I want to believe there’s a special place in Hell for city planners who build light rail and bus systems that don’t include a way for people to get from downtown to the airport.
I envision a portal out of hell within sight of their punishments but separated by impassable obstacles. Various demons offer to take them there, always demanding more money than they have on hand.
These cities should serve as a crushing rebuke to people who don’t think that city governments are all that corrupt.
I realized today while pricing out potential replacements for my dying PC (and considering seriously limping along indefinitely) that while for years I’ve resisted buying a newer car because I hate how much money they lose in value, I realized that the PC parts I’m likely to replace have lost ~85% of their value since I built this thing. If I’d bought the car I was thinking about, I’d have retained 80% of its value.
No, really, I looked it up.
My PC, which has been acting pretty stable after a period of dying a lot, died today pretty thoroughly.
So while contemplating (again) whether I should go order a replacement Mac or PC, I hooked up my beloved MacBook Pro… dead. Dead as Dillinger. I’m writing this while researching reasons the MacBook might not start up on my wife’s laptop and I’m deathly afraid I’ll go 3-3 today.
Update: My laptop’s back up. I feel 90% less dread-filled now. That was a pretty horrible two hours though. The space key, oddly, doesn’t quite work right: the correspondence between press and result is not quite 100% which is making tough typing really annoying. But at least it boots, which is more than I can say for my other box.
I’ve been looking for a decent manager for my lossless CD rips for a while now. For all its faults, I like using apps like iTunes for listening to my music: between the playlists, easy searching, and all that good stuff, it got really hard to go back to manually managing folders and dealing with winamp (or whatever). What I wanted was iTunes for FLAC for XP.
Both provide the kind of slick, library-building interface you want out of your interface. I’ve been using Songbird a lot more (it’s the hipster default interface), and some of it’s taking some getting used to (like the tabs) but it’s really quite slick. And I haven’t figured out how to do some things (like delete files from within the app, or use the app to organize all the files for drop-and-forget ease).
But strictly speaking in terms of finding a decent proxy for iTunes functionality for my FLAC files, they’re doing great. I’ll try and update this when I’ve logged more time with them.
For now, hopefully the search cloud picks this up and it’s some help to future generations typing “itunes alternative flac xp” into Google (or whatever).
Ira Glass, on storytelling:
I watched this in stark terror the first time. This is me: post-Clarion, I am more than ever able to see and aspire to something and criticize myself for not being there. I write short stories and sit on them, I’ve been working on a book in semi-secret this year and only a couple people read the first chapter, after which I stopped sending pieces out. When I write something I really truly like, I have a weird impulse to stop immediately, put my hands up, say “that’s as good as it gets, I’m going to go learn acoustic guitar or something”.
So yeah. It’s weird, that interview’s been out for almost two years (which would have been a great time for me to see it) but watching it, I felt a lot like I did at Clarion, where if you’re very, very lucky like me, the lesson of the whole thing is the things you’re doing wrong are exactly what you’re most afraid you’ve been doing wrong, so now you have to fix them.
I want to go write.
There’s a weird Prius ad that keeps running on Craigslist, and it starts
2007 TOYOTA : PRIUS HYBRID 60 MPG US$ 5400
followed by a ridiculous description and then, in huge letters, the email address to contact the person, and a chunk of spam text.
So I searched on the email address — they’re in every Craigslist location. There’s 31 on that location alone, all in the last day.
There are more elaborate variants, with similar spam text at the bottom: you can search for “georgecallum878@gmail.com” too and see the same pattern.
Or chrisgrande898@gmail.com did a ton of them at the start of the month, offering almost exactly the same text as George Callum would a week later.
They’re flagged and removed almost immediately, but I don’t see what the angle is here, unless it’s just an attempt to get people’s addys. And the fact that it’s been run repeatedly makes me think they’ve got to be getting something out of it or they wouldn’t keep trying.
But the spam text is random, torn from Wikipedia I think, the kind of stuff used to get spam email past Bayesian filters:
another Red Sox pitcher hurl a no-hitter and the next Fenway Park no-hitter won’t come untilcoin It originally meant the side of a die with only one mark before it was a term for a playing card Since this was the lowest roll of the die it traditionally meant ‘bad luck’ inin 1977 to become Harris Queensway plc until the company was taken over in 1988 Lord Harris was also a non-executive director of(4 8 15 16 23 and 42) It is also the number of minutes within which these numbers must be entered into the computer and the button must be pushed
— it’s not as if people are searching for that stuff. Randomized post stuffing isn’t going to get a lot of people searching for those terms, seeing a Prius ad, and handing over their email addresses. You’d want to go for Allison Williams or one of those other weird keywords that delivers a bunch of strange traffic to your doorstep.
I don’t get it. Unless it’s all more or less automated so it doesn’t require any effort, it doesn’t seem like the return would be worth it.
Also, the people at Eastlake Auto Brokers post over and over about their cars and it’s really annoying.
Embassy couldn’t possibly allow Cartrivision to just be a general purpose record-and-playback system. They were just like today’s split-personality entertainment megacorps, who on the one hand want as many people as possible to pay to “enjoy” their “content”, but on the other hand would rather like it if any customer who even considered copying some of that content for a friend immediately burst into flames.
My computer is so toast. Got it running yesterday after a long while. Hooked the second monitor back up. Died. Would boot, then did a crazed dead screen display trying to load windows. Safe boot didn’t work. Single monitor, eventually got safe boot to work. Got everything running again… now I’m afraid to try again. At least one of these is semi-toast, in a troubleshooting sense beyond my capacity to understand:
– video card
– power supply
– OS
The rest of this week is going to be totally awesome, I can tell already.
I had a kind of heinous doctor’s appointment this afternoon (eliding details). After I got out, I was all knotted out with stress and whatever, but I realized I could check out the Cafe Vivace by REI on my way back… and now I’ve just finished a stunningly good latte, I’ve got work open via VPN, and I’m starting to chill out nicely.
Vivace rocks and the rest of my afternoon’s looking up.