onward

I was so brain-fogged the other day when I wrote the previous post that I didn't know what day it was. Not that it matters substantially in the greater scheme of things, but when I wrote "tomorrow," I should have written "today"--but I didn't know what day it was. The good news is that the change in dosage levels that day (Wednesday) has led to me feeling substantially better. All my symptoms have lessened and I've felt well enough today and yesterday to play the piano a little and also--here's the scary part--upload all kinds of crapola to Facebook.

This is more complicated than it sounds because it involved audio and video. Now, I have been a techno-nerd since 1982, and I build my own computers, but I have resisted joining the media blitz on the internet for years. I'm pretty much a luddite when it comes to multimedia, and don't even own an iPod. I hate noisy and blinky things in my web experience and so I use a browser that makes it really easy to turn all that multimedia garbage off by default. What this means however is that I am increasingly having to adjust the content blocker and the plugin stopper for individual websites like Facebook, and for some things I even have to switch to a more popular browser so that things will work, especially if multimedia is involved.

So yesterday I started with what I thought was a relatively simple task: figure out a way to get a certain recording off of a CD and onto my Facebook profile as an MP3. But, as always, things are never simple when Windoze is involved, and it gets worse when you throw in the nonsense called DRM [rant omitted]. I eventually accomplished the goal but it set me onto other ones: figure out a way to capture streaming video for later playback (for free); figure out a way to post other multimedia stuff to my Facebook profile. I spent most of the day today at cnet researching freeware (with a detour to the WayBack Machine at archive.org), discovering the fun at Hulu.com, and revisiting a karaoke site where I recorded a bunch of songs last summer for fun. I still haven't found the right software to capture that stream, but I did find an interface that enabled me to post my karaoke recordings to my Facebook profile.

Just in case you're wondering, I already know how to post my karaoke recordings to my blog. But don't worry, I'm not going to.