John Blayter - Other Stuff

Using Airfoil for syncing audio

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:09:00 -0500

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.

How to cancel your MySpace account

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:51:00 -0500

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.

Log In
Click on My Account in the main navigation bar
Click on Account in the secondary navigation bar
The 3rd heading is Cancel Account
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.
You then have to click on the link in the email that launches MySpace again
Click on the cancel account button
After that your request to cancel your MySpace account has been made and it takes 48 hours to process according to the site.

Pandora One vs. Slacker Radio Plus

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:56:00 -0500

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! [More]

Messages in the dust

Fri, 22 May 2009 16:22:00 -0500

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.

New Design

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:32:00 -0500

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.

Up on the rooftop

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:10:00 -0500

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.

Update on Goals for 2007

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:34:00 -0500

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.

Goals for 2007

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:42:00 -0500

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.

first snowman at 29

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:37:00 -0500

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.

New design

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:58:00 -0500

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.

how to make a popsicle

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:14:00 -0500

Step 1: Take an Arizona native and move them to Colorado.
Step 2: Add snow

From October 2006 #4

Daniels Park in fall

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:03:00 -0500

Living in Arizona my entire life I have seen fall (in December) but never really have experienced it for myself. This past week fall has started to show its face here in Denver and for a AZ guy like me it is a awesome experiance. This morning I drove down the street to Daniels Park to check out the views. I stitched together a couple of the pics with AutoStitch and created this awesome pano view.

Busted...

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:52:00 -0500

I was going through some of my photos I took from my trip from Phoenix to Denver and I found this one that I snapped just before the New Mexico border. I was caught doing 83 in a 75. Nothing too bad but just enough to get a warning. I set the cruise control at 79 for the rest of the trip.
The officer that pulled me over was cool about it and even joked around with me for awhile.

My new home - SoftPro Books

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:02:00 -0500

I found a new home today at lunch. No we have not yet sold the house in Phoenix yet; but a co-worker showed me a local book store that only sells IT books. Softpro Books is only about 2 miles from my new job and they seem to have every book that I have ever bought and or wanted.

Chasing the dream

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:49:00 -0500

About 7 years ago Joni and I went on a family reunion / vacation to Colorado. We fell in love with the open space and the pace of life. Since then we have kicked around the idea of moving but have done nothing other than that and it remained a dream.

The next 7 years were filled with our growing family some play and a lot of time away from home. At work I found myself climbing the ranks and turning from developer to manager. I also found that I was always “on”. Even if I was playing with the kids that I still was being pulled away for client emergencies, silly support issues not to mention that I was thinking about work 24 x 7.

About a month ago we the subject came up again about moving to Colorado and changing our pace of live. We decided to take it to the next step and really look at housing, the job market and schools. I posted my resume to Monster and the floodgates of recruiters started. I posted to about 6 different jobs on Monster and 1 off of CF-Jobs. About a week after my initial postings I was given an offer late one evening. The next morning I called the company back up and accepted the offer. Not 60 seconds after I hung up the phone I got another call from a company that was interested in talking to me. At this point my head started to spin and I left work for the day. On the way home I ended up having 2 different phone interviews with this new company. When I got home Joni and I talked and we decided that I needed to go up to Denver right away to talk to these 2 different companies. So off I went and by 3:30 that afternoon I was in Denver driving to this second company. I met with them that afternoon and later that evening I left there with a second offer. The next day I spent with the first company checking out what they were all about and flew home that evening. I ended up accepting the offer from the second company the day after I got home.

The next day I gave my notice to my company and started an insane 2 week brain dump / transition plan. After 5 years of being at the company I needed a USB interface into my head. There were some days where I was physically ill because of the amount of information that had leaked from my head into whiteboards and documentation.

So last Friday I packed up my car and off I went to Denver. It was a 20 hour drive after getting stuck in a flash flood in Albuquerque. Joni and Anna flew in over the weekend for some house hunting. We found a house in Denver; now we just need to sell our house in Phoenix.