Wednesday, September 10, 2008

LHC Switched On

In honour of the successful switch-on, I thought this was not bad and quite educational: The LHC Rap (which surpassed 2 million views today)

 

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Chrome and Don't You Just Hate It When...

With this post, I have surpassed the total number of posts I made in August (2). Just felt like saying that.

I've downloaded the new Google browser Chrome and have to say I like it's minimalist functional take on a browser. It is sort of becoming my browser of choice already.

Last but not least a minor annoyance:

do you know the bags of pasta that you buy that provide you with a strip of tape to reseal the bag? Don't you just hate it when the tape loses its stickiness and the bag just unrolls open? The other thing I hate about those bags is that they make opening the bag so difficult that the force required to open them usually rips it down the side, thus rendering the strip of sticky tape useless because of the gap down the side.

Driving and Eating Skittles

I called at the garage on the way home tonight. It's not my usual but I was low on petrol and as I have a long journey tomorrow again I thought I would get what I needed this evening instead of tomorrow. This particular garage has some sweets that I like - called Black Jacks and Fruit Salad. I also picked up a travel pack of Skittles. Sweets help keep me alert because sometimes when I'm driving for a long time I need some stimulation to avoid getting sleepy and just to keep focused on driving situations. Skittles were a bad choice because I am so addicted. It is impossible for me to have a Skittle and forget the rest. I am even now munching on a multi-coloured handful. I think there is one colour of Skittles that contains a substance banned in the US. Even more reason not to throw them down my neck like I am doing now. And yet I still continue to eat! How much fool am I?

Monday, September 08, 2008

The Rise of iTunes

We've used iTunes for probably 2 or 3 years now but it's only in the last two weeks that I have started the big project of putting all my music into it. I haven't finished yet and have over 9,500 songs (26 days) in my library. I've gotten several boxes of old CDs from my loft and have ripped them onto our external hard disk. I was always worried about not having the capacity to store my music on our hard disk but the external hard disk eliminates that worry.

iTunes has some great features, coverflow for instance. It's funny how coverflow draws you in and just the act of browsing covers is pleasurable. iTunes sometimes doesn't associate any artwork to an album, so I have to look for the cover on the web - Google image search is the best thing for this I've found. The browse library feature is interesting because it shows you how the Gracenote database assigns a genre to your music, examining this I can see that many classifications are not what I would have chosen. It's good fun to see your music collection sliced up into someone else's categories. Just a shame that it is going to take such a long time to work through correcting incorrect categorisations. I do like the smart playlists feature that you can use to create rules that automatically selects songs for you, another way you can "find" songs you haven't listened to in ages.