I’ve been doing this HOW long?!

Posted on July 30, 2011 by

Well ladies and gentlemen, today marks a somewhat auspicious occasion in the history of this site. Today, July 30, 2011 marks the 10-year anniversary of Cantplaypiano.com. I believe in Internet-years this makes me dead. I still don’t think I use any of the resources available to me correctly, but hey, here I am still chugging along 10 years later.

So hey, it’s a work in progress, as always, and I look forward to hopefully being around 10 years from now to be able to make another meaningless quasi-sentimental blog post.

Cheers!
-T.J.

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Something having nothing to do with radio!

Posted on July 12, 2011 by

I’m sure this will be refreshing. It’s about technology. Old technology even! You’ll love it, I promise.

My parents bought their first PC in the spring of 1992, a 386 (a spectacle of graphics and sound!) that ran this newfangled graphical shell called Windows 3.1, and MS-DOS 5.0. We eventually threw more memory and a CD drive at the problem, but by 1996 it had become evident that most software wasn’t going to make any pretense of running on a 386. We got a 133 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM, and glory to the heavens above: Windows 95.

In May 2001 I wound up killing the OS, and upon getting it fixed, it turns out the hard drive was on its last legs anyhow, so it looked like it was time to get a new box. Take careful note of that date, May 2001.

In November 2000, Intel released the Pentium 4 processor, and the Socket 423. The socket was discontinued in August 2001 when it was learned that it exhibited poor electrical characteristics with processors over 2.0 GHz.

In September 2000, Microsoft released Windows ME, which represented a series of steps backwards in the progress of, well, progress. It wasn’t very stable, didn’t offer much if anything over what Win98SE did, and it exhibited memory leaks to the point where I’d have to reboot the thing several times a day. Windows XP was released in October 2001.

In November 2000 Intel released their first chipset for RDRAM, a proprietary, expensive, heat-producing, not all that efficient type of memory that they had tremendous hopes for. By September 2001 they released the Granite Bay chipset, which used DDR, and never looked back.

We bought a new computer. In May 2001. 1.4 GHz socket 423 Pentium 4. 128 MB RDRAM. Windows ME. After adding another 256 MB of RAM at tremendous expense, a DVD drive at reasonable expense, and Windows XP at very little expense, my parents actually used that thing until 2010, when I built them a Core 2 Duo which they seem to be pretty happy with. We literally bought a computer in the midst of the worst time to buy a computer in the history of buying computers.

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The technical difficulty scheduled for this time…

Posted on July 12, 2011 by

…has been postponed, due to technical difficulties.

For those of you who found it bearable to bear with me last Saturday, I thank you. That was without a doubt the most failure we’ve been able to cram into a one hour show. Anybody can do a radio show, it takes real skill to muck it up as expertly as we did. The short version is, the computer that sends one stream to the streaming server, which then sends a stream out to all of you out there, rebooted itself due to Windows Update™, and therefore the station was off the air for probably about 11 hours. Then the file containing my playlist got corrupted, and finally we tried to make some adjustments on the fly and wound up getting out of sync with reality. As per usual, I’ll simply promise we’ll try to do better the next time.

Live show from in the studio this weekend, Saturday at 2:00 pm ET, and as always you can hear it on Radio Free Kokomo.

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Just a small problem or three

Posted on July 4, 2011 by

So here are some issues I discovered.

First, the next live show is on 7/9, not 7/8. I wasn’t paying any mind to a calendar when I made that statement. 7/9 is a Saturday, 7/8 clearly is not. So July 9, 2:00 PM ET, http://radiofreekokomo.org. Be there!

Next, I’m working on getting set up on Google+. It would be nice to drive a few listeners in that manner too.

Third, I’m working to address the quality issues that have beset my show since I started doing it live from home. It sounds about a standard deviation worse than a live-in-studio show, which I’m unhappy about. I have an easy solution for archival purposes, and that is to record my end of the show as I do it, then patch it all together later. That’s fine, but it doesn’t address the issue of the live portion of the show sounding crummy. I’m working on it, that’s all I can say about that right now.

So to all my fans, thanks for sticking with me, and I appreciate everyone’s support. Makes the whole thing worthwhile, really. Clear your schedules for next Saturday!

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Roll out the Barrel

Posted on June 27, 2011 by

Didn’t do a post-mortem on my last couple of shows. Haven’t actually listened to my last couple of shows yet, so I don’t know if they even sound halfway decent or not.

The 6/18 and 6/25 shows were done live from my apartment, which is fun. It means I don’t have to drive 100 miles just to do a show. It was costing me $13 a week to do my show, which beats the $13 a day for the drives to work all those many months.

Anyhow, I’m rather enjoying doing the show from home. I wish I could figure out what the heck it was that caused me to pick up a sports talk radio show in my ear the whole time. I also wish I could just be me, that’d be nice. The problem is I tend to ramble on somewhat incoherently, and that’s troublesome too. I’m still learning, and I’m sure I’m better now than I was when I first started back in February.

No new show on 7/2 due to the holiday, so my plan is to be back on 7/8 at 2pm Eastern with another live Wacky on the Weekend!

Twitter follower count: 124 as of 6/27/2011.

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Partial failings of an afternoon

Posted on June 15, 2011 by

We’re getting cable internet at work because our other options are more T1s (expensive) or metro ethernet (slightly less expensive, but still expensive.) We have two cable companies in town, so I checked out their offerings and chose one as it offered more bandwidth for the same price. Obvious choice, and when I called the representative, they got the address and said we were good to go, so they conjured up paperwork for me, which I signed and sent back.

A week or so goes by and I get an email from the rep stating it would cost them $20,000 to build to our location and that they wouldn’t do it. Gee, thanks guys.

At this point I’m already cutting it close, and after having explored a bunch of options already (and growing quite tired of this by now) I contact the other cable company and get on their calendar for an installation today from 2 pm – 5 pm. What I was not anticipating was the guy showing up at 4:59, and I had some plans for this evening, so letting the guy start at 5 pm wasn’t really a terrific option, so we rearranged it for Friday at 11, that way if he’s late it doesn’t matter so much.

So there was that. Then I came home and was planning on hanging a curtain in our bedroom. Turns out that my cordless drill, the drill bits, the battery, and the charger are all in different places. I found the drill and the bits, but no battery or charger yet. Although it just occurred to me where I think they are, so I’m going to go look for it. I also couldn’t find my Bop-It. Grumble.

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For the people who are still alive

Posted on June 1, 2011 by

A group which I am just barely in anymore.

We’ve closed out the old apartment, so that’s done. All of our stuff is in Fishers, so that’s done. The problem is there’s still two full cars which I haven’t gotten around to unloading yet, which isn’t going to be much fun.

A process that was supposed to be finished over the course of a weekend wound up taking every bit of the 12 days we overlapped the two apartments, and I think luck played a bigger role than anything else in this whole process, both good and bad. The good thing was we got everything moved on time. The bad thing was it took about 8 more car trips than I anticipated, which was a clear indicator that we have too much stuff. One of my goals over the next year is to reduce the amount of stuff we have by about ⅓.

So that’s that. If I don’t fall over dead by Saturday, I’m planning a live show Saturday, June 4. The re-air schedule is going to change so that there are only 2 re-airs, but they will be the full 2-hour block, since I don’t have the time to edit together the individual hours and make them believable as single hours of programming. Hope some folks will listen, although I’m afraid my most staunch supporters are all collectively unavailable that day anyhow. Convenient for me. *boo, hiss*

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Боже мои…

Posted on May 19, 2011 by

Well this is going to be a hell of a next few days, and here’s why.

We’re moving starting May 19. Of the 6 rooms in our apartment, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell 4 of them are any different than when we started. We’ve packed approximately 12 boxes, and it doesn’t look like we’ve done anything. I banked on a week being enough time to pack, and it might have been except that my wife and I both got sick at the same time. She’s taking it far worse than I am, which is going to bode very poorly for the weekend. I just hope I have the energy come Saturday to get the big stuff into the U-Yank truck and then back out again 35 miles down the road.

Add this to the fact that I’m exhausted this week already, and am actively losing sleep as I write this. We’ve lost so much packing time already, but we’ve got to do this some how some way. May 19 begins the process, and I’m sure I’ll be live-tweeting the move so that you can all hear about all the things that are actively going wrong along the way.

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Explanation of impending hiatus

Posted on May 13, 2011 by

Alright folks, here’s the scoop: we’ll be in reruns until June. And here’s the reasons why:

May 14: One of my friends is moving around the end of the month and is trying to lighten the load of items he’s taking with him, so I’ll be going up to Ft. Wayne, IN to visit him and see if I can relieve him of some джунк. (That’s “junk,” but much funnier when transliterated into Russian.)

May 21: Moving day. I honestly thought about doing a show this day; packing the truck in the morning, then doing the show, driving to Fishers in the late afternoon and then unloading things. Probably not the best idea.

May 28: Memorial day weekend. I have no particular objection to doing a show this day, however it is still unclear to us whether this the campus is closed this day or not. Stay tuned on this one.

The next anticipated live show is looking to be June 4. In the mean time, please send in your jokes, music recommendations, and assorted assortables to my Twitter (@cantplaypiano) or if you’re feeling ambitious, as a comment to this blogpost.

Thanks to all my listeners, and let’s carry this thing through the summer and we’ll keep on Makin’ it Great!

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Getting better

Posted on May 8, 2011 by

Alrighty, so I’m slowly getting back to some semblance of normal: The 5/7 show was a lot better than the 4/30 show, which I thought was pretty bad. Here are a few things I’ve learned and I thought I’d share.

  1. There’s a certain level of prep that is optimal. Too little and you stand there bumbling like a dolt. Too much and you feel like you’re reading from a script. A series of notes seems to be the best thing. I still stand there sounding like a bumbling dolt, but it’s a charming sort of bumbling dolt.
  2. I must find a way to spin people up about the show before it starts. I’ve noticed that at the beginning of the show there are only ever a couple of listeners, then I pick up a few more along the way. I’m bad at this self-promotion thing.
  3. Just be myself, because frankly if I try to be somebody else, it’s just going to wind up sounding like crap. This is good advice for anybody doing anything.

So this is what I know, if I figure out anything else I’ll let you know. And in the mean time, tune in next week, 2pm ET on http://www.radiofreekokomo.org.

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