It’s all about where you draw the line

So, you’re reading through some blogs, and you come across this:

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Today I missed my Japanese class again, since I have gotten a bad throat. I only went to the class once this week, so I am probably so far behind now. I will catch up in the summer tho so no worries hehe. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, oh yeah working on the jap report as we speak!

Nothing special — just some guy commenting on the boring little details of life. *Yawn*

Except…

He was found murdered later that day. Police believe he was killed soon after hitting the <Send> key on this post. As you might suspect, an arrest has been made.

Talk about a voice from the grave. Brrr….

(And from the really, really, incredibly dark humor department, cross that story with this and see what you come up with. Oh god now I have to go scrub my brain off.)

Via Steven Den Beste

Note: I posted this, reread it, then completely rewrote it and reposted it. So if your RSS program or whatever gave you a completely different bit of text from what you see here, now you know why.

Update: The victim’s fateful blog entry is here (with 2,878 comments!).

Cerberus is back. We missed him.

That is all. Go read.

Jeff reveals the secret behind “the most awe-inspiring stealth marketing move [he's] ever seen”. I think he may be on to something.

In the long run, (for reasons other than this one-off fringe benefit), I genuinely believe that the switch to Intel processors may be a good move for Apple. It’s a pity that IBM couldn’t advance the “G” chips fast enough, or make them cool enough for laptops; but these days Intel seems to be where the real chip innovation is found, and Apple has always been about real innovation over slavish conformity.

In the meantime, while everyone is so busy spouting gloom and doom over Apple’s future, I notice that Apple’s stock price has dropped a few dollars since the announcement. Stock speculators make of that what you will….

My only caveat regarding Macs down the road, is that with this move, Jobs has finally driven the final nail in the coffin of OS 9. It appears that there will be no “Classic” mode on an Intel-based Mac. (Then again, that will only last until some enterprising programmer creates an emulator.)

Interesting Times….

Update: Changed the title of the post. I’d accidentally left it on the default, which in this case was the name of Jeffs’s blog, to which I had linked.

Jeff over at The Shape of Days has smacked me with a blog meme. Actually he tossed it my way a couple weeks ago, and I answered it… but after writing my painstakingly crafted reply, my browser crashed and I lost everything I’d written.

<Insert “Jesus Saves” Joke Here.>

Long story short, I was too annoyed (and it was too late at night) for me to redo it all right away, and after that I kinda forgot. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder all this time, taunting me in silence. Sorry Jeff.

Anyway… here goes:

Total size of music files on my computer:

13,239,538,721 bytes (some of which is audiobooks and similar programs) (Update: For the techno- or metrics-impaired, that’s roughly 13 gigabytes, or 13,000 megabytes.)

The last CD I bought was:

Erin Bode: Don’t Take Your Time. Actually, I do still buy CDs if I want an entire album. I only use the iTunes store for single songs and such (and Audible.com for audiobooks).

Song playing right now in iTunes:

“Everything is Everything” by Phoenix. This was a “free song of the week” from iTunes. It’s a surprisingly good song for a gimme. Oops, the song just changed — now it’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” by Harry James and His Orchestra.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

• “Ask DNA” by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts — a cool little tune from the soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop. (I’ve got five soundtracks from this TV series and movie, and they’re all good.)
• “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen — one of the most eminently danceable tunes ever recorded. I can’t help but grin when this one comes on.
• “One For My Baby” by Frank Sinatra — I love songs that tell a story, and this one is told very, very well.
• “She Moved Thro the Fair” (trad. Irish) performed by Finbar Wright — if Edgar Allen Poe had written music, it would have sounded something like this. Brrrr… Creepy Goodness! (”I Am Stretched On Your Grave” performed by Kate Rusby comes in a close second in this category — Irish music is sprinkled with these macabre little gems if you look hard enough).
• “What a Wonderful World” — I didn’t fully appreciate this song until I started working for a band, and hearing (fellow singer) Willie performing it on a regular basis. What a great, great tune.
• “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel — I don’t listen to this one very often at all.

Yes, that was six. Waddaya gonna do about it?

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

• Erik, because he’s been blog-slacking even more than I have.
• Jeff, because recursive humor amuses me.
• Brian, because I absolutely know he uses iTunes. [Update: Brian's reply]
• Heather, who, if I recall correctly, has interesting musical tastes. As she doesn’t have a blog (to my knowledge), she will just have to post her response in my comments.
• Steven, because, hey, a man can hope….

But then again… isn’t everyone these days?

Hat Tip: Lileks

For about six months I’ve been the happy owner of a Roku Soundbridge, which is a neat gadget that lets you play music it pulls wirelessly off a computer. I run iTunes on my computer in the other room, and the Soundbridge’s wireless connection grabs the music files and plays them out to the stereo (to which it has a wired connection).

I also have a laptop. Often time I’m sitting on the couch in the living room working on the laptop, and listening to music. The Soundbridge also has an interesting feature in the form of a web-based control panel. I can open a browser and access a “web page” being served up by the Soundbridge which allows me to control the player. (It’s rudimentary control — I can play pause, skip, and so forth, but as yet there’s no support for pulling up song lists and the like via the web controls). Though neat, it can be a pain having to fumble with bringing the particular window to the front just to turn the volume down a bit — especially if I already have a bunch of windows open.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have an affection for the flexibility of Mac OS X “widgets”, which (for those not in the know) are little programs that you can instantly summon or dismiss no matter what other program you’re in at the time. Very handy for doing small momentary tasks such as checking a calendar or a stock price, using a calculator… or, say, pausing or playing music.

Thus, my latest project:

At this point, what you see doesn’t do anything but look unpretty. I knocked the interface together, and am in the process of trying to figure out how to get Javascript to interact with UPnP, a.k.a. “Universal Plug & Play”. I don’t know how long it will take me, but when I get a working prototype you’ll be the first to know.

I may, sooner than that, have an alpha version up that works on the virtually-guaranteed-to-break-on-a later-revision-of SoundBridge-software HTML interface, but in the meantime, if anybody out there knows of a good tutorial on getting Javascript to work with UPnP, or manipulating UPnP from within what is essentially a web browser, I would appreciate it. (Dashboard widgets in OS X are at their core little custom web pages being run directly by the OS).