For 3 weeks I’ve been posting like crazy over at donburnside.com. It’s a pretty cool site where you can find out all about me, see the work I do and read all of my blog posts. Heck, you can even subscribe via RSS if you like.

If you could update your bookmarks and subscriptions that would be awesome. When you are done, give your Mom a call. It’s been a while and she’s wondering when you will be coming over for dinner.

Then, one day, that blog ceased to exist. And it was even better.

A quick reminder for those of you that might have missed it last week. As previously mentioned, w(t)f is now in archive only mode and will not be updated any longer. Whoa whoa whoa there killer. No need to get all upset and defensive! I’m still a blogging fool, just someplace new.

You can find me now, full time, at donburnside.com. add /section/blog to read the blog. Heck, you can even subscribe in your favorite news reader with the feed.

wind(the)frog(dot)net will continue in it’s current state until the end of 2008. At that, full redirects to donburnside.com will go into full effect and windthefrog.net will vanish into nothing.

The new website address is donburnside.com.

For you using a feed reader, please update your feed to feeds.feedburner.com/donburnside.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Yea, that’s actually teh lad’s! W00t! A report card that doesn’t suck. First time since elementary school.

You could say I was nicely surprised when I opened the mail today.

Made even funnier knowing that Microsoft spent a whole bunch of money on ads that they aren’t even going to use.

Have a great week! I’m off to the Nevada and Arizona desert to earn some money. Keep an eye on the Flickr and Viddler for updates through the week.

Sunday post was already in the can when I woke up at 6:00a this morning. So I took advantage of having the morning to myself and got to spend a solid 4 hours working on the new donburnside.com.

By the time it’s finished it’s going to be the best parts of the theme I use here (and every where else), plus the good parts from the existing donburnside.com theme and the new header. Here is how it is going to work out.

• All blog pages and posts will be like this, complete with 2 sidebars
• All pages will have extra width and 1 single sidebar
• New footer section using a similiar layout that I did on the Implementing Scrum

I’m getting the colors nailed down as well. Overall, I’m very pleased with how it’s shaping up.

The header and body

I really like how the tabs on top turned out. Too bad they won’t look that cool in IE. Oh well, just more motivation for people to switch to FF/Safari/Chrome I suppose. Maybe IE8 will support the border-radius css style.

The footer

I already have the database almost converted as well as you can see from the archive links above.

Feedback, as always, is appreciated

My Current Frustration

Sure, I’m always frustrated, you already know that. If it’s not someone bragging to me about the latest expensive Apple gadget (that I want) they just purchased or too many people talking about that damned Apple telephone product (heretofore known as atp), it’s going to be something else.

I am here to tell you that am I currently in the possession of the teh Lads brand new LG ENv2 cell phone. It cost me $140 with tax and shipping. His Razor finally died and I need him to have a phone that works, so I really couldn’t get out of it.

The reason why it’s in my possession and not his is because he has been lax in answering it when I call. As I told him, the number 1 reason why he has a phone is (and, in this order).

1. I can make it ring
2. He can answer it, especially when I make it ring

2 days in a row in neglicted my calls. The worse case was Friday when I sent his phone over a dozen text messages, called no less than 6 times and left 2 voice mail messages. If I wasn’t going on the road this week, he wouldn’t have his phone all week.

Currently, there are 5 working cellphones in my house. The reason why isn’t important, but some of you know why. And god damn if I can’t get any of them to return my calls. For example.

I was at the store the other night and needed to check on something before I bought it (or not), so I called teh Lad for inventory check. He did not answer. So I tried again. Again, no luck. So I text him. Again, nothing. So I text 2 of the other phones in the house. Nothing. Yet again, this time to every phone in the house. Not a thing for 5 minutes until the youngest phone owner text’d me back.

This is normal behavior for the other phone owners in my house. Effective immediately, they have all been notified of their removal from my “in case of emergency” list.

The bad part of this is I’m getting ready to drive out to the desert again. In a car with expired tags and 198K miles. I’m afraid to break down or get towed. Made even worse that if there is a problem, there isn’t anyone I can call.

Annoying.

Ever.

It’s a tradition I try to take part in when I can. If I’m too tired or didn’t eat anything all day, then I definitely skip since I still have over an hour drive ahead of me. If I’m staying for dinner I do have one. But I don’t drink the whisky. Or rum. Or scotch. Or gin. I have to wuss out with a vodka something (of late, grapefruit juice has been pretty good). I just can’t drink the booze. Why?

I can’t get past the burn.

Into 2 rocks glasses with ice I pour in a generous shot of Jack Daniels for the g’rents. Topped with water, bottomed with a cocktail napkin. Into 1 more rocks glass I pour a sissy shot of vodka and finish with grapefruit juice or bloody mary mix.

As they down theirs, I sip mine, adding more mix as the level in the glass allows.

Wine? Oh yea, 2 bottles in a night is not a problem for me. Beer? I can keep up, don’t you worry. But booze? I can’t do it.

That’s not entirely true. I do enjoy a good tequila now and again, but we all know that I can’t have tequila if there is any travel involved. And a shot of Tuaca with an icy cold beer back is pretty keen on occasion too. I just can’t handle the hard stuff.

For those that missed it on the Twitter, I was playing with wine today.

My film transfer project is pretty much done for the most part, as is my family photo archiving. That leaves me to help the g’rents out with a few things around the house. And this one thing in particular.

Back in the ’70’s, my grandparents bought a crappy little lot in the mountains right on Lake Arrowhead. Over the course of 4 years they proceeded to build one of the most beautiful homes on the lake. Built entirely by hand by master craftsman, no expense was spared. Hand picked rock for the pier and fireplaces, solid oak for the walls and stairs, 1 piece bar tops also made of oak. You get the idea.

When my grandfather designed this house, he wanted it to have a wine cellar. So it did. Built into the foundation in such a way that the temperature was always 70 degrees and there was almost no humidity. All without the use of any machinery. Within this cellar lived some truly great wines, and those are what I’m dealing with now.

Among the wines in the collection, besides the 11 full cases of Opus One (79 - 86) are many bottles of BV Latour (71 - 83), Dom Perignon (including a ‘69), some fine Sterling Cab (’77) and 2 bottles of Chateau d Y’Quem (trust me, it’s fancy).

Mixed in with this high dollar examples were some more great wines, but not as spendy. Quite a few bottles of Fetzer from the ’70s and 80’s and more than a few bottles of BV Rutherford Cabernet from the ’70s and 80s.

It’s quite a bit of wine and I have taken it upon myself to organize, sort and inventory (the good stuff) and re-store it. Am I sore after moving over 24 cases out of that room into another? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely!

When my grandparents first started moving into the big house in Lake Arrowhead, they had to stock it. Some of the first bottles to arrive were some from Mondavi, of which I have found some ‘82 Cab and 1 bottle of ‘79 Pinot Noir.

With dinner tonight, Grandpa thought it would be neat to let me pick a bottle out of that room. So, naturally, I grabbed a bottle of BV Rutherford Cab from ‘88 (about $50) of which there are many. I brought it out and was shot down since that cab is on the ‘drink it all the time’ list, just from a new vintage. So, back to the room I went. I remembered when I found those bottles of Mondavi Grandpa’s eyes lit up and he sat back and said “That’s some great wine right there”. So, that’s what I grabbed. 1 of the cabernet and that bottle of Pinot.

From that he made me pick. I almost went with the cab, but last minute I changed my mind and decided to have the pinot instead. And yes, it was fantastic. Made even more so after curiosity got to my grandparents and they wanted to know the value. For those of you wondering at home, current retail value of a bottle of ‘79 Robert Mondavi Napa Valley Pinot Noir is about $125 per bottle.

But that’s not the cool part.

The cool part is that I got to enjoy what is probably the only bottle of that left in my Grandfather’s collection, taken from the first batch of wine that was delivered to the last house he built. And I got to enjoy it with him.

I was interviewed for the Viddler blog.

Thanks to Lavardera for recommending me!

I think it’s a pretty good start and now I can’t wait until it’s done and I get this fired up and running over there. Maybe a week or two left until it’s done.

Why have cable

A few years ago I decided not to waste money by having a land line phone and a cell phone at the same time. It was forward thinking when I did it, and now it’s all the rage. I mean really, how many of you have land line telephone service from your local telco? I do mean phone service, not a line that is there for your DSL connection. If you are younger than me, I’m going to say none of you. If you are older, I would say there is a higher chance, but not by much.

Looking again to save a few bucks, I’m thinking about turning off the television part of my Fios service. Honestly I only watch a few shows and seems like a waste to be paying Verizon $45 a month for 8 hours of programming. Then I saw this (via) and realized I wasn’t the only one.

But I have a really nice setup. 45″ HD TV. Full Dolby Surround (with 100w 12″ sub to rattle the walls). To keep that from going to waste, I’m seriously thinking about getting an Apple TV. I’ll buy the shows I want (in HD no less, or whatever the iTunes version of it is) and watch them when I want. I already have a pretty good DVD player for movies and I’m very comfortable using Handbrake for, um, any other programming I might come across, that I want to watch on the big screen.

Plus there is Hulu for when I want to watch Burn Notice, Carrier (which I highly recommend) or anything else that might strike my fancy.

Then, if I still need to be entertained, I can always cruise through Viddler, Vimeo and even YouTube. The way I see it, I don’t need cable.

Has anyone else thought about canceling your cable TV? Or have you actually canceled it? Let us know.

To start, I decided that today would be a good day to get on the scale. Imagine my surprise when it told me 235lbs! You could say unemployment has been good to me I suppose.

Then, as I’m driving to the g’rents to work on the video project and other things, my phone rings. Breaking the law I answer it. It’s my brother-in-law telling me that some guys working on the house on the corner just brought over my social security card, birth certificate, passport and title for the MINI! Nothing else was in the house except some empty coin wrappers and other junk, plus lots of grafitti.

So, off to a good start. I will probably be buying a lottery ticket for tonights game, see if the good luck streak will keep going!

I don’t mean to go all hippie-tree hugger on your here, but I have been wondering if you could do me, my friends and pretty much everyone else a favor?

You see, 1 gallon milk jugs are created in such a way that they have a handy handle made specifically to carry the jug or remove it from the refrigerator. This handle also provides an easy way for the jug to be removed from the trolley and placed into the trunk of a vehicle with ease after the purchase has been made.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could train your employees such that they don’t put the milk in a bag. It’s more difficult to carry (even in a paper bag), wastes more plastic (as if the 1 gallon capacity jug wasn’t enough) and it just gets in the way.

Any help you could provide in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

The Internet People

Some of you might have seen that toot last week. Plus a few others this week.

Mix those Windows toots with the Mac hate posts from last week and you started drawing conclusions. To which I can only say.

Man, you guys are easy!

First, I would like to take this chance to remind everyone that I am, still, effectively unemployed. This means I have no funds to purchase a new computer right now, let alone keep my bills current or my cell phone on.

Second, while the thought of having an inexpensive PC that is twice as powerful as any Mac for the same price interests me, they still run Windows. They still have IE installed on them and everything still doesn’t look as nice as it does on the Mac.

Then why all the Windows toots? It was time for my grand dad to retire his 7 year old HP with something new. Here are the spec.

• Quad core AMD processor @ 2.4gHZ
• 750GB hard drive
• 8GB RAM
• Super Duper Crunchy Windows Vista Home Ultimate 64bit
• 512MB nVidia Video
• 16X DVD do-it-all drive

Plus everything else you can image. 2 firewire ports, 6 USB ports, a spot to plug in another eSATA drive, all that. It’s pretty nice for the most part, but it doesn’t run nearly as fast as I would expect. That much processor and that much RAM I would expect a machine to be quite snappy. This one, while it’s fast, isn’t snappy.

I will have more on what I have had to do it to make it work for my Grandfather later, just wanted to clear up a few things with all y’all first.

Suckers

I’m sure you’ve seen the front page of donburnside.com or even the Motoringfile News Room. I built both of them using features built into Wordpress and nothing else. How did I do it?

Start by checking out this page at the Codex.

Retrieves an RSS feed and parses it. Uses the MagpieRSS and RSSCache functions for parsing and automatic caching and the Snoopy HTTP client for the actual retrieval.

If you scroll down the page a little bit there is an example of what you need to get things working. In my testing, I started with that as a base and modified it for how I needed it to look and work. Once you get it working the way you want, what do you do with it?

I built custom page templates within the Wordpress theme that included the code to pull the RSS feeds I wanted. Then, I created a page with a title and used that custom template for the page. If you are familiar with modifying WP template files or creating custom template files, then it should be easy for you too.

Am I using the right tool for the jobs I need to do? More specifically, am I using the right computer?

For the bulk of the work I do (HTML/CSS/PHP coding, light graphics work, photo organization, porn) I could use any computer.

But more and more I’m also doing A/V editing which requires more storage and more speed. 2 things that I don’t get from my current Mac. Converting video is slow. Importing video into iMovie is slow. Exporting video out of iMovie is very slow. Burning the video to DVD is extraordinarily slow. For example.

• Convert 60 minute of anything to DV takes 90 minutes
• Exporting 60 minutes of video takes as much as 135 minutes
• Burning 60 minutes of video to DVD takes 120 minutes

And this doesn’t count the audio. For me to make a 45 minute show ready for download after editing usually takes about 30 minutes.

For me to fix this, it’s obvious that I will have to upgrade my current computer. Except I can’t, you know, because it’s a Mac. I’ve already got 2GB of RAM (the max amount for my MacBook), I’ve upgraded to a 120GB hard drive (should be 500GB) and I’m stuck with onboard video.

The next logical step would for me to cruise over to the Apple store and dream about a computer that I will never be able to afford like a new Mac Book Pro or iMac. Nice machines to be sure, but is a 15″ laptop really worth over $2500? Is a computer with a 20″ display worth almost $2,000? Would either of these machines yield improvements over what I’m seeing now? Noticeable improvements that would justify the purchase price? I don’t think so.

Maybe it’s time to switch.

So I fired up Dell.com to start looking for a desktop. A very quick search finds a machine that has a faster processor than the iMac, more memory, larger hard drive and better video. Plus a 22″ adjustable display. How much? about $500 less than an iMac. I would call that substantial. And this would be a machine that would edit video faster, render audio faster, do pretty much everything faster than the Mac I have now.

The only downside is Windows. I don’t like looking at Windows. I don’t like seeing my work in Windows. I don’t like having to fiddle and mess around with my computer in Windows. And I hate IE.

Too poor to own a proper mac, too spoiled by OSX to switch back. There must be something I’m missing.

Right, the Apple fanboy. I hate you Apple Fan Boy. I didn’t think it was possible to be worse than MINI Owners, but you have done it! Not you among us of course, since you know better. It’s the rest of you. It’s the Macbreak Weekly crowd. It’s the folks that continually type Windoze or Winblows or some other less-than clever derivative of Windows. I didn’t like you when I switched in the first place. But I, like many of you, was blinded by the White.

But, as it turns out, I never should have switched in the first place. Unless I find a good reason (or win the lotto), I’ll be putting my MacBook up for sale and getting a Dell first chance I get.

Gotta use the right tool for the job.

I am done with the iPhone.

Did you see the period? Did you see the word done? This is to serve as your official notice that I will not listen to anything anyone says about the iPhone. I will no longer read posts that contain the word iPhone in them. I will no longer listen to podcasts that spend too much time on the iPhone. I’m going to stop following people on twitter that talk about the iPhone too much. After this post, I will no longer use the term iPhone on my blog or any site I work on unless I am paid to do so.

If all I had to listen to or read about was how awesome the phone is, then I probably wouldn’t be too upset. But that’s not all.

It’s the people that complain about it. That jailbreak it. That, for all intensive purposes, hate it. Yet they still carry the damned thing even though they get bad signal or have to jailbreak it to work the way they need it to, or have more problems than should be allowed by law. I don’t care.

I’m done. You can comment here about iPhones one last time. Go ahead, get it out of your system. After that, I’m done.

I’m probably going to switch back to Windows too, but that’s for another post.

I’m sure you would agree, that is quite a bit of old.

Besides all of that, it would appear that I have also turned into the family archivist. I have a Great Grandmother that is 99 and turns 100 in March. Consensus is that she might not make it to 100, so I have been gathering photos and scanning them to get ready for the eventual day when they will be needed for the funeral.

It’s not that I mind so much. It is that I am starting to forget what ‘new’ is like.

Maybe not entirely.

• I do have a new bank account
• I did make a new version of my resume
• This is a new post
• I have a few pairs of new underwear
• I have seen all of the new episodes of Heroes and Chuck

I have recently removed all of the old music from my iPod. I’m almost done dealing with the old video. I only have a few more old photos to go through and scan.

I’m hoping in a few weeks time I will be able to work on new stuff again. I’m getting pretty tired of the old.

If you are tired of reading about the old, click over to my flickr where I have posted a few new pictures (much like the one above).