Where’s the peanut butter?!

adam.kruszewski href="http://blogs.unixage.com/blojsom/blog/adam.kruszewski/pocketpc/?permalink=Working-pocketconsole-on-wm5-0.html">is
a god.

Why does my ipod mini plug ‘n’ play using firewire with my home
computer but plug and start a goddamned endless loop of flashing the
screen at me and resetting itself on my work computer?

Sometimes href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_one%27s_own_dog_food">eating
dogfood massively sucks.

So I’m a couple days into my status as an ipod owner and so far I’m really happy. To recap - I got a used mini last week after my iRiver finally broke and after learning that rockbox, the open source firmware I used to replace the system on my iRiver, had been ported to the iPod. Here’s a quick list of what I like and what I’m not so happy about…

What’s to like?
• The interface is as awesome as everyone already knows. The ipod wheel and organization just makes sense - I love it.
• The size and weight. This isn’t really anything special about the ipod, ipod mini, or rockbox but having carried around a 20GB player for a long time I really appreciate the smaller and lighter 6GB device. In a couple months I may be pining for capacity again, though.
• Rockbox - the games are better, the “while-playing-screen” themes have been improved a little since I installed the iRiver port about a year ago, and it’s generally just a great system.

What’s not to like?
• The interaction between rockbox and ipod is kind of lame. Rockbox doesn’t (seem to) read the ipod music library at all and ipod doesn’t read the rockbox filesystem structure at all. This means if you plug in your ipod and copy files over just using the simple filesystem (rather than the ipod or itunes? db) then the ipod firmware can’t find it - though this is exactly how rockbox wants your music structured. I’m guessing the converse is not true - if you used itunes to copy files over it would probably create some filesystem structure which rockbox could read, however it might not be as intuitive as whatever you would do it you built it by hand. Since I don’t use itunes, I don’t know.
• I have gotten occassional “Codec error” messages when rockbox has tried loading a few ogg files. It has never crashed with this message and simply trying to play the song a second time works, but it’s still frustrating when you’re two miles into a run and Erik finishes explaining “WHEN THAT DAY COMES
  I’LL BE SMILING WHILE YOU’RE CRUCIFIED FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE” and you expect it to go straight to “Maximum Piss & Vinegar” and instead you just get silence. This has been rare and is easy to work around, though.

If you have a supported ipod, I think rockbox is definitely worth installing. It dual boots so you can have your old world back and shouldn’t be dangerous to take it for a test spin.

Nuff respect to Adam for telling me about this past weekend’s Paint It Black show at the new Paradox. I haven’t seen a hardcore show in years (the kind where every song on the band’s album clocks in under two minutes) and they were totally, totally awesome. If PIB come through your town don’t miss them! Check out Exit Wounds from their myspace and if it doesn’t make your head explode then there’s no saving you. The Loved Ones were good but felt moderately out of place in the lineup - there were a couple times I thought the singer was trying to carry a tune. Shook Ones and Sinking Ships rounded out the night. Trivia I learned since the show: after Kid Dynamite broke up a couple years ago, Dan Yemin (Kid Dynamite guitarist, Paint it Black vocals) had a stroke - this was why they titled their first album CVA (cerebrovascular accident). If there were a movie about strokes and they wanted a theme song that got across the same message as the “I have MS but it doesn’t have me” campaigns - this would be it.

Here’s to the skinned knees and sutured hearts -
here’s to the unhappy endings and all the false starts.

wednesday at the doctor’s office I heard the unfortunate *klunk!* as my iriver dropped out of my hoodie as I was getting dressed. I really loved the h120 and had a symbiotic, but love-hate, relationship with it. ‘iriver, why won’t you let me create playlists on the fly?’ ‘but I am the giver of ogg.’ ‘iriver, I love you so - thank you for your ums capabilities!’ ‘yes, patrick, our union is a happy union.’

but this was the last time iriver would put up with my battery. after the trip to the asepsis linoleum it would not turn on. there are a lot of fish in the sea, they say, and the personal digital music player market is no exception. I started shoping around and my eyes were drawn again to iriver’s sexier, user-friendly cousin: the ipod. but what about my 70gb of ogg files? I had no idea rockbox was so flexible but it turns out the ipod port has made considerable progress and it provides the grease needed for my menage a ogg with the ipod.

I feel sad for my iriver betrayal. our years together were always happy, its usb storage was truly massive, and every time I want to listen to the radio I know i’ll be pining for my departed h120. but sweet daddy is rockbox better on the ipod! goodbye clickity-clicking dpad, hello wheel!

…cuz I resemble Che Guevara and Schindler’s List:

What Famous Leader Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com

What Classic Movie Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com

Google calendar just launched and it’s super-cool. It’s a webbased calendaring system which may really not work all that well at all, but claims to help integrate calendars between people who want to share them and at least if it does nothing else - it IS able to consume my upcoming.org events, which is super awesome. Upcoming is nice and I just remarked to Nick earlier today that I think it’s better than most weeklies for finding things to do, but it does not offer a nice calendar view of events. Google calendar does.

tanya finally convinced me to take the plunge and this week I started a hockey clinic at the lowest greatest seattle hockey league level. tuesday night was out first class and it was really educational. for instance, I had no idea that I have such highly developed groin muscles - otherwise there is no explaining my current discomfort. seriously, I was a little late for my bus this morning so, as usual, I didn’t think twice about upping my pace. “Hold it right there!” arrested my loins “Not so fast, buster. Just take it easy and nobody gets hurt.” good god it was awful. so only one class in, i’m already taking my first day off. also my brother and nephew are visiting from Minnesota. I’m really glad to have a good excuse to miss practice but in reality, it’s at least equal parts family ties and debilitating muscle pain that’s got me on the DL tonight.

lock - SOLD!,
originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

Time between posting this lock to Seattle Craigslist and someone coming to my house with the money to buy it: < 2 hours. Sometimes Craigslist is really, really great. And then other times you'll post furniture from Ikea and get swamped with email asking about the dimensions of the piece (which was included in the posting) or for details about how it might work in someone's living room (come on - this is Ikea we're talking about). But when it's on, it is SO on!

Somehow my DNS registration is about to expire on psoul.com - I could
have sworn I requested the 10 year registration. Anyway, I was
surprised to see that my current registrar, href="http://www.dotster.com">dotster, would charge me about $65
for a five year extension of my registration. This seemed like a huge
rip-off so I did some comparison shopping amongst registrars and found
regselect nicely breaks down
costs from various ICANN accredited registrars. It looks like href="http://aitdomains.com/">AITDomains is the new kid on the
block offering the best prices for the service (without airing sexist
Superbowl ads), so I’ll give them a whirl. Please excuse any downtime
while the dust settles.

Congratulations to my aunt Margaret who successfully defended her
dissertation today! Now there’s nothing to do but kick back and use
that degree to solve all the world’s problems. Not having an advanced
degree myself, I have to guess the first steps will be dumping some
pizza boxes and maybe tending to some overdue laundry? I’m sure not
everybody’s PhD lives up to my romantic ideals, though. Anyway - way
to go, Margaret!