1000 buffalo stampede

It’s been a productive weekend, which is just what I needed in a couple respects. One, with Jenna out of town at the start of her apprenticeship, I definitely needed to be busy. Second, I’m hugely busy and backlogged on professional and personal projects.

Past work stuff, the major accomplishment was the recovery of my music and other digital media. The iMac crashed the other quarter – hard drive failure it seems – and with everything going on at the time, restoring it got put on the back burner. Extra frustratingly so when I learned it was out of warranty and coverage. Joy.

This weekend, I had some time in between work, to focus on the recovery process. It took about 8+ hours to get the data, restore it and set up a new library accessible to the laptop (and therefore the tv). Along the way, I got my backlogged episodes downloaded and added (mainly Stargate Atlantis Season 5 and BSG webisodes).

Throw in some additional time resetting and resigning the wireless network for the Manor, including some network attached storage for media access and back ups (and redundancy). All of which sets me up for a good year of networking.

I spent the weekend working on getting the house cleaned up and sorted. Well, I mean, just because I got everything moved here didn’t mean it all got put away properly. I got some rooms done, but the real win was discovering Signal and solved a big piece of my home stereo system.

I put in a new wireless network last weekend – part of that was wiring the living stereo (downstairs) to stream from my home server (which is not downstairs). It’s been working outstandingly … but, if I want to change the music, it required leaving said living room.

Until now. Signal provides access to my iTunes libraries from my iPhone, including switching speaker locations.

I’m fairly impressed.

I remain quietly, happily addicted to the iTunes Music Store and my trusty little fat-drive iPod. Out of random scribblings, my latest music acquisitions:

• “Make Me Smile” – Chicago
• “Suddenly I see” – KT Tunstall
• “Crazy” – Gnarls Barkley
• “I’m So Gone” – Jackie Greene
• “Killer Queen” – Queen
• “Dani California” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Rob Thomas – iTunes Originals album

Out of random commentary, “Crazy” is the KFOG Music Director’s bet for the song of the summer, the Rob Thomas iTunes collection is pretty bitchin’, and Chicago … well, what can you say about rock with a horn section except … rock on!

Rock on, people!

and for enjoyment, I read Stubborn Chronicle Staff Writer Is an Ignoramus, wherein John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes a very sharp and entertaining logical knife to an SF Chronicle article on the Apple.

My personal favorite: “Are there fact-checkers at The Chronicle? … Can you just make up any crazy bullshit you want and get it quoted as fact in The San Francisco Chronicle?“

Well, looks like I taught the ol’ TiBook a little Titanium Daemon-Tiger kung fu. As in, I finally upgraded to OS X Tiger, and so far, it works pretty well. I’ve only had one issue with it – it seems to have muddled up my php install, which I use for hosting my notebook. The MySQL database is intact – it just won’t host. Not a major issue at the moment. Definitely a lotta chrome in this update. A whole lotta chrome.

I should add that I blogged this little ditty from a new desktop widget for OS X’s Dashboard feature. Even niftier, I’ve enabled the developer mode for Dashboard. Widgets float over the desktop all together in a single “layer” – the Dashboard layer. You can easily toggle it on and off. For the blog widget, I pulled it out of the Dashboard layer, and into “regular space”. Basically, it means I have a little instant blog tool floating above my workspace. Very handy and works like a charm.

Footnote: After a good night’s sleep, I woke up, typed a google search of “running php on tiger”, hit the first link (Bill Stevenson.org – Bill gets extra points for having a picture of The Family Guy’s Stewie on his blog) and refreshed on the directions to edit my httpd.conf file. Which I had done, of course, when I had last upgraded the system. A few quick keystrokes with the text editor and the TiBook’s Apache server was happily serving up php pages again.