The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
I just wanted to mention how enjoyable (and educational!) it is to read JWZ’s blog.
Just today I learned about exploding frogs in Germany, that the new pope bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Evil, Drew Barrymore isn’t afraid to poo in the woods, SciFi is doing a remake of Land of the Lost (one of my seminal TV shows, I’m still hot for chicks in flannel) and a bevy of other useful and fun things.
I got a call from a woman claiming to be from The American Breast Cancer Foundation at at 8:25pm on 4-26-05. She sounded nice and knowledgeable. While she went through her schpeal, I googled the organization. I came up with precious little information.
She refused to send me information by mail but said they would send me a receipt by mail if I would commit to a donation. Yeah. Right.
I went to The charity arm of the Better Business Bureau and they had very minimal information about them. They are a 501(c)(3)… and that’s it. No address, no phone number. A Whois search ended at a Post Office Box in Cincinnati. Yeah. Right.
Why are there so many bad people in the world?
Trav started using FLAC a while ago to archive his music. At the time, I called him silly names because I knew that MP3 would do the same job in 1/5 the space. But now when it comes time to archive my music, I instantly recognize that the choice is obvious. Gigabytes are cheap and getting cheaper, and I don’t know what format I’m going to want my music in the future; recompressing a lossy format like MP3 or even OGG can sometimes work out very poorly.
I’m convinced that OGG is a better lossy compression format than MP3 because it gets a higher quality sound for the bits it uses. 192 kbit OGG uses less space and has possibly higher sound quality than 256 kbit MP3. (I say “possibly” because I can’t discern an acoustic difference between them. They are both “near perfect”)
There are some non-obvious switches you have to set to use CDex and FLAC together. Here’s how:
CDex ripper1.5.1, FLAC compression1.1.2a
From DarkRyder on CDexos.sourceforge.net
Actually, ripping to FLAC is very easy in CDex, can be done on the fly, and doesn’t, thankfully, involve the CLI:
1. Install the FLAC encoder from http://flac.sourceforge.net/
2. In CDex, set the Encoder to “External Encoder”
3. Do not check “Don’t delete ripped WAV…”
4. Point the Encoder Path to flac.exe (mine is “C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe”, which is probably the default)
5. Set the Parameter String to"-8 -o %2 -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%b" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%tn/%tt" -T "genre=%g" -"(this is where the magic happens; see below)
6. Bitrate is irrelevant (I left mine at 128)
7. File Extension is “flac”
8. You can check “Hide DOS box…” if you want (I don’t because it show progress, but you might not care)
9. Check both “Send WAV header…” and “On-the-fly…”Now ripping to FLAC will work just the same as ripping to any of the internally supported formats.
If you’re interested in that giganto parameter string, here’s the breakdown:
-8: Compression level — higher numbers mean more CPU usage but smaller files, lower ones mean less CPU and larger files. Can be 0-8
-o: Output file name. This is how CDex “tells” FLAC to follow the Filename Format from the Filename tab.
%%: These are CDex replacement tags. You can find the full list in the CDex help file under “External Encoder”. The only real drawback to this external encoders is that the track number always has leading zeroes. Doesn’t bother me, but it may bother some people.
-T: These set the “tags” in the compressed file for Artist, Album, etc. You can find the list of supported tags on the FLAC website.
-: The trailing dash tells FLAC to expect the WAV on stdin, which is what makes on-the-fly encoding possible.
And from some other folks:
It is also CRITICAL that you set the ID3 Tag version [in the Generic section] to NONE, as if you don’t, you’ll make an ogg that can’t be read by all the *nix folks, and that will piss us all off.
I went ahead and watched Matrix Revolutions while my PC was incommunicado. I’m disappointed in myself. The first time I saw it, just like Matrix Reloaded, I was disappointed by a number of things. Well, 90% of that disappointment was in my mind. The philosophy is tight, the action is great, the effects are wildly creative, tremendously realistic and groundbreaking (except, again, for some stretches of the CGI Neo & Smith combats) and it’s just a tremendous movie.
I got sloppy and….
Partition Magic ate my hard drive! AAAHHHH! My last backup is from March 6th! AHHHH!
Oh please oh please let me be able to recover everything alright.
The first couple rounds of recovery tools haven’t gotten me going yet.
If anyone could throw me some good juju right now, I’d appreciate it!
update: The influx of juju is having an effect! She’s booting up again! Woot! A 1 hr long Chkdsk did it. Right now, it won’t boot in Safe Mode but it will boot in normal mode. TIME FOR A BACKUP AND REINSTALL!
All this came about because I was trying to repartition my C: drive… It’s a 150 gig drive. With the 137 gigabyte limit, I had a 130 gig partition and an unallocated partition. I was trying to make two 75 gig partitions. Partition Magic burped on me during the resizing operation.
Once again, thank you, universe, for that extra bit of juju just when I needed it.
another update: This is just a side comment. 200 gigabytes sure takes a long time to move! While I watch the progress bar go from 18.001% to 18.002%, I’m contemplating how much information 200 gig is. Multiply it by 8 and you realize that my little desktop computer is moving 1.6 trillion pieces of data… trillion with a “T”. That’s 1.6*1012 bits of data! Just for giggles, I should note that the data transfer has so far gone perfectly. That means the system is at least 99.999999999% accurate.
Ok, enough gee-whizzing for today. Back to it!
:-)
(see update below)
“24” jumped the shark in season 4 between 4 an 6 pm PST. Up until then, the scale of how things unfolded was large and seemless. The terrorists had comandeered 106 nuclear power plants with a remote override control. I had nightmarish visions, wondering feverishly if America’s nuclear power plant system could be so suseptable to a single directed attack.
And then…. Ta-da. only 6 plants were under attack. And then 1. Yes it’s sad that a nuclear plant had a meltdown but they averted a disaster that literally would have destroyed America and the people involved didn’t get so much as a wayward smile… instead, they instantly became worried about the next great threat… well, there weren’t any next great threats so they worried about other, much more petty things. At that moment, the walls of the set fell down for me. It stopped being real-ish and started resembling (just a little bit) like The A-Team with constant nonsensical action, snide remarks, pat cliches and cardboard acting.
The clincher was Jack’s phone number. In a recent episode, Jack gave somebody his cell phone number. It showed on-screen for a couple seconds, 310-597-3781. So of course I called it. How could I pass up an an Easter Egg like that?!
Hurumph! The message on the voicemail is:
[female vmail voice]The mailbox belonging to [man’s voice] Nextel phone for twenty-four [female vmail voice] is full. It cannot accept any more messages. Please try again later. Goodbye.
TVTome.com says that at one point, stagehands and such on the set of the show picked up the phone. That sounds tremendously cool… but now that the folks on the set have gotten bored of answering the hundreds of calls a day, they’ve just left the phone off with nothing fun for anyone else. At least have Mr. Sutherland or someone could leave a short message there.
update: After a bit of googling, I found several message threads talking about how they called and got through to people on the set. – – – – Ok…. I’ll admit it. That’s cool. There could have been better follow-through, but that was cool.
.
.
I still watch, but now it’s just for the sake of completeness.
Update 5-5-05
Grr. Ok, maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe I’m weak willed, but I just watched 2am-3am and it was terrific, like really terrific.
Ok, so they had a lull, and the pace had a weird hiccup, and there was a slipup and how the plot flowed in one storyline for a moment. But darn it, that’s good TV!
I got a message from an aquaintance a few days ago.
The backstory: If I recall correctly, he and some friends used my website Guestbook for a couple weeks to have a rude conversation… the kind of conversation a bunch of rude high school freshmen would have on a message board. I tracked their IP addresses to the Roxbury Latin School in Boston and gave the school a call. I got a short “Thank you” note from them and heard no more.
After I got the message below, I googled him and found that he’s a senior and (I assume) graduating in about 1 1/2 months.
Here’s what he sent me on Saturday:
Hey lee. 5 years ago i posted an obscene message on your message board, and you felt the need to contact my school, roxbury latin and tell them about it. you got 15 kids suspended and i think you’re worthless.
I hope you realize how worthless you are and that you really have no real friends in your life. your website is even worse than it was 5 years ago. keep it up pal.
you’re worthless,
-[removed]
I responded today:
Own your failures as well as your successes. You’ll be 10 times the man you thought you could be.
All the best for graduation.
Look forward and look up!
Lee
I
had always wondered what was on the other side of Stratton. I practically grew up skiing there… most every weekend in the winter for several years..
I knew that the Sun Bowl wasn’t completely on the opposite side of the mountain… but what was? Would Stratton ever expand out that way? Well, this picture says, “nope”.
You can just make out that the mountain doesn’t strictly have a back side. It doesn’t decend for 1/2 a mile, and then into the town of Stratton…. (original image)
I’m registered at Clucas-moe.
I saw The Matrix Reloaded tonight on HBO. The last time I saw it, in the theater, I was sorely disappointed. I think I blogged that a long while ago but I’m too lazy to look it up.
“Hype” is such a strange animal. You see, this time around, I really liked the movie. The action was eye poppingly realistic (except for the multiple-Agent-Smith parts where it was terribly noticeably computer animated), the storyline worked for me. And the thing I most suprised myself with was that I actually was kind of digging “The Explainer”.
The first time through this movie… wooo-eeee, was I disappointed. But there were so many fairly subtle things I cought this time through. For one, after Neo gained is “The One” powers, I was initially really disappointed that the only super-power he had was flying. An ability he used very well to run away on a number of occasions. I even talked about this with others and they gruffly agreed. But now I noticed that he had supa-fly X-Ray vision, could pass his hands though solid objects (like Trinity), could reanimate someone (Trinity again), could stop a sword being swung at him full-force with the pinky edge of his open hand taking the full force and only bleeding a few drops, fly at about 4,000 miles per hour, fight 100 Agent Smiths at a time without bleeding, fend off an Agent Smith “copy” attack, destroy squids with the power of his mind (and I now kinda understand how that would be possible).
I did slow-motion through a couple fight scenes and they were total poetry. When fighting multiple opponents, each opponent was generally fighting full speed. Neo just fought faster. I say this because in many kung-fu movies, when the hero fights multiple opponents, the opponents are usually fighting poorly and taking a long time between strikes. Not so in The Matrix Reloaded. I’ve got to say that this is a great testament to Keanu Reeves, who was at the center of most of these tightly choreographed scenes.
Trinity riding her bike in the wrong direction on the highway… I did slow-mo through it and couldn’t tell how they did it. I mean, I know there is CGI in there, but it was totally seemless.
So forget your expectations, watch it again and enjoy it!