Month: January 2004

Madacy != metadata

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I’ve babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group.

I’ve been slowly working my way through re-encoding my music collection. I’d had it all ripped to my old computer as .mp3s, but now that I have my G5 with the extra storage space and processing speed, I decided to re-encode everything as .m4a. Less space, better quality, and all that. While I could have just pulled all the .mp3 files over and done a mass convert to .m4a, I wanted to get the best quality possible, which necessitates encoding from the original CDs. No problem — it’s a big project (with upwards of 1200 CDs to go through), but worth it in the long run.

As I’m going through, I’m ensuring that each imported CD has all the correct metadata for each track — title, artist, composer, and year of release — which most of the time isn’t a problem, as all this is generally listed in the CD booklet that comes with each album. However, over the years I’ve occasionally ended up with albums from Madacy, who seem to specialize in ultra-low cost compliations. I’m not sure how I end up with them, as they’re generally not something I’d go for (cheap in more than just price), but I’ve got a few.

The thing is, apparently one of the many cost-cutting measures that Madacy employs is simply giving as little information as possible about the songs included on their compilations. I just ripped a 3-disc set of Irish folk music where the only information given for any of the 44 tracks was the title — no performing artist, no composer, nada. Grrrrrr.

I know this kind of stuff (especially to this extreme) matters not a whit to most people, but dammit, it matters to me, and having to deal with a company this shoddy about their releases is just frustrating.

NetNewsWire display bug

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NetNewsWire display wierdness

Has anyone else seen this particular NetNewsWire bug? Every so often when working my way through my feeds, I get a weird display glitch where a section of one post will be repeated over and over in the viewport, with each repetition getting slightly more blurred. A quick click in the display port clears up the display, but eventually this will pop up again. So far, I haven’t been able to pin down any one thing that triggers the glitch — sometimes it won’t happen for a while, other times it happens just about every time I use the space bar to move to the next article. Very odd.

This is under NetNewsWire 1.0.7 (it happened with 1.0.6 too), using the “combined” view and the spacebar to move among unread posts, on a stock dual 2.0Ghz G5.

It appears that I’m not the only one seeing this…I’ve added my own bug report too.

From vinyl to .mp3

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The New York Times has a decent overview of how to transfer vinyl recordings to .mp3 (or AAC, or whatever your digital format of choice may be). This could come in very handy at some undetermined point in the future, whenever the family record collection swings my way again (currently I believe it’s in Fairbanks somewhere with Kevin’s stuff, though I’m not entirely sure).

(via Paul Beard and Cory Doctorow)

Update: MetaFilter links to another site looking at the same process: Converting Tapes and Records to CD.

We all have our priorities

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Phil Ulrich: I miss IRC.
Phil Ulrich: In some respects.

Michael Hanscom: :nods
Michael Hanscom: been ages since I found a good irc chat, though
Michael Hanscom: i’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of checking into [#joiito] (or whatever it is), but I’m not sure if I’m “a-list” enough…lol

Phil Ulrich: You are after the MS Incident, me bucko.

Michael Hanscom: :laughs
Michael Hanscom: notoriety counts?

Phil Ulrich: Sure.
Phil Ulrich: ;)
Phil Ulrich: I like to think it does.
Phil Ulrich: Or else you could just show up and be A-list by association.
Phil Ulrich: Kind of like the losers at the party who hang around and get drinks for the cool people.
Phil Ulrich: Not to imply you’re a loser, again, of course. Phil Ulrich: ;)

Michael Hanscom: LOL nice…

Phil Ulrich: We should start a B-list IRC chatroom.
Phil Ulrich: Lifestyles of the Inconsequential and Infamous.

Michael Hanscom: lol sounds good to me
Michael Hanscom: there’s got to be more of us out there
Michael Hanscom: in the meantime, though…dinnertime for me

Phil Ulrich: Pick a network, any network.

Michael Hanscom: bbl (at some point)

Phil Ulrich: Mmmm, dinner.
Phil Ulrich: You choose dinner over IRC? HEATHEN.

Michael Hanscom: dinner…and Buffy

Phil Ulrich: Okay, that’s a winner.

Blog of the Month

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This was nice — I got picked as “Blog of the Month” by AndrewBlog:

This is a beatiful blog with amazing content and a superb layout. Michael Hanscom is bringing blogging to the next level with this site. He has a firm commentment to his blog (this is the guy whogot fired from Microsoft for his blog).

Thanks, Andrew!

Cheaper By the Dozen

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I absolutely, uncategorically, and unquestionably refuse to go see the Cheaper By the Dozen movie currently playing in the theaters.

The original book by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey was one of my favorite books growing up. It’s the true story of the Gilbreths, a turn of the century family unlike any other. Father was an efficiency expert, hired by companies to examine their work processes and find ways to speed up production — and he ran his life and his household by the same standards as his business. His wife shared in his duties, giving lectures on efficiency techniques (no small feat for a woman in 1917), and continued her husband’s work and business after he died. Then, there were their children — all twelve of them.

At first, when I saw that there was going to be a new movie made from the book, I was interested. Then, I found out that it starred Steve Martin, and I began to worry. Then I saw the previews, and my fears were confirmed — in the name of “modernization”, the story I loved as a kid has been gutted to the point where apparently the only connection to the original source material is the number of children. Such a shame.

I was ranting about this to Prairie after seeing the preview a while back, and while she could sympathize with my frustration, she couldn’t empathize, never having read the book. So, one of her Christmas presents from me this year was her own copy of Cheaper By the Dozen. She’s been reading it off and on all evening as I’ve been dinking around on the computer, and I’m constantly hearing her start to giggle (or out and out laugh) at one passage or another. I love it when something I loved so much when I was younger gives someone else the giggles as they read it for the first time.

Exploring the new Seattle Library

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Seattle’s library system has been in something of a state of flux ever since I moved down here. Just about the time I came down, the central public library moved into a temporary space just a couple blocks down 8th street from my apartment, across from the Seattle Convention Center. The old building was torn down, and construction began on the new library building.

As I’ve watched the new library building go up over the months, I’ve always been more or less confused by what I was seeing. Lots of diagonals, parts of the building jutting over other parts — it looked interesting, but it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Seattle's new library

Today, though, thanks to a pointer from mahalie, I finally have some idea at what I’ve been looking at all these months — and not only does it make sense, but I really like what it looks like the end result will be.

It turns out that the Seattle Public Library‘s Libraries for All site has an extensive collection of information on the construction of the new central library, including press releases and meeting minutes dating back to 1998 and continuing throughout the construction process, photographs of the library’s construction, and something I’d been wondering about for ages — a floor by floor breakdown of the new building.

Suddenly, it all makes sense, and where before all I’d seen was a confusing jumble of girders and construction equipment, now I can see where all this is likely to end up. According to the status report the grand opening is tentatively set for May 23, 2004 — and you can bet I’ll be there to finally see the end result.