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01:21 0601.27
You can call me Aaron Burr ... ...from the way I'm dropping Hamiltons. Because you know, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is up to its old antics. THIS SPRING.I personally think it's awesome that BEP is actually offering relatively high resolution JPEGS of the new 10s. I mean, they're just that awesome. Oh, also, this is by far my favorite of the 2nd-edition New Money. But, regardless, uh, it's still All About the Benjamins. Look for it the new 10 this March, I guess. Individual Post | Comments (3) 01:37 0601.25 This title is witty when you're not looking Yeah, so I'm about to go to Spanish on Monday, and am printing out what's due for that day. The printer freaks out and eats a couple sheets of paper. Now, normally I'd just staright away email the work to Mrs Conley and go to class none the worse. But, you know, I just bought this freaking printer and oh now the paper tray isn't even reseating itself! I was incensed. But, somehow, I think this focused my consumer electronic diagnostic prowess, and I was able to repair the printer, remove all the jammed paper (not easy in these new inkjets -- they don't have a service hatch on the back, so there's areas that you basically need hemostats to remove paper, but I'm elite), reseat the paper tray and gain an appreciation of the operational mechanics of my newest major purchase. Of course, this tripartite victory came twenty minutes into class, so, yeah, I had to skip. Still got all my work turned in fine, and I can miss roughly three hours of class with no penalty so, you know, whatever. Especially in a course where most of the grade comes from out-of-class structured (thank goodness) groupwork. Had two different Polisci tests today, and both of them were rather easy. French class went pretty well eventhough I didn't comprehend the reading. My English language copy of Madame Bovary came in today, and so did the fabulous Cliff's Notes. The last time I used one of those road-sign-themed librettos was to get myself out of finishing freaking David Copperfield for Reading Counts -- no, it was still Accelerated Reader back then -- before the end of the first nine weeks. I got all 64 for points for that book, and didn't have to read another book on the list for the rest of the year. I've actually been in a rather good mood before I go to bed the past several nights, which is the reverse of the usual situation. I still need to freaking finish unpacking and clean up the mess I've made of this room, though. Thank goodness room czech wasn't this week. Oh, and whichever suitemate leaves his pots and pans in the kitchen sink to moulder -- well, he's going to find that they've been translated to the salla delle garbagio pretty soon here. Oh ho, wordplay with both the meanings of translate. I'm so clever I need to have my own late-night TV show. I'd settle for a jazz-rock band though, as long as it means copious amounts of Hammond B3s and, like, one of those hollow-bodied Gibsons -- the symmetrical ones like B.B. King has, not the Les Paul. INTERNETS, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK? Individual Post | Comments (1) 19:45 0601.21 iTunes So I've spent the last several hours re-ripping my CD collection. iTunes support for FLAC, my digital music format of choice, is nil, and the few Macintosh programs that support for the free lossless audio codec have iPod integration that is specious at best. Fortunately for myself, this newer lossy codec of apple's, AAC, doesn't sound as pathetic as the few old (late 90s) mp3s I still have laying around in various folders. Anyhow, aside from no FLAC support, iTunes also has some other areas where it leaves plenty to be desired. For some unknown reason Apple made the decision to have CD lookup done through Gracenote's CDDB, as opposed to the more compreshensive (and often more reliable) FreeDB. CDDB, in my mind, primarily conjures thoughts of wholly-differently formatted track information for the two CDs in the same box set. Here, five years after I last used a ripping program that interfaces with it, it does the same thing. Of course, it's often that neirther one of them are really correct. For example, For Outkast's most recent double-album "Speakerboxxx / The Love Below" tracks on the Speakerboxxx (Disc 1) have artist attributes set to "Big Boi" (one of the two rappers comprising Outkast) unless, say, an outside rapper is featured in a verse, and then the artist attribute is "Big Boi feat. whomever", in typical rap credit fashion. However, tracks where both Big Boi and Andre 3000 are clearly present on a track, the artist is merely listed as Big Boi. However, on The Love Below (Disc 2), The artist attribute is merely "Outkast" regarless of any collabration on the track. This means going through the CD liner notes and hand-editing all this metadata, which is basically the same thing one would have to do if they didn't have any access to a CD metadata DB. When I set the thing on shuffle after importing my first few CDs, I noticed iTunes doing something that brought me back to those heady days of Winamp 2.2 -- cross-fading the end of one song into the beginning of the other. Not only does this make for some hillarious (and sometimes rather fitting) segues that's to the fairly eclectic nature of my music collection, it ignores the fact that not all songs, you know, have a three-second outro for the radio station DJ to fade. This is an easily-disabled setting in the iTunes preferences, although it once again is another part of iTunes that, to me, smacks of the Napster era. What is kind of cool are these "smart playlists" that allow you to collate songs by their metadata. This is hobbled, of course, by the fact that the aforementioned Gracenote CDDB metadata sucks. Half of the music from 2002's Early Days & Latter Days: The Best of Led Zepplin Volumes 1 & 2 is listed with the date when the song was recorded (late '60s and early '70s), and the other half with a year metadatum of "2000." 2000! What the heck? Okay, admittedly, this album came out in 2000, but this CD edition is from 2002 -- but still, it might be the "Latter Days" of Led Zepplin, but it's not that late. Finally, eventhough iTunes and the iPod support album art, iTunes makes no effort to look up any art. Fortunately, Amazon has plenty where that's concerned, but this is just one more far-from-automated step in what would otherwise be considered a fairly idiot-friendly program. This software merits the rank: GOOD (+2)On the Lamb Metered Rating Scale (LMRS).On a side note, I noticed on one of the CDs a little blurb that finally explained the RIAA's position against filesharing in a manner that isn't totally bogus. Normally it's some sort of big FBI seal, you know, and whining about how they've made it a felony and blah blah. This one's actually sort of reasonable: This recording and artwork are protected by copyright law. Using Internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music -- especially the artist.The irony, however, is that this is printed in the jacket of a Rat Pack CD -- Sinatra, Sammy, and Dean Martin are all long dead. Individual Post | Comments (2) 10:57 0601.18 Easy Button So, like, I realize that my cantankerous Epson printer has just finished dying a horrible death about an hour before I have some mock-ups of letterhead due in Spanish. All my buddies with color printer were in class at the time, and the only school color printer I have access to is in the art building's mac lab, which had a class in it all the way until noon -- when the stuff was due. Of course, this left me but with one option, and I aquired the necessary financial backing to go purchase one from Staples. I nearly immediately found the kind of paper that I needed -- heavyweight matte stuff with high brightness numbers -- I think it was 100 or so. Finding a good quality inkjet printer was simple when I realized that they now make these inkjet printers specifically for printing photos, and that the regular inkjets are less expensive for the capabilities and were located further down the aisle. I got an HP Officejet Pro K550, because it featured the new type of HP ink that the nicer photojets had. Of course, I was rather confused why there were some HP ink cartirges hung throughout the printer aisle, but none of the type 88 required by mine. A clerk almost instantaneously noticed what my problem was and escorted my to another area (the actual ink section) and actually pulled all the cartriges I needed and put them in my cart, instead of just, like, pointing to them. I was so impressed with the ability for me to get all this stuff in the timeframe of about 10 minutes -- in Searcylandia, of all places -- that I even bought one of their little toy 'easy buttons', which replicate what you see in the commercials. Except, every time you press it, it says "That was easy!" Maybe it's a statement, and not an exclamation, but I'm going to treat it as the former, because, well, it sure was easy. Oh, so, also, I get this email on my Harding account from one of my friends from various foreign language classes talking about how she's the editorial editor for our campus newspaper and that she'd rather like to write a column for January 27th's Bison, and perhaps to do some more in the future. Since she (probably unwittingly) picked the number twenty-seven, I knew there was no way I could back out. Since, you know, 27 is only my most favorite number of all time. If you're on campus, expect to see the same junk as this -- where I sound like I know what I'm talking about -- being printed on dead trees and distrbuted for the very first time next week! I know you'll love every second of it. Except, not really. Yeah, anyhow, first week of school has been pretty good, classes shaping up to be decent. I've already told the kid next door several times to seriously not play loud music (and my definition of loud is that I can here it in my room) after midnight. In fact, this is a reasonable and more-than-generous request on my part, for here is the regulation on noise as quoted from "A Guide to Residence Hall Life: Harding University 2005-06": NOISE A primary right of students in residence halls is the right to study and sleep in one's room free from unreasonable interference. Thus, noise and other distractions that inhibit the exercise of this right are strictly prohibited.So, yeah, if it happens again I'm freaking telling the RA. Individual Post | Comments (3) 01:10 0601.12 CLASSES BEGIN Yeah, so, I'm down here in Searcylandia. I can't even bring myself to falsely preface that with a 'fabulous'. Oh well, whatever! XD Well, what is fabulous that rarely do I even get to tell a person that sees me and asks me how stuff was before someone else comes up and gets their greets on. This is most excellent, because it means I don't actually have to say the same stuff over and over, as I'm cut off before I can even say it. XD XD XD XD XD XD And, honestly, it's good to see all these people. But first, in the time-honored iaatb.net tradion, Here's my schedule (all times Central): 1130 T R POLS 435 GANB 125 JEWELL 1200 M W F SPAN 413 GANB 112 CONLEY 1300 M W F POLS 410 GANB 125 ELROD 1300 T R FR 271 GANB 111 LOVE 1400 M W F BNEW 317 MCIN 233 COCHRAN 1430 T R POLS 353 GANB 125 KLEINSome old profs and some new profs. All but one class in the Classes so far have been pretty fun. I'm only on five meals a week from the caf, so yeah, that should save some cash for everybody. Last year they forced me to have 14 meals per week because I was a sophomore by semesters, which was total malarky. I guess you could just call it an 'underclassman food tax', because that's what it is. Moving in has been less than stellar-- by the time I got back from my afternoon classes (did you see that? I have chapel at 0900 and then nothing until the noontime aw yeah) today I really wasn't in the mood to do much but bring in what I had remaining in my car, so the room is fairly disorganized, but I've got most of my stuff in here. No TV yet, though. Not like I really watch it, however. Also plus too! The school dropped their pepsi contract! COKE IS IT. Elrod expects us to write good comments to his blog for class effort. And not like extra credit, either. If and when I'm a professor, I'm totally doing that. Aw crap, it's midnight-thirty. well that's enough of this crap for tonight. Individual Post | Comments (3) |
