iamthejeff

So I got the idea that it'd be a fun experiment to see how much money I can "earn" by simply begging for it on the internet. No tricks or scams; my strategy is to be completely honest. The incentive: If you donate a small amount of money, you'll get a small gift in return.

The whole point is to see if I can raise $180 to buy a new digital camera. In the first few hours of launch, I got $12 in donations (just from friends), so now it looks like I'm going to have to rely on complete strangers to complete my goal.

I am getting some free advertising out of Project Wonderful, which is a bid-based advertising service. I'm also periodically searching for things on Twitter like "what should I spend it on?" or "what should I buy?" and linking them to my site. OH YEAH, the site is PrettyPreez.com.

GET DONATIN'

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I haven't been writing as much the past month or two, most likely because nothing exciting has been happening. So here are some updates probably worth mentioning:

Back Yard Adventures

Billie and I have been slowly working on our new back yard to make it a little more presentable. This weekend we finished staining the old and weathered patio and patio furniture. It started out kinda fun but turned into a monotonous job by the end. I got sunburned which was NOT FUN. We also finally cut the grass for the first time this summer (it was overdue) and gave it some much needed fertilizer. Our new satellite dish is mounted on a tripod at the end of our yard, and the tripod is just sitting on a few cinder blocks. It looks incredibly hick-ish and stupid, but we're planning on making it prettier.

Kitty Kwest 2009

We've been getting visted by a local stray cat every day for the past month or so. Her ear tips look frozen off, so unless she has REALLY AWFUL owners, we're confident she is definitely a stray. Billie thinks she has kittens, so we've been leaving out little bowls of cat food. Now we're worried that when the summer's over, she'll have to survive the harsh winter again. So if you or anyone in the Edmonton area wants a really cute and friendly kitty, let me know???

TOP SECRET

I recently started somewhat of a secret web project. I haven't been working on it very long, but I am pretty excited for it and I think it will be fairly impressive when it's done. That's just about all I want to say about it right now. I have the domain bought and everything!!!

Look out world here I come.

 

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Anyone with an internet connection for more than a few days has probably come across a parked domain. There are so many parked domains now, legitimate websites are forced to accept ridiculous alternate spellings like Flickr or Digg or whatever else. Today at lunch I went to fun.com to find that, surprise surprise, it was also parked. I decided to perform a little experiment by pretending I was a completely ignorant internet user who was innocently looking for some free music. I clicked the first drop-down and selected "free music". Oh dear.

I eagerly clicked the first result that was presented to me and it brought to FreeMusicConnection.com. I was greeted with a very low bitrate song playing in the background and an animated Flash intro. After clicking "Skip Intro and Take Me to My Music!", I suddenly had a form to fill out. I'm sure they just need a little info and I would be on my way to FREE MUSIC.

So secure.

I guess now everybody knows my password is "Gordon". Please don't tell anyone, guys. Also, at least they're up front with you about how little they respect your privacy!

After filling out the form with fake information, I came to a screen asking to verify my phone number. Rats. I guess they're too smart to let bogus sign-ups get past them. The scary part, though, was in the fine print:

The Service is available to customers of Rogers Wireless, Bell, Fido, Sasktel, Telus, MTS Mobility and Virgin Mobile for a monthly fee of $5.00/week.

Yup. $20/month for FREE MUSIC if you weren't careful enough to read the fine print. Sadly, my relationship with FreeMusicConnection.com was at an end, but I wasn't ready to give up my search.

Back at fun.com, I found another site offering free music, this time it was EZ-Tracks.com. Upon clicking, I had to mute another low bitrate song playing in the background of a flash animation. EZ-Tracks didn't force me to fill out a form before I knew what my options were, which was nice, so clicked a few songs in their "Top Song Downloads" section. Before attempting to download, I checked out some of the comments at the bottom of the page. This was for Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot":

wow i would like to drop it like its hot too. because i am hot and sexy

Sounds reasonable. This one was for Queen's "We Are The Champions":

I think this song is very cool to listening to if you are happy

I was sold. I clicked "Download Now" and I was prompted to enter my email address. I gave them a fake one, and I was brought back to the exact same screen that FreeMusicConnection.com sent me to earlier, asking me to verify my phone number. I guess I wasn't getting any free music today.

Just out of curiosity, I clicked their Terms & Conditions and I found this gem:

Many of the songs available through the Service are performed by their original artists. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you understand and agree that most of the available songs are performed by other musicians in the style of the original artists.

I am pretty certain that the only people that get reeled in by these offers are naive moms that just don't know any better. I weep for them.

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Yeah, this is another post about managing my digital music collection. It's a doozy.

I have been an iTunes user for years, but it was only recently that I decided to force myself to switch to another music library application. I've tried a few over the years, including Winamp and more recently Songbird, but I felt they all seemed to lack some pretty basic functionalty that a picky user like myself just needs. Winamp was alright, but its lack of drag-and-drop always bothered me. I liked how iTunes let me drag a song directly from my playlist window to an MSN contact so I could easily initiate a file transfer. Songbird is open source and seemed to have an abundance of features, but it ended up using even more RAM on my computer than iTunes did. A music library application does not need to use more than 150-200 MB of RAM when it would be better off spent by another application that is better suited for it. I could go on about why I like to have a buffer of free RAM versus the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument, but I won't.

So although I have been fairly pleased by iTunes over the years, I was starting to get a little annoyed by the sluggish interface, especially when scrolling through a library of 8000+ songs. Add album art into the mix, and your RAM usage skyrockets while the interface gets even more sluggish. So I decided to finally make the switch to a little piece of software called foobar2000. Foobar2000 is an application that you can tell was made by programmers. The interface is ugly, menu items are hard to find, and there are no handy "getting started" wizards when you first launch it. The appeal of it, though, is its blazing speed (launches in about 2 seconds), low RAM usage (15-25 MB with over 9000 [har har] songs) and most importantly, the fact that you can customize anything in the application. The difficult part is figuring out how.

Ugly as sin.

Foobar has a fairly active community of programmers constantly making and updating components that add all kinds of features and tools to the application. One of the first things I did was download a custom UI component (columns UI) that let me create an interface that closely matched iTunes. There are numerous UI components available, some that can completely reskin the player. I also changed the color scheme to something that was a little easier on the eyes. It's not quite as slick as other applications but it does the job nicely.

Much better.

So now to the reasons why foobar is a complete dreamboat:

• Complete customization of the interface - Besides being able to customize where interface items are laid out, I wanted to see how many songs were inside each of my playlists, as well as how many hours, minutes, and seconds each playlist was. I made it show me. I wanted to see the codec and bitrate of the file I was playing in the status bar. I made it show me. You can pretty much do anything you want.
• File format support - Besides the standard MP3, foobar will also play pretty much anything you throw at it. If you find a format that isn't natively supported by foobar, you can be pretty sure somebody made a component that adds support for it. AC3 is one example.
• Folder monitoring library - Instead of dragging files into foobar to add them to your library (like iTunes), you can tell foobar to monitor one or many folders on your PC and it will add them to the library automatically. Delete a file from the folder, it gets removed from your library. You can also tell it to ignore certain file types.
• X to X file conversion - Want that FLAC file converted to OGG? You can do that. Though that is a little obscure of an example, I've found myself needing to convert AC3 files (ripped from a DVD) to MP3 a few times.
• Mass tag/rename/move - Pretty self explanitory. You can retag, rename, or move large amounts of songs at once. Format the target file names however you like using built in variables. Have it sort files into an organized folder structure based on artist and album tags.
• Statistics - With an optional component, you can keep track of ratings, play counts, and dates songs were last played. By default, your tags are not modified. A nice option for those (like me) that hate when applications sneakily rewrite your tags.
• Autoplaylists - These are basically the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, except probably a little more powerful. You can literally write your own queries that are actually quite similar to SQL. If you want a list of songs from the 90s that you haven't listened to in the past week, you can achieve it with: NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 1 WEEK AND (date GREATER 1989 AND date LESS 2000).
• Album art - Displays album art embedded in files or saved externally (folder.jpg in Windows).

It even lets me drag-and-drop songs into MSN. It's pretty much perfect for me. A few other features worth mentioning are gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts, and yes, it can scrobble to Last.fm.

The only gripe I have with it, is that it doesn't have built-in searching of album art, and it can't import album art downloaded by iTunes. For this, I had to download a separate application called Album Art Downloader (accurate name), which can search an entire directory for missing artwork (if you tell it to look for folder.jpg files). Once it's figured out what you're missing, you can get it to search various online sources (Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Discogs...) for artwork and automatically save it to the appropriate directory. The awesome part is, its possible to integrate into foobar if you download the foobar COM server component.

The thing that turns people away from foobar the most is how much time and effort that needs to go into configuring it to look and function exactly how you want. Since components are all made by third party developers, the options interface for most of them are all different, adding that extra level of complexity. Luckily there are plenty of people online in forums willing to help you out.

oh my god options

I guess my point is that if you're looking for that perfect player for your music, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. Most of the work is done for you, you just need to spend a few hours customizing it to meet your needs. It'll be worth it.

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Anyone who knows me nowadays knows that I am a pretty big Nine Inch Nails fan. What most probably don't know is that I actually only really became a fan around 2005, about the time With Teeth was released. I remember reading an article about how Trent Reznor was mad that a radio station leaked two new songs from his album (his first new album in 6 years), and how fans' first impressions of it were ruined by listening to a low-quality radio recording. To "get back", or maybe to prove a point about how first impressions are important, Trent ruined the ending of Million Dollar Baby which had just opened in theaters. A movie I hadn't seen yet, but wanted to. I was a little cheesed, but I thought it was funny, and I decided to download With Teeth and give it a shot.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08 - photo by Warrren Hrycun

My first impression was that the album was "okay". I had been aware of NIN as a band (if you can call one guy a band) for years, seeing as they were fairly popular in the mid-late 90s, but I never actually gave them a chance. I gave With Teeth a few more listens, though, and it started to grow on me. It wasn't until several months later that I decided to buy The Downward Spiral on a whim when I saw it for $9.99 at HMV. I was out of town at the time (Billie's brother's wedding), so without a CD player, I had to wait until I got back home to listen to it. Unknown to me at the time, I had just planted a seed that was soon to grow into a full blown obsession.

In the next 3-4 years, I managed to track down not just all of their full length albums, but each of their singles and EPs as well, which usually contained many good remixes. It was easy to keep track of which albums I was missing, due to a convenient little numbering system for each release called Halos. Each release (with a couple rare exceptions) was given a Halo number. Their first single was Halo 1, and their very last release to date is Halo 27. In 2005 they were only at Halo 19, but I still had quite a bit of collecting to do. To this day, the only ones I am missing are 12 and 15. One being a rare out of print VHS tape, and the other being an also out of print, three-part single that usually sells for $80 per-part on eBay.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08

My obsession took another turn for the worse when I bought a record player some time in 2007. Now I had the need to go back and buy all of my absolute favorite albums on wonderful vinyl (Billie was initially opposed to this idea, but she's now somewhat grown fond of collecting records). I held back a little bit, partly due to the rarity of many older NIN albums on vinyl, but I eventually managed to find copies of every full length album, including Broken and The Fragile which have never seen repressings beyond their original release. My absolute prized possesion that came from all of this has to be the ultra-deluxe limited edition of Ghosts I-IV that was released in 2008. It's pretty awesome, you guys.

By now you're probably wondering why I'm sharing all of this, and if you're still reading, here's why: It has been recently announced by Trent himself that the current NIN tour is going to be their last. Their last forever? Nobody knows, but at least their last for a long, long time. In the short time that I've been a fan, I have been lucky enough to see them live three times. Once in 2005, and twice in 2008, and they were by far the favorite concert experiences I've had. Though I am probably a little biased. Just a little.

Single tear.

So here is where my obsession ends, or at least slows down, for now. Trent prematurely announced he was in talks with HBO to pitch an original TV series revolving around the story of the album Year Zero, but that was a while ago and there hasn't been much news about it in some time. I guess I am lucky to have enjoyed new NIN music in the short time it was available, seeing as though the older fans commonly had to wait 4-6 years between each album prior to With Teeth's release. At least now other fans and I can follow Trent on Twitter to see what he's up to. I guess it's time to play the waiting game.

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