Using Last Skipped in Smart Playlists

Bryan has posted an elaborate examination of the “Play Count” metric used by iTunes. I, too, use the “Play Count” metric as a component of many of my Smart Playlists, so I was interested in his research. I agree with one of the comments on his post, though, and think that iTunes really simply considers a song as “played” and increments the “Play Count” about ten seconds prior to the end of the song. (It would be interesting to know if the “Cross Fade” option affects this. Maybe Bryan can investigate …)

In most of my smart playlists, the “Last Skipped” metric is more important than the “Play Count”. I have a “base” smart playlist which I include in almost all my other smart playlists. It contains all the tracks which I do not want to include. If a track is a music video, or holiday music, or from an audiobook or podcast, for example, I don’t want it to play while I’m jogging along Olympic Boulevard or doing the laundry. Consider this my Exclusion list.

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Busting Vegas

This weekend I finished reading Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich, the same guy that wrote Bringing Down the House. It’s pretty much the same story: M.I.T. math geeks take on the gambling industry. David and Goliath, etc. It’s a good, quick read. I’d definitely grab Bringing Down the House first, though. It was much more in-depth and — although both are allegedly true stories — it felt much less like a fictionalized account. “Busting Vegas” tends to focus more on the relationships and touchy-feely parts of the story; there are chapters written by the author in the first person and there’s a smallish love-story sub-plot. Either way I should warn you that the chances of learning any magic Blackjack skills and winning big are slim. But it’s still a fun book and perfect for reading while you’re on the beach this summer baking in the sun.

Night Golf at Porter Valley

On Saturday night Kelly and I played in a “Nite Lite” golf tournament at Porter Valley. One word: Awesomeness. The format was a Texas Scramble, which basically means everyone hits a ball and then decides who had the best shot. Then everyone hits from there as if that was his shot. We got to use two or three of my drives and several of my other shots, so that was heartening. The sun was gone from the sky by the time we started the back nine and it was just about pitch black, so we had glow-in-the-dark balls and neon necklaces and little glowing ropes on the carts. It’s quite amazing that nobody was killed.

Because there were so many groups we started on the 5th tee. Every fourth or fifth hole had a theme. The first tee was margaritas and fajitas and tacos. The fifth was ribs, chicken, and rum drinks, etc. The best was probably the 10th hole, with chocolate brownies, scotch, and cigars and coffee. One of the holes was cheese and crackers and wine. Our last hole was, if I remember correctly, fourteen; we finished the night with Italian sausages and beer. This was not an evening for the intestinally weak. Lots of photos, of course, posted to Flickr.

Ryan has finally posted a gallery of photos of the painfully cute Madeline Tober.

Akismet Works

I installed Akismet here at the beginning of the Fall of 2006. I really don’t know how I lived without it. I emptied the queue about seven hours ago, and when I got to the office this morning there were already almost 1500 comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks flagged as spam.

Akismet has protected your site from 380,243 spam comments already, and there are 1,471 comments in your spam queue right now.

Porter Valley Country Club

I played Porter Valley Country Club with Kelly on Sunday. I shot a 55 on the front nine and a 54 on the back nine for a 109, tied for my best round ever. As usual it took me nine or ten holes to get to the point where I could put all the pieces of my swing together and really feel like I was hitting the ball well. (Kelly promises that will only last for about ten or eleven years.) We played the back nine with a nice couple, Dennis and Linda. (Dennis does “flutter testing” for a living, which means he takes airplanes on test flights to make sure the wings stay attached.) Next weekend I’m going to play in a “night golf” tournament at PVCC, so I’ll have to bring my camera and let you know how that goes …

Why would anyone blow their nose into a disposable piece of cotton when they can keep their boogers close to them until laundry day in a customized piece of soft cloth?

WordPress Tags

I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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Robbed at the Tropicana: Part 2

Right around 11 o’clock on the night of Sunday, March 16^th, is when my dad and I realized that our iPods had been stolen from our hotel room at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. My dad had left his charging on the bathroom counter and mine had been in the zippered front pocket of my bookbag with my headphones wrapped around it. We both knew immediately that they had to have been stolen, but we still tore the room apart looking for them. And we went down to the rental car and inspected every inch of it. It was laughable, of course. If you know me at all, you know I am absolutely psychotic about losing things.

After about an hour of searching, my dad was ready to go to bed. He had shot a 95 at Desert Pines that morning — his best round ever and first time to break 100! — and knew there was little chance that hotel security was going to care and / or help us at all. I was so angry I couldn’t see straight.
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Totally awesome: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

Slicing Code with a Rusty Razor Blade

A year or two ago I was returning to my office from lunch with some co-workers. I spotted an old, rusty, razor blade on the sidewalk. “You don’t see that every day,” I said. In retrospect I was probably wrong. Everyone likely sees dozens of rusty razor blades on sidewalks and in gutters every day. We just don’t notice them. That’s not the point. The point is that I told my friend, Jon, that it would make a good domain name. “You should register rustyrazorblade.com,” I said. And he did. Now, if you’re looking for an esoteric, complicated, intense Apache and / or MySQL resource, it’s the place to go. True story.

When the Mob Ran Vegas

Last night I finished reading When the Mob Ran Vegas, a great book that I grabbed at the McCarran Airport on my last trip to Sin City. At times the book suffers from some pretty poor grammar and editing, but the stories are so fascinating that you can forgive the author’s quirky, personal style. Plus, I mean, the guy has got to have a contract on his head; there are dozens of personal anecdotes involving organized crime and its perpetrators, and he really lays the lumber to Sinatra a few times. My mom’s side of the family is 100% Italian — the old school Rhode Island kind <wink wink> — so I recognized pretty much all the characters. (Tales of “the Family” were frequent dinner conversation at my house when I was a kid.) I really enjoyed reading about all the connections to Hollywood and the movie industry, too. If you order a copy from the author’s website, he’ll send you an autographed copy.

Paper Denim & Cloth

I am amazed that Paper Denim & Cloth doesn’t have its own website. I have searched Google and cannot find any authoritative site for the company. How strange. You’re selling $200 pairs of jeans and you don’t have a website?

Anyway. I was pretty proud of myself for snagging a brand new pair of PD&C on eBay for only $35. The original price tag showed that they were retailing for $198.00, so I felt like I made a steal. But then it was pretty funny when I wore them to work today and found another, handwritten, price tag stuffed in the pocket.

Good Will $6.99

I just noticed that a few days ago was the eighth anniversary of this blog. It seems like only yesterday …

Dell Laptop Hard Drive Failure

Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save the day. Alas, after about five hours troubleshooting and researching and on the phone with Microsoft and Dell customer support, I was forced to admit that the hard drive was toast. Three different Dell technicians all gave me the same advice: Reformat the hard drive and reinstall WindowsXP.

Doing that would have deleted all of her data — including her 3000+ iTunes library. This was clearly not a good solution.
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