Month: August 2008

Pets

Spotty

Shelly

Spotty is spotty no more. I noticed this morning that his last two burned scales are back to their proper orange color.

I also noticed that I have acquired an astonishing pile of fishy accouterments. Everything from medicine to tank clarifier to stress coat to 101 different types of food. All for two silly goldfish and their pet pleco.

And speaking of Mr. Pleco, he’s a total riot. Whenever I give him an algae tablet, the other fish try to take it away. He’s no dummy, though. He lays down on top of it while he nomnomnomnomnoms, so that they can’t get to it. And watching him clean the algae from above the water line is hilarious, too. He suckers himself to the side of the tank, then shimmies up until his head is just above the water, then he scrubs furiously until he has to go back under.

My Garden, Photography

A Garden Update

Shelly

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My sedum is finally getting ready to bloom. The little buds are starting to take on a pink blush, and a few of them have popped their outer skin.

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As I was photographing the sedum, I noticed that 1) my volunteer basil plant has gotten ginormous and B) there was a praying mantis hanging out in it.

I’ve also got something else volunteering in another bed. I’m hoping that some of the seeds I planted last spring finally decided to grow. Otherwise, it’s just a weed. It’s got buds forming, so I should know soon, either way.

And speaking of things I didn’t think were going to grow, the purple aster I got from a coworker is blooming! The grounds crew scalped it not long after I planted it, and then it got hidden by the basil, so I didn’t notice that it had come back.

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Uncategorized

Vast Tracts of… Books!

Shelly

I’ve cataloged 124 items* so far today, and it’s only 2pm. Can I go home now?

*That’s about 15 items per hour, not accounting for breaks. When we were told last year that one of the candidates for Dean of the Li-barry said that copy catalogers should be doing (if I recall correctly) 11 books per hour, everyone got up in arms about how no way, no how, nuh-uh could anyone work that fast. Um, yeaaaaaah.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Comments

Shelly

Andy emailed me to tell me that my blog was requiring folks to register and log on, in order to leave comments. WTF?! I haven’t changed any settings, nor would I try to make people register just to comment. In fact, I’ve completely turned off registration, as that’s how the asswagon hacker got into my blog a few months ago.

Hrmf!

Anyway, I’ve located that particular problem and fixed it. Sort of. It seems that when WordPress suddenly took it upon itself to require registration, it also closed comments on all old posts. I don’t see a fix for that, other than going back and manually editing posts, and that ain’t gonna happen. If there’s an old post you want to comment on, just leave a comment here, and I’ll unlock it. From here on out, though, everything should be back to normal.

Crankypantsing, Music

Instant Review: Songbird

Shelly

I ended up returning the refurbished iPod I bought. It was supposed to have a one year warranty, but Apple wouldn’t honor it. Hrmf. The main reason I wanted that particular older model is that new iPods require iTunes 7.4 or above. iTunes 7.4 and above require service pack 2 if you’re using WinXP. I don’t have service pack 2, and I have no intentions of getting it. Hrmf again.

What to do? As much as I’m not an Apple fan, the iPod Classic seems to be the sweet spot, in terms of providing a large amount of storage for a reasonable price. But, if it won’t work with my set-up, then I’m screwed.

I spent a couple of days thinking over my options and reading up on possible solutions to the iTunes-SP2 problem. I found several programs that came close, but nothing that was guaranteed to work. Some of the work-arounds were convoluted enough that I didn’t even want to try them. I was not a happy camper!

And then I found Songbird.

Songbird is open source, so it’s sort of like Thunderbird for your iPod. It installs easily (seriously, it’s 100% foolproof). It can pull music from your iTunes folder, if you have one, or it can automagically search for music on your drive(s), or you can manually add selected songs. It can play audio files and streaming audio. Other than that, it’s pretty basic. It does not (yet) rip or burn CDs, so you’d have to use another program for that. (There are approximately eleventy brazillion free ripping and burning programs out there.) Video playback is also supposedly forthcoming.

The user interface is basic, as well. It supports multiple tag editing (as far as I could tell, iTunes 6x did not) and playlist creation. I have not found an easy way to check/uncheck which songs to include/exclude when syncing (one thing iTunes did manage to get right), but there is an “add manually” option when syncing that might fulfill the same function. You could also create an iPod playlist, and export just those songs. My solution is to remove everything I don’t want on my iPod from the Songbird library. Since I’m using an old version of MusicMatch Jukebox to manage my real library, the “master library” is unaffected.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that Songbird does, indeed, sync beautifully with the iPod Classic. It took about 14 forevers to transfer everything to the iPod, but it did so without any problems. I give it 11 stars out of 10 for A) solving my headache and B) freeing me from Teh Eeevil iTunes.

And now I have more music-to-go than I can shake a stick at. There’s something kind of mind-boggling about having ALL OF THE SONGS on shuffle.