lightning strikes twice

Richie Hawtin’s next DE9 disc due in the next few days sounds excellent. A 96 minute version on DVD! I can barely wait.

Mark Cuban is right — the “hey” song that is played at every professional basketball game I’ve watched needs replacing, really, really badly. It’s like the light globe has blown, but people are still using the switch and envisaging light themselves. Finally someone has stood up and said “hey, the lights aren’t on, they don’t work anymore!”.

I still love my new Squeezebox, but they’ve just released an even better looking third generation model — think I might need to get a second (and third) one.

I made a couple of minor modifications to a script outlined at ASPN by Bill Bumgarner to make a great deduping tool for my mp3 collection.

It checks the first couple of thousand bytes of a file for matches, and if it finds a match then checks the whole file. So unlike some other tools, it actually finds byte-for-byte matches.

iTunes, for instance, just finds files with similar song names, which returned a lot of false positives when I tried it out.

This script deletes files, so run some tests using small files in a temp folder first. Use it at your own risk!

Note to self: buy a copy of Fatback Band’s Spanish Hustle soon.

One thing that really gets me annoyed is how the real estate industry treats the public like idiots. I actually would probably agree that most of the public ARE idiots, but thats not the point.

Every other day, there is an article in the paper quoting a real estate ‘expert’ on how the property market has ‘bounced back!’, and that the ‘downturn is now over!’

Any fool can see that the property market in NSW is going to be stagnant for a few years yet, but even still, you’d at least think that the spruikers for the industry would at least be able to see the foolishness of declaring the soft market to ‘be now really over’ THREE TIMES A WEEK. Idiots.

The Squeezebox took less than ten minutes to setup. I am super impressed. And even though I’d set up my stereo with a spare input so I could plug in my iPod whenever I wanted, I rarely went to the effort of doing that. So the Squeezebox has had more “airtime” in the last couple of days than the iPod has had in over six months. True!

I’m already trying to decide how many more I’ll need (one for the study, one for the kitchen, heck, maybe even one in the bathroom).

I go through tech obsessions, where I’ll spend a lot of time thinking about a particular gadget, oscillating between a state of NEEDING it, to not being able to justify it. Generally this goes on for a long time, for my laptop I was changing my mind for EIGHTEEN MONTHS, before I eventually got one (note, I’m in software, so this was pretty much the easiest decision to justify ever, and it still took me two years).

I’ve also been through this with iPod, my Nokia, and finally the Squeezebox. I think the Squeezebox voyeurism has lasted for well over a year — and I caved last week. It arrived today, and I plugged it in at work. The screen is so beautiful — very bright and clear. Can’t wait to get it setup tonight.

Squeezebox

A lot of people in the “blogosphere” have been smugly writing posts today about how they predicted the video iPod a year ago, like they were some sort of genius. Really.

From the trading diary for week ending Friday 7th October:

Let’s get recent events into perspective: the odds continue to favor the upside. If the index respects support at 4260, that would indicate that the primary up-trend remains strong. A successful test of primary support at 3900 would also suggest further upside potential; but a close below 3900 would signal reversal to a primary down-trend.