been trying to find new stuff to do on the home pc and had a breakthrough from an unusual source: fm radio. i had taken to playing fm radio at the office with my mobile phone once the ipod owners had left for the day. as a joke i had been playing pop stations like Love Radio (DZMB 90.7) or Energy FM (DWKY 91.5). And it has steadily become a staple occasion that as they were leaving or their ipods ran out of juice with no way to plug in; the room would be filled with the cheesiest songs known to regular commuters.

there would be the nuggets of wisdom offered by the tandem of "ang balasubas at ang balahura" (i think i have that right). there would be, recently, those direct translation/tagalized (or whatever chosen dialect) renditions of pop songs. there would be the screaming bumpers:"naka-love ka pa ba? kahapon pa!" or "hi pangga; may energy ka pa ba?" there would be us giggling, brows furrowed, complaining wildly and eating up every bit of it. as a side note; i've heard that drivers listen to music that they don't care for when they are sleepy on the road because recognizable music is too comforting. i believe that is true. the number of threats levelled against my person if i don't switch stations seems to be directly proportional to the amount of work completed at this time. to help promote productivity in the workplace i usually switch between those two stations.

anyway, i had been neglecting listening to The Home of NU Rock (DWNU 107.5) since the reception with my phone sucks. it takes forever to try to find the right position for my phone where the sound wouldn't scramble if someone moved around in the room. yesterday around midnight i tried it again and found a great position for both the speakers and the phone. the Rock Jock mentioned that it was Remote Control weekend and that they were our slaves. calling in requests was offered as well as sending them in through sms. then the dude mentioned sending it through messenger. i gotta tell ya; that was a huge light bulb moment. i had to try it (nurocktalk@yahoo.com). when i got a response that my request would be played i shared it with everyone left on shift and we went nuts.

when i had the time at home i just had to figure out how to get the stream through the net because that was the only hitch. i found out that opera wouldn't play it "out of the box" or without a bit of tinkering. i remembered how much trouble i had getting audio and  flash to cooperate and decide against rooting around the app. firefox could play the stream through eradio portal with the totem player plugin but i didn't like the idea of having ff open all the time for only that; i already kept rhythmbox open for music and wanted it to run through that. right-clicking on the embedded player gave me the option to play the stream on the standalone app. when that worked i created a playlist file on the desktop. now  all i had to do was double-click that and everything worked. it took some rooting around with the source of the nu page on eradio portal to find the .asx link. with that i could add a new internet radio station on rhythmbox.

listening to the music i do have on my computer is okay but stepping out to listen to new stuff or music i never heard before can only happen with the radio. i let my parents have my old radio player because they like listening to the news on am stations while they worked around the house. that left me with the pc which has become my entertainment center by now.

i guess the big pit that linux has for gaming is all that's left. maybe i expect too much for free stuff to be up to snuff with for-profit developed games. but things have been looking up. the linux games are looking more and more polished with story depth. wine is improving compatibility when running windows based apps. i've got virtualbox running xp for my brother, the windows slave (although he swears its to run the windows native productivity apps for files that they need to present at school). and there is always the option to go dual-boot. not just confident with that because it entails re-sizing partitions and i've had bad experiences with that.

a comment that nerveending had about plurk has changed my mind about microblogging. he said i should start adding friends so that the service would "come alive". not too keen on that, i guess. it made me question why i bothered posting up there when he was the only friend i have. twitter is the same; i have a few followers and nerveending is the only person who replies. i had to rethink the fact that i have this blog and why i haven't posting here in a while. now as i type this out i can't figure out why i don't post here more often.

what i do figure is that i'm probably going to close my accounts on both plurk and twitter. it would have made more sense i suppose if i knew more who were into micro blogging. it is a really great idea however i think i'm using it the wrong way. or even worse, had the wrong set of expectations using the service. i can't decide. i'm still on a high from the archers pulling out a win against the tigers earlier. that and the sugar high from the soda i'm drinking is making my thinking all fuzzy. either way, it has stunted instead of help develop my writing. well, back to this old thing then.

come to think of it. i don't know that many people who send long sms messages without cutting the words short. i kind of equate microblogging to typing out sms messages; and the main reason i hardly put anything up there on twitter or plurk is that the charachter count freaks me out, getting closer to zero before i'm done. then i get too lazy to type out on my main blog (another one is up on my friendster account which is just a mirror of this). time to shake off some bad writing habits. time to stop making excuses. time to start barfing out ideas to this blog.

yes, i do have an account on friendster.

that is for another post.