Schinckel.net

When we sanded the floor of the front (non-main) bedroom, a water mark appeared on the floor, near the front wall of the house. As far as I can tell, the water has come through the damaged timbers surrounding the asbestos sheeting under the windows. Some pieces of the timber, and the quad that is ‘trim’ had rotted away - either because the vine that was there had allowed the water to remain there, or because the paint had cracked. I pulled some parts off, and then found that the main bottom timber had been repaired at least once before. Since removing the whole beam was out of the question, I just patched it up again…but it isn’t quite finished yet. So now, our house has sheets of plastic across the front, just incase it rains tonight.

I have got (at last count) 5715 tracks in my iTunes library. I have rated 1988 of these, or around 35%. Show Duplicate Songs tells me I have 409 duplicates. (Maths tells me I have at least one triple!). I have 225 unrated duplicates, so I have rated nearly half of the duplicate songs. Whilst some of the duplicates are live versions, and I may not like one or other version quite as much, it’s a fair bet the ratings would be similar, if for instance the tracks were the same, but were from best-of albums, compliations and the like. So, it might be nice to have a program that gets all of the tracks that are duplicates, but at least one of them has a rating (and at least one of them doesn’t), and apply the rating from the rated one to those that don’t have ratings. Of course, you could have it that if there were three songs, and two of them were rated, that the third gets the average rating of the other two. I may write an AppleScript that does this. Rag Doll • Songs About Jane • Maroon 5

I’ve included the ability to rate the previously playing song in 0.7 When iTunesRater knows the current song, and the previous song, it will activate a checkbox: Show Previous. Clicking this button will open a drawer with the details of the previous played song, which can be rated. I seem to have made the whole thing run a bit slower now, I’m going to refactor everything at some stage. But not right now… Edit: Whoops! Big bug there - if a track doesn’t have artwork, iTunesRater spits it bigtime…fixed now though. Get 0.75 from iTunesRater0.75.zip.

Whenever I listen to iTunes now, I have iTunesRater running, and attempt to rate tracks as I hear them. I have my Unrated playlist running through Party Shuffle, and have to rate each song before it ends. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to rate the previous song. I’ll try to code this into iTunesRater….

I just had a thought. It’s relatively well known that the Xbox 360 will be using a PowerPC chip, since the development units are all Macs. But Apple is moving it’s product range to Intel. Doesn’t it seem bizarre that Microsoft is moving to PowerPC, while at the same time Apple is moving to Intel. Unless the Macintoshes that were the development platform are actually already running on Intel chips. Oooohhh…

I have Osteitis Pubis, an inflammation of the pelvic joint, due to poor muscle tone in my abdominal area, and overuse from Touch. I haven’t played a game of Touch since February, and have been going to the Physio, doing my exercises (occasionally). Last night, I decided to have a light run in my Social team (Arab Steed Pornstars). But I am unable to run ‘lightly’, and I wound up diving all over the place to score and make touches. So, I am a fair bit of discomfort this morning. I guess I was a little premature in my return to sport…

I’ve noticed a few abusive comments on various posts, and it struck me as interesting as to the general form of them:

• They are always anonymous, or pseudo-anonymous (kala@kala.com, god@heaven.net).
• They always include lots of swearing.
• They almost always lack proper capitalisation and punctuation.
• They don’t actually make a decent point.

I am actually happy to have posts critical of stuff I have written, as long as they actually provide useful feedback. I don’t really want to have to turn moderation of comments on, I’d rather just remove comments that are totally inappropriate (SPAM, not adding anything useful to the discussion, etc), but if I get too many abusive comments, I may just have to…

I found an error on Whereis.com, or rather, a couple of errors. The first one I’m happy to let slide - they only recently changed the northern end of Pondham Road, Hynam to be Schinckel Road. The other one I’m not so happy with: Check the travel time. It does not take 38 minutes to drive down the road that the Meatworks is on!

I can’t quite remember how I came up with the title of this blog, but I know it had something to do with “The World According to Garp”, which I remembered as “Life According To Garp”. I’m glad I got it wrong, because there is another site with the title The World According To Matt. I did a bit of a look, and he started it well before I started mine, so I’m going to do the honourable thing and come up with a new title. I might go by a Google Search referer I got today: Monkey Female Names According To Matt. Doesn’t quite have the ring I’m after… Here’s my top options:

• I don’t like your trousers
• Barely Respectable, Rarely Bespectacled
• Mistaken at the top of my voice
• hateful AND boring
• Paint the Tiger/Carve the Swan
• Afterisms (Inc)

Vote for which one you like most in the comments. Here are some more options:

• part of the precipitate
• vanilla won ton soup
• Chewing Gum For Your Eyes (thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Not An Actual Emergency
• At night, the ice weasels come
• I’ll have a pie, thanks!
• Segmentation Fault: Core Dumped taken
• Proto-Nasal-Philosophy (Inc)
• Not Company Policy
• The Global Dictator
• Still safe to eat, just
• A thousand measure of rice
• You can’t polish a turd
• Thinking of a Flannelette Shirt
• Like a fortune cookie, only without a witty fortune, or a cookie
• Footprints in my hair
• Counting Thoughts: 1…
• Old enough to conform
• Intolerable Bryl Cream
• Always Rely on Miracles
• Believe the Donkey, for he Brays
• Taste the Fat
• Impermanently Confused
• Love is no excuse
• Not Evil. Lively.
• Youth is a Curse
• They kill people for less than that
• Twatology
• Damn this Childproof Cupboard!
• Everyone Likes Berries
• Power, without responsibility
• Adequately Competent
• Whatever you do it ends up raining
• Ghandara, Indiana
• Are we there yet?
• Simultaneous Noise Production

I regularly check my Referers list in the WP backend - it’s interesting to see who has visited my site, or rather, where they came from. I really like a couple of features - especially how it points out Google referers. It struck me as a useful way to see how my site ranks in terms of Google searches. A couple of terms return a page from my site as the first hit. For example: Google: probability of our existence This in itself is interesting - and it’s accurate. The post in question is about the Probability of our Existence. But more interesting is what people have searched on, found my site and visited about, where the topic is not quite right. To increase user satisfaction, I could write posts about what they were searching for initially. For example:

• How to rate song with itunes
• Old postsecret posts
• Easiest way to resize pictures
• 1 itunes library for multiple users
• resizing the length of songs in itunes

The thing I think is most interesting is that most of my hits come from searches for sudoku - and I only ever wrote one post on it! (And it doesn’t really tell how to solve them…but details how I wrote a program to solve them.)