Chad Things

I am so happy to see my friends rallying around Otto to raise the money he needs (see last post). Good people.

But I’m also happy to have creative friends that actually do stuff. If you know Jason and Monica, they’ve thrown many great events, and their latest project, swapsf, is awesome (no, jason doesn’t own that word). But i’m not here to plug that – i’m here to plug a short play – The Old Ones. Sorry, you can’t see it live, but you can watch “The Old Ones” on youtube.

Our big brother needs help. Luckily, he has many friends and family helping him – especially Lee on the ottoshutt.com blog. But the most important thing is how Otto and others are facing this challenge. Otto says it all better than i could even imagine. He has always been one of the guys you look up to, a natural leader, but now Otto is one of my heroes.

Last weekend Shayna and I had our housewarming, and it was a great success. We had many friends show up, delicious food and beverages, and good times had by all. Well, until about 7pm when we had to leave because the noise was bothering the old ladies upstairs. We knew it might happen, so we just got everybody to go around the corner to Dovre club, bar at 26th and mission. The housewarming was planned to go from 2 till 10, so we had a few people show up after 7pm. One of them, Stephanie, said it best when she said “This is the best housewarming at a bar i’ve ever been to”. Amen. Thanks everybody for coming !!

Just gonna share some geekiness in this blog – short and sweet.

First, how to make your own custom ringtones (tested with several verizon phones)

1. Download Audacity (Windows or Mac) and Lame mp3 codec. This lets you cut a 10 second selection sample from your favorite mp3.
2. Download and install Lame mp3 codec (copy to wherever audacity is).
3. Drag your favorite mp3/wav file to Audacity and make a selection that will be your ringtone. Best if its between 3 and 20 secs.
4. File – Export Selection as MP3. First time it will ask you where Lame mp3 codec is, tell it. Then Give ringtone a name, save to disk.
5. For Verizon – Email it as attachment to <your_10digit_cellphone_number>@vzwpix.com. For example, 4151234567@vzwpix.com
6. Done.

iPhoto – merging multiple iPhoto libraries for free. I couldn’t agree more with this dude.

Google Analytics – been out for about a year, but i just started using it. You basically add some javascript code to the end of every html page you want to track, and google does an amazing job of showing you stats and other useful info. Really. And its great to manage different domains, or setup multiple profiles within a domain. Once again, google is way better than anything else thats ever tried to do this. Sux that i can’t do it on wordpress.com .

Oh, and not a geek thing, but give some love to my friend otto – he needs it and deserves it.

About 2 weeks ago I noticed my bike, a 1993 Honda Nighthawk, was not where i left it on the street. I was not upset, i don’t really ride it that much anymore (not since January before my RTW trip). So i figured i’d get some insurance money and just move on. I filed a police report on Friday the 28th, about a week after i saw it last.

Surprisingly, 10 days after i told SFPD it was missing, they found it. The police actually found my motorcycle. wow. And it was found only a few blocks away from where i left it in upper haight. Apparently whoever stole it was using it and just parking it in the street like he owned it. Smart. I was surprised and asked the cops lots of questions, and they gave me concise answers.

• Who found it? Dunno – anonymous call.
• Will it be investigated further? no.
• Anything else gonna happen? no, its now removed from stolen vehicle list.
• So thats it, i can take it now? yes, just show us your Drivers license and sign this.

Yay! I guess… Actually, i rode it across town to do an errand around 5pm and i was very happy to be on my motorcycle. So I am glad i have it back. Once my bike-friend Tony looks it over and makes sure the thief didn’t do any damage, i’ll be good to go.

It’s been a week since we moved in, and our place is almost livable. Hurray. Shayna’s fast – she got her art studio (ok, desk and drafting table) set up in a couple days, organized her stuff, and has been decorating our place like we’ve been living here for months. Makes it feel … homey. Meanwhile, i just finished going thru all my boxes today – man, do i have a ton of stuff. And i still have some personal stuff from work and friends over the last 10 years that i need to .. process slowly. We had most furniture we needed, but did buy a bed, a shelf, a few other little things from Ikea last week. But i’m really excited about my recent purchases on monday – a new TV and DVD player. Here’s where i bust out the geek in me – After 10-20 hours of research and shopping online, i got a 42-inch Philips LCD from costco. A beautiful, true HDTV – 1080p screen (not that 1080i crap), and it can be a 1920×1080 monitor for my macbook pro. It was fairly inexpensive for the features i got – hopefully there won’t be any problems. So far it works great as an external monitor. To go with it, I had to buy a true 1080P DVD player (Pioneer DV-400V-K) and hooked it up with HDMI cable (most expensive cables ever). Oooooo.. Ok, ’nuff of da geek.

On a side note, we also enjoyed the Treasure Island music festival over the weekend. Shayna and i went both days, as did Juan, and we ran into lots of other friends as well. The venue was awesome – grass field along water, 2 stages, food, beers, ferris wheel (didn’t go, line too long), some bman style art, and 2 stages for the bands. Saturday was the electronic day, ghostland observatory and flosstradamus were both crews i never heard of but loved, MIA was a bit disappointing, Gotan project was great as well. Sunday Modest Mouse was the best (Isaac is a great performer), but i also was pleased with M. Ward and Built to spill. Clap hands say yeah and Spoon were good as well. I hope they do more concerts there.

Last of my big trips for the year – Burningman. My ninth time going, always glad i went. This year’s favs include the dust storm thursday, my boy pete hudson’s monkey-snake thing (read wired, mercury news, grist.org), the big rig, and the oil rig tower (hello? coolest fire EVER). Oh, and the glowing ping pong balls – best visuals ever. And how could i forget our very own monkey island art car. Good times, good times. Check out my flickr pics and the youtube videos.

I have several domains hosted out of my apt, meaning the computer that controls samo.org (among others) sits in my apartment. Now that i’m moving, i decided to look into hosting these domains somewhere else a bit more reliable (although it was fun to walk fritz and shayna thru a reboot from Thailand).

Here’s what i’m looking for

• cheap monthly (less than $10/month)
• virtual hosting (2+ domains)
• linux/BSD/Unix
• PHP access
• ssh access (csh, cron, .htaccess, php.ini, etc)
• web stats (access to apache log files)
• decent disk space and bandwidth (?)

I’m happy to see that shared hosting (one machine serving many domains and many customers) is pretty cheap ($5-$10/month). This is in comparison to dedicated hosting, where a customer gets their own machine – for high bandwidth and/or highly customizable stuff. I used to think i needed that, but now i don’t. First I tried to find current reviews of web hosting, starting with GoDaddy, since that’s where i have some domains registered. Basically they are one of the cheapest around, but there are many on the net that complain about their customer support. After a bit of digging, i found some decent review sites and decided to do it right.

Webhostingsitesreviews does a good job evaluating the company and their offerings – their top linux sites were BlueHost 95%, StartLogic 95%, IX Web Hosting 92%, HostMonster 92%, HostGator 87%, Yahoo 87%, and last place GoDaddy 83%. I also liked Hosting Review’s top 10 table with links to their verbose reviews. YourWebHosting also lists a top 10 with BlueHost at the top, followed by IX, GoDaddy, Dot5, StartLogic. Top 5 Hosts picked Hostmonster, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic, and Hostgator. Ahh, those names sound familiar – I think i see some patterns. Good.

I also found a few sites that seem… off. Perhaps paid placements? Hostsearch allows people to review sites, which is nice to get user issues, but they are not as thorough as webhostingsitereviews. Hostsearch’s top picks are (in order) Webstrike (402 reviews), WebHostingBuzz (258 reviews), eBoundHost (43 reviews), Galaxyvisions (22 reviews), HostForWeb (259 reviews). Web Hosting picked these as their tops: Globat, Poweb, HostRocket, GoDaddy .. and none of them seemed like a good deal.

Anyway, on with the Round-Up – My Summary below. Most of the top ones were about the same, altho I noticed a few things i wanted that not everyone has, like SSH access and access to log files (i like to ssh and tail logs while troubleshooting).

And the winner is … Hostmonster, everything i need for $6/month.

Notes – doteasy.com only had 1GB storage and 20GB/month xfer for $7/month plan. Yahoo was equally lame.

Don’t ever ever get a gift card for Tigerdirect.com – trust me. I worked for yahoo, got a free gift certificate at giftcertificates.com, which i used to buy $250 gift cards at Tiger direct. Bad move. All i wanted to do was buy stuff from their site using the gift cards –

1. I ended up having to call them 5 times, totaling about 3 hours, longest call was over an hour (this really sucked)
2. I got passed around from customer service to credit card payment and back and on hold and talked to supervisors and on hold and … dropped entirely, 3 of 5 times. Each time they liked to tell me how their internal operations work (hello, do i care?), and it varied depending on who i talk to.
3. Web site is great, but does not work with gift card system. During checkout, It incorrectly reports the amount available on gift cards
4. If you use less than the full amount of a gift card, they have to mail you another gift card for the difference (why not email? or better yet, just change the amount on the gift card to whats left? not rocket science)
5. They have at least 2 different types of gift card numbers, and one of the problems i had was that both could not be applied to one
   order – at least the supervisor acknowledged this as not great and made it work for me.  well, i hope he made it work – not shipped yet.

Seriously, guys, how much money do you waste on customer service? Perhaps gift cards are not that popular, and its not worth the time to make the system functional, relying on supervisors to fix it? I thought about calling Carl Fiorentino, TigerDirect’s president, at home in Miami, like Fred Wise did, but haven’t. I think i got it sorted – we’ll see if my package arrives after burningman.

I’m finally getting in gear for this year’s Burningman. This will be my 9th year going. Yeah, i’m old, and nine times may seem like alot, but each year is different at burningman and for me (where i am in my life). Why do i keep going? why don’t i get burned out? Well, i see burningman as life – you get out of it what you put into it. You don’t have to party or drink or build large things that take all your time. You just have to participate. You do have to abandon some comforts of home, but you get more creativity and freedom in a larger context. I like that alot.

This year i’m going small again, minimal planning, small camp of friends tied together by the Monkey Island Art Car – brainchild of Sir Checkoway (and chef ben as the workhorse). The island is a ford taurus station wagon with the back chopped off, wood platform for the island, rocks, green plants, a generator, dj setup, and tastee beats. Right up my alley, and i’m lucky to have close friends that let me join in at the last minute. Sadly, i’m not staying with the brasstax bunnies – they’re way over at 3 o’clock and we’ll be at 9 o’clock area.

I’ve only been back in SF for about 2 weeks, so i’m still getting my feet wet in this year’s theme – the Green Man – but its right up my alley. Mainly cuz i’m looking into doing a Green MBA – environmentally and socially aware business – but i admit i’m still just looking.  But if you know me at all, you know i love nature – especially hiking in mountains.  I read that the man will be on a green mountain peak this year.  Can’t wait to climb that mtn !!

I also put together a list of DJ lineups at Burningman 2007. This will be updated till i leave on Monday. Enjoy.