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Breaking news: Useful Advice

mood:

hopeful

Today is July 1. I thought of a cool idea for iPod users I wanted to pass along. So as the staff of Jordan Creek has told pretty much everyone in the DSM metro, using the shuffle feature on your iPod seriously drains your battery, because it has to spin up the hard drive. To maximize battery life you are better off making a playlist and listening to that. But shuffle is pretty darn cool. I was a fan back in my Discman days. How can the iPod keep us guessing, while at the same time have enough juice to keep on truckin? I think I has the solution.

In your iTunes, make a "smart playlist" which has the qualification(s) of excluding any genre that is *not* music. These might be Comedy, or Books & Spoken Word. If you have an iTrip, make sure it excludes "Unclassifiable." This step is kind of optional but it prevents you getting cuts from "Mitch All Together" mixed in with your songs
If your iTunes still has the "Recently Played" smart playlist you are set. Otherwise you will need to re-create it. The qualification is Last Played is in the last x days/weeks/months. 2 weeks is the range they use for the "Recently Played" that comes with iTunes, but you could play around with the time to suit your needs.
Sometime like maybe at night or when you're at work, turn on your iTunes on your computer and set it to shuffle in your new songs-only playlist. Turn the volume off so it doesn't keep you awake if you are doing this on the overnight. Your iTunes will dynamically add each randomly selected song to the Recently Played.
Next time you plug in your iPod, Recently Played will update itself if you have your 'pod set to auto-sync, or if you are on manual you can drag it over. Then just fire up RP and get ready for shuffled song fun!

Ok so that was probably quite tedious for those w/o iPods but hopefully you enjoyed the spirit behind it anyway. In other news, I participated in the MIT Weblog Survey. I even got a blog merit badge!

So I got some more books from the library. They had a Rush book that I'd never read before (!) so I picked that up, as well as Persepolis 2 to see if it had the unique voice and appeal of the first. Also I got this book called The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club. It was written but Laurie Notaro and it basically sucks. I had vaguely heard of it before, and it was in the 810's of the library so I checked it out. If you lke books written by people who think they are funny, but in reality are obnoxious, whiny, and gross, you will "get a kick" out of this one. Don't let the 5-star reviews on Amazon fool you, this book was painful to read and I only finished it out of spite. There were a few who agreed with me on Az but enough people must be buying this as she has several other titles to her credit.

4th of July Report

mood:

sleepy

Today is July 5. Check, check it I did an image-heavy meme, so I put it on a separate page. N-Joy. I found the pics Sunday night and then put it all together just now. I suppose I better make more of an entry.

For the 4th I went to Slater with my aunt & uncle and cousins. We watched the parade and then had some lunch and hung out in the park. I enjoy spending time with them but sometimes I worry that my aunt thinks of me as another kid she has to mind. Like I act way too immature when I am around them. It was a fun day at Slater. I caught up with Grandma Hazel so I got to chat with her a bit. In the parade there was a kid they knew carrying a chicken so Lisa and I petted the chicken. She had soft feathers. I have been to a lot of parades but I don't think I'd ever seen a kid walking in the parade carrying a chicken.

The fireworks were actually Sunday night so I was up there Sunday night then came home and slept and went back again for the activities on the 4th. The fireworks were great. You could see them really well since Slater is so close. Tonight in WDM I heard a lot of fireworks action but didn't see any. Also I was a little cheesed b/c I guess they don't actually keep the pool open til 10pm. I went down there at like 9:30 to cool off after doing some laundry, and they already had locked the gate. Boo. Will try again tomorrow.

Mulder 'n' Scully 4Ever

mood:

uncomfortable

Today is July 10. I have this weird feeling inside that I'm supposed to be doing something, but I can't remember what it was. The TV is playing an episode of the X-Files. I guess I am not enough of a fan because I can't remember the title but I would guess it is from around season 3. goes off to find the episode info, looks on epguides.com but then cheats by catching the production code, 4x19, from the ending credits Ok, it was Synchrony, from season 4 not 3. According to the episode listing it was right before the completely awesome Small Potatoes.

Molly, Lawrence, and I went to The Fantastic Four last night after work. Well it was after work for Lawrence and me. I thought it was an enjoyable movie although I guess reviews have not been that great.

I got Paul Feig's new book from Amazon. It, like Kick Me, is an entertaining read. In this volume, he seems to have a real problem with fat people, fat women specifically. Paul Feig, what the fuck? He has another trait that is pretty annoying which is that he seems to only like girls who don't like him back, although he is at least consious of this/admits to it. Sadly, (and annoyingly) some people apparently are still in denial about this type of pattern. Maybe CK thinks it makes him more "indie," who knows.

Can you remember what I was supposed to be doing? The only thing I can think of is futzing with my modem (BluthCo has been down for way too long and it's only a matter of time before the owner of linksys gets wise and kicks me off). I was thinking of plugging in my wireless router from the old apt into the ethernet port on the Actiontec. Maybe a project for tomorrow morning. If you need me, I'll be in my office doing Mad Libs (that was a quick shout-out to the 'unrated' edition of Dodgeball coming out, which I guess I will rent just to see what the differences are and stuff). Actually I'll probably just fire up the Home Movies DVD from Netflix :-p

Oh yeah, I just rememberd something else about "Killing Yourself..." and that is that I felt quite insulted when he took the time to explain what a combine is, and what it is to walk beans. People from cities don't explain city stuff, they just make you figure it out on your own.

DARE to keep cats off string

mood:

hot

Today is July 13. String, or as it is known on the street as "yarn" or "thread" can lead a cat to a life of self-destruction. Everyone thinks it is funny to see a cat playing with a ball of yarn but there can be tragedy behind this (and I'm not talking about just puke). You hope the string can come out, one way or another, and that it is not tangled up in there somehow. The cat sits on the coffee table, admitting nothing but perhaps already on his way to death's door.

So today was day 8 of 8. Sunday, Tuesday, and today were all [scheduled as] 5-hour days with a half-hour break. It's a weird balance of knowing that you get to leave early, and feeling good about that, but then also feeling awful because you know you won't get much accomplished before it is time to leave.

Right now I'm watching the movie Committed. I like Luke Wilson, and Heather Graham is usually OK, but this movie just is not funny. And I mean I think it was supposed to be. On the plus side it has a unique story that does not seem to be a copy of anything. It sort of reminds me of Party Girl where there's a woman and she's funky and she's trying to accomoplish something. Who knows. Although I'm pretty sure that PG was kind of funny, whereas so far Committed has only made me laugh/smile once and that was Luke Wilson's character whipping eggs into the desert.

Cool stuff for me and a select few

mood:

lazy

Today is July 14. Enjoying the day off by doing not a damn thing. Other than some cat-wrestling and light dvd-taping. The other day I was seriously wishing I had a Wet Hot American Summer tee-shirt, specifically one with Christopher Meloni as Gene saying "Mr. Kickass, Mr. Rubber-Burner" or with this part of his last-dinner monologue : "I said I'm gonna go hump the fridge. What you may not know is that I also own a bottle of dick cream, I fondle my sweaters, and I often like to smear mud on my ass." Then I walked by Hot Topic and saw all their Napoleon Dynamite merchandise. I was thinking about the similarities between the movies (both funny, independent, cult hits, and even though ND takes place during the school year it still feels kind of summery). I wondered why one would completely take off and have tons of tee-shirts and stuff and the other would essentially remain below the radar. I think part of it has to do with ND being (as sick as this sounds) "family-friendly," i.e. no rough language or sexual stuff. Which WHAS gloriously has in spades. The other facet I would guess is the wacky or fake-vintage tee-shirt craze which was nowhere near as huge back in 01 when Wet Hot came out, as it is now in 04/05. Well at least we've got this which I may have to order. Perhaps Preshrunk, a very cool t-shirt blog, could be of some assistance.
In the mean time just continue to be awesome!

A few items

mood:

happy

Today is July 16. I was watching Scrubs, episode My Occurrence (Part 1) and Dr. Cox called JD "ChalkBoy!" How awesome is that?

Later I guess it says "A few items" up there, so I should include some more content in this post. Maybe I'll try my hand at some humor, fake Larry King style. (sidebar - even though Norm is awesome, I also used to enjoy the Larry King bits on Bob and Tom, especially the part about "take a cat, put a red plastic cup on his head, Shriner!)

Say what you will about Fritos, gang, but you just can't beat, Chili Cheese Fritos.

Ok, so these are a lot harder than I thought. And another cool thing just happened on Scrubs, Elliot had a rape whistle. So I guess just read those Larry King things I linked and don't think about how I'm not funny anymore :-p

No, Google, I did not! C'mon, don't you know *anything* about me?

Mall wars continue

mood:

content

Today is July 25. There's another Merle Hay Mall commercial running, and it's not as blatantly "calling us out" as the last one was. But the actress in the ad has a *really* annoying sibilant 's,' which is almost as bad. I even heard a blip on the news that sales at Merle Hay and Valley West have not been affected as much as they thought since JC opened.

A few days ago, Chris loaned me the Family Guy season 1 DVDs. I guess I've been really getting into this show again since it was brought back from cancellation. Right now it has the original chicken-fighting scene. I'm just waiting for the episode with "I'm think of a word, and this time it's definitely not kitty." "Is it kitty?" "Get out of my HEAD!" From the recent eps my favorite line is "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa (...) whoa, whoa. Lois, this is not my Batman glass."

Yesterday and today I did some more scrapbook pages. That was kind of fun. I wish I had some pics from Tennessee though =( But I did find a disposable cam that I can take to Eric and Kira's wedding in a couple weeks. Weddings usually make for good scrapbook pages. Also I'm not sure where the Canon is right now...oops. Hopefully it's around here somewhere. Wow I did like nothing today but for some reason I'm really tired. Maybe after this disc of FG I can take a walk. I heard that the next two days are going to be remotely pleasant (highs <80) so that seems nice. In the next couple days I need to do laundries and buy some groceries. It's a great vacation fime.

Nerd cred, the 80's, and more

mood:

determined

Today is July 26. A couple weeks ago, I came to posess a $15 iTMS card. I bought a few songs, some Better than Ezra after seeing them, a couple others I randomly needed to have. Then, while working on a project last night (see next pgh), I discovered a NEW Herb Alpert album. Immediately catching my eye was the cover of Hot Butter's Popcorn. I thought of just buying that song, but then decided using 9.99 of my card now was better than 99 cents now and 9.99 later when I inevitably would go back and get the album in its entirety. I burned it to CD (thanks, helpful iTMS popup reminding me to backup!) and played it during bedtime reading. On the first pass it sounds good although maybe I would have preferred more up-tempo numbers.

If you're like me, you'll get fixated on a random idea from time to time, and either you find what you're looking for on the 'net, and be vindicated, or you *won't* ("The Right Way" driver's ed movies, the 1-then-2-then-3-then-4-legged horse from Sesame Street) and get frustrated. Well last night, as the phrase "Is that Freedom Rock? Well turn it up man!" refused to leave my head, turned out to be the former. Courtesy google I found many other folks using the tagline on their blogs, but it wasn't until I found the Freedom Rock track listing that I really felt complete. I have created my own annotated listing, which tells the tracks that are available on iTunes. (Sorry if the formatting looks like butt, I used Tabs so it could be easily imported into Excel). I may also do an iMix for it. Oh yeah, and before finding that Warner Special Projects page, I also found a site that has THE ACTUAL COMMERCIAL of Freedom Rock. Seriously, I must have seen this commercial 1000's of times on FOX back inna day.

Speaking of commercials, the other day David and I were talking about that deodrant ad that said "Anything less would be uncivilized" and I was trying to remember the men that they used. All I could come up with were Charles Barkley and Hulk Hogan. For some reason I was thinking Chuck Norris too, but no one could corroborate. To think that there was a time when tough guys were willing to go against their macho man image and wear white sweaters and paint or something, all to sell deodorant, and now all we get are essentially pranks. Randy Johnson whipping dodgeballs at people, or Method and Red clotheslining dudes wif a big rubber band.

A cool website I found today: Retro Junk. Tons of articles, multimedia, forums. Lots of great content there. Even commercials, heh.

Today I did a bunch of laundry. Still some more to do (dark tee shirts if you must know) but at least made some headway. I enjoy going to the laundramat. Lately that have had older issues of Spin there (no pun intended, especially since it didn't even occur to me until I was typing this sentence). In the ish I read today, that also featured the 66.6 greatest Goth moments, they had a brief mention of mc chris. So I guess it is all downhill for him now, ha ha, just kidding Spin.

So I'm watching King of Queens right now, and I'm wondering if it's one of the ones where Leah Remini was pregnant, and that caused me to wonder if there was any type of website that has screenshots of various programs where they "shot around" a pregnant woman, such as Seinfeld or the X-files. It wouldn't even have to be a fetish site, like those ones where they have screengrabs of women smoking on TV, or the NBAK. I don't know what purpose there would be for such a site, beyond preggers fetishists, but it could be helpful for directors looking to block a scene with an actress with a bun in the oven. Heh. I'm crazy and I've definitely had too much "alone time" over the past couple days. I rule.

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