Austin Prime's Blog

I just got back from the coolest trip of my life! I went on a cruise from Port Canaveral in Florida to Nassau, Bahamas.

We had to take a bus ride that was about 16 hours. This is a picture of us pulling up to Port Canaveral and catching a glimpse of the ship for the first time.

We had to go through an exciting checking in process which took about an hour. Once we got into the ship we were amazed by everything we saw!

During the first day we did some exploring around the ship and swam in the pools. One of my favorite parts was the water slides. We went on those the first day, after that we didn’t really use them anymore. There was just so much to do.

At night our towels were folded as animals which I thought was pretty stinking cool.

At night there was a show in the theater which was pretty lame, so I spent most of my nights in the  Karaoke room. That’s right, Karaoke. It was quite entertaining seeing old drunk people trying to sing. The cool part was everyone remembered my performances. I would be on an elevator and people would be like “Are you Austin from Karaoke?” It was pretty cool. I was famous on a cruise ship! haha.

On Friday we made it to the Bahamas. It was REALLY pretty. Above is a picture of us pulling up to the islands. At the top of this blog post are two pictures that I took on the island.

So yea, my first trip out of the country was REALLY fun. Have you been on a cruise before? Let me know in the comments!

As an online dj, I have been trying to get the word out about internet radio for a long time. Many people know there is internet radio, but some people don’t realize how awesome it really is.

To some people, internet radio is AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio, Pandora, and all the other sites like those. Well that’s all well and good, but to me this isn’t ‘real internet radio.’ Tons and tons of work is put into ‘real internet radio stations.’

Internet radio stations can be found on most popular media players such as Windows Media Player, Winamp, and iTunes.  iTunes and Windows Media Player have an index of online radio stations that are selected by a ‘real human’ rather than a robot. This means that most of their indexed stations are high quality and well programed. Other programs like Winamp grab internet radio stations from sites like ShoutCast.

If you have ever listened to a station online and thought “wow this station sounds horrible.” well some stations broadcast at a low bitrate. Bitrates for internet radio stations normally only broadcast at kilobytes per second (kbps). The higher the number, the higher the quality. 128 kbps is typically the highest quality, 64 kbps being the middle, and 32 kbps being the lowest. Some talk stations have been known to broadcast as low as 16 kbps. If you have a slow internet connection you will want to listen to the lower bitrate ations and if you have really fast internet, you want to listen to the higher bitrates. Next time you listen to a station, look carefully at the bitrate!

Many stations are not well programed. Many of your local FM stations broadcast online. The down side on most of these statuibs, is that they broadcast at very low bitrates and tend to have many short commercial breaks or occasional long commercial breaks. That’s no good. Most internet only radio stations have little to no commercials. Also, some stations such as FLY 104.9 have a staff member called a program director who manually chooses each song every day to garuntee a perfect rotation of music. Some stations have an automation program that choses music randomly and sometimes they have a bad rotation. It is sometimes difficult to find the internet radio station with the perfect rotation.

So next time you are planning to tune into a radio station online you know what to look for!

CheckUserNames.com is a really neat tool that I found this week through a tweet that someone posted on Twitter. With this tool,  you just simply type in a username in the input box. It will then search tons and tons of sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Wakoopa, Rejaw, Twitter, Digg, Vimeo and many other social media websites to see if your username is available. If it is, you can click the Available link and it will take you to the selected site to register. No registration is necessary. CheckUserNames.com.

Let me know in the comments if you used it, and if you signed up for any of the sites!

Enjoy this week’s pick!

This week’s Webcam Comments: What does your desk look like right this second?

My desk was really messy, but what does yours look like? Don’t make any changes because that would be cheating!

Also in your comment, let me know what you think of this idea. Do you think it’s a good idea? Also if you have any suggestions for future webcam comments let me know! Have fun!

This week I came across something VERY unique. The website is called Throwboy.

Throwboy is a new company that designs tech pillows! When I first saw them, I thought holy crap I need one! From what I have read, they are amazing.

Currently they have one set available, the Icon Pillow set. This set includes a few Mac icons which are pretty awesome! New pillows are coming soon including Chat It Up with sayings such as “O RLY, wtf, OMG, LOL, TTYL, etc. They are also planning on releasing RSS logo pillows too!

The cool thing about them is they are hand made! They are not made in a factory, so you are assured great quality!

Hopefully I will have the money to buy a pillow soon, as for now you guys totally should check out Throwboy today! Enjoy your tech pillows!

Click here for video.

The snow is not that bad yet, but the wind is really bad! The video kind of shows the wind but not very well. So far it has knocked over tons of large branches in the area. Here are a few pics that I took. Enjoy .

*Permission is granted to anyone who would like to use the pictures. Please do not take credit for the photos.
Click the pictures for full res.

I can not believe it! It’s March 1st and it is snowing in Virginia! I live in central Virginia and we rarely get snow, and when we do it is NOT in March! And this isn’t just a ‘snow.’ It’s snowing like hardcore. The roads are all covered and everything. Well I made a video a few hours ago when it first started, so check it out:

Make a video response in the comments, and let me know what the weather is like where you are!