’t replace the AppleTV interface, just adds on to it. I can now pull media from any number of sources around the internet, not just YouTube. I also tried out PlayOn to stream my Netflix queue to my AppleTV over UPnP with some promising success. Forthcoming Hulu integration in XBMC and working Netflix and I’ll be set!

I just returned from a wedding for one of Christina’s friends. The wedding got started a bit late and my iPhone came to the rescue again. I’ve been extremely happy with my iPhone. Like today, I’ve found myself in a situation where access to the internet or the use of one of the iPhone applications has been extremely useful. Last weekend on our camping trip, I was able to “watch” the VT football game and root on the Hokies in their victory over Nebraska while I laid in bed. Christina’s friend Laura refers to it as Shawn’s “Answer Phone” due to the number of times I’ve looked up something we’ve been discussing.

As the primary developer for a software package used by a growing number of schools, my work load has grown exponentially over the past few years.  By primary developer, I of course mean the only developer.  I also do customer support, general IT, database administration, and pretty much any other role that needs to be filled.  The trials of working for a tiny software company.  There is only one other person who is involved with the school software and that would be the marketing/customer point-of-contact person.

This morning, we were reviewing some voicemails from customers and received a “funny” call from a parent she had been speaking with about a problem with one of the schools.  This particular parent had encountered a weird browser error message that I’m working on resolving.  The parent left the message to thank us for our help and not to worry, she had some sort of issue with every other online system from each school she’d applied to.  Then she proceeded to list off all of the schools she had issues with.  This was actually quite informative… we lost our first client recently and one of the schools she mentioned having issues with was that schools “replacement” software.  Good for us.  However, the next school she mentioned was another school we wrote the software for… whoops!