I couldn’t agree more with this T-shirt.
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Moving CDs
Empirical evidence suggests that a typical CD jewel case weighs between 3.0 oz and 3 1/8 oz. Let’s call it 3.1 oz. I have to ship about 864 of them to Alaska. That means I’m shipping 164 lbs. of jewel cases.
Alternatively, I can move the CDs to binder cases like these:
Each of them weighs about 3 lbs and contains 324 discs. Well, really, they have 324 pockets, but as you can see, I’m loading every other pocket with the album art/booklet for the CD:
I figure I need six cases like that. That means I’m shipping 18 lbs, for a net savings of 146 lbs. Sounds good to me.
The best part is that, when I get there, I can put all six binders into deep storage, since I hardly ever listen to CDs, once I’ve ripped them into iTunes.
(Bonus points if you can connect the bottom picture with the title of the post. Hint: what is the first disc on the next page?)
Moving to Alaska?
People have been asking me if I’m out of my mind to move to Alaska. (Possibly, but that’s not important right now.)
Of course, people are generally too polite to say it directly. Instead, they ask if I know what the weather’s like there. Here’s my answer:
Browncoat Vocabulary
About time! Someone’s put together a list of the top 15 Chinese expressions (“curses”) from the late, great TV series Firefly.
My personal favorite: å–畜生雜交的髒貨, which is from Shepherd Book (naturally).
Via VodkaPundit.
Command Line Interfaces of the Future
This cracks me up: the Windows 8 server is going to nudge, and eventually force, administrators to give up their point-and-click interfaces in favor of something a little more up-to-date.
(I could have told you they’d eventually wind up here, after struggling for years with COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE, only to see them finally produce a halfway decent shell—long after I’d moved on.)
(Via RedmondMag via someone I’ve forgotten (sorry).)
Internet-Enabled TV
We got rid of our cable nearly 15 years ago, and haven’t seen any broadcast TV since then, except at neighbors’ homes. We are great patrons of Netflix and the library’s DVD loan program.
Increasingly, we get a lot of content off the internet, which we watch on our computers. I’d been wondering how to watch internet content on our TV. Now I know, courtesy Tyler Stanton (yes, the Tyler Stanton of Tripp and Tyler fame).
Top Music in 2011
Looking at iTunes, I see my top song this year was “40 Day Dream” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. I listened to it 137 times. A few of those must have been in 2010, since I bought it that October, but there’s no question it was one of my favorites this year. (Sadly, there’s no way with an iTunes Smart List to learn what a song’s play count was during a certain period of time.)
(Note that “40 Day Dream” is on the same (eponymous) album as “Home”, a song covered by Jorge & Alexa Narvaez in their charming YouTube viral video.)
Following “40 Day Dream” in my most-played list were “Bye Bye Bye” by Plants and Animals, “Buildings and Mountains” by the Republic Tigers, and “Can You Tell” by Ra Ra Riot, with 116, 111, and 106 plays, respectively.
As it happens, all those are digital downloads from Amazon. I have a handful of songs from the iTunes store, but only a few, since a web browser offers a much better shopping experience than iTunes does. Web browsers have offered tabs since, when, 1997 or so? But iTunes is pure-linear, and shopping on it interferes with other things you might be trying to do with iTunes.
If we subtract out all the digital downloads, leaving just songs that I’ve ripped from actual physical brick-and-mortar CDs, my top songs from 2011 were: “If You Leave” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “He’s a Pirate” by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, and “Africa” by Toto. (Don’t wince at my taste: serious musicians love that song! See track 11 here.)
The pirate song is from my collection of Film Music of course. The others are, like those I mentioned previously, from a playlist of music that has appeared on the TV show Chuck. If we subtract out “Chuck” music and “Film Music” then my top songs in 2011 were: “YYZ” by Rush, “A Raft of Penguins” by Ian Anderson, “La Villa Strangiato” by Rush, and “There is a Green Hill” by the World Wide Message Tribe. Also in the Top 10 list are the Genevan Psalter’s Psalm 124 by Calvin College, “Peace of Mind” by Boston, and “Just Showed Up (for My Own Life)” by Sara Groves.
The Goodbye Look
Well. Here’s something different: Mel Torme covering Donald Fagen’s “The Goodbye Look“:
That’s my second-favorite track on, The Nightfly, one of my all-time favorite albums. My favorite track is “Walk Between Raindrops.” If you don’t like it, well, you’re a loser, I’m sorry. And if you do like it, try Kamakiriad, Fagen’s next solo album, which was released just 11 short years later. Start there with “Tomorrow’s Girls.”
A Sarcasm Detector
From the Smithsonian, via @HankFortener, comes this useful information:
Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.
It’s too late to use this insight at family Thanksgiving dinners, but Christmas is coming.
Headline Says It All
The UK C|Net brings us this:
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider
claims he’s from the futureA would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.