Paul Kaiser's Blog

I’ve always insisted on getting all my music on my iPod. The fogy in me doesn’t like being tethered to the internet for everything these days.

In search of good coding music

I asked some folks what they listen to while coding, to get and stay in the flow, in the zone. Almost all of them pointed me to Pandora.

Checking Pandora out again

I sighed, and logged in to pandora.com. I already had an account, but had abandoned it due to the aforementioned fogy feelings.

In the flow and feeling great

It’s a good thing I’m not opposed to change. If I were, I’d miss out on this excellent source of music! At this moment, I’m listening to my version of the “Paul Oakenfold Radio” channel. I first heard of Paul Oakenfold when you could download sample tracks from music.download.com. Glad to be reaquainted!

Status of my coding music selection

I have some stations based on Nirvana / Foo Fighters / The Vines, and on Sia. By far, the best for getting in the flow and coding is the Oakenfold channel, though.

Here’s how you can get yours, once you log in and sign up at pandora.com.

NOTE: You could just listen to my modified Paul Oakenfold channel directly.

1. Search for “Paul Oakenfold” in the “New Station” box, and add it.
2. Under the resulting station, click “add variety.”
3. Add the following, which end up being called “Artist Seeds:”
• Tiesto
• Paul Van Dyk
• Sandra Collins
• Armin Van Buuren
• Hallucinogen
• Infected Mushroom
• Atmos
• Vibrasphere
• DJ X-Dream
4. Now, listen and enjoy! Be sure to use “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” to help Pandora tailor the station to your preferences.

Let me know if you find any more great artists I should add.

This just struck me as funny and nostalgic today.

Cheap and easy

Leigh’s main computer has been the Acer Aspire I bought back in 2008 when my Gateway crapped out. It was only $500 at Best Buy, I was able to pick it up right away, and it kept me from losing 3 WordPress development clients who were counting on me. It has been a pretty good computer.

What’s that noise?

Except, starting in 2010, when a fan started groaning like a dead cow. How distracting. It was obviously something like a bearing going out. I think these fans have liquid bearings or something, but you get the picture. I put off looking in to it until the cow apparently died, because the noise stopped. As suspected, the fan had completely seized up.

The fan in question was on the Nvidia graphics card. I figured I could easily get a replacement fan down at Simplified Computers, but no luck. They even went through a junk pile of old PCs to see if there was an old video card with the right size fan. Swell guys.

Anyway, I’d just bought Leigh a new LG LED monitor, and we pretty much used it for most of our Netflix watching. I didn’t want the thing to burn up, so I hit the junk box to see what I could find.

Junk box to the rescue

Lo and behold, I found an old “personal fan” that I’d used back in 1983 to solve a cooling problem on my Tandy Color Computer 2. I’d sent it to Radio Slack for repair, but I think it just sat on the shelf for a couple of months and then they shipped it back — the problem persisted. Rainbow magazine had ads for a couple different cooling fans to fit over the power supply, so I figured this must be a known issue that people just didn’t acknowledge much. We spent $10 and bought the personal fan.

Here we are today, 28 years later, and the same fan is saving me from the same problem.

Now, if only I could make this a priority, I’m sure I could find a replacement fan on eBay or something.