Schonhose

Last night a friend of mine, who’s a DJ, invited me to go along with him. It has been a while since I’ve done some stuff behind the turntables so I decided to tag along. He had to play in a small party pub somewhere in Schagen. Instead of different rooms for different music styles (trance, R&B and party music) there was only one room. This makes playing music even harder because you have to keep everybody happy.

A long time ago I have limited myself to one style: German hardstyle. I’ve tried two – three numbers but it never caught on. So the rest of the evening we played mostly party music which the people seemed to enjoy better. A little unfortunately for me, but I still had a good time.

The thing however that bugs me the most is the requests from the audience. Sometimes people suggest a song that actually fits into the scheme, but most of the time they make suggestions that don’t fit.

Imagine this: you’re playing some party music and most people are having a good time, judging by the people on the dance floor. This guy walks up to you and puts in a request for Rammstein. Are you kidding me?

Ever since my last post the weather here has been amazing. From all countries in Europe we actually had the highest temperatures over the last week. Yes, that is right, temperatures in Greece ranging from 15 – 20 degrees Celcius while the temperatures in the Netherlands were ranging between 25 – 30 degrees on a daily basis.

Although I find anything above 25 degrees to hot while being at work, I have to say I’ve enjoyed it. Unfortunately I work on the third floor, which happens to be the top floor as well, so our rooms don’t cool down as much as I would like. It doesn’t matter anyway, since we’re heading for some cooler weather (around 20 degrees Celcius) with some rain.

I love rain, I really do. I have to admit I only love it after a period of prolonged sunshine and high temperatures. There is actually a reason I really love it. I have a condition called Allergic rhinitis, and as you might imagine the past few days were not all that funny. I have to admit, I have had it worse than it is now. Somehow I’m thinking it doesn’t affect me all that much anymore. A couple of years back the allergic reactions seemed worse.

But still I can feel the effect of it, sometimes I have reddish eyes which itch, I have to sneeze a lot and last but not least there is the drowsiness (mostly because all that sneezing wears me down). The upside of rain is that it completely washes out the pollens from the air. Another upside is that it will clean my car as well. I used to have a dark colored car but the last few days it is turning completely yellowish from all those pollens.

Well, since my last (rather large) post almost eleven days ago I decided to write a little something about nothing. Funny how things go, I got caught up doing my everyday job while not having much room to do some other stuff. I do have stuff laying around I ought to be doing but time isn’t pretty easy to come by these days. Sometimes I try catching up on my RSS feeds only to realize I need more time.

I’ve updated my Huey to a Huey Pro, or at least I’m in the process of trying. The current status is I’ve payed for an upgrade, got a couple of files to upgrade the hardware and then I got stuck. It seems the upgrade utility cannot find some file needed to perform the upgrade. I’ve contacted Pantone Support and I’m still awaiting response from them. As usual it could take a few days (it has been almost two now….). I do hope I can sort this out soon since I really need to process some pictures for my website.

Yesterday I had some serious problems with my DVD-burner. I couldn’t burn any DVD or CD, Nero Burning ROM just gave up on it giving the dreadful “Power Calibration” error. So feeling quite adventurous I visited the website of the manufacturer, checked out their support site and found a ROM update.

In general my philosophy is “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it“, but in this case the burner wasn’t working as expected. So I went ahead with the ROM update, updating it from version 3 to version 9. After the successful update Windows needed a reboot (and another one after that). I started Nero Burning ROM, slid an empty DVD in the burner, selected the files and pressed “Burn”.

There it was again: “Power Calibration” error. So I decided to use some other software. I created an ISO file first, then tried to burn the file with the excellent tool ImgBurn. Immediately my computer became very unresponsive. It eventually came back but while the burning progressed the overall feel was kind of sluggish. But hey, at least the burning worked.

After the burning finished I checked the settings of the IDE controller. What do you know, there was the root of my problems. The primary IDE channel, on which the burner resides, slipped back into PIO mode which is slower than any of the DMA modes. So, setting the PIO mode to DMA would solve the problem.

Well, not quite. I was unable to change the settings and I ended up with removing the drivers of my IDE controllers as well as the drivers of the burner and other DVD player. Needless to say I needed several reboots after that.

After the final reboot all hardware was discovered and reinitialized. A check confirmed both drives are now on Ultra DMA 4. That will beat PIO anytime.

Most pages I visit have it in one form or another. Heck, it is even on this page you’re visiting right now. But somehow it is the hardest thing to find for most users. Those of you thinking that I’m talking about the Paypal button are wrong (although I wouldn’t mind if you hit that button if you’ve downloaded something nice from this site). I’m actually talking about the search button.

For those of you who are not aware of this wonderful feature, let me explain. Allow me to get theoretical for just one second here. Suppose you got a question or a problem. Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask other people for help? Well, your dreams have come true, these days the internet is full of useful community places were people meet online to discuss a certain subject. Let’s call these places forums. Pretty exiting thus far right?

On these forums you can ask your question and people will come up with suggestions or fixes. Pretty neat huh? So the easiest way to get a fix for your problem would be to drop the question on the forum and wait. WRONG!!

Let me elaborate. What if someone else has had almost the same problem you have. For sake of argument, lets assume the solution for the problem is a well known fact in the community. See were this is heading? If you had used the search to see if someone else had the same problem and got it fixed, you wouldn’t have to wait several hours,days,weeks for an answer.

So using the search actually saves you time. Not to mention it will save the time of other people answering the same question over and over and over and over (well, you get the point) again, so they can focus on the ones which haven’t been answered.

There you have it, the tip of today: Saving time by using the search.