Day: October 24, 2008

Music

Instant Review: J. River Media Jukebox

Shelly

In my seemingly never-ending quest to find the best solution for handling my music and my iPod without iTunes, I have been playing with J. River Media Jukebox.

I’ve been looking as much for a replacement for my beloved, much out-of-date, and long defunct MusicMatch Jukebox (R.I.P.). I’ve been using the same old piece of software for almost ten years, and it was time to upgrade. The problem was, there wasn’t anything out there that did everything I needed it to do. I wanted good, flexible metadata handling (including custom fields), playlists, drag-and-drop adding for folders and sub-folders, flexible multi-column sorting, ripping, burning, file conversion to multiple formats, iPod syncing (with cover art, if possible), and YADB or CDDB look-up. And it would help if it weren’t a ginormous resource hog.

J. River Media Jukebox does all of that. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am impressed. It’s also free. More or less. I had to purchase an mp3 encoder, which cost US$10. And, for US$40 you can upgrade to J. River Media Center, which will allow you to run your TiVo/TV/sound systems through it, play music through your computer network, and other fancypants stuff, but I’m not really interested. The free version does everything I need, and it does it very nicely.

Pets

Good News Bad News

Shelly

I had to take Harriet back to the vet on Wednesday because her rash came back. I started thinking about the timing. It first showed up after she finished her initial course of post-op antibiotics. And then it showed up again after she finished the second course of antibiotics. Given that (and I told the vet this) the spots were filled with pus, the logical conclusion seemed to me to be an infection of some sort, not hives. And guess what? The second vet diagnosed a staph infection. She probably got it when she had surgery.

Harriet is on a 21 day course of cephalexin, with instructions to get a refill and leave her on it for a full six weeks if the rash is not completely gone in 18 days. I also got a bottle of antimicrobial shampoo for her. I haven’t used it yet, because I wanted to make absolutely sure that she was responding to the antibiotics first. Which she seems to be. The rash is almost gone again, except for a few spots on her knees, where the skin was pretty badly broken open. Those are healing nicely, though.

I would be more upset about the initial misdiagnosis, except that the course of prednisone did kick her pre-existing allergies in the ass. She’s not itching at all now, nor is she chewing her feet. I’m impressed! This is the first time in years that her feet have not bothered her. Now, to see if she stays itch-free after the pred is out of her system.