d0rkorg

Last night was our first ‘Fun Night’ in league. There weren’t many people playing, being this close to a holiday and all. So, our league organizer decided to change things up and have specific rules for each hole, as follows:

1. Heckle Hole - Normal Golf, with the exception of: talking, whistling, yelling, burping or whatever noise you can make come out of your body, while the player is making a shot, chip, putt, or whatever! Each and every shot until the hole is completed.
2. One Club Hole - On the tee, pick a club out of your bag. This is the club you will use on the entire hole. Teeing, chipping, and putting.
3. Two Club Hole - Pick two clubs out of your bag. These two clubs are the only clubs you can use on this hole, including your putt(s).
4. Girly-Man Hole - Everyone gets to tee from the Women’s tees. If you’re too manly to hit from the women’s tees, then you must be a real man and thus tee from the blue tees.
5. Silence Hole – Normal Golf, with the exception of; there is to be NO talking from the time the first ball is teed until the last putt is made. Anyone who talks, is assessed a 2 stroke penalty. If you happen to talk and take the penalty, the penalized person may treat the hole like a heckle hole, to try and make the other players slip up and get penalized also. You may yell FORE as a warning if there’s an errant ball. No penalty. Don’t abuse it!!
6. Bonus Hole - Regular golf, except, you get ONE FREE KICK and ONE FREE THROW. You may kick the ball once to advance it and you may throw it once to advance it. You do not need to count these as strokes. However, you are not allowed to kick or throw when the ball is on the green. So, get your kicks and throws in early!!
7. Advantage Hole - Once on the green, you may move your ball 2 club lengths closer to the hole without incurring a penalty. However, you must putt the ball one handed. Stance doesn’t matter. But only one hand can be on the putter! ( 2 stroke penalty if you don’t)
8. Penalty Hole - Failure to hit your ball in the number 8 fairway with your tee shot, you must add 2 strokes to your score. Do whatever you need to do, to get the ball in the fairway on your drive!! Bonus: If you hit the ball in a sand trap, subtract 1 stroke from your score!
9. Heckle, Silence, and Bonus Hole - Heckle hole on the tee and green. Silence hole ( 2 stroke penalty if you talk ) immediately after the last player has teed, until you reach the green. Once on the green, and you have to be on the green, Heckle away!!. Bonus hole is in effect ( free kick and free throw ). Refer to holes 1, 5 and 6 for further details.

Special Bonus – You may deduct a total of two strokes off your score, if you attempt and hit your tee shot like Happy Gilmore. You must tee this way twice to earn your deduction.

It was actually a lot of fun - especially since I did fairly well. The scorecard there does not include the Happy Gilmore bonus -2 that I think nearly everybody received. I did see some entertaining swings and misses though - I watched one guy who hit 3 off the first tee because of misses.

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So I joined a golf league this year, in hopes of improving my pathetic golf game. We play 9 holes every Tuesday evening at Otter Creek Golf Course, which is a pretty nice course. In the past I’ve usually been in the mid-50’s for 9 after my sliced drives and 3-putts. Officially, I’ve got a handicap of 15 for the league. So far this year I’ve played Otter 3 times and have shot a 51, 56, and 50 - shooting the 56 last Tuesday, the first night of league.

I’ve found a pretty sweet application that I run on my Smartphone (Motorola MPx220). Its called IntelliGolf and assists in round scoring, amongst other things. You can use it to track each individual stroke to find out where you need to work on (for me it would just say everything and give me the finger so I haven’t done this yet). Also, it supports GPS so you can figure out your exact yardage to the pin, you can track your putts, bunker shots, sand saves, etc. You can even use it to have some friendly side-betting - another feature I dare not try until I can find a game that favors my sloppy style. This is a pretty fun app - here’s my scorecard from Sunday.

I just sat thinking about this after coming back from lunch and seeing the rain pick up to make for a very soggy round tonight or possibly no round at all. Sigh.

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A curious user posted a question to Ask Slashdot that I’ve often pondered myself: Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?

The Problem

I’ve got a pretty good size music collection (too big for my 20gb iPod at any rate), and I’ve wanted an easier way to play music throughout my house. While my question isn’t quite what the poster on /. had in mind, here’s basically what I’ve been looking for:

1. A centralized music library. I’ve already got this with iTunes and a rsync scheduled task that runs every morning to back it up across a couple different machines in my house.
2. Ability to read iTunes ID3 tag information. I spent a considerable amount of time making sure the CD’s that I ripped had up-to-snuff ID3 tag information, and even went through the trouble of running at least half of my collection through MusicBrainz. I want a player that can recognize these ID3v2 tags including such things as CD# for my box sets.
3. Easy to use. Ideally, I’d like something so easy to use that anybody can go pick up the remote, find an album or specific song with ease, and just play. Also playlists should be very easy to create/maintain.
4. Multi-headed. Meaning that this will be running in multiple rooms and each room should be independant of one another. Also, a very nice feature would be the ability to play the same (read: synchronized) music source in two or more rooms.

The Contenders

I read through all of the responses this question elicited on /. and I came up with a few products that fit the bill:

• Sonos ZonePlayers are simply amazing. These players do everything I can ever imagine wanting to do. Watch the demo and you’ll be drooling too. The downside: way too expensive. The “sale” they’re having now is $1200 for 2 ZonePlayers and 1 remote. That is just more money than I’m willing to spend on something like this - this product is immediately ruled out.
• Roku SoundBridge looks pretty nice. The device itself looks pretty interesting… unique approach to the design of the thing. Unfortunately, I don’t see that this can play in sync with another device on the network. Also, this plays streamed music from an iTunes shared library, but doesn’t have a centralized server to control more than one device. Ultimately, this solution doesn’t seem to be quite what I had in mind - it looks like it is intended as a single-room unit.
• SlimDevices SqueezeBox is a very promising solution. These little boxes satisfy all of my requirements, and the server software they use is even Open Source. I have downloaded and configured SlimServer and played around with their Java player client SoftSqueeze. I’m pretty impressed - the boxes only cost $200 and are available through Amazon.com

The Solution

I’ve decided to try out a SqueezeBox to see if it’ll work for me. It seems to be pretty cost-effective and I can even hack around with the server to get it to suit me perfectly.

Here are a few things that I’ve stumbled across with SqueezeBox that may be of some interest to others:

• SlimServer runs as a service in Windows 2000+. This is really almost a necessity; it also means that I’ll be running SlimServer on my main Windows PC that I use to rip my music and have my master iTunes collection on.
• SlimServer is smart enough to read the iTunes Library XML file, so it knows about every single MP3 and AAC file in my collection. Unfortunately, the players can’t play DRM’d AAC files, so I’ll have to make sure I convert all my AAC’s to MP3’s by burning/ripping them with iTunes.
• SlimServer understands Smart Playlists and makes them available as normal playlists on the SoftSqueeze / SqueezeBox clients. Any iTunes user will tell you how great Smart Playlists are.
• SlimServer supports SSH tunneling and I’ve tested this out at a remote location running SoftSqueeze. Unfortunately, it requires more bandwidth than my cablemodem has so the sound loops every once in a while. There is on-they-fly recompression support to scale back on bandwidth usage, but that seems like a bother for lesser-quality audio.

I just unpacked my SqueezeBox last night and I’m pretty impressed. It took all of 30 seconds to get it up and playing music. When you give power to the device, it enters setup mode. In setup mode, you need to let it know how it should obtain an IP. I have a DHCP server, so I just let it grab an IP from my pool. Then, it searched for my SlimServer. It found it quickly and asked if it was the right one (you can override it by specifying an IP if you wish). After this, I was told to hold down a key to begin. I did so, and it grabbed the latest firmware and updated itself automagically. Already being familiar with the interface (thanks to SoftSqueeze), I was playing some Cowboy Mouth in no time.

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I ran across this joke from an old email today:

HOT AIR BALLOON

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He lowered altitude and spotted another man in a boat below. He shouted to him, “Hey fella can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and Replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.”

The man in the balloon rolled his eyes and said, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well, answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’re no help at all to me.”

The man in the boat smiled and responded, “You must be a Democrat.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the boater, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s all my fault.”

Good stuff ;)

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Last night I was watching the new Dennis Miller show on CNBC and I saw Ray Bradbury was going to be the featured guest. I have a lot of respect for the guy, usually mentioning his name includes ‘literary genius’ somewhere nearby. Apparently Miller feels the same way, after a nice introduction and Bradbury sharing some stories, the discussion came to Michael Moore.

Miller asked Bradbury how he felt about Moore using the title Fahrenheit 9/11, obviously taken from Bradbury’s famous novel (that is celebrating its 50th year anniversary) Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury explained that he heard of the “documentary” 6 months ago and was eager to talk to Moore about the title. Long story short, Moore called only a couple weeks ago and apparently didn’t seem very apologetic for not getting permission to use the title.

I’m trying to track down a transcript of the show, will update here if I can find it.

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Looks like there are a few popular google bombs going on right now:

One about John Kerry and his waffles (search), and here’s one about a miserable failure (search).

(I think the latter is more applicable to the URL I provided, since it is kind of hard to call the leader of the free world a miserable failure.)

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This year’s Anime Central was a lot of fun. The headlining Japanese guests were all from the series R.O.D., which I hadn’t heard of previously (I have since watched the OVA and the sequel series R.O.D. the TV).

Also, back again was Fred Gallagher from MegaTokyo. His second MT book was published this January so I decided to pick it up and wait in line to get it signed. He still takes the time to do a sketch of your favorite character, which is pretty cool. His wife Sarah was there as well, signing next to her character in the front of the book.

I didn’t attend many panels, so the other guests I can only recall from the opening ceremonies and none of them really caught my attention.

It seems they have settled into the Hyatt a little better this year. They moved the registration lines over to the conference building, which was very nice (though I’m a little irked that the pre-reg line was twice as long as the non-pre-reg was). There was a little more room available for the dealers to setup shop in, and I believe they had slightly more room in the main ballroom as well. Also, they had more space in the basement for the game rooms. This time, the consoles were separated from the arcade machines and the table card games were separated from the board games (I think, I only wandered in those rooms once).

All-in-all, it was a smoother experience than last year and it seemed like they had a more adequate staff there this year checking badges and maintaining order. If you’re in the Midwest, this is a great con to attend.

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