the corner office

The nominations are in and voting is open for the 2005 SA Blog Awards.

Many of the usual suspects are there, and deservedly so. But it's something to see how the SA blogging world has exploded - I've never seen half the blogs on the list. How many more weren't even shortlisted? When I first started blogging I'd sub to every South African blog I found, just because they were there. The community, so to speak, was pretty small and a new blogger joining the ranks was quite an event. No longer. It's been something to see the growth since I started in 2003, and I can only imagine what some of the real early adopters who've been doing it for even longer must think. I wonder what it'll be like in another year's time?

Crikey. A British 3-year old with an IQ of 137 has joined Mensa.

As friends and family start raising their little 'uns I constantly find myself asking stupid questions about what kids are supposed to be doing at various ages. "Little Algernon said his first word today" and I'm not sure whether to congratulate the parent or not. Was it "on time"? Was the timing something to be proud of or worried about?

I'm clueless about when babies should be walking, talking, mastering precalculus, etc. But at age 3 I doubt I even knew how to tie my own shoelaces.

Today saw me return the gym after far too long a break. Didn't do anything intense... just "get the blood flowing" stuff. It's a bit depressing how far I've regressed since last year's diligence. I suspect I'm going to have some seriously tender abdominal muscles tomorrow. But as always, it's great to feel revved up after a stretch of exertion.

Ronwen rented Kaena on DVD this afternoon. Lousy story, but absolutely stunning graphics. I haven't seen too many animated movies, so maybe this kind of stuff is par for the course these days... but it's a long way from The Secret of NIMH, that's for sure.

Wasted nearly an hour this evening trying to figure out why a sample app from one of my textbooks wouldn't compile. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why a simple rand() was causing a linker error in this app, and only this app. After spending a lot of time with Java and Eclipse recently the whole makefile palaver is a bit of a jolt again. I wasn't really paying attention when I typed in the source code, and I was looking at rand() in one place but not noticing the rand() a few lines up, which was a typo. Aaargh! The usual lesson learned - when you know things don't make sense, they probably don't, so give up and try something else for a while. That could be summarised into this maxim:

If Googling for your error message returns a page or less, you should probably work on the assumption that you're doing something stupid.

The CD ripping continues - I'm past the A's and onto the B's. I'm having fun doing some genre-bouncing, especially with some of these CDs not having been listened to in half a decade or more. So after revisiting my entire Bauhaus collection and then ending up with Chet Atkins' and Mark Knopfler's "Neck and Neck," things can't get much weirder. (Well, they can, 'cause Syd Barrett's next, but that's tomorrow's story).

Unbelievable. I mentioned earlier this week that I was ripping my CDs, and was using a tool called cdparanoia. Well, cdparanoia finished off reading a single CD track last night, that has taken days (literally) to read. Good sense said I should have cancelled the process, but I was curious to see what the end product would sound like, and also because this is a CD that I really was heartbroken to see damaged.

The outcome is amazing. Playing this CD normally was a bit like listening to a scratched vinyl - jumping, and non-stop scratching and clicking noises. After days of whirring up and down, I now have a nearly perfect-sounding digital copy of the track I was ripping. It'll probably take more than a month of non-stop ripping to get the rest of the CD, but I'll do it when the rest of my CDs are done.

What CD am I so desperate to preserve? It's the Abelarde Sanction's Best of 2000 compilation CD. The deterioration isn't surprising - it was only ever a home-burned, supremely limited edition affair. And why am I so desperate to preserve it? Because it's the only CD that has me on it!

Way back in 2000, friends of mine had an electro-punk-ish band called Atmosphere Control Unit. They were between guitarists at the time, and I offered to jam with them until they found a "real" guitarist. I was (and am) an utterly unaccomplished guitar player, but my ham-fisted noise-making seemed to work and I ended up playing with the guys for well over a year... got to play a good few gigs, and we recorded one track at the time, a badly mastered version of which made it onto the Abelarde compilation. Playing in a band was an awesome experience and I was always grateful for the chance to do it.

I realised after the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2004, that this CD is the only copy I have of that recording, and so, it is... precious to me...

In addition to that, this compilation just takes me back to the "live music" days before Ronwen and I became complete hermits... amazing bands, amazing music, amazing experiences. Many of the bands, the venues and the people have moved on, so this CD is a once-off, small piece of history and a happy reminder of what it was all about.

Via Radley Balko (here and here), the hip-hop look stands to get very expensive in the US state of Virginia, which is looking to pass a law which will render wearers of "lewd or indecently exposed" underwear liable to a fine of $50. This is a gem of a line from the Washington Times:

It's not clear if the fine would apply to plumbers, carpenters or other laborers who have problems with low-riding pants.

Heh. Heh. Say no to crack.

I have no idea what statement one is making by exposing one's rods to the world, but as long there are no skid marks, what's the big deal? It could be worse. We could go back to that 60s/70's tight jeans look when underwear wasn't really in fashion at all, and men and women let it all hang out, so to speak. They never passed laws against that. I have an old Cat Stevens vinyl and the album cover has a photo of ole Cat perched on a chair at a concert, and I'm sorry, but I got the heebies every time I saw that picture. I'm all heebied out right now, just remembering it. What was that generation thinking? The worst you can say about baggies and exposed undies is that it looks a bit foolish to the uninitiated. That whole tight jeans thing, on the other hand, was plain traumatic.

Anyhoo.

News today is that Prince Charles is to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. It seems to be a bit of a hot subject for some, but I don't really have an opinion. Good luck to them, I suppose.

What did jolt me a little was one news report mentioning that it was 24 years since Charles and Diana married. Nearly a quarter of a century? Jeez... talk about feeling one's age. Then I got to thinking about the wedding photos (images which must be indelibly imprinted onto the brains of anyone with access to a TV in 1981), remembered the hair styles, and realised that yes, 1981 was indeed a loooong time ago.

I remember, way back in '96, on a local mailing list, someone sending out a "you know you're addicted to the Internet when..." joke - the usual fluff about portaloos and upset spouses and faceless friends. The one "addiction sign" which really made an impression was this one:

You check your mail. No new messages. So you check again.

I remember that line every time I hit the 'fetch' button in my mail client. In light of that, this BBC article (via Steve Castledine) about a man who's kicked the broadband habit and returned to 56k dial-up, and reclaimed his life in doing so. It rings far too true for me.

A month or two back I commented to Ronwen on how we're just constantly ingesting information, constantly looking for more stuff to give a shit about. Why do we do that? I remembered my late grandfather, in particular, who'd sit down religiously every evening to watch the 8 o'clock news, take in what was happening in the world around him, and then move on and not worry about it for another 24 hours. I can only imagine what he'd think of the idea of multiple 24 hour news channels, email, instant messaging, constantly-updated news sites, RSS aggregators and the like. I'm sure the first thing he'd ask is "how do you get anything done?"

I started ripping all my CDs this weekend. I decided I'd had enough of the grab a few, play 'em, re-file 'em schlep I've always gone through before. Being able to share everything on my home network and get to whatever music I want with a few button clicks is the way of the future, baby... As soon as you dive into it though, you realise it's not a simple job. What software to use, what encoding formats, what bitrates, decisions, decisions.

I've ended up using a nifty Linux command-line tool called abcde (A Better CD Encoder), which is a really simple front-end for really awesome pieces of software like cdparanoia and lame - tying in CDDB lookups, naming, tagging, the lot. One or two config file settings and off you go with a simple abcde.

Cdparanoia rocks in that it seems to do a really good job of "repairing" otherwise shaky tracks. A few of my CDs have been "sensitive" (polite way of saying poorly manufactured or succumbing to rot) and almost unlistenable on most CD players. Cdparanoia's done a decent job of constructing an error-free digital copy of the CDs, and I can listen to them again. The most frightening part is looking at the diagnostics as cdparanoia works its way through audio CDs... I'm amazed that they work at all!

The other major decision is what encoding format to use. With some of these damaged/dodgy CDs, I've encoded the files in flac, a lossless (and free) format which is an exact copy of the digital data on the CD itself. These "masters" can then be used to create mp3 or other "lossy" formats for normal listening. It would be great to keep everything in flac format and know that my CDs are fully backed up, but at a few hundred megs per CD, my hard drives will be overflowing in no time. The downside is that I'll probably want to redo all of this again some time (when terabyte disks come standard with new PCs), but I'll just treat that as another chance to amble down memory lane in the future :-)

For most of my (healthy) CDs, I've encoded them to mp3, using lame's default VBR presets. My ears aren't the greatest, nor are my speakers, earphones and sound card, and most sites suggest that the defaults are near-enough to CD quality for most plebs, so that's what I've relied on.

Via Russell Beattie, Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines.

First, it'll be changed logos and branding. Then Ask Jeeves crap will start working its way into the functionality and UI. Anyone want to bet on how long it takes before you're wading through banner ads to get to your feeds? Then a "Bloglines Pro" for a low low subscription price, while the free version becomes more crippled, neglected and sucky.

Before long, you've exported your OPML (if you can still get to it), and you're back to a private bandwidth-guzzling RSS reader.

I'm being rather negative, and if I'm wrong I'll be a happy camper. But I don't think my pessimism is misplaced. Bloglines' running costs must be horrendous. It has no ostensible revenue stream right now, so it seemed rather obvious from the outset that the end goal must have been to build a loyal user base and collect enough blog content and useful technology to make it salable to some corporate types who'd be wanting to wring some sort of business model out of it. Perfectly understandable, and respect to the Bloglines folk for doing it. I'm just disappointed that reality had to set in.

Sheesh...

Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a supervolcano. It's active, causing parts of the area to rise and shift, scientists calculate that it's over 30,000 years past its expected eruption date, and when it blows, our planet isn't going to be a fun place to be:

We have absolutely nothing to compare it to. The biggest blast in recent times was that of Krakatau in Indonesia in August 1883, which made a bang that reverberated around the world for nine days, and made water slosh as far away as the English Channel. But if you imagine the volume of material ejected from Krakatau as being about the size of a golf ball, then the biggest of the Yellowstone blasts would be the size of a sphere you could just about hide behind. On this scale, Mount St. Helen's would be no more than a pea.

It's estimated that only a few thousand human beings survived the last supervolcano eruption, some 74,000 years ago. More interesting detail and links at The Agitator.