08/25/2010

Tomorrow, Thursday Aug 26th, The Specials will be preforming on David Letterman. If you miss it Im sure you can watch it on the site the next day.

08/25/2010

You may have noticed a lack up updates for the last several weeks. My brother in law who lived with us for many years until recently was killed on his motorcycle in Lacey, WA Aug 7th, he was only 21. I was off of work(where I run the station from) for a week and a half to help the family make arrangements and support my wife (his sister) then we took a small vacation after his services. This was mainly to rest (we hardly slept for a week) and to get away from all the questions like what happened and what can I do. My wife's answer unless you can bring back my brother then you can not help me. When I got back to work it took I was way behind and had much work waiting and it took another week until I felt like getting back to running the site.

If your interested, he was a fun and goofy kid. He would do things like buy scary masks and camouflage himself with long grass to sneak around the back yard and try to scare his dogs. He was always a risk taker and would be the first one to sled down a big hill or say we have to make that bigger. In the last year he he got into drug and alcohol abuse, maybe from being bored or he was suffering depression ( the song Devil's In Her Soul by Go Jimmy Go reminded me very much of him, just call it Devil's In His Soul).  After having a few drinks Aug 7th he took off on his 650 Ninja and made it about 1 mile then went off the road and was killed instantly when he hit a large tree.

Here is a video tribute I put together for the funeral, it only shows a small part of the person that was lost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9Jh2TwVUs

07/22/2010

Music Is Our Occupation seems to be up and running again, so I turned the front page news feed back on from their site.

07/17/2010

Removed Music Is Our Occupation news feed from the front page until the site comes back up. The site and news feeds has been down since about the end of June.

06/08/2010

A few minor updates to the site again. Upgraded to the newest version of the radio software and requests should be correctly counted again. I am working on a new page that lists the last 10 or 15 requests. Should be up soon.

5/20/2010

Fixed some of the broken things in the menus (missing "Buy cd's" link on some pages, some of the "Artist Info" links were broken, sizes were to big and didnt fit in the window) and got around to updating the Top Requests page so it looks more like all the other pages. I think its much better now. I had these changes "my list" for a long time and finally got to them.

4/21/2010

Leave a message in the new chat box. Where you at ? What CD's should I add ? Want a request ? Open pop-out chat

Its been busy recently. Hit 32 listeners at the same time. Remember I can currently handle 30 on Shoutcast and 20 Windows Media. If you get a message server full, try the other format.

4/2/2010

As it turns out the emails I got were fake, I think the Pope was messing with me, so I decided to go back SKA Radio.

4/1/2010

Its been a great run but I have ended Bob's SKA Radio. I have found my faith and after a few emails from Jesus we have decided to switch to a 24/7 hardcore religious format.

3/24/2010

Updated and added some links, find them on the main menu.

3/10/2010

There have been alot of listeners on the site recently, hitting 26 this morning, 20 on Shoutcast and 6 WMA at the same time. The shoutcast server would max out at 20 listeners and it hit that limit several times this week. I upgraded to 30 shoutcast slots and I am still running 20 Windows Media spots. If you cant get on one try the other but I think 30 & 20 should hold me for some time. Note: Hit 27 listeners soon after that.

3/2/2010

Watch for many new videos coming soon from the 7th annual Seattle ska fest, including Chris Murray, Warsaw Poland Bros, The Get Backs and many more. Since last week the station has been up and running, so it must have had a bad connection causing the random shut-downs.

02/25/2010

Station went down a few times with in the last day, power supply may be going bad as the computer just seems to die off. The power light was still on but computer was not running. Normally upon power loss or a crash the computer will automatically reboot and resume broadcasting. It may have also had a bad connection on a drive power plug, if it continues to do it I will run the radio off a back-up computer until I can get down for a power supply. I now have a 2nd computer here so the old computer is dedicated to running the site 24/7, while I use the 2nd computer as my daily work computer. I will load a full copy of the station and songs on the new computer, so in the event of a hardware failure I can just broadcast from the other computer.

01/18/2010

Not much to report for the new year besides what is on the Album Updates page. We did get a new high of 23 listeners at one time a few day ago.

12/23/2009

I am trying out Windows Media streaming, now you should be able to listen to Bob's SKA Radio with out needing to download a special player (for Windows users anyway). Since the cost of running 2 streams is double I do not know if I will keep both going, I will give it some time and what stream has more listeners.

12/15/2009

Got some videos up from Rude Tuna & The Trutones, openers for Big D. They in Videos section

Also I almost forgot about my super cool bendy santa video I made last year, and yes has a ska soundtrack.

12/09/2008

Not really sight news, maybe I need a blog section...Bob got to see Big D & The Kids Table live for the first time at their Seattle stop. They did a great show and they played for what must have been about 2 hours, till about 12:30. I would recommend their show. Also playing was Sonic Boom Six from the UK and 2 great local bands, The Trutones and Rude Tuna.

11/11/2009

Yesterday was the first time the site reached it max listener count at 20 simultaneous listeners. Thanks to all the listeners and supporters of Bob's Ska a Should this start to be a common occurrence I will look into paying more for a higher number of listener slots.

10/16/2009

My web host (Gate.com) said this site would be among those that may be down for 4+ hours on Wed 10/23/2009 for scheduled server upgrades. Expected start time is 5PM Pacific Time. They hope all the sites get carried forward correctly. None the less I will do an entire site download (as I do from time to time) to save locally, that can be quickly restored if needed. Maybe this will fix the long first page load time some users have been experiencing lately.

This does not effect the SKA radio, just bookmark or save the url of the stream.

10/02/2009

You can now leave comments on new albums, this page or on most other stories. Like the message boards, anyone can leave a message if you fill out the stupid CAPTCH. If your a registered user, you do not have to fill it out. Again, like the boards, keep the comments nice and for you robots no spam. UPDATE 11/09/2009, I have turned off the comment system after a large number of messages about buying real fake Rolex watches and other spam. The message board is still working if you wish to post a comment.

09/09/2009

Now the site layout looks good(I think) and everything has been working well I may try to get the station better integrated into the main website. The easy method was to use a wrapper that loads the station pages in an frame. Thats why it's a different color and sometime doesnt line up correctly. Over the next few days/weeks it may look different from time to time as I play with it.

Also, the new user registraion seems to have stopped the spambots I cleared many of the old members, since most were not real accounts.  You may have to re-register if you want to set up a message board profile again.

09/04/2009

Seems like I have alot of college listeners, in the middle of June the numbers of listeners fell by about half and now the first week of September the listetner count has jumped back up. Visit the message board and let me know where you at.

08/26/2009

Seems the message board had some corrupt files, making guest posting hard. I think this was due to a security problem with my hosting company. I have 3 domains at Gate.com ( www.fakewrx.com www.campbellsautosales.com & www.kensyardservice.com ) and each has a different log on and password but all 3 had an iframe virus ithing inserted into some of the pages, all on the same date. One of them I had not even logged into for several months but files had been modified since my last last log in. I emailed them about this and never got a response, my guess would be all / many of their accounts were compromised.

So go ahead and post a message in the guestbook or in the ska talk section. You do not have to register to post, just fill in the CAPTCHA and post as guest. If you do register, you will not need to fill in the CAPTCHA for each post anymore and you can add an avatar for your posts.

08/10/2009

Due to automated bots registering on the site and never responding to the activation email, accounts will deleted after 48 hours if not activated.

As a reminder, you do not need to register to use the site or listen, only if you want to make a profile on the message board.

07/29/2009

After several months finally changed the weird orange color scheme to something better.

07/24/09

Station down from just after 8am to 10am (Seattle local time) due to power outage.

06/02/09

We start this month off with an upgrade of the web site, from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.  1.0 Has served me well but is has reached the end of its cycle. There will most likely be no more updates,  and add-ons (forums, guest books, etc...) are mostly being put out for ver 1.5 now.

There was a tool that saved the web site content, but not style or design. I will get the colors or logo back on soon, for now enjoy the simplicity of a generic web site. I have to copy and paste the old guest book entries and make a new pages of my SKA videos but everything else transferred very well.

I have replaced the guestbook with a message board so its easier to keep track of postings and responses.  Hopefully it will not be to hard to keep it spam free. For Now: The stupid CAPTCHA is turned off, if the board starts collecting hundred of fake users & postings it I will have to turn it on.

05/10/09

I started a page that lists new albums added to the site. I will try to keep it updated as I usually add several albums a month. Check the Newest Music link under the Radio menu.

4/10/09

Everything seems to be working well after some people had problems connecting last weekend.  Added in a few more CD's this week bringing the total tracks available to over 2800. I will start working on an updates page listing new tracks & cd's added each week or month.

3/31/09

Be sure to sign the new guestbook, I was getting tired of the pop-out noise from the old one and this is has much more space for comments.

3/16/09

If anyone is having problems or has questions about Bob' SKA Radio check the Radio FAQ page for links to shoutcast compilable players, submitting your bands music and other stuff.

I have recently started removing "THE" from band names due to the "T" section getting so large.  If you cant find the band your looking for to make a request, look for the 2nd word of the name (IE: The Georgetown Orbits are listed under Georgetown Orbits, The).

Tired of my station ? Be sure to check out the Links over there <------ to links to other SKA radio stations, podcasts and downloadable weekly hosted shows broadcast on local radio stations.

2/5/09

Note: Due to changing database programs  the top requests have been reset. From the  success of the this station , the number of songs played and from the number of request per day the old database (firebird) that came bundled with the station software was getting extremely slow, stopping my computer for 5 seconds between songs and making station turn on time after a reboot about 5 minutes. So I upgraded my mysql, we will see if that speeds things up. (Update: Several months later, mysql is much faster and has not lost any speed at all, unlike firebird, that got slower each week as the database grew larger. I would recommend to anyone using SAM Broadcaster, skip firebird and setup mysql.)