I joined the military the my first duty station was Charleston, South Carolina.  Due to being the lowest ranking person in the shop at first I was immediately put on third shift.  Which was from 11:00 pm to 8:00 am.  As so started my exposure to late night /overnight talk radio.  Boy was were my eyes opened to yet another whole new world out there.  Suddenly, here I was working with a mix of fellow youngsters and older civilian employees.  For the first year of being stationed there I become intimately familiar with Art Bell and his Coast to Coast AM radio show.

After leaving the military in order to go to college this new and exciting development called the internet came into existence.  Suddenly I was no longer tied to just AM radio.   With the introduction of Broadcast.com, thank you Mark Cuban, you were able to access radio shows from around the whole US.  Eventually, it became the entire world.  I could not have been more excited.  As software evolved and a more robust internet infrastructure the offerings of talk radio and radio in general become quite large.

Fast forwarding a few years later the talk radio offerings available is a virtual buffet available to  consumers.  Today, my interest in various shows is rather broad and the local stations where I live either don’t carry a majority these shows.  After trying multiple set-ups to capture these shows I came across a wonderful website.  This being www.dar.fm.  At first I would let record these shows and then go home and listen to them on my computer.  I rolled with that for about two years.  Then I got an Android powered smart phone and installed Astro Player with the DAR.FM plug-in installed.

Now I can have my shows with me where I go and I am also able to delete shows and fast forward through comercials from my online storage on DAR.FM  So, if you enjoy radio as much as I do please take a look at www.dar.fm.

The beauty of pursuing building apps for the Android operating system is that Google encourages it and provides an wonderful

Image via CrunchBase

Now that I have put this out there for all the world to see I better start working a little harder on development.  I will share my progress along the way and will undoubted be quite giddy when I successfully make my first “hello world” app and it works.

Image by William Hook via Flickr

Sometime ago I purchased a first generation Apple TV as a media extender or as I have read on the net “the ultimate media extender”.  I was pleased with it.  Not really overwhelmed.  Things got a little better when I ran a jailbreak script on it.  It was still only about 90% to where I really wanted to be.  One of the major hang-ups for me was the constant updates and then having to re-run the jailbreak.  It was getting annoying.

After doing some research I decided to buy a Boxee Box.  I almost went with a Roku but after helping someone set-up one I decided that it was not the option I was looking for.  I downloaded the Boxee software to my laptop to try it out and see what I thought about it.  The GUI did take some getting used to but after a couple of months I think that I am relatively comfortable with it.

After a quick and quite easy set-up I was ready to go.  Get some apps up and running.  I need to have my MLB.TV and NHL Gamecenter.  That went smooth enough.  Next up, mapping it to my media server.  Again, not very difficult.  To my surprise after all the media folders were mapped it took a while to actually go back and navigate these folders.  I was a littled concerned.  Well, after some time I was able to navigate the folders.  Behold, it went out and got all the album and DVD cover data on it’s own.  That was one heck of nice feature that I was not aware of.

I am still working with a variety of apps beyond my sports related ones.  I have a list that I have been working on getting installed and will report the choices that I have settled on.  For my money this is the best set top box, media extender, or whatever you want to call it, is the best thing out there at this time.

So, after troubleshooting and looking into buy a replacement hard drive I decided to buy a new one.  Everything pointed to a failed hard drive.  I was able to find numerous sites that claimed to sell the iPod hard drive replacement kits.  Unfortunately, none of them had any in stock.  Or so they said.  Looking at the cost of this kit and the amount of time it would most likely take me to complete the task I decided on buying a new one.

This device has grown on me and I will admit that this skeptic

Image by zeuxis.pixelsurgery via Flickr

has be turned when it comes to the iPod.

I am looking forward to this new chapter in my life beginning.

More postings about my experiences soon.

Image by Night-thing via Flickr

I was recently out a Las Vegas occupying my wife as she was attending a convention.  This gave me an opportunity to visit the Pinball Museum.  This is something I have wanted to do for some time.  Pinball is a game that I grew up enjoying it and getting the chance to see all the various machines and hopefully playing some of my favorites.

After locating the museum the next task was getting a cab and head out there.  While the number of machines did not disappoint me and getting to play so many of my childhood favorites.  I took numerous pictures and hope to share them with you soon.  (This will force me to install a photo gallery plug-in)  Once I am able to do this I can tell you that you will step back in time on some of them just as I did.  It was quite an experience.  The only real downside was that it was in an old industrial park type garage.  Not really what I expected however, it is the beautiful machines that make up the museum and not the building so much.

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had a very painful lesson in dealing with a Windows 7 crash on my main desktop machine. At first I was quite upset about seeing the constant Blue Screen of Death (BSD). It initially appeared that it was both a virus and hardware failure at the same time. After many long hours and tons of moving of files to a back-up hard drive I was ready to jump in and “fix” my OS issue.

As usually the best laid plans will always have issues. In my case. Many issues. At first all tests that I ran pointed towards the RAM going bad. So, I purchase some new RAM. Still no success in starting up the OS. I then moved on to working with the hard drive with a Live CD of both Linux and Windows operating systems. Viola, I found a couple of pieces of spy-ware and a virus. This must be the cause I am thinking to myself.

It turns out that this was just the tip of the iceberg and it was not until after I did a clean install of the OS did things start working correctly. After getting my system was back up and running with only the essential software installed I found out that it may have been a Service Pack issue all along. Imagine that. That Windows would release something that is not fully tested.

This while experience was great. It forced me to learn and explore out of my comfort zone when dealing with software. It scars me that I am seeing a trend start to grow as there appears to be more software coming down the pike.

When I need a break in the action I turn my attention briefly to Twitter and see what is going on out there. Sometimes it is pretty interesting to see how things progress in this world from different perspectives. One, the new organizations and second, the average person like myself.

So, back to work I go as this PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets won’t make themselves.