quasisocial

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Man, what a beautiful day here in the midwest; tree-shaded deck, music, beers and the sounds of lassitude all around. The ‘burbs get a bad rap.

I wish. I’m somewhat jealous of my friends at the show.

As our relationship matures and deepens, I find times where we need to renegotiate terms. The other day I gave 3 demands:

1) We have to flush the toilet every time it’s used – no yellow/mellow brown/down rule
2) I need Saturdays to work in the shop
3) To not use the letter “e” when we talk

See, you have to make one crazy demand, that way you can pass the whole thing off as a joke if there’s too much pushback. Hehe.

“Saturdays off”. Hehe.

I’ve been fighting a back pain issue for a few years now. Once my right leg went numb and I started limping I figured it was time to ratchet the care up a notch. So on Thursday I had microsurgical discectomy of my L5/S1 disc. On the whole, things went well. The surgeon described the herniation as “huge” but they got me squared away . I still have a lot of numbness (crushed nerves take a while to bounce back) and post-surgical pain (chewing up a percocet every hour or so, wOOt!) but I think it’s gonna get better eventually.

Major issue though: Impaired mobility/inability to bend and lift the toilet seat, coupled with an aversion to turning on the W.C.’s super bright light in the wee hours found me peeing into my sink about 2:30 this morning. Crikey, I hope my aim was true.

I don’t think there’s anything else to say but I have to ask, have my methods become unsound? Has a line been crossed? Will I ever be able to brush again?

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
  – Hunter S. Thompson

Try This:

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Just a reminder: No matter how good the recommendation algorithm, on it’s best day it can’t match the serendipitous awesomeness of the good random set from my collection. Unexpected juxtapositions come and go and you get to enjoy the zero-effort playlist. Sometimes a genre hits the ear just right and the Song Oracle delivers back-to-back goodness. There’s no effort to craft, earning the triple-song score. Because it all comes from my songs, it’s prescreened for righteousness (at least for me). There’s a place for lots of new tunes but there’s also a place for a healthy dose of favorites.

Tonight I’ve heard some great jump blues,  dub, indie, chillout, and rock: Big Joe Turner, Dub Syndicate, !!!, Nightmares on Wax and Monster Magnet and dozens of other great tracks. And it just keeps coming, even now as I type, Z-Rock Hawaii wants to have a word with me.

Make sure that eventually you get a button installed at the top that reads “Shuffle Play All” with no repeats before they’re all done. Matt: Think we can get this on the backlog for the next release?

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Andre Malraux

There’s a new RC for one of the programs mentioned below that makes the other program irrelevant. Go download Tag & Rename 3.2 RC 2 and get busy.

This is not a terribly easy to understand product but it is all powerful and it has special support for Media Center built in. If you’ve got a library project to undertake, start here. You’ll get 30 days free and it’s $30 bucks for the full version.

Go to www.softpointer.com

Another update: If you’re a Media Center user you’ve probably wanted to convert dvr-ms files into a smaller format. There was a freeware app that supposedly did this but it was pretty limited and always seemed to crash during batch jobs. Enter Digital Media Converter. It has a nice set of controls and will work with any codecs you have (I prefer DivX). It also seems to be pretty fast, transcoding at .9x – 1x. Free trial that drops a watermark can be found here:

http://www.deskshare.com/dmc.aspx

Enjoy – hit me with any questions you may have.