Trivial Matters

Sunday I joined Facebook. Between the new job on campus and the fact that everyone else I seem to run into is on there, I figured it was time to give in.

And I must admit, this is *way* better than MySpace (not that I’m a social network aficionado by any means). The interface is cleaner, better organized, and has much more information avaialble at any given moment.

It isn’t perfect, however. I still find myself stumbling around for a few things, even after three days. The search feature could use some improvement in narrowing down my results, and a quick tutorial wouldn’t have hurt either.

But the crowning achievement has got to be the applications. I’ve heard about people being bombarded with application invites from their friends, but I’ve yet to experience that. So, for me, the application feature is just fine. I started playing Mafia Wars yesterday, and (as some could see from my status messages) I’ve had to pry myself away from it to do homework, sleep, and everything else in life.

Even as I write this, my character, Louie the Cyclops, is rebuilding his energy levels so that I can finish a few more jobs and get to level 8. I like the fact that the money rolls in regardless of whether I’m there or not, but it’d be nice to build energy and stamina just as quickly.

I’d also like to see the fights explained a bit more, especially the Hitlist jobs. I took on several with no idea about what the guy was packing, and lost them all. That being said, for a free game that I can play when I run out of Conceptis puzzles (which is happening faster and faster each week), Mafia Wars is the bomb.

Capice?

People! Yeah, you! Come over here. Let me show you something…

See this? This is a Meetup group. Yeah, I know Meetup is a great place to meet new people. But did you read the terms and conditions when you joined? No. Well, let me clue you in to something. When you join a group, you sign up automatically for an email list for that group. Anyone who is in the group can send a mass email to everyone else in the group.

What’s that you say? You don’t want to get emails from everyone in the group? I can understand that. So how do you think you should go about handling this?

As a matter of fact, I don’t think telling people to stop using the email service because your tiny mailbox is full is an appropriate response. What’s that? Yes, I do think complaining about it to everyone only serves to compounnd the problem.

What would I do? Thank you for asking. I’d scroll down to the bottom of the emails you are so hell bent on not receiving and click that link that says, “To unsubscribe or to update your mailing list settings, click here.” And then I would either unsubscribe from the email list entirely, or elect to only recieve emails from the group’s coordinator.

Yes, that was easy to do (and maybe even fun). Yes, you can adjust these email settings for every one of your Meetup groups all on the same page. Yes, I do think the people who designed the Meetup site knew what they were doing after all.

No, I won’t help you sort through your email to see what is important. Get a GMail account.

There were actually two benefits that came out of my music drive going to sh*t.

The first was finally weeding out some old duplicate tracks that I had been carrying around. Back in 2002, when I was deployed, I copied about 5 CDs of MP3s off of a shared music server on base. Most of the tracks had poor tags (missing track names, album names, etc.) and over the years, I acquired many of the tracks through legitimate means. The record companies can rest assured that my music collection has quite a few less pirated tracks.

The second benefit was being able to redo my main playlist. I like to use the party shuffle feature when I’m working (like now) and I use a playlist to narrow down the library to just the tracks I want to hear. Right now, the playlist of 1671 tracks out of 5792 total. But I’m wondering if there is a way to optimize this further.

I use a “top 50″ playlist on my running iPod, and I want to try and keep it as accurate as possible. The problem is that I still have duplicate tracks in my library. Some are songs that are on more than one album, but most are live tracks that I also have a studio version of. I’m wondering if there is a way to program iTunes to combine the play counts of all of the related tracks and put the most played of the duplicates into my Top 50.

For example, I have three copies of Everlong by the Foo Fighters. Two are studio tracks (from the original The Colour And The Shape and the re-released extended 10th anniversary edition) and one is a live version off of Skin and Bones. If I play all three on a regular basis, say Sudio Version 1 - 10 times, Studio Version 2 - 12 times, and Live Version - 8 times, how can I get just Studio Version 2 in my Top 50 with a total play count of 20?

I’m sure I can find a way to exclude duplicates from the Top 50, but that would not help if track 50 was played 15 times. Then all three versions of Everlong would be excluded for bieing under 15 plays individually.

I’ll do some searching tomorrow and see what I can find. If anyone has some ideas, post them below.

Grrr…

I bought a hard drive several months ago in preparation for my deployment. I wanted to increase my music library in the likely event that I was asked to play some music while I was over there, and my MacBook HD just was not big enough to hold it all. (My current iTunes library is about 10 GB larger than the MacBook’s HD.)

So I got a Smart Disk FireLite 250 GB drive with FireWire connection. I got everything moved over and started importing more songs, TV shows, and movies. Pretty soon I was on my way to complete domination of the music scene (ok… maybe not). The drive worked so well that I started using it as my backup for the MacBook itself.

Then, a few weeks ago, the drive suddenly went offline. I checked the MacBook, and the FireWire port works fine. After a while, I plugged the drive back in and it stayed connected for a while, and then fell offline again. Thinking it may be a power problem, I tried to get a power adapter for it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any specifications on the type of power to supply beyond 8-33 VDC (there was no amperage rating), so I got an adjustible power adapter from Radio Shack: 1 A, 13.5-30 VDC.

That worked for a few hours and then it fell offline again (after I trasferred all of my new music from the MacBook to the drive). Now it won’t connect at all, so I got a new external drive (a 400 GB USB Western Digital Passport HD) and am in the process of manually copying the library off of my iPod to the new drive, after which I have to go through the library in iTunes and remove all of the old file references.

That means that I will also lose my play counts, but I think that’s for the better as it gives the new tracks a chance to catch up in my Top 50.

I’ll probably take the drive apart at some point and use a new case to see if I can recover anything I might be missing, and maybe use it again as a backup drive.

Earlier this year, my BlackBerry crapped out on me. Sprint refused to fix it because they could not duplicate the problem here in Portland. But every time I went away for the Army (to California, Washington, or New Jersey), my service would start acting funny. I’d get no connection despite having multiple coverage bars.

Frustrated at not having a phone, I bought a TracFone on one of the bases, canceled my Sprint service, and didn’t look back. After a while, though, I got to missing the extra BlackBerry features (email mostly) and decided to go with Cricket because I didn’t want to be tied to a contract in the event that I have to leave the country.

The one caveat was that I needed to be able to take the TracFone number with me. I didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of having a new number, especially when there are still people who try to use the BlackBerry number to get ahold of me (and then wonder why I don’t answer). TracFone told me that I could port the number with no issues. They gave me the info I needed and I went to Cricket last weekend to buy a new phone.

I picked the Samsung Messager, which is a very nice phone. It’s not a BlackBerry or iPhone, but it does what I need. The problem was that they don’t do the number porting in the stores. Instead, I was given an 800-number to call, which I did. Too bad they aren’t open on the weekends, so I had to wait until Monday to call again.

After spending 30 minutes on hold, I was connected. I gave the guy all of the info and he said to call back in four hours to check on the status. It was more like four days before I got someone to answer again. This was last Friday night. The new person told me that the change never happened because Verizon didn’t have that account. I explain why Verizon doesn’t have the account (it’s not a Verizon phone). To which she replied that TracFone was closed (they’re on the East Coast apparantly) and that I’d have to wait until Monday to have the new request processed.

It’s now Monday. To my knowledge, the number is still not ported. I tried calling earlier this morning, and nobody answered. I went back to the Cricket store and had them call. The manager was on hold for 45 minutes when I finally gave up waiting. I told them that if it wasn’t done by tomorrow, I was returning the phone. I’m thinking I’ll use the money to buy a netbook instead.