Note: Today I’m changing the rules. If I find new music because of the ’similar music’ recommendations for the prior day’s artist on lala.com and amiestreet.com, then I will post about that artist.
Emiliana Torrini
Emiliana was recommended by both Amie Street and LaLa as similar to yesterday’s artist, Alela Diane. She is the artist that sang “Gollum’s Song”, which played over the ending credits of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Currently on LaLa she has two albums – Fisherman’s Woman from 2005 and Me and Armini from last fall. I listened to the older album first and was pleased by it enough to buy the web album. It is the second album though that really impressed me. To my ears I was hearing a guitar centric sound, and at times heard sounds reminiscent of the Cowboy Junkies or Dire Straits. Emiliana’s voice sounds very much like the lead singer of the Monkestrikes, a band I’ll talk about in a couple of months.
Dan’s “I Likes What I Likes” Rating (1 to 5): 4.5
Similar Artists: There are no duplicate recommendations between LaLa and Amie Street, so think I’ll try Beth Orton from LaLa – I believe I’ve listened to her on Pandora before, and Hanne Hukkelberg from Amie Street just because of her name.
Note: Since I don’t hang out on the social music sites I’ve decided to share my music through my blog by highlight an artist a day. Alphabetically of course. And no, I don’t critique the music because I likes what I like because I like it, not because it meets some level of quality, hipness or relevance. That and I’m musically inept so all those fancy music terms confuse me.
Alela Diane
This is one of my finds from amiestreet.com, where I purchased her album “The Pirate’s Gospel”. She’s listed there as alternative/folk and her music reminds me of Natalie Merchant’s House Carpenter’s Daughter. Both Amie Street and LaLa mention Emiliana Torrini as a similar artist, so I’ll probably have to go check her music out. Other similar artists that I own – Basia Bulat and Cat Power – both of whom I enjoy listening to.
Update #1: For some reason I thought I’d sorted by artist before picking the first one to do. But no, it was sorted some other way, so Adele should have come first. I’m anal, but I’m not going to delete this and re-add it in the proper order. This update is for those people that will catch that it is out of order. You know who you are.
Update #2: I happened to find tonight information on Alela Diane’s upcoming second album, To Be Still, which comes out in February. Here is a YouTube video of the song White As Diamonds.
Each year I “run” the Henry Weinhard’s St. Patrick’s Day Dash in Seattle. If I remember correctly, 4 years ago I had a pretty good run, then took a year off, then 2 years ago didn’t have any fun at all after coming out of the tunnel, and then last year finally beat my brother. Of course he’s almost 8 years older and had heart issues he had to deal with. But hey, pretty sure I finished in front of him, haha.
This year I’m recovering from back issues in November that had me flat on my back the entire month, and while I’m not interested yet in getting back into running, for some reason I am looking forward to doing the run this year. And to make sure that it’s not a miserable experience for those 3.7 miles, I’m actually trying to prepare myself. My comfort level with jogging isn’t here yet, and probably won’t be for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been out walking four nights in a row. So far I’m up to 6 miles.
What are my goals for my preparation during these 7 weeks leading up to the race? Lose 10 to 12 pounds, strengthen my core muscles so there’s no worry of back issues during the race, and get myself to the point where I can run the entire course. I’ll try to post every week or so with updates.
So far in my preparation what I’m most happy about is my increase in crunches. For as long as I can remember crunches have always resulted in incredibly uncomfortable muscle tightening in the mid-back. Sticking with them this time has resulted in some good results. My physical therapist has me doing them with one hand behind my neck and then crunching to the side so the opposite hand goes out and past the knee. Switch hands and then after that put both hands behind the neck and crunch so that my elbows go to the ceiling. The first time I did them I had trouble doing 10 of each, and had to stop in between each 10 to let my back loosen up. Tonight I did 2 sets of 10 to each side and 3 sets to the ceiling of 20, 15 and 15. That’s 90 total. I still have to rest in between sets and split up each side and to the ceiling with other exercises, but hey, there’s little to no tightening in the back so I’ll take the improvement!
So I’m having an interesting conversation with someone on Facebook. You know those conversations, where someone makes a claim with no basis in fact, and yet you just know they will never back down from the initial observation no matter what you say, but you feel compelled to continue trying. I think I’m seeing some maturity in myself in that I’m not getting upset. More like I’m trying to see how long before they get pissed. :)
Anyways, this conversation started with the assertion that for 1/3 of the current bailout money, all the taxpayers could get a check for $500,000. Of course that’s possible because there aren’t really 138 million taxpayers, that’s the number of people in the US, and it excludes all the millions on welfare who are already getting a full ride. Umm, what? Even ignoring the welfare piece – yes, ok, the whole system does need to be reworked, I’m game for that – but do these people that think this read a paper? Or watch the news? Or do they really only get their information from Hannity, Savage, Limbaugh, and the like?
Ok, here go the facts. There are 305 million+ people in the US according to the Census website. According to the IRS website, in 2007 139.4 million tax returns were filed. According to the Tax Foundation, in 2004 32.4% of tax returns had zero liability. We’ll assume the upward trend has continued and guess that it is at 35%. That means that about 90 million of the tax returns paid tax. This is just tax returns, not actual taxpayers since many are joint returns.
If you gave these 90 million tax filers each $500,000, it would mean giving out $45 trillion! For comparison the annual GDP of the US, by far the largest economy on the planet, is only$13.8 trillion. And we aren’t taking into consideration all the joint returns. Or the fact that the majority of the zero liability filers actually work full time and aren’t on welfare. Guess we’ll just let them enjoy the trickle down effect of giving us hard working tax payers a boost.
Please people, research these things a little. Don’t trust the email forwards or the talk radio hosts – conservative, liberal or otherwise. If it doesn’t meet the reasonability test, then do a little googling to find out the right answers.
I choose, through hope for a strong America that leads the world to innovative changes, to agree whole heartedly with Wil Wheaton’s choice of passages to single out of Obama’s inaugural speech.
The future for America needs to be that of a respected leader, not a hated bully. And as we change the perspective that others have of us, through peaceful discourse and not wars that have destroyed more lives than the events that triggered them, we need to push for returning our lives to what they were. Contact your representatives in congress now, and tell them what you expect from them. Change won’t start with Congress, and it won’t start with Obama, but it just might start with us being inspired by the hope Obama inspires in us.
I’ve decided to focus on Excel in the development that I do ‘on the side’. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be creative in my left-brained way, and most of that time has been spent using web development technologies. Lately however I’ve gotten a little tired of constantly keeping up with the latest changes in the web technologies, and it has been very hard for me to stay focused on the projects I start when there are so many cool new toys to work with. Excel on the other hand, as a platform for development, has stayed relatively stable.
The workbooks I create will be at http://www.giantmoon.com. There will be free sample workbooks related to personal productivity, along with more advanced personal workbooks for a nominal charge. In addition I’ll offer custom Excel programming services. My strengths are in parsing of complicated text files, interfacing with databases, and manipulation of data within Excel. All of these have been used many times over the years to turn manual tasks that take hours to do into the click of a mouse button.
Update – 1/19/2009: Forgot to add in information about how I’m getting the DVDs into the library. Added in at the bottom.
Based on search queries people use to find this blog, the issues people have with the Popcorn Hour are similar. As I’ve said on here before, I wouldn’t recommend this product yet to the general public unless they have geek friends to assist them. That said, I figured I’d summarize my experience with the Popcorn Hour in hopes it will help others.
Purpose: For quite some time I’ve really wanted to rip my DVDs to PC/network storage and have some type of device that would play them on my TV. I’m not a video fanatic and the thought of running these things through 1 or more decrypters/converters/compressors and then possibly not having a format that would work – shudder. I’m not stupid, but trying to figure out video formats and devices and the software needed can leave you running in circles. In my very sequential way of thinking I wanted a process where I would stick in the DVD, tell some type of software to rip the DVD, then use my remote on the TV to pick and choose the movie I wanted to play. The Popcorn Hour A-110 and its ability to play .iso files, plus the ability through 3rd party software to play content from Hulu and Netflix, is what led me to the solution I have now, and I’m really enjoying it now that it is all set up.
Side Note on Ordering: Ordering was easy! After ordering you’ll want to click on the Community link on the Popcorn Hour site, which will take you to www.networkedmediatank.com, where you will find forum threads related to shipping information. The units are sent out of China in batches every week or so. Unfortunately I missed the end of a batch by 24 hours, and with the upcoming holidays my batch took a little longer to ship. Once it ships from China and you get a tracking number you can expect it to arrive quickly. Mine took 4 days from Shenzhen to Spokane, WA.
Suggested Setup for the Non-Fanatic for a DVD Library:
Adding a hard-drive to the PH A-110 unit: This was pretty easy to do – just open the case, slide in the HD, turn it on and answer some prompts. At this point, with my setup, I’m not sure if I’ll keep the HD in the unit. I will probably do some playing around with music and pictures, but if I don’t use the HD to store songs and pics I want in the living room, then I’ll pull it and use it for more video storage. An HD in the unit is not necessary for this suggested setup.
Video storage: If you are starting fresh, buy a PCI/PCIe eSata controller and only buy Sata/eSata drives. I’m currently working with 3 USB drives and moving around the files can be very slow, so I’m hoping through attrition I’ll move to the Sata drives and gain some speed. The ideal of course would be some type of network Raid storage that allows you to throw in any size drive, but I’ll have to wait for that. For now the location of the storage is more important than the speed of the storage.
Drives connected direct to the PH vs. connected to the PC: My suggestion, assuming you have a wired connection between the PH and the PC, is to put the video storage on the PC. I’m a Windows user, so Linux folks may choose a different path, but I found the trouble of formatting the drives as ext2, plus unexplainably slow transfer rates to the drives hooked up to the PH more trouble than it was worth. Also, I’m happier knowing the drives are out of the way, and that purchase of a new drive won’t require jumping through hoops.
PC/Network: Choose wired over wireless! My PH A-110 is wired through a switch to the router, and originally my PC was wired through a print server then wireless to the router. All the components in the system are 802.11g, and there was enough stuttering in the playback to make me unhappy. Once I moved the PC to a different location and connected it directly to the router playback was perfect. I haven’t seen it stutter since then, and have even had the PC copying movies from USB drive to USB drive, or ripping other DVDs, during playback with no effect. Also, with the wired connection I’m using regular SMB shares so I don’t have any need to install an NFS server.
PlayOn: PlayOn is installed on the same PC that the video storage is attached to. Yes, there are issues with the PH staying connected to PlayOn. I don’t think it is anything to do with the network chip as some have stated because I don’t lose my link to my shares on the PC. I’m going to pay the fee for PlayOn when the trial is up because I believe that the developers of the PH and PlayOn will get this fixed – too many people want this! If you haven’t looked at PlayOn yet, the biggest feature is the ability to connect to Hulu and Netflix to play content from your queues on those services. When it is working it works great, when it doesn’t work it is necessary to turn off and back on the PH unit with the switch on the back.
DVD Library: As mentioned above, I want my DVD library to be as easy as the Popcorn Hour. To get that ease of use I’m using AnyDVD and CloneDVD from SlySoft. Put the DVD in and within a few seconds it is ready for CloneDVD to copy. I simply set it with a target setting of a double-layer DVD, pick the disc features to include, and send it to an .iso file. I find it kind of a pain to rename the file inside of CloneDVD each time, so I send it to the same place each time, then move it to where I want it and rename it in Windows.
Feel free to comment with questions about my setup. I’d like to help out if I can, and would really like finding out how others are using their PH.
Update – 1/20/2009 – Added at the end the web sites that PlayOn supports.
Ok, so here’s the current setup:
Devices:
TV – Samsung HL-T5676S – 56″ DLP
Receiver – Yamaha HTR-6030
Popcorn Hour A-110
Connections:
PH is connected to the TV via HDMI, and to the receiver via optical audio.
PH has a wired connection to a Netgear switch, which has a wired connection to a Netgear router.
PlayOn, from www.themediamall.com, is installed on a PC that is connected to a Netgear print server, which is wirelessly connected to the router.
Result:
Nice! The picture quality, considering that it is streaming off the ‘net, is actually pretty good. If you compare it to the SD and HD qualities from Netflix, it is definitely close to the HD end. Navigation is as simple as everything else on the PH. I didn’t try browsing content, but I did go to hulu.com and add things to my queue, then started watching those items. So far I’ve watched episodes 5 through 9 of the BSG webisodes, and now I’m watching the 24 movie from back in November. Jack is back – can he do something about the blatant product placement advertising?
And another excellent feature – no setup! Once I got PlayOn installed on the PC, the Popcorn Hour picked it up automatically. One problem I ran into is after the initial trip through the menu system I started getting “No content found on the server” errors, which according to a forum topic on the PH community site, the software engineers for the PH and PlayOn are working on. Not being satisfied with that answer I decided to see if there were settings in PlayOn that could be affecting the connection. The first things I tried was unchecking the “Always process entire video” checkbox, then I restarted the PlayOn Media Server. And obviously you know the result since I’m now watching 24. :)
PlayOn also supports other services besides Hulu. The menu items you get when connecting to PlayOn are 1) Netflix (you will need a Netflix account for this), 2) Hulu, 3) CBS (decent quality – lots of shows listed – seems like most have episodes available), 4) YouTube (lots of options – most popular, recently featured, etc), 5) CNN, 6) ESPN. I think those last two are in the right order – unfortunately the connection to PlayOn from the PH started to fritz out again. I confirmed it is definitely the PH by starting up the XBox 360 and connecting to PlayOn.
Or at least what I consider to be success. After converting one of my external drives to ext2 and testing it, I put it back on the PC and started transferring files to it. Last night I put it back in the entertainment center with the PH A-110 and after watching the Mentalist off the DVR I brought up the list of movies that were on this drive and asked my wife if she wanted to watch something. And she said yes, so we watched The Phantom Menace. I very seriously doubt we would have gotten up and walked over to the movie racks and been able to decide on a movie – not on a week night.
So yes, watching a movie with my wife when we otherwise wouldn’t have is what I consider success!
I have to admit that I wouldn’t recommend this product to someone who isn’t a geek. Not that I’m some ubergeek, but I didn’t mind having to play around with things to get it right. Hopefully if anyone comes over and likes what they see then they can use this as a guideline to setting their’s up!
Before I got the Popcorn Hour A-110, I made sure I could connect dual monitors to my Dell laptop (XPS-M1330) so I could dedicate my desktop as a media server. That meant waiting for an HDMI-to-DVI cable from amazon.com. When that got here and I realized both my 17″ monitors had only VGA inputs (doh!), I had to swap out one of them for the 19″ monitor downstairs. And yes, it works perfectly, although I haven’t tried to set it up in Vista yet as I’m still mostly using Windows 7, which handled the dual monitor setup easily.
Next up was to install a server version of Windows on my desktop to see if everything would work with it. I had it all set up with a hodge-podge of 3 external USB drives (750GB, 500GB, 300GB), and 2 internal drives (250GB SATA, 500GB PATA).
Popcorn Hour was received quickly after it shipped from China, and setup was a breeze. Then I tried out a couple of movies streamed to it and noticed quite a bit of stuttering in the playback. Research on Google indicated that NFS shares may be better to use than SMB shares – although newer pages said the difference is now negligible. Trying to set up NFS shares in Windows wasn’t working easily, and a lot of suggestions were on the forums for HaneWin NFS server, so I decided to downgrade back to XP Pro.
The downgrade to XP was supposed to be the easy part, but I started getting disk read errors with strange characters showing on the screen, almost like it was some type of virus branding. After purchase of replacement hard drive – hasty on my part – and a number of hours of trial and error, I determined that it most likely is my IDE controller. If I have a bootable disc in either of the DVD drives then I get the disk read error – any other disc is fine. Once that problem was solved I started playing with NFS shares.
I installed the HaneWin NFS server and the streaming from those shares was better, but there was still some stuttering, so I was thinking my next step would be to physically move the desktop down by my router so I would have a wired connection between it and the A-110, rather than wireless from a print server to the router. Then it dawned on me – I now have an extra SATA hard drive – so I could install it in the A-110, install the NMT applications, and attach the USB drives direct to the Popcorn Hour.
This was going to work great. Adding the hard drive meant the NMT apps could be installed on the PH, which meant I could script nightly FTP uploads of any new DVD rips to the USB drives. Unfortunately all my USB drives were formatted in NTFS while the PH is running some type of Linux which prefers a different hard drive format. Luckily I recently purchased Acronis Disk Director which will format drives with ext2/3. Another problem solved!
And finally, tonight I attached a hub to the PH, added the smallest of the external drives which I’d moved a number of kids movies to, and fired up Lilo and Stitch for Jaiden to watch. And it was perfect! No stuttering!
So, in summary, if you get a Popcorn Hour A-110, here’s what I would plan on doing. Get some help! :) Hopefully the above helps, but as you can see if you run into any problems you may want to have a geek on speed dial. What would most likely have solved all this is to either 1) compress the DVD rips so that the file sizes are smaller, or 2) make sure you have a wired connection between the PH and your media server. Possibly a network with full 802.11n would also make a difference, as much of my wireless network is still 802.11g.
