I’ve done… questionable things.
And I got to make up for a couple of them over the course of the last few days.
Short version: My angering of the Apple gods resulted in me having to re-rip an awful lot of CDs. For most of them, thankfully, this was easy enough - open CD-ROM drive, put in CD, push button, it looks up tracks, rips CD, ejects tray for next CD.
Then it got tricky. I have quite a few CDs for which there are no track listings… or for which there were no track listings when I originally ripped them. I’d like to say that I’ve always been careful about how I entered data for CDs, but that wouldn’t be true. There have been a few CDs I’ve entered the track names for as follows:
Fushigi Yuugi Singles Collection Track 01
Fushigi Yuugi Singles Collection Track 02
…and so on… which is absolutely useless information but at the time I just wanted to get them ripped and I couldn’t read the track names anyway. And these got uploaded to whatever database Windows Media Player uses.
So, as I was re-ripping CDs, occasionally one of my old “Track 01″ style entries would pop up as I put in a CD, and this time I took the effort to go and look up real track names. Hopefully they’ll overwrite my old nasty entries, so the next time some poor schlub puts one of these discs in their PC they’ll get… well, they’ll get some track names.
I’ve done my part for world peace.
As an aside, I’d like to go through the CDs for Saturn, SegaCD, Playstation and TurboDuo games next… lots of them included CD-audio tracks of the game music, and some of them had quite good music. That won’t happen any time real soon, though. Something for the to do list.
And another bit about school…
Classes done and pulled out a pair of As. Books cheerfully sold back, and $150 worth of books bought for next term. Also 8 credits @ $67 each + $20 a class “online fee”… And I know full well I’m still sitting in the cheap seats. The real pain comes after I finish up the Oregon transfer degree and start working on the real degree.
One of the books for next term is “1984″. I read this in 1984. Most of my classmates for next term probably weren’t born then.
I’m really glad it’s an online course, I feel old enough.
My cdjapan order came in…
I got my “Linda, Linda” single, and the Honey and Clover Complete Best album and uh…
Seven Haruhi character singles. I happen to know there are people with much worse obsessions.
The revenge of Apple, Inc.
Apparently saying something against the Steve is just bad karma.
Let me sum up.
There’s a bug in Front Row. Not a big one, really more of a nuisance. Front Row will occasionally claim that you don’t have a license to play your unprotected mp3s. They work fine in iTunes, but not Front Row. So I go looking for a fix.
Simple fix found in mere moments. It seems all I need to do is select all the music in the iTunes library and tell iTunes that I want everything to have ID3 v2.4 tags. This churns for a while - overnight, actually - but when it’s done I seem to have fixed the problem. All my mp3s play fine in Front Row.
This feeling of satisfaction lasts until the next time I try to play an mp3 from a Windows PC on the network. Then I discover hell.
See, I have a lot of mp3s with kanji song titles, artist information, album information, so on. And the Mac represents kanji internally just a little differently from PCs. Just enough different to completely blow away all the kanji when these tags are viewed on a Windows PC, since MediaPlayer can’t figure out what’s going on and thoughtfully tries to rewrite them out…
After a few attempts to fix the problem automatically I wind up truncating all fields in the mp3 header to 30 characters and losing all album art, to say nothing of extended character sets. Time to give up. Last backup… October 2006. I guess it could have been worse, I’ve only gotten… uh. Quite a few CDs since then. Maybe 40? Mostly Japanese. Those Haruhi character singles do pile up.
Also, while I’m at it, I really ought to re-rip CDs that didn’t come in with proper track names, or had their track names tweaked to work on an old mp3 player that didn’t speak kanji either… and I should try to fill in some of this missing album art… So a simple disaster recovery becomes something more of a project, as occasionally happens.
Life would be a lot easier if I was studying, I don’t know, Spanish or something and had a bizarre obsession with wrestling instead of anime. I would have fewer problems involving kanji support on US hardware and software, for a start.
And, as an aside, I’m never letting the mac touch the network shared music folders again.
Milestones
When you start off at 290 pounds, it’s important to set reasonable expectations for weight loss, and then set new goals as you hit them.
My first goal was basically “climb the two flights of stairs in the parking garage without needing to stop at the top to rest”
Then it was 270, then it was “get 250 before going to Japan” (August 06 - I was 252 when I got on the plane but 247 when I got back to the US a week later)
Then 220 by New Year’s.
Then “break 200″
This morning was 199.6. Seeing the first digit on the scale change is, well, pretty damn cool.
I have a little ways to go… I still have to hit 189 to be a “healthy weight” for my height… but it’s looking pretty possible to hit, which isn’t something I’d have said 16 months ago when I started this whole lose weight thing.
Uh oh, I drank the kool-aid
I think that should be hyphenated. Probably needs a tm or something, but I’m a very lazy person.
Anyway. So this particular kool-aid.
I’m typing this from a Windows PC. There’s another two to my right and two behind me. At work I use Windows machines. While I’m not fool enough to claim that Windows is the be-all and end-all of operating systems, I’m pretty familiar with it and I don’t have the bandwidth to get as familiar with any other OSes.
I don’t even own an iPod, I have a hand-me-down Creative Zen player than I’m quite fond of.
We have a Mac mini, which I have no complaints with. It’s a fine piece of hardware but basically its purpose in life is to sit under the TV in the living room, play back downloaded anime and TV purchased from iTunes, and record episodes of Legion of Super-Heroes and travel programs about Alaska and Japan. Also it has many fine emulators installed which I do not take advantage of because, again, the whole collect lots of games never have time to play them thing.
It’s running OS X 10.4.8. I don’t need anything better than that. I’m certainly not upgrading to 10.4.9 because I hear horror stories about non-booting macs after the 10.4.9 upgrade.
So why was I really depressed when all the Apple rumor sites stopped saying “10.5 in late march” and switched to “10.5 by the end of June!” today? Why am I even READING Apple rumor sites?
Apparently the next step is buying a black turtleneck and camping out in front of the Cingular store waiting for the iPhone. Which I won’t be buying because it’s six hundred dollars for a fragile device that fits in my pocket.
You won’t get me, Jobs!
Nemu’s no good for you, dork
I finished Da Capo SS, and while the ending could have gone slightly better, I had a bit of a realization.
The show was based on a videogame. If you were to purchase and PLAY the videogame, you could probably make it so the main character finishes out with Kotori, or Sakura, or anyone you chose… clever little marketing plot there. Kind of lost on us poor Americans, but those are the breaks.
The romantic angles aside, I liked the ending. Now I need to pick another series off the pile of unwatched and turn it into a watched.
Feedin’ am good
I’m a bit of a list maker. Some of these lists get to-do items on them that take months or years to actually get accomplished, but it’s rare that they completely fall off the lists.
Saturday I got to knock a couple off the general “japan topics” list.
After a fairly uneventful speech class - I did get a 95 on last week’s speech, so my flirtation with a decent grade continues - I realized that I had two hours before I had to be out in Hillsboro to get the car’s oil changed, etc. So, instead of heading straight out there, I went home so I could see Abandoned Wife first.
She decided to join me for my exciting trip, and while she was getting ready to leave, I was wasting some time reading about the intimate details of stranger’s lives on the web.
One of them, a local anime club member, mentioned “Syun Isakaya”.
Now, an Izakaya is a kind of Japanese restaurant that I’d wanted to try but was fairly intimidated by. Think of it like a tapas or dim sum place - you go there, you get drinks and then you basically order lots and lots of little plates of food. They traditionally have a huge menu, unusual for Japanese places.
A quick google search turned up two things: One, that the name of the restaurant was slightly misspelled, and two, that it was in Hillsboro.
Serendipity, I tell you.
So, after the car got its oil change, and we found a car wash because the dealership doesn’t automatically do that for you, unlike the Saturn dealership, grr, and then after we did rather a lot of shopping and Rescued From a Weekend Day At Home Wife got to get some well deserved wardrobe additions and I got a little portable tripod for the pink camera…
We went to Syun Izakaya. And, oh, my, it was some goodness. We went a little nutty with the menu and wound up with easily four people’s worth of food and managed to eat about three people’s worth of it… okonomiyaki, spider roll, aparagus with bacon, beef with green onions and garlic buds, croquettes, tonkatsu, ebi tempura, and …
the other thing on my list of to-do that I managed to get done was “try natto”
Now, natto has a reputation for being really quite nasty. It’s fermented soybeans. I have no idea who first decided they were hungry enough to eat it, but it’s an important part of Japanese food and I need to learn to eat it.
At any rate, Syun Izakaya had a roll that was maguro and natto, and I figured that cutting the natto with something I LIKED would be a good way to break me in.
The first piece nearly came right back up. By the third piece, it was only rather nasty, and I figured I would leave it at that and try more later - and, besides, there was a table full of other stuff to eat.
So, Izakaya style dining - check. Ate natto and lived - check.
Good Saturday all around.
Travel plans, the Joy of Pork, and the return of Sakura…
I’ve finished Da Capo SS through episode 22 now, and as always happens, the plot kicked right into gear after the show was a bit over half over.
Sakura’s back!
Finally, some of the “let’s dance around issues from the first series” nonsense is ending!
Aisia and Sakura seem headed for a showdown, and that makes me Happy Fanboy.
The only mild downer is that, of course, Nemu is going to wind up as the big winner at the end of the show and Kotori and Sakura are going to be left out in the cold.
But enough soap opera updates.
My boss’s final day was today, so we all went out to a really quite nice Peruvian restaurant. Peruvian is not a cuisine I’ve ever sampled before, and I really had no clue what to expect… Ordering almost completely blind introduced me to a pork dish that I will be remembering for a while… and now I’m faced with the absolute impossibility of trying to describe food I’ve never had before and that was described using adjectives that were either not in English or in English, but using words I’ve never had to encounter before. It had, uh, pork, and apples, and some kind of marinade, and ravioli for no logical reason, and it was, uh, yummy, and while it’s a shame to see my boss move on to other jobs, it meant a mighty fine dinner out for me, so moderate win.
And for dessert there was Flan. Can’t go wrong with Flan.
Alaska Airlines is having a really sweet deal on airline tickets if you order them by Mar. 30th and travel by November, so it looks like we’re going to try to do a longish weekend in Victoria, BC, in September. I’m looking forward to it, since I’ve never visited our Canadian neighbors to the north. I understand they’re awfully nice people.
Between that and the 8-day Alaska jaunt in July, this summer is looking pretty packed with travel. Life is good.
Da Capo and Vista and Goodbyes…
All right, neither episodes 13 or 14 of Da Capo Second Season were clips shows. What is the world coming to?
Also, the pain that is Aisia is starting to subside, and Kotori is getting much more screen time. I honestly could not make it through the Aisia-tries-to-cheer-up-sick-kid-with-circus-act episode, I stopped it after the eyecatch with a serious case of the heebie jeebies.
Let me put that in context - I’ve watched untranslated, 3rd generation videotapes of Minky Momo and gotten through them with less mental fingernails-on-the-blackboard.
Hayashibara era Minky Momo, though.
In the Eternally Hopeful Category:
Tonight, I sent in the second and last of my “You bought a new PC! We’ll send you Vista!” coupons. So in a world where these things actually work I will be receiving one copy of Vista Home Premium, for the Acer Laptop, and one copy of Vista Business, for the PC that Generous And Loving Wife allowed me to build a couple weeks ago. No, that acronym is no better. I’ll keep working on it.
From reading assorted sites around the net, the number of people claiming to have received their free Vista upgrades is slightly lower than the number of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens… I would like to work in something about cow mutilations or orifice probing here, since these are the Two Standard Alien Abduction Jokes, but I quite honestly don’t have anything funny. Make something up, and laugh at it, it was better than anything I came up with.
Anyway, Vista may be on the way, two copies even, and the odds of me actually installing either anytime before Vista SP1 is released… well they’re not good odds, but I wanted to make sure that I had the installation media and license keys.
In kind of Meh and I am vexed news, I had math class tonight. This itself isn’t a big deal, we have two more sessions and then I’ll be done with the class. What did meh and vex me was that my Japanese friend from the class is off to Osaka for the next three weeks, and when she comes back to the states she’ll be moving to San Antonio of all places. So, no more conversation buddy. On the other hand, this does avoid the awkward thing where eventually if we’d become better friends I would have had to invite her and her husband over and then they’d be walking right into an otaku lair of the highest order and probably run screaming for the streets as soon as they saw the DVD shelves, so this might be for the best.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
