I just posted my top stories of 2005 at MacMegasite, and my top albums of 2005 at WorldBeatPlanet.

WordPress 2.0 has been released. I’ll probably upgrade after New Years.

So far I haven’t found any Mac software to convert video to my PSP that doesn’t suck. Video conversion is painfully slow and I find that it fails pretty often. I’ve tried both iPSP & PSPWare, and both have their problems. iPSP is a little nicer, but still buggy & slow. It’s very easy to lose data on the PSP with PSPWare because it tries to synchronize items. iPSP lets you copy individual items to the PSP rather than synchronizing selected items. EyeTV’s export for PSP seems to be the most reliable conversion, but it’s only for EyeTV recordings.

Via Daily Kos: Josh Marshall brings up a very interesting point. Why have there been almost no terror alerts since November 2004? Did the terrorists suddenly give up and crawl back into their holes after our election?

Mom’s funeral was today. One good thing about this is I got to see a lot of family I haven’t seen in years. This time I hope to remain in touch with them. Some of my friends & neighbors who didn’t really know my mom also came & I was very glad to see them. I’ve been trying to decipher my mom’s address book and copy the names into my computer’s address book. In the last few years her handwriting became nearly unreadable because of her arthritis, so it’s been quite a chore.

Mom just died this evening around 9PM. Thankfully I got to see her a last time just two hours earlier, along with a good friend who came with me. I told her not to worry about me and that everything would be OK even though she didn’t wake up. She also didn’t wake up when I was there earlier today. I’m thankful for the great friends I have who I can depend on for support.

My mom seems to have taken a turn for the worse. She’s now getting hospice care & they’re trying to keep her as comfortable as possible & relieve her pain rather than treating her cancer. When I saw her today she slept the whole time and didn’t seem to realize I was there. Yesterday she was awake and talking to me.

Today my mom looked & sounded better than she has in a while, but the doctor is suggesting hospice care. He doesn’t think aggressive treatment for her cancer will do much good, so the best thing would be just to keep her as comfortable as possible. I don’t know how her doctor missed the cancer all along so it’s now in such an advanced stage. Her health has been deteriorating badly in the last few months. Until April she was living in her own condo (which she recently sold), although she needed someone to help her during the day. When her home care wasn’t renewed, she moved into an assisted living facility. In the last few months she started having more trouble breathing until she went into the hospital around the time of hurricane Wilma. That’s when the (new) doctors discovered her cancer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my father’s unexpected death during Macworld Expo in 1991. That’s one reason I’m not going.

MacMegasite Mobile on PSP

I created a new mobile home page for MacMegasite that looks better on small screens like a PSP. It’s at www.macmegasite.com/mobile.

It had to happen sooner or later. Tim Berners-Lee has a blog and he’s using Drupal.

My condo had the annual meeting tonight. I’m on the board for the second year, although we didn’t have to vote since we only had 7 candidates and there are 7 board members. We did have to vote for or against reserves, as we do every year. Since we don’t currently have reserves, if that changed, our maintenance would go up by about $100 a month. Like most years, we didn’t have enough votes for a quorum, so we had to start knocking on doors to get people to vote. We finally made it & the vote was against reserves.

PSP Web Browser

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

I just got a PSP. I’m not really into games, but I love it as a video & music player, and I love having a hand-held web appliance. It’s a lot more useful than my old Palm Zire, which lacked internet access & had a much smaller screen. The PSP’s 16:9 screen is beautiful for playing movies & viewing photos.

I’m still waiting to get my GP2X fixed. Both the GP2X & PSP have their pros & cons. I like the GP2X’s ‘hackability’, but it really needs wireless capabilities.

Via nancies.org:

DMB’s performance last night at Madison Square Gardens is receiving some of the most glowing reviews that we’ve ever seen. Terms including “magical,” “electrifying,” “amazing,” “unbelievable” and a “life changing force” have all been used to describe the performance, which featured Mike Doughty singing on “Jimi Thing,” Robert Randolph on “Smooth Rider” and “Louisiana Bayou,” and a “Christmas Song”/”Halloween”/”Ants Marching” encore. The low percentage of songs from Stand Up (about 25%) and the snow-blowing stage theatrics probably had something to do with it, too.

The performance is likely to be remembered as being on par with classics like the June 11, 2001 Giants Stadium show, particularly for those who were there.

I just downloaded “Jimi Thing” and a few other songs (thanks Dave for letting fans share your music). It’s awesome hearing Mike Doughty with the band.

I’m selling my bricked gp2x on eBay for anyone who’s able to unbrick it or use it for parts.

I finally went to get a passport today, which I should have done long ago, so I’ll be ready the next time I have to go to Vancouver. It was a lot faster & easier than I expected.

I still haven’t been able to get my bricked gp2x working again. The firmware was damaged badly enough by the attempted firmware upgrade that it can’t be restored by normal means. Neither Gamepark Holdings ore their US distributor has been able to resolve the problem. Gamepark & gp32z haven’t replied to any of my emails, although I’ve contacted gp32z via AIM. They need to find out from Gamepark how to fix it & they can’t replace it because the damage was caused by a firmware upgrade. From what I’ve seen on several gp2x message boards, a lot of other people are having the same problem. Needless to say, I’m NOT happy with this situation.

The changes I made to MacMegasite seem to have helped the CPU usage situation. It’s reduced the CPU usage by each execution of PHP.CGI by at least 50% as well as reducing the overall CPU usages. Here are the resource usage stats for the last few days, only counting CPU usage by PHP.CGI.

My mom is back in the hospital. This morning I got a call that she was being sent to the ER with possible congestive heart failure. I started freaking out because that’s what my father died from. I was at the ER around 10AM and they wouldn’t tell me anything or let me in until about 12:30. When I finally got to see her, she was awake & alert, so I asked how she was and she said “my backside hurts from laying here”. Thankfully it wasn’t life threatening, but they had to drain a lot of fluid from her lungs. She’ll be in the hospital for a few days. The last few weeks have been very difficult & I’ve been spending most of my time doing errands for her.

Via Boing Boing:
Here’s a six-minute MP3 of reggae hero Eek-A-Mouse jamming with a bunch of traditional Irish pub musicians — fiddles, pipes, etc — at his 50th birthday party. The result is great; Eek-A-Mouse’s schtick is to sing in a high, Chinese-sounding falsetto, but to groovy reggae beats. Add to that some lively Irish fiddlers and you’ve really got something. Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Eek-a-mouse is my favorite living reggae performer & one who always brightens my day.

I’ve cleaned up my code for MacMegasite’s new page by breaking it up into separate include files for the left & right sidebars. The entire code is less than 50 lines and uses only a single database query and no calls to Drupal code.

Here’s the full code, not including the style sheet and sidebar content:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>MacMegasite</title>
<style type="text/css" title="text/css">
<!--
@import url(INC/style.css);
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<img src="INC/logo.gif" class=logo>
<br>

</body>
</html>