Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Last Day

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Last Day: Taurus 3’s, Year of the City 2003: Carousel begins…

Last Day

Carousel was developed as a means for Body Retirement. When a person reaches their 30^th^ Birthday, their face begins to show signs of ‘aging’. They may notice some wrinkles under their eyes, they may notice that their eyesight is not as good as it once was. Also, they may begin to develop white hairs on the head, or worse — loss of hair (known as balding).

This is your body telling you that it’s time to transfer yourself into a new, fresh body — a baby’s body. A body that will take you through another 30 years.

Baby bodies are provided through ‘seed mothering’ — from the female citizens of our society. After being delivered, these babies are taken in by our nuturing Mother Computer and are then given the ‘souls’ of those Last Dayer’s who were able to reach Life Renewal on Carrousel.

Last Day?

When your lifeclock in the palm of your left hand begins to blink, your time is up in your present body. Upon blinking, proceed to our Headquartes on Nolan Street, 7th Floor, Room 1976.

There, you will be given proper ceremonial garb and final instructions for participating in Life-Renewal on Carousel.

Remember, the higher you are able to ‘fly’ while the Carousel turns, the greater your Renewal chances. Don’t let the fear of knowing that your old body will explode into a fiery pulp as you try to reach these heights hinder your efforts, or you may not make it to the Renewal Stage.

Carousel is meant to be an enjoyable, life-renewable experience. As you’re out there standing with your fellow ‘Renewer’s’, and with all your friends watching and shouting from the stands, by keeping a positive outlook on the process…

…YOU WILL BE RENEWED

'Recent Tunes' update

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Utilizing the iTunes Music Store linking hint I found earlier, I’ve updated the ‘Recent Tunes’ section of my sidebar. Before each artist, track, and album listing you’ll now see icons for Amazon and the iTunes Music Store — clicking on those will perform a search on the respective service for whichever line you clicked on. Nifty!

Some of the Amazon links are being a bit tweaky, and I’m not sure why, though. Sometimes they work fine, other times they get passed through with ‘"’ on either end of the search term, which confuses Amazon. I don’t know where that’s coming from, either — I can’t find that entity in any of the code on my side of things.

All the iTunes links work fine, however. The only caveat there is that they’re still building their selection, so the majority of my music probably isn’t listed yet. All good things in time, however.

Linking to the iTunes Music Store

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Excellent tip that I’m saving here for future use: how to create a website link that performs a search on the iTunes Music Store.

Link format (as a single line, broken here for clarity): itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?

Immediately following the ending ? are any of four search terms, or a global search term:

  • songTerm= (song title)
  • artistTerm= (artist name)
  • albumTerm= (album title)
  • composerTerm= (composer name)
  • term= (global, search all fields)

Use & between query items if you are using more than one of the first four (non-global) querys, and replace any whitespace with %20.

Example: building a link to search for U2:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2

Example: building a link to search for U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/ advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2&albumTerm=the%20joshua%20tree

Many thanks to Jim, Fuse, Erik, and Bill!

Internet Explorer .pdf files?

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IE .pdf's?

It’s the little things that get to me about Windows most of the time. Things like this — today, for absolutely no reason that I can think of, Windows has decided that Adobe Acrobat .pdf files should have Internet Explorer’s icon.

Why? Only Windows knows. I haven’t installed anything, changed any system settings, or done anything differently than the same basic things I do every day (opening, saving, printing documents). But it looks like this is what’s meant to be. At least until Windows changes its mind and either sets .pdf’s back to their original icon, or chooses something entirely different.

iTunes/www.applemusic.com

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Just some initial thoughts after playing around with iTunes 4.0 and the iTunes Music Store for a bit.

  • AAC: I’m sold. Through some very non-scientific, non-mathematical experimenting, I seem to be getting about a 40% reduction in file size with 128kbps AAC .m4a’s as opposed to 160kbps VBR .mp3’s. With a \~14,000 song, 75GB music collection, a 40% reduction in size is beautiful. Plus, they do sound at least the same, if not better.
  • iTunes 4.0: Basic functionality is still the same as previous versions of iTunes, which I was already quite happy with. They’ve obviously done some under-the-hood work, though — where I used to get “spinning beach balls” almost anytime I clicked around in iTunes, now the only time I get a wait cursor is when I’m getting info on multiple tracks at once. Much snappier performance — and on an aging 350Mhz blue-and-white G3, that’s pretty impressive.
  • iTunes Music Store: Again, I’m sold. Very nicely and simply integrated directly into iTunes, finding stuff in the store is a breeze. I’ve already purchased one track to replace a corrupted .mp3 file created from a scratched CD, and once the iTMS is tied to my .mac account, single-click purchasing works flawlessly. Could be dangerous, though — talk about instant gratification! The selection of music available could use a little work, though I suffer a bit in having more esoteric music tastes — the majority of the “big artists” seem to be pretty well represented, and Apple says that they’re constantly working on expanding their library. Can’t complain too much, though — I’ve even found some pleasant surprises that I’m thinking about picking up (lots of Bill Cosby, and even a fair chunk of Spike Jones albums!).

Excellent work, all around. As far as I’m concerned, all of the whiners at MeFi and /. can jump off a cliff — Apple’s got a good thing going here. The only downside I can see is that to take advantage of AAC’s smaller file sizes, I’ve got about 1500 CD’s to rip all over again…

Apple turns up the volume

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Well, today was the day that Apple finally made the announcments that rumor sites had been salivating over for the past few months. Lots of cool goodies…

  • QuickTime upgraded to v6.2, which includes support for AAC (more info on AAC here).
  • An iPod software update to v1.3, adding support for AAC, and longer battery life.
  • Redesigned and updated iPods, now in 10Gb, 15Gb, and 30Gb models, a slimmer design, software updates, and a price drop.
  • iTunes goes to v4.0, adding AAC support, Rendevouz local streaming (so you can stream audio from one Mac to others on the same local network), and support for the new…
  • …the long-rumored iTunes Music Store! Featuring 200,000 songs (and growing) from all the major music lables, previews of songs, one-click downloading, a 99 cent-per-song purchase price, and very reasonable DRM (unlimited listening time, unlimited CD burns, unlimited iPod support, purchased tracks can be copied to up to 3 other Macs), Apple looks to be making a good solid attempt to do the online-music experience well.

The new software just made it to my Mac — time to install and play!

Redesigning

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Redesign in progress.

This is a starting point, not an end point. Some things may look goofy at the moment — my most humble apologies. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Yet to come: color (not one of my strongpoints, but I’m not planning on sticking with pure black and white for too long), some graphics to spruce the place up a bit, and, oh, whatever else that might fall out of my head along the way.

Destinations

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I’ve implemented a new mini-feature that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a few days.

It’s not uncommon for me to stumble across something on the ‘net that catches my eye, but that I don’t create a full entry for. Sometimes I want to come back to it with a full entry later, other times it’s just a “ooh, neat!” moment. In order to track these, there is a new sidebar section called “Destinations” — little one-line links. Sometimes I may come back to these for full posts, other times that may be all that appears. It’s worth experimenting with for a bit, at least.

Inspiration for this was derived in part from Jason Kottke‘s ‘Remaindered Links’ and Christine‘s ‘Cookie Crumbs’.

Mayday! Mayday!

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The other day at work, I was toying with the idea of doing a “day in the life” series of photos. Taking my camera with me during the day, and snapping a shot every so often, then presenting them to the world. I hadn’t decided quite how to do it — a picture an hour? Every half hour? — but I’d been letting it rumble around in the back of my brain since then.

To my amusement, though, today Dyanna pointed to the Mayday Project, which is essentially exactly what I’d been turning over in my brain, only somewhat organized and loosed upon the blogosphere at large.

So, I’ve signed up, and on May 10^th^, will be documenting my day hourly.

Hrm. This means I’m going to need to actually leave the house that day, doesn’t it? Something tells me a series of fourteen pictures of my computer monitors would be pretty un-exciting…

Things I shouldn't admit in public

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Well, okay — since you asked…

  • I do, occasionally, like some really bad music. I can rationalize it well, but…(sigh)…the occasional song does come along that I know I shouldn’t like, but I do. For example:
    • Britney Spears’ ‘Oops…I did it again!’: I don’t really know why, but for some reason, this song amuses me to no end. It’s not one I’d play over and over, but it’s not going to get shut off when it comes up in the playlist, either.
    • Celine Dion’s ‘All Coming Back To Me Now’: This one, there’s actually a reason for. The first time I heard this song, I had no clue who sang it, but it sounded like a Meatloaf song. Now, I’ve always liked Meatloaf, and both of his ‘Bat out of Hell’ albums were actually written and produced by Jim Steinman. So, just after hearing this song, I called the radio station and asked them who it was, but first I wanted to know if Jim Steinman wrote and produced the song. Turns out he did — then they told me who the vocalist was. Celine Dion? (sigh) Ah, well — to me, it’s a Jim Steinman song.
    • The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’: Again, I’m not sure I can really give it a reason. It’s a fun, bouncy, brainless piece of bubblegum pop, and okay, I like it. Besides, the line “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” sounds far too much like she’s telling some guy that if he’s going to sleep with her, he’s going to have to sleep with all of her friends, too. This amuses me (not to mention that it sounds like a damn good deal…).
  • Kind of tied to the last of the three guilty pleasure songs above — Spice World (the Spice Girls movie) is surprisingly funny. Just trust me on this one — forget the fact that they were a manufactured pop group, and just sit back and enjoy the silly British humor and the multitudes of cameos. It’s not nearly as bad as you think. Really.

You know, that’s enough embarassing myself for the moment. Time to stop before I dig myself any deeper. ;)