My kid's online... I have no idea how that works.

So I was talking to someone and they mentioned their 9 year old's DS and how he had lost a piece to it. I asked if he lost the stylus, intending to suggest a good replacement brand.

"The what?" she replied.

"The little pen thing," I explained.

"Oh, I don't know what it does. I have no idea how it works." And the conversation ended.

And that's kinda okay, I guess, but then later on I overheard the same person talking about their son to someone else. "Oh, yeah, he connects it to the computer and plays games on there with his friends."

Wow, so you don't know how your 9 year old's game works, yet he's going online to play Pokemon with strangers? Awesome.

Link to my early post about buying a Nintendo DS

I love Pandora.com!

My wife turned me on to this great online radio station / music website, Pandora.com . You tell it what music you like, and it then picks songs for you, playing them back to back without interruption. You help it learn what music you like by giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down (or nothing to be neutral). I've been using it for a few weeks and it's fairly refined, almost always playing music that I really like (across multiple genres even!).

It'll play bouncy fun music like They Might Be Giants, then go to some nice J-pop, then to something like Primus or Soul Coughing or even Prodigy... but always something good! The feedback system is simple and fun and you can query it to find out "why" it is playing certain songs.

Embedded video and automatic charges

A couple updates for ericbolstridge.com:

First, I finally changed ericbolstridge.com to have my lil' demo reel on the main page. I was having some trouble getting into the FTP client from home, but no problems from work. Must be the uber-security the wife has set up at home. Anyway, I also added dead links to what will eventually be a page with my resume and more video samples. I also put CoasterRadio.com on there, just for kicks. I've been doing some reading about embedding video on websites, and it seems that the way to go is to build 'object' tags for embedding Quicktime and not use WMVs at all. So, I think I will try to get my videos all over to Quicktime and re-upload them.

Second, I got an email from GoDaddy that they automatically charged my credit card for another month of hosting! I know I definitely did not sign up for an automatic renewal, so I investigated a bit. I couldn't find any setting in my account to turn this off or preventing it form happening again, so I guess I'll have to live with paying the $6.99 a month until I decide to investigate hosting options. I'm fairly satisfied with the whole having a website thing, so I will eventually look into a long-term hosting plan with someone.