This past weekend was the 8th annual Labor Day party in my neighborhood. We close down the street and party until early the next morning. There are a couple of us that have receivers in our garages that we crank up to provide tunes for the party. In the past we have tried satellite radio and the buffer would be off by a second or two. We also tried wireless speakers and they got too much interference from cell phones.

This year we used Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba to sync the music. What Airfoil does is hijack the audio signal from a software application to then broadcast it across a network in sync. I hopped on my neighbors wireless network that happened to be centered between the houses with radios in the garage. This allowed me a strong 802.11G signal in both locations (about 300' apart from each other). I then installed the Airfoil application in combination with my Pandora One application. On the other end I installed the Airfoil Speakers application. Once this was all setup I was able to perfectly sync the audio from the main computer to the other computer. We ran this all night and had perfect audio entertainment for the evening. For $25 it is well worth the money to broadcast your audio across your network in prefect sync.

I have not logged into MySpace for over a year and I thought that I would go ahead and cancel my account since the last activity from any of my friends was in November of last year.

1. Log In
2. Click on My Account in the main navigation bar
3. Click on Account in the secondary navigation bar
4. The 3rd heading is Cancel Account
5. You have to fill out a couple of forms as to why you are canceling your account. From there an email is sent to you.
6. You then have to click on the link in the email that launches MySpace again
7. Click on the cancel account button
8. After that your request to cancel your MySpace account has been made and it takes 48 hours to process according to the site.

I stopped my XM Radio subscription at the in January of 2009. I moved to listening to streaming radio on my iPhone. In the first couple of weeks of listening to it in the car I realized that the audio quality in Slacker Radio was far superior to Pandora. I have an after market stereo in my Equinox and you could hear an noticeable compression of the music on Pandora. So I ended up signing up for Slacker Radio Plus. Oh what a mistake that was!

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The past couple of days I attended a conference that my employer put on for our clients. As I was walking through the parking lot I noticed a car that was covered in dust. Not a little amount either. Months and months of dust had settled on the car. I walked over to read some of the writing on the windows and was surprised to see that the car clearly belonged to someone who was no longer with us. The car windows had been inscribed with messages by the hotel employees to their former coworker.

Some called this morbid and wrong. But in a way I was glad to see this. While it is just a dirty car in a garage. I am sure that it serves as a reminder to the hotel employees about their coworker and about how precious life is.

Well after a couple of years of the old design I decided to take a few minutes and update the site with a new template that seemed to match more of the colors that we use in our home.

This past weekend I was hanging Christmas lights for the first time at our house and when I climbed up to the roof I was blown away by the amazing view. I just sat up there for about 30 minutes to just soak it all in. While I was up there I pulled out my Blackjack and snapped a couple pictures to create this panoramic.

One of my main goals for 2007 was to "Release a product myself and not through my employer". I have been working nights and weekends for months to release GoTrip.mobi. While mobile based products are an emerging market in the hospitality industry this solution squashes the competition in features and usability. You can read the press release here

On a side note... me working on this product is the reason I have not updated the cf_googleMap tag. I will be getting back that now that the product has launched.

While be it late I wanted to share some of my goals for 2007.

#1. Have at least 3 open source projects.

Releasing cf_googleMap has take a lot of my time and it has been a learning experience to say the least. Dealing with other developers hacking away at your code, finding bugs and asking for feature requests is a bit scary. It really is the best form of peer review. I have some ideas on releasing some other projects around better error trapping and reporting, better debugger than the classic cfml debugging page. I am open to any other ideas as well.

#2. Release a product myself and not through my employer

I have been working on a product to release to the world for the past few months. I want to make money while I sleep! (More to come soon)

#3. Write an article and have it published

I have a decent start on some uses for the asynchronous event gateway. I just want to finish it up and submit it into the CFDJ.

#4. Enter a contest

I've seen many of the coding contests come and go and I never took any time to enter any of them. I doubt that I will win but I want to make an effort of going through the process. I've heard a lot of good things that you learn by going through some of these contests and I just want to put my hat into the ring.

This may be hard to believe for some but today I was able to do something that I have never done before. Build a snowman! Rusty helped me a lot and made sure to tell me how to build it. I am glad that I had the help of my 5 year old to guide me through the process.

Well after about a year with the last design up I decided to change it a few months ago but never got around to implimenting it as well as BlogCFC 5. Thanks to John Wise for the use of his great photography and to Ray Camden for the blogware.