Josh has decided to call it quits on the CD Mix Of the Month Club, a sad day indeed. It started out as a good idea, but as with every­thing inter­net, word got out and out­grew it’s roots. Thanks for the ride. I guess that I can always rejoin Colum­bia House again — nah, then I’d have to pick out the music myself and pay a lot for it to boot. For now I’ll just lis­ten to RADIOIO.

Had a whole rant worked up because the com­ments weren’t work­ing, but now they are. I won­der if it a code incom­pat­i­bil­ity? About 95% of the time they don’t work over here they are still work­ing on my other site (where nobody com­ments anyway.)

I have been lis­ten­ing to Radioio for a cou­ple of weeks now. It is a lis­tener sup­ported site that plays a mix of music that really agrees with me. Free­load­ers such as myself are only allowed to lis­ten to the lo-band/mono stream. The high-band and a bunch of dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory streams are for sub­scribers only. $20 bucks a month or $200 a year gets you the works. The have a free 3 day trial so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Signed up Sun­day night buy Pay­Pal­ing them 20. It was Mon­day before I actu­ally got upgraded, and right away there was trou­ble in radio par­adise. 1} Can’t get it at work. The net­work weasels have got it all blocked (can’t blame them, our band­width already sucks, Inter­net access is slower than dial-up some­times.) And 2} all those other vari­ety of streams are vapor­ware, not avail­able yet. I can­celled — back to free for me.

We went out to din­ner with friends at Hilton Head. They took us to a very nice restau­rant called Charley’s Crab, cloth table­cloths and every­thing. Dur­ing the meal at the next table someone’s cell phone starts ring­ing. As usual, a totally unim­por­tant con­ver­sa­tion ensues. Bad enough we had to hear her end of the con­ver­sa­tion, but the poor folks she was din­ing with had their face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion put on hold while this woman chats about her day so far. Before the drive back to the condo I made a pit stop in the Men’s Room. While using the uri­nal a phone rang in the stall right next to me and the guy answered it. He then car­ried on a con­ver­sa­tion about how busy it was a work that day, etc.

Stum­bled onto the Dell Sup­port forums while rum­mag­ing the sup­port area. Sure enough, there was a long assed thread on the Sound­Blaster Live card I got. Part of the rea­son I spent a few hun­dred more on the 4550 instead of the 2350 was the sep­a­rate sound blaster audio card and an nvida video card as opposed to built in stuff on the moth­er­board. Turns out the Sound Blaster is a pro­pri­etary Dell thing made in who knows where and not sup­ported by Cre­ative Labs at all. So I have two options, buy a real card or go back to XP. I went to Sta­ples and bought a SB PCI512 card. It is a step down from the live, but bud­get only allowed a $50 expen­di­ture. I know I could have got the Live for fifty online some­where, but I wanted the easy return option of a neigh­bor­hood brick and mor­tar store just in case the card wasn’t the prob­lem. It was. The new card works fine, I’m happy now over­all, but unhappy with Dell.

Sat­ur­day morn­ing, my wife, her mother and I leave for a week long vaca­tion in New Orleans. We are dri­ving down in Mom’s Honda Civic, so there is one empty seat. First per­son to show up at my place Sat­ur­day morn­ing after 8:00 PM can come with us. Don’t pack too much as I think the three of us will have the trunk full, so your lug­gage may have to ride on your lap.

We stayed in New Orleans at the French Mar­ket Inn on Rue Decatur. We were there for a total of 5 nights and our total bill was $800. At first that sounds like a lot, but it works out to 160 a night and for a room in the French Quar­ter that’s not bad. Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that we got like their nicest room (I think.) It was the size of a decent 1-bedroom apart­ment. There was a full kitchen, a full bath, a liv­ing room, a small din­ing area and a bed­room with a large closet, nicely done up in a mix­ture of antiques and mod­ern fur­nish­ings. There were 15′ foot ceil­ings, a TV and phone in the liv­ing room and a TV and phone in the bed­room, a ceil­ing fan in the bed­room, a bal­cony over look­ing Decatur Street from the bed­room and it was cen­trally air conditioned.

Before you won­der if I’ve changed the title of this page to “Brian’s Daily Rave” let me list a cou­ple of things that were wrong with the place:
1) The remote con­trol for the TV in the liv­ing room did one thing and that was it — chan­nel down — any but­ton you pressed, and I mean any, made the chan­nel decrease by one. To get it to turn on or adjust the vol­ume you had to use the but­tons on the TV. We brought it to the atten­tion of the front desk and they sent up a main­te­nance per­son to fix it. He tried a lot of but­tons and con­firmed my diag­no­sis, but had no solu­tion. He lit­er­ally said, “Gee, I don’t know why it would do that.” He did show me that I could use the Nin­tendo con­troller to make the chan­nel go up as well as down. Vol­ume and power were still on the TV. Thanks a lot. His part­ing words to me were, “Boy I hope I can go eat now.” I thought to myself, you must be starved after all the effort put forth fix­ing my prob­lem. This encounter led us not to call for main­te­nance for any­thing else.
2) Both phones had flash­ing mes­sage lights and pos­si­bly still do. There were no instruc­tions on the phones so we didn’t even try and fig­ure them out. We unplugged the one in the bed­room so the flash­ing wouldn’t bother us when try­ing to sleep.
3) There were no phone num­bers on the phones either, so you couldn’t call some­one and give them your num­ber.
4) The phone in the liv­ing room had the room num­ber 214 on it, nice, but we were in 221.
5) The toi­let ran. Nearly every time you flushed you had to go back after a minute and jig­gle the han­dle to get it to stop.
6) The Jacuzzi tub had 2 of the 4 jets miss­ing so we didn’t even turn it on. Might have tried if there were some instruc­tions lying about.
7) It was a full kitchen, but the entire inven­tory of all the cab­i­nets and draws were 3 plates, 1 fork, 1 knife and one table­spoon.
8) In sev­eral places in the bed­room and liv­ing room the wall­pa­per cov­er­ing the ceil­ing was dan­gling. It was com­ing up at the edges in other places, but most wor­ri­some were the pair 1–1/2 square foot flaps hang­ing down in the bed­room over the bed.
9) The place seemed dirty, the car­pet was badly stained in lots of places and there were a few dan­gling dust sta­lac­tites that looked as if they might be launched into your lug­gage by the breeze kicked up by the AC ducts.
10) On day 1 we were out of room from 7:30 AM until almost 3 PM and they hadn’t cleaned the room. We snagged some fresh tow­els off a cart that was in the hall. Day 2 was the same thing. From then on we just hung the do not dis­turb sign out and would get some clean tow­els from any cart we saw in the hall or court­yard.
11) We had to share the room with a mouse. Donna, hav­ing grown up in New Orleans, first assumed it was a roach when she saw the move­ment in her periph­eral, but amended her iden­ti­fi­ca­tion when she noticed the tail. We saw him a cou­ple times and both times he evaded my chase. To be fair there was exter­mi­na­tor in our room within an hour of com­plain­ing to the front desk about Mickey and he was never seen again.