Europe at its finest...

My coworker tipped me off to Eurovision. A cultural lesson awaits you all! Be sure to watch the videos, they're entertaining.

My favorites:
Austria
Estonia
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Russia (purely for the lesbian schoolgirl thing going on)

I wish we did this here in the states... I'd love to see the different songs that would be written from Maine, to Georgia, to California, to Hawaii, and my own state Washington.

Say hello to Hephaestus...

Right now, I'm sitting in front of a brand spankin' new dual 1.42GHz PowerMac I have named Hephaestus (Greek god of smiths). Attached to it is a stunning 20" Cinema display.

This thing is unbelievable. Right now, I'm in dual-processor heaven. I could care less about PPC970 Macs. This might change in a few months, but that's alright. This thing is faster than anything I've ever used before.

And the display. Good lord! I'm going to have the display for quite a few years before I ever feel the need for another.

My older 800MHz G4 iMac is for sale. As soon as I'm ready, I'll be putting up more information about it. I'll probably put it up on eBay.

Update: Here's a pic of Hephaestus.

GORBY

Coworker says, "I wonder if there's a random band name generator."

Google says, "GORBY."

My favorite so far: dueling castrati

Take 606, and so help me if this doesn't work!

A coworker of mine sent me this and this about the Honda "Cog" ad. Turns out it took 606 takes to get it just right. Oh. My. God. I can't imagine the amount of dedication and precision required to get something like that right. It makes me all the more impressed.

Klingon Translator Needed; Leave Bat'leth at home...

According to this Seattle Times story, Multnomah county in Oregon needs some Klingon-English translators for their mental health program. If I knew Klingon a bit better, I might apply ;-)

Cool iTunes stuff....

So, since iTunes 4 came out, I've been experimenting a little bit more with smart playlists and converting my lower-quality MP3s to higher-quality AAC files. I found out some cool things yesterday:

1. I created a smart playlist called iPod playlist. I told it to populate the playlist with songs that never had been played before, rated between 3-5 stars, with a maximum playlist size of 4675MB, chosen randomly. Why the size? Simple, for my iPod. That's about as many MP3s I can fit onto it. So, when I play my iPod, the play count for the song will be incremented on the iPod and automagically synched up with my iTunes playlist. Very cool. And because the smart playlist is dynamic, it'll constantly give me new stuff to listen to until I've listed to all of my music. When that happens, I'll configure the playlist to give me stuff I haven't heard in six months or so, keeping it still very fresh.

2. If you're re-ripping CDs to AAC format, replacing the MP3s you have, and the ID3 tags match up with what's already in your library, you'll be given the option to Replace Existing songs. Do it - it preserves the original creation date, play counts, ratings, and any album art you might've added to the file. The only thing it doesn't preserve is the genre, but that's easily fixed.

I'm VERY impressed at how iTunes manages the library. I hope all those Windows users get a good version of iTunes at the end of the year that does all of this stuff.

And there was light...

It's so nice to finally see spring here in Seattle. What's not nice is that I have to be in bed by 9pm so I can wake up at 4am for work at 5am. Yeah, that sucks, especially with the long days we have this time of year.

I've been working on catching up on some video encoding I've been doing - taking every episode of the Simpsons Futurama and encoding them in 3ivx format for my own personal use. I also finally had decent enough weather yesterday to get out and mow the lawn. And, I spent some time yesterday finding a replacement light bulb for the HVAC controls on the Bernenwagen. Cracking open the center dash is interesting, but I didn't break anything. That's a first!

Speaking of lightbulbs, I had to get one for our fridge, as its bulb had burned out.

I have a doctor's appointment today at 3:15pm. I'm not looking forward to telling the doctor that I didn't get the prescription he wrote for me because my insurance won't cover the drug. I don't have $160 for prescriptions every month or two weeks or whatever. So, I have to go get myself weighed today. Eeesh. My weight seems to stay constant, at right around 380. At least it's constant. The last thing I need to do is gain more weight.

I've been watching Manor House a.k.a. Edwardian Country House. I just love how we Americans can import a show from the UK intact, yet change the name to some Americanized oversimplification, a la Junkyard Wars (Scrapheap Challenge). In any case, Manor house reminds me a lot of 1900 House. I wonder, why do I have to watch the British take these trips back in time? Isn't there anything like that here in the U.S.? Do we have enough of a past to really know what life was like 100+ years ago? Did we have the same sort of class structures that early 20th century Britain did?

And finally, a question I submitted to the P-I's Getting There column got published on Monday.