Last night, I was able to go to see Emm Gryner play at Maxwell’s in Waterloo with my dear friend Courtney. It was wonderful.
Jan 182009
Jan 152009
Google Reader is sorta awesome.
That is all.
No Flowchart, I Hope You Forgive Me
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Jan 132009
Over the years, my musical tastes have evolved. I used to be big into punk and alternative. Bands like Black Sabbath, MxPx, Bad Religion, Rancid and Pearl Jam filled my high school years with loudness and angst. Which was great. Now, I’m starting to evolve towards the more melodic, acoustic end of the musical spectrum with artists like Dar Williams, Emm Gryner, a sprinkling of country music, and lots and lots of Elvis Costello. I haven’t completely lost my love of the loud. I’ve recently learned to quite enjoy the Alkaline Trio and Anberlin amonst others. However, my music collection is no longer exactly representative of my tastes.
A couple of weeks ago, I started a daunting project: sort my mp3 collection. There’s over four thousand tracks, some of which are correctly tagged, and others which are not. What I want when I’m done, is a directory called Music, with a subdirectory for each artist. All of the files should be of the format “artist – album – track number – song nameâ€, all correctly capitalized. The tracks should have to correct ID3 information, and may include the year the album was released and the genre, but I don’t want any extra information, stuck into the comment, copyright or other such fields.
What I did to start was move all my songs out of their proper hiding place in the Music directory to a directory called Sorting, and then created directories for each letter of the alphabet. All my music files were dumped into the directory which corresponded with the artist’s name. I also created two other directories, ‘ZToTag’ and ‘ZCorrect’. The Z at the beginning is so they’re always at the end of the directory listing. I have been processing these directories alphabetically.
In order to not be bored listening to the same artist for weeks on end, I want to grab a subset out of the directory I’m currently processing, so what I do is draw a box 1 file wide down the directory listing and move those files to the Sorting directory. It ends up being about 10% of the files in a given directory. I listen to those files until I decide to keep or delete the file. If I want to keep it, the file gets moved to ‘ZToTag’. Sometimes it take five or six listens to decide to keep a file, especially considering I am doing this mostly at work, so it’s only a background process.
Occasionally I will check ZToTag and ensure I have the proper album and track number for the file. Wikipedia is super useful for this. I will then edit the ID3 tag in a program like EasyTag, and move that file into ZCorrect. When I have completely sorted one alphabetical directory, I will move my newly correctly tagged and labelled files into Music, where I move the files into a directory for each artist.
How boring was that to read? I was bored typing it. Right now, I’m sorting through D. Lots of Dar Williams, David Bowie and Dropkick Murphys songs.
Philip K. Dick - Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep
1968
A police officer hunts down rogue androids in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future. While hunting down the androids, we explore the topic of what makes us ‘human’. Humans in this future are faced with a grim reality of toxic dust which alters one’s DNA, few remaining animals, and a huge decrease in population. They counter their sad existence with a dial-an-emotion boxes, television, and a religion centered around shared experience. Our hero, Rick Deckard, has to hunt down six androids who are on Earth illegally and “retire†them, before they kill him.
I am not generally into dystopian sci-fi books. I read it because my fiance loves it, and I wanted to see if I would like it or not. The short answer? Not so much. I liked that there were fake animals, and fake people, and that is about it. I hear that Philip K. Dick is a great writer, and this book was exceptionally well written, but the story just wasn’t for me. I like happy future sci-fi books.
January 4, 2009 – January 10, 2009
Well, I spent most of this week sick with a head cold that knocked me down for a few days. Regardless, here goes my list for the week. One of these entries is sarcastic. Try to guess which one.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Death by Black Hole.
An incredibly interesting and funny interview with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He talks about the process of dying in a black hole, defines one of my new favourite words, “spaghettification”, and tells the audience about the asteroid that may destroy the Pacific Coast. A fascinating discussion about some terrible things that may happen to the Earth.
“Ninety nine percent of all species that ever existed are now extinct. That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life.”
Learning that none of my JavaScript works in Internet Explorer 6.
My boss went to Cambodia for two weeks after Christmas. The day she returns, we are to present her with a full, bug-free copy of our latest project. On Wednesday, we discovered that next to none of our Javascript works in Internet Explorer 6. I know it was rather remiss of us not to test, but we’re not the best at browser-compatibility testing.
Anyways, IE6 is a mystifying piece of badness. There are lots of things in it that make no sense at all, like how select boxes are drawn by the operating system, and not the browser. What this means is that modal dialog boxes, as well as mouseover-style menus, don’t draw themselves on top of those elements. Web 2.0 style applications use these sorts of elements quite often. The solution? Something called an iframe shim, which makes no sense at all. I have so far wasted a number of days attempting to make these elements play well together. We need to find a new way to draw modal dialog boxes, drop down style menus and a calendar widget. Before tomorrow morning at 830 am. I’m not expecting that to go well.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
I loved watching Billie Piper as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, so I decided to download the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl to see if she could really act or not, and I learned that she can. It is an odd cross between a comedy, a drama, and a softcore porn. I have now seen far too much of Billie Piper’s body, but I still found the show excellent. Her character is quite compelling and I enjoyed watching the two parts of her personality conflicting with each other. I would recommend this show to a couple of friends, though I’m not sure if it would be my friends who are obsessed with Doctor Who or not.
Getting our spare room set up.
Alan and I recently housed a friend of ours for about four or five months. In that time, he stayed in our spare room, which had formerly been our computer room. Since our computers were nice and cozy in their new home, and we wanted to hide our TV a bit more, we turned our spare room into a TV room. We put the TV and our gaming systems in the closet so we can hide it when we have guests, and the spare room now has our DVD shelf, our plastic shelving units, and our futon. The living room is fantastically empty, and will make a great space for dance contests and Twister. Or our cozy chair can go there for our new reading corner.
