I Think This Is Getting Needlessly Messianic

Anyone who's seen my MP3 collection knows I have a lot of them.  Anyone who's seen the directory tree for my MP3 drive also knows that I'm picky about how I store them.  Albums go in 'Albums', individual songs in 'Singles', and anything that has been backed up to a CD goes in 'Archived'.  As of right now, the albums I have yet to archive to CD stands at close to five gigabytes.

It was looking at this, and realising that I had yet to listen to many of them in their entirety, that has led me to a new project: I am going to listen to every single MP3 I own.  Ah! But where's the challenge in that?  I am going to listen to every MP3 I own in chronological order based on album release date.

Actually, that's not quite true; I'm only listening to those MP3s I copied to my hard drive from their archived CDs, or that I have yet to burn.  Albums and songs that I'm embarrassed to admit I once listened to are still on their respective MP3 CDs, and are going to stay there.  Also, I am only listening to those songs I have had a chance to sort through and properly tag.  This means that the approximate 3 gigabytes sitting in the 'To Be Sorted' folder are currently excluded.

iTunes estimates that it would take me 11.3 days of straight listening to make it through this limited selection.  I better go make myself some coffee.

Title is worth 1 point.

Oh You Mean Xmas. You Must Be Using an Archaic Pronounciation.

Ax, v. t. & i. [OE. axien and asken. See Ask.] To ask; to inquire or inquire of.

This word is from Saxon, and is as old as the English language. Formerly it was in good use, but now is regarded as a vulgarism. It is still dialectic in England, and is sometimes heard among the uneducated in the United States. "And Pilate axide him, Art thou king of Jewis?" "Or if he axea fish." Wyclif. "The king axed after your Grace's welfare."  Pegge.

And now you know… Courtesy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition.

One point for the title.  Let's see if someone can beat Matt to it.

Just Under the Word "Emergency", Above the Word "System" and Beside the Sign Saying "Out of Order"

After finally getting the brick of a handheld working again, I decided to take a look as to what I could do with it while waiting to figure out what they go for on eBay.  The answer?  Not much without upgrading to WindowsCE 3 (aka PocketPC), which is what made the thing stop working in the first place.  There is, of course, always the ever trusty Inform interpreter.  But the thought of playing text adventures with a soft keyboard isn't my cup of tea, and the less said about CIC's Jot, the better.  However, I did notice that ActiveSync went and changed some of my files default handler to something called AvantGo.  So, I take a look and find it's a way to view webpages offline on a handheld device.  Good enough, install it, fiddle with it, install another version as it needs seperate ones for CE and Palm devices, curse, fiddle some more, and I've finally got it working on both the CE device and my Palm.

Now, that brings me to my problem: I decided to create an avantgo version of this site (no stylesheets, now left menu), but soon discovered that if I wanted to read the comments (via the archive pages), I'd end up back at the normal layout.  So I defined a new individual archive template for it.  However, I can't seem to find a way to get it to use both templates at the same time.  Anyone had any experience with this?

Today's title is worth 1 point.

Step Right Up! Step Right Up! Everyone's A Winner!

I've already sent these to some people, but I figured I'd post them here in case anyone else could make use of them.

$10 off of any online purchase of $40 or more (good until the end of March), and $10 off of any online purchase of $50 or more (good until the end of July).

Do You Think Death Could Possibly Be A Boat?

Among my many oddities is an obsession with old Infocom games and text adventures in general.  I can never solve them (ok, so I solved one that I beta tested for the IF contest years ago), but I still love them.  In fact, one of the largest applications on my Palm is Frobnitz, a Z-code interpreter.  Not that it's all that fun to play a text adventure with Graffiti or a stylus keyboard, but it's still there.

Anyways, I discovered an online text adventure based on Hamlet.   Yes, that Hamlet.  The one written by Shakespeare, with the murders, and the madness, and the suicides, and all that stuff.  It's not too easy, and doesn't always work in anything other than Internet Explorer, but how can you not love a game where the command 'kill Claudius with scissors' elicates the following response:

"Hamlet!" she snaps. "How many times have I told you NOT to murder your relatives! I know it's difficult for a Shakespearian lead, but…"

While you're at it, why not check out the Shakespeare Monkey Simulator, which tries to answer the age old question without resorting to RFC 2795.

Today's title is worth 2 points.

What About Fucking… Fucking… Beethoven!?

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here we go: My all time top five favourite track one side ones.  (All thought up in the shower this morning, so it may not really be 'all time')  Song links go to a one minute sample, because I felt like trying out Audacity.

5. Suede - Dog Man Star.  Track one, side one:  Introducing the Band
4. Wilco - Being There.  Track one, side one:  Misunderstood
3. Primal Scream - Screamadelica.  Track one, side one: Movin' On Up
2. Massive Attack - Mezzanine.  Track one, side one: Angel*
1. Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.  Track one, side one: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

* Sample is about 30 seconds into the song, as there's no vocals for about a minute.

Today's title: One point. Category:  Soft-pitching to Derek

The State of the Network Address

As some of you may or may not have noticed, the database server was down all day today.  To be honest, I'm not sure what happened.  The logs show nothing unusual, and all I know was that it was powered off when I came home.  Either way, that's fixed and you can now comment again.

As for the temporary loss of access to the database and/or webserver, we've hooked a spare switch up and now don't have to disconnect anything if we want to use the XBox.  In addition, our random disconnects seem to have been taken care of by getting Rogers to change our cable modem.  The old one used to drop the connection during high bandwidth usage, but this one seems to handle it just fine.  In fact, it even managed to take care of a day which received over 20,000 connections to the webserver. (Note to self:  Don't ever post a link back to this machine in the Fark forums again.)

No points for the title, but if you can find me within the next 24 hours you are permitted to hurt me for that pun.

Egg Freckles?

Last night we were talking about Dmitrii's new Palm and how much he had gotten off of eBay for his old ones, when Scott suddenly remembered something:  somewhere in his room was a Windows CE device that he had gotten from a former employer that went under.  Much searching ensued, and eventually the former $6000 (US) device was found: a Symbol 2700.  (Scott also thinks he used to have a 2800, which had an ARM processor, but he can't find it.)

It's amazing comparing the price to the actual device's characteristics.  It has a 40MHz MIPS R4000 processor, 16MB of RAM (which is divided up into user defined portions for storage and operation), a barcode scanner built-in, and possibly 802.11 support.  (I'm still trying to figure out whether that last bit is true.)  Add to that the fact that it's built like a brick (both size and stability), being able to withstand hurricane conditions and repeated 4ft drops onto concrete.

In addition, there's two cradles, a sync cable, and a thermal printer which can operate via infra-red.  It's eventually going to go on eBay (after we figure out how much they normally go for), from which I will receive 30% for doing the listing/shipping/&c.  Until then, however, it's a fun little toy to play with; even if it is slow, old, and ugly.

Today's title is worth 2 points. Category: Newton.

Am I Too Late For The 4:30 Autogyro?

There are certain advantages to living in an apartment building located directly across the street from Sobey's.  One of which is the fact that if you suddenly get the craving for pad thai at eleven o'clock at night you can simply hop across the road and buy the ingredients.

Of course, it doesn't help if you forget to add the bean sprouts and are forced to add them when you recook it the next day for dinner.  Someday I should ask the woman at the market if she'll give me her pad thai recipe, as it's nothing like the recipe I followed, which called for shrimp (replaced in favour of tofu).

1 point for telling me where the title is from and its relationship to this entry.

By Any Other Name

For those of you who didn't notice, version 0.8 of Phoenix Firebird Firefox was released this morning.

The main mozilla.org server is bogged down at the time of writing this, but I had no trouble with the ISC's mirror in California.  At least now people don't have to worry about installing a DBMS by mistake.

Today's title: 1 point.

Vagina Junction, What's Your Function?

In keeping with my habit of posting strange links that I come acorss in my travels, I present to you the ultimate in strange, odd, and &why the hell does that exist" consumer items.  Yes, that's right, we're talking about the one and only vulva puppet collection!  Available in such natural colours as green, blue, and leopard print, this wonderful performance item could be yours for 200 to 300 dollars.

While I mainly wonder who would pay that much money for these, a blurb on the site that states that it's wonderful for having "the talk" with your child makes me wonder one more thing: how do you have the talk without a penis puppet?

Today's title should be an easy one and is worth one point.

The Pipe-Cleaner Insect Returns!

If you've tried to access the comments recently, you might have gotten a database error.  The reason for that is that our switch simply doesn't have enough ports to support 3 servers, a computer, and an XBox.  Therefore, whenever we want to plug in the XBox we have to unplug something else.  Since the webserver is hosting pictures for my auctions and Scott's usually doing something with his, that leaves the database server as the least damaging.

Scott's gotten a wireless card, so the problem should only be off and on for a short period of time, but right now he can't get the third party chipset driver to compile against 2.6.

<Insert Generic Title Here>

It was either that or "You are reading my writing", but that's not the point.  If you haven't seen it yet, and you have a printer and scanner, head on over to fontifier.com.

When you get there, you can download a GIF, print it out, write your letters, scan it, then upload the resultant image.  A script will automatically use the image to generate a Truetype Font based around your handwriting.  It will probably take a few tries tog et it looking right, but the result is amusing, to say the least.