Having grown somewhat discontent with the venerable XMMS, I cast about last week during quieter moments for a replacement media player to use on my Linux workstation. What I found was a media library system called “amaroK,” and so far I’m very happy with it.

And yes, that’s the inaugural image for a new section of the gallery. I realized today that I lacked a place for screenshots and other digitally-generated imagery. Hooray for progress, eh?

Anyway, if you run KDE and want a damned nifty media player that automatically updates its media library, gives you one-click lookups of album covers, and throws a pretty nifty playlist manager into the bargain, you could do worse than to give amaroK a try.

As I write this, the firmware and OS on my Treo 600 cellphone is in the process of updating. Yes, that’s right, I’m upgrading my phone.

It’s not necessarily that I have to do it. It’s that the new version is there, and I want it.

In case you didn’t know, I’m one helluva geek. Sad, isn’t it?

I noticed this morning that the CPU in my main Linux workstation wasn’t being used. This may seem like an odd statement if you don’t know that I’ve been in the habit of running the SETI@Home client on whatever Linux machines I can since May of ‘99. Running the command-line client with the “niceness” turned up from a cron job is part-and-parcel of my setting up a new workstation.

So I looked at the SETI@Home website to see if anything had changed. Boy, has it ever.

A few minutes ago I activated my transferred account and converted over to the new BOINC client code, and I’m once again happily churning out SETI results packets. Of course, now I have to make this update to all of the other machines I have that run the old client code…

Back in November I upgraded the server that this site, among several others, is hosted upon. This involved going to new versions of several webserver software products, including PHP. The new version of PHP required me to make a change to the comment script that I, among several others, use.

I just discovered the reason that my comment script, among several others’, hasn’t been storing the email addresses of commenters. (I’m not talking about displaying the addresses. I don’t want that, and I’ve disabled that accordingly.) This means that if I wanted to reply to a comment directly, well, it wasn’t gonna happen.

What, then, was the culprit? I didn’t capitalize a letter ‘m’ during a variable declaration. That’s it. Had I typed ‘M’ instead of ‘m’, I’d have saved myself nearly six months of losing those email addresses in my site’s, among several others’, comment files.

I have, of course, fixed this on my site, among several others.

Let me tell you what kind of moron I’m feeling like right now: top-notch, baby.

UPDATE: Yeah, commenting’s been broken all afternoon. I’ve been tweaking the hell out of the script, and finally managed to accomplish very rudimentary email-address validation. Now, if you don’t enter an email address, your comment doesn’t get posted. It’s that simple. As always, though, your address isn’t displayed anywhere. I insist on it mainly so that I can reply to comments personally and privately if I so choose. We apologize for the inconvenience…

So there was I was, at Fry’s, replacement parts in hand for the kids’ broken anime-viewing computer. Dawn had her Stellvia DVD and was looking for other stuff to buy tax-free at the Geek Mecca Of Portland, and Lil’ was outside waiting patiently with Geoffrey after having picked out her iPod. (She chose the 4GB model, in silver, in case you’re wondering.)

For some reason I ended up wandering from poring over the anime box sets to poring over the music box sets. I didn’t find what I was looking for on the first shelf, but I turned around and discovered it on the other.

It, in this instance, is the Genesis Archive #2: 1976-1992. The three CDs cover the usual boxed-set gamut from unreleased tracks and B-sides to live material and demos. Once I got home (after dinner at Kell’s… my tummy and Dawn’s both thank Lil’ very much!) I spent the first entire hour listening to various tracks and poring over the nifty booklet insert.

So, why did I get it? You mean other than the fact that I’m a die-hard Genesis fan, that is? Well, this box has some tracks from the Invisible Touch and We Can’t Dance sessions that you can generally only find as B-sides, my favorites of which include “Feeding the Fire”, “On The Shoreline” and “Do the Neurotic.” There’s a song I’d never heard before, called “Naminanu.” (The geeky fanboy in me goes “Yay,” while the jaded media employee in me nods knowingly at the lack of mystery behind why the song didn’t make it onto the album.)

The live tracks I was most excited about include cuts from the generally-disregarded And Then There Were Three… album, which is admittedly not one of the band’s strongest works. I got a kick out of hearing live renditions of “The Lady Lies” and “Burning Rope,” as well as “Ripples” and “Entangled” from the Trick of the Tail album.

Included are a few tracks I’d consider filler, like the contents of the Pigeons EP, the fourth side of Three Sides Live, and a few remixes. On the other hand, it’s sort of nice to have even these not-so-rare birds collected in one place.

The track I got the biggest kick out of hearing for the first time, though, was “It’s Yourself,” another bit of the Trick of the Tail sessions that didn’t quite make it on the album. I say “quite” because the bridge section does make it on… as the opening salvo of “Los Endos,” the instrumental power-medly that closes the record.

So, yes, for the first time in many years I’ve had the chance to buy Genesis music and actually have something new to enjoy. It’s a damned shame that I’ll probably never have that pleasure again.