EEEEEK!

Elf at Work, 2002

When I went to work for my current employer, someone came around with a hand-held digital camera and took pictures of everyone to put up on the company directory. I had long forgotten just how bad that photograph was.

They're re-shooting the company directory today, so I decided to make sure that this image was preserved for all time. Just, because, y'know... it's kinda sick. Ye gods, the mullet. The Mullet!

I didn't get to see Obama. *Pout*

Overflow crowd at Barack Obama rally.

Well, Obama is holding a rally even as I write this over at Key Arena in Seattle. The arena seats 16,641 17,500 (in the current configuration), and this photo is of small portion of the two thousand or so still standing outside the doors, turned away because the arena was full. I was one of them. Sad. It would have been fun. I even brought my camera.

I will say this: Obama's supporters are way cuter than Hillary's.

Sometimes, you have to do it yourself

I am rather annoyed right now. I went out and paid cover price for the new Ayreon CD, 01011001 and have spent the last two flamin' hours trying to encode the damn thing. There's nothing particularly wrong with the CD; it's not DRM'd or anything like that. I just want to put it on my MP3 player, dammit. And I'd like to be able to encode it at a higher quality than 128bps and 44.1KhZ.

Every single console-based ripper/encoder sucks. They either claim to respect your LaME codings and completely ignore them, or they take "simplified" arguments that they then parse into the quality settings they assume you mean when passing to LaME.

Look, I'm using the command line. I know what I'm doing. Let me do it.

Ultimately, it came down to my ripping the tracks by hand, and then crafting the LaME and id3v2 command lines myself through emacs. Which is, yes, knowing what I'm doing... and being told to do it because rip/coders can't get their stuff together.

(Yes, I know, I dissed Arjen a couple of years back but, y'know, his kind of sci-fi space rock opera does grow on ya. And you have to love an album that uses the word "extremophile" correctly.)