Today, we got the earliest snowfall I’ve ever seen that was more than a few flakes. We got three inches, and Ouray got eight. Took out trees, which took out power for a good number of hours. It’s been loads of fun. Pretty, though!
Breakup
“I think I need to go.”
“I know.”
“I’m … I’m going to miss you.”
“I know. I am too.”
“I feel like I’m going to be missing you forever.”
“I know. Me too. I think in some ways, I always will.”
“Yeah.”
“So when are you leaving?”
“Right about now.”
I’m alone right now.
And it’s the right place to be.
926
Home suddenly feels at once like home again and totally foreign. Strange.
'related' links done wrong
I think there should be a simple rule for “related” links: make them actually link to related things. I just looked up some lyrics on a site, and this is what it said at the bottom:
Visitors interested in The Dresden Dolls Lyrics may also interested in:
- Green Day Lyrics
- My Chemical Romance Lyrics
- Good Charlotte Lyrics
- Eminem Lyrics
- Avril Lavigne Lyrics
- Mariah Carey Lyrics
- …
Now, if it’s automated, I can understand getting a few wrong, but there’s something really wrong about suggesting a bunch of pop divas known for hollow lyrics, a rap star, and an altrock band, when the source page is lyrics for an obscure, angry, instrument-and-voice duo who’ve opened for bands such as NiN.
Let’s see, folks, “popular on this site” is not the same as “related to this page”. It baffles me that people can be that dense when designing a site.
924
I figured out why that story I was writing was going nowhere. I wasn’t writing transformations, I was writing descriptions. Silly me.
923
Good things about today:
- Working 24 billable hours in the last 36.
- Drinking beer and hanging out with friends
- Discovering that you can get half an order of nachos at your new favorite restaurant
- Watching Buffy with your sister.
- Being happytired and sleeping really well.
It goes to 11
Ever feel like your life needs one of these?
Damn good evening
I just got to hang out with two really awesome women. I ran into Joyce and Sarah in the coffeeshop this morning, and it turned into me inviting them for pizza tonight. They brought beer, I made pizza, we hung around and talked music, then went back to their place and hung out for a while. I’ve really missed being in queer women’s spaces.
Sarah reminds me of anandabrat. Tie-dye, musical tastes, all sorts of things. Hanging out felt like home. I’m happy, happy, happy.
Ringtones on the T509
Samsung and T-Mobile decided to lock ringtones with some crappy DRM, so you have to buy their ringtones, and not just use some random clip of a song you like. Good luck if you don’t like prime time TV clips and Top-40 music.
They missed something. They let you use .3gp files as ringtones, which as guides on the web would have you believe, are 8-bit, 8000Hz and abysmal quality.
I discovered however that the 3gp file format supports the AAC codec, so you can make a decent quality tone with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i infile.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 36 -acodec aac outfile.3gp
Take that, silly carrier.
919
I think that Imaginary Girl is a frightfully good idea.
Objective C 2.0
The new features coming in Objective C 2.0 are making me pretty happy for it as a language. I need to find time to keep using it, and not do all my coding in Ruby.
Playing with JACK
I’ve been playing with JACK again, this time having success, thanks to ALSA‘s support for it with its jack plugin.
It should be possible to package an asoundrc and init script and have an RPM that makes JACK the default output. Sample rate conversion might be a bitch though, especially choosing between 44100Hz and 48000Hz.
916
After Sunday’s concert by Sweet Sunny South in a gorgeous setting in perfect weather, I’m back on an old-time music kick. So today I find Hober Thinking Radio, which turns out to have a lot of the aesthetic I was after in office music. Life is good.
915
I found my desk!
914
Dear Political Activist Groups,
Please send me emails that are in a format other than the following:
Subject: Something including the words “Victory” “success” or “win”
Dear ______,
Last (period of time) we (some small political event, phrased to seem like a partisan victory).
But, we need your money.
14 paragraphs about how you can help. All of which are giving money.
Really. I’ve had enough. It was clever when MoveOn was beating the GOP with political judo, pulling in this “internet” thing and making it dance and sing, airing ads and making people wonder how the fuck they did that.
That was more than half a decade ago, folks. We’re used to it now. It’s not new. Even the most technophobic corners of the political campaigning world know how to write those emails. From now on, I’ll be filing your requests for money in this bland, uninteresting, and, frankly, disengaging form directly in /dev/null.
Sincerely,
Aria.
P.S. You suck.