Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

A marriage made in heaven

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…If Yoko Ono married Sonny Bono, she’d be Yoko Ono Bono.

…If Dolly Parton married Salvador Dali, she’d be Dolly Dali.

…If Bo Derek married Don Ho, she’d be Bo Ho.

…If Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader, she’d be Ella Vader.

…If Oprah Winfrey married Depak Chopra, she’d be Oprah Chopra.

…If Cat Stevens married Snoop Doggy Dogg, he’d be Cat Doggy Dogg.

…If Olivia Newton…John married Wayne Newton, then divorced him to marry Elton John, she’d be Olivia Newton…John Newton John.

…If Sondra Locke married Elliott Ness, then divorced him to marry Herman Munster, she’d become Sondra Locke Ness Munster.

…If Bea Arthur married Sting, she’d be Bea Sting.

…If Liv Ullman married Judge Lance Ito, then divorced him and married Jerry Mathers, she’d be Liv Ito Beaver.

…If Snoop Doggy Dogg married Winnie the Pooh, he’d be Snoop Doggy Dogg Pooh.

…G. Gordon Liddy married Boutros…Boutros Ghali, then divorced him to marry Kenny G., he’d be G. Ghali G.

…If Jack married Andy Capp, then married Jack Paar, then moved on to Stephen King, he’d be Jack Handy Capp Paar King.

…If Woody Allen married Natalie Wood, divorced her and married Gregory Peck, divorced him and married Ben Hur, he’d be Woody Wood Peck Hur.

…If Ivana Trump married, in succession, Orson Bean (actor), King Oscar (of Norway), Louis B. Mayer (of MGM), and Norbert Wiener (mathematician), she would then be Ivana Bean Oscar Mayer Wiener.

(via Prairie)

Meme 2: iTunes

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iTunes FoldersAnother meme that Kottke pointed out — iTunes usage methods.

How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn’t heard in a while (and at times, didn’t remember that I even had).

One of the godsends of iTunes is the “smart playlists” feature — I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they’re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: “new additions”, “random unplayed”, and “random 1gb”.

  • Random 1Gb: the single most important playlist, for me. This randomly grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that 1) I haven’t listened to in the past 2 months, 2) is rated three stars or above, and 3) isn’t in the “Christmas” genre. Whenever I listen to a song, it removes it from the playlist, and grabs another one. This syncs with my iPod, and as the iPod tracks what I listen to each day, the playlist is automatically updated at night when I get home from work, and in the morning just before I leave. The end result — roughly 20 hours of songs that I know I like, but haven’t heard in a few months.

  • Random Unplayed: this playlist grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that I’ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I’m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) — as long as there’s something in this playlist, then I know that there’s songs that I haven’t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).

  • New Additions: this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.

Other smart playlists that come in handy: “recently played” (anything I’ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), “top 25 played” (a pesudo-best-of list), “top rated” (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).

The only two “normal” playlists I have at the moment are one for Poems for Laila (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony’s excellent Soundtrack for a Century collection. Other than those two, it’s all smart playlists for me.

Meme 1: The Dock

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My dock

There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.

So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.

Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).

Exciting, huh? ;)

Collective nouns

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I just ran across the phrase “a smug of Mac users“. Collective nouns can be a lot of fun to play with. A gaggle of geese. A murder of crows. And so on. Every so often I’ll play with creating other collective nouns, with the goal of being equally descriptive and clever if I can manage it…

A giggle of girls. A scrape of skaters. A mope of goths.

I’m sure I’ve come up with others, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head right now. Anyone have any more suggestions?

Trying to get caught up

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So far, I’ve found two (and only two) downsides to the new computer.

Firstly, I need to get used to having a single monitor again. I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for the past few years with my old Mac, using two 17\” CRT monitors. Once was an old Apple monitor that used the old proprietary Apple monitor connector, and the other was a standard VGA monitor attacheched to a VGA port on a second video card.

I can’t do this on the new machine, though. While its video card has two ports, and will drive two monitors quite comfortably, one port is the new ADC port for Apple’s LCD screens, and the other is a DVI port for non-Apple LCD screens. The machine came with a DVI to VGA adaptor, so I can run one of my 17\” monitors, but that’s it. I’ll get used to it, it’s just feeling a bit cramped right now, and I keep losing windows.

Guess what just rocketed to the top of my wish list? ;)

Secondly, after spending the weekend getting things set up and configured on the new machine — and doing a fair amount of playing and marvelling at the new goodies — I’m way behind in reading all of my usual websites. Uff-da.

So, things have been a little slow for the past few days, but I’m working on getting back up to speed. Small prices to pay, really.

Excluding OS X?

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So I’m in the midst of getting my new machine all configured the way I like it, installing software, drivers, etc. I use a Microsoft Office Keyboard (that’s discontinued), so I hit Microsoft’s keyboard pages to download the software. As I was working my way through the download process (verify system requirements, choose your product, choose your OS, choose your language, and download), I was presented with these choices when choosing my operating system:

Mac OS 10.1 - 10.2.x (excluding OS X)

Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me just what operating system Microsoft thinks I’m running on my Mac that has a version number equal to or greater than 10.0, and yet excludes OS X?

My new toy!

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So today was the big day — new computers for both Prarie and me! Prairie got a new iMac (which came with all sorts of other goodies), and I got my G5. Once we got home and unloaded the car, we had to memorialize the occasion…

All of our new goodies...

I opened mine up first — I’d been waiting for this for a while, and there was only room on the bed for one of us to unpack at a time, so Prairie was kind enough to let me dive in first. After a minor incident with the knife I used to slit the tape on the box (it’s okay, I didn’t really need that part of my fingertip anyway), I got to see in person what I’d been drooling over online for the past few months.

Two! Count them! Two! Ah ha ha ha ha!

And, just a few minutes later, everything was plugged in and I was up and running. I haven’t installed any really processor intensive applications yet, but even with just poking around at the basic stuff that comes pre-installed, this is so much nicer than my old machine. I’m definitely looking forward to taxing it a bit more in the future — right now, the biggest speed test I’ve had has been with opening iPhoto. On my old G3, with an iPhoto library pushing 2000 photos, it was a good minute or two for the application to open and be ready to use. On the G5? Roughly three seconds.

Oh, and I was highly amused by this. Never having unpacked an iMac before, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but from what we could see when we opened up Prairie’s box — it’s a boy!

It's a boy!