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#6 Streaming music

2008-04-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

I'll skip talking about the RSS module for another day or so and jump ahead to the streaming music exercise. This was really easy to set up, but it took me a few minutes to realize that it was working but I wasn't hearing it. The shared computer I usually use had been set to 'mute' so I sat waiting for the music to start and almost dozed off. When I woke up and figured out to turn on the sound it was pretty amazing how easy it is to create customized 'stations'. I know at the last place I worked they discouraged listening to music over the Internet supposedly due to band width limitations. Is this really a concern depending on the connection, or was it just a management mind control issue?

Time to catch up

2008-04-11T07:05:00.000-07:00

OK, I have been negligent on the blogging part. I have pretty well kept up with the exercises, but haven't blogged about them. The set up of the instant messaging was pretty easy, the difficulty was coercing someone into chatting with me. What does it mean when it costs $20 to get someone to chat? Is this illegal in some states? Thanks anyway Ryan.
I was recently having one of those annoying 3 way phone conversations (one person in the middle with a separate phone to each ear) and realized that if we were all hooked up to IM it would have been a lot easier. Maybe next time.

First of many?

2008-04-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

At long last here is my first posting. This whole process was originally presented as 'optional' for my group, but this has been clarified recently to 'required'. I had intended to pick away at it as time allowed anyway, so now it is just a matter of trying to catch up. Being behind a hand truck or steering wheel a good part of the day limits the opportunities to just randomly blog to your hearts content.
What do I hope to learn from this exercise? That is hard to say. I have no real expectations and at this point view it all as good general knowledge. After getting over the initial resistance to something new it was actually fairly easy to set things up (so far). These are all probably good 'tools' to be aware of, but it seems like in today's world there is always something new to replace what you have just become familiar with, so it is hard to believe that this will be the last great thing.