Posted by DraconumPB on 06/21/08
Categories: General 32 views
Hey guys. This next week I am gone (until Monday, June 30th).
I will be in Bayfield, Canada for a few days, then on Wed I am going to Pittsburgh for Anthrocon. Don't expect me to respond to anything until Monday, though if I get internets I might respond sooner.
Posted by DraconumPB on 05/28/08
Categories: Computers/Internet 81 views
Sorry guys. I love my Crackboo- er, Macbook now. I know that I said I'd never go to Macs, even if they made me do it, but, well, I take that back. I'm all about the Mac OS now. It's pretty hot stuff.
Now my only gripe is the price point. Fix that and we have a surefire winner.
The funny thing is, I am starting to feel like my money was more than worth it, even when I could have spent half as much on a Win-based laptop.
(PS: There's only one reason for this: Mac Saber. jk.)
Posted by DraconumPB on 05/20/08
Categories: Computers/Internet 78 views
I just got a Macbook a couple weeks ago. I love it to death (despite my previous inhibitions regarding Macs.. mainly due to latent and not-so-latent feelings of hatred towards the general mac-using populace..).
However, I just now had a very close call. I was actually close to calling (gasp!) Apple's tech support.
I really want to be able to use my external hard drive right now, but guess what? It's formatted with NTFS, so I, er, can't. Yup. I simply can't write anything to my external hard drive. So I thought I'd check out this tool: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
Neat, huh?
Well, sortof, if it wern't for the fact that it borked the fuck out of OS X's Finder. As soon as I installed the damn thing and rebooted, Finder would not start successfully, no matter what. Hell, I couldn't even reboot the thing without holding down the power button. Needless to say, I felt like I was thrown back into the days of weird Windows problems, only worse. Honestly, I can't say there's ever been a time when I had a Windows problem I couldn't solve using some ingenuity.
Unfortunately, one thing about OS X that does bug me is that being able to troubleshoot problems yourself seems next to impossible. Heck, I couldn't even download/run anything... because any downloadable application comes as a .dmg which needs Finder to be opened! And I only had the Dock accessible, not my full list of Applications, because that too requires the Finder.
So, my first task was to get to Terminal. I couldn't browse for it, BUT I could do something else... I went to go download an application using Firefox (which was thankfully on my dock - else I'd have been royally fucked). Firefox prompts you for what app to use to open .dmg files! I clicked on 'Choose' and was brought to a mini filebrowser which apparently was not dependent upon Finder. I told Firefox to use Terminal to open the dmg file. When it was done downloading, it followed my orders and opened up Terminal (obviously not opening up the dmg file as that's not what Terminal does, but that's besides the point). So from there I browsed around in the System dir until I found the directory (/System/Library/Filesystems/...) where the installed ntfs-3g files were kept. I just did sudo unlink and sudo rmdir to every file/folder related to ntfs-3g, and rebooted (and prayed to Steve Jobs, if He even exists.)
Posted by DraconumPB on 04/30/08
Categories: General 106 views
I hate it.
"How's your day?" or "How are you?" or "What's up?" are questions that I loathe. When people ask me them, I have to spend a bunch of energy trying to come up with a succinct answer that actually sums up my day in about three words.
Now, I can tolerate them if they are simply the icebreaker to a real conversation. But they, in and of themselves, are not conversation. Do not IM me to say hi if you have nothing else to say, as having to deal with small talk from umpteen-billion people is a waste of time and energy.
It even bugs me when people do this at work, say passing by in the aisle-way between cubicles. "Hi" I can tolerate. "Hi, how's it going?" is slightly less tolerable, however. I generally ignore it and treat it as part of the greeting these days, though. Which usually ends up making my response either nothing, or "Good." I haven't the time (literally, we're talking about a quick pass-by in a hallway here) nor the energy to come up with a meaningful or accurate response, and honestly, you don't really care to hear what it is, I'm sure.
Every once in awhile is fine. But if you're repeat offender, be aware of the fact that I probably consider you to be really annoying and don't have it in me to tell you so directly.
Posted by DraconumPB on 04/21/08
Categories: General 131 views
I recently attended Penguicon 6.0 in Troy, Michigan. It was a convention where all kinds of geeks got together and celebrated whatever they wanted to celebrate, and partied all weekend long.
While there, there was a table filled with little advertising pamphlets and other cards. There were also a bunch of burned DVDs, simply labeled "WDET". WDET are the call-letters for my local NPR station, which, until last year, was the home of interesting, locally-produced content including several lovely music programs. At some point (I don't remember exactly when it happened), WDET killed off nearly all of its original programming and became a station full of nationally syndicated talk-radio, making it just like every other NPR station. Everybody that loved WDET for the things that made it great was soon in an uproar, but there was no turning back.
Well, these WDET discs that could be found contained something very special.
From the file Readme.txt found on the disc:
" What's this?
This is a piece of history. For decades, WDET was known as the home of locally produced "college" and alternative music programming in Detroit. From techno to bluegrass and everything in between, WDET dedicated lots of airtime to it. They carried some NPR news and talk, of course, but music was the bulk of their schedule.
In March 2007, changes were announced. Five of WDET's signature music programs would be canceled, and the schedule filled with more NPR during the day, and the BBC World Service overnight.
But nobody in southern lower Michigan was hurting for NPR programming during the day, or the BBC world service at night, because that's exactly what Michigan Radio (WUOM/WFUM-FM/WVGR) already provided! WDET was turning itself into a clone of Michigan Radio. Comparing the two stations' schedules for an entire week (168 hours), in 2005 their schedules only overlapped by 39 hours, mostly Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation.
By 2006, the weekly overlap had increased to 61 hours, and as of April 2007, the overlap is 103 hours. Well over half of WDET's schedule now mimics Michigan Radio's. WDET's coverage area is a subset of Michigan Radio's.
Five great music programs went off the air at the end of March, and this is a collection of their last days.
The files are in WMA format, exactly as they came off WDET's streaming server. Playlists for each show have been saved, as this data is no longer available on the site."
That's right. This disc I now am in posession of contains many hours of the last two months of original WDET programming, including a torrent file designed to help people who have a copy of the disc complete their collections and share them with others. If I can figure out how to work that thing (I rarely use BitTorrent), I will post more info on how to obtain and share these files.
IF YOU ARE THE PERSON WHO LEFT THESE DISCS ON THAT TABLE AT PENGUICON, I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU. I want to find you and give you a hug. You are a kindred soul. Please be in touch.
Posted by DraconumPB on 03/31/08
Categories: General 148 views
Guys,
I think this is it for me. I've realized that I can't seem to accomplish any of my goals, so I'm done trying. I'm taking the site and forums down in a week, so collect everything you want to before I do. (Including the music FTP'ed up to the server).
There is some good news, however. I've gotten an offer to move out to New Mexico and help run one a convenience store that my uncle owns. He assures me that I'll get decent pay, and first dibs on 'expired' dairy products that we can't sell. (Little known secret - unopened milk can sometimes go a week or two after the date!).
Anyway, send me an email if you'd like my phone number.. I'm going to be getting away from the Internet entirely.
I didn't actually think I'd get to do two years in a row, but.. well.. the proof is in the pudding, my friends. Or something like that. Anyway, whatever, I get to DJ Anthrocon again! And people won't hate listening to what I have to play (I hope!) At anthrocon, if you don't like the music - come back in an hour :)
Posted by DraconumPB on 01/17/08
Categories: General 1546 views
Lemme explain this one:
So you all know that I go by "Draconum", right? Well, a lot of people assume this means that I'm supposed to be some dragon-type thing. Which is, of course - not true. The confusion arises from the fact that my handle came from a game (Mage Knight), from a class of character called "Draconum" - which are dragons. Basically, I just started using the name as a handle in online games and messageboards, and soon enough, I was known as "Draconum"!
Then I got into furry, and decided that my furry persona was definitely a husky. But everybody knew me as Draconum, so I was not about to go and change my name. Heck, I even call myself that occasionally (and sometimes my friends - IRL - do too!). Heck, I GOOGLE OWN "draconum" (check it if you don't believe me).
So I was talking to a couple furry friends of mine, joking about being drawn as a "drusky" - of course, a dragon mixed with a husky. I've always liked dragons, sure, just never considered it to really align with me or represent me at all. But it sounded like an interesting idea. Apparently, it's already been done, as a fursuit even. That is Really, Really Cool.
Posted by DraconumPB on 01/15/08
Categories: General 201 views
I've been getting, occasionally, bounced emails from various servers/places saying that the message I sent was rejected by its spamfilter.
Why? It appears that some jackoff spammer is using my domain as his origin-address on his spam emails, so everybody that gets them sees 'draconum.net' as the sender of the email.
No spam email ever originates from Draconum.net, ever.
In fact, our DNS stuff is set up so that our email services are actually hosted by Google, so it would be impossible for my server to actually send out email in the first place.
If you recieve spam email appearing to originate from Draconum.net, it's not sent by me! It's sent by some spammer using my domain name as the return address. So, yeah. Hopefully anybody who thinks I'm a spammer reads this.
Posted by DraconumPB on 01/06/08
Categories: General 224 views
OK - lemme get this out there - why doesn't anybody seem to agree with me that at the end of the day, Microsoft, Apple, Sony - even Google and Mozilla - are essentially the same money-grubbing company?
I know an Apple fan and a Sony fan, neither of which believe these companies can do any wrong.
Bullshit!
Probably my favorite company is Sega, because Sega is, as far as I can possibly tell, pretty honest for a company, anyway. Nintendo has their moments, I guess. But Sega seemingly sacrifices itself for the gaming industry all the time, usually to the benefit of Sony (who has had no problem stabbing them repeatedly with unfair but probably legal practices).
Though actually, Apple is not nearly as bad as Sony, they just have more of an attitude problem. And Steve Jobs.... ugh. Steve Jobs is pretty much worthless. At least their products are pretty decent.
(note: I don't know anything about anything. I'm not trying to be definitive here. I just have some personal grudges :p)
Posted by DraconumPB on 01/01/08
Categories: General 205 views
It's 2008!
So don't write the wrong date on stuff like I will. (Seriously, that's one thing I DISLIKE about the new year).
That and the fact that it never quite feels like it's really the new year until like, oh, 2-3 months in.
As far as I'm concerned, it's still 2007 :)
But hey, hope you guys had a good year. I actually did, despite it all. 'Cept it would have been nice if my boyfriend wasn't in Pennsylvania all this weekend. =/
At least I've got lots of good (professional) prospects coming up in the future, and possibly a way out of the current muck I'm in these days. Lots of opportunities to be seized... just gotta go after 'em.
Posted by DraconumPB on 12/22/07
Categories: Google That Word 531 views
http://draconum.net/index.php?cat=42 < If you remember, way back when (over two years ago, actually!), I did some stupid little posts called Google That Word, which, against my better judgement, involved picking words off the top of my head, and then giving each a random number. I would then GoogleThatWord (tm) and pick the image in the list corresponding to the number (i.e. 5 would mean I would pick the fifth image in the results). This made for some weird and random stuff.
I've decided it needs reviving for Christmas, though I'm going to make a slight modification. It's going to be based off of the Flickr image search, which may make for better (and less irrelevant) results. I'm sorting by interestingness, by the way. I'm also foregoing the number, because it'll probably be best if I just handpick the most interesting pics to post anyway.
So, here's the words:
Figgy Pudding Santa Cat Consumerism Lots of Ham Reindeer
An article by none other than David Byrne himself - both a musician and artistic/practical intellectual (among many things). This article is him talking about changing business models for music distribution, why joining up with a big label is often a BAD idea for nearly any artist, and he also details the 6 primary ways to do business with music these days (ranging from the 'label owns all' approach to 'self-everything', where the artist essentially does it all).
I'm mainly in the camp that thinks that labels aren't entirely obsolete yet, but they need to be much, much smaller. And composed of artists (with a dash of business sense and technological savvy), not guys in suits with executive payrolls.
For anyone who is aware of our current evil plans, you'll know that we're trying to set something up like this ourselves ('we' being myself and my co-conspirators). We're all artists, we all want to sell music, but it doesn't have to be alot, we don't want to spend a lot of money, and we want to do almost everything through the web (though sales of physical media are a must. CDs now and hopefully vinyl later - this is paramount for the electronic musician, whose clients/patrons could potentially include DJs. Fortunately such people are increasingly turning to web-based download stores for music and not relying quite so heavily on the pressed wax, much to the chagrin of purists.)
Posted by DraconumPB on 12/19/07
Categories: General 216 views
Dynamic Duo - Go Back
This is a song that's in the dancing video game Pump It Up (basically like a Korean Dance Dance Revolution with diagonal arrows instead of the traditional up, left, down, right, as well as a center-step in the middle). I don't really play PIU, but my boyfriend now does and I watched him play this song many times the other day. It's an awesome song to listen to and the video is cool too :)
This is a mix I did for an audition for a spot as DJ at Furry Weekend Atlanta 2008. It sounds like shit because I recorded it through the mic input on my laptop, which I think is Mono, and also really terrible anyways.
So it sounds pretty terrible, but it's a good mix anyway :p
Glenn Morrison - Hydrology
Retroid - Snowdrop
Tilt - New Day (Boom Jinx Dub)
Deadmau5 - Jaded
Draconum - Looking Glass
DJ Jeroenski - Back Once Again (Vandalism Remix)
Robot Needs Oil - Defected (Olivier Giacomotto Remix)
Copyright 2006-2007 Draconum
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