I just spent 3+ hours reorganizing my MP3 collection; it’s one of those things I like to do every few months to keep everything in order, and I think I’m already pretty anal with the metainfo tagging and filenames (I basically go through and tag all my files in a temporary folder before I officially add them to “the collection). I’d like to think Apple’s announcement of their iPhone prompted me to relook at my music, but admittedly it’s the looming Econ. paper that’s making me do stuff I wanted to get done…three months ago.
Incidentally, I’ve discovered that the MP3 player QCD (), now defunct and no longer in development, is a nice tool for retagging MP3′s and setting rules for filename formats (mine is simply [artist] – [title].mp3). Nothing irks me more than some funky Bach ~ (Allegro in g MINOR) ~ BWV1053 ~ [ripped by CDRipper] metainfo tagging mess.
Black Friday passed by last week, for me without much fanfare as I watched people climb over each other for PS3′s, Wii’s, and $400 laptops. Of less fame is the Monday following, dubbed “Cyber Monday”, when online retailers take moderate discounts to existing inventory that didn’t quite clear Black Friday and makes it slightly easier to obtain goods without crowds or overloaded servers.
I took this opportunity to buy one of the things missing from my current home theater setup: an actual sound system not consisting solely of my television set’s speakers. I had been reluctant to get one because of the sheer trouble of wiring speakers, especially in a rented apartment, and because I wouldn’t be doing my neighbors any favors. Living here for over 2 years has shown me that, well, either my neighbors don’t care or they can’t hear anything, and hell, if I can fit a 140 lbs. TV in here I might as well match the visual treat with an audio cornucopic experience.
I usually don’t post simple links in my journal entries, but I’m making one exception for something that I found uniquely funny. Dubbed nerdcore, it’s rapping about subjects of interest to geeks and dorks, which is an interesting – to use a mild term – juxtaposition of two very different things.For a sample of what such rap may sound like: one such artist, MC Plus+ (+0x0A point for the nerds who get the reference), has made his art free and downloadable online. The lyrics are along the lines of:
I’m encrypting shit like every single day;
sending it across a network in a safe way;
protecting messages to make my pay;
if you hack me you’re guilty under DMCA.
+20 points if you’re groaning along with the rest of his listeners, +062ul if you get the references.
Upgrading a computer is like watching a prime time sitcom – you start of innocent enough, watch a few episodes, then a few more, until you’re downing entire seasons’ worth of content and holding week-long couch marathons. Then comes the period where you form a cone of quotes from the show and annoy everybody around you, hence prompting you to drop the obsession and pick up something else less addictive, like a…crime drama, say. Rinse and repeat.
Recently, price drops in computing parts of goodness have prompted me to look at means to turbocharge my machine and give it a swift, speedy kick in its metaphorical pants. As I said, chasing performance in personal computing can be an expensive, time-consuming, and if nothing else futile effort, but it’s damned fun while you’re doing deed.
I’d like to say that my room is organized, neat even. I’ve spent a good chunk of change getting various pieces of furniture and equipment to refacilitate this supposed cleanliness: shelves, CD racks, drawer organizers, velcro strips for cables, etc. A few of these things work, but most fail due to the simple fact that people have a lot more stuff than it is depicted in those ads selling these items. When bookshelves are designed to look good half empty, trying to stuff a shelf full of heavy tomes of knowledge tend to result in an unnatural sag that can be corrected by having the books in the shelf below prop up the droopy middle.
But I hate dusting and vacuuming. The areas of the house that I frequent are free of dust; it’s the places that I don’t go which gather motes, and are often the subject of reprimands by girlfriend and parents alike. So instead of cleaning the place myself, I did the next next next next best thing to hiring a maid, which is buying one of those iRobot Roomba vacuums.
(For those who aren’t familiar w/ the little red machine, it’s a squat little robot that runs around the house vacuuming floors, automatically detecting walls and obstacles as well as avoiding falling off high places)
I recently tried updating my computer’s hardware (the keyword being “tried”) by replacing the graphics card – the part that affects game and graphics performance the most on modern systems and will make running Windows Vista bearable. With the amount of games I play, I figured this was a good visual investment (although it’s a terrible monetary one, graphics cards depreciate even faster than other computer parts).
As it turned out, the card I picked (the nVidia 7900GT) was a dud; people have been complaining about failures for a few weeks now, and chalk it up to my lack of extensive research that I went ahead and bought a card known to have issues anyway. I will say that it looked real nice for the week I had it.
But what I wanted to jot down wasn’t how nVidia won’t admit to problems with their cards, it’s how good some company’s customer service can be. I had made the purchase from Newegg (I had never had to return something from them before), and from my previous experience with the online retailer buy.com, I was expecting some hard work and argumentation on my part to get an acceptable return.
