Superca-... Superca-... Oh Bother

I got the Mary Poppins DVD a few weeks ago. Rachel's been watching it a lot and has gotten really good at some of the songs. She's just generally getting good at remembering tunes and words and singing, or even humming, along. So, the other day she was at my parents' place humming the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. My father, who claims never to have seen the movie, recognized the tune and asked if that was what she was singing. She says it is and starts singing it, instead of humming:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious
if you say it loud enough you always sound precocious

Evidently my father just about fell over from surprise. She sings it a lot now, and the sight (and sound) of a 39" tall three-year old singing "you always sound precocious" is hysterical. And, of course, she knows it's cute so she flirts while she's doing it...

The Straight Dope has an interesting write-up about the word (which I'm not going to type again).

Grumpy Honey

Dawn and I often call each other 'Honey'. At some point several weeks ago Rachel started calling us that instead of Mommy and Daddy. I didn't like it for some reason, so I asked her repeatedly not to call me that because I didn't like it. After a day or so, she started saying she was sorry and wouldn't do that again. After another couple of days, she did stop calling me honey for the most part.

A couple of days ago, Dawn talked to Rachel and asked her not to call her honey because she didn't really like it... Dawn: "I'd really like you to call me Mommy". Rachel: "No, Honey"

And then there was when Elisabeth brought Rachel home and was going to make dinner and they talked about what to have and agreed on something... then Rachel said "and can you make that quickly so I don't have to get grumpy?"

The Things We Find At Random

A few days ago, I mentioned the Accord leaking again. I did, in fact, have it serviced last week, and the mechanic actually thinks that he fixed it - the area around the sun roof, and the drains in particular, had gotten pretty clogged with dirt, branches, leaves, etc. He cleaned them out and doesn't think it'll happen again.

Anyway, today while I was using Google desktop search to find something about how to configure our product, I came across an old email to a former co-worker, my friend Jason, in which I told him about the first time the Accord leaked, which was actually the weekend before my anniversary in 2002. I posted it, back-dated to about when I sent the email.

Height Advantage

Rachel's now a little over 3 feet tall. A couple of weeks ago, she was playing with something I didn't want her to, so we went back and forth a bit about giving it to me, until finally I said that if she doesn't give it back I'll just have to take it. In response, she rears her self up as far as she can, arches her back away from me and sticks her hand over her head as high as she can. I can't repeat it without laughing now, but I said with a completely straight face, "now, Rachel, you don't really think that will stop me from taking it, do you?"

Live From The Distractions

I finally finished listening to all my music in alphabetical order yesterday or the day before, so then I moved on to listening to all the KFOG Live From the Archives discs I have in order. That list is almost finished, and then I will probably listen to my two new albums, Session for Robert J (Eric Clapton) and the Ray soundtrack. But I digress.

Yesterday, as I sat at work finishing and cleaning up some business rule meta-data for M, I happened to notice that someone had more than one song in the KFOG collection. Obviously, the work I was doing is pretty mind-numbing. Not that either the interest level of the work or the fact that the CDs have multiple songs by various artists was a surprise, but iTunes makes it very easy to identify all the artists who have multiple songs in a given playlist, so I did...

The following artists have multiple songs, with no duplicates, on KFOG's Live from the Archives 3, 5-11, and the 10th anniversary disk. Unless otherwise, noted, they each have a different song on 2 discs.

• Ben Harper (3 songs, 3 discs)
  
• Blues Traveler
  
• Bonnie Raitt
  
• Bruce Hornsby (1, 2), also has one song credited with The Range
  
• Coldplay
• Counting Crows (2, 3)
  
• Cowboy Junkies (3, 3)
  
• Dave Matthews Band (1, 2)
  
• Elvis Costello (3, 3)
  
• Indigo Girls
• Joan Osborne
• Joe Jackson
• John Hiatt (3, 4) - most discs
  
• Keb' Mo' (3, 3)
  
• Kenny Wayne Shepherd
• Lyle Lovett (2, 3)
  
• Melissa Etheridge
• Nickel Creek (1, 2)
  
• Patty Griffin
• The Pretenders
• Robben Ford, also one song credited with The Blue Line
• Ryan Adams (1, 2)
  
• Sarah McLachlan
• Shawn Colvin
• Susan Tedeschi
• Tori Amos
• Train (3, 3)
  
• The Wallflowers (3, 3)
  

So, then I decided I should do the same thing with the This is Alice Music CDs, of which I have 2-8 (all but #1):

• Alanis Moresette (3 songs, 3 discs)
• Barenaked Ladies (3, 3)
• Coldplay (2, 3) - only artist with a song that appears on more than one disc (Trouble, which appears on Alice 6 & 7)
  
• Creed
  
• Dido
  
• Duran Duran (2, 1) - only artist with 2 songs on one disc
  
• Erasure
  
• Jewel
  
• Luce (1, 2)
• Maroon 5
  
• Matchbox Twenty (4, 4)
• Michelle Branch
  
• Natalie Merchant
  
• Sarah McLachlan (5, 5) - most songs, most Alice discs
• Sixpence None the Richer (3, 3)
• Third Eye Blind
  
• Train
  

If I ever get the rest of the Alice & KFOG discs, I'm sure I'll eventually decide that I simply "have to" redo this list...

On the Wet Seat Now

The Accord leaked again while we were away. It's been sitting on the level portion of the driveway since, probably 12/22/04... maybe longer. Around Christmas eve, it started raining in our area. Heavily. Since it was parked level, the roof actually slopes forward. This is a no-no with our car because the sunroof leaks. We'd gotten pretty good at parking it facing up a hill, but completely forgot. In 12 days it got good and soaked. And smelly.

Fortunately, I noticed that it was wet before I sat on it, so I'm not all wet. There happened to be a kitchen garbage bag under the seat, so I'll be driving it while sitting on that for the next several days until it dries out. When I'm at work, I can leave the windows part way open because I park in a garage where it won't get rained on. I wonder how long it will take to dry out.

It's due for service soon as well, so I'll have to ask our mechanic to see if he can figure out what's up with the leak... good luck, I know.

Is That Serial or Cereal?

Last night, Dawn and I got into a discussion about mumbling. She does it a lot and it can be frustrating for me. Once upon a time, Dawn would get mad at me for constantly asking her to repeat things, but it really wasn't that I wasn't paying attention or didn't care. If I didn't care what she was saying, I wouldn't ask her to repeat herself, for instance. Anyway, the problem was that she mumbles a lot. Then last night after she mumbled something at me I started trying to recap some of why it's frustrating for me and I said something along the lines of "you do it a lot. there's mumbling, there's drive by mumbling, and there's serial mumbling." This lead to quite a bit of laughing, the kind of easy, happy laughter we haven't had near as much of as we might like or as we often used to. Dawn said she got the drive by mumbling (mumbling something at me as she walks by and out of earshot) but wanted to know whether it was serial like cereal and I said, no, like a serial killer - mumbling something and then mumbling again and again when asked to repeat.

How 'Bout That iPod?

I've had my iPod for almost a week now. I've used it every day and I love it. I love having all of our music on a device I can take to work or use with any of our stereos. On the stereos in the bedroom and living room, we connect it with Y-audio cables (1/8" stereo on one end and an RCA audio pair on the other). For the little boom box in the breakfast nook, I've actually used the cassette adapter - as my friend Duane says, they can't really make a CD adapter because the cord will tend to get wound up. Hah. In the car, we can use the FM transmitter. It's not all that great when there's any kind of interference, so I don't tend to use it much, or haven't yet. I figure on our trip to LA for Christmas we'll use it. I love that I can not only look, when I go to the CD store, at the list of stuff we have, to make sure I don't buy something we already own, but that I can have a text file list of artists or albums I'd like to pick up.

And I can use it for carrying other files around, such as the hysterical fake MasterCard ad where MasterCard collects all the things RedSox fans said they'd pay to have the Sox win the Series... $5000. Motorcycle. Car. House. First-born child (go Sox). And Denis Leary's left nut. Not to mention the Fenway Flasher video, of a woman in the stands right behind the plate talking on a cell phone who flashes her breast a little and then completely while the pitcher pitches. Several friends I've shown it to have been watching the play, strangely enough, and not seen it without it being pointed out to them.

Naturally, being an erstwhile (read "limited budget at present") gadget-head, I have certain ideas about how the iPod and iTunes could be better. Shocking, I know. So, let's see... In no particular order... and I've only been using iTunes with iPod for so long, so I'm sure there'll be more.

1. It's my bloody music, I should be able to copy it off the iPod with iTunes. I know, I know. DRM. Fuck that. I don't have pirated music on my computer or my iPod. Period. If my home machine gets blitzed, I don't want to have to re-rip 250+ CDs or buy all the stuff I've already bought from iTunes. Now, yes, I can, in fact copy the data off the iPod using it as a hard drive, but it is poorly organized and it would be a major production to get it all sorted out again. Not to mention that wouldn't help me with the playlists, which are becoming more important to me because...
2. It isn't really all that easy to find a point in a list that contains thousands of entries; I've been listening to all my music in alphabetical order by song (since 10/18 whenever I'm at work, pretty much, and now sometimes when I'm at home). If I want to go to that particular point in the iPod's master list, it will take several minutes to scroll through using the touch wheel. Not that I can think of anything to do about that off the top of my head. The iPod's interface is pretty simple and that means it's going to have some limitations.
3. The iTunes interface is quite simple and generally very nice, but there are some things that are just really annoying about it's lack of compliance with Windows' keyboard behavior. For example, the context menu key works some times (while editing a field) and not others (with a single song highlighted). It would be nice if I could use that to get to the context menu so I can bring up Get Info for the song that's currently highlighted. Oh, and this one is classic - say you're going to highlight a bunch of songs using the keyboard. You find the first one, hold the shift key and use the down arrow to go down several songs. But wait, you went one further than you meant, so you hit the up arrow thinking it will un-select the one you picked by accident. Nope. Guess again. What it actually does is to leave all the songs selected, including the last one that you don't want, and then add in the one that sits before the one you started with! Huh?
4. Oh, and going back to #1, the iPod should really synch both directions with iTunes. That is, I should be able to say the iPod is the master and my two computers are the slaves. If I am at work and buy a song and add it to the iPod, I want it copied automatically to my home computer the next time I hook up there. And if I change a playlist or the name or info for a song, I want the change to propagate among the three sources as necessary until they are all the same. I mean, even if I'm manually managing lists, if I grab the whole library and throw it on the iPod, it shouldn't duplicate anything that's already there!
5. There was a #5 I was just thinking of, but it's late and I can't think of it now...
   

OK, I just noticed that you can hit ^I to get to the Get Info screen, but it would still be nice if the context menu worked the way it is supposed to. The home and end keys don't really work the way I would expect either with or with out control, shift, or control-shift. I don't feel like figuring out what they do or which do nothing right now. The just oughta do something sensible like jump to the top or bottom of the list the way other Windows applications do.

As for the problem of trying to get songs out of the iPod onto a computer, there are various packages available, such as iPodRip. iPodRip isn't all that great, but it's working at the moment. I'm going to have to look around some more and see what's out there... and if I don't find what I want, then I'm going to write one myself.

These Boots Are Made for Walking

My co-worker Michelle comes by a little while ago and asks if I want to go for a walk. No, I've got work to do, I say. Just 15 minutes, she says. So, I say, no, 30. Wait... didn't I say I couldn't go?

It felt good to walk, although my headache is bugging me a bit. I haven't had any exercise in a month, since I tried to go for a bike ride and wasn't sure whether I was going to die first from my heart jumping out of my chest or from choking on all the residual mucous from the cold I evidently wasn't as far over as I thought. Ick. Now I just need to start get back into a better habit again...

Enough Already!

Hallelujah! Dawn had finally had enough of torturing me that she gave me the rest of my gadgets tonight! I'm very happy. Basically, she got me an iPod and a Belkin kit. She says she was planning to give me the iPod the first night of Hanukkah, but then Elisabeth put her up to giving me pieces from the Belkin set one at a time.

This actually could have resulted in 8 gifts without ever getting to the iPod, which would really have been mean, but she relented after giving me the batteries (for the FM transmitter, it turns out), the headphone splitter, the cassette adapter, the FM transmitter, and the car charger. That gets us through Saturday night. Sunday night, first she gave me the belt clip carrying case. It's more or less been a foregone conclusion what is ultimately coming, but the carrying case really confirmed it. Then she had me close my eyes and had Rachel give me a wrapped cube. Hmm. I wonder what this could be?! She even had me open it with my eyes closed.

Needless to say, I was very excited and had it hooked up and synching within minutes. In fact, I think it was fully loaded with nearly 20G of music before an hour was up. Then she let me have the rest of the pieces from the Belkin kit (the Y audio cable and the car charger cable to connect to the FM transmitter). And I told her about some of the things I'd been thinking about. See, Elisabeth called me the week before Hanukkah started, asking me about iPods, supposedly for herself. Now, I did know that she was considering getting herself one, but I am much too suspicious to leave it at that and wondered if she was calling on Dawn's behalf. I also considered the possibility that Dawn might have called my friend (& co-worker) Duane, whom she knows is a serious tech-head and would be perfect to give her advice about what to get.

Turns out Elisabeth was really calling for herself, but gave Dawn the information too, and that Dawn had been trying to call Duane but our office's phone system doesn't actually ring through to a person unless you know a name or extension. Anyway, Dawn gave me an iPod & I'm very happy about it. I've got all our music loaded on it and we're going to fall asleep to some of it playing from the iPod through our little bedroom stereo tonight.