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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: February 2008

  • Sick and tired, like whoah.

    You know the illness has me good and floored if I can’t even bring myself to sit at the desk and putter around on the computer. Seriously: I’ve checked mail and that’s about it. Even writing this short post is just about all of the “glowing rectangle” time I can muster this afternoon.

    I have a fever, aching joints and muscles, tender skin, an off-again on-again cough, and for some reason it hurts to breathe through my nose. (That’s a new one on me!) I’ve also been subsisting mostly on water and cold meds due to a near-complete lack of appetite. All of this has gone on for three solid days, and as of yet I don’t feel one whit better now than I did Sunday… in fact, I’m feeling worse in most respects. (The coughing’s gone down a bit.)

    I need to get better, and quickly. Missing two days of work, especially the two that I have so far, is not enhancing my standing at the office any. Argh.

  • Karel’s Birthday Present

    I despaired of finding the perfect present to convince everyone that they should get me, but now… I think I’ve found it.

    [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GAUnuuBkW4]

    That should do nicely, shouldn’t it?

  • I’m awake now, thank you.

    I often joke about my list of five hundred fifty three reasons I’m glad I was born a boy-type person. One faces little dangers on occasion, however, in this form. For instance, you could be getting dressed in a daze after a bad night’s sleep, not really paying attention to the usual safety requirements of (for the want of a sillier turn of phrase at this hour of the day) product placement, and end up pinching oneself in an article of clothing.

    Later I’ll probably be dozing off, but right now? I’m quite awake. Ow.

  • I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.

    Well, some great-and-powerful computer geek sysadmin guru-type fellow I turned out to be. I came home, got onto the computer to check my mail and do the other usual just-got-home online stuff, and the machine pops up a message saying that I’m low on disk space.

    “I am not!”

    Then I decided to check anyway.

    Huh. Go figure.

    So I burned off a couple of DVD-ROMs’ worth of downloaded videos; now my computer’s a bit happier with me. Apparently I have a new priority project for the foreseeable future… and my tax refund shopping list just acquired a new line item: A large secondary hard drive.

  • Thanks a lot, brain.

    That’s funny, I don’t remember asking to be awake at 5:30am on a Saturday. Yet here I am, sitting at the computer trying to distract my brain from a nightmare that woke me up startled enough to cry out. Man, I hope my roommates are still soundly asleep, ’cause I’m pretty sure I sounded like a damsel in distress. I embarrass myself often enough when I’m conscious, I certainly don’t need help from my subconscious.

    Tarantula-like creatures have no business crawling around in my psyche, particularly when I’m asleep, dammit.

  • Music Library Meme

    The guy who draws Dork Tower posted a silly meme a few days ago, and I decided to hop on board. (Hey, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I think I’m allowed.) Mind you, I don’t use iTunes (no Ogg Vorbis support) so all I can do is make Winamp jump through the hoops. Luckily I’m already in the habit of using the Media Library…

    So here goes:

    How many songs total: 5,028
    How many hours or days of music: 15 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes
    Most recently played: Dodo/Lurker by Genesis
    Most played: Integral by Pet Shop Boys (10 times) *
    Most recently added: “Version 2.0” (album) by Garbage **

    Sort by song title:
    First Song: #1 Crush by Garbage
    Last Song: Zoot Suit Riot by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies

    Sort by time:
    Shortest Song: Vitamin C by Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop OST #2 “No Disk,” 0:06) ***
    Longest Song: Sasha’s Voyage of Ima by BT (“Ima” CD#2, 42:45) ****

    Sort by album:
    First album: “10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1” by Midnight Oil
    Last album: “Zone Of The Enders OST” *****

    First song that comes up on Shuffle: I’m With Stupid by Pet Shop Boys

    Search the following and state how many songs come up: ******

    • Death – 9
    • Life – 71
    • Love – 190
    • Hate – 31
    • You – 377
    • Sex – 9

    Most Represented Artist: Genesis (233 tracks) *******

    Footnotes:

    * I’ve only recently gotten into the habit of using the Media Library. Otherwise there’d be songs with much higher play counts.

    ** I had to find this the old-fashioned way: Doing a date search in the file directory. Winamp seems not to track my “recently added” very well for some reason.

    *** I’d have found the shortest “proper” song in the list, but I ran out of time this morning. The first dozen entries were “non-songs” of one sort or another. So I gave up.

    **** Which beat out Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready,” the previous (three) contender(s) (original and two live renditions), by almost twenty minutes!

    ***** Last studio album, not a single, by a proper band: Worldillia by Porno Graffitti

    ****** In Winamp, file path and album are included in all searches. These numbers are therefore inflated a little bit. Yes, this annoys me but there seems to be no way to search only in the title of a song. (Argh.)

    ******* By no means is all of my Genesis music ripped to MP3 or Ogg. The same is true for most of my other favorite artists, actually. That first number (~5000 tracks) would be much, much higher if I really wanted to go crazy with the digital music library…

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