my so-called blog (redux)

Stuff and/or things. I’ve been way too interested in not doing anything productive lately. I did manage to actually finish a book - on a whim, I got a copy of High Fidelity and Sideways - and am halfway through the other. High Fidelity was great, and now I need to read more of his stuff. Sideways is a good bit different than the movie in a good number of areas, but that’s the one I haven’t finished yet.

Apple released Boot Camp a few days ago. I think this with the Parallels beta that’s out give me enough ammunition to justify an Intel iMac for my work PC. I’m honestly way more interested in Parallels, because dual-booting is too klumsy. Plus, I tried Parallels out on my home PC (which is a piece of crap Athlon 2400+ with a $25 motherboard) and it’s actually a really good performer. It seems to work better than VMWare Server Beta on the same hardware. 20″ iMac plus Dell 2007FPW equals much goodness.

I would like it to be known that Chris sucks. Said “friend” introduced me to a song called Heartbeats done first by The Knife and then covered by Jose Gonzales. So yeah, that’s totally all I’ve been listening to. Over and over again.

Qcodo’s built-in Ajaxy stuff is rocking, though a bit slow. I have my tabs and an editable DataGrid element and It Works(tm). I just need to use iframes (blecch) to get everything to work properly where it needs to. Hooray automagic pagination and sorting.

So the tabbed view I wrote works. I’m gonna try to combine it with sliding doors to make it purty. Maybe I’ll even nice up the code and release it. It Fucking Works(tm) so if it’s on the Web maybe I won’t lose it.

As I said before, I’m trying to integrate more Ajaxy stuff into this project. I’m focusing on the admin console right now just because I need a good interface to edit stuff before I develop the client front-ends. It’s come to my attention that prototype.js ends up being Really Cool since I found some third-party docs for it, that authentication with this kinda stuff may not be quite as hard as I figure it might’ve been, and that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Right now I have some code that kinda works in Safari and doesn’t work at all in IE or FireFox. It’s weird, though, because it breaks in the same fashion in IE and FireFox. It’s actually kinda scaring me a bit.

I really want to write an iTunes library synchronizer tool. There’s already one - syncOtunes - but it relies on ID3 tags for matching. I’ve been kinda thinking up ways to do it by comparing the files themselves. The big problem with this is that you may have two songs that are the same song but, for example, encoded at different bitrates, or that are extended versions of the song. I had some ideas on how to chunk up and process the file to come up with a signature, and then compare them with a bit of uncertainty thrown in to make things interesting. Something to add to my list of things. Haven’t decided yet if it should be before or after learning Java/J2EE/JSF/etc.

Actually managed to wake up early this morning. Like, 7. I never wake up before 8 unless I *have* to and even then, 8 is usually a struggle. Ah well. Life sucks at the moment, work is scary, yadda yadda yadda. At least the team is doing well.

So it decided to be winter for a day. Proof here! Hopefully it’ll stay wintery and there’ll be snow tomorrow, so I can take more pictures and have some that actually turn out.

Getting more used to the Linux thing. I made some changes to my desktop arrangement and it’s a bit better. I still feel lost without Quicksilver and Gaim just doesn’t compare to Adium. But, I have two screens that look about the same now and more total desktop space. Can’t complain too loudly. Would like to have my music, though.

update: most of the snow melted overnight. boo.

due to the fact that I pretty much chewed through the cord on my old Sony headphones, I went through amazon and got a set of Sennheiser HD202 headphones (note: not an affiliate link). I’ve been listening to them with a variety of music - Counting Crows, Peter Gabriel, Björk, et. al. - and they’re bloody awesome for $20. Could stand to have a bit more midrange. I think though I’m gonna buy another pair for the house as they seriously seem to sound better than the Klipsch ProMedia GMX a-2.1s I have in my computer room. The ear elements didn’t seem like they’d fit my ears but they block out ambient noise really well. Looking forward to putting them to the test on Monday.

Hard to believe it’s almost the end of the year already. The whole lack of sunlight when leaving work is helping my sleep schedule, which is nice.

so I spent halloween this year napping and listening to new music. fwiw, these bands are particularily nice:

• Minus the Bear
• Sharks Keep Moving
• The Divine Comedy
• South

good stuff all around, though everything sounds pretty similar. I also went ahead and got Peter Gabriel’s Up album - it’s awesome. I’m kinda thinking of redesigning my website as well, to have more swoopy bits and whatnot..

It’s finally turning into winter kinda. Played baseball in mid-50s yesterday and existed in mid 40s today. Too bad it won’t last.

Been getting more into chill-outy kinda music lately - stuff kinda like the music of Mogwai, Boards of Canada (who have a new album out, btw), Engine7 and Mum. Unfortunately I don’t know too many more bands like them. Kinda intrigued at the moment by Hammockmusic though, who I found through CDBaby.

I finally also got the Airport card for my laptop in. I’m honestly enjoying the Titanium; for what I do most of the time, 1GHz is plenty fast. It’s actually replaced my Mac mini for the time being, and it’s a 1.42. That said, Apple did bump the Powerbook line last week.. the 17″ now has a screen that features the same resolution as the 20″ Cinema Display. Too bad the CPU speeds didn’t go up too. And, speaking of Cinema Displays, I’ve been kinda thinking of getting a Dell 2005 or 2405FPW when the prices get insanely cheap again. It would be nice to have some extra desktop space.

So I’m thinking of getting this. (This is after I buy an old powerbook and a new Mighty Mouse.) Looks neat. Need to get some new desk-type devices as well.

Now down south of Nashville for vacationing purposes. Few things: this PowerBook gets pretty stupidly hot when it’s on your lap, tickets from state troopers are expensive, and such.

In brush-up training for Windows Server 2003. Few key notes:

* Internet access through the cell phone is awesome, as this location doesn’t have Ethernet or wireless. Go T-mo!
* WS2003 has a neat shadow copy feature that provides some simple versioning support. Not horribly extensive but nice to have.