Milwaukee 2.0 - Episode 001

Milwaukee 2.0, my internet audio talkshow (podcast), is now available. We recorded our first show tonight. Tad Mazik, my sound engineer, did all the down and dirty work, I just did the babbling. I also picked out the music, it was hard..

Download Now (MP3 19.8MB) - Shownotes

You can subscribe with your podcast client using the RSS feed. Yes, that's the same one that's provided with that orange XML button the top right side of this page.

Tags: Milwaukee 2.0, podcast

Photo Albums

I'm hearing rumor that photo album support will be coming to the Facebook soon. It's apparently already available at an inferior Milwaukee school (Marquette).

I've thought this would be an awesome feature for quite some time now and would allow people to waste even more time on the site. Please, give me access Facebook gods!

Tags: Facebook

Lack of Posting

There is a legitimate reason the updates have been lacking on this blog for the past week. Come last week at about this exact time I started to feel a serious pain in my back. Immediately dismissing my first thought that I was pregnant, I moved on to realizing that moving my fridge and computer tower at the same time was a bad idea. I moved recently from the seventh floor down to the first floor to a single room for various reasons. My refrigerator was the last thing I had left to move. This is one of those small ones that is no taller than say oh, my computer tower. To fit the fridge best in my room it had to go where my computer tower currently was. I picked up the computer tower with one hand and sort of pushed the fridge under after just sitting it down. A little more lifting and adjusting of the two (at the same time) and I was set. In the process of carrying the fridge down (I held it while in the elevator) and adjusting it once it was in the room, I did something very wrong to my back.

I now have a pulled "gardener" muscle, which apparently snakes up inbetween my vertebras in my back and helps hold them together. This means it hurts a lot to stand still or sit with my back not firmly pressed against something. This has resulted in extended times to do the simplest tasks such as homework and folding clothes. There has been little desire to blog or do much of anything else lately, however things are improving. The pain is supposed to last at least another two weeks however, so things won't be improving too fast. On the plus side, I can barely stand in our cafeteria buffet area to get food, so it's like being on a diet for a couple of weeks.

Mario Twins

By way of my friend Perry Lewis, comes the Mario Twins flash animation video thinger. Cool.

Tags: Mario Twins

Halloween and My iPod

I should have dressed up my iPod Shuffle for Halloween. I missed out.

Tags: iPod, shuffle

Oil-for-Food and Illegal Kickbacks

Talk about corruption check this out. I can't wait to see who is on the list of the 2,000 companies that were involved in the illegal kickback programs. That Saddam Hussein, he sure was a clever, sneaky guy.

Perhaps the most important thing though is not the kickbacks. This however is my favorite part, "The smuggling of Iraqi oil outside the program in violation of U.N. sanctions poured much more money -- $11 billion -- into Saddam's coffers during the same period, according to a finding in the new report.". $1.8 billion in kickbacks seems like a much smaller failure for the UN, when you're talking about missing a $11 billion in oil that went out of the country. Not that it's easy to watch barrels of oil, but he was under the spotlight for how many years and we still missed this much oil? Oops.

Tags: Saddam Hussein, Iraq, United Nations

Badger Game Panorama

Badger Game Panorama- 10-22-05
Originally uploaded by Matt Schilder.

An awesome photo stich of the Wisconsin vs Purdue game last Saturday. I wish I had the seats this guy had.

It looks the best when you look at the original shot.

Milwaukee Wifi - Second Thoughts

There is an article from Milwaukee Magazine available online that talks about the potential "dangers" of this city-wide wifi plan for Milwaukee.

I had previously mentioned the Milwaukee wifi network in this post.

Tags: Milwaukee, wifi

Senator

Around 1:30 P.M. CST I was confirmed as a Senator in the Milwaukee School of Engineering Student Government Association. I am now one of 15 senators "who are committed to maintaining the communication link between students and the school's administration."

Cool.

Tags: MSOE

The Sun - Must Be You

A VC was right "Must Be You" by The Sun is a great song.

Download it now

The Sun

LiveMeeting Ad

Here's a great Microsoft ad about LiveMeeting.

Tags: Microsoft

Moving

I've been working on moving the past few days, so expect today, like the days before it, to be a slow day. On the plus side, the new keyboard is in!

AJAX in Fantasy Football?

Yahoo's Fantasy Football has an interesting new feature this year. It's a little note to self box on the bottom of your roster that you're able to write down a quick and private note to yourself about a player, upcoming game, or I guess even a vanity message. The neat thing I found about it is it appears to be created with AJAX, which makes for a very pleasant user exerpeince. I don't have to reload the page or anything of that nature, I just type and save.

Next, I hope they do the whole system in AJAX. I hate having to flip back and forth pages to manage my roster. What if they had some AJAX-powered drop-down boxes of available players for each position? Say I want to replace my kicker. I click on his position and a list appears dynamically of all the available kickers and their stats. When I find one the want I, I just execute the move, minimize the window and go on my way. They can do it with Flickr, they can certainly do it with fanstasy football. That would sure save a lot of time and give Yahoo an edge in the fantasy football market.

Tags: Yahoo, fanstasy football

Free Books

Via Slickdeals.net "Two free Visual Basic .NET e-Books from Microsoft."

Update: From the comments, there is also 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005 available. Definitely something I'm going to be checking out.

Tags: Microsoft, Visual Basic

T.J. Ford

Milwaukee Bucks point guard T.J. Ford squashed any doubts that his spinal cord injury that sidelined him for a year and a half had any affect on his overall playing ability tonight when he scored 17 points in his first game back.

Tags: Milwaukee Bucks, T.J. Ford

Blog of the Week

The campaign is over for being Milwaukee's Blog of the Week for me, however casey chestnut deserves your support. He's a super intelligence .Net guru that writes over on his blog Brains-n-Brawn. He claims to be the deciding in my election, so it would be nice if you could return the favor to him.

He of course, being more skilled with these here computers, created a crafty way he could cheat and assure himself a victory. His morals did set in as he decided it was just too easy to cheat. Learn all about it and vote for him.

My apologies go out to Raster creator of Tinkernet who I somehow beat, perhaps because he did not learn of the competetion until the last day.

Tags: Milwaukee

Good News

I received a letter in the mail a couple of days ago indicating that I've moved up to number 38,353 on the season ticket waiting list for the Green Bay Packers. I signed up sometime around 1998 and was in position 47,000 something at that point, I'm making progress!

Tags: Green Bay Packers

Good Ol' RWJ

HPIM0487
Originally uploaded by Benny Jagger.

Bening snapped a picture of RWJ (right and the Regents dorm (left). RWJ is of course home to Bening, a couple of hundred others, and me. I thought I would toss this up on the blog so that all the stalkers I have can have a better visual of where I live in Milwaukee. I'm sure the Public Safety guard downstairs checking IDs of everyone entering the building will protect me, yeah....

Tags: MSOE

NBA Live 06

I've been playing NBA Live 06 for the PC for a few days now and I must say I'm very impressed. It's much better than NBA Live 2005 (my review), which I couldn't bring myself to even play. After playing this game a few times I have finally convinced myself to upgrade from NBA Live 2004. I calculated a while back (sometime in May) that I had spent nearly 200 hours of my life playing NBA Live 2004 over the past two years, so this is a big switch for me. Without digging into too much detail, let's just that the game is improved in almost all aspects. Graphics are a steady step up, the ability to block a shot has been toned down, player movement has been greatly improved, substitutions finally allow you to queue up a subsitution, and there are a few more dynamic features in the Dynasty Mode. The salary caps seems to be much improved in Dynasty Mode, as before it was nearly impossible after a few years to stay under the cap. It appears now that there is more flexibility, but I haven't played a whole season yet to actually test this out.

Wishlist for the 07 Version
   - Hot and Cold streaks for players
   - Smooth lines on the court, I'm sick of them being jagged
   - Improve the PDA in Dynasty Mode, it's too cumbersome to use
   - Try and minimize the announcers repeating a comment when playing through a season
   - Updateable roster downloads for the PC version (I think it exists on the Xbox version)
   - Ability to modifty controller settings without having to leave Dynasty Mode or more importantly the game
   - Keyboard support in the menus

Check out the NBA Live Series Center for more information on the game.

Tags: NBA Live 06

Keyboard Dead

The keyboard on my desktop computer died. I had always wondered if a keyboard could just wear out, and sure enough they can. It started with the left control key while playing the new NBA Live 06. I was playing the game and realized my players would no longer sprint when I hit the control key. I switched to the left shift key as sprint, but my left shift key is now dead too. Along with that I noticed the 5, 6, -, +, and delete keys are also all dead. I've been using the keyboard since 1999, it's now being used on a different computer than I had originally started using it with. Six years of heavy use I do suppose is pretty impressive. I went ahead and bought another one that is identical, I don't want to bother having to learn a new feel to a keyboard.

For now it's just me and the laptop. Here's a link to the black Belkin ErgoBoard I have.

Tags: Belkin, keyboard

Milwaukee's Blog of the Week

That's right, you're looking at it. BobtheKing Dot Com is officially Milwaukee's blog of the week. The Chicago-esque voting was greatly appreciated, I'm sure the five votes per person pushed BtK to victory and me into fame and fortune. I shall now bask in my 7 days of fame by drinking Mountain Dew and eating Nutty Bars while watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Thanks much for your continued readership, I do it for you!

Tags: Milwaukee

Video iPod

The Video iPod was released. Wow.

Tags: Apple, iPod

Bucks Scrimmage

I went over to the Milwuakee Bucks intersquad scrimmage on Monday night at the Bradley Center. After finding some close seats still available (tickets were free) a half-hour into the event, I was rather pleased. My calculus lecture just had to interfere with the Bucks schedule. Either way, when we got there it was still somehow the first of four six minute quarters. It was more of a "fun night" for fans than it was a intersquad scrimmage, so I'm sure they started with fan activities before the scrimmage. But let's talk about basketball.

I was very impressed with the play of rookie Andrew Bogut. If the success of the team is going to depend on one player's performance more than any others, it might be him. Things are looking good though. He ran the floor well, demonstrated good passing vision, and slammed home a few nice dunks, exactly what he needs to do. The Journal Sentinel agrees with me. T.J. Ford also looked sharp coming off a spinal-cord injury that sidelined him for more than a year. The addition of Bobby Simmons, who played fairly well in the scrimmage, is another positive sign for the Bucks. Adding to an already talented core of Michael Redd, Joe Smith, and Desmond Mason, Bogut, Ford, and Simmons should provide the lift to get us over .500 again. As I said before I can't wait for the season to start on November 5th, my playoff-bound Bucks are going to rock.

Tags: Milwaukee Bucks, Andrew Bogut, TJ Ford

Milwaukee WiFi

The Journal Sentinel just tossed a quick story up about plans that will be unveiled today to build a citywide wireless network at zero cost to taxpayers. The proposal is from Midwest Fiber Networks, a Milwaukee-based company. Let's hope the service is reliable and cheap.

PDA + Wifi + Bus = Cool, PDA + Wifi + Walk to Grocery Store = Cool, Laptop + Wherever + Wifi = Cool. I like it. There is wifi all over where I live now thanks to unlocked access points, but this network would be AWESOME.

Tags: wifi, wifi

Gates To Wisconsin

Bill Gates will be at UW-Madison tomorrow (Wednesday) in an attempt to drum up more interest in computer science. As it looks like he is headed to Michigan next, perhaps I could call him on his cell phone and get him to swing by MSOE. Yeah.

Tags: Bill Gates, Wisconsin

Shameless Plug

It's the last day (I think) that you're going to be able to vote for BobtheKing Dot Com as Milwaukee Blog of the Week. Vote now! It takes a second, doesn't result in any extra email for you, and really boosts my ego.

Tags: shameless

What's Google Really Up To?

The Joy of Tech pleases me as the Google Skeptic by letting me know exactly what Google is up to.

Tags: Google, Joy of Tech

Wallace and Gromit

Over the weekend I saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It was excellent. What I'm seeing is that the box office numbers have been pretty impressive so far. Unfortunately it appears the creator, Aardman Animations, has hit a little bit of bad luck. THEIR BUILDING STORING EVERYTHING WALLACE AND GROMIT BURNED DOWN! It's gone, all the little clay models, gone.

Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park is suprisingly realistic about the situation saying, "Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal."

CNN has a decent story with details.

Tags: Wallace and Gromit

Redd Does Not Forget

Michael Redd demonstrates why he's a class act by saying thanks to those who mentored him to stardom. I can't wait to see him in action tomorrow night at the FREE intersquad scrimmage between the Bucks and the Bucks at the Bradley Center.

Tags: Milwaukee Bucks, Michael Redd

Go Pack

How about those Packers? They finally were able to close the deal, in a big way. They destroyed the New Orleans/San Antonio/Baton Rouge Saints with a final score of 52-3. I was able to blast Todd Rundgren's "Bang the Drum All Day" everytime the Packers scored, and it felt great to do it so often. They're now 1-4, but only one game behind the division leader Detroit.

Tags: Green Bay Packers

wikiHow

wikiHow, the How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit. Awesome, this is my kind of site.

Tags: wiki

Badger Ball

Congratulations go out to my friend Devin Barry on making the Wisconsin Badgers basketball team. I knew when you were roasting me in middle school I was getting beat by the best.

Tags: Wisconsin Badgers

Tag Camp

Tag Camp now there is something I wish I could go to. Unfortunately it's the way out on the west coast and I have no way of getting there being in Milwaukee.

Tags: Tag Camp

AOL Revamped

It's good to see that someone else noticed that AOL is becoming a new company.

Tags: AOL

Identity 2.0

If you have a few minutes in your life, you should really watch this keynote video from the Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt of SXIP. If you're building applications you want to keep something like this in mind. It's an excellent presentation, plus the idea of Identity 2.0 rocks.

Tags: Identity, SXIP

Microsoft Expression

There has been relatively little buzz about Microsoft Expression especially including the fact that it potentially could blow away Photoshop and Dreamweaver, along with strengthing the power .Net developers have. I suggest you check it out, I know I'm going to.

Tags: Micorosft

Multiple Home Pages in Firefox

The story of my life, I just accidently discovered a new feature in Mozilla Firefox. If you have open multiple tabs and set your home page using the "use current page" function it will set all of those pages to be opened in tabs upon Firefox start-up. I could have been living under a rock on this feature, but it's pretty cool. Will the next version of Internet Explorer support this?

Tags: Firefox

Office 12 Video

I've been showing off the Channel 9 - Diving Into the New Office 12 video to people on my floor and the reaction has been very positive. I watched parts of it with someone for the first time and we were both impressed at the new top menu bar. Everyone seems excited about the PDF support and the highlighted text floaty function. I can't wait to get my hands on a beta.

How long has that =rand() capability been in Office? I've never seen anyone use that before, I'm going to be using that all the time now.

Tags: Microsoft Office

PDFs in Microsoft Office

The next version of Microsoft Office will support the loading of PDFs. This alone is enough for me to tell the whole world to upgrade once the next version ships. Adobe Reader has always been near the top of my list of most hated programs and I now have my chance to help wipe it off the face of the planet. Adobe Reader takes far too long to load, hangs my computer every other time I open a PDF, and causes Firefox to crash on a regular basis. They have improved on these issues with each version, but I can't wait five versions down the road for them to get it right. I'm excited for Office 12.

Learn about the PDF support.

Tags: Microsoft Office

Web 2.0 Meme Map

Web2MemeMap
Originally uploaded by Tim O'Reilly.

Here is the Web Version 2.0. Without actively attemtping to be Web 2.0, this is great map of what I do on the Net. Products of this kind of thinking are just better. Flickr, Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Technorati for tagging your blog, Google AdSense, Wikipedia, AJAX, Bit Torrent, and the Creative Commons simply rock.

What do you think?

MemeFlow - Your Goto Page!

This is cool....

So what is GoTo? Simply put, it is a collection of links arranged into blocks. You provide the links and it acts as a simple,clean and fast home page. Just set this page as your home page and ignore all those favourites, links on the title bar of your browser and other places that links get put.

Thanks Scoble, I had been considering creating my own link page to use as my home page in place of Bloglines. This should work great, I hope.

Check it out.

Tags: GoTo

Is Google Evil?

Everyone is calling me the "Google Skeptic" lately and fair enough, I am. I was just as skeptical of Microsoft a few years ago as many of you probably remember. I don't think anyone is holding Google's feet to the fire. Google this, Google that is all I hear, but no one talks about their failed products (Google Web Accelerator anyone?). Google is cool, but they're not perfect. I just want to make sure they're held to the same standards Micorosft is.

Scoble reminded me of a story Robert Cringely had written that I had read a few days earlier. Initially I didn't feel the story was blog-worthy, however being the "Google Skeptic" and reading it for the second time, I have changed my mind. It's an interesting analysis of a Google AdWords experiment. Check it out.

Tags: Google, Robert Cringely

Yahoo Maps on Your iPod

Jeremy Zawodny has a post up about a new service called iPod-iWay that takes driving directions from Yahoo Maps and saves them for viewing on your iPod Photo. That's a fancy little hack, unfortunately it won't work on my iPod Shuffle.

Tags: Yahoo, iPod

Update for MSCONFIG

Chris Pirillo put up a post about the update Micorosft released for MSCONFIG. If you know what MSCONFIG is, check this out.

Tags: MSCONFIG

LAN Party Map

From the co-host of the LAN party I founded (Network of Gamers) comes an absolutely awesome use of Google Maps, The LAN Party Map. If you're looking to find LAN parties in your area or get exposure for your LAN party, this is the way to do it. Congratulations to Michael Isaacson on a job well done.

Tags: LAN party

Intelligent Design

If you're going to teach "Intelligent Design" it appears you should also be teaching about the flying spaghetti monster and how he/she created us. Awesome, thanks Logan.

Tags: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Intelligent Design

I NEED YOU!

So get this, somehow I'm in the mke blog of the week contest for MKEonline (Milwaukee Online). Someone nominated me apparently, and whoever you are, rock on, you rule. Now it's time to win this baby. Vote BobtheKing Dot Com to the top!

Vote Now!

Tags: Milwaukee

It's Coming

revolucion
Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

Web 2.0 is coming and it's only going to get bigger and better. I love how services like Flickr and Del.icio.us are reshaping my life already.

Try^d’s First Album

Via Lawrence Lessig, Try^d's first album Public Domain is now available for download from their site.

I've listened to the first few tracks and it's decent stuff.

Tags: Public Domain, Lawrence Lessig

Technorati Tags

Why is it that with Technorati's tag service when a tag does not have any blog posts associated with it it will not show the resulting images from Flickr and links from Del.icio.us? A quick test of this would be to look at the tag Jeramey Jannene, on technorati this turns up nothing. When we go to Flickr however, we see a lot of things.

Tags: Technorati

Road Ahead for the Crew

After a very pleasing .500 finish for my Milwaukee Brewers, now the even harder part of the journey emerges. The Brewers must now work to emerge as one of the league's elite teams. Typical tactics for general manager Doug Melvin of claiming players off waivers and drafting them are not going to work as well, the team's better record means they are further from drafting first and having first priority on the waiver-wire. Tom Haudricourt of the Journal Sentinel has a good story with more details on the situation at hand.

Tags: Milwaukee Brewers, Doug Melvin

Bradley Center

It had to happen at some point soon, here comes the talk of a new stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. Without jumping in head first, I have one request. I hope they keep build the new stadium downtown. Outside of the large economic impact it has on downtown Milwaukee, I absolutely love living five blocks away from the home of my favorite sports team.

Tags: Milwaukee Bucks, Bradley Center, Milwaukee

Oh My Gosh!

Oh My Gosh!
Originally uploaded by CK+3.

It's Friday, enjoy the weekend.

Joy of Tech and my Cat

Joy of Tech has a comic up about what the familiy cat is thinking.

Tags: cat

Seattle

So I was out in Seattle over last weekend and let me say, it rocked! I was out there for the Microsoft Student Ambassador Kickoff Event and enjoyed every minute of it. I'm excited to be the Microsoft Student Ambassador for MSOE, the things I'm working on planning for this year are shaping up to be awesome. I'll be working to create a new club at the school, the Microsoft Users Group (just so I could get the acronym MUG), that will hopefully be a part of the .Net Users Group and Windows Users Group. The two existing groups already meet pretty close to MSOE. I will also be working to expand the technical library of books MSOE has with the addition of a lot of Microsoft Press books. Perhaps most importantly, I will be working with faculty and students to better understand the MSDN Academic Alliance. Through the program I will also be giving out a lot of free pizzas, t-shirts, and encouraging involvement in competitions such as the Imagine Cup.

This will of course be one of the first places to find information on my experiences with the program and upcoming events, yada yada.

Tags: MSOE, Microsoft, MSA

Coming

I'm still requiring.... dang it... recovering from the trip to Seattle. As you can see I can't even find the right words, nor did I have the time in the past few days to post much of anything. I can only hope that what I said to people during class today made sense. Actually, I really hope what I said did make sense as I talked with the Dean of Students and the President of the Student Government at length today.

If you're at MSOE and want to be involved in a new club on campus, shoot me an email or call me. I'm looking for anyone that is interested in free stuff and technology.

Time for sleep. When will the madness stop?

Tags: MSOE