Today was one of those times. I wanted to check the weather, so I went to my bookmark for the local weather on weather.com. First, they gave me an interstitial ad, then a pop-up, then a jump-up, and then something on the window made noises — but eventually, I got the weather.

Later on, I wanted to check it again, so I decided to try the Weather Underground. They had an ad or two on the page, too, but one of the ads offered to sell me a year’s ad-free membership on the site for $5. That was a no-brainer — I’ve been using the Weather Underground for years, going back to when it was a Gopher site at the University of Michigan, and so I was glad to give them $5.

Buying Radio Userland should have been a no-brainer, too, but I didn’t get around to doing so until I was writing this posting. I tried using it right after 8.0 was released, but didn’t make a habit of it, so it expired. But now I’ve got it and will begin playing with it again, as though I needed something else to do with my time!

But I don’t plan to donate a buck to Adam Curry, even though I enjoy his site a lot. First, because if I did donate to him, where would I stop (there are a lot of people whose sites I enjoy over in the left margin)? And, I guess his being a multi-millionaire might have something to do with it, too (though a buck wouldn’t break me, either)…but I’ll happily donate egoboo instead.

Starting over

I think I’ve cleared out all the debris at the Radio site, and I invite you to join me there to see just how badly a weblog can begin.

Technology is not always your friend

Jeffrey’s Hebrew class is learning Torah cantillation, which will help prepare them for their B’nai Mitzvot (less than a year away!).  The book that they’re using comes with an accompanying CD, with several tracks per trope, to make it easy to find the right track to match the lesson.  All in all, there are 83 tracks.

Unfortunately, the CD player he’s using is an old cheap boombox, and it only displays track numbers up to 39 — we didn’t discover this until today, when he wanted to play track 40 and couldn’t find it!

So I’m in the process of copying tracks 40-79 onto a new CD so that they’ll be accessible.  Easy CD Creator came with my CD burner, so I thought I’d use it.  That was probably a mistake.  Even though I have a 24x burner, the defaults in the software have slowed it down to a crawl — it stopped between tracks when it was copying the audio, and now it’s stopping between every track as it’s burning the new disc.  So what I thought would be a five-minute process is turning into a half-hour exercise — and then I’ll have to figure out how to finalize the disc so it can be used in the CD player. 

Oh, well; it’s cheaper than buying another boombox.

And it worked!

Having all twelve shows on DVD is much more convenient than having them scattered about several videotapes (especially when going back to favorite shows or moments), and the extras on the DVD are worth seeing, too (at least once). I haven’t gotten around to playing any of the episodes with director’s commentary yet, but I probably will someday, when I run out of other things to watch.

Not that that’s very likely. While we were on vacation last week, we’d almost emptied our TiVo — at one point, all that it had was the figure skating gala from the Olympics — but now that we’re back at work and school, TiVo is filling itself up steadily, far faster than we can watch it. And we still haven’t seen the figure skating gala. Or any of the pile of DVDs in the backlog. And let’s not talk about books…..

At least I’ve finally gotten through reading my e-mail backlog at work, even if I haven’t quite answered everything yet. Or even everything I plan to answer.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping Verizon will finally get my DSL line completely functional. It works fine if I only want to use it for data, but there’s still some crosstalk if I try to use the line for voice calls, and Verizon tech support tells me that there’s a “cross-ring”. So they’re sending out a tech tomorrow morning, forcing me to work from home — darn.