Christopher Rivera

Wow, an update in 8 month! And on April's Fools Day! Yes boys and girls, I'm writing an update. For some reason last night, I could not go back to sleep at around 3:15am. Of course, as I felt like I was getting closer to sleep, my neighbors sprinkler system turned on at 4:00am, which I could feel from my bed. I tried the earplugs, but I was still restless and at around 4:15am, I got up.

So since I was up, I figured I would do something productive. The first thing I did was end up on Chris Pirillo's website. How did that happen... I do not know. So I'm on the website reading an article, and noticed there was this video streaming in the top right corner. At first I thought it was an ad, but looking at it further, I noticed the time in the video, and that is said it was live. It's now 4:35am, trying to wake up, and processing this randomness of voyeurism on the web. I think I would have been better off watching bangbus. I have no clue what Chris Pirillio and his friends were doing, but it looked like it they were doing videos for April Fools Day. What kind of videos you might ask... oh, I'll tell ya.

April Fools Day, is that special time of year for the netizens (web citizens) post some random information that is all false. Yep, false. Why? Because it's April Fools and it's a great day to do a gag on people, who might actually believe what they read and see.

Chris Pirillo, for example, was doing this one video segment of "I got Windows Vista in my eye!". Yeah, wasn't that funny when I saw it somewhat awake, and isn't that funny now. Granted, I thought of some funny thoughts for that video like "can you dual boot your eyes?" and "you better install an anti-virus program or else you will get pink eye!". Another video he was doing was one where he switched from Mac OS X back to Windows, because none of his Windows software worked on the Mac. That one I had to think about for a bit, then gave up. He did another video where he called Apple support about his Airport, the Mac Wireless unit, and asked about the cables. The joke here is "Wireless" and "cables". C'mon people, wake up. Yep, it's going to be one of those days.

So what can I expect from the rest of the day... well I can expect digg and slashdot to have the most random news articles out there. It'll be like news articles from The Onion, all over the web. One thing that would be really funny would be for The Onion to run nothing but serious stories all day today. That would be classic.

So what other bit of productiveness did I do this morning? Minor coding for the job, and I migrated my website over to my new host, FINALLY. I've decided to switch from ThePlanet (btw, which I prefer as a webhost) to VPSLink. The reason... being frugal. I got a VPS setup at VPSLink for half the cost of my current provider, and ThePlanet is no longer doing the VPS service. VPSLink is one of their recommended vendors so it's all good.

It's now 7:15am, time to have some more coffee, make breakfast, and get ready for work. Have fun people!

I use PuTTY, a free telnet/ssh terminal client, daily when I work on my Windows machine. My only complaint about this is that I have to look at multiple windows. When I program from home, I use my Linux box and use Gnome terminal, which has multiple tabs, so things are much easier to manage.

Fortunately, there are two options for Windows users to have the same effect.

Option 1: PuttyTabs
http://www.raisin.de/putty-tabs/putty-tabs.html
PuttyTabs does something close to what I get with Gnome Terminal. What it does is it creates a standalone application that is like a toolbar that floats on the screen. You can position it anywhere on the page. It's similar to the toolbars of Windows. It'll create a tab for each PuTTy window you have open. This was the first one I used. It works nicely but not exactly what I wanted. Fortunately I found something better.

Option 2: WinTabber
http://www.wintabber.com/
WinTabber is a program that is designed for almost any application and allows you to group them all into a tabbed window. The way it works is you log into all the boxes you using PuTTy, then you start up your WinTabber program and add all your PuTTY sessions to WinTabber, and that's it. You can even reorder the tabs how ever you like. I find it a to be a better option over PuttyTabs.

I'm always in the market to find new music. I'm not too crazy about today's pop music, that blocks real music from getting on the airwaves, so anytime I can get my hands on something new to find new music, is always appreciated.

Musicovery: I got a link today from Maria about a website that visually displays artists by mood and by dance. You can refine the selection by genres, eras, and whether it was a hit or not. Overall, it's a pretty interesting and nice way to look at music, with the potential to find new music. I'll try it out for a bit and let you all know what I think shortly. In less than 10 minutes, found a new song that sounds cool. "Cars and Girls" by "Prefab Sprout". The guy sounds a bit like Rob Thomas, and it has a catchy beat.

Pandora: This is another link I got from Maria some time ago. This one does it more based on similarity between artists and song. You can rate the music as it plays. It also allows you to skip songs. You don't get the variety of immediate options of songs, but it's pretty good so far. You can build a station based on an artist or a song. I've played with it a bit and like it. I definitely recommend this one. It also allows for a subscription model that will allow you to save and share your stations and unlimited skips.

If you hear of any other sites, drop me a line.

My review of transfomers the 2007 movie

Ok, so it's been some time since I've updated my site. I've been a bit busy and have not made this site a priority. I will begin updating again shortly. I will plan the following:

• Bloging: New blogging system in place. Either wordpress or something homebrewed.
• Photos: My photos will go live. Either homebrewed or Picasa from Google of Flickr. I have plenty of old photos I would like to post, like that famous Alaskan trip from 2001. *gasp*
• Writings: This will be articles and ramblings from me that will include technology, web development, computers, and any other hobbies and work related stuff I'm into at the moment.
• Links: This will be a database of links of places I frequent online.
• About: information about me, what else.