Uninspired

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For one reason or another, I just don’t seem to be terribly talkative right at the moment. The usual stuff is going on out in the world, of course, much of which is quite outrage-worthy, but…well, everyone else is doing such a good job covering it all.

I’m sure something will pop up eventually that will kick things off and get me babbling again. For now, though, things might be a wee bit quiet round these parts.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’m almost guaranteed to find a good six things that I want to ramble on about. Maybe that’s the point of posting this? ;)

So…as long as I’m a bit lacking at the moment — any questions, curiosity, or comments from the peanut gallery? No particular topic, anything goes. I’m just curious to see what might pop up if anyone actually responds.

iTunes: “Suck (Live)” by Shriekback from the album Dancing Years, The (1990, 4:54).

Oh, snap! It’s getting kind of hectic up in this piece.

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This may be the funniest thing I’ve read lately…

At this point, according to observers, both statesmen decided—by seemingly unspoken mutual consent—to abandon the gutter patois of the common carnival worker and to resort instead to an eminently more quotable (but, to those not versed in the vagaries of hip-hop idiom, more confusing) exchange of viewpoints.

“Oh, it’s like that?” Mr. Cheney queried.

“Whut? Whut?” Mr. Leahy shot back.

“Once again,” Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube’s 1990 album, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”), “it’s on.”

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle.

(via kottke)

There’s no such thing as too much music

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My one major accomplishment of the weekend was finally completing a project that I’ve had going on for months now: importing every CD I own into iTunes. Quite a task, when after years of being a complete music junkie (compounded by a few years of DJing), I’ve built up a CD collection of 1,142 albums!

Now that I’m done, though, the final tally…

  • Total songs in my iTunes library: 14,622
  • Total time: 49.6 days (49 days, 15 hours, 8 minutes, 23 seconds)
  • Total space: 65.09 GB

The fact that all that music takes up only 65 GB was a pleasant surprise. When I was using my G3 as my primary computer, I picked up an 80GB drive specifically to hold all my music. At that point, though, encoding my music as 160kbps VBR MP3 files, I couldn’t fit all of my music on that drive! This time, though, I’ve been encoding at 128kbps AAC (not archival quality, but slightly better sound quality than the 160kbps .mp3s even at smaller file sizes), and managed to get all of my music on the ‘puter in 15 GB less space than before.

Then, since iTunes has a special “Grouping” field that can be used for whatever sort of customized sorting options the user wants, I set up four groups for my music. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the majority of my music is music that I actually own, and I’ve generally only resorted to downloading songs from peer to peer networks such as Napster or the like when I was trying to get really rare tracks that I couldn’t find any other way. I was curious as to just how the numbers worked out, though, so here’s my four groups, and their final results…

  • Copied from friends or downloaded from P2P networks (technically illegal): 610 (4.172%)
  • Original rips (my own mixes, GarageBand creations, or imports from vinyl): 51 (0.349%)
  • Bought from the iTunes Music Store (legally owned, though without the physical CD): 232 (1.587%)
  • Ripped from CDs that I own: 13,729 (93.893%)

Overall, I really don’t think that that’s too bad of a ratio.

And yes. I’m a complete and total music whore. :)

iTunes: “Come What May” by Kidman, Nicole/McGregor, Ewan from the album Moulin Rouge (2001, 4:48).

Up, up and at ’em

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Guess it’s about time I should poke my head up around these parts again, huh?

Been a good weekend — a little too hot and muggy at times, but overall, quite enjoyable. Saturday I took the ferry out to Bainbridge Island for a blogger’s picnic, and sat and chatted with Julie and Ted Leung and their three girls, Anita, Chip, Beth and her new son (all of six weeks old), and Robert and Myriam Scoble for a few hours. I ended up plopping down on a blanket and spending a good amount of time with the Leung’s girls, all of whom were adorable — and since Julie already mentioned Michaela showing me the owie on her middle finger (“Look at what I’ve got!” as I try to keep from laughing too hard as she gives me the bird) than I guess I can too. ;)

Between the heat and not sleeping terribly well for a couple nights, Saturday night became a night of rest, doing very little aside from dinking around on the ‘puter, ordering pizza, and kicking back to watch The Abyss. I really enjoy that movie, especially the extended special edition cut, and that ended up being just the night I needed to recuperate.

I debated heading down to check out the Bite of Seattle festival on Sunday, but decided that it was a bit too muggy outside for me to go traipsing around Seattle, so I wandered down to the theater to see I, Robot instead. Overall, not horrible — but not great, either. Pretty much just standard summer movie fare more than anything else. A few amusing lines here and there, decent special effects, and very pretty to look at (I do enjoy Alex Proyas‘ directing), but aside from the title and the Three Laws of Robotics, any connections to Asimov were few and far between. Character names and a couple situations lifted from the pages of Asimov’s robot short stories, but the spirit of Asimov’s writing definitely wasn’t there. It’s not so bad that I’d recommend staying away, but if there’s another movie you’re more interested in, don’t go out of your way to see I, Robot.

And now the weekends done, the week begins, and I try to catch up with everything else in the world that I missed over the past few days.

Whee!

iTunes: “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Vanessa Mae from the album Violin Player, The (1995, 7:49).

The New York Times posts a Mea Culpa

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It’s always nice to see one of the ‘big boys’ admit that maybe, just maybe, they could have dug a little deeper into the goings-on in the months before we invaded Iraq.

Over the last few months, this page has repeatedly demanded that President Bush acknowledge the mistakes his administration made when it came to the war in Iraq, particularly its role in misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda. If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.

…we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm.

As we’ve noted in several editorials since the fall of Baghdad, we were wrong about the weapons. And we should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed.

[…]

Saddam Hussein was indisputably a violent and vicious tyrant, but an unprovoked attack that antagonized the Muslim world and fractured the international community of peaceful nations was not the solution. There were, and are, equally brutal and potentially more dangerous dictators in power elsewhere. Saddam Hussein and his rotting army were not a threat even to the region, never mind to the United States.

iTunes: “Don’t Go” by Bypass Unit from the album Reinventing the 80’s (1997, 5:52).

Pictures of Noah

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Kevin just sent me pictures of Noah! At this point, I’m required to do the “proud uncle” thing and display them to the world.

Mom and Noah

Noah Avery Hanscom

You, of course, are required to expound upon how beautiful and perfect he is, even though at this stage, all children pretty much look like Winston Churchill. ;)

iTunes: “Planet Rock (SwordFish)” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force from the album Planet Rock Remixes (2001, 7:47).

My Depeche Mode collection

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For Rebecca, for comparison purposes, and for Jonas, because he made fun of me for dancing to Strangelove at the Vogue a few months ago. ;)

My final Depeche Mode song count:

  • 217 songs
  • 42 albums (this includes compilations where DM has only one track)
  • 19.3 hours
  • 1.03 Gb

And here’s the full list, in .pdf format, printed straight out of iTunes:

iTunes: “Judas” by Depeche Mode from the album Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993, 5:14).

Okay, okay, I’m awake, I get it

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Weird night last night — no matter what, I just couldn’t sleep solidly. Tossed and turned all night long, until I finally gave up trying to get back to sleep a little while ago. It’s Saturday and I’ve been up since just before 8am. Ah, well — hopefully a nap later in the day will happen, and I’ll knock myself back onto my usual schedule before too long.

I do remember having a long, very involved dream revolving around discovering that Lloyd Alexander had written a series of companion novels to his Prydain Chronicles: two collections of short stories, and a full trilogy of three almost Harry Potter-length novels set about sixteen years or so after the end of the Prydain Chronicles. I was really excited about this, found some beautiful leather-bound editions, but the bookstore I was at was missing the first book of the trilogy, so after flipping through the ones that were there and admiring the maps of Prydain in the front leaf, I started going to another book store to find the first of the new books.

Then I woke up, realized that it was all just a dream, and was very disappointed.

I’ve had a couple people notice that I’ve just been reading the (real) Prydain Chronicles after seeing them pop up in the sidebar and ask about them. I’m planning on writing about them, but at the moment Prairie’s borrowing my copies, and I’m waiting to put up a full post until I have the books back in my hands to quote from. So no smackings and crackings of my poor tender head, please — I’m getting there!

I’m also just a few CDs short of finally having every CD I own imported into my computer. It’s almost frightening how much music I have. Almost, but not quite. ;) More details on that once I’m actually done.

And, as long as I’m up and (apparently) functioning early enough, I’ll be catching the 10:40 ferry over to Bainbridge Island for today’s blogger picnic. Should be fun!

And the day begins…

iTunes: “All I Really Need” by Machines of Loving Grace from the album Rite of Shiva (1991, 5:07).

Bumbershoot 2004 lineup

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The Bumbershoot 2004 lineup has been announced. Sweet. Quite a few big names catch my eye and will be fun to see, but I’m also looking forward to discovering a few new acts that I might not have heard of otherwise (I find at least one or two more each year).

Just calling out a few that catch my interest…

Friday: The Clumsy Lovers

Saturday: Seal, Nancy Sinatra, Robyn Hitchcock

Sunday: Public Enemy

Monday: The Pixies, Toots and the Maytals (Kevin just played some of their stuff for me on his way through last weekend), Critters Buggin’

Not as many “must see” acts as there have been in the past few years for me, all in all. In fact, the only one to really make me sit up and get excited was Public Enemy. Still, it’s certainly not a bad initial list of possibilities, and as I said before, it’s the unexpected discoveries that can be the most fun.

iTunes: “Pine Effect” by µ-Ziq from the album In Pine Effect (1995, 4:51).

Noah Avery Hanscom

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Many, many congratulations to Kevin, Emily — and Noah Avery Hanscom!

Noah Avery Hanscom was born this morning, the Feast of Sts. Helier, Plechtelm, and/or Steven Harding Tenenan, at 3:56 AM (Memphis time), weighing 7 lbs. 4 oz. Emily and Noah are doing well, and Noah, so far, in his less than a day outside of his mother, seems to have his father’s laid back attitude toward life.

Yay!

iTunes: “Happy Birthday” by Concrete Blonde from the album Free (1989, 2:22).