Catherine and I headed to the Nats game tonight. And though they lost to the dastardly Marlins, it was too nice a night for us to mind all that much. Plus we ran into Tom from DCMetblogs.

And on that internet-related note, I'll mention that there was a wireless network in RFK tonight with the SSID of "Marlins" (yes, I am a huge dork). If I had to guess, I'd say that tonight's visiting team owns one of these, that a fan could scan the attached machines with this, then find an exploit within this (using this). All of which would allow for proper vengeance to be exacted upon the hated, hated Marlins. That'd teach them to be better than us at sports, right? Right.

neat tip on how to clean a gunky bbq grill.

sorry for the relative lack of blogging. i've been too busy throwing up about my rapidly impending move to chicago (four days or so to go). the bedroom's a mess, half of my stuff isn't packed, i have two shirts and one pair of shorts to wear for the next six days because what is packed is most of my clothes, and i'm stressing about not wanting to give my dad a heart attack when we move since we'll be the only two doing it in chicago and i have about three thousand pounds of stuff. i've also been doing a lot of retail therapy, which i'm sure filene's basement appreciates ($600 wool coat from barney's marked down like a billion percent! cheap pointy leather and suede shoes from kenneth cole and bcbg's!) but which my already rapidly dwindling student loans don't. yes, they're already rapidly dwindling even though i haven't yet received them. they are very sensitive.

anyway, stuff i've been enjoying lately that's helped the stress:

With 4.7.1, iTunes introduced a 5-connection limit on sharing. A lot of my friends work in offices where everyone shares their music, and they found this to be a real pain in the ass.

Well, perhaps I'm late to the game on this, but this site claims to have a workaround, and it's as simple as setting a password on the music share. Supposedly password-protected shares aren't subject to the 5-a-day limit. The authors suggests using the share name to tell folks what the password is in order to make connecting simple for everyone.

I haven't had a chance to test this out, but if anyone's in an iTunes-heavy office and wants to give it a try, I'd be very curious to hear if it works.

Related: iLeech and RendezvousProxy, for pulling songs off iTunes shares and making shares accessible across different IP subnets, respectively. Documentation is sparse, but if either of these sound useful you might want to give them a download. They're written in Java, so they ought to work across platforms.

There's a good howto here. With this method you can upgrade your console without ever opening the case. All you need is a memory card, a particular rented game, and a Gameshark-like device called the action replay (or a friend's modded xbox).

They promise an update explaining how to add a larger hard drive with the softmod method — important, because the xbox's built-in drive is only 8GB. That's large enough for a decent number of emulators, but not much else.

But I'm more interested to hear if a softmod can be made to play nicely with Xbox live. Connect to XBL with your modchip turned on and your xbox — and perhaps your account — will be banned for life. But if you flip your modchip off before booting up (and don't make any other really egregious mistakes), you can play happily. Seeing as I've got at least one more modding job on the horizon, it'd be nice to know if it can be accomplished satisfactorily without shelling out for a modchip and firing up the soldering iron. That d0 connection point is a real bastard.