27 thoughts on “Socked in”

  1. the iPod is truly a wonderful thing.
    now if they could just teach iTunes to allow a single song to belong to multiple albums, i could delete dozens of duplicates.

  5. When I got my jukebox (Creative Zen Nomad), I used the same comparison, only I said that it’s better than sliced bread — I’d be much more willing to eat bread by ripping hunks off than go without my jukebox.

  7. “I have become that which I used to hate.”
    Well, all I can say is that you were wrong then, so your taste must have improved 😉 Still, you shoulda bought a Prius. (I just had to buy gas again, for the first time in ages, and was absolutely shocked at how much it cost. In this case, ignorance is bliss. I think I’ve been to the gas station once since I finished the teaching-in-DC gig in early June.)

  8. This is the kind of thing that contributes to my desire to purchase an Infiniti FX35 – in an ill conceived attempt to out yuppie my friends.
    Thankfully I have some self control (mortgage).

  9. BMW? Wow. We do become what we hate. Bring back the Corona.
    Ahh, the 1980 Toyota Corona: 95 hp, rwd, 5sp., fuses easily accessible under the dash (they blew every 100-or-so miles), owned 1991-1998, then junked. RIP.
    Not quite as good as Toby’s polka-dot junker, though.*
    Well, all I can say is that you were wrong then, so your taste must have improved 😉 Still, you shoulda bought a Prius.
    Actually, I really (really really) wanted the Mini — which is closer to the Prius model. But we needed a sedan.
    von
    *FTR, the shout-out of “nice dots” — though kinda funny in the abstract — takes on a more menacing quality as you meander, lost, through pre-reconstructed Cabrini Green at 3 a.m.

  11. The open thread!! The open thread!! I’ve been waiting anxiously for the open thread!!
    And me without home internet access for the next week. Grr.
    Here’s my question, which I hope some of you can answer — and I’ll check back in tomorrow for your wisdom:
    I need to transfer my business website (30-odd pages) from its long-time happy home with AT&T (where I had a dial-up account for years) to…a server service or whatever you call it. How do I start looking? Any recommendations? It has to be ad-free and reasonably priced.
    Our business is pretty specialized, so we do not have an enormous number of hits — maybe 40-100 a day.
    I don’t know where to start. Help?

  12. Opus. first thing you gotta do is make a list of all the services you need from your provider. ex. do you need Perl, PHP, ASP, My-SQL, .Net, SSI, telnet, FTP, etc.. or maybe all your pages are just static HTML and don’t need any kind of server stuff. in any case, find out what you need to run your site, then use something like TopHostRankings (found them by Googling “find host”) to find a host that matches your list.
    i use LunarPages for my business. they do all the server stuff i need, and are fairly inexpensive.

  13. They sell bread already sliced? When did this start?
    I’m liking my new iPod, especially as week 2* of the annual West Coast vacation gets started. Tell you who really needed them: we went to the McLean Mill National Historic Park today — they actually fire up the steam powered sawmill twice a day — and life would sure have been better for those guys with some tunes at the workplace. Then again, they’d/ve probably catch the wires in the machinery, and gotten some extremity cut off.
    Anyone who finds themselves in the Port Alberni area should consider stopping by the mill. Very impressive early 20th century technology.
    *To those who would say that it’s a luxury enabled by having associates, I’ll note that I always took my vacation time when I was an associate too.

  14. I had been searching for an easy way to catalogue my music, DVD and book collections, and I have to plug the most amazing piece of software I’ve ever encountered. It’s called Delicious Library — for Mac OS X users only, Windows suckers! — and it works like so: You hook a digital camera up to your FireWire port, point it at the barcode on the item, and the software reads it, then downloads all the item info from Amazon. It then builds your libraries and allows you to sort by pretty much any criteria, cross-reference books and music, etc. I spent a couple hours scanning barcodes off my DVDs, and every one of them worked fine; it even knew to look for info at the .de, .uk and .jp Amazon outlets for things I’d bought overseas. Amazing.

  15. I’m actually still kicking myself for moving up to a Honda Accord, even though it’s by all accounts (not just through less wear, either) a finer car than the ’91 Sentra I sold a year ago (I’m the original owner).
    The Sentra wasn’t chock full o’ speed, but it did ok; it’d get up to highway speed in less time than…well, certainly much less time than a ’76 Chevette I once owned, which in my experience never actually made it to highway speed. And it got 30 mpg in town; about 40 on the highway. They don’t even make Sentras like that anymore.

  16. Actually, I really (really really) wanted the Mini — which is closer to the Prius model. But we needed a sedan.
    Oh, that is tragic. I’ve been in a Mini, and they are serious fun. I can see why one might need a station wagon or a minivan, but why would one specifically need a sedan?
    (Also, since no one else has done so, please insert a pro forma “die, lawyer scum” in here. Strictly for tradition’s sake.)

  17. BMW 330i, grey ext., terra int., sport suspension, 6 spd. manual
    […]
    Actually, I really (really really) wanted the Mini — which is closer to the Prius model. But we needed a sedan.
    So why not an M3? They make 4-door versions.

  20. So why not an M3? They make 4-door versions.
    Money, as in: not enough (on my part)/too much (on BMW’s part). I also have bizarre quirks, like an irrational fear and hatred of debt and a measure of guilt for spending more than Y dollars on a mere thing, when there are (I can hear my mothers voice now) “starving children in the world.”
    Yes, I know: seemingly odd words to hear from Mr. Free-Trade/Capitalism Rocks/Etc.

  21. “seemingly odd words to hear from Mr. Free-Trade/Capitalism Rocks/Etc.”
    Not really. Capitalism works best when its practitioners have been given a very thorough and early education in a contrary value system, i.e. a system in which there are more important things than money, unfair advantages are to be eschewed, the needs of larger groups weigh largely in the individual’s mind, etc. etc.
    It’s when capitalism is embraced as a *conscious* ideology in the first person (instead of a mere description from the outside) that the wheels start to come off, in various Gordon Gecko, Ken Lay-ish sorts of ways.
    To restate Micawber’s equations:
    Free market plus extensive early education in virtue and extensive government oversight? Happiness.
    Free market without any moral or legal guardrails? Misery.
    Might be a thread in there, too, though I agree with Catsy’s proposal about the shuttle. And welcome home Discovery.

  24. Capitalism, it seems to me, is best defended (to the extent something so powerful needs a defense) as the best and most effective way yet established to secure a better life for the most people. In other words, it is a beautiful and worthy thing because by a continuing surprising alchemy it transforms money into those things that are more valuable than money – security, health, education, peace.
    On the other hand, it is most poorly defended by those that see capitalism as a sort of overarching and infallible arbiter of quality or morality, that believe that market success is equivalent to intrinsic worth, that there is no such thing as a bad market outcome, and that if a problem cannot be solved by the market, then it is an immutable part of the landscape and must not be solved.
    Nice car, by the way. Kind of like my Jetta’s older, steroid-addicted brother. A friend of mine just got the convertible version, and let me drive it. I used to tell people that my Jetta was great beacuse it was cheap, but had the feel of a German road car. I don’t say that anymore.

  25. really an open thread? There were oral arguments in the Arar case yesterday. See if you can pick out the government argument that made me maddest…actually, I’ll just reprint it:
    ” In some ways, she asserted, Mr. Arar had more rights than a United States citizen, because he could have challenged his deportation to Syria, which he had left as a teenager, under the Convention Against Torture. He also had 30 days to challenge his removal, she said.”
    Right. Of course, he did say repeatedly that he would be tortured, and was told it didn’t matter. And they lied to him about his attorney’s whereabouts and lied to his attorney about his whereabouts, so he had no representation at his hearing. And for those 30 days he had to challenge his removal, he was being taken by the CIA to Syria on a chartered jet, and then locked in a tiny, lightless underground cell in a Syrian prison & taken out for torture sessions. But he really should have filed an appeal, it was so lazy of him.

  27. I have some iPod issues, and hope someone can give me guidance.
    (1) Is there a way to link songs so that they will always occur together in a shuffle? Think for example of the first 4 cuts of Quah, or the latter 3/4ths of the backside of Abbey Road: these songs were meant to be together, but are not a whole record. Even if iTunes won’t do this, does anyone know any other software that would let me maybe create combined files or something?
    (2) Is there a way to break files on a CD apart. I’d be happy to have the various snippets of Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers, for example, pop up in a shuffle.
    (3) Any advice anyone has on where and how to download songs, uh, at very low cost, that I already own on vinyl would be appreciated. Feel free to email me directly.

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