Just Don’t Bite

It seems to have been on the news, and in the news, and around our waists recently. But America is seemingly getting fatter and fatter as the years go by. Who knows what causes this. Be it the stress of working all the time, the crappy diet, or what ever. Fact is we’re getting fatter. The troubling fact though is our toilets seem to be getting smaller. How does this make sense?

The way I’m judging this is that in older houses that I’ve been in I find the toilets have a nice size bowl and there is no need to tuck down and scoot and make sure your not going to be left with fecal matter squishing up your backside. However in newer houses with newer toilets it’s like a game of chance. You must sit what seems like perfectly to relax and not get your winky in the water.

Now what I want to know is how on earth obese people handle this? Girls presumably have little issue with this, but guys. Come on, seriously. If you’re so big you can’t see your tool and bits, how do you sit on one of these little toilets and get the job done.

I’ve been asked several times in the last week how to do something that really should be common for people to do. Simply shift the music from a CD to your computer, for free, with no added trouble or mess. Of course we’re going to use some thing free. We’re going to use CDex a nice little app that I’ve used for years. Now back then… hrmm been a good while. You had to add the mp3 encoder too. You’d have to get a copy of LAME and that would be your encoder. LAME is also free, it has been since 2000 when it was compiled cleanly. Kinda nice really.

At that time there was a community driven project known as CDDB. It has sense been bought out and is now Gracenote, but does the same thing. Works great, you hit a button and the whole CD is named and ready to go. Now enough with the history lesson and time to explain how to do it and for that you click to read more.

(continue reading…)

It’s sad to think that a fair amount of the influences on my musical tastes come from a handful of people. But it’s a bit scary to think that two very distinct people had a HUGE influence on how digital music took off and worked. One of them has been on the cover of WIRED magazine, yet failed to make a recent list. I’m not sure the other has ever got much of a mention in WIRED.

Ask yourself, where would your mp3’s be without Shawn Fanning. They’d be on someone else’s computer and you’d never had accessed them. This is the guy that originally wrote Napster. Back before it was a pay service. This was the application that brought mp3 sharing to the masses. Suddenly what had been done over other channels was easy enough for the average person to access it and to find the music they wanted. It worked, and it worked so well that the law suits came and down it went. But he was small potatoes compared to the other guy, of course I’m talking about Justin Frankel.

What did this guy do? Very simple, he made Winamp, and later with someone else developed SHOUTcast for streaming music. After all what good are mp3’s if you don’t have a robust player to play them? Eventually he was bought out by the cooperate drones and hired by AOL. It was there that he wrote Gnutella, a step forward in P2P. I’m going to guess you’ve not paid a large amount of attention to the protocols that are used by your applications, but if you’ve ever used Limewire, Bearshare, or iMesh (to name a few). You have used his design.

Maybe I’m wrong. But if it had not been for these two guys, mp3s and file sharing would probably have never taken off like they did. At the same time, had napster never been forced to filter mp3’s someone may not have made a wrapper for it. They may not have decided to develop a new method. Never know. But one thing I do know, had these two not done what they did Apple wouldn’t have a group of people so addicted to digital media that they’ll buy over priced mp3 players.

My reply to TJ’s Rock Music Owes…

Since I tend to get wrapped up in the smallest of details, I forget a lot of things. Like say preventing spam bots from raping my comments and such. Then I realize it’s so much easier to just use some existing code work that does everything I think I want. Bash my head on the theming structure for a while and avoid getting lost in all the small details. Well I’ve half managed that. So this post is to get rid of the boring annoying default crap that this application uses.

Now to get lost in the config details and seeing if I can break it or at least make it somewhat more interesting and to my liking. This should be a nightmare.