I have a large enough pile of unfinished books that I’ve stopped buying them. I imposed a rather impossible rule that I would discourage myself from acquiring new books till I have finished the ones I have.
That rule falls apart when it comes to authors I love.
So the moment I saw Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Murakami Haruki on the bookstore shelf, I took it to the cash register immediately.
Cakewalk has released Sonar 6, the latest version of its recording studio software. I use Sonar for my work on Eponymous 4, and I’m waiting for the reviews to come in before I decide to upgrade.
I upgraded from Sonar 4 to Sonar 5 last year, and I don’t think I really got much out of it, feature-wise. I got more out of upgrading from Studio Edition to Producer Edition.
In fact, Sonar 5 turned out to be pretty buggy. I’m not sure I want to upgrade to Sonar 6 if it’s unstable, even if it’s tricked out with new features. This thread from the Cakewalk forums, however, does mention some things that sound tempting, namely audio quantize.
If I do decide to upgrade, I’ll do what I’ve done the last few times — wait for a sale. Christmas is coming soon.
Forbes ranked Austin the fifth drunkest city in America, while the US Census ranks us the fifth smartest city. So, is there an inverse or direct proportional relationship between these two rankings?
Seattle took the top spot for the smartest city, but don’t tell that to the musicians — they’re heading to Portland.
Using the criteria lined out by this list of résumé pitfalls, I think my own résumé is a bit dull when describing the professional experience, whereas the miscellaneous stuff sounds more flash.
While I don’t use buzzwords, I do list the relevant technology used at each job, which is why I guess I get a bunch of random calls from third-party recruiters.
I didn’t realize recruiters and hiring managers had that much of a disconnect with their filtering methods. I always wondered why I felt something was always getting lost in translation when some recruiter would pitch me a job description that even I could tell I wasn’t qualified for.
Have you been to the new Taco X-Press? It’s been open for the past two weeks now.
Although the interior is new and comfortable and spacious, the decor is still every bit as funky as the original shack. Just … cleaner.
Of course, "spacious" depends on the time of day. I try to get to Taco X-Press right when it opens, when the line is at its relatively shortest. I couldn’t manage that this past weekend, and the line threatened to snake out the door. Every table inside was practically taken, and the ambient noise from all the customers rang throughout the high ceiling.
*sniff, sniff* … *ha-choo!*
Yup. It’s pretty musty here. It’s probably high time to dust this corner of the Internets off.
But how? That’s a good question.
Remember how I toiled away at loading a Musicbrainz mirror into MySQL? Well, I deleted that mirror.
Running queries on a database as large as Musicbrainz was remarkably sluggish with PHP, and joins were practically impossible.
Musicbrainz does offer an XML web service. So it wasn’t a terrible leap to write a simple class in PHP to query the service and parse the results.
M3U files, at the very, very minimum, are text files listing MP3s in a particular directory. Most of my playlists are located with their MP3s, so they don’t mess with file paths. There is an M3U specification, but I tend to be lazy.
How lazy?
I open up a command prompt in my directory of MP3s and type:
dir /b *.mp3 > "playlist.m3u"
I then edit the resulting M3U file in Notepad, if I need to change anything around. Usually, my files are named in a way to put them in their proper track order.
This technique applies to Windows. Not sure what other operating system users do.
Between the fliers in the mail and the spam on my answering machine, I’ve actually gotten curious about the brouha over Propositions 1 and 2 in the upcoming city elections.
When the screed hits the fan, I usually just tune out. Nothing turns me off faster than a political pissing match. Thing is, Proposition 6, which repeals a prohibition on domestic partner benefits for city employees, is on the ballot, and I’m making sure I vote for it.
So I can’t very well vote for one proposition without knowing about the rest.
I just want to give a big, warm FUCK YOU to all the drivers who made this morning’s commute to work feel like fucking Lord of the Flies. That is all.