Voting

OK, this is my one post about voting... hopefully. Enough things have happened recently that I feel it's worth a post.

I've been pretty interested in the election this year, but unfortunately I waited pretty late to get my voting registration transferred to my new address. I finally looked online to try and get it changed last month, and was disappointed with the "online process". All it really did was take your standard information and put it into a pdf that you could either print and mail, or that they would mail to you. Not quite the easy and quick solution I've come to expect from the internet :) I finally got my notice this week that my registration got changed, and it turns out that my voting place is in someone's house a block away - it's pretty cool that I'm going to walk down the street to vote :)

We finally watched the SouthPark election episode this weekend, and it was ok. It seemed a little less focused than some of their better episodes. If this election is any indication, we have a whole bunch of politically motivated shows and movies to "look forward to" every four years... meh.

My parents sent me a forward of some information about how much Kerry has cut spending and would be a worse leader, which just got me angry. I hate forwards, and I'm disappointed that my parents feel the need to try and change my mind (and maybe think that they can change my mind) about my political beliefs.

OK, I'm done venting... don't forget to vote :)

Creative TV

Sometimes we forget to fast forward through the commercials with our TiVo, and tonight it blessed us with some profound lyrics:

If you want it
And you need it
Just ask us
And we'll get it

flickr

While I'm on a roll tonight, I'll mention that I opened an account with flickr, to try it out. I'm currently using it as a quick place to store and share my cameraphone pictures, but that may change when I have more time on my hands.

You can check out my photos here.

MarsEdit

I've been playing around with the MarsEdit beta a bit, and I like it so far. It doesn't support Blogger all that well yet, but it's good enough that I've been using it for the past half dozen posts or so.

Currently it can't:

• set titles for blogger entries (even without that, I am happy to go add that later just so I can save things on my hard drive)
  
• download entries from my blogger account

But those are hugely outweighed by:

• an easy way to save entries on my hard drive
  
• quick html formatting so I don't have to keep typing the code to make links
  
• an interface that just feels more comfortable than a web page - nothing against blogger, I just like having a client app for this.
  

Anyone else played around with it?

Percussion tape

We had another marching show this last weekend - down in Gilroy. The weather was nice to us early in the day, so we were able to practice without getting rained on, but it didn't last. Soon after we got to Gilroy that afternoon it started raining, and it was on and off for the rest of the night.

Rain is arguably better than snow for the performers, but it still sucks for the instruments. Almost every percussion item doesn't react well to water: drum heads, drum shells, mallet keys, yarn mallet heads, felt mallet heads, etc. - so we spent a good portion of our time avoiding rain and drying off the instruments when all else failed. The show went pretty well though, and we certainly had our best performance of the year. Playing in the rain can be really fun, and I think the kids figured that out during the show. Once you realize that, even though it's pretty miserable, you can't do anything about it - all of a sudden you can have more fun than you would for a regular performance. Weird but true.

I spent a good chunk of Sunday listening to the percussion tape from the performance, trying to see what things we can improve. Marching bands get an overall score for their performance, which is made up of parts such as music, general effect, and what I really care about - percussion. Since I don't really take drum lessons any more, I take the time to review tapes and try to improve my writing and teaching skills by looking over what things we've done. I started doing this last fall, once I was writing the entire percussion book, so I've got a fall and spring season full of tapes that I can refer back to so I can figure out what did and didn't work. It feels like I can account for things better when they're written down, rather than just looking back and thinking "that was a good/bad show" (which is the most I can really remember of my own high school or drum corps performances). It's kinda nerdy, I guess, but I enjoy it :)

Blogger feeds and NetNewsWire

I was stumped for a while the other day - Daisie pointed out that my blogger blog wasn't working in NetNewsWire. I spent a while tracking it down, and since the answer was a little hard to find, I'm posting it here:

Blogger.com feeds don't work with NetNewsWire 1.0.8 - you need to get a more recent version of NNW (such as 2.0b6 - posted today).

It seems pretty simple, but it actually took a while to find. Unfortunately NNW allows you to add the atom feeds that blogger creates, but once they are in your subscriptions list they don't behave correctly. The NNW 1.0.8 documentation doesn't mention anything about atom feeds - you have to find mention of it in the docs for the 2.0 betas or in old mailing list archives.

Hopefully this will save someone else the 20 minutes it took me to track it down :)

Bloglines vs. NetNewsWire

I've blogged about this before, but things have changed a bit since then. Bloglines has gained a bunch of new features (like blogrolls, linkblogs, etc), but I haven't really used any of those. I still like using bloglines because it keeps everything in the browser - there's no switching between apps.

The other key feature for me is keeping all of my machines in sync. I find it hard to believe that I ever lived without .Mac syncing for all of my machines, and I don't want to have the same problem with web feeds. But since bloglines introduced their web services and NetNewsWire announced support for it, this feature will soon be possible in a desktop app. I'm really excited about it, and I can't wait to give it a try (it's not in the current betas).

Here are some of the other "good things" for each of the services, but they aren't important enough to me to get their own individual paragraphs:

Bloglines

• it shows the number of people subscribed to a feed, which I always find interesting
  
• being able to view things from anywhere, on any type of machine or browser, is pretty cool (though I haven't done it on any machine other than my own... it's the principle!)

NetNewsWire

• the non-web interface allows me to do multiple things at once, like reading an entry while changing the info for a feed
  
• it's a cool little app, and I love little Cocoa apps :)

Cocoal.icio.us continued

I meant to give Buzz some comments about Cocoal.icio.us when I would pass him in the hall - but it just hadn't happened, so when I wrote the last post we finally got around to talking about it.

Cocoal.icio.us is a great app, allowing you to accomplish things that are easier to do in a desktop app, such as searching as you type. It's got a really clean UI, which I expected just from knowing Buzz. The actions that you can do within del.icio.us are pretty simple - post, edit, view - and most of what I have been doing so far is posting. For me, I have the same sort of conflict that I do with Bloglines vs. NetNewsWire (I'll rehash this in a future post) - posting is a little more convenient (and to me, appropriate) within a website. del.icio.us has a script that you can add to the Safari toolbar that will add the current link, which works really well. Where I think Cocoal.icio.us really shines is in viewing and editing. When I'm trying to find a link it's much easier to search by typing or click around on the various categories and get immediate results - which is where the web version isn't nearly as elegant.

I had originally hoped that Buzz would to add a list of other people's del.icio.us links, but it turns out you can do that sort of thing by subscribing to various items in your inbox (though I still need to try it). I think my usage pattern for this will be similar to shared iTunes playlists - I don't want to look at them all the time, but when I'm in the mood for surfing and have time to kill, it is fun to browse other people's links.

My only other feature request is for the ability to sort the table columns for links :)

15" Aluminum Powerbook

After it sat in some warehouse nearby for the past three days, my new laptop finally got delivered. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it before - I ordered a new laptop last week! Woohoo!

Xanga vs. LiveJournal vs. Blogger

When I got started with blogging I only really knew of two services - blogger and livejournal. I don't know exactly why I chose to go with blogger (it might have been because Amul was using it), but as time goes on I am getting happier with my decision.

Originally my blogger account didn't have an RSS feed, didn't have comments, and it was the free version of what blogger offered (at some point you could pay for extra features and to remove adds, etc - but by the time I got my account, I couldn't find the place to upgrade it). All of that has improved, and I don't really have any complaints about blogger these days.

LiveJournal was the other option I knew of at the time, and again, I don't really know why I didn't choose it - but I can tell you why I wouldn't choose it now :). Actually, it's not all that bad. In LJ you can add people to your list of 'friends', which is more than just a blogroll - you can create entries that can only be viewed by your friends list. I'm not a fan of creating accounts just to be able to view things, so I have resisted creating an empty LJ account so far. It still allows you to post anonymous comments and have an RSS/ATOM feed. Most of my info on this came from a discussion where I was taunting Daisie about this very policy, so I may have missed something in my eagerness to make a joke at the time.

I went on Xanga for the first time today to try to find sites for some of the people I teach with, and unfortunately I had to register to even try searching (at least it didn't take long). Even after that, it wouldn't let me search some things unless I was a "premium member", and so I looked for another way. I originally thought that they didn't have RSS feeds, but a quick google search turned up the answer. Ok, so I don't have as many things to be upset about...hmm. Well, browsing through random sites, there seems to be a large proportion of annoying designs - music that plays when you open the page, background pictures that make it impossible to read the text, etc... so I guess that's something :)

Of course, none of the people I work with have sites with that problem. Seriously. No, I mean it.

My del.icio.us links

I recently added a link to my del.icio.us links to the sidebar, but you probably haven't noticed unless you have _way_ too much time on your hands. del.icio.us, aside from being really tedious to type, is a social bookmark manager - where you post and categorize links online for you and others to see. It keeps track of them by keyword, allows you to see other people that have linked to the same thing, and probably has many other features that I don't know about and/or haven't really used yet.

It's really a perfect service for me, since I have been dragging URLs to my desktop for years, and I have a huge folder on each of my machines with lots of links that I have no idea what they are about anymore. I always figured I was saving them so I could find things later, but the mangled web page names make it really difficult to find anything, so the folder sits idle. (I also considered writing an app to parse the 'internet location files', but then I think I saw something shiny off in the distance...)

I wouldn't have even looked at del.icio.us if not for Buzz and his Cocoal.icio.us client for Mac OS X. He was the first to explain the service to me and help me realize that it was exactly what I wanted. Kudos to Buzz - it's a really great app!

Techno-woes

At home, our reception of UPN has been getting gradually worse over the past few weeks - which wouldn't be so bad if that wasn't our daily source of Simpsons episodes. Well, something seems to be causing problems with our DirecTV, and even with the help of tech support we haven't been able to figure out if it's the dish (maybe the neighbor's tree has grown this summer), the cabling, or the receiver. Unfortunately, there isn't a really fast way to check, and I don't want to disable things for more than an evening to try to figure out what's going on. Since we still have one tuner that is working, I'm not very motivated to tear everything apart either :)

TOB

That's "Tournament of Bands", not to be confused with "Tower of Power". The Cupertino marching band competition was this past Saturday, and I'm happy to report that we (Fremont HS) won our division. It was the first time we had marched and played our whole show (except for another drill set or two at the end), and the kids played really well. I'm really proud of the percussionists, since (as I mentioned before) they just started looking at the last song this week.

Our show still has a long way to go - the guard doesn't have all of their work that they will eventually have, the drums have various things to work on, which should keep us busy for quite a while. It's a better place to be than if we had everything fixed and didn't know what else to do - but as many times as I've heard that said, I can't say I've ever been in a group with that problem.

Band competitions

Well, the band season is in full swing. Last weekend was their first performance - an exhibition for the other schools in the school district. This weekend is our first competition, and we're playing our entire show for the first time. Now that the kids have all the music, it's just lots of cleaning until the end of the season - lots and lots of cleaning.