Flexistentialism Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Last night I went over to Billy’s and watched “The Two Towers” on his projector, which was quite nice. We wrestled with his home theater PC for a while, but eventually we traced the problem to driver issues. A quick update from the internet, and we were in business. The movie, being quite long, put Billy to sleep. Don’t blame the movie though. Billy’s usual bedtime is around 9pm, and our after midnight movie watching was quite a stretch for his usual schedule.

I fell asleep on his couch, woke up the next day, and ate pancakes that Karen made. We fiddled with some DVD authoring problems, and then decided to go to the zoo. It was cold and snowy, but that meant we had the zoo almost all to ourselves, which was nice. The monkeys were very active, since they had just been fed, and it was exciting to see them running around and eating. The birds too had been recently fed, meaning there was lots of activity. Billy learned to mimic the gentle whistling call of one of the birds, after which it would follow him back and forth in front of the cage whistling back. It was very neat.

I just had a job interview, and it went pretty well. The position is a bit of a stretch for my experience, but I think I gave a good interview, and I think I have a decent chance at the position. However, I imagine this is common, but I walked away from the interview thinking, “Geez, I should have talked more about this, or I should have brought up that, or whatever.” Oh well, what’s done is done, and I just have to wait a few days for a call back.

Today I got my haircut by a large woman with an even larger hairdo. She did an OK job, which is good, because I have a job interview tomorrow at a hi-fi audio store. Hopefully it goes well! I have some bad news to report as well, namely that I am an ass and didn’t realize it. I didn’t tip my hairdresser, because I didn’t know that it was customary to tip them. This stems from the fact that I’ve only had my hair cut by people who aren’t family members or friends a few times in my life. So to that mystery woman, sorry I didn’t tip you. You probably said dirty things about me to your coworkers after I left, and you were right to do so. I’ll tip next time, I promise. Thanks to Madalene for informing me of my faux pa.

As many of your probably read, NASA finally ended communication with the Pioneer 10 spacecraft today. The craft is now 12 Billion kilometers from Earth, well outside the solar system. They are still able to detect it’s carrier signal, but they are unable to lock on for telemetry. Additionally, Pioneer 10’s radioisotope power source is probably reaching the end of its lifetime as well. As Pioneer 10 falls silent, it will fly as a ghost ship, arriving at the great red star Aldebaran in about 2 million years.

The Pioneer series spacecraft were relatively simple, but were solidly built. Pioneer 10 completed its primary mission objectives, including flybys of Jupiter, in its first 21 months after its launch on March 3rd, 1972. It has been a great workhorse since then, and it has been said that NASA really got their money’s worth on that one.

In a time when troubles here on Earth are pressing, there is a tendency to take our interest off the skies. There is too much to worry about here, we feel, and we look away from space exploration, and look to war/social problems/economic issues, etc. I’d like to put forth an idea put in my head by the late great Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize winning physicist with unique and amazing views on science. He saw science not as something you do in a lab with grant money, but as something you do because you have a desire to learn. A desire to uncover the great mysteries of the universe. He never felt that he had to justify his research in terms of practical applications. While much of his work resulted in practical applications, and even nefarious applications, including the atomic bomb, he never tried to define his research on those terms. Practicality, he felt, was not part of science. Science is about recognizing that the universe is an amazing place, filled with beauty and wonder, and recognizing that we don’t know but a tiny fraction of all there is to know about it. Each bit we peel back, each time we learn a little more, we see something more wonderous than we had seen before. We learn that no matter how sure we are of something, that there could be a discovery just around the corner that could prove us all wrong. Doubt keeps us humble, and keeps us flexible. When we perform research that has no outright practical application, we aren’t wasting time, or wasting money. We are expanding our knowledge, and honing our ability to separate truth from fantasy. Richard was wary of anyone who claimed they had all the answers, in any subject, because he knew that no one has all the answers. By reminding ourselves through scientific discovery that answers come through careful examination and creative new ideas, we remind ourselves to be more humble in our lives, and to base our political, personal and moral decisions on the idea that learning comes through personal experience, and careful examination of evidence, rather than straight from a book, or from a leader’s mouth.

Richard didn’t realize it at the time, but his philosophies are very Buddhist in nature. Buddhism has no dogma, no absolutes. The Buddha himself continually reminded his followers that they shouldn’t take anything he said as the truth, unless they learned through experience and contemplation that it matched their views and understanding. When people ask the Dali Lama for advice, he gives suggestions, but only suggestions. He says, “This is what works for me, and I have seen it work for others. Try it if you like, but if it isn’t right for you, or you think it should be changed, please do so.”

I’m rambling, but the point I want to make is that space exploration isn’t useless. We might get practical benefits from it in the future, but the reason it is valuable isn’t because of the promise of riches, but because of the opening of the mind that occurs when we peel back more layers of this wondrous universe. Pioneer 10 was one of our first successful attempts to reach out into the sky. When I imagine what 12 billion kilometers looks like, and I imagine a piece of humanity hurtling into deep space, carrying a seed of knowledge and exploration, I’m filled with awe at the vastness of the universe, and I feel renewed in my desire to uncover even a fraction of its secrets. Its a reminder that we still know so little, a reminder to be humble when we think of political and religious leaders (and even some scientific leaders who have perhaps lost sight) who claim to have the solution to all the problems. A reminder that knowledge comes only when we leave ourselves open to doubt. When we feel like we know everything, we turn a blind eye to the truth.

iScrobbler has been released! Visit the project page for information and download links. Big thanks to the beta testers who helped me iron out some show-stopper bugs today, and for their input on features that are now in the works. I’m too tired to write much, but download and enjoy, people.

iScrobbler was released into the wild this evening to a group of beta testers. Assuming all goes well for them, it will become available to all in a few days. In the mean time if you have an inkling to check out the source code on anonymous CVS, you can do so at the iScrobbler SourceForge project page. Keep an eye open here and on the AudioScrobbler pages for news concerning the public release.

I’ve been up since 5am (don’t ask), so I’m going to go to bed. To all a pleasant evening, and an enjoyable Monday!

My father has a quality I’ve always admired, that being that he seems to know something about everything. He has an intelligent answer for nearly every question you might have for him, and knows how to work his resources to find any answer he doesn’t already have. One example of this is that he is an excellent short order cook. He had worked as one many many years ago, picked up some valuable skills, and never forgot them. He could have four pans going on the stove at once, eggs here, hash browns there, bacon, sausages, what-have-you. Each item requires its own special care, and has different temperatures, starting times and finishing times. Yet he could keep each one under control, and time them all to be ready at the exact same moment, so he could grab some of each, put them on a pre-warmed plate, and send them out to be consumed by his family.

Today I shall impart to you a lesson I learned from him concerning the cooking of eggs. When you are cooking eggs, perhaps an omelet or scrambled eggs, you are eventually going to find yourself in the position of needing to get some cheese to melt onto the cooked eggs. But, the eggs are cooking fast, and you don’t have time to let the cheese melt by itself, because the eggs would be burned by the time the cheese was done melting. A solution is to examine your stove. Nearly every stove burner tilts one direction or another, meaning there is a ‘high side’ of the pan, and a ‘low side’. Take a large lid, like the kind you’d put on a big huge pot, preferably about the size of your pan. Then move the eggs up to the high side, and place a small piece of ice on the low side. It will instantly start to melt and form hot steam. Put the lid over the pan, and wait a moment. The ice melting will release a steady stream of hot steam into the confined area, which will almost instantly melt your cheese. The ice doesn’t melt too fast, so you don’t get a bunch of water all over the bottom of the pan. If you managed to get the ice into the low side of the pan, you’ll have even less water to deal with. When you pull the lid off, be careful not to drip too much water onto the eggs, put the lid to the side, and pull out your perfectly done eggs, with cheese melted perfectly on top. People will admire your kung-fu.

Which leads me to a related topic… Frequently you hear of people describing non-martial arts activities as ‘kung-fu’. Hip-hop artists, chefs, etc. all being described as having kung-fu. At first it sounds like just a silly thing, people goofing around and comparing their activity to martial arts. But in fact, the literal translation of kung-fu is “Skill with effort” meaning any skill that has been learned with great effort can be accurately described as kung-fu. I recommend using that in your day to day speech. If someone criticizes you, pull out the real definition of kung-fu, and prove their criticism is without merit. They will admire your kung-fu.

Rest in peace, Johnny Paycheck.

I never much liked country music, but Johnny Paycheck, who brought us the hit that everyone knows, “Take This Job and Shove It”, along with over 70 albums worth of music over the 64 years of his life, was quite a musician. “Take This Job and Shove It” is officially my favorite Karaoke song ever, and, when it was released, actually inspired strikes, and even a movie of the same name.

Johnny died after a long battle with emphysema. Don’t smoke, kids.

A service everyone needs to check out is the new MusicBrainz. It is a service that identifies music, with a searchable database. In that respect it is very similar to services like FreeDB and Gracenote’s CDDB. However, a fundamental difference is that instead of just generating CD identification numbers, MusicBrainz analyzes the audio of the track and generates a TRM id. This ID number will be the same for a track on a CD, an mp3, an ogg file, a wav file, etc, because it is generated based on acoustic data, not just sector data from a CD track.

The organization is a non-profit, and all their software, server and client side, is GPL. Their entire database is free data as well. This helps alleviate concerns that they will turn evil, like CDDB did when it was acquired by Gracenote.

Currently, MusicBrainz software is rudimentary, but effective. It only exists for Windows at the moment, though the library that handles the actual generation of the TRM is available for unix, and development is in progress for other operating systems. I may attempt to port the library to OS X (I already tried compiling it, and it almost got there, so porting shouldn’t be too hard), and then write some software to go with it, but I’m afraid that I’m not a good enough programmer yet. We’ll see. However, even if I don’t do it, someone surely will. This service could revolutionize media identification, and they are even planning on expanding to video file identification, and more.

The software currently loads up a list of your MP3s, generates TRM ID’s for each song, and checks with the database to see if the song is already there. If so, then the tag information is downloaded, and your file is updated. If not, you are given a method to search the database for songs that have been inputted, but don’t have a TRM yet, and you can link them up. Finally, you can specify the artist, album and track name yourself, and MusicBrainz will create new artist and album entries in its database. You can also import albums from FreeDB. When you are done, you hit the submit button, and all the TRM ids you generated get sent to the server where they are added to the database to help other people identify their music. Then you hit the save button, and all your files get their ID3 tags updated, and optionally renamed.

Another benefit MusicBrainz has over other services of its type, is that the content is user-moderated. Say I go in and find that the track Lunar Cycle by Man With No Name is in the database, but some jerkoff couldn’t spell, and put it in as Luner Cicle. With other services, I just have to live with what it finds, but here, I can submit a change. The change gets added to a list of changes that people vote on. If my change is voted in, the title gets updated. Every user can make moderations, and vote on other moderations. There is a rudimentary karma system in place that rewards people who fix a lot of mistakes.

If you create new albums and songs in the database, they urge you to pay attention to the style rules, which include information on how to capitalize names, how to indicate multiple disc sets, how to indicate collaboration songs, etc. This is to keep the database searchable and consistent.

Right now I’m going through my files, which is quite a mighty undertaking, and updating tags and generating TRM IDs. My taste in music is quite eclectic, so I’ve already had to create about 15 different albums and artists on the database. I’ve taken the time to make sure all the data is accurate and that my entries follow the style rules. Its that kind of quality participation that will help the database for everyone.

Oh, and just so you know, AudioScrobbler and iScrobbler support for TRM IDs and the MusicBrainz server are planned for the future!

Here are just a few random status updates..

iScrobbler development is coming along very nicely, and things are basically ready for release. As anyone interested in the project knows, RJ is in the process of moving AudioScrobbler.com to the new servers, which has occupied quite a bit of his time recently. The new servers are being very kindly provided by Jahingo.com, and should help matters greatly. Once RJ has taken care of that, the receiving end of iScrobbler will be put in place, and I’ll send out betas to people who were interested. Some new iScrobbler features include automatic version checking, and detailed error reporting to aid in bug submission.

Josh at SpeckledPaint.org has agreed to design a schnazzy icon for iScrobbler! We’ll see what he comes up with, I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll be good.

This site was mentioned on Neural.it, an Italian technology website. Here is a direct link to the article that mentions the iScrobbler. The site looks quite interesting, though saddly I can’t read any of it! They do have a small english version however that you can check out.

This brings up an interesting possibility, which is that iScrobbler will be very easy to make multilingual. Unfortunately, you know what they say, “If you know three languages, you are trilingual, if you know two languages, you are bilingual, and if you only know one language, you are an American” and uh, I’m an American. However, if anyone is interested in translating iScrobbler, the process is pretty easy, and can be done by a non-programmer. All that is required is basic familiarity with the Terminal, basic familiarity with Interface Builder (which isn’t hard to learn at all, especially for a rather simple program like iScrobbler), and a good understanding of English and the target language, including knowledge of basic technical terms in both languages. Just email me if you are interested.

In other news, Moveable Type 2.62 was just release, which fixes an annoying text plugin bug, and some other little quirks. Its advised that anyone who previously upgraded to 2.6 or 2.61 upgrade to 2.62 in order to take advantage of the fixes. Along with the update comes a Kung Log update to match. Very handy.

On a personal note, I’ve been feeling very erratic recently with regards to my sleeping schedule. I seem to just wake up and fall asleep at totally random times of the day and night, and my circadian rhythm is all but shot. It seems to be a combination of narcolepsy and insomnia that causes me to have this erratic schedule. Hopefully I’ll sync back up to the rest of the world soon.

Last night Madalene and I enjoyed a fine meal at the Thai Cafe near our house. Its just a short walk away, and the food is quite excellent. The restaurant had become so popular several years ago that they opened a sister store down the street, about a block away. Then they were both super popular, and they opened another one, and then a fourth. They are all within a two block stretch, with the two closest ones almost next door. Each one has a slightly different menu and decor. Our favorite is the Thai Country Cafe, which serves more ‘home-style’ thai foods, and some vietnamese selections. Another specializes in seafood, and another specializes in Thai delicacies and ‘fancier’ Thai food. The original restaurant has a good mix of all types. The prices are very reasonable too, which is appreciated. Not cheap, persay, but mostly $6-$8 dollar entrees, which are very large and delicious.

Then we went to see Adaptation, the newest film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. Thats the same duo of Being John Malcovich fame, and Charlie Kaufman wrote Human Nature as well. The movie was excellent. It is a movie about Charlie himself and his brother Donald (who doesn’t actually exist). Charlie is trying to write a movie version of a book called The Orchid Thief, which is an actual story of a wild and crazy man who loved flowers more than anything else in the world, and was accused of poaching orchids from Florida State Parks. Charlie wants the movie to be pure, he doesn’t want to make it into a crappy hollywood movie. He wants it to be a movie about flowers. Wonderful flowers. But he can’t do it. His agent’s are breathing down his neck, his brother is an insensitive goof-off, everyone is against him, and fat stupid ugly Kaufman can’t think of a single way for the story to begin. So he goes off the deep end, and writes himself into the story. The movie Adaptation is the movie he writes in the movie Adaptation.

Frankly, anyone who has ever aspired to be an artist and felt like they couldn’t do it, needs to see this movie. Its about disappointment, its about passion, its about the passion for passion. The desire to find something, anything, that fills you with vitality and life. Nicolas Cage plays both Charlie and Donald, Meryl Streep plays the author of The Orchid Thief, and Chris Cooper plays the amazing, filthy, lurid orchid thief, with a strange and beautiful streak of lucidity. He’s been nominated for an Oscar for the role, and I think he would deserve it for his performance. And as always, Spike Jonze’s unique and penetrating directing combined with Kaufman’s complex, rich, freakishly imaginative stories makes for a really sweet film.

Today we took that massage class, and it was very nice. Basically I spent the first several hours being practiced on, which was quite relaxing, and then I ate lunch, and got to practice on Madalene. Not a bad way to spend the day at all! The teacher was a very nice lady, and there were only a few other people in the class, so we got a lot of personal instruction and help.

Is available at your local community college. Today Madalene and I are taking a class on therapeutic massage. Its an all day class, which is a bit intimidating, but it looks interesting. I made sack lunches, which is guaranteed to make anything better. I spank up a pretty good avocado sandwich, if I do say so myself.

iScrobbler beta’s this weekend (once RJ at AudioScrobbler.com gets back to me letting me know he’s ready). Also, I’ll write later about the movie Adaptation, which I think was positively great.

Moveable Type 2.6 is installed, after a short issue stemming from my flagrant misuse of the -fr switches for rm. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, well… I just hope you don’t have to. Let me just say that backups are cool.

Also, Textile Formatting has been implemented by your friend and mine, Brad Choate. Textile formatting is a syntax for formatting web text ‘on the fly’ that was developed by Dean Allen at Textism that allows for semantically valid markup that is easy to type, and unobtrusive to use. Instead of having to write out whole link tags, I just use a simple markup, and it fills in the details. It escapes HTML entities, supports the acronym and cite tags, linking, paragraphs, block quotes, emphasis tags, wiki tables, lists, and knows how to deal with the pre tag and tags I input myself and more. In short, if you write a weblog, and want to produce cleaner, more effective markup without being annoyed with tons of taggery in your text, then this is the plugin for you. If you want to try it out in its original form, check out the original Textile page and give it a whirl. The syntax is the same as the adapted version for Moveable Type.

Also, the wonderful new release of Kung-Log fully supports the pluggable text formatters, with a handy-dandy drop down menu to select the formatter of your choice. It also supports pinging URLs, which is a feature I was hungering for. Boy, its a good day for the software world, at least in the little weblog corner of the software world. Expect to see lots of interesting new plugins coming out soon.

Here are a few of MT2.6’s features that got me excited..

• Pluggable text formatting.
• The ability to close comments. You can end the discussion if you want, yet keep the existing comments available for reading.
• Built-In support for Brad Choate’s Sanitize plugin.

• Trackback autodiscovery.

  Lots of goodness. Anyway, since things are fluxing a bit here, let me know if anything is tweaked to heck and broken or something.

Its X.2.4 time, peeps. Get on that software update, and lets pound the Apple servers silly!

Also, in a nice little flurry, we have Moveable Type 2.6 released, and Kung Log 1.3 released. So much great software out there, its both exciting and intimidating for a newbie developer like myself.

Damn, I just got boingboinged! I’d say it was the happiest day of my life, but you’d think I was ridiculous (hint: I’m ridiculous).

I suppose that obligates me to make an update on the progress… Its totally functional at the moment, its just got a few main problems:

The password is stored locally in plaintext. Thats not good. If anyone can point me to a good tutorial on storing passwords in the keychain, or in the very least, storing them in the preferences as an encrypted hash or something, I would be very appreciative.

The algorithm for querying iTunes isn’t very efficient. It basically uses a timer to periodically check iTunes to see what its up to. If the song playing is different from the last time the timer saw an update, it prepares and fires off a submission. I’ve got some plans on how to make this more ‘intelligent’. The current plan works, but isn’t as well behaved as it should be.

Some features from the Winamp plugin are missing. Namely the ability to wait a period of time before firing off a submission to verify that you are actually listening to the song, and not just scrolling through songs. Also, the ability to store submissions for sending later if a connection can’t be established is missing.

BUT there is good news! Support for Audion (in addition to iTunes) is in the works already. Applescript is super. If anyone knows of another mp3 player for OS X that is scriptable, let me know, and I’ll probably be able to work it in.

I’ve gotten a few emails from people wanting to beta test. If I don’t respond right away, don’t worry. Unless I get a bazillion requests, everyone who mails me can be a beta tester. Qualifications at the moment would be that you are using iTunes (until Audion support is final), and have a persistent internet connection (since error handling for when a connection can’t be established hasn’t been worked out yet). As soon as I get the password issue worked out, I’ll send out some beta copies for testing, and then once I make sure there aren’t any fatal bugs, I’ll release a public beta.

Also, in case anyone has noticed, audioscrobbler.com is down as of this moment, because RJ is having some issues with his host. “Too much traffic” they call it. I call it a great start for a project. I watched it go from 200 members to close to 1000 in the span of a few days. Anyway, RJ has all his data, and the site will be back up in a day or so, once he works out the host issues.

News fucking flash! My dear friend Dustin’s house burned down the other day!! He is fine, though he has a bit of a tan. Dustin was put in the unpleasant situation of discovering that his house was on fire while he was upstairs working, and having to run around screaming making sure everyone was out of the house as it burned down. No one was hurt, everyone got out in time, but almost everything in the house of 30 people was lost. He didn’t have a whole lot of stuff, but what little he had, he lost most of. He lost his computer, most of his books, his titanium spork, and some precious mementos. Just a little dirty laundry, his backpack, and a few sooty bits from his room were saved. If anyone reading this knows Dustin and hasn’t heard about this, go ahead and
’);
while( data[idx]!=n ) {
document.write(’&#’(data[idx+]^n)+’;’);
}
idx++;
document.write(‘’);—>
.

By all accounts, it seems the fire was caused by faulty wiring in the building. Just a reminder to keep those buildings up to code, boys and girls. Also, remember to back up the stuff on your computer, and save the backups somewhere off site. He isn’t in need of much stuff right now, it seems. Santa Cruz is a good town and he has lots of friends there. I’m going to send him a package with a few books, an article or two of clothing he might appreciate, and some photos that he might like to have copies of.

He lost all of his phone numbers and addresses too, so if anyone out there hasn’t heard from him about this yet, its probably because he doesn’t have your contact info or anything, so send him an email with your details.