litheon! Where've you been?!
So if you're reading this that probably means my feed is in your RSS reader somewhere, since it's been almost two months since my last post I doubt anybody has been holding the F5 key over here waiting for an update on something. So here's two months worth of blog posts in one.
NOFX
I went to a NOFX show on May 9th. It was an amazing show, and to my surprise the opening bands American Steel and No Use For A Name were pretty good. As usual, I managed to get up to the front row and snap a few photos from the camera. It's worth mentioning that the crowd was freakin insane, and managed to mob so hard towards the front that I actually have a scar from where part of the riot rail at the front of the venue wore a cut into my left side. Other than that the show was amazing. Here are some of those photos from Flickr:
Skool
I've also finished (sort of) my first year of university (woot!) and am now officially a sophomore. Nothing really that interesting to report regarding that, although it is worth mentioning that I used that LiveAnywhere app I wrote for the project I was assigned as part of my Computer Science class; which earned me an alright 100%. Unfortunately, I'm taking an online class during the summer semester to make up for the fact I didn't really take that many credits during the course of the year.
Werk
I'm currently working at home by telecommuting. There's not much interesting regarding my work other than I'm working on deploying a SharePoint intranet site for my department, and doing a myriad of other tasks from setting up Ffmpeg on a server to re-encode videos for one of my work's Drupal sites, to writing a tool that dynamically generates HTML based on some pre-specified parameters given by the user.
Xbox
As far as Xbox land goes I don't really have much to report, other than I've been playing quite a bit of Halo 3, and Gears of War lately and I also just recently bought Rock Band and am in the process of playing through the guitar career on expert and the drum career on medium. I also used the new DRM tool to transfer some of the offline play licenses to my Xbox 360 Elite so I can play all of my arcade games even while offline. As a personal opinion in regard to that tool, I think the web-based aspect is great. It's light-weight, simple, and easy to use and takes nowhere near the 30 minutes given to go through the process; however, I think it's kind of lame that you have to go through each and every item in your download history to get all of the licenses on to the new console.
MajorNelson.com
The past few days we did have a few blips on the radar on Larry's blog (for instance, it not loading at all) which was due to a RAID controller that went bad in our front-end server. We switched the site over to our database server, and Clay over at CentraComm did a bit of maintenance on the server by replacing the RAID controller and restoring a backup of the drive images. So this doesn't happen in the future we've got our web cache pointing at our front-end server as a primary but in the event anything ever happens our database server will be there to pick up the load.
I've also been working on a complete redesign for the site, with a unified theme across most every public page. We'll also have a threaded comment system similar to Newsgroup discussions (Which is of course, user selectable), and a simplified registration system not to mention quite a few additional features that will give Major's blog more of a community conversation feel moving away from the one person talks, and everyone else talks back model.
There isn't much news to report regarding the LiveAnywhere app other than I'll be working on it once I finish my online class, and the redesign/upgrade I'm working on for Larry's blog.
Audio Gadgetry
I recently purchased one of the new 8 GB Zunes as my old 30 GB Zune's LCD screen just stopped lighting up quite a while back. So far I've got to say I'm loving it. There is obviously a significant decrease in the amount of storage, but that does really force me to get the media I want to enjoy on there. Thanks to the relatively new (to Zune anyway) autoplaylist feature I've got a list of music that I enjoy in addition to some of the stuff I haven't given too much attention to on the Zune. Using that rating system and the "Don't sync stuff I don't like" sync setting, I indicate what music I like so I can get back to it later, and if I find something I really don't ever want to listen to again I'll "broken heart" it so it'll get deleted off of my Zune the next time I sync.
For this past father's day I did all of the component wiring (connecting the upscaling DVD player, DVR, speakers, and subwoffer all to the receiver) my step father's new surround sound system, and helped a bit with determining the items that did and did not need to be purchased. That rounded off the whole entertainment console, so now we've got a 42" 1080p TV mounted to the top of our entertainment center, 4 Klipsch in-wall speakers (with built-in crossovers), a Klipsch center channel, an amplified Klipsch subwoofer, and two Cerwin Vega speakers in a separate room. Although none of this stuff is by any means top-of-the-line, it definitely reveals the quality difference between compressed CD rips and the real thing. Not to mention when I'm playing Rock Band on it I feel like I'm playing at a show.
Althrough through great struggle I also managed to install a subwoofer in my car. I aquired the Punch XLC 12" sub, Punch 600 a4 amp, two front speakers, two rear speakers, and two crossovers all for the low price of $100. (All of that was sitting in my garage, so I persuaded the owner to hand it over. Yeah I'm a bargain hunter.) During the process I had to deal with figuring out where I should ground the amplifier (ended up just drilling it into the trunk), running the B+ power cable (ended up just running it through from the hood up through the door jams, then back in near the rear door of the car, through the seat and into the trunk), and the horribly tedious task of using a wiring kit to get the new deck to work in the car (i.e. crimping tons of wires together). Now I can make sure everyone hears the awesome gangster rap I'm blasting when I roll down the street.
Well that's about it. Now that I've got that out of the way I'll try to post regular updates.