Archive for August, 2005
08.31.05
Posted in General at 12:30 pm by Nicholas
Just one week until the beginning of the school year. It’s been a good, productive summer — I went to Charleston to learn how to teach Latin to children, learned more about the school’s recordkeeping sytem than I ever wanted to know, set up a new Gentoo box to use as the school’s web server, wrote an improved web design unit for the seventh and eighth graders, and bought a car.
Stephanie got a job teaching third grade — unfortunately, it’s in Antioch. But it’s a job doing what she wants to do, and after she builds up some experience she can move back to Sacramento if she wants to. Her school year starts the day before mine does. And no, she’s not commuting there and back every day — until she finds an apartment in that area, she’s staying with the principal of her school.
I started attending the Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup last June, and have been enjoying that immensely. The predominant style of games at these meetups is variously known as “German games,” “Eurogames,” “family strategy games,” and probably a few other terms I haven’t heard yet. They tend to be a lot more strategic than what Americans think of as boardgames (Monopoly, Sorry, Life, etc.) but lighter and more social than traditional strategy games like Chess and Go. My favorite so far has been Settlers of Catan — influenced not at all, I swear, by the fact that I won my first game of it. I also enjoyed Euphrat & Tigris despite coming in dead last and basically stinking up the board with my utter lack of strategic insight. Jim and I, among others, are working on a site to coordinate several Sacramento-based gaming groups with a central news and links page — I’ll link to that as soon as it’s done.
I also did some hiking up in the foothills. Nearly died. That’s a story for another time.
And that’s been my summer, pretty much. Now it’s over, and I feel like I accomplished a pathetically small fraction of what I’d intended to do. But it’s not such a bad list, looking over it now. Could be worse … right?
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08.30.05
Posted in General at 7:30 pm by Nicholas
I’d been annoyed lately by slow performance in my web browser of choice, Safari. It still loaded quickly enough and all, but had developed the habit of freezing for a few seconds shortly after bringing up a page. See? Annoying.
The solution, as it turns out, was right in front of me — in the Safari menu. “Reset Safari…” clears the history, Google search history, cache, cookies, and form field entries all in one go. Doing this took about two minutes on my system (after two years of particularly heavy web browsing). Now I have to log back in to all my favorite online services, but the benefit is a much faster web browsing experience.
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08.23.05
Posted in Music at 6:24 pm by Nicholas
Several of my favorite musicians have released good albums this year — like Ben Folds, Foo Fighters, Sleater-Kinney, Aimee Mann, and The White Stripes, to name a few — not to mention a shockingly good unofficial online release by Fiona Apple and a compilation of EPs by Belle & Sebastian. But a new (to me) musical discovery may turn out to be my favorite album of the year: Andrew Bird’s majestic and strange The Mysterious Production of Eggs. I’m now happily and confidently recommending this album to every single person I know — it’s that good.
It’s hard to describe Eggs in terms of influences and similar artists, because there just isn’t anyone similar to this. Vocally, Bird comes in somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Thom Yorke, but with none of the tendency to over-emote (or, on the other end of the spectrum, mumble). Musically, Bird seamlessly mixes the country and swing of his past projects with rock, folk, and classical influences. At times the instrumentation reminds me a bit of late-period Tom Waits (which is good), but mostly he stays a little closer to the pop end of the spectrum while mixing things up enough to keep the listener on his toes.
Bird’s lyrics shine, too — every song could be read as a poem. But along with the music — gorgeous melodies, shimmering harmonies, and Bird’s stellar violin, guitar, and occasional whistling — it’s irresistible. I can’t recommend this album highly enough.
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Posted in WordPress at 11:30 am by Nicholas
Operating on the theory that most people who come to my blog don’t particularly care when something was posted, but focus rather on the subject matter, I’ve eliminated all links to date-based archives and inserted a tag cloud into the sidebar. This has the additional benefit of trimming the length of my sidebar significantly, making it somewhat more likely that people will notice stuff like the AJAX poll. Another cool feature: in addition to clicking on a tag to see posts on that subject, you can view tag intersections with just a little bit of manual effort. The format for tag intersections is http://www.acetylene.net/tag/tag1+tag2: for example, apple+podcasts. Maybe sometime in the near future I’ll work up a way to do that without having to type anything into the address bar.
The plugin I used to add tag support to WordPress is Ultimate Tag Warrior. This description of the process was a big help, too.
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08.20.05
Posted in Software at 11:33 am by Nicholas
For some reason I can’t seem to leave comments on Jim’s blog, so instead I’ll comment on his iPod bookmarking travails here. There are two ways to bookmark files in iTunes and on an iPod, and which you choose depends largely on how you get your tracks into iTunes in the first place.
For podcasts, as long as you’re using iTunes 4.9 (the latest version, as of this writing) even MP3 files should be bookmarkable with no modification whatsoever — but in order for iTunes to know that the track is supposed to be a podcast, you have to use the built-in RSS reader. In other words, as long as the podcast is coming in via the built-in “Podcasts” section in iTunes, and appears in a dedicated “Podcasts” category on the iPod (separate from the rest of your music files), it should just work.
If it doesn’t, or if you need to get the files into your iTunes library by some other means (like NetNewsWire or the like), converting the files to AAC is a good first step. But AAC files aren’t bookmarked by default, because for most music files that would just be annoying — most of the time when you stop listening to a song before it’s over, you don’t want to pick up where you left off next time; you just want to listen to the song again from the beginning. But if you change the file’s extension from .m4a to .m4b, iTunes and the iPod will see the track as an audiobook, and will insert a bookmark whenever you stop playback. You can change the file extension manually, or via a handy Applescript.
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08.19.05
Posted in Gadgets at 10:21 am by Nicholas
Would someone please be a dear and buy me a Butterfly RC Airplane? I think this just might be the coolest thing ever invented.
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