Zero Hour Productions

Greetings.

Thanksgiving approacheth. In other words, the day (or rather, the biggest day) where we Americans step back, sit down, and...gorge ourselves on unhealthy amounts of food. Still don't get it? Neither do I - if Christmas can be tied to commercialism, then Thanksgiving can sure as hell be tied to gluttony. Meh, I guess I can't complain too much about it...I enjoy the food like everyone else does. Still, nothing quite fires up my sense of cynicism than a holiday that may have meant well at some point, but has since gone completely the wrong direction. But, rather than make this about how I am growing to distrust "society's" (and I use the term loosely) principles, let's get to topics of vastly more constructive natures.

First, kindly look to the right side of your screen. There should be an embedded Flash audio player chock full of audio just waiting to be heard! If you can't see it (and see instead some text advising you as such), you may need to install and / or upgrade your Flash plug-in. I haven't been patient enough to listen to a full file yet, given my relatively...horrendous connection speeds here, but I do know it works...in Firefox 3.0.4 on Kubuntu 8.10. So. if after upgrading Flash and whatnot it still doesn't work, please drop me a line with your OS and browser info and maybe some insight if you can spare it. I am using a bit of modified code from this guy so I can have Flash content and still be standards-compliant. On that note, yes, this site validates as XHMTL 1.1! w00t! So realistically, if stuff doesn't work as it should for your browser, you have every right to bitch at them (not me) for not making a standards-compliant application.

Want proof? Fine:

The podcast service is powered for free by GCast, the same fine folks that run GarageBand (the independent music people, not Apple's software). After reading the terms of use - which were surprisingly clear and succinct, by the way - some of the stuff I want to post may not be exactly 100% legal, in the sense that some of the audio included are commercial songs. But...I can rationalize that away by the following:

The one thing that concerns me about using GCast as a whole, though, is that it seems to restrict maximum per-file length to 8,337 seconds - beats me how they determined that number. If that is the case, though, that's a problem, as some of the audio is well over three hours in length...a whopping 10.800 seconds, at least. So, if you're listening that long to these audio files (thanks, by the way) and it just cuts out in the middle of a song or sentence or something, please drop me a line so that I may split the offending files appropriately. I've also provided links to subscribe to the broadcast and open the broadcast in a new window, just in case one would require such things.

As far as content goes, the audio I've uploaded (as I said I would today) is some old recordings of the INFINITY radio show a buddy of mine and I broadcasted from WSNC Radio, our college's pseudo-radio station - I say pseudo, because we don't have an actual over-the-air broadcast frequency, but we have an online broadcast. We're still doing the whole radio thing, and more recent recordings will make their way into the broadcast soon. Even better, if you'd like to catch us live, hit up the WSNC Radio Stream around 7 PM Central Time on Friday nights - we will be doing our last show of the fall semester on 11 / 29, but we'll pick up again at the start of the spring semester in January 2009 (specific date to be determined).

Project Omega is moving quite fast - after this past week (Week VIII), all final database design optimizations are done, and we can now start moving into a test implementation. By the end of Phase II, almost all data currently stockpiled - including all data on legacy projects - will be housed in a production-level database to await the construction of the rest of the system. While we already have some decently solid production material, actually having a solid database in hand will be nothing short of energizing.

There was one other personal matter I wanted to vent about here, but I think that's enough text for one night.

Mr. Bond, signing off.