2011 — 24 December: Saturday
Suddenly,1 it seems to be 01:24 or so, and I'm falling asleep at the mouse (as it were).
G'night!
If there's a...
... breakfast starter more bracing (or do I mean 'brutal'?) than a fresh grapefruit, I'm not sure I'd like to meet it. But it wakes me to the point where I can consider resuming last night's obsessive little task: trying to tidy up that subsection of my MP3 files that I ripped from random compilation CDs.
Though Foobar2000 does everything I want of a player, I haven't made it easy to solve this particular 'problem'. It's surprisingly tricky to find a specific2 track when you don't know where it lives in which of the hundreds of folders you lazily popped into a "Comps" folder. And you have yet to find a completely satisfactory music library system.
I concede the Ampache music streamer helps, but it's by no means a speedy solution when running on my tiny Asus Eee PC server as it indexes the complete music library, not just the compilations. Ampache's web interface gives me hundreds of web pages to scour and no rapid route into them beyond a binary chop guesstimate than can only cut through 20 pages at a time.
Copernic...
... to the rescue. Having recently paid for the 'pro' version of this lovely desktop search tool, I decided I might as well see how effectively it can handle the indexing of my music files. So I unleashed it on my MP3s folder, with 635 compilation subfolders lurking within 3533 'albums'. And after ten minutes or so of pretty heavy duty disk activity I asked it "Where's John Barleycorn hiding?"
Not only did it find him, it even offers a preview of the tracks. You know what this means, of course? Though I really ought to tidy up the subfolder structure, I seem to have a good working solution. Now, how about the rest of my breakfast before I nip out to redeliver the cards that have arrived here simply because they have my house number on the envelope rather than my name? It's 11:12 already, dammit.
Distorted reality
I've just read an interesting review of the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. Source, and damning snippet:
Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs's art.
Not being a...
... card-sending type of chap, I suppose I could turn my post-prandial attention to a few festive emails. And a festive cuppa, with a festive couple of "Daddy biscuits" thrown in for (festive) good measure.
How the heck did it become 22:50 already? All I did was write a few emails and listen to some music and watch a couple of "Castles" and make a meal. I haven't even started the book I brought downstairs to read. Bah, humbug (or words to that effect). Still, there's a walk planned for tomorrow, Xmas or no Xmas.