12.01.2006

Radio Gaga

I was on the radio this morning. My clip was about 20 seconds long.
The Edge morning show asked their listeners to call in and tell them the weirdest place they had gone to the bathroom.
They where worried things would get too graphic and the stories where taking too long so by the time they got to me they where in rapid fire mode and all they wanted to hear was where it happened. My story got turned into something like this:
"My roommate; in his closet. 2 months later, walks through the bathroom and goes into our neighbors closet." They laughed and talked about it for about 10 more seconds and then went onto the next caller. If you where listening to The Edge 103.9 this morning at about 7:32ish I was the first caller after they took a commercial break, and the first of the "rapid fire" callers. I didn't hear it, but my wife says it didn't sound like me on the radio.

I had a great story that would have taken about 15 more seconds to tell and would have made the hilarity of the situation even greater but I was following the rules so that my story would get on the air. BTW for things like this they didn't go live. They talked to me while a song was playing and recorded the entire conversation, when the song was done they just played the clip. I thought that was an interesting workaround for saving that emergency "dump button" for errant swear words, or maybe it was just so they could cue up as many stories as possible and remove any dead air time.

Anyway.. I feel the story needs to be told in a more robust and less "embellished" nature.
I was not actually present to witness the acts but I heard about them first hand in the fashion that all great stories in the military are retold.. the very next day. When I was in the Marine Corps my friend Scott Kruse told me a tale of his roommate Ian Cole. Ian came home drunk one night and passed out on his bed. A while later he gets up, stumbles over to the wall locker and proceeds to relieve himself in it. It left a rather lingering odor, and as my fuzzy memory serves me, it wasn't his wall locker, it was Scott's and a large amount of clothing was stored at the bottom of the locker. A number of weeks later Ian once again gets up and stumbles toward the wall locker but Scott is keenly aware of the past transgressions and re-routes Ian towards the head. Ian walks through the head and into the neighboring room (keep in mind that in the barracks 2 rooms share a bathroom). Ian can not open the neighbor's wall locker because it is locked (as it is supposed to be) so Ian just pees on the wall locker, the wall, and the very cheap carpeting.

Oddly enough this is not how Cole got the nickname of "Head."

11.29.2006

Clarification

Has our society of spoon fed information and comedy in a box sitcom watching been so detrimental to the ability to think and reason that we no longer see a joke when it is staring us in the face? Perhaps I am just not as obvious or as ironic as I though I was.
After the 5th comment (oddly enough all by private contact, either in person or email) about my blog title being misspelled I feel compelled to explain the joke.
Yes, I know "blissfull" is spelled wrong. It is part of the irony of the title. I did this on purpose.
The tried and true rule for telling jokes is "if you have to explain it then the joke isn't funny".
It actually saddens me that this is the case because I thought the title was quite clever. I understand that small spelling errors like this have become much more common with the advent of online communications but I also thought those around me had more respect for my abilities, especially since Firefox 2.o has a built in spell checker. I will give credit to those who contacted me in that they all did it through some form of discrete communication instead of what they felt would have been a humiliating public one.

So.. to set the record straight "Blissfull Ignorance" is intentional and a comment on itself. However, now that I have commented on it I am no longer ignorant about it and therefore I have lost my bliss. :P

11.17.2006

18 hours

I finally converted my 15.2 GB itunes library of .m4a to MP3. It is now only 14.1 GB but there was about 6 hours of files that didn't convert because they are DRMed (an audio book). It took 18 hours. I used my laptop so my main rig wouldn't get bogged down or slow the conversion process. Hell, my laptop has a full desktop P4 3.2GHz HT processor so I would say it was definitely up to the challenge. I did notice a slow down after 9 hours of that I attribute to processor throttling due to thermal protection so I gave it an hour break in the middle.

You may be asking yourself "why"? Well, I don't like itunes very much. I don't really know why, I just never quite got the hang of it. I'm not one of those "let my computer tell me what to listen to" kind of guys and I didn't like making a bunch of play lists. I am kind of old school like that.
I go through my mp3 directory where everything is organized nicely and just queue it up in winamp or WMP through the right click menu. All media players have some sort of library management and I don't really like any of them, although the itunes one is the best overall in my opinion and I feel that winamp has a stronger search function.

The real problem is that when all the CDs where ripped into itunes they where given a serialized file name and stuffed in a random serialized folder. This means an album can have 3 songs in 1 folder and 6 in another but you would never know it because the folders are called f00 and f27 and the file names are ZQLFS.m4a or IGPAK.m4a
For someone who likes to browse his music collection by wandering through his folder hierarchy this doesn't help. By converting all the songs to MP3 itunes renames the files by the same hierarchy I've been using for almost 10 years now (started way back when I would record my CDs into .WAVbecause there wasn't anything else). That structure is a folder for the artist->folder for album->song files.
Compilation albums are clumped under various artist or don't get an artist folder.
Itunes follows this close enough for it's mp3s and I can now find and listen to all those songs on my IPAQ. With a 1 gb SD card I can fit enough music to get me through the week but all those .m4a files where off limits. Not anymore. It feels good to have my library consolidated and standardized. No I need to go through and weed out all the duplicates and I know there is a lot of them.

Special thanks to C1 for donating large portions of my itunes library ;)

11.15.2006

I have no testies!!

My wife told me "you have no testies" tonight. I know what your all thinking... "las vegas was a lie!"
No no.. its ok, no lies yet. I was is a rather chipper mood tonight and my wife asked why. I told her I had my last test today for a while and was homework free.

On a slightly different topic both of us have gotten a cold. I am pretty sure I brought the damned thing into the house and I am getting better while my wife is just passing the worst of it. I'm sorry baby, I didn't know. I love you, I didn't mean to make you sick. Man what a crappy week.

The last time we got sick together was a week after I moved here. It was our first New Years together and we toasted the occasion with a shot of Nyquil.