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I've managed to spend the quiet time over this Thanksgiving weekend doing some digital purging.  My Google reader account has under 300 unread articles, and my gmail account is down to less than 400.  But what I really need to do is spending some time doing some physical purging, and clean out all the old computer parts in my basement that I've amassed over the years.  There's really no use anymore for 30 pin 256 KB memory sticks, is there...?

I use Kopete, and have never had any luck connecting to Google Talk at work, where outbound AIM ports seem to be locked down.  We're doing some work on our team to improve our ability to work remotely, and I thought I'd give another shot at Google Talk to use it for voice purposes.  I ran across this post, talking about how port 443 is open for connection, and lo and behold, making that simple change connected me up to the Google servers.  Sweet!

Over the past year, my dad has done a great job of treating me well when it comes to listening to music at work.  Early last year, he bought me a pair of Grado SR60s headphones, and this Christmas he got me a HeadRoom Total BitHead headphone amp.  The BitHead not only serves as an amp, but it also serves as a USB audio device, meaning that you can bypass that crappy on-board chipset and run it through a decent sounding sound processing chip.  It runs a Burr-Brown PCM2902E DAC, and seems to be really well supported across a variety of OS platforms, seeing that it was picked right up by linux distro when I plugged it in.

So far, the combination of headphone and amp has been killer.  Last year I started the arduous process of replacing all the mp3 files that I have with lossless FLAC copies.  While it may not have been friendly to my available disk space, it has made music listening at work a much more pleasant experience.  Without any equalizer tweaking I've gotten great results.   All of the FLAC files have a superb, rich sound.  The sound stage is really wide and airy.  All the instruments are really distinct sounding and are not lost in some muddy musical haze.  But, what really impresses me most about this setup is bass presence.  Typical big box headphones have no low frequency presence, and sound completely washed out and tinny.  When you hook this up and start playing songs, you'll swear somewhere replaced all of your music.  The bass is ridiculously melodic, silky and omnipresent, but not overpowering.  You can feel it in your head, but in a very satisfying "this is what music is supposed to sound like" way.

There are a few recordings that really stand out too.  Kylie Minogue's Give it to Me from her Fever album sounds so completely different on this setup than on normal headphones.  The song has a kicking, driving bass, and the tinny sound that lesser headphones produce is totally missing, replaced by real sounding music. Willie Nelson's voice on Crazy from his Milk Cow Blues album is front and center, oh so clear, and he sounds like he's sitting in the cube across from you singing.  The Flaming Lips It Overtakes Me... from their At War with the Mystics is superb sounding too.  The bass pumps but is entirely distinctive, not intruding on any other instrument, the vocals are smooth, the acoustic guitar towards the end of the song is crystal clear and sweet sounding.

The pair also does a decent job on 128+ bit mp3 files, although if you listen, you can hear the difference between the mp3 and FLAC files.  The mp3 files don't have the same breadth to the sound stage--they seem a little more confined.  They also lack the whole feeling sound of the FLAC files.  The music seems a little more muted and not as rich feeling.

If you listen to tons of music at work, and are not one of the millions of mindless "I just use music as background noise iPod clones" (sorry Larry), then I'd definitely recommend looking into spending ~$200 and adding a whole new pleasent taste to your work life.

Maps fascinate me. Maps in motion even more so. Check out this video of flight patterns. The part that I found most fascinating was to watch the country "wake up", and see flight density patterns throughout the day.

From the KevinBrill.com technology desk

The weather is wicked nice (71 degrees at 11:15 PM), so I'm sitting out on my front porch with a beer, and the dog sitting next to me as I blog (I suppose I'm what happens when you cross redneck with geek). Wireless devices are my favorite gadgets. My PSP pretty much sits in my car in the garage now, and every morning when it fires up at 6:30, it still manages to pick up a nice signal and pull down all the latest podcasts wirelessly. My slimserver is also now completely wireless, and being able to take it into the basement and hook it up to the modest stereo I've got down there while I play pool is really nice. Now, I wonder if I can find a breadmaker that has an 802.11x connection on it...?

I've been trying to get onto the GA Dept Motor Vehicles website since Sunday, and haven't had any luck. It's basically been offline for 4 days now. My only question is, where are the sysadmins? If this was a commercial site, it would've been back online within a few hours, or if there were larger issues, a friendly "We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties" page would be up instead of the generic FW-1 at hqfw1: Failed to connect to the WWW server. I've been getting for 4 days...

I had some work to do today (so I could leave things in a reasonable state for people next week when I was on vacation). One of the things that I dislike about working on my laptop is the production that I need to go through to have it run on my desktop monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. This is in large part my own doing, since I'm not too keen on installing a KVM switch, since most that I've seen don't have decent DVI support. It wouldn't be much of an issue if my laptop ran Windows, since I could just remote desktop into it, and be on my merry way. But since I run linux, nothing is ever easy (the price that I pay to be DRM free).

In doing a quick scan of the web, I ran across NoMachine. I plopped the server on my laptop, installed the client on my Windows desktop machine, and connected right into my laptop. I didn't have to make any strange configuration changes on the laptop--I was able to connect right up and get working. So far, so good. I'm connected to the laptop, and the laptop itself is VPNed to work, and I'm able to chug away full-screen on my desktop. Best of all, I was able to install and use the free edition.

You will tell everyone you know about KevinBrill.com.

Earlier in the week I installed some traffic analysis software on the site, and I noticed that I was getting a lot of foreign IPs hitting comment pages directly. This is kinda coupled with the fact that most of the traffic on my site is from comment spam robots. So, I've decided to disable comments for a little while to see what effect it has on the overall site traffic, and hopefully I'll be able to drop off some of these crawler lists.