Small things annoy me… like links that spawn new browser windows.
If I’m clicking the link, I obviously want to go there. Don’t leave the current screen up.
All I do then, is shut the one that just popped up and open it in a new tab. But still, annoying.
Re-ripping my CD collection for the 4th time in as many years, I’m reminded of all the great music I own, that I rarely listen to.
Having everything located on a central server you can stream from, either by artist or just random, let’s you hear things you haven’t heard in years.
I need to get the server back up. Soon.
From all appearances, it’s anything but Time Warner vs. Comcast. From a business point of view, Comcast owns 22% of Time Warner. They’re jointly buying Adelphia together and splitting it up.
And that’s where it get’s ugly.
In doing the joint venture to buy the US’s 5th largest cable company (Adelphia), and divest Comcast of it’s 22% share of Time Warner, what they don’t tell you is they’re going to swap some markets around. The Star Tribune has the story.
And one of those is here, the Twin Cities. Today, TW owns the South and West suburbs, as well as parts of Minneapolis. Comcast, through it’s purchase of AT&T, owns St. Paul and the northern suburbs.
And a year from now, they’re gonig to trade a market. And Comcast gets the Twin Cities.
Which just plain sucks.
Financially, Comcast is going to raise my rates over 25%. But what chaps me is the level of service. Since Comcast bought AT&T, who bought TCI, they’ve been upgrading those cable lines for years, and are almost done. Time Warner on the other hand, has had wonderful service for the last 5 years.
Comcast blocks ports, such as 80, so users can’t host different kinds of servers.
Time Warner not only doesn’t block them, but once every few months I get an email saying “Hey, we see you running an email server, so we scanned it, and it’s not a relay”. Even though it’s against the TOS for me to do so, they give me a heads up that they know, and continue to let me.
I’ll be honest – I’m not a big fan of Big Media companies, and Time Warner is one of the biggest. But their cable broadband service has been phenomenal. Few service outages, ok customer service, and the quality, including boosting from 3 to 5 megs down earlier this year, has kicked ass.
I am not looking forward to being a Comcast customer. They’re going to raise my price substantially, because I choose not to subscribe to TV service from them, they have antiquated cable systems, and are now going to try and merge someone else’s cable system in to theirs.
Great.
It’s the 35th anniversary of Earth Day.
But every day is Earth Day. Do your part.
I especially liked Google’s logo today:
Flickr continues to amaze me. What did they do this time? If you had previously bought a Pro account, they have announced Pro users have been given a another year for free, and 2 Pro accounts to give away to friends. In addition, normal Flickr users have had their bandwidth and photo’s doubled, and Pro users have had their bandwidth doubled, and the price of a Pro account is now almost half of what it was last year.
I guess being bought by Yahoo was a good thing. God knows I’ve been very, very happy with Flickr, and this made my day.
It’s nice to be home. Even if the weather is cold, rainy and windy.
So I leave for a business trip for a week, and halfway through I finally check the ‘net for news, and what do I see?
Jinzora and Netjuke are merging efforts to create an even better music management web tool.
While kind of cool, I’m glad to see the Jinzora team in firm control – their release cycle and active development is why so many Netjuke users have jumped ship from Netjuke to Jinzora. Blake Waters, the lead developer of Netjuke, has been busy for the last 2 years on other projects, leading to Netjuke development stalling.
I’m glad Jinzora 2 has been released, and under the GPL. I have concerns about Netjuke’s future, as they wanted to get away from the GPL, and possibly even charge for the software. I’m hoping Jinzora stays on the path they have so far, and away from where Netjuke had thought about going. And Netjuke’s requirement for 2.0 for PHP5 was disconcerting – I understand wanting to use latest and greatest versions of software, but even Ubuntu doesn’t support PHP5 yet.
I look forward to the teams working together.
Thanks to Jamie for the heads up on my forums.
I’m in sunny Florida this week. 80 and sunny every day, upper 50s, low 60s at night.
I could get use to this. Except for the hurricanes.
Time to go ride the Hulk a dozen times.
After continuing to play with Jinzora, I discovered something: Displayed number behind Genre’s is not the number of songs – it’s the number of artists.
For whatever reason, I thought it was the number of songs, leading me to believe the import process was missing tracks, though it would show the correct number of tracks imported.
Well, der. Jinzora was right.
I now return you to your scheduled programming while I rip my CD collection for the 4th time.
I’ve been playing with Jinzora this week, as you could see in the screenshot in my previous post.
I’m very impressed. I still have some glitches to work out – my ID3 tags don’t seem to be importing correctly, and I downloaded Easytag to check, and they looked right. A light bulb just went on, and I’ll have to check to see if it’s using id3v1, instead of version 2. I’m 99% positive all my tags are v2.
I really like the layout, it’s one of the best install routines I’ve ever seen, the album art it automatically grabs and puts up random is cool, and it does everything else. My only complaint, is that it doesn’t seem (and I’m new to this, could be wrong) a recursive file scan after the initial import to check for changes. One of the cooler things about Netjuke was I could update my ID3 tags, scan for changes, and it would fix it in the database. That, and the web pages seem to load slow, even on my local lan.
I’m slowly re-encoding all my CDs after the great hard drive crash of ’04, and doing it in MP3 this time, instead of Ogg. My new MP3 player cheats, and won’t do Ogg (though it does Napster2Go, but I’m not signing up for that).