I had a problem. All of my digital music lived upstairs on my computer. My wife's computer had music she's purchased from iTunes, plus any CDs she's ripped; and her computer was reading the songs off my computer, too. So, we can play songs from our computers, which is nice since we spend a lot of time in front of them. But, our stereo is downstairs. It serves as speakers to the TV in the living room, and there are speakers in kitchen and on the porch. And, the stereo can't talk to either of the computers, so our digital music collection is essentially off-limits to the stereo unless we burn a CD, or bring my iPod and dock downstairs. That is not ideal.

I searched all over for a simple and effective way to stream music from a computer to a stereo. There are a number of products which claim to do this: everything from FM-transmitter things (no thanks); to dedicated 'music library appliances' that act as file servers, with RCA jacks for stereo output, and little LED-screen interfaces on them them that allow you to choose songs - none of them can handle iTunes music, though. And, they all take control of your music, organize it, manage it, etc. This would probably infuriate iTunes. So, I was stuck.

Until last week... I bought a "Network Attached Storage" device - that's a big external hard drive (or array of hard drives) with an ethernet jack on it. So I can plug it into my router, and all the computers in the house can see it. Ah ha: a plan takes shape. So, first I put all my music and my wife's music onto this server. Then I pointed our individual copies of iTunes to the server. Now she can see the music that used to live on my computer even when my computer is off. Yay. As a bonus, because this server is a "RAID 5" server, even if one of the hard drives in the server dies, I don't lose any data - I just swap out the dead drive, and the server fixes everything - somehow. Another yay. And, now I can take my WiFi laptop, install iTunes on it, point iTunes at that server and it can play music from anywhere within 100 feet of my router. Specifically, it can run iTunes, pulling music off the NAS server, while sitting right next to the stereo downstairs with a cable connecting the audio-out jack to the Aux channel of my stereo.

Problem solved.

The only drawbacks so far are that iTunes doesn't automatically update itself when new files appear in its 'music folder', so we have to update each copy of iTunes individually, when anything new gets added to the server. And now I've pretty much dedicated my laptop to being a music server, and moved it away from where I work. If only these things were cheaper.

Ch-Check it out

There are few hot political issues right now that interest me less than immigration. It feels like a completely manufactured issue to me - red meat for the radical, reactionary, isolationist, right. And I got no respect for those folks. But, that doesn't mean I can't get a chuckle out of the way some approach the immigration issue. For example, this article at WorldNetDaily demonstrates how a writer can utterly annihilate his own argument with an absurdly inappropriate analogy:

And he [George Bush, a.k.a. "Jorge"] will be lying, again [in his speech tonight], just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

No, that's not satire. That's Vox Day: !

Yes, Hitler's treatment of the Jews is a good example of what's possible when a country really pulls together and decides to get something done !

Apparently, the Joker's sister works at one of my local TV stations: WRAL.

make this

Note to readers: my grandmother made the blackest, richest Devil's food cake I've ever had. I never got the recipe from her, or my mother, while I had the chance. Maybe this will come close... sounds like it could.

David Byrne tells us a little about Neurochemicals. My favorite part:

Left on our own we tend to select partners who have a set of genes known as the MHC complex that are dissimilar to our own. Pairing these different gene sets produces healthier offspring. It is thought we do this by scent. (Here's to sensory abilities we didn't know we had.) However, women on the pill tend to select men whose MHC is the same as their own. Something gets blocked or short-circuited. They make what is not necessarily the best choice…but, they won't have a child anyway, so it all evens out.