In the spirit of procrastination I decided to write an applescript that allows you to enable/disable multiple tracks in iTunes, since it seems to be natively lacking that functionality. Basically, the disabled tracks won’t get played in playlists/random selection — it’s useful if you’re an album whore and have tracks you never listen to just but you just needed to have the whole album. I began my quest but decided to check the internet first for existing scripts. Low and behold, Apple comes through (why this isn’t in the product is beyond me).
Now, don’t let that shifty purple logo and iTunes 2.0.3 thing deceive you, the Enable|Disable Script will work just fine with iTunes 4.1. You can’t get the scripts by themselves, so just download the whole package, unpack it and throw the Enable script into Library>iTunes>Scripts and then try running it on a track in iTunes. It’ll ask you to find Internet Explorer.app, just select Safari instead (i think all it needs it for, is if you’re not running iTunes 2.0.3 it’ll launch the webapp and bring you to the site to download it).
That concludes the procrastination session, I’m off to study some more computational geometry and approximation algorithms. Go team!
The Onion A.V. Club interviewed Rza, you should read it, like Freeman says. Here’s a few bits:
O: You like Bob Hope?
RZA: Yeah, man. Bob Hope is crazy.
O: Who surprised you by being a Wu-Tang Clan fan?
RZA:Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, man, this nigga knew all my shit. That fucked my head up. There are a few other actors like that. There’s a lot of Hollywood actors, in fact, that I be meeting and shit. The Baldwins, I’m real cool with them.
Sounds like a pretty cool guy, like someone you’d want to hang out with. And just make shit.
The paper finished up pretty early last night, we were outta EngSoc by 2:30. It’s the last issue of the semester and it probably shows. It’s a busy time of year for people, tons of shit due and everyone looks incredibly overtired. I looked around at about 10:30 and realized that none of the writing staff were around and was happy that we had cut the paper size from 20 pages down to 16. However, the loyal staffers Freeman and Tavis returned to keep us company in the wee hours, although I suspect the alterior motive may have been bandwidth abuse.
I’m trying to get my ass motivated to write a paper on Palm/PocketPC computing, I don’t really know where to start. I’m supposed to do it on roughly the same topic as my presentation, but so far the farthest it has progressed in my head is, “dry pice of boringness.”
Halo coming to mac. I got a bit bored when I played this on Xbox, i didn’t really know what I was doing and got my ass kicked in multiplayer or something. I don’t game all that much, but sometimes it’s nice to have another major release game around to play.
Terminal command of the day:
sips –addIcon imagefile(s)
The scriptable image processing system allows you play around with images, this switch will use the image to create an icon for it. Useful for browsing photo archives.
If you’ve got a mac, you can make your terminal speak to you. You can even make it speak text files to you. And send the words into an audio file for safe keeping. It all comes courtesy of the ’say’ command.
say “I am the terminal, I hate you.”
say -o filename.aiff “I am the terminal, I hate you”
say -o filename.aiff -f tobespoken.txt
The first one will make it say something, the second one will output it to an .aiff file and the last one will speak the textfile into the .aiff file. There’s a -v switch to change the voice, you can also just make it speak text files. It could be useful in conjunction with an iPod. You can even convert your .aiff files to .mp3 (or acc) by using the advanced menu in iTunes (example).
Looks like the past is coming back to haunt Eminem, people have produced a recording off a song with racist statements towards black women: “Never date a black girl because blacks only want your money, black girls and white girls just don’t mix because black girls are dumb and white girls are good chicks”.
He says it was something stupid he did after he had just broken up with his girlfriend at the time. The main reason I’m bringing this up is this quote from the article, “These are racist remarks by someone who has the ability to influence millions of minds.” I think accusing Eminem of racism is nigh on retarded, look at most of his collaborators and mentors. The first thing that popped into my mind though was the millions of minds thing. And then Strom Thurmond, celebrated US politician, with the power to influence millions of minds. Who stayed in US politics for decades despite having a track record for extreme racism (including running as a third party presidential candidate whose platform was essentially, don’t give black people any rights).
Well, I finished my hellish beginning of the week, now I get to relax a little bit. Got out of the paper around 4:30 monday morning (issue is out today!), had a classics test at 11:30, a networks assignment due at 1:30 and a 15-20 minute presentation for Tuesday afternoon. And I finished it all.
Last night I watched Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s three hour European epic. Visual it was amazing, absolutely sick… he uses a lens developed for NASA to shoot scenes in natural light. The music is fantastic too. And that narrator, wow, it’s that soft soothing voice that puts things bluntly and isn’t really expected. If you like the bang bang bang style of film making you probably won’t enjoy it. If you like lush cinematography and general brilliance, you should really check this out, it’s one of the most underrated films of all time.
Some tidbits:
Gates as Morpheus, Ballmer as Neo
Reporter could have killed Bush
Too bad this Prime Minister is leaving
ShapeShifter - Mac Themes
Hola, there’s a Golden Words BNO/GNO tonight that I should be going to. Unfortunately, the decided to hold it on the same day that I Guided by Voices is playing in Toronto. So, I’ll be at the concert tonight, it should be good. I remember the boys night outs that I went to when I was beginning to write for the paper, it was a lot of fun and a good way to get to know the older staffers. It’s too bad that I can’t be there, I remember getting my editor in first year to drink a coffee mug full of gin, it was pretty nasty.
On a somewhat related note, the weather is fucking ugly out. Well, maybe not that bad but it’s the ugly gray cold shivery kind of november stuff that’s no fun.
Sentence in algorithms textbook taken out of context: “The twiddle factor used in each butterfly operation depends on the value of s.” I have test tomorrow. Test involves discrete fast fourier transforms (multiple processor) and decrypting RSA encrypted messages without private keys (small values).
And I give you an efficient way to waste your time, I love some of those games.
Another issue is done, that makes 11 for the semester and about 14 so far. I still haven’t received a transition manual from either of the former editors. Fortunately, Neil left us a bible. I don’t really refer to it anymore, but I read through it before I started (the thing is at least an inch thick). Anyway, the issue this week is 24 pages, that’s like doing a double issue compared to some of the ones we’d been doing. In my opinion it’s too much, 16 and 20 pagers make for better content, oh well, it’s fun. There’s a lot of good stuff in the issue this week, there’s also a lot of space filler. Our main graphics dude was sick (may or may not have been related to Sci Formal), he usually works his magic on the cover. We only had one graphics person around and lots of colour stuff to be done, so I did a bunch of work on the cover. It’s alright, it’ll make people smile at least. It’s a pun though. A fucking pun. I think sleep is in order now.
Hmm, lets see. The lightbulb in my desklamp blew out, and i fucked up one of the one’s in the overhead light trying to see what wattage it was. It didn’t really want to go back in the socket. So, my room’s a bit dark.
Stuff stuff stuff. There was the DJ Vadim show at the Elixir last night; I went with Freeman and Tavis, Eve showed up too. The show was alright, I didn’t stick around until the end, I was kind of tired. The waitress we had was kind of wacky, I think she was overworked/tired. She left her tray at our table for fifteen minutes and rambled on about stuff, it was funny. We had a pad of paper with us and drew a bunch of stuff, I should probably take a look at it. Some of it should probably be burned.
I went and saw Matrix Revolutions on Wednesday night. It wrapped up a bunch of stuff, left some question but no worse than the first movie. There was a lot of action, boom boom boom. I found that their ammunition expenditure didn’t seem to match the amount being put in. I guess that’s generally the case in the movies though. There was also a tendency to explain away large questions in a sentence or two, generally along the lines of, “That’s the way things are, you gotta do what you’re meant to do.” It seemed like everything happens for a reason and you should just let it all happen, but while you’re doing that your should do it all really really really fast. On a whole I enjoyed it and wasn’t really disappointed.
Man, the proposal for my final project was due yesterday. I haven’t finished it yet. I probably could have whipped it off, but wanted to thing about it a bit more. The 499 supervisor is my project supervisor, so it’s not like a really have to describe my project much to him anyway. It’s just getting the rough deadlines done. The date isn’t too tight, but if he didn’t do it, no one would submit them. I’m halfway done it, with most of the outline finished. I have a networks assignment due tomorrow, I’m done the second half, but the first question or two are throwing me for a loop.
A new day has arrived — I present to you the comprehensive Guided By Voices online database. Now, it’s the GBV database and not the Robert Pollard database, so don’t get your hopes up too high. Regardless, it’s enough to satiate the most rabid GBV fan. As for me, I can say that I didn’t know Tonics and Twisted Chasers existed. And you know what, I just realized that I lied a sentence or two ago when I said it wasn’t a Robert Pollard database. Well, actually I didn’t lie because it’s not. The point is you can sort by label too, including the Fading Captain Series, so it may as well by the Pollard database.
I went and saw American Splendor with Dave on saturday afternoon. It was at the Screening Room downtown. For those that haven’t been, it’s akin to watching something on a really big television, but lower quality. The theatre has an endearing quality to it though.
I saw the trailer for the movie a few days ago and decided that I wanted to see it when it came out. Coincidentally, it showed up at the Screening Room last weekend. The movie is about the life of Harvey Pekar, in a pseudo-documentary/biography sort of way. There was a bunch of different techniques used to give it a more authentic feel, mainly some white screen things while the real Harvey is narrating the movie. Basically, he creates a comic book series based on his life and illustrated by his friend Robert Crumb. It was a little bit different than I expected, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I recommend going to see it.
The internet is littered with abandoned websites that haven’t been updated in months or years. We’ll no shit.
Well the good news is that the newspaper is back up to 20 pages this week, rather than the 12’s we’ve running lately. The bad news is that I got out at 5am and have a test at 1130. Go classics, go classics, go! Absorb yourself into my brain.
