Category Archives: Wondering - Page 9

He Who Controls The Spice

Posted by anachostic on July 24, 2017 No comments

This weekend, I picked up a couple of other CDs from my prime musical era: the 80’s. It would probably be interesting to poll people and find out what they consider the best music of their life. Based on anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, it would be the era in which a person became an adult, about when they were 18-21. But that’s not really the point of this post.

The thing I have discovered is that although we have all these eras of music: 50’s/oldies, 60’s/hippy, 70’s/classic rock, 80’s/glam/pop, 90’s/depression, and onward, each era has so much more than those generalizations I just assigned to them. And even when you explore those other genres, they are still consistent with other genres of that era and also different than the same genre in other eras. For example, Jazz in the 70’s sounds different than Jazz in the 80’s. But Jazz in the 80’s still has that production sound of pop music the 80’s. So the point I’m trying to make is that you can explore many genres within your prime musical era. The amount of music just within your preferred era is staggering. Believe me, I’ve been getting more and more daring and buying artists I only had a faint memory of. The best way to describe the result of that effort is like filling in a puzzle of the entire musical landscape of the 80’s. You see (hear) each album all in context and relation to the others and the era as a whole becomes more defined. But that’s not really the point of this post, either.

I had to put those thoughts out first because I am curious abut the future (and a little about the past). The 80’s could be the premier music moment in recorded music history, all due to the creation of the CD. Because of the mad rush to upgrade past recordings to CD, then because of the eventual low cost of CD production, there is an overwhelming amount of music physically available on CD, both past and present (present meaning 80’s).

However, as we know, streaming is becoming the new standard. Proponents of this format claim that it will encompass everything, where any music ever made will be available at a moment’s notice. But will it? It’s been shown many times over that an artist can simply refuse their catalog to be offered on a streaming service. Not only an artist, but maybe an entire label. If a label goes bankrupt, where do the rights go? The music is only available when everything is working perfectly – and I wasn’t even meaning the technical bits working perfectly.

With our massively analytical society and our ROI-driven corporate environment, what are the odds that a streaming service would look at some particular music and see it isn’t being accessed enough or isn’t generating enough revenue, so it is just removed from the service. It’s no longer available. It’s not lost, just unavailable, which is pretty much the same thing to an end user. I have seen news that some albums are no longer being released on a physical medium, therefore there is no way to own a copy of the music. If this pattern accelerates, then there will come a time in the future where music can be lost.

Of course, none of this matters to me, because I’m still filling in the gaps of my era, but future generations will end up having a very spotty image of what music was like in their prime. That would be a shame.

Get Off My Lawn, And My Beach, And My City, And My Country, And My Planet

Posted by anachostic on June 5, 2017 No comments

Over the weekend, I got to spend some time at the beach and it was pleasant. The key to that pleasantry was going early in the morning, before the large families arrived. As I was basking in the silence, actually able to hear the waves, I thought about how nice it was right then and how it wouldn’t be so nice in a few hours.

I thought about these groups of people with screaming children and boom boxes and thought it would be really nice to not have to be around them. But obviously, they have just as much right to any public space as I do. It’s just that my quiet presence wouldn’t intrude on them, but their boisterous presence would intrude on mine. Somehow, that doesn’t seem fair.

I thought up a label for these people. They are “environment modifiers.” Wherever they go, they modify their environment to suit themselves. Natural beauty? The sound of nature? Unnecessary. We have children and portable stereos. It’s just like being in our house or our back yard, only the visuals are different.

I mulled over different ways to handle this. One idea was segmenting the beach into noisy and quiet zones. Of course you don’t say it like that. The beach is divided into “those who love the sound of children playing” and “those who love the sound of the sea”. And those are truly mutually exclusive.

And sadly, this little microcosm is applicable to our society as a whole, when the loud and obnoxious drive out the polite and quiet. When decisions are made based not on merit, but on amplitude. Where resources are acquired sorely through aggression. When acquired resources are resold to others at a profit, when the justification of that profit is solely getting there first.

“And the meek shall inherit the earth.” What a wonderful, ruinous place it will be to inherit.

It’s Good To Be A Coder

Posted by anachostic on May 30, 2017 No comments

While driving over the weekend, I had a humorous thought that I think I can stretch out into an extended joke. The base premise of the joke is simple, just recaptioning an old comic strip to change the context of the comic and the dynamic between the characters.

So, to begin this, I need the original comic strips so I can deface them and make them funny in a different way. I found the website that was hosting the comics and looked into what effort it would take to get these comics.

Here’s a small lesson in image thievery on the internet. The most pedestrian way to get an image off the internet is to do a screen capture with something like Snipping Tool. That route will burn you out in a matter of minutes.

The better way is to right-click the image and choose Save As. This preserves the original image dimensions without any possible variance from lassoing. However, web developers have gotten smarter about this technique and will do protective coding to prevent the unwanted downloading of their files. One way to do this is to capture the mouse’s right-button click. Other way is to overlay a transparent image over the other so when you right-click and Save As, you save the transparent image instead of the one you really want. The most effective way is to show the image as a CSS background. However, the truth is, if it’s in your browser, your browser requested the file and you can do it too.

To get around these tricks, you can use the developer tools built into most browsers. They will allow you to look at the source code and find the URL of the actual image you want. That is the path I originally took, finding the image tag, copying the URL into a new tab, then downloading/saving the image. That lasted for about 7 images before it was too much effort. Coders are lazy, and they write programs to do the work for them.

Looking at the URL for the image, it was a dynamic URL, not a static one. It was similar to:

http://thewebsite.com/content.php?file=QXJlbid0IHlvdSBjbGV2ZXI/

At first, I was discouraged, because the file parameter just seemed to be a string of random characters. There wouldn’t be any way to turn that into a reliable sequence to cycle through. But the more I looked at the URL, the more familiar the text seemed. I took a guess that the string was Base64-encoded, and my guess was correct. Decoding the string resulted in another URL, although that URL was not accessible from the internet. It was a page that “content.php” had access to, though. (Just as an aside, this programming design screams “security issues!”)

The decoded URL had a very understandable structure that would allow cycling through comics based on date. It’s just that I would need to construct that URL, encode it in Base64, then pass the encoded URL as a parameter to the content.php address.

I fired up Visual Studio, added a datebox and a button. I wrote 4 lines of code to construct the URL based on the date in the datebox, then download and save the image. Then I set up the button to decrement the datebox by a day and process the image. Now, All I had to do was click a button over and over and the images would dump into a folder. If I wanted to, I could set up a loop to cycle through images and I wouldn’t even need to click the button at all. This was less than 15 minutes of effort.

And that is yet another example of the power that comes from being a programmer.

Collecting, For The Eyes And Ears

Posted by anachostic on April 25, 2017 No comments

A co-worker of mine has recently fallen into the rabbit hole of sci-fi novels. Every day, it’s read, read, read. And because of that, it’s also become buy, buy, buy. He does his research. He knows all the prominent authors, their styles and topics and their bibliographies.

Recently, he’s been talking about “collections” and first editions with increasing interest. As we discussed the viability of being a sci-fi novel collector, the parallels between his book collecting and my CD collecting became ever more obvious. Here’s some of the connections I made:

Novels will move around between publishers. Albums will also move around between publishers. In both cases, the publisher determines the quality of the end product. The artwork may be different between different publishers.
First editions of popular novels are just like first pressings of albums. They are desirable by those that care and can command higher prices.
Both books and albums are reprinted in special collector’s editions, which collectors of each can have a great interest in. Because the content is usually the same, the improvements are usually better packaging and bonus material (extra songs for albums, drafts or letters or forwards by the author’s peers for books).
Both can be turned into compilations and churned out for quick bucks by publishers. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect the royalties to the writers suck in all cases.
You can “remaster” a book with the same expected results as remastering an album. You’ll have purists that hate the changes and progressive modern types that embrace the changes. In the book world, they call it “revised and expanded”.
The collecting of this “old technology” is a mystery to the majority of the public. The details of the versions and editions are lost on them. “It’s all about the music”/”It’s all about the story”
You can find used copies of either at specialty used stores and save a lot of money.
You can also find digital copies of either for free (legality aside), but for a collector, this is insufficient. The physical product is paramount.
When a collector starts “talking shop”, it sounds exactly the same; only the authors/bands and titles/albums are different. They all have exclusive details and timelines and history, but they are completely interchangeable.

On the topic of money, he and I have both been doling it out. Him maybe a bit more because he’s been buying new, where I buy used almost exclusively. Yesterday, I gave him the opportunity to validate himself. I asked if he wanted to visit my usual CD haunt during lunch. I warned him it could be dangerous for me because the last time I was there, they had some very hard-to-find albums I wanted. Being hard-to-find also means hard-to-justify-the-price. I’ll spend up to $10 for a used CD I want, with gold CDs being the rare exception.

We get to the store and all the CDs are still available. Six of them, priced between $18 and $25 each. I ask him if I really want to do this, because it’s not gonna be cheap. He replies that he is the wrong person to ask for support. For both of our entertainment, I ended up buying them. As the cashier rung up my $144 purchase of CDs, my co-worker, red-faced and grinning, beamed with delight that someone was behaving just as irrationally as he does with his books.

Jokebook Notebook

Posted by anachostic on April 24, 2017 No comments

I often have a lot of random ideas and I typically forget the details of them later. I should be carrying a small notebook to jot these things down. Like this morning, I saw a billboard and a commercial idea started forming in my head. The great thing about writing commercials is there doesn’t need to be a lot of dialog (unless that’s the joke) and it’s over in as little as 15 seconds.

So, I came up with a brief sketch for a iced tea brand. It involves the talent of Ice-T (of rap and CSI fame), Mr. T (of 70’s A-Team fame), and Master Shake (of Aqua Teen Hunger Force semi-fame).

(At the scene of a fancy outdoor party, mingling guests on a wide lawn, white party tents and small white bistro tables set up through the area. Ice-T is standing alone and somewhat bored at one of the tables and someone approaches. He looks up and sees Mr. T)

Ice-T: Hey. (extending hand) I’m Ice-T.

Mr. T: (shaking hand) Hey, I’m Mr. T.

Ice-T: Huh. Nice to meet you.

Master Shake: (interrupting, not in scene) Hey, I’m also a beverage!

(Ice-T and Mr. T turn to look at Master Shake, annoyed at his interruption.)

Master Shake: I said… I’m also a beverage. You know, like a drink. Speaking of drinks, I could use a drink. Nothing but teas at this place. Iced teas, Mr. T’s – HA! You see what I did there? Seriously though, I could drink like a couple dozen Fuzzy Nizzles, you know what I’m saying, dawgs?

(Master Shake continues rambling on while Ice-T and Mr. T awkwardly stare at the table, trying to ignore him. A waiter walks by with the promoted iced tea brand on his tray and the camera follows him away from the scene Master Shake is making.)

“Promoted Tea Brand – not always inappropriate”

That idea led me to a sequel.

(In a music studio, Ice-T and Mr. T are sitting at the mixing console listening to some of Ice-T’s new music.)

Mr. T: I can’t imagine doing this for a living. This is awesome.

Ice-T: It’s a great creative outlet. You can really connect with people through music.

Master Shake: I connect with people all the time. Because I have the connections. You guys wouldn’t know about that. You got no connections.

(Master Shake is standing in the back of the studio mixing room, not really talking to anyone. Ice-T and Mr. T stare blankly at Master Shake)

(Master Shake reaches for something on a shelf and knocks everything off onto the floor, including awards and memorabilia.)

Master Shake: Yeah, that’s what I think of you, tchotchke’s! You can stay down on the floor, because you’re nothing. Nothing! (Realizes Ice-T and Mr. T are staring at him angrily.) Hey, I got this idea for a song. A rap, if you will. (Master Shake starts making beatbox sounds and moving in jerking motions like he’s dancing.)

Ice-T: Talking cup, you are so white.

(Shot of Master Shake freezing in place with mouth agape.)

“Promoted Tea Brand – not always inappropriate”

I have an idea for another sequel involving Carl fanboy-nagging Mr. T about his A-Team exploits, too. But since these would never see the light of day, no need to develop it.

A Nose For News

Posted by anachostic on January 23, 2017 No comments

Update: Now with even more noses!

Before I updated my phone to Windows 10, I used the Microsoft Money app for news. It had a glitch where if a photo was a certain size, it would zoom in on a smaller portion of the photo. This resulted in an article thumbnail image that really had little to do with the story.

I don’t have this app anymore, so I present to you: My archive of noses:

En Garde

Posted by anachostic on November 1, 2016 No comments

My CD collection continues to grow by leaps and bounds. My spinning CD rack that holds 800 CDs is just about full. I’m planning for the purchase of the bigger model that holds 1600 CDs. Yeah, it’s a problem.

Anyway, while on one of my shopping runs, I came across a CD from a band I don’t see very often at all – The Residents. I have a couple of their albums and I don’t really get them. Regardless, I had to buy this CD anyway, just because their catalog is so infrequently seen. I popped it in the stereo on the drive home.

I don’t think a lot of people have even heard of The Residents. More people have probably heard of Frank Zappa. And of those people, fewer still have actually listened to Zappa. And of those people, fewer can even “get” Zappa’s music. Now, I listen to Zappa and can get along with even some of the weirder stuff, but The Residents are on a whole level beyond that. I can’t even really handle it.

So as I’m listening to this album of terribly performed songs, I’m trying to think of what I’m supposed to be experiencing, other than, “This is ridiculous. I did stuff like this when I was 15.” Although, I really didn’t. I didn’t have a full studio and multitrack recorders and other period technology to make sounds like that. That’s kind of the idea to keep in mind. A lot of The Residents stuff might be described as “creation of sound”, rather than “making music”.

And the fact that I was exploring how the music made me feel, rather than enjoying the music, made me characterize the album listening as more of an artistic endeavor. And The Residents would be clearly classified as “avant garde”. Coming to this realization was almost like taking a burden off my back.

When I’m faced with “music” that is just so difficult to understand, that seems to make no sense, that is completely unstructured, I try to figure it out anyway. In the end, I’m just frustrated and come to the conclusion that “this music sucks.” But I’m unsatisfied with that conclusion because obviously the artist spent time on this “music” and it makes sense to them, somehow. But, approaching the album in the same way as visiting an art museum, it becomes palatable. Similar to visual arts, you just absorb it and consider how it makes you feel. Are the sounds menacing? Humorous? Does it stop and start unpredictably? Are there multiple “subjects” conflicting or cooperating?

With that new perspective, I could classify some other CDs in my collection as “avant garde”, too. Buckethead’s Cuckoo Clocks of Hell makes absolutely no sense to me. The best I could come up with when I listened to it was that it was primarily rhythm-based. There wasn’t really a traditional song structure with a melody line and a defined chorus.

And my final takeaway from my epiphany is that I granted myself license to only listen to an album once. Like visiting an art gallery or a performance, you take in the whole experience in the same way you take in a speech. You leave with a singular overall impression – motivation, happiness, uneasiness, or whatever. And that experience is done.

Pick And Choose And Confirm

Posted by anachostic on September 21, 2016 No comments

At work today, a co-worker made an unusual comment. He said he missed floppy discs. He missed them for the reason that they were self-contained “topics”. Like, this disc will boot your computer. This one will load a game. This other one is a word processor. That thought is actually going back quite a ways, before hard drives were common. But his recollection was good, miming flipping through a box of discs, looking for the precise one you wanted or needed.

Later, I saw another (yet another) article about the death of CDs – who was buying CDs? What kind of crazy people are doing this? Why aren’t they gone yet? This made me reevaluate my own situation and I found that I had this same thought earlier in the day talking about floppy discs.

A CD is a self-contained “topic”. It’s a capsule of time in a band’s lifetime. It’s how they were “then”. And when you’re browsing through a collection of CDs, like flipping through floppies, you may be looking for a specific something and you stop flipping when you find it.

This is not the same satisfaction you get when searching your hard drive, or opening your music software, or browsing your music device. Although I didn’t think much about it back in the floppy days, that satisfaction was probably found there too. It’s a confirmation – “I got it!” And that’s reason to celebrate.

Searching (or seeking) physical items is also a totally different mental and emotional experience. Consider this. You’re in the mood for some music. You want something to pep you up. When dealing with virtual media, you handle your choice “offline” (which sounds backwards, but hear me out). Your thought is, “What band/album makes me feel like smashing down walls?” And then you run through your mental list of bands or albums and settle on, say, Dokken.

If you have a physical collection, you have the same desire for an album, but instead of processing the results in your head, you flip through the discs and evaluate each disc one by one, an “online” process. “Does this album make me feel like smashing down walls?” Maybe yes, maybe no. And when the answer is yes, it’s a confirmation – “I got it!” and you’re hyped to start.

It’s kind of a stretch to use the floppy disc analogy with everything, because I can’t recall feeling triumphant about finding WordPerfect and saying, “Now I get to work!” But games, or other sources of entertainment, like CDs, would be.

The point I wanted to make earlier, but now this post is bullshit-long, is that choosing a floppy or a CD is a deliberate act. This is in contrast to any streaming or cloud service recommendations, or a random pick from a plethora of folders.

A Good Idea Made Better

Posted by anachostic on September 12, 2016 No comments

Driving to work today, I saw a dumpster truck for the disposal/moving company, College Hunks Hauling Junk. It made me wonder how that name came to be. Maybe the original founders were considered hunks and were in college and decided to haul junk to make money. It makes me wonder if the founders approached other college kids and offered them a job on the premise that they would get paid for essentially working out. You get paid and you maintain your “hunk” status. Sounds like a win-win.

Well times have changed, so I’m going to create the next iteration of this business model. I call it: Middle-aged Shitheads Being Crossfit-heads. And I already have the commercial planned out. But the pitch to the potential employees is still the same. They can get paid while doing their ridiculous exercises.

We open the commercial with old, large, grouchy moving men slowly moving pieces of furniture from a house to a truck. “When you’re moving, you understand that time is a crucial factor. Why be held up when your moving company moves like a glacier?”

Switch the scene to a few thin, ripped people (men and women!) in crazy-tight spandex dashing back and forth between the truck and house with household items. The difference is, in the true crossfit standard, the items are just chucked into the back of the truck. You see, the focus is on speed, not quality.

The subsequent scenes reinforce the absurdity of applying crossfit to moving. Boxes and completely unpacked articles piled up in the back of the truck; someone pitching clothes from a pile like a dog burrowing in the ground; someone struggling with a heavy item and two or three others crowded around him shouting at him to “finish it” instead of helping out; a couch being flipped end over end through the house out to the truck; gratuitous celebrations after moving a box. You get the point. The commercial could get lengthy.

At the end of the commercial, there would be a teaser for a sister company, Shithead Servant Services, which specializes in personal household services, like handyman (cue scene of hanging a picture with truck tire and sledgehammer), gardening (scene of “battle-roping” with hoses – or fire hoses), and carrying groceries inside (Guys looking at grocery bags in truck. “It’s at least two sets of Gurpals!” “AUUGH! I HATE GURPALS!!” “Oh wait, these are going to be Durkels.” “YEAAHH! I LOVE DURKELS!!!” Guys then hauling in all bags at once, then obviously celebrating on completion.)

I’ll be rich.

Service Standards

Posted by anachostic on September 6, 2016 No comments

It’s a new month, so I need to keep my post stats active every month – here goes nothing. This is something I’ve mulled over for some time, but never gave it much internal analysis until recently.

Restaurant kiosks are starting to proliferate. My reaction to them ranges from indifferent to disgust. The first kiosk on the scene was at Chilis. And at this place, I am indifferent to the presence of the checkout device. I use it without any issue and I’m out. Next up was Olive Garden. This one irks me. I try to pay for my meals through the waitress, and if I’m made to pay through the device, I always leave a comment that I hate using it. The most recent arrival is at McDonalds. This one really irritates me. After a few interactions with these huge devices, I gave thought to my feelings. Why do I not mind kiosks at Chilis, dislike them at Olive Garden, and hate them at McD’s?

In the Chilis/OG setup, I know that I disliked OG’s more because it cheapened the dining experience. Go ahead and laugh that I think OG is a “dining experience”. But it is a full service restaurant. So is Chilis, but the atmosphere at Chilis is definitely less formal. Go ahead and laugh that I think OG is “formal”. Whatever.

So if I don’t mind that Chilis is informal and has kiosks, then why do I have an issue at McDs? It sure isn’t more formal than Chilis. I gave it a lot of thought and this is what I came up with.

At McDs, a part of my satisfaction of the meal is the service. You can laugh and say that’s a pretty low hurdle, and you’re right. And you’d be surprised how often it isn’t met. Or maybe you wouldn’t. But when it’s good, it makes things pretty awesome. Think of it like a shitty baseball team. You want them to win. You know it’s a long shot – a really long shot. But when they put up a good fight and still lose, you can still have some pride. You know they really tried. They’re just not good. Doesn’t that sound like your typical McDs experience?

Oh wait, I had a better example that explains how I feel about this. Imagine a band playing at a concert. There’s an awesome song you want to hear because it has this really technical, difficult part in it. Even if the band messes up the part, it’s still great. You know they can do it (because they did it before, when they recorded the album), so you give them a pass. Maybe they mess it up at every concert you go to, but you still love them for trying it.

Now imagine the band determines that they just can’t play the song like they did in the studio, so they decide to cut out that section. They just don’t play it. Yay, no more mistakes. But you get no satisfaction out of seeing them try and maybe they’ll actually kick ass and get it right. That would be awesome after so many times of seeing them get so close. But, they cheated.

And that’s what McDs is doing. They’re cheating. They know they suck at the service part, so they’re cutting it out. But they don’t always suck! A lot, yes, but not always. And I want to be there when they don’t suck – that makes it awesome. But they’ve taken that potential away.

So now when I go to McDs (3 out of 4 of the locations I go to have kiosks now), sometimes I get a cheerful person introducing the device and how to use it, and sometimes I get nothing. Either way, I’m in no mood to talk to a person. That’s not what McDs wants, clearly. And that ruins my meal. It’s like buying food from a machine.

Currently, they are bringing the food to your table, but I expect that practice will probably stop and you’ll just get your number called and you have to pick it up. Then they will probably just wall off the kitchen and serve you through a small window. Maybe you won’t even see a person back there anymore. Maybe there won’t be people there anymore. Time will tell.

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Anachostic