Posts from — January 2007

So I’ve been out of the womb for about a month now.  What’s it like?  I can finally open my eyes to non-Microsoft stuff and not feel guilt.  How does that feel?  Amazing. 

I’d played with Firefox a little while I was part of the collective, but didn’t get into it much.  Man is it nice.  I’d though IE7 was a nice step up, but not really.  My only complaint is it is a bit slow to load.

My biggest eye opener has been Google Reader.  Someone showed me it very early one (I’d say at least a year ago) and I didn’t like it at all.  The whole “one stream” of new items wasn’t for me.  Since I’ve been searching for a new news reader I thought I kick the tire on it.  Color me impressed - especially with the keyboard interface.  Yeah, I’m probably late to the game here, but I’m slowly opening my eyes to the world outside.

Apple doesn’t point out specifically that Cover flow is a Mac only sort of thing, but I sure can’t seem to figure how to turn it on if it is indeed on all iTunes versions.  I’ve never been fond of the library interface of iTunes, but Cover Flow looks like it might go a ways toward correcting it.

Update:  Nevermind - just discovered the following row of buttons:

Silly me, I was pouring over the menus.  I guess Apple software is too intuitive for me.

This is a cool DIY project - make an oil lamp out of a glass bottle and some old sock.  They use Olive Oil as the fuel, which I remember seeing a Mr. Wizard do on Nickelodeon back in the late 80’s, though he did it in a small pie tin with cotton string pulled through a simple nut.

I reloaded my wife’s iPod Nano over the weekend and listened to one of the playlists this morning while I was snow blowing the driveway. Almost immediately I was reminded I’d been meaning to run MP3Gain on the whole library for quite some time - any two tracks that are more than 10 years apart in release had massive volume differences.

Lo and behold, just after I kick the process off in the background - it’s a feature on Lifehacker today. Weird timing. As noted in the comments there, it needs to be run in Album mode. I tested a few albums I knew were vastly different and it worked perfectly (at least to my ears).

Rick’s article hints that it is the first in a series. I’m curious what else he’ll cover as I’ve “groomed and combed” my own library ever since ripping my entire CD collection to one massive library. My workflow was pretty much.

• Rip in WMP10 (this was pre-WMP11) to WMA Lossless. Purist will scoff at me using anything except EAC in secure rip mode, but the meta data in Media player comes from AMG. EAC uses freedb and most of the time, the tracks are mis-spelled and I don’t get cool info like composer. This file is my archival copy. To date, I haven’t heard any bad rips yet.
• Correct album art if needed. (with a cool utility I can no longer find that scanned the WMP library and allowed you to pull down JPG’s and import them)
• Since the WMA Lossless format doesn’t play well with iTunes/iPod, I wrote a custom app that used the Windows Media SDK and the LAME library to transcode to MP3 and pull along all the beautiful meta-data from WMP. This file goes into iTunes.
• Before iTunes 7, I was SOL for album art (iTunes automatically uses its own from iTMS), so I leveraged the script interface to iTunes, and ran through the whole library and pulled in the JPG that WMP had stored in each album directory.

Seems like a lot, and there is probably an easier way out there (one would be to ditch my OCD tendencies and just live with bad data and no album art). If I was a real geek, I’d automate this whole process so it is streamlined, but I don’t really buy CD’s anymore, and the occasional addition to the library can be done fairly manually.

Damn, Google Finance is pretty sweet.  I’ve used the charts and stuff on Yahoo since probably 1997 or so, but Google’s blend of AJAX and Flash makes it so usable.  Go to the site and type in any ticker symbol.

Larry Kuhn pointed out to me that Ben Malec has a blog. I worked with Ben in my Geneer days and I always enjoyed his pragmatic approach to sotware architecture and design.  His recent post on abstractions is a great example.

Ben also had a great “computer hall of fame” in his office, including a vintage Next computer that actually worked.

So as I eluded to earlier, I’m planning on listing out my goals for 2007 here, not as some public display of coolness, but to give myself a bit of accountability since now I have my throngs of readers to hold my feet to the fire.

In no particular order (and with detail that hopefully will be fleshed out in later posts):

• Read 12 works of fiction (so one a month). This is a goal I set most years, but never really have tracked to see if I do it. When I do it, I really like reading, so I think I should hold up my end of the bargain here. No qualifiers either - my first book was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown which I finished last night.
• Run a Marathon this year. I registered for the 2007 La Salle Bank Chicago Marathon this morning. I’ve wanted to do this last year, but I didn’t think I’d have the time to devote to training. I don’t necessarily have more time this year, but I think I can make it work. I ran my first race last year (The 8k Crazylegs Classic in Madison) and didn’t collapse. Granted, I’m going more than 21 miles further, but I still feel confident I can do it.
• Finally update my MCSD. I got it was back in the VB6 days and didn’t keep up with it too much. Mainly since I was busy doing actual work. No difference now - I’m still busy, but seems like a good thing to try and do.
• Post regularly to this blog. I went in fits and spurts ont he MSDN blog. Finding the time to actually write is a chalenge, but we’ll see how this one pans out.

That should keep me busy.

Thought I’d set up Live Writer.  Surprisingly it required almost zero effort.  I just hope the image uploading works. 

(Above: Proof that winter was here at one time in Wisconsin (though it is a bit colder out today). Sledding back in early December)

Whether anyone cares or not, but I’m going to stick with the WP default theme for now, it isn’t as bad I first thought. Once I get a chance I may tweak it, but there is other stuff that will take priority and time isn’t too plentiful.

So what is taking up my time? Namely getting back into the swing of things and settling into the new job. With the holidays and infant care leave, I’d pretty much been out of the mainstream of work for almost three months. Couple that with actually having to write code again and there is a lot of cobweb clearing going on. So far the new job is nice. Everyone I’ve met is really cool and there doesn’t seem to be too much politics to contend with. Granted, it’s still the honeymoon period, but no regrets so far.

I still have one Microsoft obligation left, though it technically isn’t an official MS event: I’m still climbing with the Microsoft team in the 2007 Hustle up the Hancock. This will be my third Hancock climb and fourth competitive climb (I climbed the Sear Tower in November of 2005). This year (unlike last) I’m actually training a bit and trying to get my ass back in shape. My debut time is still my best (19:45) but I hope to top that this time around.

Finally, as a service to myself, I plan to declare my New Year’s Resolutions publicly here so I can try to hold myself accountable. Still working out the details, so maybe they won’t be officially resolutions since they weren’t declared on January 1, but I do have some goals for the year.