Category Archives: About Me - Page 28

Encroachment

Posted by on December 8, 2014 No comments

‘Tis the season to be homeless, or so it seems.  I’ll start by saying I’m ambivalent about homeless people.  I really don’t think there is a solution to it, much less a solution to those that actually desire to be homeless and live off of charity.  My reaction to homelessness would be, in D&D terms, chaotic neutral.  but anyway, the stories…

Case 1: The GF and I are out driving and stop at an intersection.  There is a woman wearing the standard-issue safety vest for panhandlers.  Joking around, I commented, “nice butt,”  the GF commented, “nice phone in the back pocket.”  But joking aside, the GF is a lot more generous and tolerant of panhandlers than I.  She will regularly offer a drink or a snack if she has one available.  I infrequently do that.

Anyway, to get to the point, the woman turned around and it was a person that my GF knew from her job.  Knew pretty well, in fact.  That changed a lot and not in the way it might sound.  This woman would show up nearly every day totally drunk and just be belligerent all day.  This is not someone you want to give money to, because it goes to one thing.

Case 2: I’m pulling in to a restaurant for lunch and a vagrant is in the lot.  I leave the car running and pretend to be busy with something inside.  Undeterred, he comes over and is happily gesturing at my car.  Yeah it’s a nice car.  I give him a thumbs up through the window hoping he’ll continue on.  Nope.  He continues gesturing and finally I roll down my window.

The guy is deaf, for real or not.  Signing some stuff, pointing and making noises.  I have no idea what he wants.  He eventually hands me a piece of paper with his pitch pre-written on it.  He’s deaf; he can’t hear or understand what I say; he wants money for McDonalds.  Sigh.  I give him $5 and tell him to enjoy his meal.  He seems extremely grateful.

Case 3: I’m leaving a restaurant and a guy is in the lot with a bike.  “What kind of car is that?”  “It’s a Miata.”  “A what?”  “A Miata.”  “Hold on I can’t hear you.”  He comes closer as I realize what I’ve gotten myself into.  “A what?”  “A Mee Ahh TA”.  “Oh!  That’s a beautiful car.  Must be very expensive.  Never seen one like that before.”

Trapped, I am.  “I just want to fuckin’ say something.  I want to fuckin’ thank you for acknowledging my existence.  All these other people just fuckin’ fly away.  They don’t even say anything.”  And it goes on like that.  It’s cold and drizzling outside and I’m not a fan of that situation either.  So to end the conversation, I say “you know, you really need to find shelter.”  And at that moment, I thought, “God damn it.  Why did I have to say that.”  I get more story, about his mom, who loves him.  I see him trying to figure out how to use whatever I’ve said to work in some kind of pitch, a pitch that will be full of profanity, certainly.   He points at an overpass and says how he has slept there for 5 days. (That’s his shelter, he says). 

I figure, ok, we’re going to do this, huh?  So I asked, “why do you do that?”  He was caught off guard. I said, “I know there’s shelter here in town.  Why don’t you go there?”  Well, he had to think quickly for that. “eeehhhhh, those shelters…. they’re not… nice.  They have bed bugs.  It’s not good.”  And I was getting ready to tell him it had to be better than a bridge when he commented, “he’s eyeing me up.”  I asked, huh? and he said “the cop over there.”  Then I hear behind my car, “Excuse me, would you mind coming over here and talking with me?”

The vagrant walks over and I shut my car.  I’m going to take my opportunity to get out of this.  I look in my mirror and no I’m not.  I’m blocked in by the police.  And… another car shows up.  I catch little bits of their conversation: “You from around here?”  “You have any weapons on you?”  “You said some things that worry me.  Are you going to get violent with me?” Oh boy.

So, the officers don’t find any reason to detain him and let him go.  So I’m going to just finish this up and get home.  I do the nice, dumb thing.  As he walks by the car to get his bike, I offer him a can of Coke.  I want that to be the end and I’ll go.  Nope.

More conversation ensues.  I finally tell him that he needs to clean up his presentation, stop swearing so much, and better things will happen to him.  I have to put the car in gear and start moving for him to get the hint.  I think he stroked the hood of my car as I backed away.

So there’s three recent interactions with the homeless and vagrant within a couple of weeks.  Where it goes from here, I can’t be sure.

What A Baby

Posted by on December 1, 2014 No comments

This is rather an oddball post for me, but whatever.  Mid-life, end-of-year, retrospective, introspective bullshit.

I want to think that the old saying, “real men don’t cry” is pretty much obsolete now.  So I feel ok with making a top 5 list of songs that get me choked up.  Sometimes, you just need an emotional release, with all the crap that goes on in our hectic lives.

I can say that I kind of need to be “in the mood” to cry.  Lots of times, I can power through these songs or just not actively listen to the song, or just not think about the meanings I get from it.  There’s plenty of times I hear the song and don’t even register any emotion, but sometimes, it just hits me – as the kids say nowadays – “in the feels”.

So without further adieu:

#5: Steve Morse Band – The Oz.  This one doesn’t exactly make me tear up, but the guitar solo is one that really gets to me.  Not as much anymore, but I remember a time when it was really something powerful for me.

#4: Kansas – Lonely Wind.  This one gets me with the “choir-y” arrangements.  It kind of brings me back to my grandfather’s funeral when I was very young.  Didn’t feel anything throughout the whole funeral until the end, when the choir started singing, then it was over.

#3: Flying Colors – Peaceful Harbor.  Another with choir arrangements and a message about “weathering the storm.” I’m not really sure why the nautical imagery affects me so much.

#2: Rush – Time Stand Still.  A song about getting older and how time seems to speed up.  How we don’t seem to realize how quickly things come and go.  How you should always live in the present and appreciate the current moment.

#1: Indigo Girls – Cedar Tree.  The worst: losing the love of your life.  And worse than Rush’s song, realizing in hindsight that it was “the best you ever had.” But then, it’s too late to appreciate it for what it is, because it’s over.

Cleaning Up

Posted by on October 30, 2014 No comments

At this point, I’m solidly in phase 2 of my music enhancements.  Phase 1 was ripping my CDs to a lossless format (with a .1 of acquiring a specific label’s full catalog).  Phase 2 is scanning the album covers in high quality.

Phase 2 is a MUCH more labor-intensive process.  The scanning part is easy, the cleaning up of the scans is tedious as hell.  I’ve been doing this for four days and in those days I managed to complete 21 covers: 5 the first day, 2 the second day, then 6, then 9.  It takes about 15-30 minutes per cover.  I’m getting better and learning more time-saving tricks as I go, but still, 750 covers is going to be ~250 hours of work.  Being able to put in only a couple of hours each night, 5 days a week, I’m looking at almost 6 months of this work.  That’s pretty insane.

Sometimes, I think I should only focus on the covers that are unavailable online or are rare or out-of-print.  Other times, I think I need to represent my entire collection.  Sometimes I think I need to focus on the MCA Master Series, so I can move on to phase 3 – framing.

So, what is my process?  I scan the cover at 1200 dpi, which gives me a 10mb, 5700×5700 jpg.  I take that into Photoshop and run a descreen filter on it.  This blends the “dots” into a more-or-less solid color.  Then I do cleanup of the stains, dust, and scratches.  Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it is extremely difficult.  Then I add an adjustment layer for Levels, in case I want to tweak the black point or contrast.  I save this to a PSD file, which ends up being 80-180mb in size.  This will be my “master” from which I will do further refinements and resizing.  When all is said and done, I’ll probably have near 100GB of cover images.

Looking at my post history, this conquest has been going two months so far.  All I can hope is that another unexpected obsession doesn’t appear in the next six months.

In Time For Thanksgiving

Posted by on October 28, 2014 No comments

I’m starting to make some steps forward with phase two of my CD collection plan – scanning the artwork.  I did a couple trial runs on an old scanner at the house and it was way too much of a headache.  So yay, I get to buy more stuff.  A new scanner, but not such a big expense.  $65.  I can’t believe how cheap that tech has gotten.

While preparing for that effort, I researched communities that I could benefit with my efforts.  I found one that was appealing, if just a touch elitist.  When I went to sign up, I took the time to read their terms of service.  I didn’t like what I read.

In summary, when you upload to their site, they become the owners of the content.  Further, they insist that they will be the only source for that content.  You can’t post your artwork anywhere else.

First off, let’s just make it clear that it’s very odd to be discussing who “owns” owns a replica of a copyrighted work.  But, ignoring that for a moment and moving to a secondary “IP market”, let’s think about what this ToS means.  I “created” the work with my effort of scanning and cleaning and when I upload it, I effectively lose ownership of that work.

Yeah, yeah, it might be standardized language.  But there’s other standardized language that is more lenient.  Something like: By uploading, I am granting an unlimited license for the site to use my work however they want.  In that case, I retain the original rights (yeah, of a copyrighted work; just ignore that…).

So my problem with the site is that they are taking my work and making it their own.  It’s Christopher Columbus on the Internet.  Why should I be outraged?  Tons of websites have a similar model.  Or do they?  The first thing I’m thinking of is Huffpost, that site that pays people in “exposure”.  But even there, after reading their ToS, you grant them rights to use your submission any way they want, even through derivative works.  And, you still own your stuff.

That thinking and research made me start questioning the entire publishing for exposure model.  If you create something awesome and it gets posted on HuffPost, and gets scooped up by multiple news outlets (licensed? paid-for? maybe.), what do you get out of it?  Your name is attached to it, but does that really help you?  There’s just so much happening.  You would have to repeat that success over and over to get recognized as consistent talent.

I’m much more agreeable to the “toss it to the ether and let other do what they want with it” ideal.  So, my choice is not to affiliate with any artwork website, but to use Flickr.  Hypocritical?  All I’m doing is providing great content to a huge corporation.  Yes, but, all I want from them is hosting space.  If someone wants to use my cd scan for an ebay auction, great!  I would encourage that.  See, it’s not about just making your world better – which I’d already have done for my own cd collection – it’s about making everyone’s world better.

Time, Money, and Music

Posted by on October 22, 2014 No comments

imageHere’s an update to my music label collection: I am down to six remaining CDs.  This leads to the questions, “what’s next?” and “and then what?”

Well, the next thing is CD cover scanning, so I have pristine artwork for all my CDs.  Over time, reissues and re-releases will change the cover artwork, usually to the album’s detriment.  For example, all the Ozzy Osbourne covers got some massive, dumb border around them, with the actual album artwork in a tiny box in the middle.  Who came up with that stupid idea?

So, yeah, I want my album artwork to be exactly like my CDs.  And, I want some album artwork framed and hanging on my walls.  But then what?  I think the next step is owning a real listening stereo system (again).

What’s up with that graphic?  That was the image I got when thinking about owning a high-quality stereo system.  Right now, I can get by with my home theater system, but there is a certain appeal to having a real stereo, with dedicated speakers and amplifier, and components.  Why?  I have a computer with every CD ripped to lossless format playing through studio monitor speakers in my office.  Why this?

Let me first explain the graphic.  I think that owning a dedicated listening stereo is the realm of young, single men and old, retired men.  Exceptions abound, but bear with me.  The graph illustrates the likelihood of owning a stereo between the start and end of your adult life.  Yes, I had a great system in my 20’s.  I got into a stupid relationship and sold it all off for pennies at a garage sale.  Now, 20 years later, I am reconsidering the purchase again.  I’m not sure now is the time though.  Maybe a little later.  When I thought of why now might not be the right time, my rationale illuminated why the parabolic curve makes sense.  It’s about time.

Being young, single and free, you have the free time to indulge in nothing but music.  The same freedom applies once you are an empty-nester or a retiree.  You can also apply this to book-reading or really, any hobbies you had to give up because of the rat race of life.  For me, I’m not sure I’m nearing the end of the rat race yet, but I want to slow down, definitely.  I can say I haven’t exactly disliked any point in my life so far.  I sacrificed some things at certain points that may or may not have been wise.  But overall, life’s been good to me.

Now, about that stereo.  Why is that something to desire?  This sentiment would probably be shared by many hobbyists who have had their hobbies “stolen” by modern convenience.  There is an effort you must make when using older, dedicated equipment.  One might go so far as to say there is a ritual involved.  It’s the performing of the ritual that matters.  If you don’t do it right, the results won’t be good, or said another way, the more precise you are performing the ritual, the better the results will be.  And you can take pride in that.

Sure, the ritual of listening to an album involves choosing a cd, placing it in the tray, pressing the play button, then sitting down.  But that’s more than using a wireless remote to scroll through a huge list of albums, then clicking one.  Book people, you understand.

Disconnecting, and Connecting

Posted by on October 10, 2014 No comments

I made the decision today to delete my personal Facebook account.  To some, it may sound dramatic, but I hadn’t used it in months, so there was no pain involved.  I’m just staying old-school with the blog.  I’ll continue to maintain a different account for business purposes, but that never has any posts from me anyway.  That’s enough discussion about that.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a little about social media.  It started when I was forced to install the Facebook Messenger app on my Windows Phone because that functionality was removed from the main app, and also seems to have been removed from the phone integration (a key selling point of Windows Phone).  That led me to take a peek at Ello, which has been in the news lately as a potential rising star for future social platforms.  I was rather unimpressed.  If Facebook beat out Myspace for the reason of lack of customization, Ello beats Facebook in sheer minimalism.  And, I really dislike monospace fonts.

However, looking at Ello in such an early state gave me reason to think about what problem social media platforms are trying to solve.  When will Ello stop adding features?  How much do they need to add to make it “usable”?

I think what the Internet needs is a global contact list website.  To me, that would be the Internet’s “killer app”.  Do one thing that is critical, and do it extremely well.  How hard would it be to do this?  I’m going to spend some time and see…

Status Update

Posted by on October 4, 2014 No comments

After returning from a refreshing vacation, it’s time to jump back into the collection plan.  The current status is: of 42 albums, I now own 26 and 6 are in transit, leaving 10 left to purchase.

My current mantra is, “Why am I not listening to music?”  There’s a ridiculous number of times that I catch myself just working in silence.  I’m spending a good amount of money to complete this music collection.  At the very least, I should be listening to it.  Geez.  But, I have found some very good music that I am glad to have.

And I did get most of my music ripped to lossless before the vacation.  I say most, because I used Exact Audio Copy and there are some discs that had some errors in ripping and some discs that I had to skip complete tracks.  So, there’s going to have to be a second round of ripping to recover what I didn’t get the first time.

And then somewhere in the future lies the CD cover scanning, which I will use for artwork, both digitally and physically.

A Fool’s Game

Posted by on September 24, 2014 No comments

Today I learned (TIL for all the modern, acronym-dependent, Internet citizens), that when it comes to personal injury, I am no smarter than a toddler playing peek-a-boo.

Almost a week ago, I had some shoulder pain, like a knot in my back shoulder.  It’s not really uncommon, since I am either sitting at a desk or driving in my car 90% of my waking day.  The last time I had this specific kind of knot, it lasted for days and days and kept me pretty miserable, so I wasn’t thrilled to have it return.

So Friday night, I broke out my Shiatsu chair massager and beat the hell out of my back and shoulders.  It was like twanging guitar strings.  Just to be on the safe side, I took a pill from my emergency stash (now 5 years old) and went off to bed.

I woke up the next morning in pain.  Great pain.  I made it through the day with ice, heat, and Advil.  At the end of the day, I figured I was past my problems, but just in case, I took another emergency pill and went to sleep.

Sunday morning was no better.  Worse, in fact.  Probably because I had spent some time Saturday doing yard work since I wasn’t feeling any great pain (Thank you, Advil).  Now, I can’t turn my head or look down.  I self-diagnose myself with a pinched nerve and I can still feel the knot in my shoulder blade.  So I call up a local massage place and get a walk-in appointment.  They say, “We only have a male masseuse available, is that ok?”  Geez, whatever.  Even if I wasn’t in excruciating pain, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

So I get the crap wrenched out of me on the table.  He probably spent too much time on my neck and not enough on the trouble spot, but everything was messed up, so whatever.  As the night comes on, I’m sinking back into pain.  Advil wearing off again.  Then I get to thinking, maybe it isn’t a knot or a pinched nerve.  Maybe it’s actually an injury, like a pulled muscle or a torn tendon.  After all, I am currently on an antibiotic whose primary side effect is causing brittle tendons.

So, to recap:  I have a knot in my shoulder.  I pull or tear my lat muscles with a shiatsu massager.  I go to a massage and have them ripped up even more.  All the while, I’m peaking and crashing on Advil thinking, “I’m better!” or ”I’m in hell!”

It doesn’t end there.  Sunday evening, post-massage, my shoulder back doesn’t have a knot anymore.  Now it’s just one big swollen mass.  Sleep that night was in 20-30 minute intervals, followed with a painful repositioning.  At one critical point, I was on my chest and turned my head to stretch my neck and I heard and felt something in my neck squirt.  As scream-inducing as that was, it actually was kind of a turning point and I slept better afterward.

Monday, I had to leave work after less than a hour because the pain was making me dizzy.  Tuesday, I felt pretty good during the day, so I thought I was on the mend.  Then the Advil wore off.  Silly, me.  I took more Advil and felt better.  Better enough to do yardwork when I got home.  Silly, me.  Today, I’m paying for my transgressions again.

So yeah, I’m just playing peek-a-boo with my injury.  As long as I don’t feel the pain, it doesn’t exist and I’ll just go and injure it more.  It’s definitely not the first time I’ve done something like that.  This is just the first time I’ve noticed my behavior.

A Troubleshooting Challenge

Posted by on September 8, 2014 No comments

You have to love troubleshooting.

As a mentioned earlier, I’m doing a hard drive update on my Zune to bring it up to 120gb.  In the first chapter of this crazy process, I simply bought a 120gb 1.8” drive that was supposed to be IPod and Zune compatible.  I got the drive and prior to installing it, I erased the Zune completely, firmware and all.

After installation, the Zune wanted to be connected to the PC to install the new firmware.  After doing so, the Zune software registered a hard drive problem – not enough space on drive.  Hmmmmmmmm.  After thinking about it for a while, I considered that the base level of firmware back when the Zune 30gb came out might not support a 120gb drive, since they didn’t exist at that time.  So I thought I should bring the firmware up to the most recent, then install the new hard drive.

I put the old drive back in, upgraded the firmware, then put the new drive in and restarted.  Then I get a obscure (and yet common) error code.  So I think some more.  The new hard drive is a different brand – Samsung instead of Toshiba, and it uses more power – 4v instead of 3.3v.  Maybe it’s the drive that’s just incompatible?

So, I order a second drive, a Toshiba this time.  Without erasing the firmware, I install the drive.  The Zune boots to a “Please Wait” screen.  I wait for a few minutes and decide it’s not doing anything.  I power the Zune down, check the drive connections and start it up again.  Same screen.  I look online and the Internet says that that screen is shown during drive format and initialization (Do not disconnect or turn off the device).  Oops.  So I leave the Zune plugged in overnight.  The next morning, I left without remembering to check the status, so it ran all day while I worked.  When I get home, no progress.

I put the old drive back in and everything works just fine.  I put the new Toshiba in again and it doesn’t.  I put the old drive in, wipe out the firmware, put the new drive in and I get stuck at the “Please Wait” screen. Hmmm. The Samsung got past that screen but failed when writing the firmware.  The Toshiba doesn’t get past the drive initialization.  It’s actually a worse situation.

The next step of my troubleshooting is going to be at a lower level – the drives themselves.  One possible theory is that the drives can’t be formatted because they are not partitioned.  The company that sold me the drives may have run a diagnostic test that erased the drive’s file system.  So, I’ve ordered a ZIF to USB adapter so I can connect the drives to my computer and verify for myself.  Maybe I will need to create a partition and/or format the drives myself before installation.  As a side project, the adapter would let me see what kind of files are saved on the Zune itself.  That could be interesting information, too.

Running cost for this project: $70 for the two drives, $10 for the adapter.

Genres, Generalizations, and Generations

Posted by on September 4, 2014 No comments

Continuing my quest for ripping and metadata-izing my whole CD collection (currently midway though the D’s – getting through one letter a day).  And I’ve come up against the dilemma of assigning genres.

There seems to be 3 camps: don’t use genres at all, use a limited number, or go all in and use hundreds.  I’ve read a few interesting schemes as well, one being to use a limited number, then subcategorize using playlists.  That was going to be my plan, until I kind of realized something.

Looking at the Rock genre, there is a very large collection of sub-genres under it.  For example: Surf, Hard Rock, Hair Bands, British Invasion, Rock & Roll, etc.  Reading this list made me realize that the “genres” are actually few and far between, but the sub-genres can nearly be classified by release year.  Right?  Rock is different in the 50’s, the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and on and on.  Yet, it’s all Rock.  It’s the same with Heavy Metal.  The metal of the 70’s is nothing like the metal of today.  70’s metal is many times tamer than modern rock.

So I guess my plan now is the same as it was, keep a very limited number of genres and the classify things further with playlists.  But with my new insight, I can create smart playlists grouping by Year and get a pretty close approximation of a specific sub-genre.

In an semi-related topic, I had a hell of a time ripping one particular CD: The Digital Domain: A Demonstration.  This is one of those CDs that you almost need to have in lossless because its entire purpose is to demonstrate the capabilities of digital audio.  For some reason, every single track resulted in a read error when ripping with Exact Audio Copy.  I got the great idea that I could copy the disc to ISO as data instead of as audio, then mount the ISO and rip from that.  The first tool I tried, ImgBurn, hung during track analysis, so I ended up using Daemon Tools Lite, which I had installed already.  The rip from the ISO went off without a single issue, and it was fast.