Typo 4.0!

Every so often, I do an svn update on my Typo codebase to see if there’s new updates… particularly because of a rather nasty bug I’ve been experiencing. Whenever I post a new item, it inserts some error message in the post’s text_filter column, which causes my entire blog to break. The home page appears empty (0 posts) and the admin area crashes when trying to view the post. I had to go into the database and manually set the text_filter field to NULL. Needless to say, this undoubtadly had an impact in my posting frequency. But with the latest update of Typo 4.0.1, I’ve found the issue to have vanished! Hooray for blogs that actually work properly! \o/

First Day Back at Quicken Loans

Today marks my first day back at good ol’ Quicken Loans. As a web interaction engineer, I’ll be working on and with their in-house developed PHP5/OOP framework, Skeletor. I’m going into the office probably a few days this first week, but once I get comfortable with things, I’ll be able to do a lot of work remotely, from my home in East Lansing. Just to prove how incredibly cool they are, they went and bought me a 15” Macbook Pro. Wholly crap how lucky am I.

Yeah, I’m still here

I just returned today from spending the weekend in Chicago with Julie. The clubs in that city are serious business, let me tell you. (Fun!) Also, I go into Quicken Loans for my first day of part-time work on Tuesday since I interned there two years ago.

DNB == Robot Wrestling

Apparently, in the eyes of David Barr, my DNB is akin to robot wrestling… and dnbradio needs to use torrents.

Oh, and I spun another nice 2.25 hr set for my show last night. DNBRadio Archive.

Spring Break 2006

Well, it’s the Sunday before classes start again and it all went by so fast. I spent the time with my girlfriend of about 2 months now, Julie. We went to visit her parents’ house In Aurora, Illinois for the first friday through monday weekend. We also spent saturday night at my friend’s apartment near Columbia University in Chicago, met some good friends, and had a nice Italian dinner.

We drove back up to East Lansing on the Monday, and then drove to my home in Ann Arbor on the Tuesday to hang with my brother who was home for the week and see some friends. Unfortunately, Julie suffored a 24-hr stomach flu that lasted from Wednesday morning til that night, so we stayed for another night. Miraculously, though, I walk away with no illness! Yay!

The final bit of excitement for my break came last night (Saturday) from Taste of Chaos at Detroit’s Cobo Hall where the Deftones rocked the house. Actually it was a bunch of bands, but they were mostly loud and boring. Deftones have some good material, though. BOH

Caffeine Nap?

Apparently, according to this source, the most effective way to stay alert when you’re not exactly well rested is to take a caffeine nap! Drink a coffee or other caffeine source and then sleep for 15 minutes—no more, no less.

http://goalsuccess.typepad.com/goaltips/2006/02/how_to_take_a_c.html

Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW, Good House Party Tonight

It’s Friday the 13^th and two good things are happening today. First, My new LCD has arrived. I’d been thinking of getting a new lcd for a while, and when I saw deal like this one, I had to splurge. It’s a combo Dimension system & LCD deal, but the price is killer. The bad news is that I’ll have to find a buyer for the tower that comes with it and my old LCD, but after all is said and done, I’ll have saved several hundred bucks on this screen (hopefully).

I’ve got the thing set up at the kitchen table right now… so that’s what’s in the picture. I was nothing but wow’d when I opened the thing up. I’m really not used to seeing screens larger than 19 or 20 inches. The design is really nice; the black & grey scheme matches the rest of my system. The base allows the screen to swivel with ease in all conceivable directions—including raising the entire screen up and down. You’ll need to raise it up in order to make enough room underneith to rotate the entire screen 90” clockwise and go into portrait mode. I haven’t looked into making this feature work in linux yet. Oh, and it has a multi media card reader in the left side of the screen which saved me just now when I couldn’t find the usb cord for my camera. I have no frickin clue where that thing is…

And I found it interesting that this product made #5 on PCWorld.com’s 100 Best Products of 2005.

The second good thing happening today is that I’m going to go DJ at a house party on Durand street (like a block over from me). I’ll be working in some other styles besides dnb to appease the peoples tonight. I may end up posting at least part of it for those of you who couldn’t make it. ;)

Tunes to Hack to

My friend Tim Riley wrote about someone who wrote about Music to hack to. He links to a bunch of mixes that I’ll have to check out as well as my site. ;)

I, too, am into things upbeat. Drum ‘n Bass is my preference, but I must admit that it will distract me at times. It’s still my favorite though.

One mix that I heard this morning is a very sweet techy liquid one by the Future Engineers who I only recognize as authoring a track on an also very nice atmospheric dnb mix album from Blame.

Update: I can’t believe I forgot to add the link to the mix. I just decided to listen again today and realized the link to the mix download page was missing. I guess it’s a freebie. GO LISTEN!

DJ Thread – A Big Long One

So it was a lazy afternoon around the house. Colleen has moved out, Erin is home for a couple days, and Matt is at work now until he leaves to go home as well. I think I’m going to end up at a house a couple blocks over for tonight since there isn’t anything going on around here.

Here’s the first mix for the new year, and it’s pretty long at 163:45. Unfortunately, mixxx was being a bit fussy today, so there are a handful of spots where it breaks out for a few seconds. It’s a pretty nice mix otherwise, though.

Update: Damn, there are some really nice bits in this mix, but when Mixxx gets disconnected from jack, the interruption really sucks. I genuinely apologize, once again. :)

Happy Christmas Etc.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas or whatever holiday you’d like to celebrate this time of year. Yesterday, we went to the aunt/uncle’s place for a family get-together of about 17 family members. As for loot, I got mostly just the cash and checks. The clear message this year is that people don’t know what to get me. But I pretty much expected this… which is why I’ve already upgraded the computer like a month ago. :)

In unrelated news, our amateur neighborhood wireless provider has proven that he has no idea how to manage an ISP. 1-2 days ago, he began blocking ALL except a select few outbound ports. This had the net effect of breaking my dnbradio streaming, quake playing, file sharing, and even email checking (imap) capabilities to name a few. He’s been faster to fix some than others. SSH tunneling allows me to use some services over an encrypted tunnel (using a 3rd host) but that doesn’t work for a lot of apps that are unpredictable as to which ports they’re going to use (quake, bittorrent, etc).

But anyway, he wants my dad and I to come over tomorrow and help set up a linux box as per my suggestion to handle the firewall rules and quality of service functions for his ISP. He’s clueless, but at least he’s willing to accept help.