Posts from — January 2007

The radio is almost unbearable to listen to, most of the time.

Since I shipped my car to CA today and was driving my Mom’s car to visit my brother, I didn’t have my typical music collection with me. Typically I listen to a half-dozen mp3 CDs of music in my car, but my Mom’s car doesn’t have an mp3 CD player. Unfortunately, I threw out all my old CDs last week, thinking that I hadn’t used them in years and had no reason to use them in the future. So this left me with the radio.

I tried listening to some sports talk for a bit, but it was so overcommercialized it was driving me crazy. Everything had a sponsor, and commercials were frequent. That, and the commentators weren’t saying anything I didn’t know already… I don’t know much about sports, but I don’t need to be informed that Peyton Manning is a talented quarterback.

I listened to some political talk radio, but it was all just character assassination of “the liberals”, so that wasn’t worth anyone’s time. I listened to some NPR talk, which was pretty good (I used to listen to it a lot), but then that show ended and was replaced by something lame.

I tried searching around for music, with about the same amount of success. I don’t consider myself an audiophile, but listening to really low-quality music bothers me. MP3s (as opposed to FLAC) are fine, but laptop speakers and poor reception on radio bother me. I did find some music I liked… one station was playing Incubus’ Wish You Were Here, but the DJ had to overlay lame jokes on top of the (really good) start of the song. His joke had something to do with Ray Charles gaining weight, and the DJ wondering if the could tell that he had gained weight. Pause for a moment to consider how stupid that is.

Anyway, all the stations were filled with stupid sound effects like Stewie and Brian used on the Family Guy episode in which they get their own radio show.

I had to resort to hunting around for good music, which did turn up some things, but it got distracting and tiring. None of this is surprising, but I figured I’d share it anyway. Don’t bother commenting that you like a certain station.. I don’t doubt that there are good ones out there, but they’re pretty rare.

Despite all of the licensing options for Windows Vista, they really don’t have one for me. They have lower-priced versions people who require fewer features, but there’s no way for me to pay less because I’d use it so sporadically. From what I’ve read, the improvements aren’t compelling enough for me to switch from linux, so Windows will remain a seldom-used OS on my desktop, not worthy of an upgrade since I just don’t use it enough. It’s a shame, too, sinec I was curious to give it a try. I should have a mac soon enough, anyway, so whatever.

I like how I can listen to two Mitch Hedberg albums ordered alphabetically by track name and not notice until halfway through.

This is definitely good news… LJ is going to be searchable later this year. I’m glad to hear this since I was toying with the idea of downloading my journal to my computer so I can grep it. Also, my public entries aren’t indexed by search engines, so this will be a good alternative (the LJ search will take privacy settings and friends lists into account).

Bill O’Reilly’s open hatred of the French never ceases to amaze me. It’s one thing to take issue with a government’s actions, but to just mock someone for their heritage seems rather racist to me. Maybe he’s kidding? I don’t know. On that note, Colbert on O’Reilly is kinda amusing. I especially like how Bill never laughs but the other people in the studio do.

From the things-i-shouldn’t-be-surprised-are-rather-gross department: Time-Lapsed Baby Pig Decomposition (not for the faint of heart)

I’ve sold nearly $300 of books on half.com in the last month… not too bad.

If you’re in the DC area, I’ll be around Saturday-Monday, so let me know if you want to do something. I’ll be around Lehigh Tuesday night through Sunday at some point.

I’m not entirely sure where the boss bar ended up. I think I left it somewhere or lent it to someone.. please let me know if you know.

I’m really excited about the iPhone. Engadget has a good overview of the announcement here.

Definitely more interesting than anything Microsoft announced this week. I used to get excited about Microsoft products, like IE 4 and windows 2000, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. I don’t think that office 2007 and windows vista are bad, I just don’t care about them.

Anyway, I tried Office 2007 the other day.. I installed it and then realized that I don’t really need office anymore. It’s ok.. I didn’t spend enough time with it to give any sort of recommendation one way or the other. I used OneNote 2007 the other day, and it fixed a lot of things that had been annoying in the old version (like FULL SCREEN, finally). Also, if you import an image into your notes, you can right click it and run OCR on it to copy the text out, which is a really neat feature. I wonder how robust that performs, but I haven’t tried out anything beyond the examples given in the program.

Update: my excitement has been dampened a bit when I heard that I might not be able to write my own software for the phone, but I’m sure more details will come out later to confirm/refute this.