2007 — 14 May: here we go again

When I eventually crawled into bed last night (which was at about 2 a.m. this morning) I left the newly de-duplicated MP3 library copying itself over to the second network drive. Since that appears to have worked, I shall now reset iTunes on the iMac by clearing out its library files and then pointing it to the revised location. Then, no doubt, the fun1 will start. (So far, so good: iTunes is contentedly reporting 20,307 "songs" or 60.4 days. It is still, however, chomping through them all at about one per second in a doomed attempt to locate album artwork — since I haven't allowed it to go out unaccompanied onto this dangerous Interweb thing, it's not going to get very far!)
Update: much improved, thank goodness. The Roku is behaving itself so well, I suspect I have tempted my neighbour to travel a similar route. I wish I was paid a commission.

So all yesterday evening's efforts eliminated nearly 1,700 duplicates. Not too shabby. (It's not that different to the duplicated SF short stories in my library, I guess.)

Still, later this morning I have the chance to watch my neighbour spending money in Richer Sounds. He is my latest convert to the Humax twin tuner 160GB PVR. I wish I was paid a commission.

More important news

Christa's discomfort level is such that we're going to request her hernia be repaired sooner than in the default six weeks. It can't be much fun being most comfortable when standing up rather than sitting, and her job involves a great deal of sitting... Poor girl.
Update: much improved, thank goodness. "What a difference a day makes..."

Damning with faint praise... department

How's this, from a Washington Post article about a lecture at the National Endowment for Humanities? We're not talking about the composer of elegant soundtrack music for "2001", by the way!

His speech, the first intellectually substantial Jefferson Lecture since the tenure of NEH Chairman Bruce Cole began in 2001, was complex, elliptical, erudite and wry.

Philip Kennicott, writing A Strauss Primer


My thumbnails are too big!

Or so it is (very politely) asserted. I shall try to remain aware of this — I suspect the recent "Casper the cat" pair provoked the comment (as I didn't even provide any before rushing into print, as it were). Apologies. Actually, one of my regular readers tells me I apologise too much... — sorry!
Update: actually the criticism was more literal. I had not realised Wikipedia defines the usual size range of what it calls a "thumbnail" (80 to 200 pixels in the long dimension) whereas some of the image sizes I've been using are encroaching into "vignette" territory (no more than 250 pixels in the long dimension). Who knew?

Day 192  

Footnote

1  What I've yet to investigate, in other words, is why the Roku network player downstairs was latterly happily receiving the necessary "browsing" data (playlists, track titles, etc.) but deciding that all the data files were in a format it knew not how to play. It seems to have a distressingly short memory at the moment.