InfiniteTides

I finally did it. I buckled down, nose the the grindstone, and churned out episode 6 of the Infinite Tides Blogcast! It was a long hard slog uphill for this one, but I think it’s well worth the time (5 minutes) and effort (I talked) invested in a quality product. I’m no expert on podcasts, but I think this one is my best yet (which isn’t saying much).

Josh, you’re still welcome to get in on the next blogcast I record, Episode 7. I’ll no doubt have a lot more stuff to talk about in a day or two. Good thing no one at work knows about my blogcasting, because I keep telling them that I don’t talk to myself. What they don’t know won’t hypocriticize me.

Every time I sit down to record an episode of the Infinite Tides Blogcast, I either don’t have anything worth talking about, or something comes up to divert my attention. Lately I’ve been working on a couple different projects like my brother’s PC and working out how to install Linux on my PS3. Today I was playing around with Audacity and Ardour on Linux, but found out that Ardour doesn’t support .ogg or .mp3 files (two huge strikes against it in my book), so I started looking for another audio editor/mixer for Linux. It looks like I might be stuck with Audacity for the time being if I persist in wanting to both record and edit my blogcasts in Linux. That might be doable for the Infinite Tides blogcasts, but the length of the average Critical Strike podcast requires I use something more powerful and more user friendly than Audacity. So I’ll continue using Windows XP to edit Critical Strike for the foreseeable future.

One of these days I really will record another Infinite Tides blogcast. I even asked Josh if he wanted to be a guest. He wanted to be paid so I told him I’ll pay him 3 times what everyone gets paid when they appear on my blogcast. Let’s see…three times nothing is still nothing. That sounds about right.

I just put the finishing touches on my brother’s PC (for his daughters). He had two 20 GB hard drives, but his IDE cable didn’t have dual connections on it. I had to swap out an IDE cable from my parents’ computer (they’ll never miss it!). Then I had to figure out which of the two identical hard drives actually had the MBR and OS’s installed on it so I could remove the jumper from the other hard drive (for some reason, cable select didn’t seem to work). Once I got it to boot again (after much trial and error), I fought with Windows XP, trying to make it format as FAT32 instead of NTFS so it could be used by both XP and Linux OS’s. Talk about harder than pulling teeth! XP didn’t want to format as anything but NTFS when right clicking on the drive. I stumbled upon a weird work around for this. Instead of right clicking the drive then choosing Format, I chose Open. Of course it couldn’t open, because it wasn’t formatted. XP offered me the option of formatting, this time including FAT32 as a file system option! Sweet! Do it!

Now I just have to put the side and front panels back on Bill’s desktop and take it over to him. Hannah and Tori must be nagging him constantly about when it will be done, because he let Hannah email me to ask last night.

We’ve been working Saturdays for as long as I can remember now, but technically it’s not mandatory for me to be there. I mentioned to my team last night that there is a slight chance that I won’t be working Saturday. No one believed me! What’s up with that?! Have I become such a workaholic that it’s just expected that I’ll be there every day that the plant is open?

Not completely irrelevant is the reason I’m considering skipping out on Saturday. I plan on installing openSUSE 10.3 on my Playstation 3 this morning, and I half expect there to be complications. In fact, there have been a couple of complications right off the bat. The Playstation 3 doesn’t see my external hard drive that is connected via USB, and there isn’t enough space to do a complete back up to my 4 GB USB flash drive. So now I’m copying my game saves manually onto my flash drive.

I’ve reformatted the hard drive on my PS3, and I’m burning the openSUSE install DVD. Hopefully the PS3 will recognize the installer, and the Linux will go on without any more complications.

Another glitch. It appears (and I’m partially to blame) that the openSUSE download site gave me a link to the wrong torrent and therefore, to the wrong .iso. I should have double checked that it was correct before downloading 4.2 GB of garbage, but I didn’t. Someone over there really should double check that their download site works properly with all browsers. It’s not like Firefox is some oddball browser! Gah! That’s very frustrating to have wasted 15+ hours downloading an .iso that’s worthless to you.

I guess I’ll try again tomorrow morning…which makes my going to work that much more unlikely! Take that team of mine!