I dug up my overwintered broccoli today. Damn that plant was huge, neary four feet tall. My last overwintered produce is a four-foot carrot top with what I estimate to be a five-pound carrot beneath. I am waiting for the flower to blossom before I pull it. My intention is to use it for a main dish.
Neat
Well, cool!
Joe Strummer’s London Calling – found via a cursory google search for “curated playlists.”
Tuning in
So, as noted in some earlier posts, I have successfully (I hope) executed a Grand Unification of the iTunes Libraries. Unfortunately, a key element in so doing was nuking the extant actual iTunes Library files, which means all my various library playlists are history as well.
My head hurts. On the other hand, I suppose the proper methodology is to assemble some album-by-album playlists and as I am so doing other ideas will occur. How I wish for straight-up tagging instead of bullshit genre catgories. Every single song ever written or performed by Willie Nelson belongs to the ‘country’ genre, but rap-crossover records with Afrika Bambatta AND Willie also belong in any number of additional genres.
Pursuant to Dr. Zink's
Pursuant to Dr. Zink’s notice of Miriam Linna’s nascent narrative of the Ohio mafia, I found her linking to one Houndblog. The Hound was a key WFMU DJ specializing in older regional sides but years ago he relocated to NOLA (so I am told) where he owns a bar. Persons who actually live in NOLA and play the rock and/or the roll may have better 411 than I on such matters.
So, like, listen to the airchecks, read the blog, and, y’know, stay sick.
Not playing
Well, my iTunes project is hung up. There are any number of remote-control applications for iTunes. I have downloaded several. iTRC seems to be the most mature.
All the Mac OS apps rely on activating Apple Remote Events on the host machine, and there my troubles start. Remote Events use a creaky old protocol, ‘eppc:’ which no longer operates properly and in particular has difficulty passing user IDs and passwords.
So, the long story short is that while the desired functionality is supported and documented within all-Apple products, it’s currently fuct. I will spend a bit more time on it tomorrow but it looks to me as though my desire is unlikely to be fulfilled in the manner I had been visualizing.
Anatome
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/
Ah, that is the stuff!
Now playing
After literal years, I have finally completed a multiple-library merge and de-dupe on my primary iTunes music folder. At the end of the project, I have about 30gb of unique songs, representing about 750 artists.
As I have been working on this, I have been pursuing a concurrent project to enable multi-zone playback from the primary iTunes machine, a five-year-old Mac Mini which is a part of my A/V stack. This was accomplished via both an inexpensive local-area rebroadcast base station and two satellite speakers (battery or brick power, which makes them easy to tote around inside or outside) and an assortment of Apple Airport Express wifi stations picked up on eBay at $25 – $50.
Overall the project was pretty hairy.
I blew out a 7.1 A/V receiver pretty much as soon as I started it, sometime last year, by hooking up a non-powered speaker to the B speaker outlet and refusing to realize why the amp was shutting down until I actually saw and heard a literal sparkflash and watched a sad curl of very expensive smoke curl up out of the receiver chassis.
Merging four separate 30gb iterations of the same music library is yet another kind of madness and one that drove me to the brink on several occasions. There are many tools designed to assist with this process but none that really easily manage the sheer range of possible variations a tune file can morph into over time. As it is, I am sure I tossed a few uniques along with the 90gb of duplicate files.
Anyway, it’s done, and I can get back to listening to the music, something I found nearly impossible to do with pleasure when the various housekeeping tasks I wanted to address were unresolved. Of course, in the intervening years, I have bought a great deal of music, and the older music that I have not had a chance to listen to for a few years is nearly new again.
So as I play the music, every second track, I’m all, “Hey! This is pretty good! Who is this?”
So now I’m off to track down a universally-accessible iTunes now-playing track publisher. I’m kinda thinking a Twitter publisher might be the way to go. Off to the internet research squirreling!
UPDATE: utter success. Mini now updating playlist via Twitter in protected mode. Inaugural programming: Sandinista, The Clash
THE CAT we found.
As Viv and I left our dining tonight, bemused by the continuing foie gras protesters (yes, really and no we didn’t have any and yes, they were mildly annoying and made me want to order some but it was too mild an annoyance to generate a genuine backlash), we saw a kitty on the street and went over to say hi.
The cat is a longhair calico in the end of kittenhood, filthy and matted and starving. She (I think) ran away at first, then hungrily charged our hands for affection, and finally chased after us as we began to walk to the car.
So. If you have been neglecting the fuck out of your longhair calico kitten, she’s not dead. No, you can’t have her back.
Some lettuce and a broccoli seedling
Lots more to see here.
sage's birthday flight
pilot in training