jason thurber's blog

I can’t believe that I’ve never used the Smart Playlist feature of iTunes before today! I’ve been manually managing my iPod for a while (long story, but it starts with “So, I’ve got a 40gig laptop, 30gig iPod”… this was before the HD Upgrade) and have found some major advantages to manually managing the synch process (how do I put this delicately…. umm… when you’re manually managing the iPod you can connect your iPod to multiple computers and “synch” their music to the iPod without really registering the iPod…. yeah, that’s a fair way to put it). The downside is that I’ve ended up manually managing a lot of playlists on the iPod such as:

I had a whole workflow going. I’d rip a CD (that I owned, of course) to MP3 via iTunes and add it to an Unsynch’d playlist. Next time I had the iPod connected to the Powerbook I’d copy the contents of Unsynch’d to the iPod and into their appropriate playlist. Then I’d clean out the Unsynch’d playlist. That was the old was of doing things.

Now I’ve simply cleaned up the Genre tag of my music and created Smart Playlists directly on my iPod. Some examples:

These are all set to update automatically, so when I am listening my way thru the Un-Rated playlist and enjoy a song I can increase it’s rating and it moves into the Highest Rated list, in real-time, with no synch! Anyway, I thought this was super cool!

At some point I will need to move all my iPods contents to somewhere (relatively) safe. I currently have about 20gb of music, so I forsee a weekend of using some shareware iPod Manager to move the songs to disc, then burning them to DVD.

We got the fridge upstairs last night. It took us less than an hour, including removing the doors (on the ‘fridge) and taking the box off (at which point the only damage of the night occurred; a small scrape to the stucco on the entrance, not bad). We lifted the fridge over our railing which, even tho’ I knew it “should” work, surprised me by actually working as planned. Very smooth!

“The Move” is complete!

BIG Thanks to:

Jeers and Derision to:

All in all it was a very painless move. I’ll have DSL again around the 29th (oh yeah, and we’ll have a washer/dryer that same day, but that’s not nearly as important). Until that time all early morning/late night browsing is via the good graces of Sprint and the wonder of the WirelessModem for the Treo 300.

From The Filthy Critic:

The Filthy Critic was killed in a
bicycle collision late Thursday night.

He died the way he lived–wobbling aimlessly in the slow lane.

Is this the end of Filthy?

Set up a CafePress store selling quality “Look at the Monkey” gear…

This (The Soporific Manifesto) is great. Some highlights:

Q: What can you brush your teeth with, sit on, and telephone people with?
   A: A toothbrush, a chair and a telephone.

When someone says “I know this is a death march, but you will be rewarded well if you succeed or fail,” run (away) like the wind.

Usable interfaces should not be innovative. If it’s clever or tricky, then it’s probably confusing.

Found it here.

How apropos that i just posted a picture of the cbr1100xx tire. I got a nail in the back tire on the way to work. Called Dad (who happens to be king of all field expedient MC repair). Three patch attempts later (including a trip to pick up a patch gun) the tire is still losing all it’s pressure in under an hour (I think there was some damage internally that was preventing the patches from sealing well). Pumped it full of air and ran down to Cal BMW Triumph who for the low, low price of $226 (OUCH!) put a new Bridgestone 180/55 BT020 on it (that’s right, just the rear-tire).
No more posting about the bike for a while, I can’t afford it!

Obligatory (crap) Fourth of July firework picture… It really is harder to take these than it looks:

Just rememember, dry ice and water should not be enclosed in a small, sealed container… unless you want the container to explode… in which case remember the DIY Explosive Makers motto “too much is never enough” (if that’s too hard to remember, you can substitute the “use it all” formula is most cases).

An interesting article (in The Guardian) detailing a Pentagon project from the 60’s in which two Graduate Physics students designed a working nuclear bomb:

You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

Found this here.

This is a great interview with Howard Dean (Democrat candidate for Prez.). He’s also got an official weblog here. Hopefully this guy bears watching.

Well, that was about 15min of work. Sweet web app’y goodness…

Alex is calling my aesthetic judgement into question over on his blog. This sort of unfounded personal attack is the reason that children shouldn’t be allowed to roam the web unsupervised (’cause they might side with Alex, while adults, with their more developed comparitive faculties, would side with me). Actually, I think he’s just mad about the whole Accord vs. Civic argument… 😉

In any case, you should consider yourself morally obliged to comment on Alex’s blog (unless you’re siding with him, in which case, piss off).

This Blog links to this story on the BBC’s website. It’s an interesting read.

New Stephenson Book (for the uninitiated he’s the guy who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon)

After losing about 2 1/2 paragraphs of blog as a result of a badly timed Command-Q this afternoon I decided to follow Alex’s advice and author my blogs in Tasks. That involved a bit of installation-type fun on the PowerBook, but it’s all working now.

Save works so now I just click the blog button and…

It’s Sunday, in a few hours I’ll head to the airport, spend 14hrs on a plane and it will… still be _Sunday_. Seems wrong somehow. Finishing up the last minute shopping, then it’s time to return the rental car and settle down for some quality “seat time” with our friends at Air Newzealand. Here’s hoping I haven’t totally destroyed myself for left-hand drive.