8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

First off, I have two new sites to present:

Awecelot.com
I was in a Rock Band tournament at a party one night, and we entered our band as “The Ocelots”. The person running the show misspelled our moniker, and so we were down as “The Awecelots”. I thought it sounded/looked pretty cool, and so I snagged the domain. I am not exactly sure what I will do with it, but at least I have it.

BigSixSocialClub.com
For those of you who know me well, you know I am in a dominos club bearing the name of the URL mentioned above. The Big Six Social Club convenes every week to throw bones, and we now have chapters in Silver Lake, Washington D.C., and New Haven.

Yahoo! Media Player
Finally, I have launched the new version of my Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin. This new version allows you to input your Amazon Affiliate ID to monetize referrals from your site.

- click here to get Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v1.1

So on Sunday I went to celebrate Easter at my friends’, Steve and Kristin’s, house. While it for some reason involved an unusual amount of sombrero wearing, it also brought that standard excellent food, candy, and fun. In addition, they gave me my birthday present (we celebrated the week before; I was born on the “Ides of March”). Kristin made this most awesome throwback piece for me, and I was giddy when I got it. Now to find the wall space…

This Saturday I witnessed two fantastically ridiculous events in Downtown LA: the “Pillow Fight Day” flash-mob at Pershing Square and a gigantic, block-long water slide set up for a Dodge commercial.  Check out the Flickr slideshow below to see the silliness that ensued…

As I was leaving the office the other day I was perusing the radio and stumbled across this excellent playlist courtesy of Santa Clara University’s KSCU. It was an incredibly spot-on selection given my mood, and really made the afternoon commute enjoyable. Many thanks to the DJ who exerted excellent taste and also played my request. Below is the snippet of the set recreated from memory (DJ, please feel free to correct me).

Elliott Smith: Rose Parade (thankscaptainobvious.net)
Jose Gonzales: Heartbeats
The Mountain Goats: No Children (my request)
Belle & Sebastian: Wrapped Up in Books (vaguespace.net)
Jens Lekman: Your Arms Around Me (bestfootforward.info)

Well, the Jens Lekman song might have actually been different. That was the point at which I got out of range of the station and the fuzziness forced me to switch the dial…

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury area and felt inspired to swing by the Amoeba Music in San Francisco. While there I picked up two new albums. Check out songs from each below:

The Russian Futurists - Paul Simon, from “Our Thickness” (herohill.com)
Saturday Looks Good to Me - The Americans, from “Fill Up the Room”

If you just upgraded to Safari 3.1, you may have noticed that the Yahoo! Media Player is crashing the browser. This is due to a change in the latest version of Safari, and is being addressed and should be fixed ASAP (EDIT: this problem was fixed and pushed to the stable build as Wednesday afternoon, 3/19).

In the meantime, if you try to deactivate the current plugin (v0.3), you may encounter a problem. This is a non-fatal error, and your admin panel should return to normal through just hitting the “back” button on your browser. However, I have found and corrected the bug, so please download and install the new version.

- Download the Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v0.4 with bug fix

Every week I venture up to the corporate mothership in NorCal, and so I spend a fair bit of time in rental cars. I’ve worked it out with Avis so that I get a Prius whenever there is one available, but occasionally they throw me a curveball. This was one of those weeks. When I got to the rental car lot at the San Jose Airport, I found this white Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible waiting for me. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day; definitely top-down weather.

Growing up, my dad always had convertibles (which he has now augmented with a motorcycle), and so I have a visceral love for drop-tops. Once I got the top down and hit the road, I was able to put the car through its paces on the 101. The seating position is a little low for my taste, but it did feel cozy. The steering was a bit loose, although the handling in general felt nimble. I don’t have the peppiest engine in the model they gave me, but it still had a pleasant acceleration curve that gets more zest in the higher gears. In general, I definitely enjoyed darting about the roads while en route to Sunnyvale.

Well, this week certainly started off on the right foot, and I’m looking forward to spending spring with some more fun rentals.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a music player integrated into this site. It creates those small play buttons next to each mp3 links (such as for this incredibly amazing song), and also creates the player in the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you want to see a richer demo, play with my music posts category. This player is a free piece of software available courtesy of Yahoo!. While they have already done an excellent job of making the player easy to integrate into a site, I decided to test my coding chops and make a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform (the one that this site uses) to make it even easier to install and manage.

I recently had some free time to work on the plugin, and it now is up to version 0.3. I have completely rewritten the plugin, and added some functionality. There is now an “options” pane that will allow you to turn on the “beta” build of the player, so to speak, so you can test the new features coming down the pipe.

Also, I must disclose that while I am a Yahoo! employee, I work on this in my free time since I love the utility, am a big music fan, and needed a cool coding project. Please play around with this latest version and pass along any feedback.

Download: Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress plugin v0.3

Those of you who know me understand that I am severely lacking in kitchen talent. This has lead me to have an encyclopedic knowledge of microwave dinners, hot pocket types, and more recently, selective photographic memory for all restaurants in West LA. However, my fine friends from college do not share in my ineptitude. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have enjoyed many an excellent meal as an undergraduate. I personally witnessed one of Claire’s battles with buttermilk biscuits when she brought them to help us recover (along with Kevin’s lentil soup) from a rather zany New Year’s Eve as we spent the first day of 2008 playing the most excellent game, “Power Grid”.

So please lend your eyeballs to the work of Kevin, Brandon, and Claire, as they help guide you through the world of sustainable food, buying locally, and act as your general tour guides through the culinary kingdom. Their new blog, the Food Junta, is here!

I thought it would be great to have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV so I could have “Front Row” on the big screen. Well, this turned out to be a more complex (and more expensive) project then I had originally imagined.

After getting the Mini, the first thing I did was snag the right cables and accessories. This included a DVI <–> HDMI cable, the Apple wireless keyboard, and the Apple Mighty Mouse. With these gizmo’s, I was ready to enjoy some couch-browsing. This is when the first problem arose. I realized I was out of HDMI ports. This problem was compounded by the fact that my receiver doesn’t handle HDMI switching and was out of digital inputs. After a great deal of searching, I found a company called “Octava” that makes this wonderful product. The fantastic thing about their HDMI switcher is that it switches digital-optical signals as well. I ordered one immediately.

After the switch I arrived I got everything hooked up and was ready to rock. Actually, I wasn’t. You see, the DVI-to-HDMI setup was causing severe overscan issues (where the pixels extend out of the visible area of the screen). In order to correct the overscan, I had to spend way too many hours tweaking with SwitchResX. I finally found a custom set of settings that corrected most of the overscan. Alright, so now I was ready to sit back and enjoy some quality Front Row time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Besides 8bitkid, I also have a site with many friends called: “Hall of Beers”. It is a site that covers beer news, reviews, and adventures in booze (as our tag line states). I have just finished a large round of upgrades, so go check it out, add it your RSS, and take our sage-like advice.