Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.
Examples:
We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really [...]
Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad.
I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start [...]
I’ve finally started backing up my CD collection, only half a year after I planned to do this. The goals are:
To have lossless backups, including offsite ones, of the entire collection.
To do whatever error correction is possible when creating the backups.
(The vast majority of the CDs are between 10 and 20 years old, and [...]
What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case.
Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order:
Quality [...]
I just upgraded to iTunes 7; I wish I hadn’t. Downloading fancy album cover is nice (though I wish I hadn’t had to give a credit card number to do so); the reflected images of the album covers are a bit much, but whatever. We’ll see how gapless playback works.
Unfortunately, it turns out [...]
Guitar Hero is a music game that comes with a guitar-shaped controller. There are five “fret buttons” on the neck, and a strum button on the body. (It’s somewhat inconsistent on the model it uses - sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with a single string and five frets, and sometimes it [...]
The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff.
The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in [...]
A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going [...]
I had hopes for France, but not much seems to be coming of that. But now Norway is stepping up to the plate, and is demanding action fast.
Aside from the DRM issues, I like that they’re complaining that Apple “reserves the right to change unilaterally consumers’ rights to access material already purchased.” Yes, [...]
I am still looking for music recommendations. Several of the bloggers that I read occasionally recommend either individual artists or podcasts; since I seem to agree with said bloggers’ tastes in other matters, I usually give them a try. Alas, all such experiments have proved unsatisfactory. Fortunately, the artists that they recommend [...]
Translators, beware.
Banana phone!
Just in time for the primaries.
No, we don’t need webcasting rights.
Fun with flash.
Um. Well.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out. Don’t get me wrong - the proposed law won’t leave us in an ideal situation, but I am glad to see a real stand for openness, and sensible penalties for making unauthorized personal copies.
On a related note, I laughed at this quote from an interview with [...]
I was listening to Herbert Grönemeyer’s first two albums in the car today; as they always do, they reminded me of the game Trinity. It is by far the strongest association I have of any piece of music with any other work. (Other than soundtracks, of course.)
Which is pretty weird - the two have, a [...]
I did not know about these.
I would seem to be quite the lucky fellow: I won another iPod at work. They asked us all to bang on the Sun Grid for a little while before its launch, to try to find some bugs; I did my banging, and my name was drawn out of a hat.
About which I feel [...]
I am juvenile enough to be amused by the phrase “his ancient vocal technique, known as ‘yoik’.”
(From Gierran, by Wimme. The vocals are pretty interesting; I could have done without the decidedly non-ancient accompaniment, but Scott warned me when he lent it to me that he probably likes electronica more than I do.)
A followup to an old post of mine: I was just reading the liner notes to the Davitt Moroney recording of The Art of the Fugue, and it seems that there is good historical evidence that the unfinished fugue was, indeed, intended to be part of the work. Which makes me happy: it would [...]
I don’t know if anybody cares, but here’s a longish John Lennon interview that I hadn’t seen before.
I’ve been celebrating my newfound freedom to listen to whatever the the hell I want by going through the oeuvre of Charming Hostess. At least most of their oeuvre; browsing through their website, it would seem that I am missing Thick and Grim. So maybe I’ll have a followup post next week.
Anyways: I [...]
When I first moved out here (summer of 1998), I didn’t listen to music much. When I was at home, my media time was largely spent playing video games; sometimes I listened to CD’s in the car, but once Liesl learned to drive, I took the bus to work. (During which I read [...]
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