Mark Headrick's Blog

What with Avatar, ESPN and Discovery announcing 3D networks, and 3D Televisions appearing at CES, there’s been a lot of talk about 3D technology lately, which is certainly warranted and understandable. However, none of it means anything to me because my brain and eyes are just not wired for it.

I was born with one (maybe more) of the muscles in my left-eye missing or otherwise defective. As such, that eye was pointing to the side. This generally results in what is called a lazy-eye. I went through 5 eye surgeries by the time I was 5 years old. I also happen to suffer from astigmatism.

Due to my sight issues occurring at such a young age, my brain essentially re-wired itself to deal with it and how I see is perfectly normal to me. 75% of what I see in my field of vision is my right eye. When I close my left eye, I only loose a certain part to the left of me, basically, what my right eye doesn’t physically see (the nose kinda gets in the way LOL). However, what I see does not shift any.  Now, when I close my right eye, things change a lot. My brain lets my left eye now “see” what my brain had only been processing from my right eye and images shift to the right and down.

Because of this non-convergence in my eye-sight, none of this 3D stuff works with me. With those red and blue glasses I either saw all red stuff or all blue stuff. The images simply do not combine to form a single image. Needless to say, I will not be buying any 3D HDTVs, 3D DVD/Blu-Ray players, or watch any 3D television networks.

Thank god Avatar was released in a 2D version at the local AMC theater; otherwise, I would have skipped it. If you look now, you’ll notice that only the 3D versions are still playing there.

My only hope is that movie studios keep releasing 2D versions of their movies. Well, the ones worth seeing anyway LOL.

Just a real quick note to mention that I’ve updated my NASCAR and Weather pages to include some additional links and Twitter resources.

June 6th.. well, not only is today D-Day, it’s also my B-Day. I turn 40 today! ACK!

The following music video also mentions the date June 6th:

Convoy

Yeah.. that’s about all I have to say for now LOL. I’m tired.

Well, this is going to be one of those posts with a very narrow target audience and will undoubtedly make no sense and confuse others.

(Update 12/21/2009: With the release of Winamp 5.57, the Now Playing Plug-In version 2.1.2 I discuss below started to cause Winamp to crash. I found a new plug-in and discuss it here.)

I use Winamp to play my music with: MP3s, MIDI, MOD files, Internet Radio and so on. I also use the Winamp Now Playing Plug-In version 2.1.2 which interfaces with a PHP script on my website to create now-playing images, a list of the past 10 songs I have listened to, and sends a Twitter out to my mrheadrick_np account.  The plug-in is rather old and it’s amazing it even still works with the current version of Winamp. It does seem to exhibit one rather odd and maddening behavior that has taken a while to track down.

The behavior manifests itself when playing a URL playlist stream (which are typically from Shoutcast) such as this one from Club 977 Music: http://www.club977.com/CLUB977HI.pls. When it first starts playing, the Now Playing Plug-in will always see the first song that is played and update the images and lists accordingly; however, it would not always recognize changes in the song title when a new song started playing. This was, of course, annoying. Over time I seemed to notice a pattern and today I tested it out and here are my findings:

1. If I start Winamp with a classic skin such as Bento Classified or the standard classic skin that comes with Winamp, the plug-in will recognize song title changes as the stream plays. If I then switch to a different classic or modern skin while Winamp is running, it will continue to work.
2. If I start Winamp with a modern skin (Winamp Modern, Bento, etc.), the plug-in will NOT recognize song title changes as the stream plays, even if I change to a classic skin.

So, the key is to always close Winamp with a classic skin loaded so that it will start with that skin and the Now Playing Plug-in will work. The work-around is simple enough but figuring out what was going on was a bit maddening. If you use this plug-in then, hopefully, you’ll find this useful.

Since Winamp does not provide tech support for 3rd-party plug-ins, I’m not going to bother to find out exactly why it acts this way. At least I now know how to keep it working.

After reading Be Careful What You Post, this got me to thinking about something I’ve thought about fairly often. In the past there have been many things I’ve wanted to say or get off my chest that after thinking about it decided against making a post. The reason being, for good or bad, that anything you post, say in a tweet, or write in an “open” forum is there for all to view potentially. This includes past, current, or possible future employers or someone that knows someone who knows some person, company, or product you talked about. In this age, you know that anyone that is thinking about hiring you, that you currently work with, that you’ve just asked out on a date or whatever, is going to look your name up on Google or some other search engine or social network like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter to find out what they come across.

Since I’ve been doing a lot of twittering lately (I think that addictive nature of my personality has, at the moment, grabbed a hold of Twitter), I sometimes wonder if people forget that what they say in @replies are completely open for public viewing. I also wonder about how private direct messages really are. I also wonder about the integrity of the authors/creators of all these Twitter clients and Websites that ask for a username and password.

So, I guess, in the end, unless you don’t care who might potentially read what you say and the possible repercussions if they do, well, then don’t post, tweet, or write it.

As you can tell, I have not said anything on here since July.  A lot of things have happened since then that I could go on about.  So, do I talk about everything in one post or keep it all separate, focused on one topic?  I suppose what I could do is just a brief synopsis of what’s been going on without too much detail and those things that could be detailed out I will do in some other more focused posts… provided I get around to it LOL.  So, in brief what’s been going on:

1. I’ve started playing EverQuest II during the past few months.  This mostly explains my absence from the blog.   I’ve started playing a Warden in the game that has reached level 72 and is also a level 72 tailor. I happen to be on the Befallen server and am currently in the Elysian Storm guild on there.

2. I have been dealing with this Gout Arthritis stuff in my right foot.. big toe area.  What a pain in the, well, foot. LOL.  After this last flare-up I’ve started taking medicine to help keep my Uric acid levels normal.  Looks like I’ve reached that point in life where you have to start taking some kind of medicine every day. I’m sure being old and over-weight has much to do with it… the body is falling apart.  I really need to exercise but my jacked-up foot is preventing that at the moment.

3. I have been keeping my WordPress blog and Gallery up to date during this time; however, there were some problems with the latest Gallery upgrade.  In short, after upgrading to version 2.3 of Gallery2, I could no longer log in as admin or any other user.  It would just timeout/lockup.  Thankfully I was eventually able to restore my gallery back to version 2.2.6 and am able to use it fine.  I will hold off upgrading my gallery again until they release version 3.

4. During my problems with the gallery upgrade, I started to check out the Coppermine Photo Gallery script.  To test it out, I made a gallery for my EverQuest character to hold snapshots and so on.  Not sure if I want to include a link to it yet. The code is much less complicated to deal with and does seem to put less stress on the server.  Customizing the theme also seems much easier and intuitive.  My main problem with it so far has to do with how it handles SEO urls and urls in general.  The links to image pages are not consistent as they are based on the position of the image in the album and not the actual image.  So, if I were to post a link to an image page and then changed the album sorting order or even added new images to the album, that link would all of a sudden point to a different image.  Dumb.  From what I read about the newer version of Coppermine it will correct that and use image IDs instead which will always be the same.

5. During this time there’s also been an historic presidential election.  As it happens, the candidate I voted for, Barack Obama, won. Hopefully he can help improve this economy which has gone down the toilet and change how the rest of the world sees the United States. I don’t even want to think what my 401K is worth now. The positive thing is that I shouldn’t need it for some 20+ years. There’s a lot I could go into but this isn’t the post for it.

6. I have added to my DVD collection during this time; however, I have not got around to creating DVD pages for them yet. Once I do, I’ll make a posting about them.

Well, I guess that’s it for now and will publish this.  The Big 12 Championship game is about to start between the OU Sooners and Missouri and I’ll be watching that.