March 2005 Archives

Yesterday on the XM Radio station Chrome I heard the long version of Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem I Will Survive for the first time. It's quite impressive. The version you're probably used to hearing is about three minutes long. But the long version is basically her singing the whole song all over again. Toward the end the drummer starts doing some really funky improvisations, like he's had an itch for a while and needs to scratch without missing any beats.

Because I always forget, here's how to manually send a mail given a telnet client and an SMTP server in order to test and make sure the server's working:

$ telnet mail.example.com 25
Trying 12.34.56.78...
Connected to mail.example.com (12.34.56.78).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.example.com ESMTP Ready on Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:29:31 -0800 [a.mail]
HELO mail.somewhere.com
250 a.mail.somewhere.com Hello 98.76.54.32.somewhere.com [98.76.54.32], pleased to meet you
MAIL FROM:<mike@somewhere.com>
250 2.1.0 <mike@somewhere.com>... Sender ok
RCPT TO:<someone@example.com>
250 2.1.5 <someone@example.com>... Recipient ok
DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Hello there!
OK, bye!
.
250 2.0.0 0987654321 Message accepted for delivery
QUIT
221 2.0.0 a.mail.example.com closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
 

If you're looking for a replacement Aquadoodle pen for the one your youngster ate and/or flushed down the toilet, try this instead.

I finally bit the bullet and started encoding my whole CD collection. I have 4,201 songs ripped with about 50 CDs to go. Mary's happy, because in the process I threw out all the jewel cases and put the ripped CDs in relatively compact binders.

Waiting until I was in my mid-30s was the way to go. Extensive A/B testing proved that I can't hear as well as I could in my youth, and this saves me hard drive space because I can pick a lower encoding quality. The setting I'm using is lame -h -V 5 sample.wav sample.mp3. This means variable bit rate (VBR) at level 5 (0 is highest, 9 is lowest). I also normalize the audio level to 100% after ripping, and strip leading/trailing silence. For 17,763 minutes of music, I have averaged 0.999286 MB (MB = 2^20 bytes) per minute.

iTunes can organize your directory and filename structure, and it has a good UI for fixing ID3 tags.

Other tips:

- Don't let albums titled "Greatest Hits" slip though. Change to "Britney Spears Greatest Hits," so your MP3 player doesn't try to play one week-long album entitled "Greatest Hits."

- Try to limit your genres. Who gives a crap if that Cure album from high school is "Darkwave," "Alternirock," or "Goth"? Just call it "Pop" along with virtually everything else you own. Picking broad genres saves a lot of tedious debates with yourself in your head.

- It's tempting to get the ID3 year correct for each song in greatest hits albums, but honestly, will you ever really need to make a playlist consisting only of songs from 1986?

- For God's sake, this is the time to start backing up your data. I'm not sure how I would react at this point if I suddenly lost 18 gigabytes of MP3s. If nothing else, at least copy your music folder to another place on the same hard drive from time to time, so that one stray mouse click doesn't delete the whole thing.

AT&T Wireless customers, one of whom is me, were switched over to Cingular a few months ago following the merger. My new carrier has a trick to either get people to pay their bills earlier, or charge them hard-to-dispute penalties for unintentionally paying a few days late.

Nowhere on the bill does it give a date when the bill is due. Instead, in the "Date Due" field it says "UPON RECEIPT." In the itemized portion of the bill it says a "late fee may be applied for amounts unpaid 22 days after the date the invoice was mailed." But there's no indication when the invoice was mailed. There is no postmark. There is a "Date of Invoice," but that could be before or after the mailing date -- indeed, on my latest bill the itemized charges stopped three days before the date of invoice, so they could very well have mailed it with a post-dated invoice.

Since it's impossible to tell with certainty when this 22-day period begins or ends, most people will simply pay the bill right away rather than risk being late. And if they are charged a late fee, it'll be hard to determine whether it was justified.

Evil, inconvenient, and lame.

I hear some readers saying that the due date is "right away," and that I have no right to demand a grace period. The most concise answer I can come up with to that position is "WRONG." A slightly less pithy response is that this is a contract, and both parties should be able to know the exact terms of the contract.

Thomas rolled over today -- on his three-month birthday. Good job, squirt!

When I'm listening to internet radio, I'd like a hotkey that copies the current song information into the clipboard so I can paste it into a "songs to buy" text file. Or take me to a web page that contains that information and/or tries to sell me the song, whatever. Just give me a way to say "I like this song and want to know more about it."

iTunes seems to do this pretty well for songs in your library, but it should do the same with the Shoutcast MP3 tag info in streams.