On August 5th, a group of artists out of Nashville, TN calling themselves Ten out of Tenn converged on Eddie's Attic in Atlanta, GA. This was a group of 10 artists from across Tennessee who got together for a compilation CD and tour. The artists performing were:



Butterfly Boucher

Griffin House

Andy Davis

Katie Herzig

Trent Dabbs

Matthew Perryman Jones

K.S. Rhoads

Tyler James

Erin McCarley

Jeremy Lister

On the evening of July 27th, Sixthman put on a special show called "An Evening With Sixthman" 100 people descended on Vinocity Wine Bar in Atlanta, GA for an evening with Emerson Hart (of Tonic). This event consisted of a 5 course meal, followed by a 2 hour unplugged intimate concert by Hart.

Update - see end for update

Recently, while looking at my Comcast Bill, I decided to look at their current offerings. To my surprise, I ran across the "Digital Double Play" package. For only $66 they offer their Digital Cable package with Channel 1 on Demand, plus High Speed Internet. My current package is Limited Basic Cable ($18.95) with Performance Plus Internet ($52.95) for a total of ~$70. (As an aside, it is a total rip off that they tack on a $15 fee for not doing cable. When I signed up, I just wanted internet, only to find that there was a $15 charge per month for having "only" internet. My choices were to pay $15 for nothing, or $18 for limited basic)

The cable package is much better, with a slight decrease in internet, for a cheaper price. I can live with that. I look at the feature description and see the following note:

This package is designed for new customers

Ok, great. This is a good package for new customers. Lets look in the terms of service to see if it says anything about new customers only.

TOS of Digital Double Play Package
Offer is only available in wired and serviceable areas in participating Comcast systems
(and may not be transferred) and is limited to residential customers satisfying applicable
eligibility criteria. Offer not available to customers with unpaid account balances

Awesome, nothing. For comparison, here is a TOS about one of TV plans

TOS of Digital Preferred Plus
Offer is only available in wired and serviceable areas in participating Comcast systems
(and may not be transferred) and is limited to new residential customers satisfying
applicable eligibility criteria.

Note how it explicitly says for new customers only in the TOS. The digital double play doesn't. The only thing to suggest that is the note about "designed for" new customers. Now, if this had said "for purchase by new customers only", this might be different. But it doesn't. It says designed for new customers. This does not mean for new customers only. Take, for example, a track/veldrome bike. These are "designed for" use on a track. Does this mean they can't be ridden away from the track? Of course not. The same idea applies here. "Designed for" is not an indication of "for the sole use/purchase of", especially combined with the fact it does not say that in the TOS while other packages do.

With that said, I decided to sign up for this package online. I go through checkout process and at the end get directed to live chat.

For the uninitiated, the Eye-Fi memory card is a SD memory card with wireless capabilities built in, allowing automated uploading of your images as you take them without requiring a connection to a computer. You simply walk to a hotspot or a wireless access point you have registered with and your images are uploaded to the web for you.

With that being said, here is the problem: My 2 photo sharing services of choice are Flickr and Gallery 2. I am usually more selective and upload less images to Flickr, so didn't want to connect the card to Flickr (also of note, you can only have the card upload to one service only for some reason.....) This meant it would connect it to my Gallery 2 installation. This, in theory, works fine. The problem is that when uploading to the gallery, a new album is created for each day at the top level of your gallery. Thus, if I take 2 images today, an album will be created for "Images taken on June 13th, 2008". Take another 12 images tomorrow, and a new album for "Images taken on June 14th, 2008" will be created at the top level of the gallery. This becomes very annoying very quickly and there is no way on the Eye-Fi site to disable this behavior. The ideal solution would be for all of these albums to get created under one top-level album, and therefore not overrun my top-level gallery space.

I was able to come up with a solution to fix this. It requires a few patches to the gallery remote module, but it works. Check out my Gallery 2 Eye-Fi patch if you are interested in modifying your gallery as well. In the meantime, enjoy my clutter-free Gallery, thanks to this patch. This could possibly be turned into a true module for ease of use, but for now, this works and hopefully will still be of use to you as well.

My Macbook Pro was purchased in spring of 2006. At the time, I decided to choose the one hard drive Apple offered that was 7200 RPM - specifically, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB drive (ST910021AS). Over the past year or so, I found myself constantly running out of disc space, and decided it was time to do something about it. I decided upon the Western Digital Scorpio drive - a 320GB drive that is 5400RPM (WD3200BEVT).

Upon first look at the new drive specifications I was a little worried, as I wasn't sure the effect dropping down from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive would have on my systems performance. However, upon looking at the charts on Tom's Hardware, I was surprised to see the 5400RPM driving beat the 7200RPM drive in nearly every category. In the following tests, the 5400 drive was shown to be superior:

• Average Read Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• Average Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• File Writing Performance (PCMark05)
• Idle Power Consumption
• Interface Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• Maximum Read Transfer Rate (h2benchw 3.6)
• Minimum Read Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• Maximum Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• Minimum Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
• Windows XP Startup Performance (PCMark05)
• Database I/O Benchmark Performance (IOMeter 2003.05.10)

For the following 4 tests, the 7200RPM drive has superior performance (and it should be noted that other than the Random Access Time test, the 5400RPM drive was only barely beaten).

• Maximum Power Consumption
• Random Access Time (h2benchw 3.6)
• Webserver I/O Benchmark Pattern (IOMeter 2003.05.10)
• Workstation I/O Benchmark Pattern (IOMeter 2003.05.10)

You can click this link to see graphs of the results and the raw numbers if you are so interested.

Since installing the new drive, my system has 'seemed' a bit zippier (of course, if the mind wants it to be, it will imagine it so). I have definitely noticed no negative impact on performance from the drop of 7200RPM to 5400RPM. A large part of this is most likely due to the fact that technology for drives has improved a lot since early 2006 - if I had dropped the equivalent 2006 5400RPM drive in, I would imagine I'd be having much different results! Either way, it is definitely nice to have an extra 200GB of free space in the drive (which I'm sure I will be reporting is almost full shortly).

One of the first things I wanted to do upon installing this blog was to enabled Disqus comments for this blog. For the unitiated, Disqus is a web-enabled threaded commenting system where comments are accessable via API, which means they can be pulled into other tools such as FriendFeed.

Much to my disappoint, no module existed for Drupal to integrate Disqus. On the Disqus blog I found a post showing a hackish type workaround, however, this implementation did not really work for me.

Today, however, Rob Loach published the module I had been waiting for - Disqus for Drupal. I just installed it and it is working great thus far. The module is still in its infancy, but as of version 1.2 it has all the features needed to be fully functional.

This site has been basically non-functional for about a year and a half...way too long! So, I'm slowly re-building it up. So far the only content of any usefulness can be found on the sidebar.

You can see what music I've been listening to with the Last.FM widget, and see some random postings/comments around the internet with the FriendFeed widget. You can see the most recent images I've posted in the "Flickr recent photos" section. Finally, if you want to see my full Flickr gallery, click on Photography then Flickr Photostream.

I also have a self-hosted gallery (Photography -> Gallery) which I'm going to slowly work on loading images into - just a warning though, I have a lot of images so it will take a while! And shortly I hope to have that gallery fully integrated into the site, but for now the way it works will have to do.

Here's to hoping I keep this up and running (and hopefully with fresh content) fairly frequently!