Month: April 2009

Still refining that recipe for napalm. Need the mix just right before I embark on clearing the back yard.

Bobkat; the words ‘science project’ and ‘sleepypete’ in the same sentence fill me with fear… 🙂

Especially when he includes words like ‘petrol’ and ‘matches’….

cq

These are GREAT pics, and I agree with the others: kudos to you for posting the self-portraits.

I’ve always wondered why cricket isn’t more popular here in Canada. We’ve got enough of a British heritage that it should be second nature to us. Thankfully, at least, rugby seems to have a solid footing in uni circles.

Funny — I mentioned that I thought about posing for my “round” entrance,
but – I wouldn’t DARE post it. We women just take ourselves too seriously.

I played racquetball for years – and I had huge bruises from being hit by the ball. Occasionally I’d get hit with a raquet — and that was bad!

Think I need to buy more wires …

I’ve run out of different setups I can play with !

And I reckon I’ve been sold a lemon with the wifi card that went into my desktop 🙁

The science project should keep you out of trouble? LoL 🙂

There is nothing more frustrating than a dodgy internet connection.

… which means a distraction is needed. Cos while I’ll natter about the people, I’m not too fond on talking about work.

I have a new Science Project 🙂

And those words usually have people who know me diving for cover or grabbing a gas mask. Previous Sleepy Science Projects have involved things being left in fridges long enough that they grow tentacles and fur. This one is a little different and it’ll be highly techie, so it’ll appear on the techie zone blog as it evolves.

Been having the annoyance of a dodgy internet … I went a long period where I just wasn’t interested in playing online games but now the interest is rising again, it gets highly frustrating when your enjoyment of the online game gets blocked by you getting knocked offline every few minutes … One of the things I’ve tried is to try out different ways of connecting up my PCs to see if that makes an improvement. Which brings me to the Science Project 🙂

I back up my iTunes library reasonably often – and now it’s gotten rather big (11GB, almost 3000 songs !) it takes a while to copy it from laptop to desktop. Especially when the wifi card on the desktop apparently isn’t too good :

Copy using wifi – I gave up after over 2 hours
Copy using a wire link – About an hour 🙂

So that’s my Science Project – checking out how fast I can wing the Bits around. Lot more boring than growing Alien Life Forms in the fridge. Dinner’s about to come out of the oven and it’s gaming tonight, so this one will take a little while to implement. Curious about the results …

Oh – highlights of the new additions to the library are :

Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) – well worth a listen this girl
Goldfrapp – I’d recommend Supernature if you’re into something loud or Seventh Dream for more relaxed and ethereal
KT Tunstall – curious 🙂

Addon – Having Goldfrapp’s Supernature on in the car makes you drive 10mph faster. Fact.

Heh heh heh – I’m cheating with the stats – they’re what iTunes tells me 🙂 But I’m a stats junkie, so that’s another thing that keeps me happy.

I kinda like iTunes but what’s really improved my listening quality lately is the Airport Express that lets me stream music to remote speakers over my wifi network. There is a bad though – iTunes 8.1 changed something that broke the wifi network for an hour or two. (See techie blog)

I don’t use archive cds as a backup – I’d lose ’em or they’d suffer cd fading … But what I do occasionally do is copy (there’s that word again 😉 the whole iTunes library between laptop and desktop so I have a backup on another hard disc.

And then I twiddle my thumbs while waiting for it to copy over wifi at about 5Mbit/s (Airport Express is unspectacular in its reliability) before giving up and using an Ethernet patch cable instead 🙂

The recording industry has failed miserably in its attempts to define what is – and is not – considered “fair use” in this increasingly virtualized age of content acquisition and consumption.

In many cases, they’re using legislation that’s decades old to try to go after regular folks who just want to listen to stuff they’ve legitimately acquired. As always, technology races ahead of society’s ability to manage it. Unfortunately, we all get caught in the middle.

Your music management is far more sophisticated than mine. I archive all my material carefully on an external hard drive and backup CDs and DVDs, but my iTunes management is, frankly, almost non-existent. I seriously despise that software!

Not sure what Tanya thinks of it, though. I should ask her 🙂

Nah – don’t think I’ve done any of that, although I have listened to half my iTunes library over the past 3 weeks 🙂 And at 2794 songs, not counting duplicates or songs I really dislike, that’s a decent sized library now.

Good job I got another laptop at the start of the year, the old one woulda been creaking 🙂

I’ve got a couple more days of off-work time to go, I’m wondering if I can get the recently played in iTunes up to 1500 different songs over the last fortnight. Going to iTunes has revolutionised the way I listen to music, as its Party Shuffle (now iTunes DJ) lets me pick and choose what’s coming up. So instead of lobbing cds into the player, I’ll listen to a variation. It’s very good quality too, as the Airport Express widget lets me pipe the music through to my cinemasound speakers. They’re not up to separates hi-fi standards but they’re still pretty good. Good enough that I’ve not felt the need to cart around the separates system I still have stored at my parents’ place.

I still listen to the albums too, my iTunes DJ typically has an album queued up along with the semi-random picks.

The iTunes habit brings me to something in the news today, where the people behind a major file-sharing network have been found guilty of copyright breach on a massive scale. The way UK law stands at present, I’m technically in breach of the copyright law by importing my cds into iTunes. Even though after import, the cd then gets stored on the shelf, safe in its box. Let’s examine that :

Sleepy buys cd in the shop
Cd gets imported into iTunes
Cd gets stored on the shelf, while I listen to the copy that’s inside iTunes

The dodgy (according to UK law) part is the “copy” bit, even though I’ve bought the music, law says I can’t import it into a software program that then allows me to drop it onto an iPod. I can’t even leave it on the safety of the shelf, where it won’t get damaged or scratched by whizzing around inside a cd player at several hundred rpm.

Crazy law, out of date now we’re in the digital age.

Another curiosity is Youtube. I’ve used the video site to check out new bands and new singers, to see if it’ll be worth me buying a cd or not. For one or two groups, I wouldn’t have bought the cd’s if I hadn’t checked them out on Youtube first. So the people uploading a copy (there’s that word again) to Youtube have led to me (and quite possibly many others) buying what they’ve watched. I suppose the best way to think of it is to see Youtube as an equivalent of Top Of The Pops or MTV, where you get to view or listen to the music but you don’t walk away with your own copy of it.

My sister and I do our own file sharing too – we’ll bounce tracks off each other via MSN. That’s technically breach of copyright too, however I can name a whole heap of albums that neither of us would have bought if we hadn’t done that.

I’m starting to sound a bit like a frustrated teenager at the moment, railing against a law that while it was a good idea at the time, hasn’t kept up with events. My real interest is in the music, I get bored quick so one habit I’ve developed is to hunt around for new music. When I find something promising, I’ll get the wallet out and lay out the cash. Actually buying your music instead of pirating it means your favourite artists get something back from the hard work they’ve put in and hopefully, they’ll make some more 🙂

The pop industry is littered with artists who have simply given up because they’re not feeling appreciated enough. If they give up, then they’re not producing interesting new music for us to buy. And as the pirates don’t believe in paying for anything, they’re cutting down the chances that they’re going to get lots of new stuff to listen to.

Right – that’s the rant out of the way and this post has grown far too big to add in what I intended to, which is to tell people about the wonderful new music I’ve been listening to lately ! Think I need to do another post …

PS Now at 1466 different songs listened to over the past 3 weeks 🙂