The Karaoke Report 4-30-12

Epic Awesomesauce Moment of the Night

Shout out to The Mayor of St. Thomas (he's a regular) for leaving me an awesome brib...er tip last night.


WTF Moment of the Night

I heard that there's a certain spot in St. John that does karaoke and my collection is better (hey, that's what the guy said).  Personally I don't like to put other hosts on the spot and make comparisons.  But when he said the host sometimes puts down the patrons I just thought WTF.  Karaoke hosts have two main duties: Maintaining order and making sure that every singer gets some sort of recognition for their song no matter how bad they sang.  Karaoke isn't Star Search, American Idol or The Voice.  It's for everyone else.

Buzzkill Moment of the Night

Remember that antenna that I caught the guy nibbling on once and had to put duct tape on it.  Well I was packing up my equipment last night and I noticed I couldn't find the antennas for my microphone receiver.  Looks like somehow I lost one and it's the one that was broken.  Hopefully the receiver won't give me too many issues with just one antenna, but I won't find out until next week.  Oh, and the power adapter for my mixer is acting up again.  Why can't I have nice things?  Oh yeah, it's because drunk people usually break it.

Random Party Pic

Stream Yourself

Seems like the big thing for St. Thomas Carnival this year is web streaming.  You can see it here, here and here.  The funny thing about streaming though is that the more people are viewing the stream the slower it gets.  This is related to the amount of bandwidth available and in the Virgin Islands there's never much.

Don't you wish you could do a stream yourself so only a few selected people can watch?  Well with your mobile device you can do just that.  UStream offers mobile streaming applications for a variety of platforms including Android and Apple based products.  Of course you're going to have to watch things like your network usage (if you don't have WiFi or an unlimited data plan) and power, but I think it's a really cool app to have.  Too bad my phone sucks and I'd have to delete a bunch of other stuff just to install this app. :(

MSN Thinks We're In Latin America

Hey there Caribbean Hotmail and MSN users!  Bet you were surprised yesterday when all of a sudden Microsoft started redirecting you to their Latin America site.  Well you weren't alone.  In fact some of your are probably noticing it just now.  The only explanation for this being that something recently happen to make Microsoft start redirecting us to Latin America.  Could be them, could be us.  Who knows (I think it's them).  I do know it's REALLY FREAKING ANNOYING.

I took a few minutes to look at what's going on.  I did an Internet Protocol check and we're listed as Country: UNITED STATES, Region: VIRGIN ISLANDS.  This is why I suspect the change occurred at Microsoft.  So what can we do?

Fortunately I found a way around the problem.  If you're blankly starting at the MSN Latin America home page right now look for this:

That should take you directly to the US MSN home page.  If you can't find that you can just click the link I've provided.  If you're lucky, your browser will keep that as the default but I'd bookmark that link anyway just to be sure.  It's rather unfortunate though that MSN isn't playing as nice as their counterparts.  They give you the option of defaulting to their main page.  MSN seems iffy on this.

The Karaoke Report 4-23-12

Epic Awesomesauce Moment of the Night

Just this pic...

Yes, friends.  THAT is an inflatable dude.  While not anatomically correct, it found itself in several compromising positions last night.


WTF Moment of the Night

I keep a tip jar handy.  I'm not the kind of guy to direct attention to it.  If you want to tip me, that's great and I'll thank you for it.  There are times though when I'd rather not get one.  We had a bachelorette party in the house and I think I really helped them have a good time.  They tipped me $2.  Actually, it was just one of them.  I can't really make her the rep for the whole group.  But get this: They threw a little tantrum when I called up the guy who tipped me $5 next.  An that's the WTF moment of the night.

Buzzkill Moment of the Night

What was up with people keep falling over on my equipment.  I had to readjust my position way too much last night.

Random Party Pic

DNSChanger: Are YOU Infected?

You've been given notice, people.  You have until July 8, 2012 (yes, that's THIS year), to check if your computer has been infected with the DNSChanger trojan.  If it is not removed, beyond this date your Internet goes bye-bye.  To check if you're infected or not click this link.  Do you see the following image?

Ok, that means you're good.  If you see something else you better start disinfecting ASAP.  It seems most of the major Antivirus and Malware manufacturers are already aware of the issue and have already taken steps to protect those users.

Now you're probably asking yourself what the heck is going on here.  I was waiting for you to clear up that malware thing before I started explaining.  If you're happy with just knowing about the infection go ahead and stop now.  I think I'm pretty good at explaining tech, but this can get boring nevertheless. 

A Domain Name System (DNS) Server is a node on the Internet that translates your stardard web address into the confusing numbers that is actually the address.  Here's an example of a what a web address actually looks like when it's not using DNS:  http://98.139.183.24 (that goes to Yahoo!)

Remembering a sequence of numbers like that would make it really difficult to surf the web right?  That's where DNS comes in.  Ok, so here's where things went wrong.  A hacker ring in Estonia set up a buttload of false DNS servers and the FBI raided and confiscated those bad boys.  Infected computers were being rerouted to sites that the hackers wanted you to go to so they could collect commissions on Internet ads and page clicks.  Problem was though so many Internet users were infected the FBI didn't want to just yank the servers offline.  If they did over half a million people would have lost access to the Internet (and half a million is just the US number; worldwide infections totaled over 4 million).  Instead they converted the false DNS servers to legitimate ones.  But keeping servers running costs money and since the FBI isn't privy to that clickjacking money stream the Estonians has so the taxpayers are footing the bill...and that's why the time to shut these servers down has come.

Google +: It's On Now

I really hope this wasn't a mistake because I'm almost never using Google+.

The Karaoke Report 4-16-12

Yeah, I'm a day late.  So sue me. :P

Epic Awesomesauce Moment of the Night

There are some songs that are guaranteed to get the entire bar to sing along:  Don't Stop Believin', Bohemian Rhapsody,  I Will Survive, I Wanna Dance With Somebody (not kidding on that one).  But imagine my surprise when Total Eclipse of The Heart was that song.  Awesomesauce.

WTF Moment of the Night

It's got to be how quickly the crowd blew up.  It was DEAD when I got there and all of a sudden people just poured in.  From what I heard the crowd was so thin the night before they closed 2 hours earlier than usual.

Buzzkill Moment of the Night

Old drunk touchy-feely straggler.  That's all I have to say about that.

Random Party Pic