this girl drives a tank

A friend of mine wanted to order a Dell Dimension desktop, she was unsure what to say on the phone so I phoned Dell for her. The salesman immediately tried to sell me a more expensive model. I suppose that is fair enough, that's his job after all. He took a rather condescending tone from the get go though, and I can only assume that he assumed I wasn't too sure what I was buying. I am kind of used to it a little bit, it is the same treatment you get when going into Best Buy or a car dealership, the salesmen think you don't know anything.

I shrugged that off and went through the options with the salesman and was surprised when he told me that I am going to need speakers, and they must be Dell speakers, and if I were to add a printer, it also must be a Dell printer!

At this point I hung up. It did occur to me that they might indeed have made proprietary connectors for their sound-cards and printer ports but this would seem like an expensive move for Dell and might cause a consumer backlash. It would be much easier to just lie to your customers after ascertaining that they are stupid newbies who don't know any better.

---

I was delighted to learn about C-h S in emacs, it looks up the `symbol' under point and displays the corresponding entry in the GNU libc programming manual.

Another nifty nugget via the emacs mailing list: M-x highlight-changes-mode

I tend not do many 'meme's` but this one looked fun, your most common shell commands:

[orchid@morcheeba:~]%print -l -- ${(o)history%% *} | uniq -c \
| sort -nr | head -n 10
    260 cd
    225 ls
    210 rm
    200 search
    152 sudo
    148 less
    139 sinstall
    137 xine
    119 man
    119 ll

No surprises there I suppose, `search' is an alias for apt-cache search and `sinstall' an alias for sudo apt-get install I added another alias last week for scrolling (with color) a directory's contents. alias scroll='ls -lah --color=always | less -r' Just enter a directory and type `scroll'.

Romain Francoise, who already packages the wonderful emacs-snapshot has filed an ITP for bongo, a "buffer orientated media player for emacs"

For quite a while now I have used Emms whenever I needed to play music from within a text editor, and I must admit Emms does what it is supposed to do with minimal fuss. Bongo proved even easier to set up, I just loaded the library and it worked without having to specify any back-end music players to use. Bongo also seemed to load both my full mp3 collection faster, I doubt that the load time is actually faster but I think Emms might parse the tags to create a track name for the playlist buffer whereas bongo simply named the files the same as they exist on disc.

Both players now support last.fm but I have not put any time into figuring out how to send this info to my account. To be honest, I find the last.fm site too slow and a bit too busy for my liking, but it is a great way to discover new music, and for me that's enough encouragement to go out and buy new music, however, buying music is still a very discouraging process for me.

Most of what I like is not on the top 40 or billboard lists, and very rarely do I buy something from the cheaper 'just released' shelf. Most albums I want are in the $20-25 range. It's not like they're unpopular bands either, last week I bought Zero7's latest album and it cost me $25.99, in fact that day I bought 4 albums for $94!!. Admittedly I could have very easily found a better deal online, but I wasn't online, I was walking around a store and being impulsive, a much better (but not cheaper) way to shop.

You might have noticed my blog has a random lyrics thingy, I like lyrics sometimes as much as the music itself and started to keep a lyrics.txt file in fortune format. Most of them might not mean anything to you, but hey, this blog isn't about you :-)

My boss agrees with me, I should probably have a laptop. My IT guy doesn't think I need one, despite him not knowing anything about the actual job I do. We had a little meeting and somehow I managed to call him a halfwit. I don't usually do such things but I was feeling grumpy. Eventually I was signed out a crappy little Compaq Evo.

It had been locked down, I cannot install software on it, and all that is there are the apps I use for work. The first order of business was to dual boot it with Debian unstable. I intended to just take it home and reinstall windows XP after shrinking the single partition but knew that halfwit would refuse to reinstall the apps I needed and make noise about me messing with the computer.

Instead I took it home and downloaded gparted, the Gnome Partition Editor, it has a 25MB live CD ISO which I then booted, re-sized my NTFS partition , allowing 6GB's for Debian. Gparted was very easy to use and worked like a charm. The Debian install went smoothly except for some reason Grub wouldn't install so I had to use Lilo instead. Now I can boot into linux on my commutes to and from work.

My new favorite band is the Polyphonic Spree, you might recall they did the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of those wonderfully quirky movies that luckily Hollywood still have the sense to occasionally make.

Since about the middle of the summer I have been trying to use my car less for work and instead take the GO TRANSIT train. GO is a heavily subsidized train and bus system for the province of Ontario. The train ride is surprisingly soothing, I usually turn on my iPod and close my eyes and drift off to sleep. It takes about 40 minutes to reach my stop and my office is a 10 minute walk from there.

It was not high gas prices that convinced me to try the train, I had to use it one day after my car was stolen for a week by my Dad. I suddenly found out how much stress driving creates, and it amazed me how better my mornings went if I had arrived via the train. I have now become somewhat of a regular and have met some nice commuters who take the same train as me every day, so we have little gossipy chit chats while we wait for the train each morning.

About twice a week I go to the gym before work so I drive to work instead, but I intend to keep using the train for the time being, in the winter I am told, it is a whole different ball game, you get to freeze while you wait, and you wait longer as the trains break down or run late in the winter quite often.

My little server has now been running without a reboot for 199 days, this is quite amazing to me as I am usually pretty adept at crashing computers. Evidently, I am no match for Debian Sarge. Perhaps I will fare better with Etch. I need to add a hard drive however and I don't see a way to do this without shutting it off.

This makes me nervous as I wonder now if it will boot back up. I don't care about the up-time, I must admit I would get a small measure of satisfaction if I were able to keep a computer running an entire year without rebooting, but most times people mention up-time on their computers it usually ends up in a silly sort of appendage measuring contest, that ends up with a story about a computer that got dry-walled in a closet and ran for seven years.

Anyhow, it will give me a chance to clean the dust bunnies out and basically check that its not falling apart. The drive by the way, I will actually buy myself, as I have already gotten too many freebies from my hardware friend this year. It is a 350GB Seagate for about $120 CDN, this seems reasonable to me.

One last thing about the GO train, the seats are arranged such that two people sit facing another two, so unless you have something to occupy your attention, (music, newspaper, laptop) you basically have to talk to your coach-mates or make the decision not to talk to them, and then try to avoid staring at them, something I am not very good at and very often get caught doing.

You also can tell when you have been caught singing along to you iPod because everyone is looking at you and smiling. This happened to me once, it is hugely embarrassing and I hope it never happens again.

A recent study on dolphins suggested that dolphins were in fact not as smart as we have been led to believe. I read about this by way of a CBC article but remained somewhat skeptical as dolphins have been known to do some pretty amazing things. The whole thing did remind me however of one of the funniest articles I have ever seen on the Onion entitled Study: Dolphins Not So Intelligent On Land.

"Dolphins have a popular reputation for being excellent communicators," Lindell said. "But our study group offered only three types of response to every question we posed: a nonsensical, labored wheezing, an earsplitting barrage of unintelligible high-pitched shrieks, and in extreme cases, a shrill, distressed scream." Even the dolphins' proven ability to navigate through a form of sonar called echolocation was ineffective on land. "The military has claimed great success in training these mammals, utilizing their echolocation skills to detect mines that have been placed underwater," said Lindell, who conducted a similar experiment in a concrete parking lot. "We were unable to replicate this finding ourselves." Lindell added: "In most cases, the dolphins succeeded in finding land mines only when we placed them directly on top of the mines."

he-he..

I noticed that the iPod software refused to copy any song that didn't have a valid ID3 tag. Unfortunately for me there is a lot of my music missing such tags. Back in the Napster days I downloaded tons of stuff that wasn't tagged and about 3 years ago, I ripped my CD collection but forgot to set the tags correctly. So, most likely I will re-rip my collection after I am done with my current ripping project and then find the remaining untagged files and fix them somehow.

I decided I needed a way to crawl my mp3 directory and find any files that are not tagged, saving the names of the untagged mp3's to a file. I wrote a little C program to do this and from this experience learnt a couple of things, firstly, C is really really fast, it took less than 2 minutes to scan 90GB's of music, opening each and every file, and checking for a string that might appear within the first three bytes of each file. The second thing I learnt was that I have lots and lots of untagged music, mostly, the stuff I got from Napster. I know of several programs that do batch tagging, easytag isn't too bad and Exfalso, part of the Quodlibet program. I guess I will have to sit down one evening and try to do some tag voodoo to make my collection iPod compliant but I do wish my iPod would STHU about tags and just play the song.

Corn season in Ontario is in full swing and although my family like to barbecue corn in the husk, my favorite is to simply boil it, I find it is more tender and far more juicy this way. One trick to getting extra Delicious corn on the cob is to not salt the water, but instead add a little sugar and some lemon juice. Try it!

I had quite a busy weekend and as a result have been laying low trying to recover. Last Friday was one of those office days from hell where everything went wrong. I then rushed home and ate, got changed and went to work downtown at my boyfriends bar. It was so busy, what we call "mobbed" and by the time we cleaned up, lingered for a quiet staff-only drink, then cashed out it was going on 4AM.

I got home and to bed around 5AM and then was awakened at 8AM by my phones ringing off the hook. I had a wedding to attend to that afternoon and had to go pick up my dress and do all sorts of rushing around. The service started at 1:30 in the afternoon and by the time the reception started that evening my head was spinning. I did however manage to get a second wind and actually had a good time at the reception but was quite relieved to finally get home and to sleep late that night.

Sunday morning I got up early to do some groceries and laundry and then headed down to the Virgin Music Festival and despite being a bit groggy and tad grumpy, had a great time, 3 of my favorite bands; Zero 7, The Strokes and Broken Social Scene, were on that days schedule so it was well worth going to see. That night I didn't get to bed until almost 2AM and then had to work Monday morning back at the office. Monday evening, I curled up in a ball on the couch and finally got a good nights sleep.

This week the weather has turned decidedly nasty, colder, drizzle and lots of wind. Add to that, looking up an seeing the Canada Geese fly off in their famous V-formation, heading to the sunny south for the winter. It seems like they laugh at me as they fly by... I know that it wont actually be winter until autumn has finished but I still get a bit down at this time of year.

Puretracks is a Canadian wannabe music download site. The only reason I found myself browsing the site was because someone at work handed me a coupon for a free song He had won in a bag of chips.

First of course you need to register an account, they don't ask for much information, name, email, age, gender, birth year and postal code. The latter being the one I object to the most, I just don't like giving my postal code out to websites for some reason, even though its probably totally harmless. In such cases I use M6K-3E3 which is the postal code of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, I also use the CRIA phone number and street address if a website requires them unnecessarily.

Anyway, back to puretracks, when I redeemed my coupon, I couldn't download the music because it required an Active X control. Then I noticed a link for alternative download methods, clicked that and firefox's save file dialog opened up asking me what I would like to do with "downloadmanager.exe", which of course I wanted nothing to do with. Finally a link was found to the file itself, and it turned out its in Windows Microsoft ASF format and mplayer wont even play it. So this is where I whine about the website being unfair because it only supports 90% of computer users.... Even though I suppose there is no incentive to support users on non windows platforms, it would be upsetting to me as a company CEO if anyone were to be turned away from my product because of browser/platform incompatibility.

One other thing I noticed, songs are $0.99 each, but if a song on an album is longer than 6 mins, they are $1.98 ! nice eh?

Overall not a very good first impression.

Jokosher is a multi track studio along the lines of ardour and muse which I found a little bit harder to set up. The latter two apps are quite mature and feature rich, but not exactly easy to use for non music studio types like yours truly.



I have a little midi keyboard, an maudio-keystation49, which has very good support under Debian. I needed to install first the Jack audio server and a nice little front end called qjackctl Once that is done I just plug the keyboard into a usb port and start qjackctl and it pops up as a midi device. Then I need something to act as voice for the keyboard, two software synth's that fit the bill are zynaddsubfx and amsynth. Then I need a wav editor, audacity is very popular but the one I really like most is sweep. Finally some drums would be nice, again plenty to choose from but I tend to like hydrogen.

This sounds like a lot to setup but really in Debian you just install it and it works. Using ardour or muse to control all of this is a bit tricky, and as I am decidedly amateur when it comes to this type of thing frustration and lost work would often be the end result. This is where I hoped jokosher would come to the rescue. It has only an Ubuntu package but on Debian sid if you first install python2.4-dbus gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs python-alsaaudio and gstreamer0.10-gnonlin you can then dpkg -i the Ubuntu .deb.

As soon as I loaded a wav file it crashed however, in fact it crashed quite easily and frequently. This is expected, I'm not even running Ubuntu and it is a first release after all. I should probably try to compile it from source instead.

The interface is excellent though, I could understand what was going on quite easily and it will be nice to see this app develop over time. The big drawback? It uses gstreamer instead of jack, so I can't even use the drum machine and synth's with this program :-( I should have clued in when I had to install all those gstreamer packages.......

The CD ripping project is plodding along, I am almost through box 1 of 4. I hope to be done tonight with that. Two new bands I really like in his collection are Audioweb and Sugar..more on that later.

If I were rich enough, and famous, and a Hollywood producer, or perhaps even a director (It's my dream, I can make it as big as I like) I would make a movie where John Turturro, Tim Roth and Edward Norton beat the living crap out of Ben Affleck, repeatedly, for the entire duration of the movie. I would have the actors do their own stunts too.

One of the problems I have with the GUI version of Emacs is the fonts, basically, they suck. Big Time. This has now changed of course as the Emacs cvs development version (Emacs22) has a branch known as emacs-unicode. On Debian this is now relatively easy to set up.

cd ~/src
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co
-d emacs-unicode -r emacs-unicode-2 -P emacs 
cd emacs-unicode
./configure --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype --with-gtk
(you might need to apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev)
make
make install

Then run with emacs-23.0.0 --enable-font-backend -fn "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10", emacs finally looks pretty, readable and much much better than previous GUI versions.


There is one small drawback however and that is I cannot seem to get W3m, EMMS or TODO mode working which is a bit of a drag as the reason I wanted these nice fonts is for reading manuals and web pages, I am hoping though that this branch will get merged with the emacs22 tree and everything will then work, as they say, out of the box!.

This week a friend of mine dropped of four boxes of CD's. Totalling roughly 1200 CD's in all. I am now undertaking the tedious task of ripping them to mp3's. It's taking some time but he assures me he is in no rush and all he wants in return is for me to provide him with a hardrive containing a copy of all his music. The cool thing is, he has a very thorough collection. Every Bowie album ever released for example, Every Who album ever released... Every Stones album...every Beatles album.....Every Oasis, Charlatans, Pixies,...you get the drift. He managed this by working in a record store.

So, I figure at 256kbits/sec, joint stereo, variable bit-rate (something I didn't know about until someone shamed me into reading up on it) it will consume quite a bit of disk space, 130GB roughly, add to this my already 90+-GB collection and yet another friend who has his collection on a Mac (120GB) and is also wanting to merge all three collections, it looks like I will need to find some serious hard drive space quite soon.

Nevertheless, its very exciting to look through all these boxes of music!