May 2008 Archives

Playing around with Muxtape, because I think it's cool... you create a personal mixtape by uploading mp3s.  Not sure about the legality of this really, but it's still cool.

I clicked on their terms (which are surprisingly simple considering the nature of this site), and it turns out I don't really understand them anyway.  Maybe somebody can enlighten me:

Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes. Users may not upload multiple songs from the same album or artist, or songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use. Individual users may not create multiple muxtapes. Accounts not meeting these restrictions are subject to termination without notice. Muxtape will never reveal your email address to a third party. Muxtape is alive.

Right, so here's the line I don't understand:  "Users may not upload multiple songs from the same album or artist, or songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use."

Uh, isn't that pretty much any song I would want to put on my muxtape?  Oh well, it's all fuzzy anyway...

Well, probably not completely, but maybe I've been a little unfair to FriendFeed.  I guess I always thought it seemed like an interesting idea, but after awhile started to lose interest and found it a bit pointless.  But ReadWriteWeb seems to think that FriendFeed's new "rooms" are a acceptable replacement.  I'm not entirely sure I agree, but maybe I do need to give FriendFeed another chance.  I like that it supports a variety of services, but I feel a bit overloaded by it.  I mean to compare SocialThing and FriendFeed at some point, I do think that I actually prefer SocialThing's interface, but it does lack the service support that FriendFeed has.

Twitter's outages have been frustrating, but today I realized why I would probably always remain loyal to Twitter.  First off, nothing beats my Twitter network.  It's a good size, and it's full of wonderful people that I enjoy sharing conversation with everyday.  So what are my alternatives?  Well, there's Pownce I guess, but it lacks the mobile capabilities (especially SMS features) that I want.  Then there's Jaiku, which does have some great features, but lacks private or direct messages to people in your network.  Not to mention both of my networks on these sites are super small in comparison to Twitter.

So what about FriendFeed?  I don't think it's really the same as Twitter, but I'll check it out, who knows, maybe it'll suffice during the next Twitter outage.  I think I really should give it a shot to see what my friends are sharing on there anyway.  My FriendFeed network does grow a little bit every day, and it's mostly people I know from Twitter so it's good that my conversations are branching into other areas with the people I already enjoy talking to!

Of course I realized just now that when you approve somebody to view your feed, that doesn't automatically put them on your list... so how do I see who I've approved without going through old email now?  Oh strike one FriendFeed, I want an easier way to manage my friends.

If you want me to login using a username then ask me to type in a username.  If you want me to login using an email address, then ask me to type in my email address.  If you want me to login with an email address but ask for a username, don't expect me to get it right the first time I try it. 

And Comcast, this is just plain stupid:

Don't you think you could've saved us both some time by just asking for my email address and not confusing me even more with username + small print message that I'm not going to read until after I've failed one time?

But you can't tell, which is actually a good thing.  My blog was upgraded to Movable Type 4 today.  The awesome people at LivingDot upgraded me for free!  I'm so happy I asked about this because I probably would've attempted to do it myself and fail miserably.  I don't know why I didn't do this sooner either, I'm already noticing the awesome spam plugins I have and hoping that comment spam will go down on the blog.  I feared that my template would need changes, but it's looking ok.  I noticed the StyleCatcher plugin is gone, but I think because I used that, this is why there may be no template issues.  I think the blog needs a facelift anyway, maybe I'll take some time this summer and a put a new template on here.  I'm anxious to see what fun plugins I can install since I'm all up to date.

I'm just really excited nothing is broken!

**Edit** Ok, so apparently there are template issues, but I have a hunch that I screwed it up myself and it had nothing to do with the upgrade.

**Edit to the Edit** A temporary fix has been enabled from a backup css file I had on MT.  I recognize this template as the one I used to create my original one actually, I am almost preferring this one to the other.  The banner no longer fits right so I had to get rid of that.  I think I'll just go out and find something more suitable soon, but this will do in the meantime.

I hadn't uploaded some of my past displays to Flickr yet, I had a bulletin board I did for the Big Read and my Banned Books display from last fall still on my computer.

The Big Read title this year was "To Kill a Mockingbird", our book club didn't do it, but we got some great promotional stuff so I wanted to use it in our branch.

I drew, cut, and painted the tree.  This turned out to be a huge amount of work.  The projector I wanted to use to enlarge the tree from a picture had a burnt bulb, which I needed to drive to a photography store to replace.  Of course I did this all last minute so I was running around trying to get it done.

I did this other display last fall during Banned Books Week, I like to do something every year, but this year was a pirate theme, which I was all over.

This treasure chest was so much fun to put together.  I used craft paper and construction paper, which I painted and drew on to make it look like wood.  I found some of the coins around the library, I think I bought the cloth (which is a nice velvety fabric), the jewels, and the necklace.  I cut up some boxes that we never use to create a leveled effect inside the big box.

I think I've now uploaded all of them I took a picture of, I may have some on my old computer with my old camera though.  I like taking pictures of the things I put together like this because it helps me remember what I've done in the past.  Sometimes I look around online for ideas for displays from other libraries too, so I hope these help out other people looking too.

I put together a display of books at the library for Michigan Week, this year I did Michigan in Fiction and pulled together fiction books from different age levels.  I also requested as many of the Michigan Notable Books I could find. 

I took some pictures of the display, I really just wanted to blog about that though.  I have an Eye-Fi that puts the pictures to Flickr automatically, as well as on my computer through the wireless network.  It's a nice little SD card, I like it a lot.  I decided to work with the pictures on Flickr first this time, I edited them using the Picnik option on Flickr, which works really nicely.  I don't mind doing this for so few pictures, but even after I got all that done and decided to make them public, I still couldn't resist the urge to edit them on my computer and replace them.  I guess I'm just really attached to Piacasa, which is just awesome.  I think Picnik and Picasa do a lot of things the same, but the one killer feature that Picasa has that Picnik doesn't is the straighten tool.  It's just a beautiful Picasa options and it's so easy to use.

Editing in Flickr could work very well for small sets of images where I don't feel like I need to do a lot of editing through.  Picnik does do a great job and it's easy to use in the Flickr interface, I would probably use it again.

I'm not sure how many are familiar with the people search engine, Spock, I know I wasn't until recently, but I guarantee you that if you have any profile information at all on the internet, you're in here.  It probably wouldn't be a bad service if it weren't for their very aggressive way of forced participation.  Also, after a recent interaction I've had with them and their customer service, I'm very much turned off to this website. 

The search sounded interesting so of course I plugged in my name.  I was a bit surprised what came up on me though.  I guess the search engine does mine various social networks and pulls that information into search results pages, the overall concept isn't all that bad, it's just once I realized that the site was pulling information from my MySpace profile, that I had deleted last year, I thought something needed to be done to remedy that.  The site does offer the ability to "claim" a page, which does require you to sign up, but keep in mind I deleted my MySpace profile.  When I tried to claim my page it wouldn't accept my email address because my profile no longer existed for comparison.  I also noticed that this was not the only page I had, there was another Heidi Hansen, that was also me with equally outdated information.  This one I could claim, I do believe it came from Twitter information, plus some other accounts, but I right away noticed that my age isn't even right and the so called profile really doesn't offer anything else useful about me.  Sure I have outdated profile information out there, that was not really the issue for me, Spock was bringing that to light and made me realize I should probably keep better tabs on this stuff.  But on the other hand it is my information and my identity, and now that I was aware of the issues I wanted Spock to remedy them immediately.  I do believe I have that right with my identity, and I wasn't happy with how Spock was representing me on their site.

I actually had no issue with the page I claimed, I now had control over it and I was willing to let this page go, but I did want the other page that I had no control over deleted, so I emailed customer support.  I simply explained that I have information on Spock that I could not claim and I had no control over and I did not want it in their search anymore.  The response I got back though insisted that I did not delete my MySpace account:

The reason why you were unable to claim your search result is that you were referring to is that this one result (http://tinyurl.com/672yqu) is associated with your Friendster, Flicker, and Twitter accounts.  You should be able to claim it using any of those credentials.  As far as the search result associated with Myspace, it appears that the Myspace page is still up.

Now I was really confused... I made a big deal about deleting my account, I even tried to log in to MySpace after this email to see if my profile magically recreated itself (of course no account found).  This frustrated me, I felt like this guy was indirectly telling me I was an idiot so I decided I didn't want any of my information represented on this service so I emailed back:

Is it possible to just remove me from your search engine completely?  I don't want any of my accounts added, even if they are public, much of this information is old and I don't have time to mine through it all anyway...  please just remove me completely.

This seemed like a reasonable request to me.  It's my information and I realize it's public, but even Google will remove results from its search with reasonable requests.

Then I get this response back:

I'm a little confused if you are referring to this link (http://tinyurl.com/6bldot), then the Myspace page is still active.

Ok, I'm sorry, but this is NOT me! Despite the fact that my age is wrong on the first "valid" profile he pointed out, it's no where close to the age on this MySpace profile.  A quick look at profile images could've certainly verified this too.  I'm not sure first name and location are enough to declare a positive match either.

Yes, I most definitely wanted all information from this site removed, apparently standards are not top priority here.  He did include a link to a Get Satisfaction thread on deleting profile information which is a truly interesting and frustrating read.  I really recommend the entire thread if you would like reading things that make you want to scream and hit things.

So here's how you remove yourself from Spock:

If you've signed up for Spock and now want your account deleted, just flag your own search result and enter "Delete account" in the comments field. The "Flag" link is in the blue bar on the right side. Please do not flag your name or other information to request that your account be deleted.

If you want your search result removed (for users and non-users), please remove the source of your search result (LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) - it should no longer contain public information or it will just be crawled again. Once this is done, flag your search result and enter "Source removed" in the comments field.

So in general, if you're signed up for a Spock account you can flag accounts to be deleted (which I'm trying with my other active account right now) but that really doesn't matter because it will be crawled again.  Or if you don't want to register for an account on this site you have to delete your public social networks so they will no longer be crawled.  I'm not the only person the discussion thread that thinks this makes no sense, it's worth reading, and it continues to generate a few new comments that really support how stupid this service is.

An update on the MySpace thing though, I tried to claim the page without having it "officially claimed" on my login, I also put a note that the account was deleted and to remove it.  I think this worked, I don't see that page anymore.  Although my other page is still active and I sort of regret even signing up for an account now.  I just now marked it for deletion and I'm not sure if this will be successful either, but even after that I still have a registered account on this website I don't want.  I also don't think that any profile information they delete from their service will stay deleted.  There seems to be no way to delete the registered account, and apparently you can't delete the search result page without wiping yourself completely from the internet so there's probably no hope.  This service does me no favors, if anything it makes more work for me in identity management and I don't have time for it.

I went out and bought Sims Life Stories today.  It's really just a simpler, more directed version of the game.  At first I wasn't all that interested in it because I'm really into the normal game, but I haven't really played that in so long because it is really involved.  Once I start playing Sims 2 I have to build a house because I usually hate the ones I already built, I can usually pull off a decent floor plan in under an hour now, even with some complicated building cheats, but then I have to decorate it.  I often spend most of my time trying to find user designed objects for the decorations, this also takes time because you have to search around for things you like, this is both fun and time consuming.  Of course I still have yet to create people to go in the house, and determine some sort of personality to go with these people.  If it's an in depth story then you also have to build more houses and generate more people and personalities.

You can see how I do not have time for this anymore.  Although I do sort of miss playing the game, so that's why I gave the Stories a shot.  The game has two self contained stories, you can play one for a little while to unlock the other.  You can play each character according to their goals, but I guess you can also play in free mode, which allows you to build houses too.  I'm not so interested in free mode, I have the original game and a good number of expansion packs (some of which may still be in shrink wrap, sadly), but it's actually a nice way to get my Sims 2 fix without actually investing a year's worth of time doing it.

What's also nice is this seems to be a version of Sims 2 that I might even be able to "beat".  I'm not used to the game having an ending.

I believe Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista came out sometime last month.  The update came up in my notification area, but every time I tried installing it, it just wouldn't install.  SP1 is a long install, it takes close to an hour, I've read an hour and a half on some message boards.  The update would to through the entire three part installation, reboot, and then decide that it didn't want to install and then revert my computer back to its previous state, which would then take another hour.  I tried the install about three times on different days like this before I finally decided that today was the day I tried to figure out what the heck is wrong with this thing.

I found a lot of my problem and none of my answer, and as usual of lot of speculations from people who actually didn't have the problem but seemed to know the answer.  I noticed that HP has a whole list of "precautions" to take while updating to SP1, it also included a note to disable virus protection. 

It would've been nice if I had this option.  Well, my actual virus protection software made it difficult to turn off, and the service pack actually reboots a few times during the process and I suspected the software was just turning itself back on during this whole install at the end.

I finally gave up and uninstalled the virus protection.  I did a few other things prior to this, according to this article, which I suspect didn't actually do anything, but you never know.  I checked for errors on the hard drive, did a system file checker, and I ran the memory diagnostic tool for Vista, as well as uninstalled the virus protection.  Mind you, this was the fourth time today that I was going to try this update, on top of the three that I had done on other days.  I had pretty much determined that if this was not going to work then I would be done with SP1 and live with the fact that my computer will probably never function properly again.

Thank goodness it worked this time, because I was almost seriously considering buying a Mac next.  You know I have to be pretty pissed off at Windows to take such drastic measures...

After the service pack installed, I reinstalled my virus protection, and everything is actually running quite nicely.  I know this SP has a few under the hood changes, I actually don't really care what changes there are, as long is it doesn't mess up my system.  I also know that not keeping Windows up to date pretty much ensures you're going to run into software issues down the road... I did this with XP and SP2, I actually resisted installing SP2 for many years because it messed up my computer when it first came out.  The thing about XP updates though is you can basically skip them if you want.  I don't quite get this option with Vista.

It pretty much ate up my entire day, but I'm just happy it's working now.  I just beg of Windows not to release another service pack for awhile...

I know, I know, I haven't posted in a long while.  I won't bother making up excuses though, I've just been busy.  I just wanted to write a short bit about my adventures into Windows Media Center, which I have to admit is pretty darn cool.  Recently I set up WMC with my TV Tuner.  The TV Tuner card was purchased with the computer, I just never hooked it up.  I have cable TV now running to my computer and I'm using WMC as a DVR.  I've even opted for watching TV on my computer, which is handy when I'm working on it, I can make the screen smaller and view both windows on the same screen, or my screen is nice and big enough that I don't mind watch across the room if I'm not working on the computer.  The tuner card did come with a cool remote and a USB censor so I can control WMC from across the room.

I was thinking today that it would be cool to be able to access the recorded TV files on the PS3, but after some reading online it looks like this might only be possible by finding a program to convert the files, and that's not really worth the effort.  I'm sure getting the PS3 to see the files is no problem, but to actually read them is another story.  I have this issue with my Rhapsody library, the PS3 will see the tracks in my library, but will not play them due to file type incompatibility.

The other thing I found for Windows Media Center is just a little plugin application called MceFM which adds some Last.fm functionality to WMC.  This sounds a lot cooler than it really is though, it's pretty limited.  I can create a queue based on tags or artists, that's just about it however.  I don't have access to any of the social aspects of Last.fm and it doesn't seem to scrobble the tracks.  The website does say it's in beta and has a request for features in the forum, so who knows, maybe it'll develop into something cool someday.

Overall, I like Windows Media Center's pretty interface, and the fact that I can control it via my remote is not bad either.  I know there's a lot more I can do with it, especially in regards to extending it to the PS3, which I hope to figure out someday.