Wild.er

I learned in December that I still love playing the piano.   I hadn’t played in years but the many feet of snow outside inspired me to sit in the warm basement and remember how to play.  Since then I’ve been thinking more about it and recently a few piano playing friends pointed me in this direction for buying a digital piano:

• Pianos need all 88 keys.
• Pianos need to make beautiful music and must handle 32 notes polyphony.
• Pianos need weighted keys.

I’ve started to narrow my search for the brands and models that I want to try.  If you have any extra digital pianos around the house you no longer play or if you have recommendations (and I know family members and friends who play are reading this) please let me know.

• This story about train congestion in Chicago caught my ear since the town my paternal grandparents lived in may become overrun over by four times as many trains as it gets today.   A company called Canadian National wants to bypass the gridlock in downtown Chicago by using lesser used tracks outside of the city.  I’m sure I would be hearing about this from my grandparents if they were still living.  Since they are not you need to know about this.
  Plan To Unsnarl Chicago Rail Hits Snags In Suburbs [National Public Radio]

• You know I love eating at Chipotle but I didn’t know that the restaurant purchased food from local growers when possible.  That makes the burrito bowls that much more delicious.
  Local Growers Help Companies Cut Costs [Marketplace]

Tonight I called Social Security and found out that I needed additional facts before I could get the information requested.  The phone rep told me they are open until 7 PM Pacific time and that I could call back before then.  It was only through the bounty of being married and our phone from a different time zone that I was able to trick the phone system into providing customer service.

I compiled the requested info and called back at 7:20 PM Eastern Time (4:20 PM Pacific time) only to hear an automated message saying that the office is closed for the day.  What?!  While it was after 7 on the east coast it was not 7 PM yet on the west coast.

Not to be deterred, I tried to beat the system.  My wife Amanda has a phone number from Colorado so I dialed with her phone and got right into the phone system and through to a representative.  Apparently the office wasn’t closed if you live in Colorado but it is closed if you live in DC.

Next time you need to reach an office with a fancy automated system shielding you from real people, keep this trick in mind.

I have a custom ring tone setup on my cell phone when my bride Amanda calls (all the rest of you get the sound of an old phone ringing). Yesterday at work I heard her calling but the phone was in the cabinet so I turned down the radio and got up to grab the phone. And suddenly she hung up on me. I sat down and turned up the speakers again and there was her ring again. What was going on? The computer can’t receive calls so it had to be that the music playing was same song as the ring tone.

The song that Last.fm was playing at the time was Chopin’s Étude No. 5 in G-Flat Major “Black Keys. All I knew about the ring tone was that it was the only pleasing music that would suit a call from Amanda and that it was named melody07.mid.

Think I am going crazy and hearing things? You be the judge. [Read more →]

I don’t subscribe to cable television so I haven’t been able to watch The Daily Show in a long time at 11 pm. This all changed today … now I can watch full length high resolution episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Hulu.com at any time I want. This is great news partly because freeing television from the broadcast schedule will make it easier for fans to watch the shows on their schedule and also because I just ordered a cable that will connect my computer to the television.  This cable will bring whatever is showing on my notebook computer to the television and therefore bring the internet shows out of the office and into the living room.

Here’s last night’s Daily Show.

[via]

Today is the first day of the 19 day Fast in the Baha’i calendar. Baha’is abstain from food and drink when the sun is up so it is important that I wake up earlier than usual to have a good meal. Waking up is rarely easy since I’m such a happy sleeper so I need all of the help I can get. Enter: a free web based telephone calling service called Wakerupper to help me stop slumbering.

Wired magazine wrote about Wakerupper back in November and I immediately tried it but it was not fully available then except for beta testers. Without an account all you can do is schedule a single call. My single reminder calls worked well but the real beauty of a service to call a phone number is to schedule multiple calls on a schedule.

Wakerupper is basically a service that calls a telephone exactly when you want with the message of your choosing. According to the company:

“Wakerupper is an experimental service that aims to make telephone alerting as easy and inexpensive as possible. In one easy step, on one simple web page, Wakerupper enables users in the United States and Canada to schedule telephone reminder calls.”

Today I got an email inviting me to be a beta tester for the servce (yay, right on time!) and it is working great. Details on how it works are below. [Read more →]