Liam
A test of the lighbox JS plugin for wordpress. A very cool script. Once you click the image, it loads on op of the current site without reloading.
It’s pretty awesome.
Posted on 2006-01-27
Every now and again, my digital music starts to complain.
“your iPod is much, much larger than you’re encoding us for.” is what they say. “look at how many hundreds of gigs of hard drive space you have. you WANT to make us sound better, don’t you?”
And then I give in and say “let’s re-encode every CD I have!” Well, this time might be the last. This time I’m going for the Apple Lossless format, and supposedly it’s a lossless compressed format. (how that works I’m not too sure.) The next step is WAV or AIFF formats, but for now, this will do. It used to be that you re-organize your music collection, chronolgically or alphabetically or by genre, but now with all my CDs never moving and simply taking up space, I’ve got to get some use out of them now and again, right?
So here I am, and whenever I’m at the computer I’ll be ripping CD after CD after CD until they’re all complete. After this, the next time I touch them will be when I move into a house (which is a whole other story) and put them back into their cases, freeing them from the oppressive black fake leather CD book they’ve been trapped in since I was in college.
This will be the third time I rip my collection in it’s completion, but it’s not the end of the mp3 on my computer. There will be those stragglers that will be in a lossy format (mp3, aac, ogg vorbis, etc.) because I weither don’t have the CDs anymore or I somehow acquired them in some other way (not illegal at all I assure you, or something like that). Hopefully I won’t have to do this again for a while, as it stands I’ve been doing this every two and a half years or so. Last time it was AAC, the time before was mp3 and the time before that was a lower quality mp3. Now it’ll be at a quality I can be happy with playing through almost any system.
10 CDs down, over 300 to go.
Posted on 2006-01-26
“oh the devil she must be a dentist, with deep jaw breaker eyes.
Red rope hair, grumdrop eyes and cotton candy thighs”
-The Presidents of the USA
I don’t like the dentist. I’m not without my reasons.
I managed to acquire enough cavities in two of my teeth to require a cap, both of my front two teeth were bonded when I was pretty young. At 16 I had 4 teeth extracted at once. Except the last fact there my mother always told me it was a defect in my teeth because of how many ear infections I had as a child. And then the coupe de grace, while I was having my wisdom teeth out, I had a negative reaction to the sedative they were using on me and I woke up convulsing strapped to the table with my mother in the room freaking out (they told I needed her but didn’t say why so she had no time to prepare herself to see that). They only removed two of the four teeth they were going to.
So if it sounds like I spent a fair amount of my childhood on the dentists chair, it’s because I did.
So when Amber convinced me to go for a tooth cleaning to say I was nervous was an understatement. I wasn’t looking forward to it for the month I had it scheduled. I wanted that appointment to die. I was convinced the appointment wanted me to die. It sat on my online calendar and real calendar like a beacon of death. January 21st is my Ides of March. “BEWARE THE 21ST OF JANUARY” is what a soothsayer would have told me if I ever employed one.
I survived. Barely. Now my teeth are clean and I’m working my way to getting that dental work done that I needed to six years ago when this whole wisdom tooth thing happened in the first place. Then perhaps I can get my retainer out once and for all.
Posted on 2006-01-22
I think that’s the first time I called anything fascist. It felt kinda good. Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!
Dare I say it, this is bullshit!
So at work, they used to have multiple varieties of coffee, tea and hot cocoa. I’d estimate approximately 6 types of coffee, 5 kinds of tea and my favorite, hot chocolate. I think it was a contract with Green Mountain Coffee. Obvoiusly this choice was too much for us workers.
With the new year, we got a new coffee setup. STARBUCKS. with a whopping TWO options. You get regular or decaf. And this is starbucks, the coffee company that’s known for a customer being nearly completly unable to order “a coffee”. It’s always somehting fancy, or the beans were grown by Guatemalan virgins who only wore clothing made by hand in the market with cometpley fair conditions and great pay or crap liekt hat. The different types of tea have turned into Lipton’s tea bags, and the hot chocolate… oh the hot chocolate. It’s GONE. there’s a hot water spigot if I bring in my own, but no more hot chocolate for the non-coffee drinker.
It’s frustrating from my point of view because I’m no fan of coffee or tea. I think just to taunt me too, the company unplugged the soda machines, slapped an “out of order paper on it” and covered the hallway in yellow “CAUTION DO NOT CROSS” tape. ….bastards.
Posted on 2006-01-22
