Archive for May, 2005
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Musical Baton
May 17
How long is this freakin’ thing gonna go on? Anyway, the talented Mr. Riffner passed me the baton, so I guess I have to answer.
Total volume of music files on my computer
Something like 9gb on the iBook and around 15gb on the Linux box. I’m working on getting those back up to respectable numbers.
The last CD I bought was
Oh geez. It’s been awhile since I’ve bought and album. I did pre-order the new Alkaline Trio album the other day, so I guess that counts.
Song playing right how
Actually it’s the History Channel. I don’t listen to music very often on the computer, usually it’s just for driving in the car or during hardcore coding sessions.
Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me
- Picture in a Frame by Tom Waits
- San Fransico by Alkaline Trio
- Repeater by Fugazi
- White Wedding Dress by Boysetsfire
- Radio by Alkaline Trio
Five people who will be passed the baton
Enjoy, guys.
The Mars Volta
May 15
Elaine thinks this album sounds like some sort of Spanish Hardcore, but still thinks they’re a great band. I agree. So does Manny and Tessie and everyone else who matters. Are you someone who matters? If so, you must like The Mars Volta. No? Then give this track a listen and become someone important! Yee! Warning, though, it’s a big download this week, some twenty-plus megabytes. With that in mind, here’s L’ Via L’ Viaquez‘_Via_L’_Viaquez.mp3 from the Frances the Mute album.
Rawr
May 13
So, I made the plunge. When Tiger arrived in the mail on Wednesday, I knew it would have to be installed soon. So, Thursday morning I sat down, hooked the iBook into the Linux box and started backing stuff up. Once I had documents, photos, and MP3s securely copied over to the Ubuntu machine, I stuck in the Tiger DVD and double-clicked the installer. The machine restarted and the upgrade dialog came up.
I know you’ve read my site before and you’re expecting a horror story. You are, aren’t you?
Well, sorry, but I have to disappoint you. The upgrade was amazing. Took about an hour and a half to answer all the questions and do the install (which is mostly just watching progress bars grow). Another reboot and there was Tiger. The first bootup took a little longer than I expected, but that’s probably due to Spotlight starting to index everything.
After checking to make sure everything was still where it was supposed to be (it was), I started playing with the system. I know before that I’ve said (probably not on here) that the Dashboard is a stupid idea. I still stand by that, but some of the widgets may actually prove useful. Currently I’m using the countdown (counting to my birthday, a bit of vanity), the weather widget and weather map widget. The last two take the place of a menubar item I used to use that was great, but not very space-saving. I also see myself using the dictionary widget, Yellow Pages widget, and TV listings widget in the future. So, stupid idea that turns out to have some use in it. Mostly I think it’s useful ’cause of it being hidden. If you had to see them all the time, on this 12″ screen, they’d be more annoying than any use I could get from them.
Spotlight, though…. So pointless when I have Quicksilver installed. Spotlight does pretty well for searching emails and files, but it’s not a launcher. Every once in awhile it’ll pull up an app and let me launch it, but usually not. If it was a launcher, I’d probably go over to it completely, as something built into the system is going to work faster than something third-party. It doesn’t, though, and Quicksilver does all the searching I need of files and email and it’s a launcher. So I’m sticking with that.
Mail’s new interface is horrible. Those buttons belong in Longhorn or some equally disgusting interface. Thankfully Cage Fighter exists to turn them off.
Safari seems to be a lot faster than before and I’m stuck using it now as OmniWeb doesn’t perform great in Tiger. Hopefully that gets sorted out soon. Firefox works fine, but it just feels laggy to me lately. So I’ll stick with the OS X native browser.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this upgrade. It was well worth the money spent on it and doesn’t seem to have any major bugs. Good job, Apple.
The Simple Life
May 9
Elaine, Poly and I are sitting on the porch right now. It’s nice to get to enjoy the late spring evenings like this. Elaine is holding Poly, watching birds and telling me about her job. It’s become a pretty nice little routine in the evenings, she comes home and we sit somewhere comfortable while she tells me what’s going and other sordid tidbits from her job. It’s even nicer when we can sit on the porch and enjoy the coming night. Having a laptop and WIFI really makes it perfect. Yes, I’m a geek.
Hot Hot Heat
May 8
I got this band a few weeks ago, but just listened to ‘em this week. I decided as soon I heard them that I wanted to post them here. They’re catchy, they’re dancey, and they have some nice word plays in their lyrics (you know what a sucker I am for puns). So, off their album Elevator, here’s Hot Hot Heat’s song You Owe Me An IOU
Ray Thinks This is Fun
May 6
So I get up the morning to check my email and RSS feeds before my trip to the doctor and I notice something funny in my logs.
Two links from a MySpace site directly to two of the MP3s I’ve posted on this site. Hmm, how odd. Surely someone didn’t hotlink an MP3 on me! How uncouth!
Go to the site and sure enough, there’s the hotlink (had to check the source to even find it, it wasn’t very good/clean code). Not just one hotlink, but two. Both as embed tags set to autoplay. Tsk tsk.
MySpace has in their Terms and Conditions that you can’t post copyrighted material. Well, well, well. Guess what these MP3s would be considered? So now he’s breaking the T&C of MySpace and stealing my bandwidth. This has to be stopped.
Now, I’m a nice guy. Really, I am. So I messaged him (thank god he posted that on his page. MySpace doesn’t give non-subscribers any information about its subscribers), telling him that he had until 5 P.M. my time to remove the embedded links from his site. After that time, I would be contacting MySpace with all the information I had about the matter.
Well, I’m going to be going out of town this evening and there’s a chance I won’t remember to check his site again at five. So I need to do something about it, don’t I? So, I did.
The files he was linking to don’t even exist any longer (files are removed after month, as is stated on the music page. Hotlinking is still hotlinking, though.
With the help of Ray, I reuploaded the missing files. Sort of. A quick conversion of an MP3 from Landover Baptist and a quick Google search gave me two fun little MP3s weighing in at 276kb total (one’s 00:00:03 and the other is 00:00:04 in length). Now, even if I don’t remember to report him, he has to deal with superChristians and Ahnold. Fun!
Update
Thanks to a suggestion from Jeff, the MP3s have been changed. I left the Landover Baptist one, but moved it to the second position. Jeff’s suggestion autoplays on pageload.
Update #2
Well, I finally got ahold of him on AIM where he refused to take them. He thought I was being rude apparently. Anyway, I reported him to MySpace, so we’ll see if they say/do anything. Either way, he has since taken down the embedded links. So, we win!