August 2008

There is a secret to creating killer Smart Playlists in iTunes. You have to know what not to play. The best way to do that is with an “ignore list”. And I’m going to show you how to make one.

For several years now iTunes has given you the ability to use playlists themselves as parameters when building smart playlists. That means you can make a smart playlist that does (or does not) include another playlist. Why is this important? It’s important because — if you’re like me — you love to hear almost all of the music in your library, but there is a tremendous amount of stuff that you do not want to hear out of the blue.

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My grandmother’s wake and funeral were — of course — very, very sad. I think one of the things that bothered me the most was the music at the wake. It was so … depressing. Now, my grandmother was 86 years old before she was killed by the incompetence of morons; she wasn’t exactly a fan of rock n’ roll. So I didn’t expect them to be playing Def Leppard in the funeral parlor, y’know? But anything would have been better than the canned funeral parlor soundtrack.

I can only hope that when I’m gone someone has the balls to bring an iPod to the wake. And please — if you’re going to even have a wake for me — do it in a house for the love of God. And bring some Maker’s Mark and vodka. If there’s one time when it should be completely acceptable to tip one back, it should be at my freaking wake. So anyway. Don’t play “Ave Maria” or Mozart (although I do loves me some Wolfgang). You don’t have to blast the stereo or anything and start a dance party. But at least listen to something I would have liked.

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Here’s a little trick to help you keep your books from getting lost forever. If you’re like me, you get a ton of snail-mail spam, what we used to call “junk mail”. Lots and lots of companies — especially those concerned with getting your money to save the whales, the environment, the lives of endangered pets, etc. — put a few sheets of return address labels, with your name and address on them, in their pleas. (I think the theory is that you’ll feel guilty for using the labels without sending them a donation.) Instead of throwing them immediately into the trash, grab those return address labels and stick them on the inside covers of your books. It might not help you keep them on your shelves, but at least your friend will remember that it was stolen from your library.

Jim just showed me a bitchin’ cool Mac trick:

If you press Shift, the Apple (”command”) key, and the 4 key at the same time, it will change your mouse cursor into a targeting device. Then hit the space bar and your cursor will turn into a camera icon. Use the mouse to move the camera over any window and left-click. Bam! That will create a screen capture as a .png file on your desktop.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports criticizes IOC President Rogge:

Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.

All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate. …

Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.

BMX? Men’s BMX and Women’s BMX? Water Polo? Volleyball? Beach Volleyball? Badminton? Table Tennis? Kayaking? Basketball? Field Hockey? Trampoline? Race Walking?

Look. I know that Ping-Pong Table Tennis and Synchronized Swimming have been in the Olympics for a long time. That doesn’t mean they need to remain in the Olympics. Can’t we just all agree that these were silly mistakes, sudden displays of horrible taste, fads gone wild? And who fell asleep at the controls and allowed these new ridiculous “sports” into the Games? Good grief.

And I know I’m alone on this one, but I can’t even get comfortable with Basketball, Soccer, Baseball, and Softball. Hello? These are team sports. What happened to the Olympics being all about individual achievement?

I am a big fan of Bloodhound Gang. They had two big radio hits — “Fire Water Burn” (1996) and “The Bad Touch” (2000) — so I guess it’s not fair to call them one-hit wonders, but generally they’re not exactly “pop” music. Most of their songs are painfully sophomoric — “The Ballad of Chasey Lain“, “I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks”, and “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” come to mind. (One of my favorites is “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying”, although I don’t play that one in the office very often.)

If you can somehow manage to ignore almost all of the lyrics, the song Pennsylvania has a refrain that I think is actually pretty beautiful:

You are the heart dotting “i”
In the word “apologize”
Scribbled drunk on a postcard
Sent from somewhere volcanoes are
I am the heart with no name
Airbrushed on the license plate
Of a Subaru that was
Registered in Pennsylvania

I’m seriously considering purchasing Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme. For some reason I have started hating the look and feel of my own site. I want to change everything about it. It’s looked pretty much the same for almost 4 years now …

Update 2008-08-21: I did it. I bit the bullet and am now running Thesis. What do you think?

Recent Movies:

• Pineapple Express ***1/2
• Gone Baby Gone ****
• Bottle Shock ** (based on the book Judgment of Paris)
• Gone in 60 Seconds *1/2

Currently Reading:

• Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai, by Ben Mezrich
• Nature Girl, by Carl Hiaasen
• How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein
• The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games, by Tony Perrottet
• Batman: The Long Halloween

Just for the hell of it, I’m posting my latest LA DWP bill, which covers June 10th to August 8th. How much are you paying?

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While we were waiting for the Olympics to start out here on the West coast, we caught the end of an old Entourage episode on HBO. The track playing over the end credits was Sinnerman, by Nina Simone. That song is also played during the conclusion of The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan, which has been on television a few hundred thousand times lately, and I really like it. This time I remembered to email a note to myself from my iPhone to download it.

Since Phelps isn’t racing until 10pm, I decided to grab the song. I’ll gladly pay $.99 for a track on iTunes, so I fired ‘er up and … ugh … Of course that’s one of the “album only” songs. For some mysterious reason every now and then Apple (or the record label, or who knows) sets it so that some songs cannot be downloaded individually. You have to buy the whole album to get the track. While I’m okay to shell $.99 for a great song, I’m loathe to drop $9.99 for an album when I only want one song.

So of course I flip iTunes the bird and fire up Limewire. But for some reason, even though there are apparently hundreds of copies of that song available, none of them will download. (I suspect my ISP is blocking Limewire, actually.)

Torrents to the rescue. I found a copy on torrents.to, fired up Transmission, and should have the whole Thomas Crown Affair OST in about twenty minutes. This is why I love the Internets.

I can’t tell if Mike’s Terms of Use are supposed to be serious or if they’re parody. That worries me.

Some of the “Tools for Travelers” at World66 are pretty nifty. You can make neat maps displaying all the countries and states you’ve visited. I feel like I’m forgetting a few states, and I definitely need to see more of Earth.

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This morning I discovered what is possibly the world’s most annoying iPhone bug. For some time now I’ve been trying to determine why every now and then I seem to sleep right through my alarm. The iPhone alarm can be set to be tragically loud and uncomfortably annoying, so the fact that I have frequently not heard it at all was a mystery. Until now.
Here is the bug:

If you receive an SMS message and do not acknowledge it — because you’re fast asleep, for example — the iPhone alarm will not execute until you clear the SMS notification.

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